Monkeytown

by Chris Vola

  “I think we’ve got enough,” Miller says. He flicks off the RECORD button. “Good job guys.”

  “Thank god,” Fortune groans, “I’m starving.” He gives a disgusted grimace, kicks Rifle Boy in the kidney. The kid doesn’t move, stays hunched over, humming what sounds like “Happy Holidays” from the ’N Sync Christmas Album.

  “I know what I’m starving for,” Miller says, winking as he slings the camcorder strap over his shoulder.

  Fortune smirks. “Aren’t we all. You’re coming, right X?”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll be there.”

  “Great. See you at nine.”

  Fortune and Miller turn and head toward the door. Fortune knocks four times and an agent unbolts it from the other side. The meth freaks start screaming, tweaking hard, realizing that their fix is about to disappear. Bug Man and Rifle Boy convulse in the sand, tearing their uniforms off, kicking the plastic rifle bits, kneading the green screen until it rips along the bottom. Bud just stares at us with sad-puppy eyes, palms extended.

  “Damn it,” Miller grunts. “We’re going to have to tell Maintenance about the screen.”

  “Fuck that,” Fortune says. “When they come to pick them up, we’ll let them deal with it. Not like Bud’s going to rat us out. Come on, X, let’s go. Staring only gets them more riled.”

  As I’m closing the door, Rifle Boy flings the hollow ammo cartridge he’s just disassembled, knocking me in the shin. I’m about to toss it back to him when I remember something. It’s plastic, won’t set off the metal detectors.

  I bolt the door, slide the cartridge into one of my cargo pockets, look up to see if Fortune and Miller have noticed. But they’re already well ahead of me in the hallway, babbling with another agent about whether or not they think Agent Thompson is responsible for bogarting the compound’s three most recent Hustler issues.

  The scrape of fingers echoes on the other side of the door. A dull moan.

  THE MINTY NEW-CAR smell hits me hard. Harry’s body is gone. Not just gone, Febreezed away without a trace. Someone’s made my bed, scrubbed the walls and the carpet into a cloud-white sheen any Pine-Sol wielding grandmother would die for.

  The extra beds are missing. Panic sets in. Harry’s bone. I take a few quick steps toward the bed, slow down when I remember the cameras. I take a deep breath, move slow, casually throw the folder and fake bulletproof vest on the mattress, slide my shoes off, sit down and roll back like an average Joe after a rough day at the office, hands crossed over my head. The hardness is there, under the mattress, barely perceptible just below my shoulder blades, but there, exactly where I left it. They didn’t look.

  I smile at the cameras, lay back for a pre-party nap.

  “GET THE FUCK in here, X! Suck on this!”

  The gallon milk jug – half-full of liquid fire, an opaque gut-rot closer to rubbing alcohol. I sputter, regurgitate onto my tee shirt and the carpet. Moonshine someone picked up in a meth lab raid, something I haven’t tasted since college, when my stomach’s reaction was almost identical.

  “Fucking pussy!” someone screams as a smirking Agent Fortune hands me a High Life bottle, slaps me on the back and takes an unimaginable swig from the milk jug without breaking the slightest grimace.

  The other nine or ten agents, indistinct faces, sit on folding chairs and Fortune’s bed, all in similar states of inebriation, which is to say bombed already, quick work. Joints are being passed and Marlboros are blazing. The room – smaller than mine, dirtier, but with a dresser and an empty shirt rack. Heads bob to crappy eighties death metal that crunches out of makeshift speakers at ear-splitting decibels – something by Six Feet Under or Cannibal Corpse. The smoke-tinged frat house, the basement dungeon where only the truly debauched make it out alive.

  I chug down the remainder of the beer – to cheers of encouragement – grab another one from a cooler near the door, and plop down on the bed next to Thompson, still wearing the same rancid jacket. He grins, slaps my leg.

  “You’re late,” he grunts, eyes already rolling. The moonshine finds its way to his sweaty bear paws and he slobbers down a huge gulp. I take a smaller one when he passes the jug to me, try to suck down the burn. The joint comes next and it’s really good shit.

  “Where is Davis?” Thompson’s perma-grin – unchanging. The solipsism of the true drunkard. “Where is Davis?” I repeat. “I thought he’d want to be here. Never known him to pass up a…”

  “Davis? Oh…he’s, he’s on a field trip. Left early morning. Going north.”

  North. “You mean New York?”

  Thompson snickers, wipes his mouth with his sleeve. “Yeah, sure, New York, if that’s what you…whatever. Here,” he passes me the milk jug that he’s been holding since I passed it back to him. I take another swig, cough. “What’s up with Davis?” he asks. “Got a crush?”

  “We grew up together,” I say and immediately regret it.

  Thompson’s glassy eyes widen. He lowers his voice. “You’re a civilian?”

  “I mean, I guess. I don’t know what else you’d –”

  “I kinda thought so,” he cuts me off. “When you first came in you didn’t look like you – well it was easy to tell. We knew it was something Titus had been toying with for a while, the idea, you know.”

  “Idea.” The liquor is shaking me down into the land of warm fuzz. Need to concentrate, need to –

  “The idea of bringing in non-military,” Thompson says. “Kind of crazy how it all went down. Apparently this young towelhead in some Taliban refuge somewhere near Kashmir or Pakistan or something got shown a video stream a few months ago with a bunch of us acting like American terrorists, Muslim converts, supporters of the cause, whatever. Well this kid watches it, along with all the other young towelheads in his village. Supposed to make them all gung-ho to kill infidels except that this one kid recognizes who else, but the one-and-only Miller!” At the mention of his name, Miller, who’s lurking a few feet away, salutes like he’s been given an order, drops his beer and scampers out of the room.

  “Turns out Miller was a Ranger,” Thompson says, staring at the open door, “part of the first wave into Afghanistan, the first bombings. The kid’s village happened to be ground zero for fundamentalist nutjobs. So after they blow the place apart, Miller gets ordered by his sergeant to go into this kid’s bombed-out house to look for survivors and ended up going shopping for souvenirs. Sliced off his mother’s nipples while she was still alive, right in front of the kid’s face. Told him he was going to use them as cufflinks.” Thompson laughs, chugs. “Now you don’t forget the face of someone who’s played Operation with your ma's tits, do you?”

  I shake my head when he pauses, glassily.

  “No, that’s right, you do not. So when the kid saw Miller all decked out in Allah gear, he still recognized him. Even though it was such a freak coincidence, Titus thought it might be a good idea to get some fresh faces in here, guys who’d never been to the desert, regardless if they were qualified or not. Davis recruited you, must have thought you were a crazy enough fuck to want to come down here and hang out with a bunch of whacks like us.”

  Davis the Recruitment Chairman. Makes sense. Gone on a trip. I take another swig of beer. Thinking is starting to hurt. The desire for getting information replaced by the desire to stuff my guts with liquid fire. Sink deeper…

  “Ta da!” Miller announces to no one when he returns, followed by three wraith-girls in soiled tee shirts and gym shorts, two of them smiling timidly, the third clearly frightened. I recognize her. She’s the mother of the little girl, the blonde woman in the meth room I saw when I first stepped out of my cage. Three fractured corpses. The putrid mouth-rot.

  Attention shifts from the booze to our new guests. “Come here, babydolls!” “Daddy like!” On cue, Fortune and an agent I don’t recognize take pipes, lighters, and a few meth shards out of their cargo pockets, dangle them like chew toys. The first two addicts, both non-descript brunette skeletons with choppy bob haircuts,
one with a fresh outbreak of oral herpes (or pipe-burn), scurry over, jump on the agents’ laps and are just as quickly thrown to the carpet.

  Someone changes the song to David Bowie’s “Sound and Vision.” Fortune, always grinning beneath the caterpillar moustache, shakes his head and wags his finger in the girls’ faces. He and his colleagues sit back, the pipes raised. Another cue. The meth heads waste no time in removing the agents’ cargo pants and boxers, working the soft cocks into their toothless mouths. Catcalls erupt as Norwood, Clark, and Sheridan circle the women and begin unbuttoning.

  I finish my beer, put it on the ground. A hand reaches over with a full one. I unscrew the cap, chug most of it down in one gulp. Sink deeper…

  Thompson – fixated on the ignored blonde cowering in the corner.

  “Hey!” he shouts. She doesn’t move. “Listen, bitch I know you can hear me!” She’s staring at the door, twisting the bottom of her tee shirt nervously with filthy nails. “Jesus!” Thompson grunts, lifts his heavy frame off the bed. “Fortune, I told you not to bring this bitch! She don’t like to play. Nearly bit Rogers’ dick off last time.” But Fortune’s eyes are rolled back, his beer spilling onto the floor, consumed in gumjob bliss. “Jesus,” Thompson mutters again. He whips around, chucks his High Life bottle at the blonde. It grazes her shoulder, shatters against the wall, dousing her in shards and suds. She lays prostrate, whimpers. The hand puts another beer in my lap.

  Sunken.

  Thompson, standing over the blonde, pulls her hair back, deposits a thick loogie on her face, kicks her in the pelvis. The mash of bone. She’s crying. The smell of burnt rubber. Smoked lungs. The brunette who had been sucking off Fortune is now greedily sucking on a pipe while Miller works an empty High Life bottle deep in her messy crevice. The other brunette is taking turns sucking three or four different agents while getting reamed in the ass by Rogers, who’s trying to drink a beer, spilling most of it on his chest and down cleft of her cheeks.

  Miller beckons me to come over, but I’m frozen inside a powerful warmth. I try to smile. He shrugs, picks up another bottle. The room is silicone and off-white smoke and there’s another unnatural bone crack and the elastic crackle of taut skin and wet and Miller is laughing and Thompson is preparing another loogie way back in his throat and there’s another beer in my hand and all three girls start crying until someone pulls out a packet of needles and hands are racing to push the fluid into their ash-colored arms and the girls’ eyes are rolling back and cocks are flopping everywhere and there’s a growing pile of bloody High Life bottles and Fortune is pouring beer all over himself and Thompson is pulling the blonde’s hair into pigtails and for a second it looks like she’s mouthing my name but there’s a sound at the door and someone brings in a large parking cone and the girls have all seen this before and they start crying again and someone else whispers, take another hit, baby, take another hit, this is going to feel good, and everyone starts laughing and there’s more burnt rubber and the scrape of something being torn apart and someone takes the beer out of my hand and it spills across the floor and when I close my eyes the only things I see are Davis’s Cheshire Cat lips at the airport three years ago saying I’m here, I’m here, don’t worry, before I feel the taste of tears running down my cheek and neck, staining my tee shirt…

  OUTSIDE THE WINDOW and just past the metal bars, a tiny honey-colored butterfly glides by my face, then another. They tumble together so perfectly. Puffs of air sometimes brush them against the grass as they move across the yard toward the barbed-wire fence. A real gust sweeps them up – five feet, ten feet, twenty feet – until they become two miniature globes in the sky. I squint to see them for another thirty or forty seconds until they disappear into a cloud, maybe the sun. I wait for them to come back, but after a few minutes I give up looking and turn to stare at Lauren, smiling at me from the left side of the bed. ‘They’d probably like it better out there, don’t you think?’ Lauren asks. ‘Two butterflies and you.’

  TITUS CLUCKS IN between swigs of coffee. “Some of you had totally too much fun last night.” Half the room reeks of beer sweat and something saltier. Vomit-stained shirts haven’t bothered to be changed, bloodshot eyes fight to stay open. I didn’t make it to breakfast. To my right, Thompson’s shaved head is buried between his knees, moaning.

  “I’ve said before, dudes,” Titus says, “I have no problem with leisure, as long as it doesn’t interfere with business. If you want to spend it obliterating brain cells and speeding up early onset kidney failure, that’s your prerogative. Boys will be moronic. On a more serious note, though, I do have to ask all of you to be a little more careful with your entertainment. I’m specifically looking at you, Thompson. Agent Thompson?”

  Thompson struggles to lift his head up and croak out something that sounds like the Arabic lines we have to memorize. Allahu Crackbar! He lets out another low moan, sinks back down. “Good,” Titus says. “You should know better, after what happened at your last party. Last night wasn’t nearly as bad, although one of your, ah, guests will probably never regain the voluntary use of her urinary tract. And the other, shame, wasn’t much we could do. Had to put her down.” Put her down. The blonde. Stomach flips but there’s nothing left to eject.

  “Be more careful during playtime,” Titus says. “It’s not like we have an inexhaustible supply for you to ruin. Raids are dangerous and most of you have gotten too fat to pull them off. Interestingly enough, though, your escapades have allowed me to understand certain aspects of the male brain-pattern as it pertains to your pornography-saturated…”

  There’s a quiet groan behind me. Rogers. He leans over, his sallow face nearly resting on my neck. I tense up, wait for the puke shower, but he whispers, “Here it comes, X, get some sleep.”

  “Huh?”

  “Whenever a bunch of us cut loose and come in all fucked up, he likes to give these stupid ass lectures, verbal torture. Verbal diarrhea if you ask me. If you haven’t realized by now, he’s a pretty big masochist for a flower child.”

  I blurt out a laugh at Rogers, a.k.a. Captain Obvious and Titus stops. The groans stop. Everyone’s staring. Titus leafs through a couple pages on the podium. “Rogers,” he says, not looking up, “apparently you can hold an audience. Maybe you’d like to come up and give everyone a taste of your killer routine, not just save the good nuggets.”

  Rogers sinks into his chair.

  “As I was saying,” Titus says, still glaring at Rogers, “I’ve always found the porn industry to be interesting, especially the Internet’s role in shaping it, expanding it. I’ve noticed – and this is what involves you – is an abrupt trend, starting in the late nineties, toward the extreme, the bizarre, the misogynistic. Painful anal sex and the absence of plot have become the norm. You don’t want a girlfriend, you want a porn star. You don’t want meek and frigid Susie, you want Tabitha the Gape Queen. The death of artistic substance. Bright blood, neon dildos. But this is nothing new. The Romans watched men get ripped apart by lions.”

  Isn’t the point of our work to create lions, not to prevent them? No reaction from the peanut gallery. I’m the only person who’s conscious. Thompson is drooling onto the crotch of his stained cargo pants. I hear Rogers’ faint snores.

  Regardless, Titus isn’t finished. “…and this all leads me to something I was going to bring up anyway,” he says, “the requests I’ve gotten from you for Internet and phone access.” A few heads perk up. “And I’m sorry to say that I haven’t changed my mind.”

  Grumbles, the shift of chairs. “No Jenna Haze in streaming video for you, Rogers,” someone says.

  Titus continues. “We remove ourselves from technological fascination. You knew that coming in here.”

  “Here it comes again,” moans an agent to my left who I don’t recognize. I can’t tell if he’s referring to Titus or the barf bag resting on his lap.

  “Interpersonal advancements without any noticeable increase in our intelligence. Americans, as a whole, have never reall
y been that smart, but we’re stupider now…”

  Silence.

  “..the screen makes it simple: Wikipedia says it’s true. It is. And who cares if it isn’t. It’s why we’ve been so successful, why we can pay above the competitive rate…how you perform, eviscerated from the wires, the network-connected bullshit.”

  As much as I want to dismiss this as a weirdly jumbled ego-stuffing babble, I sort of see what he means. The time Lauren nearly hemorrhaged when I accidentally ran her iPhone through the wash and she had to wait two days to respond to a Facebook invitation. At parties, whipping out the smartphones before the first lull. The laptop’s glow, pseudo-factoids, the pop-ups, online college commercials, product placements, spam filters, YouTube postings, DVR recordings. Attention span incinerated, along with any lasting satisfaction.

  Was Davis right? Did I need Connecticut?

  Fuck it all.

  “That’s enough,” Titus dumps the rest of his coffee into a trashcan at the base of the podium. “Take the rest of the day off. See you tomorrow.”

  The scrape of chairs, relief sighs. We stand up and begin the long stumble into the hallway. Miller pats Thompson on the back. “Ready for Round 2, buddy? Think you can take down another jug?” Thompson’s face is the color of green chalk that’s been rolled around in a pile of cigarette ash. He moans, punches Miller’s arm, grips his fat belly. Miller laughs as they disappear out the door.

  I’m almost into the hallway when a hand clamps down on my shoulder. “Come with me, buddy,” Titus says.

  TITUS’ ROOM-SLASH-OFFICE LOOKS different. It’s not anything tangible – the books, the hippie sculptures, the massive table with the remnants of breakfast, the open laptop – it’s how I remember. Outside the bay window, the same endless line of sloping trees, crackling in the soft breeze, most of the leaves speckled in early autumn rust. Titus is the same – tall gray smile in a meaty red shirt, the commune’s grandfather surgeon. But everything also seems crisper, focused – the frayed edges of the book covers, the folder with my name on it that’s laying across a pile of random stationery, the sizable lump protruding from Titus’s jugular, like Billy’s old man’s tumor. Maybe the months of constant sensory deprivation and hospital-light gloom have starved my vision into an unnatural state of clarity. And my decision to be less than compliant in following the company diet. Unafraid.