Monkeytown

by Chris Vola

  “I wanted to hand you these in person,” Titus says as he holds out a bundle of yellow envelopes. Paychecks. I open one – €120.000 made out to Joshua XXXXXX. The rest will have similar numbers. There’s a growing heap of them under my mattress.

  “Thanks.” The sun is feeble, gray-tinted, even though it’s almost midday. At least November. How long have I been underground?

  “I want to let you know how good of a job I think you’re doing here, not that you need a pep talk,” he says. He sits down, motions for me to do the same. “But how have you been feeling, Josh?”

  “Fine,” I say. I tap the pile of envelopes ironically.

  Titus chuckles, rolls up his sleeves. “I can see by those circles under your eyes that you’ve also been having some fun.”

  “Not as much as some people.”

  “True,” he sighs. “I wish they’d use a little more restraint, be cool like you.”

  Like me.

  “I just want to do the work,” I say, “walk out of here with a big-ass bank account and spend the rest of my life with seventy virgins on my own Caribbean island. The filming hasn’t been hard, the other guys are whatever. No problems here.”

  Titus’s smile exits. A sparrow hovers at the window for a moment, speeds off. “You’re telling me that you’re having an easy time?” he asks, shuffling some papers around on his desk. “The work is boring?”

  “I didn’t say boring, I meant –”

  “It makes sense,” he says. “Soldiers are programmed not to feel boredom when they’ve been assigned a task. A competent dullness few without the training can ever really understand.” He looks up from his papers. “It’s also one of the difficulties we seem to have in trying to figure out how to take in non-combatants, how to simulate boot camp, the shock and discomfort.”

  I snort. “Seems like you skipped all of that and turned me into a P.O.W. from the beginning.”

  “The point is that you’re different from the other agents, and that’s a good thing.” A good thing because you’re the only one who hasn’t gone Heart-of-Darkness-apeshit on a village of unsuspecting Muslims.

  “Your brain doesn’t have an off-duty kill switch,” he says. “You were the only one paying attention today.”

  “Probably because I was the least hungover,” I say, a blatant lie. “And I thought the gist of it was interesting. But I’m not sure how much of the technology stuff pertains specifically to…what I mean is, our target audience is made up of people who still live in caves, who barely have enough electricity to run a VCR, let alone high-speed Internet or cell phone towers.”

  “In terms of what you’ve been assigned, yes. But it’s a small piece. You haven’t seen the real, ah, scope yet. Most of them don’t need to. They’re content to follow orders and collect paychecks. It’s all they care about knowing. It’s why you’re different and why I want you to get acquainted with the entire operation. You can handle a bigger role.”

  The scope of everything. More intentional vagueness. Just let it go, be like a soldier, follow the orders…

  “How do you feel about Agent Thompson?” he asks.

  An image – Thompson bent over, navigating the blonde meth head’s pigtails like a bicycle, pulling them so hard that there’s a pile of loose strands collecting on his boots, ordering her to unzip his pants with her teeth. “Seems like a good guy,” I say. “He’s helped me get comfortable.”

  “One of our first in the program,” he says, “and one of the best. He is a fucking slob,” he says, “but a reliable slob. I’ve asked him to help get you up to speed a little with some insight and some light training, starting tomorrow after breakfast.”

  “Sounds great,” I say. There’s a brief awkward silence. If he’s not going to tell me to leave, I might as well say it… “What about Davis?” I ask. “He’s non-military. He’s hardly ever around. Is he working on something different for the group? Recruiting?”

  “What about Davis…” he trails off, closes the laptop screen in front of him. “Recruitment, yeah, among other things. He’s acting more like what you would call a liaison, a middle man to some of the freelancers we work with, to some of our clients who have assets in this country. It’s why he still has to maintain a legit birth certificate, if you’re wondering. Kane works in a similar role. ‘Killing’ either of them would have been impossible, although now I’m wondering whether or not it’s something we should have done.”

  Need to take this as far as I can. “Why is that?” I ask. “If you’re worried about him fucking around, I never suspected anything when we were outside.”

  Titus looks up, smirking but his eyes are steamy. “Deception for him is a strength, no doubt. But I’m a little worried about how far he might be...” He pauses. “Nothing for you to worry about. Right now, just focus on the job, that good ole Protestant work ethic.”

  “I do,” I say. “Hanging with Mr. Thompson will be a nice break from babysitting freaks and declaring jihads.”

  “Babysitting freaks…” Titus snickers, shifts to a lighter tone. “All right, I think we’re done here. Keep up the good work, and thanks for listening.”

  I scoop up the bundle of checks, give him an impromptu salute with my free hand.

  “You look skinny,” Titus says as I turn to leave, “you should eat some more. The food’s free.” He laughs.

  THIS IS WHAT goes down when the lights go off:

  1) Nothing for as long as it makes sense. Take the breaths a little longer, a little louder, simulate sleep.

  2) Reach under the mattress and pull out the small tee-shirt bundle containing Harry’s arm bone, the copper coil, and the ammo cartridge from the plastic rifle prop – shank components.

  3) Position the bone between my thighs, under the covers, looks like I’m pitching a tent.

  4) Unwrap the copper coil and it’s one hard, straight length of wire.

  5) Grip each end of the straight copper length under the mattress. Press it against the tip of the bone and work it downwards in short, repeated strokes, sandpaper on wood, piece of metal string on modeling clay. Rotate the bone clockwise between my thighs, a blade that’s even on all sides.

  6) Repeat

  7) Wipe the bone clean of shavings. Wipe the shavings and scatter them across the off-white bed sheets; they disappear like dandruff.

  8) Wrap the copper back into a tight coil. Wrap the bone, the coil, and the ammo cartridge in the tee shirt bundle.

  9) Shove the bundle underneath the mattress.

  10) Wait for the adrenaline to recede.

  11) Wait for the alarm clock and the lights.

  “HAVE YOU EVER had any madness in your family?” An old man in a blue jacket. His fingers are like ten cold eels as he directs me into a tiny room, checks my pulse, tests my reflexes, cups my testicles, measures my cranium with a pair of metal forceps. He wants to know if there’s a history of psychosis in the immediate family, if my parents or grandparents had suffered from any form of dementia, paranoia, schizophrenia, unipolar depression, a dozen other medical terms… He can see that I’m starting to sweat, so he changes the subject and tells me about the delicious breakfast he’s fixed. He’s devised a way to shrink the nutrition found in a full meal down to the size of five tiny blue capsules. Just five blue capsules and a glass of water, equal in dietary goodness to a plate of steaming hot eggs, bacon, grits and sausage. He hands me the meal on a plastic slab, assuring me it’s as fresh as a newly disemboweled hen. My delicious breakfast is over in two large gulps. I leave a clean plate. The man in the blue jacket and his assistant are nice enough to escort me back to my room and tuck me into bed for the most streamlined sleep I’ve had in…

  “HEY JOSH, JOSH, hey get up, come on!” Girlish whispers. Stale breath. Tiny hands shaking my torso.

  “Lauren?”

  “Shhhh!”

  The hands scuttle across my body, cockroach legs. One of them finds my left arm, locks on. “Go into the bathroom,” she whispers, releases. Muted footsteps,
the smallest creak of the bathroom door. I sit up, dazed. I slip off the covers – a man in a blue jacket? – shuffle blind to the bathroom. “Close the door,” she says. Soft fabric brushes against my arm. “Towel it.”

  I grab the towel, roll it into a long tube, press it against the space between the bottom of the door and the tiles.

  She flicks the light switch. I blink hard a few times. It’s the girl from the meth room, the blonde Thompson had his way with, the little girl’s mother. A gray, stain-riddled tee shirt that says No One Cares About Your Blog engulfs her bruised, angular frame. The same dead eyes that have choked and drowned in a cloud of sweet blue smoke countless times. She might be twenty-seven or forty-seven. As the sleep fog lifts – why is she here? How did she get out of the meth room? Another test, a live reminder?

  “You don’t recognize me, do you?” she asks, hugging herself. Something registers, but it’s not enough for a name. “From Richmond?”

  The face, way different now, but the picture is starting to become clear. I can almost grasp it. Something with an A. Amy? Alanna? Alexandra?

  “It’s Annabelle.” The eyes drop shyly to the floor.

  Annabelle. Annabelle Newton. I haven’t heard, haven’t thought about that name in almost five years. But the syllables, sounded out in a slurry back-mountain twang, conjure something entirely alien to the eighty-five-pound scarecrow scratching red flakes off her arms and onto the off-white linoleum. That name was a strawberry-blonde, curvy-in-all-the-right-places freshman who I noticed for the first time in September of my sophomore year, my last year in Virginia. She was hurrying from class, eyes lowered like now, from her room in Robins Hall, past the football stadium, in the general direction of the academic quad. Freshman didn’t begin to do justice to how fresh she really was. Fresh out of a cinderblock trailer hidden in some nameless backwoods Appalachian hamlet that she’d managed to escape by earning a full scholarship and keeping the hands of the boys she’d gone to high school with out of her skirt. Freshly moved into the gothic, brickwalled dorms of Richmond, her first “big city,” her first real gasps of air that didn’t reek of her mother’s unhealthy, biblical orthodoxy and her stepfather’s groping, unwashed fingers. Sounds like a Lifetime movie but it wasn’t her fault. And it wasn’t her fault that she was about to get her first fresh coeducational taste (or as my buddy Alex sitting next to me in the backseat of a Volvo station wagon while we cruised around campus that day put it – her first mouthful) of irresistible Yankee seduction.

  Geographically Southern, University of Richmond, like any small, private, moderately well-respected liberal arts school with a sizable endowment, attracts more than its share of New England white boys, driving their parents’ newly leased luxury SUVs on the same carpet-bagging migration each fall, building loads of character by sticking it out for four years in a place as dismally provincial as Central Virginia (which is what I would have done if Davis’s father hadn’t pulled a couple gentleman’s handshakes and gotten me into Columbia so I’d be closer to his constantly disappointing son). To a girl who’d basically wandered down from the mountains, encounters with boys who knew the difference between a jib and a foresail, and who used the word summer as a verb, were as foreign as they were enticing.

  Annabelle realized very early that if she couldn’t find anyone who would take her home to meet Mommy and Daddy Warbucks, then she would get as close to as many of them as possible the best way she knew how. It only took a month or two before Annabelle’s name had drifted through most of the major cliques, the fratdogs to the baseball team to lonely handjob virgins, everyone heard the stories about the clueless little redneck girl with the corn-fed ass and the mouth like a Hoover.

  My ride on the Annabelle train came late in my sophomore year at a “Halloween-in-Spring” party. She was a sexy nurse in a see-through red and white lingerie uniform and I had on doctor scrubs with a card that said Dr. Josh, O.B.G.Y.N taped to my chest. I don’t remember how we got back to my room and I don’t remember much about the actual sex, except for a few moments of imaginative foreplay with the plastic stethoscope I’d been wearing and my own amazement at being able to sustain an erection long enough to complete the task.

  The next morning she was gone and I had another notch on my hook-up belt, albeit one I shared with probably two-thirds of my dorm. I don’t remember seeing Annabelle after that night, but neither did anyone else. We just assumed she’d finally freaked out, realized the gravity of her transgressions, transferred somewhere distant and obscure, far enough away from where her reputation could possibly follow her. I would transfer to Columbia later that year, my own permanent reverse migration, never finding out the real story.

  What no one apparently knew was that that the seeds of her debauched pleas for acceptance were slowly taking shape, expanding inside her. My guess is she went back to the trailer, letting her parents and the mountains absorb most of the shock of her swelling shame. But then what happened? Why is she here now?

  “You don’t believe me,” she says, looking into up at my face again.

  “No, I do,” I whisper, “it’s just that this is so –”

  “Unbelievable.” she cuts me off. “I didn’t believe it either, when I saw you I thought it was a dream, but here you are. Almost the same as I remember, a little skinnier but…” she trails off.

  “What happened to you?” I ask.

  She sits on the toilet seat, kneads her fists into her bony thighs. “I found out I was pregnant, couldn’t stay at school. Could you imagine what they would have said about me?”

  Probably nothing worse than what they already said.

  “After I dropped out my parents wouldn’t see me, told me I was disowned. Not that they owned anything besides a roof and a mattress. So I left, stayed in Christianville with friends from high school until Alaska was born.” Alaska. That was what Titus called her. I’d thought it was his own hippied-out stage name.

  “After I was able to,” she says, “I got a job and we got ourselves a room, but life didn’t…things didn’t work out. I had to do things.” She stares at her chewed-up fingernails. “I came here what must have been almost two years ago,” she continues. “Titus fed us, gave us somewhere safe where my daughter didn’t have to see me…But now it’s different, he’s different. I think something’s happening. I need to get Alaska away from these people.”

  This half-assed mind game, a garbled plea. Bullshit on so many levels. I’m not falling for it. “If you haven’t noticed by now,” I say, “I don’t really think I’m in much of a position to get anyone out of here, including myself.”

  She picks at a scab. “The reason I was so surprised when they brought you in,” she says, “the reason I was so shocked, is because she’s yours. Alaska is your, is our daughter.”

  “That isn’t possible,” I whisper. “She’s not mine.” Another mindfuck. I think about Harry’s bone, waiting under my bed, wishing it was finished so I could stab this simple whore's jugular. Wake me up when this is…

  “She is. The timing of when we…fucked, it works out perfectly.”

  “There were a lot more people besides me, before and after, I’m sure.” I snarl. “What about the soccer team? What about your friends in Sigma Chi? I wore a condom.”

  “Did you?” Annabelle stands up and pushes past me, tears welling. As she bends to pick up the towel, there’s a soft clanking sound, metal on metal. She flicks off the light. The bathroom door creaks.

  “Wait –” I start, but she’s gone, in and out of the room’s main door so fast she may as well have gone through it.

  THOMPSON’S FINISHED wolfing down his third helping of eggs Benedict and French toast and his fourth cup of coffee. “You nervous, X?” he asks, wiping his crusty upper lip with his jacket sleeve.

  “No,” I say, pushing around the mostly uneaten meal in front of me with a spoon, surly and tired. “Why do you always ask how I’m feeling?”

  Thompson stands up, stretches his disgusting torso, his pits alre
ady stained. “You’ve hardly said anything this morning. Not that you ever say much any time. Real mysterious, but what do I know? You having a good time or not, X?”

  How to answer that. I was woken up by a meth head who thinks I’m the father of her child, that I can’t eat what I want because I’m afraid I’ll turn into a monkey, I’m pretty sure Titus is trying to rope me into some early-dementia-induced conspiracy about Davis – everything is peachy. Fine. “Dandy,” I say. “What’s the plan?”

  Thompson gives me this half-bemused smirk, smiles. “OK, we take the tour first, then target practice, like I said. Let’s go.”

  We exit the din of the cafeteria as one of the TVs streams 800-POUND SOUTH CAROLINA MAN DIES AFTER GETTING STUCK IN RECLINER FOR 8 MONTHS and a few of the agents snicker. I follow Thompson down the main hallway, away from where it branches off into smaller corridors – the one with my room, a half-dozen filming and editing studios, the meth head dorm, and the storage closet; and the one that contains the meeting hall, the cafeteria, and most of the other agents’ beds. After about fifty yards there’s a dead end – a door that’s the same drab gray color as the walls and floor, what looks like a lockbox on one side, barely perceptible from the other end of the hallway. Thompson flips it open, types something into a keypad. I try to lean in and see what it is without making it obvious, but his massive shoulder blocks me out.