Monkey Boxes
by James Lewelling
At fifteen thousand volts they had literally cooked what was left of the limbic
system, and since nobody had the stomach to eat it or any other part of the
subject, they gave the broken body to an underling from the fringes of the
bureaucracy with instructions to deposit it ASAP on a grassy slope some
distance from the department to take advantage of the waning afternoon sunlight
that was long and brilliant at that time of year. The underling would have
liked to carry it in a sterile white plastic bag, but none were immediately available. So he carried it pressed against his side under his right arm, and
the head, which was about the size and weight of your average grapefruit,
bobbed against his chest, the subject's neck having been broken in the final
convulsion beyond anything even rigor mortis could have remedied. This
impromptu errand drew the underling outside of his schedule, but as far as he
knew nothing else was pressing, so he took his time. On the sidewalk in front
of the department, which occupied an entire city block, he strolled past
auxiliary entrance after entrance with the body under his arm becoming less
burdensome as it stiffened. He reached the end of the department building,
crossed the street, skirted a vacant lot, hurried past the building of a
different department and another vacant lot, and reached the railroad tracks.
Crossing the tracks carefully to avoid stepping on the third rail, more for
luck than safety since he had never seen the Electric running, he adjusted his
grip under the animal's rib cage and began to whistle. The whistle evolved
into a meandering hum as he mounted the grassy slope under long slats of late
afternoon sunlight. At the summit, he stopped for a moment, listened but heard
nothing. He gripped the animal, which had become thoroughly rigid by this time
save the neck, by the stiff dry hair in its armpit and with a vigorous motion
tossed it across the crest to the opposite slope. The animal careened through
the air, spinning laterally as well as end over end, and came to rest on its
back after a short bounce. With its head cradled face up in the long green
turf, the corpse contemplated a late afternoon blue sky deepening to evening's
rich purple. The underling took a moment to clap and rub his hands together,
and resuming his whistles, descended the slope in the direction he had come.
I.
The king--we are translating--had met with a terrible accident involving an
agricultural machine that soundlessly separated wheat from chaff at an
extraordinary speed. When the other men found his visceral remains, they
understood immediately that nothing could be done with them directly and that
elaborate maneuvers would have to be accomplished if the king were to be
recovered even in part. Accordingly, everything that could be found at the
site of the accident as well as a few incidentals at the king's former
residence were painstakingly gathered, sealed in glass receptacles of roughly
corresponding sizes and brought to the council chamber, where a meeting was
convened. There it was decided that time was of the essence and that no
expense should be spared in recovering whatever could be recovered of the former
monarch. A panel of experts certified that the artifacts gathered at the site
and elsewhere were, despite the duly noted intentions of the gatherers, wholly
irrelevant to the task at hand and should be discarded posthaste in a fashion
that would allow the untainted recovery of the glass receptacles, which would undoubtedly
prove useful in some future dilemma of a similar nature.
A specialist was obtained from abroad. The specialist, combining elements of
local technology in novel configurations generated by her expertise, assembled
a device that, or so she said, if operated correctly and in the absence of
unpredictable phenomenal abnormalities, would recover whatever remained to be
recovered of the missing monarch, who had been absent now for a considerable
stretch of time. A meeting was again convened, and after a vigorous debate in
which a great deal of skepticism was expressed by some of the younger peers
regarding the efficacy of the foreign device, it was decided, in the absence of
other credible alternatives, to employ this apparatus. The specialist was paid
generously and, after instructing a local notable in the correct operation of
the machine, departed the scene for another similar contract in a distant land.
The machine--four gold dowels fitted into holes bored into a rectangular wooden
base at the bottom and corresponding glass rectangle at the top, above which a
fifth dowel ascended and was crowned by a standard 40 watt bulb--resembled
nothing so much as a shadeless table lamp which might have been obtained at a
flea market. The cord, however, run through the fifth dowel up into the bulb
and trailing down from the second platform into a coil of some length, did not
terminate in a standard plug but frayed at its end into a nerve-like bundle of
finely curved copper fibers.
A third meeting was convened, and at the instruction of the recently trained
notable, the men gathered in a circle around the device, held hands and in low
voices chanted the name of the unforgotten monarch. After several moments,
during which the confidence of the group grew through the force and solemnity
of their shared experience to an impossibly tenuous peak of expectation, the
bulb above the fifth pillar flickered to luminescence. There was a great
collective sigh as the bulb of the machine blinked, and its base twitched with
the life of the formerly departed monarch, who had indeed returned from the
dead to observe with terror through brilliant light bulb glass the jubilant,
expectant faces of his assembled countrymen.
II.
Fat men with red faces were sucking jazz out of the smoky air and blowing it
through shiny metal instruments into pastel crepe-paper streamers when the thin
woman the young man had come with slipped her hand under the cuff of his shirt,
gripped the soft flesh under his arm and suggested that he accompany her across
the river outside to a soft flat leafy place on the opposite bank. In a moment
they had left the music inside and were standing together on a cobble-stoned
path under a moonless night sky, watching the river's dark movements below
them. There was a smattering of incidental dialogue, drizzle collecting on
their shoulders, the soft corded texture of the woman's skin stretched tightly
across her rib cage, warm dew gathering in the hair under the man's arms and
the cold kiss of slender fingers draped lightly across the back of his neck.
The spray thickened to rain around them, and mud rose around the cobble stones.
A moist breeze swirled beneath the skirts of the young man's rain coat. The
woman began to hum a piece of melody pulled from the room where they had been
before.
She took his hand, and they turned to walk up the path toward an iron bridge on
their right that defined the horizon in long droops of steel cables with
knifing verticals, between which the black night shifted to deep blue. The
dark bridge drawing towards them loomed larger than their line of sight and
when they turned onto a short staircase near the bank, became a cathedral.
Neither of them remember the crossing. The rain would have continued. There
would have been wind. Without peering over the edge, they would have been
conscious of the gravity-driven rush of black horses' necks tumbling over each
other in the dark water below.
III.
He made insects at home. He didn't grow them. He made them with his hands.
He sent them out to gather messages, but once they passed through the front
door, he always lost track of their movements. He convinced himself that the
insects were performing an experiment on him, a self-serving experiment that
predicated their own small existences. It was infuriating, but nonetheless the
situation in which he found himself.
She often went out, got tired and returned prematurely. Occasionally upon her
return, she would find a park bench in her living room and was terrified. She
was terrified because it had been there all along. In other instances she
walked through the mirror on her bathroom door, exchanging places with a full-
time double, who didn't like it out there either and always returned after a
reasonable time.
Once he got up to answer the phone. The voice on the other end wanted to talk
to someone who, as far as he knew, no longer resided at that number. He
offered to take a message, but the caller informed him that that would be
unnecessary. When he returned the phone to its cradle, he noticed a dark smear
where his fingers had been.
One afternoon the universe seeped into her apartment through an open window
above the kitchen table, displacing portions of air in the kitchen, distorting
invisible spaces. For several days she was lost between the bathroom and the
front door. This didn't interfere with her work schedule, which sustained
itself.
He sent bombs to people in the mail and spent his days waiting to hear the
explosions. He said his phone was a whore, and it had him rattled that a
carnival could be compressed into such a small space. There was never any
explanation, but he suspected that the phenomena were related to the shapes of
his windows. When the key got caught in the lock, he tried to jerk it out or
banged on the glass door. It was a matter of impatience. He was incapable of
saving anything except used condoms and dirty socks, which then multiplied on
their own.
She collected shards of crating from the alley behind her building. She bored
singe holes in each of the ends and thread loops of string through the holes.
It wasn't costume jewelry. She didn't wear it. Most mornings she could hear
the muffled groans and thumpings of the couple upstairs copulating on the floor.
IV.
The elderly half-way house escapee--cottony wisps of sythetic fibers grown from
the corner of a mattress on the sidewalk in front of your residence then
gathered by the fistful and nailed in bunches to a discarded table leg--croaks
givemeadollars with automaton-like regularity standing barefoot at the foot of
the escalator at the L-station. If you are disposed to obey her, she will glow
for a moment in a blossom of confusion and delight. Two blocks later, an
affluent kinswoman--a doll cleaned and combed, apple blush on pancaked paper
cheeks hanging below brown eyes so soft they might be clouds--godblesses you as
you pass her on the sidewalk, for which you unfailingly thank her with all your
heart.
The human heart is a cavity divided into four chambers of unequal volume. The
wind might pass through it, examine its surfaces, set them vibrating. The
human heart is a space you might walk into. Slide your hand behind its
curtain. Follow with your shoulder. Let the curtain resume its hanging behind
you. The human heart is a curiosity reclined on a cot in a brightly colored
tent. A novelty. An anomaly. A freak that beats you to the punch, meets your
gaze with a candid smile, annihilates you with its open eyes. The human heart
is a muscle, a bloody fist.
There is a third woman. The one who screamed beneath your window, but when you
emerged from your residence, she was a prone figure sobbing on the sidewalk,
but she wasn't sobbing, she was only a prone figure in an attitude of sobbing,
not making noise, saying nothing because nothing needed to be said, and when
you called the police, you too said nothing but pleaded your own innocence, and
that being enough, all the players returned to their dark corners.
V.
Albert went to a movie to jerk off, but the woman seated next to him started
shoveling palms of popcorn into her open-mouthed face, and the odor of her
mastication prompted him to leave the theater. When he stood up, he made a
black shape on the screen, and as he worked his way to the aisle around fifteen
pairs of knees and several paper cups, it glided above the crowd with a grace
known only to black shapes. When Albert turned toward the exit, row after row
of seated patrons looked up at him.
On the screen an unjustly accused fugitive, having taken refuge in the dark
anonymity of a movie theater, spotted the barrel of an enemy agent's gun
glinting at the edge of the velour curtain. Because either he had already seen
the movie or seen a substantial number of movies of the same type, he
understood instantly that some kind of cinematic gunshot was in the offing and
that the enemy agent was waiting for the cover the noise would provide to
discharge his own bullet. As he rose to leave, he noticed the shining face of
his sweetheart in the back of the crowd, frowning in distress or warning.
The artist in the film, having suffered several financial and romantic
reversals in the previous reel, decided to disown his life's work--a series of
half-successful formal experiments--and redeem himself by throwing his soon-to-
be useless body across the rails of a set of conveniently located elevated
railroad tracks. As the train approached, his suicide was foiled by the
curious gaze of a homeless gentleman, which prompted him to roll under the
platform just as the train pulled into the station.
VI.
It's true. John is dead though he was here a moment ago, sketching the
dimensions of his squirrel's cage. We have his belongings. His hat. His
knick-knack--the one he kept in his pocket. His girlfriend. A carton of
cigarettes. All of these are orphans. We don't know what to do with them.
Somebody will tag and file them, we assume. We can't in our own minds
establish any obligation on our part to remain here until that is done, but to
leave them all alone seems hazardous. It invites the great white hand of God
to tear through this space and remove everything that suggests John to us, to
anyone who might wander in, to the people beneath the window, to the world at
large. We are reluctant to leave. We are afraid our reluctance will grow into
a compulsion. One of our number has heard stories about similar compulsions.
In every case the prognosis was not good. It's better to play cards. Someone
makes a joke. I think I hear them coming. Maybe everything will be all right
after all.
James Lewelling's work has appeared in
Proliferations, Black Ice, The Cream City Review,
Doppelganger, The Stranger, Sniper Logic, Friendly
(http://atfriendly.net) and elsewhere. He's been writing fiction since 1988. He has written two unpublished novels and is working on his third. He is currently making a living teaching technical writing to young basket ball playing Emirati women in the United Arab Emirates. He lives in Abu Dhabi
with his wife, the poet, Lisa Isaacson, and their two lovely daughters, Francie
and Cissy.
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