Monkey’s Business

            For it must have been closer to 1815, but no earlier than 1810, though by that time I had already forgotten. I had asked some of the sailors and some had asked me but none had any answers for each other, and by that time we had been sailing for over a year so what year it was precisely had been lost in the scuffle at sea, only waiting for orders but sailing from here to there and they had picked me up somewhere between Bordeaux and where the wreckage began. I was half-starving and perhaps one or two had taken pity on me though the others could not understand this, and I was only another mouth to feed but pledged to be useful and over the course of only a few days, I had proved this to be so. For, it was only I who could climb in seconds to the tops of the masts, secure the failing ropes, carry whatever tools needed be in my tail and my hands were always free to make haste on those long treks up and down the verticals of the ship that, again, only I could make in seconds and with relative ease. It saved a lot of trouble and work for the men who were slow to come around, and it was commonplace for them to coerce me into dances during the evenings when there was nothing else to do, and so some would sing and others would play instruments made untuned by the salty air, and others would only jeer and make lude sounds, or slap their arms to their bodies and trample their feet to the deck. And like I said, I was made to dance, even though I was not the dancing sort, or at least, not at the time for that has since changed, and now I even remember those nights with fondness as they began my love for the fine arts through albeit crude beginnings that I was only able to foster some time after the “rescue”, and have since never looked back. But, they would drink and drink as sailors do, and even the ones in their army coats wearing their false sense of propriety and self-importance, who would never be caught dead walking with me through any of the towns, and yet were the rowdiest bunch after all the drink and dance, and would try the fiercest to proposition me or even forcefully have their way with me, but I would threaten with my teeth and my claws and they would slink away, egos wounded, in to the shadows and, come the next day, never acknowledge me but do their best to make my life hard. Those were the ones who would insist I should be thrown over and drowned, or shot and cooked when food grew scarce. They would lick their lips as I ambled past, and they would step on my tail and I would screech and they would only laugh and insist I had been putting on a farce. It was them who, if I refused to dance for fatigue or illness or embarrassment, began the tradition of taking out their pistols and shooting blanks at my feet to rivet me to movement, and then this would become such an enjoyable experience that they would shoot even during the day to only get a response.

Once, however, some particularly vicious type fired at me and, indeed, a real bullet had gone off and lodged in the mast, and the captain had become furious and slapped him across the face, hard, and told him off in front of everyone for wasting bullets designated to French victory on petty acts of unnecessary cruelty. I cannot say the captain was a friend of mine, though, and actually I believe he really did harbor his anger towards the soldier for wasting resources, for all resources were scarce in those days but, regardless, you see this was my experience with them. For over a year we sailed around, waiting to be deployed, and yet never receiving any real orders, and I was told before they picked me up, they had been sailing for almost another whole year, so, they were on the whole very restless, sexless, and violent. It was only the cooks who treated me well, who made sure I was always fed after a hard day of physical work only I alone could accomplish, and there had been but one boy, a young man of about nineteen, who I could tell had taken to me, but did nothing to make his affections public or to stand up to my ever-excitable aggressors. There was only one time when he had become very drunk, which for him was rare, on one of those nights when they would sing and force me to dance, and after I had been relieved of my entertaining duties and the usual brutes had tried and failed to have their way with me, I had been surprised to see him appear at my bunk, flushed and nervous and unable to speak, and in fact I had been so stunned that he had managed to rush in and steal a single kiss from me. I allowed it, and I would have maybe allowed more but he was gone- my young navy boy nevermore. I had tried, after the wreckage, as I was being held by the courts, to determine if he had managed to survive, but my captors assured me repeatedly that no one had survived, and I had been genuinely sad at the loss. He had not been cruel to me at all and, although we did not know each other well, he had been of a nervous and gentle nature and that had warmed my heart to him a great deal. Still, he could not deviate from the group, and men at sea who are isolated from the fabric of their regular lives are desperate to establish a new world for themselves, and of course this must be accompanied with an entirely new culture and new set of norms. It seemed that picking me up in Bordeaux had been somewhat of a godsend for them as they struggled to endure their existentially void time away from their homes, as despising me became center to their new culture and acted to unite them, and give them purpose by partaking in that exceedingly human practice of stigmatizing and acting superior- my presence soothed them and enabled them to feel more human and, thus, less lost. My young soldier boy could not turn his back on this comradery in the time when he needed it the most. 

All in all, however, you can understand why I did not hold much regard for them as a whole and so, after the sinking off the Hartlepool coast, and being remanded and tried as a spy for those people, it seemed almost to be like a cruel joke. They asked me all kinds of things, and had to employ multiple translators for none of us could understand each other, and each translator would become increasingly unnerved by my appearance and the tone of my voice, and then soon disintegrate into too much shock, and would be replaced after some weeks had passed while they scrambled to find another, and I was kept locked up all that time. They asked me all sorts of questions over the course of many months and what year it was by the time we had finished I did not know at all, but I knew for sure another one had passed as it had grown colder and colder and I had heard the festivities of the holiday time all from my lonely cell. This did not bother me too much- the holidays at the end of the year, or at any given point of the year, meant absolutely nothing at all to me. Still, nobody would come down to keep me company and they kept me in a modified cell as they feared my imminent escape. They asked me who I was and were never pleased with the answer, although I found it peculiar that they would not ask me what I was until it dawned on me much later that they had taken me for a man, only a man from a foreign land and that, in and of itself was enough, apparently, to explain away all of my physical idiosyncrasies. I corrected them multiple times, although only halfheartedly, I’ll admit, as I was curious to find how it would differ to be treated by these people as a man, albeit a foreign one, and I can report in retrospect that it had not done much to improve my circumstances a lot, or even at all. They asked me if I knew how the ship had sunk, and I told them honestly that I did not. I had only heard, as everyone else had, a loud explosion and then screams as people ran onto the deck from below and reported that the hull had been breached. We were all in the water shortly afterwards, and the chaos had left little space for analysis and temperature taking. They had fished me out a few hours later, floating closer and closer to the shore on some board, and taken me immediately into custody as they searched the site for more survivors which, of course, I was later informed, there were none. They asked me if I could reveal anything about the little general’s future plans, and seemed barely able to contain their excitement at the opportunity they truly believed to have stumbled upon, but their enthusiasm failed quickly after it became clear to everyone, including myself, how little I even knew about the war, the ship, and especially about the man. Then, they simply decided to discard me through hanging, refusing to publicly admit the creature they captured was not, in fact, a spy, or even a man, but marched me to the gallows with the determination to keep their faces intact. No love lost in that part of the world for me, either.

And how did I escape in the end? Well, with the same tricks that I had used to save myself from the wreckage, and to build a name doing what it is that I do now, that has earned me my fame and reputation and allowed me to live in comfort for the first time since my birth. Although, my captors, of course, refused to admit as well that I had escaped and left them all bamboozled; they went ahead with the false execution and have since earned their own little mark of fame for the ordeal. And I was doing very well, and all was finally calm and I was able to gather enough wealth to live my life on my own terms. All until one day:

He began to panic only when the assistants did, for obviously they had heard what he had not in the strange, foreign tongue of the monkey who had predicted his terrible future. They became agitated, and argued with one another in front of him as he merely sat and awaited instruction. The monkey, it seemed, was finished speaking and could only shake its head in dismay. He was becoming annoyed. He attempted several times to interject himself into the assistants’ discourse, but they responded each time only by holding their palms out towards him in that gesture that begged him to be silent. After some time of this, the monkey could not retain its own composure, and in the excitement of the scene begun to scream as well a shrill, natural sound that he had heard other monkeys in the zoo release when they would become frenzied. This sound quieted everyone instantly, and the assistants only exchanged glances and bit their lips.

He stared at the monkey in surprise.

It had climbed up during the panic on to the shelf at the furthest end of the room across from where he sat. Its green turban, now away from the light of the table, had lost the shimmery reflections from the flecks of golden string sewed into the fabric. As he had waited for his fortune to be told, he had admired the reflections of light they produced. The monkey had curled its tail around itself in a defensive position, and its eyes opened wider than he had thought possible, with the black eyeliner smudged and crying down its cheeks. He had thought the monkey, at first, to be quite beautiful, and was stunned by how feral it now looked, clutching the wood of the shelf with its painted claws and regarding him with fear.

The assistants had had enough, they shooed him out of the room. He wanted his money back.

“No, no, no, no,” was all they could say.

“But it didn’t tell me anything!”

“The Monkey spoke with you?” the taller one asked.

“Yes- but I couldn’t understand him! No one told me it couldn’t speak any English.”

Over the assistant’s shoulder, he struggled to catch a glimpse of the monkey who was now being held and consoled by the shorter assistant. They were speaking in their own language in whispers, they were both on the verge of tears. He exhaled in frustration and yelled for the taller assistant to take their hands off him. He wanted his money back.

“NO, NO! NO!” the monkey yelled at him from the back of the room.

The assistants used his temporary shock as an opportunity to give him a final push out of the room. The door to the lounge slammed in his face and he could hear the monkey’s voice raising above the assistants in its peculiar tone that was neither entirely male nor female, low nor high-pitched.

He couldn’t make sense of it. He was being made to leave by the powers of the monkey itself and so couldn’t refute them- knew that the situation would only continue to unravel if he hung around the site, so he hobbled down the narrow stairs in a daze, into the claustrophobic entryway where the door had been left propped open, and spilt himself like grain into the street. The light outside required his eyes to adjust from the dim ambience that the monkey’s company had curated within. It must have been that he only picked a direction and began to walk toward it for really, he had no destination in mind and no capacity for thinking through. People walked past him on the street, unawares. He wondered if he was going to die.

And then, he thought, it could not be so simple, for if that were only the case, the monkey would have had more cause to react with sympathy than concern. Maybe. Instead, the animal had exploded into a fit of real fear- whether the whole thing had been only a sham or not, he could not deny in any sense that the fear had been real and awful. So, what had it seen in him? He could not know. He tried his best, as he fixed his gaze upon his automated feet, to focus and reach down into the depths of his nature yet could not find anything but familiar waves from familiar neighbors who resided within him and knew each other well. Which of these were to be his- supposed- undoing; which one would lead him into a- supposed- danger so deep and dismal that even his own hired Virgil had abandoned him upon the first signaling of its descent?

He was too overwhelmed to consider anything seriously; his pulse was shattering his chest and, in its quickening, slowing his systems down to almost a stop. He needed, suddenly, to sit. His eyes burned with tears of shame and frustration. Was it something he knew of already working its conspiracy with destiny, or was it something of which he could not even conceive? What was he to do from here- where would he go? What was to become of him?