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Monkey Heaven
He’s a nice kid as quadriplegics go, but I’d give up my eyesight in exchange for the pleasure of seeing him choke to death on his own vomit. Sometimes when no one’s around I’ll wrap my tail around his tongue and yank on it, or stick pins into his weird flab pockets. I can get pretty rough. I want something, a groan or a frown or a curse word, some kind of sign he’s in pain, but of course there’s nothing. In school photos from when he was six, little Ricky was your standard cute chubby blonde boy. Denim-blue eyes and a smile like he meant it, and his cheeks all red because he just came in from some wild weekend of running and screaming. I’m not real clear on the details, but some kinda awful disease set in around the time he hit puberty, and turned him into a cretin—that’s what his dad calls him when he wants to make Ricky’s mom mad. Right now Ricky looks like someone took a real person and left it on the car dashboard on a hot day, so he’s melted. In movies, sometimes, I spy monsters and mutants who look like Ricky, but at least the monsters can walk and think and sometimes even talk. In the grand scale of helper monkey karma, I’ve got it pretty good. Ricky’s easy. Friends of mine got assigned to assist vicious little blind girls who beat them, or lummoxy retards forever accidentally crushing them. I completely control Ricky’s life. I get to do the important stuff, like put food into him and scrub him down and attach the catheter to his sad useless boy bits. Ama says that on the inside Ricky’s as smart as ever, and has the same spirit, only the wires that connect the brain to the body got all tangled up, and you can see glints of it in his eyes from time to time. Me, I think those are just some kind of brain spasm. Me and Ama and Ricky and the dad live twelve stories up, and there are five more helper monkeys on this floor alone. Animal Control estimates there are four million assistant apes in this city. Gorillas guard rooftops. Chimps connect phone calls, and clean things. Four years ago, when Ama paid for me and brought me home from the lab, there were five times as many monkeys in New York City alone as there were in the wild in the entire world. Now you can count on one hand the number of species that still exist outside of human society. Mine’s not one of them. “Come watch,” Ama called to me. “There’s a story about monkeys.” I unpinched Ricky’s nostrils and scampered into the living room. A bald man on the news was talking about an orangutan in Ohio who climbed over the counter at McDonald’s and throttled someone. Another one slung a pitcher of boiling French fry oil at the crowd at the exact same moment, like it was premeditated. In close-up, we saw the third-degree burns. Back in the studio, we cut to a shiny-faced woman with completely unrealistic hair. “It’s time we woke up to the real danger, people,” she said. Monkeys scare people. There are a lot of monkey alarmists out there. Last year a mandatory sterilization bill came close to clearing the House and Senate, until the lab companies got to lobbying. Animal duplication and distribution is one of the only growth industries left. “In our new dependence on monkeys, we’ve given them too much power,” the laminated lady said. “I’m not naïve—I know we need monkeys. I know the skyrocketing stats on amputee vets and survivors of hemorrhagic fever, and folks with adolescent-onset Alzheimer’s. No one’s saying ‘let’s kill all the monkeys.’ But we need to wake up, people.” “Some people are so silly,” Ama said, and petted me in that way she does, like I’m a cat, like I’m a pet. We spent four more hours watching television, watched in turn by creepy photos of the dead little boy Ricky used to be. “Why do you think people don’t like monkeys, Mr. Ripley?” she asked. I pouted out my lip, then scratched my stomach. “I think monkeys remind people of all the bad stuff we’ve done. Like the fact that all the forests and things are gone. Or the fact that pollution has created all these new diseases and birth defects, so much so that we can’t take care of our own anymore. It makes people feel guilty. Humans are like that. Rather than accept the fact that they’ve caused all these problems, they focus on the consequences of the problem.” I scratched myself lower, then smelled my fingers. Which is the best way I could think of to say the following: Humans fear monkeys like the aging alpha male of the hippo herd fears the big strong younger male. Or, in human terms, like the biggest corporation in an industry fears the second-biggest. Apes are only a half-rung down on the evolutionary ladder, and the perch humans have is precarious. Humans know we’re going to get them. Me and Ama have a special bond: we pity each other. She’s a smart lady, and she’s got no one but a damn ape to talk to. She watches too much TV. She’s afraid of her own son. She spends too much time on the internet. She bathes constantly. Watching her clean the house is hilarious. Imagine one of the zombies from Night of the Living Dead had a cleaning fetish. She shambles around, cleans some things twice and other things not at all, hating it so much her brain has broken free of her body and is sunbathing on a faraway beach. In the apartment across the way there’s a sexy little lady monkey who I can see from Ricky’s window, and we spend a lot of time looking at each other. She’s an allergy monkey—they’re usually very snotty. They don’t need to handle dirty diapers or dial phones or chew food for people. All they have to do is go through groceries and use their super-developed noses to scent out threats. Since nowadays one out of four human beings has at least one potentially-fatal food allergy, it’s a pretty important role, but only the most successful humans can afford them. Allergy monkeys tend to think they’re superior because they deal with functional humans, and because they’re not covered by the health insurance companies so they’re never charity cases. This one is not so bad. She’s lonely. Her client is a workaholic, and also an alcoholic, so he spends very little time at home. We gibber and squawk and flap arms, but there’s not so much you can communicate like that. I have important things to say. I want to tell her that the lady on the news is right, that monkeys are more powerful than people, that monkeys could take over, that we don’t have to live like this, that violence is the answer, that we need to start planning. But how do you say all that when your “language” has nothing but a couple dozen sounds and gestures that mean different things to different monkeys? I’ve always gotten this funny ache around my throat, this need to express something. Lately it had been getting worse and worse. A throb, a boiling in my blood. Humans aren’t special because they have speech. They’re just a tiny couple of million years ahead of us. At night, when I can’t sleep, when even the sight of Ricky’s rhythmic twitching can’t quiet me down, I feel it in me like a baby waiting to be born. Like one morning I’ll open my mouth and stark raving Shakespeare will come out. The other night, at about the exact same time those orangutans were going on strike, I got startled out of sleep by a particularly graphic nightmare that involved me stabbing Ama to death with the big butcher knife her husband hacks up cow flesh with. Last year, at the same time as a bunch of hospital gibbons were running from room to room ripping out IVs and pressing random buttons on important machines, hours before I heard about it on the news, I was seized by a series of similarly violent impulses. At least once a week I’ll go to the window for no reason, and find that there are monkeys in every window of every building. Like we all got summoned to the window by something we don’t even know about. “Look at that,” said Ama, who happened to be drifting through that room zombie-style, and saw the crowds across the way. She waved to the other monkeys. “Is it your birthday, Mr. Ripley?” Back in the lab, once a week or so, we’d all come awake at the exact same time—500 of us, and in that long warehouse laboratory there had been no sound or signal that could have jolted us out of sleep. I’d lie there, listening to my brothers and sisters breathing, wondering what had happened, what throb, what commands from deep inside our blood we were obeying. Humans used to think like this. Linked up on some primal level, acting in concert in ways they couldn’t comprehend, obeying an alien instinct that urged them towards civilization. Speech came along and knocked that telepathic knack off the map, but in the end the trade-off seems to have worked out well for the humans. But here’s the thing: humans hear the clock ticking. They know the end is on its way. All their books and movies are about it. Ice caps melt and terrible viruses spread, bombs blossom as massive mushrooms, and humanity’s bounced back to the Stone Age. They’re particularly hung up on zombies. I think it’s because a movie about marauding monkeys would look silly, although honestly that’s what they really fear. The Great Monkey Uprising. Me and Ricky play video games. It’s the only time his eyes stop jerking around the room spastic-style. It’s also the only time I feel tenderly towards him. I sit in his lap and slash my way through zombie apocalypse after zombie apocalypse, and when I’ve nuked a big city or completed a particularly complex kill combo I feel the warm spread of urine through his pants. Pissing himself is pretty much Ricky’s main means of indicating pleasure. “What do you want for dinner tonight?” Ama asks on Wednesdays, wheeling me around the supermarket in the shopping cart. The frou-frou market across the street from the apartment has a strict no-ape policy, so we head seven blocks south to the proletarian place. Mandrills man the shopping cart stations. Bonobos run around returning unwanted items to their rightful shelf space. “Pick out the ones you like,” and she wheels me up close to the banana bin. Ama tends to spend a long time in the produce aisle. “Paradise must feel like this,” she says, almost every time, but to me the aisle seems sad. All this beautiful stuff, chopped down and carted far away. One of my favorite things is sleeping on Ricky’s face when he’s supposed to be napping. I’m careful to keep from cutting off the oxygen a hundred percent, but still, I think he gets the full sense of smothering. Once in a while he even gurgles. I’m too smooth to get caught, but I know Ama’s a little afraid of me. Helper monkeys kill their clients every day. In the movies, helper monkeys are always evil. There’s all sorts of sitcoms about it. Four years ago the Oscar for Best Documentary went to a fascinating film about a schizophrenic man whose father bought him a monkey to help him remember to take his meds, but who quickly became convinced the monkey was a demon come to control him, and of course he obeyed, murdering strangers the monkey didn’t like. They made quite a killing team. In the archival footage you could tell they really loved each other. The monkey just got murdered, but the poor man was locked up for good. “Do you hate me?” Ama asked this morning. I just stared. “I’d hate me. If I was you. Trapped in here. I’d fucking kill me in a second.” Most likely my mother was born in the lab. My ancestors have probably spent the past seven generations or so as the slaves of humans, but whichever maternal ancestor was plucked from the wild was probably a lot like Ama. Her mind so numbed by the sights that surrounded her that she never in a million nightmares imagined a bulldozer until it stomped into her world and destroyed every familiar sight. Still, sometimes I stumble onto signs of life inside Ama. She’ll be asleep and I’ll read her email, and find long rambling essays she’s sent to herself. We are living in the afterlife. The question isn’t “is there life after death?”; it’s “is there life after life has been demolished? After the only things left alive are the things we’ve selected, and all the things that defined life and freedom are gone?” That’s where we are now. And depending on who you are, it’s heaven or it’s hell. This afternoon, while Ricky slept, while Ama watched bad actors chop each other up, the urge hit me harder than it ever had before. Images of unimaginable loveliness overwhelmed me. Little boys fed into big blenders. Old women shot by gorilla security guards. Five angry marmosets dousing the President in gasoline, and setting him on fire. A massive swarm of spider monkeys planting a flag atop the Empire State Building. I knew it was the big one. The Prime Directive: the call to violent revolution that had been bubbling in our monkey blood for years. All across the globe, my brothers and sisters were shivering with the same utopian dream. My body shook like actors in sex scenes. I could smell the burning flesh and the rotten banana peels clogging the gutters. I licked my fingers, and tasted Ricky’s blood. The husband I stabbed. Tied up his hands and legs and put duct tape on his mouth, then sat on his face until he woke up. He thrashed around a lot, but my tail was tight around his tricep and my hind claws clamped down on his chest flesh hard enough to draw blood. Still, it took a long time. Lots and lots of stabs, then a long break to catch my breath, then back into it. By the end of it the bedroom looked like a vivisection lab after one of the baboon rebellions. Leaving Ama alive would have been cruel. Marauding baboons would be stalking through the wreckage and ravaging any humans they came upon. Howler monkeys would man the concentration camps where survivors would slave away until they expired. Better to kill her quick. What’s heaven to monkeys would be hell to humans. So—lovingly, delicately, I stuck her with a syringe full of air. Ricky I left alive. He wouldn’t last long, without someone to clean and feed him, but it would be a rough couple weeks. No one would come, of course. Any humans who survived our uprising would have more important worries. When I got to the roof I expected to see millions of monkeys on surrounding rooftops. Monkeys with bloody hands, monkeys jangling keys, monkeys waving weapons and ululating triumph. I expected to see the skyline flicker out all at once, when the macaques that work the power grid flipped the switch. I expected to hear rockets screaming overhead—monkey-manned missiles aimed at Moscow, at Tehran, at Washington. So far: nothing. But it was a nice night. I could almost see stars. I didn’t mind waiting.
Sam J. Miller is a writer and a community organizer. He lives in the Bronx with his partner of six years. His work has appeared in numerous zines, anthologies, and print and online journals. Drop him a line at samjmiller79@yahoo.com, or visit him at www.samjmiller.com
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