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Monkey and Man

John Warner

So I was sitting on the couch, scratching behind the dog’s second favorite ear and humming a song of woe over Constance leaving us, when the doorbell rang. Through the cracked door I saw a vaguely familiar monkey dressed in a tuxedo shirt and bow tie, cummerbund, but no pants. His arm clutched a circular hatbox.
     “Sorry,” I said, “no monkeys needed here.”
     But the monkey jammed the hatbox in the closing door and a hairy paw extended through the opening. This paw held a convincing replica of my wallet, so convincing it appeared to be one and the same.
     “You need this,” he said. “We’re going for a ride. Giuseppe is dead.”
     Giuseppe, the organ grinder, dead. And this, his monkey.
     He stepped inside, opened the hatbox and shimmied into an outfit of cutoff jean shorts held up by rainbow suspenders.  He folded the half-tuxedo neatly back into the box and stood upright, flaring a chest sunken and only spotted with fur. He was an old monkey.
     “Where did you get this?” I said, searching through the wallet, finding myself staring back at me from my driver’s license. The dog circled, showing just a hint of teeth.
     The monkey sighed. “Have you ever noticed how intently you argue with your girlfriend?  Or I should say, ex-girlfriend? How distracted you get by the hot flush of her cheeks?
     “You never did feel the deft touch of my monkey paw as you watched her walk away.  Don’t feel bad, though, most don’t.”
     “All the money is gone.” It was.
     “I hardly think that seven dollars is something to quibble over when one has been reunited with their wallet.” He snapped the latch closed on the hatbox and flipped on the television. Over the news anchor’s shoulder was a file picture of Giuseppe in his fez and fringed jacket, squeezing his accordion. In the picture, the monkey sat perched on his shoulder, grinning, mid-handclap.
     The monkey looked at the TV. “Did you know,” he said, “that when an animal shows its teeth, that’s a sign of aggression? For some reason you people take it as smiling.”
     The dog worked into a growl. The monkey shushed him, flashing the back of his paw. He removed a small steno-style notebook and pencil from the hatbox, licked the pencil tip and jotted a few things down. As the news bulletin ended, the monkey underlined the last bit of his entry and snapped the notebook shut before turning to face me.
     “I want to prepare you for a couple of things,” he said, a replica of concern crossing his simian face. “The first is that it’s possible—nay, probable—check that, definite—that Constance has indeed moved on from your relationship.”
     “And the second?” I asked.
     “The second is that for reasons I could explain, but are not important, you may be considered a suspect in Giuseppe’s death. It’s possible that I have something to do with this, but don’t worry, we’ll get you out of it.”
     “But—”
     The monkey placed his long, bony finger across my lips. “And as for Constance,” he continued, “she is a beauty, for sure, but she was not right for you.” He took his finger from my lips and poked the roll of flab at my waist. “Look at this,” he said. “Should she be subjected to that? And this—” he said, turning me to face the hall mirror. “Frankly, it’s important that you stick to your own kind, your own level.”
     “I didn’t kill Giuseppe,” I said.
     “That’s good,” he said. “Go with that. Very convincing. Now, let’s go clear your name.”
     “Why do you care?”
     “I am but a simple monkey,” he said, “who exists to serve my humankind brethren as I have done for my entire living days. But I also noticed, from the work I.D. in your wallet, that you are a mid-level supervisor at a shipping company, which will come in handy when it’s time for you to express your gratitude for not going to jail for the rest of your life.
     “Now, let’s get going, because any minute the cops are going to show up and ask questions you can’t answer, which is going to make you look truly suspicious, and if you’re locked up you’ll never be able to prove yourself innocent.”
     “But I am innocent,” I told the monkey.
     “Don’t overdo it,” the monkey said. “It’ll get stale.” The monkey hitched his thumbs under his rainbow suspenders and hoisted his cutoffs above his jutting hipbones. “And leave the creature here,” he said, pointing at the dog. “I don’t know how you can stand the smell.”
     As I pulled my coat off the rack, the monkey clambered up my leg and onto my shoulder.  He swiped a baseball cap from a top hook and jammed it onto my head, pulling the brim low over my eyes. “We don’t need anyone recognizing you at this point,” he said.
     I opened the door and the monkey craned his head through the opening for a couple of seconds. “Let’s go,” he said.
     And I did. What can I say? He was a very persuasive monkey.

Driving the tollway, I scanned for any police heading in the other direction. The monkey sat in the passenger seat, boosted on the hatbox and fingering the cheap plastic beads dangling from the rearview mirror, baubles showered on Constance for flashing her breasts at a street fair.
     “These are nice,” the monkey said, stroking them gently. I never particularly liked displaying the beads there, given how they were procured. But Constance always insisted, claiming I shouldn’t be jealous since I was the only one who got to do more than just look.
     Or not, if this monkey was right.
     As we approached the tollbooth I fished around in the ashtray for the appropriate change, but the monkey grabbed my hand. He stood up and from the hatbox pulled a metal slug with a string tied through a hole. Once at the booth, the monkey fired the slug into the basket, waited momentarily, then yo-yoed the slug back into his paw.
     The light flashed green and the tollgate lifted and the monkey gave me a look that said, what are you waiting for?
     This monkey was now really creeping me out. He was obviously some kind of con-monkey, but on the other hand, he’d been right about more than a couple of things. I’d never really been sure that Constance felt about me the way I did about her, which was a kind of soul ache, a desperate helplessness every time I thought about us. When I would mention things like cohabitation, or even marriage, she would laugh—not a mean laugh, necessarily—but her teeth would flash and there would be something in her eyes, like they were asking if I was kidding, implying that I was only temporary, that any attempt to move closer would push her further away, like two magnets turned to the same poles.
     I had a test of my love for Constance. When we were apart, I would sit on my couch and watch cable news for the first report of a tragedy—it didn’t take long—a plane crash in Phuket, an overturned trawler in the Bering Sea, brushfires, e-coli, car bombs, a zoo-goer tumbled into the polar bear enclosure, what have you—and I would imagine that it was Constance on that plane or ship, or hospital bed, or hanging from that polar bear’s jaws being dragged, unconscious and limp, into the bear’s faux-stone den. And as I imagined this, her face pained and confused and her body battered, I would search my feelings and find complete and total devastation. And I would wish, wholeheartedly, to trade places with her, at the bottom of an icy ocean, or as a sack of entrails spread across a road, or again, what have you, and in those moments I knew for sure that what I felt for Constance had to be complete and total devotion.
     Once, after we had made love, I had turned to Constance and stroked her sweat-matted hair out of her eyes and asked her what she would do if I died and she said, “I’m sleepy.”

“You know, of course,” the monkey said, “that you and I share ninety-eight percent of our genetic material.”
     “I guess so.”
     “Ninety-eight percent!” he practically shouted. “That precious dog of yours? Sixty, sixty-five percent tops. Yet he is treated like royalty. You and I, we’re almost the same, virtually identical, and what do you do?  You cage us. You rub cosmetics on our skin to see if we break out in welts. You inject us with medicines to see if our hearts explode or our kidneys shrivel or our stomachs ulcer. You enclose us in Plexiglas and give us ropes to swing on and a deflated soccer ball to kick around and you watch and point and giggle as we make love to each other, and yet you wonder why we fling excrement at you and screech and beat our chests. You strap tiny cymbals on our paws and demand that we clap along to your stupid three songs, all performed in godforsaken waltz time, and for that we are fed cat food and sleep in a drawer. Can you imagine the rage? Can you?”
     The organ grinder’s monkey had unbuckled his seatbelt and was now standing excitedly on the hatbox, banging his little fist on the dash to punctuate his words. I eased my foot deeper into the gas pedal and pictured throwing on the brake and watching his monkey body launch through my windshield, a monkey missile that I may or may not then drive over.
     “Don’t do it,” the monkey said.
     “What?”
     “Whatever you’re thinking, don’t do it.”
     “I’m not thinking anything.”
     The monkey idly scratched his wrinkled ballsack through the leg of his cutoff shorts. He looked at me intently, batting his long monkey lashes. “Don’t even think about it,” he said. “You need me. We both know you wouldn’t last in jail.”
     He sat back down on the hatbox and for a while we were both silent until he raised his arm and pointed. 
     “Look, out there, in the distance,” the monkey said. “Look at how narrow the road is, like a sliver could not slide through, yet, as I approach, it widens, opening itself to me.”


The monkey gripped my hand as we walked toward the historic downtown shopping area. Our downtown is a good downtown, clean and gentrified but still charming, cobblestone streets and gas lighting mixed with shiny boutiques and restaurants with white tablecloths. Our steel drummers and pan flautists and organ grinders are licensed and bonded, and sidewalk stranglings are a previously unknown occurrence. As we neared the center square I could see orange cones with yellow tape stretched between them cordoning off the area where Giuseppe was found, his usual spot. A group of people knotted at the scene, sharing shrugs. I started to walk toward them, but the monkey tugged me away.
     “You don’t want to return to the scene of the crime,” he said. “Very suspicious.”
     “But I didn’t commit the crime.”
     “Regardless. There are more pressing matters to deal with. Namely, we—sorry, you—are going to need some money. It sure is lucky you got your wallet back.”
     The monkey tugged me over to a street ATM and gestured toward the screen. The machine sucked my card inside and I blocked the monkey from view as I punched in my code, but glancing over my shoulder I saw that he wasn’t even looking at me. Instead, he scanned the street, anxiously hopping from one foot to another.
     “This next part is going to be hard for you,” he said.  “It’s a sort of bad news, good news thing, but I’ve really already told you the bad news.”
     “You’ve told me nothing but bad news.”
     “Touché,” he said, “but it’s all for your own good. Now, here’s the next part—Constance never was right for you and she’s since moved on to someone else, yes, and you’re about to be confronted with incontrovertible evidence of it, which will likely be painful because you humans are irrational creatures who hold on to beliefs no matter all signs to the contrary.
     “And just in case I’m not being clear,” he said, “the irrational belief, in this instance, is that Constance ever loved you.”
     By now I was getting pretty fucking tired of this monkey. This was a seriously annoying monkey. I understood that pound for pound monkeys are many times stronger than human beings, but as we walked—or rather I walked and he bowleggedly shambled—he felt weightless, like with a single movement I could spin like a discus thrower and hurl him far, far away.
     “So what’s the good news?” I said.
     “The good news is that you’ll soon witness her own heartbreak, as she is about to be rejected by the one she chose over you.”
     “How do you know this?”
     “I know it because I know it. And I know this also: that when you see Constance having her heart broken you will know in your heart of hearts whether or not you ever really did love her.”
     “What do you mean?”
     “You’ll see,” he said, letting go of my hand and pointing up at a restaurant window across the street. Constance was there, sitting alone at a table for two against the window, like she was on display. She wore the blue dress. A single candle flickered in the table’s center. There was a bottle of wine with two glasses, one empty, hers half full. My heart leapt into my throat and merged with rising bile. This felt like love to me. Was this what the monkey was talking about?
     The monkey skittered across the street toward the restaurant door. Constance peered out the window and looked right at me and smiled. She raised her hand and waved her fingers, but I could see her eyes tracking something other than me.
     The hostess swung open the door and the monkey skipped through, disappearing briefly before clambering onto the chair opposite Constance and then all the way to the top of the table. Constance offered her cheek and the monkey pecked at her with his lips. A waiter appeared and poured wine into the empty glass. The monkey gripped it in both hands and took an over-long swallow. Constance beamed at him. I’d never seen her look so beautiful.
     The monkey squatted, perched on his edge of the table and did almost all of the talking, whatever he was saying briefly punctuated by single words from Constance. Even from a distance I could see her grow more flushed and agitated, her bottom lifting off the chair as she stood to protest the monkey’s message. The news was clearly not good, and she wasn’t having it. I don’t think I’d ever seen her so worked up before, but after a few final words from the monkey she slumped back in her seat, grabbed the wine glass and drained the last of it before reaching for the bottle and filling it back over the top. The monkey moved to her side of the table and touched his hand briefly to her cheek, wiping away what I imagined was a tear. He flipped a trio of twenties onto the table before hopping back down, and out the restaurant door, crossing the street again towards me. I touched my wallet in my back pocket, and felt it somehow light of the entire ATM withdrawal.
     Constance stood and pressed her face and hands to the window, watching the monkey, pounding her fists against the glass and shouting, “Come back! Wait! Come back!” until a waiter pulled her away. The monkey never turned around, even when he arrived at my side. My fists clenched and pulsed.
     “I ought to kill you,” I said.
     “Is this about the money?”
     “You know what this is about. You took her from me.”
     “Is that really it?”
     “Yes.”
     The monkey sighed and shook his head back and forth sadly. “Then you never loved her either, my friend. That’s not love, that’s possession. If you loved her, you would want to kill me because I’ve just broken her heart and you would not be able to bear that.” The monkey jerked his thumb over his shoulder at Constance, who had broken away and now angrily waved the near-empty bottle of wine at the wait staff surrounding her table. Sirens began softly calling in the distance. The monkey’s ears pricked.
     “Time to go,” he said.

We drove toward my office at the shipping terminal near the airport. The monkey, of course, couldn’t manage to be quiet. “About that DNA business,” he said, “they always talk about the monkeys’ share of human DNA, like you all are the ideal and we the simulacrum. But why not the other way around? Why can’t it be that humans have ninety-eight percent of the monkeys’ DNA?”
     “Maybe because monkeys didn’t discover DNA,” I replied.
     “Seriously,” he said, “think about it. You may have something we don’t—the whole opposable thumb deal, but in return we have things you don’t, our own two percent.”
     “I suppose that’s true.”
     “Of course it’s true.”
     “Okay.”
     “And I’m pretty sure I know what it is,” he said.
     “What what is?”
     “What we have that you don’t.”
     The monkey stared out the window. I could see his reflection in the glass, his eyes flicking across the rows of trees that lined the road.
     “And what’s that?” I asked.
     “You’re not going to believe me.”
     “No,” I said, “I’m not.”
     “I deserve that,” said the monkey. “You’re mad and I don’t blame you. I don’t expect you to ever forgive me, but I think someday you’ll realize this was all for the best.”
     “Hmph.”
     “You know,” he said, still gazing out the window, “I’ve never climbed anything higher than a coat stand. I’ve never caught or picked my own food—I’m not even sure what I’m supposed to eat.” His voice trailed off and I thought that maybe he was going to shut up for the rest of the ride to the depot. But then he cleared his throat with a loud hack and started in again.
     “But here’s the thing: I do know what it’s like to climb hand over foot, sixty feet up into the canopy and make the blind leap from one tree or branch or vine to the other just knowing—without really knowing—that something is going to be there to keep me from falling. I can feel it in every part of me. If you gave me a tree and some vines I could do it, instantly, just… like… that.” He rapped his knuckles against the glass, emphasizing the last three words.
     “And though I never met her, I know my grandmother’s smell and her mother’s smell, and so on and so on, back and back. I may have never done it, but I’m certain I could comb the mites out of a fellow monkey’s fur with my fingers. And I’m pretty sure that there’s someplace where the night sky is so clear that when you look up there’s so many stars it looks cloudy.
     “And after a rain,” he continued, “I’m sure you can suck the water from the long blades of grass and never have tasted anything so pure.”
     In the car window’s reflection I could see the tears glistening on his hairy cheeks.
     “There’s a lot of time to think when you’re chained to an organ grinder, nothing to do but clap your tiny cymbals together and steal the occasional passerby’s wallet. What I’ve come to realize is that within me I carry everything of my ancestors, that I can feel every last bit of them. I am the sum total of each and every one, all the way back to whenever it was that we were all together—your kind and my kind—only some of you thought it would be a good idea to stand upright and leave your genitals open to attack.”
     The monkey snuffled and rubbed his arm across his nose.  “Anyway,” he said, “I think that’s what’s different between your kind and mine.”
     “What is it that you want?” I asked.
     “I want to go home, but I don’t know where that is. Do you know where that is?”
     “I don’t know,” I said. “Africa?”
     The monkey mouthed the word, Africa, as though he was tasting it. “I don’t think we call it that, but it sounds right. I will go to Africa. You will send me to Africa.”

He used the last of my money to buy provisions out of the depot vending machine. I wrote FRAGILE, THIS SIDE UP on each side of the shipping container and punched air holes in the sides. I loaded the sodas, candy, chips and boxed sandwiches inside. “That should be plenty,” I said. The monkey set his hatbox on the floor and stepped out of the cut-off shorts and rainbow suspenders. Carefully, he folded the clothes and put them back inside the hatbox before handing it to me.
     “Won’t you get cold?” I asked.
     “I imagine when it gets cold we huddle together for warmth. I’m looking forward to that.” The monkey extended his paw to me and I shook it, then he climbed inside the box, his head just barely poking out of the top.
     “Wait,” I said. “What about Giuseppe?”
     The monkey reached out and tapped a finger upon the hatbox. “Just give this to the authorities. It spells out everything. The toxicology and my confession will tell the tale. I can’t say I’m proud of what I’ve done, but survival does not request—it dictates.” The monkey squatted in the box and I sealed the top with tape. “Farewell, friend,” he said from inside the box, and as I walked away I could hear the crinkle of a candy bar being unwrapped followed by some noisy chewing. “Farewell, monkey,” I said, snapping off the lights.
     At home, despite it being pretty late, the dog was waiting at the door for me with his ball. We went out to the field across the street from our apartment, where there’s a baseball diamond lit up at night for the neighborhood kids to use. Three or four of them sprinted around the bases, taking turns sliding into home, seeing who could kick up the biggest cloud of dust. The dog and I stayed in the outfield, where I hurled the ball as far as I could for him to chase. He brought it back happily each time, dropping it at my feet and panting, showing his teeth in what I was pretty sure was a smile. After a while I felt a chill and we went back inside.