Monkey Around

by Jadie Jang

  Since I’d moved here, whenever I stood in a high place (and being a monkey, that was more often than your average human,) I’d look out at the cityscape and feel almost like it was looking back at me: a friend, a witness, almost as if it had its own spirit … as if it could speak—although I believed without question that this was a product of my own imagination.

  And these days, I thought I knew what that spirit would be saying. I’d spent high school and college under the heavy public apathy of the Bush years, and experienced how difficult it was to motivate my cohorts to any kind of action. So that fall, when word of the Occupy Wall Street protest tore through the air like lightning, and Oakland (and even San Francisco) rose up in response, I felt like something was waking up: some better angel of our nature, something militant in the spirit of the Bay. I felt like I, like we, were on the threshold of a new era, a new mass movement, one where life would take a huge leap forward.

  The peace of late-night Chinatown overlay that excitement. I breathed them both in.

  Then I texted a contact at St. James Infirmary—a local clinic for sex workers—to send their outreach team to this massage parlor. I didn’t know if the “girls” were there by choice, but the St. James team would make sure they got what they needed.

  Due diligence done, I headed for the wide-open sky and massive, blocky warehouses of SOMA. Jazzed by the weight of Bu Bu’s bamboo container against my hip, I decided to run off some nervous energy down Folsom past Kearny Street Workshop’s new location (no longer on Kearny Street—people, don’t name your art gallery after its location; not in San Francisco) and stick my head in the window to see what their new exhibition looked like.

  I’d done an internship at the venerable Asian American arts nonprofit while in college, hoping to connect to my non-existent roots, and it became my home away from home. The organization was also the fiscal sponsor for the magazine I helped to run, and we often held meetings there. They’d had an event tonight—a stand-up comedy showcase—which I’d wanted to go to, but had to miss for tonight’s emergency search. I knew everyone would have gone home long before, but still felt like checking in. I’m a monkey; I’m social like that.

  I passed a homeless person sleeping in a strange little patio area before a storefront next door, but when I reached the gallery itself, a curtain was drawn and I couldn’t really see inside. While I stuck my nose to the dirty glass and tried to see through a crack in the curtain, my monkey brain noticed something else. The smell of homeless, unwashed body, which tended to hit me a little harder than humans, had come wafting to me from next door, but it smelled … off. More of my attention followed the smell back from the curtained gallery window to the strange little enclosed patio next door. The smell wasn’t, in fact, of unwashed body at all. No, I’d smelled it a time or two before. It was of decomposing body. The body was dead.

  Now it had my complete attention. That’s why I smelled it at all. My nose isn’t that good: slightly better than a human’s, but nothing like the carnivore-shifters’ noses. I walked back a few yards to where I could see clearly and I could now see that it was all wrong. The body wasn’t huddled up, but rather splayed uncomfortably, half on his back, half on his side, his arms and legs thrown out in awkward positions. I’d thought he was covered by a blanket, but it turned out he had a sports jacket all rucked up over his head, like he had been clutching it around his face. His clothes were new, there was no cardboard lining the ground, and no bags of belongings or bedding.

  Jesus, was this a body dump? I couldn’t see any blood or signs of a struggle, so presumably the person hadn’t been killed here. What a strange place to dump a body! Folsom is fairly busy during the day, and—I glanced up—this storefront belonged to a catering company that did its own baking. There’d be someone here in a couple of hours.

  That was enough to send me to my cell phone, but another useful habit stopped me from dialing 911 right away: Maya, my rational brain said, get your story straight! Although I hadn’t done anything wrong, I could see right away that “I smelled the dead on ‘im, officer” wasn’t going to fly. I needed to check his pulse properly, and leave evidence that I had, before I called in a dead body.

  I crouched and pulled the jacket away from his head and upper body, revealing … what must’ve previously been a human face with pale olive skin, but was now sprouting light-colored fur around his temples and cheeks, with his mouth distorted by elongated teeth and a snarl, his fingernails halfway grown into claws, and the barrel of his chest bowing strange and angular. His corner-folded eyes were staring amber.

  I was immediately glad that I hadn’t called the cops. This guy wasn’t human. He was a shapeshifter.

  * * *

  “A weretiger, to be exact,” Ayo said, 20 minutes later when she arrived. I didn’t see any stripes, though the poor dude was stuck forever (or until he rotted) in the moment of transformation. I was holding out for a were-beaver (not that I’d ever heard of such a thing, but a girl can hope) but almost convinced it was just a run-of-the-mill werewolf.

  “How do you know it’s a weretiger?”

  “I’ve met this guy before,” she said. “His name’s Wayland. He’s a harimau jadian from Singapore. He runs an import/export company that—among other things—supplies a lot of the Chinese tchotchke stores on Grant. Very successful.”

  “Aiya! Wayland Soh?” I shrieked. My gut suddenly felt like lead.

  “Yes,” Ayo looked at me, puzzled. “Do you know him?”

  “Shit shit shit …” was all I could say for a moment. I’d only met him once and I couldn’t have recognized him anyway with his face all distorted. “Fuck, Ayo, we were courting him for sponsorships!”

  “We” was shorthand for one of the Asian American nonprofits I was involved with: the magazine, Inscrutable, as well as Kearny Street Workshop. There was a lot of crossover in the personnel between the two orgs (Asian America can get kinda incestuous, especially in San Francisco.) One of the magazine’s staff members, who was also a KSW board member, and I had met Wayland last week and he (Wayland) had been impressed with our youthful joie de vivre, or something, and wanted to see what kinda stuff we did. Shit, he’d probably been here for the comedy night!

  Both our orgs were laboring under the funding crunch that had resulted from the economic crash of 2008. Both orgs were direly in need of new funding streams, and local sponsorships seemed the best way to go. I wasn’t in charge of fundraising, but I did know that Wayland had been our first solid sponsorship prospect in a long time.

  “Well, that sucks,” Ayo said, sucking on her teeth and pulling out her phone. I could tell by her tone that her mind had already wandered away from the plight of San Francisco’s nonprofits. I felt immediately chastened. Here was a man—okay, a … sentient creature—dead, and I was worried about funding streams!

  Ayo leaned against the side of her car, holding her phone to her ear and looking like someone on hold. I looked past her and jumped a little when I realized that there was a man sitting inside her car, staring at me. He looked—as far as I could tell through the streetlight glare on the windshield—brown and classic, with a nose that belonged on either an Egyptian or Aztec god. He also looked middle-aged, Ayo’s age or older, and tired. Had I interrupted a date when I called her? Was Ayo dating a man this time? It had been a while.

  “Are you calling his family?”

  She shook her head. “The Asian cats have a sort of benevolent society they all pay into. He heads it up and uses that position to influence the Chinatown machine. They’ll want to investigate this death and handle his remains.”

  Inside my head, Monkey insisted that I was perfectly capable of investigating this myself, but my rational brain answered, faintly, that this wasn’t my problem.

  “I didn’t even know he was a supernat!” I said out loud, as if knowing would have changed anything. “We met at a mixer at the Asian Art Museum… there were performances and, and artists everywhere!” That would’ve neutralized my ability t
o see deceit. But even if I’d seen it… I wouldn’t have done anything differently tonight. Of course I wouldn’t’ve. So… why did I feel responsible?

  Someone answered Ayo’s phone and she, ignoring my outburst, spoke some language into it. An irritating thing about Ayo: she speaks at least nine living languages, and reads at least five dead ones. People are always surprised when they finally meet her, because petite African-looking women aren’t supposed to speak [Russian/Arabic/ Spanish/fill-in-your-own-annoyingly-useful-language-here] like a native. She can learn a new language in three weeks, damn her eyes. She learned Chinese after she met me—during a vacation, mind you—while I’m still completely hopeless at the language after four solid years of college classes, plus a summer intensive. She beeped the phone off and returned to examining the body.

  “It’s not where he comes from that we should be concerned about,” she said. “It’s where he went.” She took a few snaps of him with her phone and checked them out.

  “What do you mean, where he went? Like to Hell, or over the Rainbow Bridge?”

  Ayo flashed me a narrow-eyed look. “I mean, where did his essence go?”

  “His essence? Doesn’t that disappear when you die?”

  She sighed the sigh of the multiply martyred. “No, Maya. Not right away.” She studied the body for a moment more. “By ‘essence’ I don’t mean ‘soul.’ If there is an individual soul—an ori, the spiritual seat of personality that adds an ancestor to the spirits—if there is one, it has a metaphysical reality that’s beyond my perception. What I can perceive is the essence of a person—something you might call his emi or qi, his living energy. It’s what returns to the natural world’s energy at death. It maintains a certain … personality or echo of the person, while still combining with all the other energy and …” Here’s where I started tuning her out. Once she got into lecture mode she grew increasingly obscure until only one of her ancestors could understand her. But she got irate if interrupted.

  She flew outward into the cosmos, ordering it for her fellow, less knowledgeable mortals, before finally returning to the subject of: “… essence retains some of its character for a time, but mostly it just returns to the world. It’s exactly like what happens to a dead body.

  It lingers in its form for a while, but deteriorates until there’s only a skeleton—a structure that suggests the person that was but isn’t the person that was. Over time, even the bones can wear away, and all that’s left is the converted mass of the body. Well, it’s the same with the essence. It lingers in and around the body, holding its shape much as the body does, but deteriorating and dissipating. It can linger for weeks or months, or even years, and is where the notion of ghosts and evil dead comes from. People who are sensitive to it can ‘see’ it; that is, sense it, and then their brains transform that presence into an image.”

  “And this guy has only been dead for, what? A few hours?” His body wasn’t too cold yet, although it wasn’t much warm, either.

  “Right. So there should be a lot of relatively inert essence lingering around his body.”

  “But there’s not?”

  “Not a shred. Not a scosh. Not an iota.”

  I didn’t reply, but shuddered, with my whole body.

  “Yeah,” Ayo said, “exactly. But it’s even worse than that.” I raised my eyebrows. “Our essence is where we draw the energy for magic. And for shape-changers it’s even more elemental. Shapeshifters’ essential beings contain magic, because magical shape-changing is part of your being. That makes the magic in your essence orders of magnitude more powerful.”

  “Wait, what? I’m more powerful than you? Then why can’t I do more magic than you?”

  “Maya,” she said impatiently, “this isn’t a role-playing game. You are more powerful. You’re just constrained to use your power in a particular way. Shapeshifters shapeshift. That’s what the power’s for. You can’t really redirect it. It’s inherent to your essence. The magic I use, on the other hand, is just out there in the world. I don’t own it, I just use it, so I can pull different kinds of magic from different sources and slightly divert it. Any human can.”

  She frowned, catching herself. She’d been about to launch into another of her favorite lectures. “We’ve talked about this,” she said. “You need to read those books— Maya, you need to know this stuff cold. I can’t keep watch over supernatural creatures the way you can. You really are more powerful and you need to understand the way our differing abilities balance.”

  Whatever. “Okay, but if we shapeshifters have so much raw power, then why is no one after it?”

  She didn’t say right away. She scanned and rescanned, then finally sighed and stepped back.

  “Two answers: One, it’s extremely difficult to separate someone’s essence from their body. Essence and body aren’t really separate. Pulling away someone’s essence would be like pulling away someone’s arm. You’d have some arm-shaped matter, no doubt, but don’t expect it to grasp or throw anything ever again.”

  Hmph, I thought. Dr. Frankenstein might disagree with that. But then, that’s fiction, isn’t it?

  Ayo went on: “So even if you could do it, you couldn’t make it do anything for you, because it’s not yours. …” She trailed off.

  “And two?” I asked impatiently.

  “Well … It looks like someone is after it.”

  Before I could even shudder along with her, the were-cats arrived—with a vintage sixties hearse, no less!—and after the requisite thirty seconds spent sniffing in my general direction and stifling knee-jerk snarls, five of them got busy processing the scene. The sixth came to confer with Ayo in some presumably Asian language, casting me baleful glares every so often. They completely ignored the man in Ayo’s car, so I assumed that meant he was human—although that was no guarantee. After a few minutes, Ayo came back over to me.

  “You can go. I’ll take it from here. Best you keep away if you don’t want to answer uncomfortable questions about yourself.”

  I struggled with myself for a moment. I really wanted to find out … no, not my business. “Who’s that dude, anyway?” I pointed to her car, distracting myself.

  She turned to look, as if she’d forgotten him. “He’s a client,” she said.

  “Is he human?”

  Ayo sighed demonstratively. That meant yes.

  “How can he be a client if he isn’t a supernat?” What I really wanted to know was what he was making of this whole scene. Ayo might have been … adjusting his view of what was happening outside the car.

  She sighed impatiently. “Maya, the human world and the supernatural world are inextricably linked. You know that.” I knew that tone. “But, believe me, if there’s a job for you in this, you’ll be the first to know.”

  “There’s a job for me in this?”

  “He’s looking for something, but doesn’t want to tell me what it is.” She rolled her eyes. We both knew this schtick. Humans were super tricky about the supernatural and didn’t want other humans to know that they believed in it—assuming, of course, that they did. “It’ll probably turn out to be—”

  “Merman’s penis?” This was our jokey code word for superstitious black market bullshit: you know, dried incubus dong and things like that, stuff that either didn’t exist and was replaced with powdered goat horn, did exist but was entirely inefficacious, or stuff that did exist and had some function but that you’d have to kill a sentient being to get.

  She nodded. I started to turn away.

  “Did you get anything on Dalisay?”

  I started a bit; remembering. The emergency that the evening had started with had been driven entirely from my mind. I felt the urgency of it again, but now it was warring with the urgency of a murder, and one almost literally on my doorstep.

  “No, nothing at all.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Not a shred. Not an iota. Not a scosh. He literally said ‘That woman asking about Dalisay,’ and that was it. No chatter, no rubbing of hen
ch-hands while they revealed their wicked plans. And no sign of her being there, either. They either don’t have her, or they’re holding her somewhere else. My money is on ‘don’t have her.’”

  Ayo frowned in concentration. “Or she’s dead,” she said, slowly.

  I shuddered a little “How much trouble are we in, if she isn’t found?” I asked.

  Ayo shrugged absently, but her worried face told a less laissez faire story.

  I’d been checking the buildings of the triad-affiliated Hung For Tong because they supplied her with blood plasma for her protégés, and had been the last appointment she’d gone to in her calendar. Maybe the Tong had gotten greedy and were holding her for ransom—although there hadn’t been any ransom demands yet. Or maybe it wasn’t them. If it was a kidnapping for ransom, it could be almost anyone. Dalisay’s little aswang coterie had amassed quite a fortune over the years, a lot of it from their neat grave-robbing.

  Preoccupied with the question of who else might be in the kidnap business, I tried to leave again, but Ayo stopped me with: “And the bajang?”

  I frowned.

  She held out her hand.

  “No way, Ayo. Finders keepers.” I put my hand over the pocket that held Bu Bu’s bamboo tube.

  She looked confused … and annoyed. “Maya …” she started.

  I sighed. “He said something to me. He said something and … I think he might know what I am.”

  Her look narrowed. “What did he say, exactly?”

  “He said I was like the other one.” She waited. “He indicated that there’s another one like me!”

  “And you didn’t ask what that meant?” she cried impatiently.