Monkey Around

by Jadie Jang

  I’d met Baby (and Todd, and a handful of other Inscrutable staff) at the protest that afternoon, and we’d changed at Baby’s temporary pad (don’t ask) in downtown Oakland. Ayo hadn’t gotten back to me, nor responded to my texts, so now we were exiting the Ashby BART station and walking to mural-adorned nightclub The Starry Plough, ahead on the corner. The Starry Plough was right next door to much-crazier-mural-adorned La Peña Cultural Center, just north of where Oakland turns into Berkeley. I’d spent most of my weekends freshman and sophomore year at places like La Peña, places that hosted open mic nights and other literary and performance offerings—at first in stalk of Tez, but increasingly because that was where I found my peeps. After Tez graduated we’d moved next door to the Starry Plough to see bands, and my musical taste had broadened considerably. Half of my college social life had taken place on this very block, and I loved it fiercely.

  In fact, we’d met and recruited Cerberus for the magazine right here, the year we graduated. And tonight, the place was packed for them. Cerberus had an unusually large following for a local indie band, and their not-infrequent shows were always packed, despite the fact that they changed their name every six months or so. For the first time I wondered if magic had anything to do with that.

  We arrived just in time; Asian time, that is: half an hour after they were supposed to start. They were all on stage, fussing with their equipment, making my eyes burn, when Baby and I took our beer bottles from the bar and went to join the crowd, (Baby grabbing a napkin and wiping down the sides and mouth of the bottle I handed her even though, after a massive fight, I hadn’t pranked her at all in well over two years.) Todd looked up as we approached the stage, and gave me his wicked grin. He was learning, this one.

  “Damn,” Baby said, a little breathlessly. “He’s not just cute, he’s electrocute. How come I never noticed before?”

  His eyes flicked to her and his grin grew wider. Had he heard her? The only way he’d heard her speaking low in my ear, from 15 feet away, over the canned music and the audience noise, was if he were—

  Han’s drums interrupted my thought and the noise. Todd slung his uke strap over his head and hooked it on. Romeo stepped up to his stand-up bass and took firm hold. Fire washed over my eyes as, without looking at each other, they launched, in perfect sync, into their first song. What they played was rock ’n’ roll, if rock music had polyrhythms, insanely tangled bass lines, and the bright, plucky, pseudo-Spanish-guitarness of a lead ukulele. You could hear Hawai’ian slack-key guitar mixed in, and occasionally the plucking of a koto, and the ghosts of jazz, blues, bluegrass, punk rock, and Romani music were seated approvingly behind.

  You’ve never heard anything like this, and you’ve never seen anything like it, either. Romeo kept his head down, and his body bowed out like a bracket, but his instrument spun and spat like a strung tiger. Han played his drum kit like Muppet Animal on meth, frequently dropping his sticks and leaping into the neighboring circle of his percussion instruments like, well, like me in monkey mode. And Todd writhed and jumped and slid before them like any lead singer, only there were no vocals, and, although his body moved in every direction, his face remained perfectly still, albeit smiling.

  Instrumental-only music usually made me itch, but these guys kept whole crowds absolutely still—or completely wild, depending on their mood—without any trouble, including, and especially, me. To be honest, I wasn’t really sure if I wanted Todd to be interested in me, because I didn’t entirely want to get behind the music to see the flaws in the man. The music was too unique, too special.

  After nearly an hour, everyone in the place was bathed in sweat and the band took a break, to much hooting and applause … from me most of all. I had eleven years of intense musical training under my belt, but didn’t seem to have a single creative bone in my body. So I absolutely melted hearing true artists play—and these guys were true artists; not merely able to compose their own music, and not just practiced and incredibly tight, but also able to make a completely unique sound, and one that expressed who they were, and where and what they came from, perfectly.

  “Thanks,” Todd said, when I had awkwardly expressed this to him and the guys and tried to buy them a beer (they got free drinks when they played.) He seemed genuinely pleased, although Romeo and Han gave me and Todd funny looks.

  “Yeah, thanks,” Romeo said. “Haven’t seen you at any of our shows recently. It’s good to see you out and about again.” This seemed to be invested with more meaning than it deserved.

  “Oh, well, actually, I’ve been neglecting everybody and everything except the magazine, and now, Occupy, because I’ve been taking a lot of extra hours at work.”

  “Saving up for something?” Todd asked. Romeo and Han exchanged a glance with each other, then with Baby. All three moved away as one.

  “A ’65 Mustang,” I said, “or a life.”

  “Well, I don’t know about the ‘stang, but you’re getting a good start on the life part right here.”

  “Drinking a beer in a bar is getting a life?”

  “Drinking a beer in a bar with a handsome and talented musician is getting a life.”

  “Don’t forget ‘modest’.”

  “I didn’t.”

  I laughed, and as the break went on, laughed more in 20 minutes than I probably had the entire previous month. I’d never been very good at flirting—I simply can’t laugh at jokes that aren’t funny, and I can’t express an admiration that I don’t feel; there are downsides to being a smart woman, especially if the hottie trying to flirt with you isn’t as smart as you are. But Todd made it easy: he was genuinely funny, and I did genuinely admire his playing … and his writing, and his editing skills … and his looks … I didn’t have to fake anything. He was the one who was good at flirting, not I, but he was so good at it, that I didn’t notice that I wasn’t.

  “I should’ve taken a picture of you two to upload to Wikipedia under ‘hook up’,” Baby said as the boys returned to the stage to fuss again with their equipment. “That was more of a ‘shook up,’ though.”

  “We were just talking, Baby.”

  “That was to talking what chocolate covered strawberries are to fruit.”

  And then the music took us again, only better this time, because my mood had heightened, and I felt … seen.

  Nevertheless, I was yanked out of the magic sometime later by a strong flare I saw out of the corner of my eye in the crowd. I turned to look and saw a South Asian hipster dude who looked somewhat familiar. He saw me looking and nodded, and I recognized him. We’d met a few years back when Ayo sent me to talk to his father. He and his family were vanaras, Indian monkey-shifters, and Ayo thought maybe I could be related to them in some way. But, although they were very cool (legendary warriors with kickass moves and great senses of humor), they were nowhere near as powerful as I was, and couldn’t do most of the stuff I could do. Plus, they weren’t rhesus macaques, but a kind of larger monkey breed of their own that sort of descended from macaques. The dude … Aahil, I think his name was, Aahil invited me to go tree climbing with him and his cousins some weekend in the redwoods, and I said I’d go, but I was so disappointed that I didn’t belong to them that I never went. He came to a few Inscrutable parties with his friends, but then that was it, and I hadn’t seen him in nearly two years.

  I considered going over to him to say hi, but then remembered Todd. Was I Todd’s … date tonight? That was stupid. I was Todd’s friend. And even if I was Todd’s date, that didn’t preclude me talking to other guys. Especially if I wasn’t interested in them. Although … Aahil was pretty cute, too. Jeez, I was turning more boy crazy than Baby!

  After way too much thinking about it, I decided it would be not only stupid, but rude not to go say hi to Aahil. But when I turned back in his direction, he was no longer standing where he’d been. Confused, I scanned the crowd and caught no flare. Huh? Had he left already? I looked again, more closely this time, and saw … what was that? Was it a … shadow
? I caught just a glimpse of something dark and shadowy near the door before it disappeared and I was left wondering if I’d actually seen anything at all.

  I stood too long like an idiot before my rationality got through to me and I bolted out the door. There it was, that strange shadow-figure, floating rapidly down the sidewalk past the group of smokers outside La Peña, who were too involved in their conversation to notice. I took off after it, albeit somewhat slowly, still hobbled by the same indescribable reluctance I’d felt in the San Antonios’ backyard. Once past the smokers, I quickly shifted into a large dog, feeling a bit safer that way.

  The shadow kept pace 50 yards ahead of me for a block, but then folded itself into a mini-copse of trees in someone’s yard and disappeared. I switched to monkey and swung over the fence into the yard, but it was too dark and full of tree-shadows for me to be able to see anything. I stood looking around for a few minutes, hoping to see movement, but all I saw was an obese cat, trying to sneak away without my noticing.

  I tried to force myself into the yard. What was I afraid of? I was Monkey! I was afraid of nothing! But the reluctance dragged at my legs like mud, and Ayo’s voice, saying the shadow’s victims were all shapeshifters, spoke in my head.

  I returned to the street and looked around, nonplused. How to find a shadow at night? It was worse than a needle in a haystack.

  And anyway, what the hell had it come here for? Clearly not me, I’m not sure it even saw me following it. Or maybe … maybe it had been looking for me, thinking I had the stick? Wait, that was reasonable, actually. The last time it had seen the stick, I was interfering between it and its attempt to take the stick. It had fled when the San Antonio boys had come out, presumably because they-plus-I were too many for it. Maybe it assumed I’d taken the stick and came after me, only to realize I didn’t have it.

  But the stick was still with the San Antonios, wasn’t it? Wouldn’t it check there first? Maybe … maybe not. Who knows what kind of logic animates a creature like this?

  But, if I was right, that was extra evidence that it was after the stick, and that meant … that meant that Wayland would have had to have something to do with it. That meant … sigh … exactly the same thing it had meant earlier that day: I had to wait to hear back from the werecats about getting into Wayland’s office.

  But—and I stopped dead—this meant Chucha was in the line of fire. I’d have to warn her … and Juice too, probably. I thought for a moment and then determined to swing by the San Antonios’ house before I went home to put a word in some ears. I shoulda gotten their phone numbers.

  I changed into a hound and loped back the few blocks to where the La Peña smokers were re-entering the building. I skidded to a stop next to the mural just in time to see Baby come out the door, concern on her face. She stared at me, and I stared back for a split instant, before Monkey turned me back human.

  “… the fuck?” Baby whispered.

  “Hey Baby,” I said, as nonchalantly as I could.

  “ … the FUCK?” Baby said.

  “What?” I asked. “I was just breathing second hand fumes. And just for a second. I swear. I didn’t come out to smoke. Believe it or not, I came out for fresh air.”

  “But … but …” she pointed at me, at a very rare loss for words.

  “What, Baby? What is it?”

  “You were … you looked like …”

  “I swear. To. God. I was not smoking. No matter what it looked like.” It was a stretch, I realize. The smokers had already reentered by the time Baby came out. I was hoping enough of the smoke smell had lingered to give me my alibi. But it was Baby who was my self-appointed non-smoking guardian, a role she took very seriously. If anything could distract her, it would be the prospect of my recidivism. Truth was, I’d never smoked, but back when I’d had trouble dealing with crowds and left events often for a quick flight to clear my head, I’d needed an excuse for going outside frequently. Ironically enough, since I couldn’t stand smoke.

  I put on an innocence-injured face, to underline it and give her a chance to think.

  She did. That’s right, Baby. You didn’t just see your best friend transform from a dog into a human because that would be crazy, wouldn’t it?

  “Uh,” she said, scrambling for a footing. “Did you just see a dog around here somewhere? I thought I saw a dog.”

  “A dog?” I asked, putting on confused face. “Look, do you wanna go back in? We’re missing the ending. I didn’t wanna leave but it just got really stuffy after a while.”

  “Yeah, right,” Baby said, recovering, sarcasm first. “Fresh air my ass. Let’s go back in.” She even sniffed me as I passed her, smelling for smoke. I wasn’t sure whether to feel guilty for manipulating her, or triumphant, for manipulating her successfully. But I followed obediently, even smiling.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Monday, October 17, 2011

  Sanc-Ahh Café, Oakland

  I didn’t see Chucha again on Saturday night. She wasn’t home, so I passed my word of warning along to the henchbrain on duty and left, still worried that nobody would take it seriously. And Sunday didn’t yield any results. Ayo didn’t get permission from the werecats to go through Wayland’s stuff, but she had his office address, and was ready to turn a blind eye to whatever I had planned. So I broke in and went through every freakin’ receipt in the place, as well as all the spreadsheets on his desktop computer (the password was on a post-it stuck to the bottom of his top drawer, and he didn’t use any database software, just simple excel spreadsheets) but nothing looked weird or out of order, every item was a huge lot on a huge pallet, and there were no walking-stick-sized packages anywhere.

  Granted, if he was doing any black market deals, he probably wouldn’t record them in the same spreadsheets the IRS might be auditing. So I also looked through the entire office, including both the obvious wall safe, and the less obvious floor safe under his very heavy desk (it looked like heavy rosewood, apparently had a core of iron, and only a shapeshifter could have moved it by themselves,) but found nothing. Actually, the floor safe was suspiciously empty and I suspected his werecat next-of-kin, or whoever his trusted second would be, had already cleared it out.

  I made a mental note to get Ayo to figure out who this person was and ask them, but she didn’t show up at work Sunday, or all day Monday—or answer my texts—so I was shit out of luck and starting to grow anxious again.

  Todd showed up at Sanc-ahh on Monday evening about when I was expecting Tez and Chucha. Dude had the worst timing … or maybe the best, depending on what he was trying to do. If it was “annoy the hell out of Maya” I’d call it good. I plucked a hair and threw it surreptitiously down onto the stool facing me.

  Todd greeted me cheerily and sat down enthusiastically, right where I’d planned. With a loud rip, a farting noise tore out from his seat. He looked down, startled, then looked up, as the noise continued. His cheeks pinkened. It went on. We both waited. It was really long. Heads came up all over the cafe. The note held for a fraction of forever … Then the sound trailed off into something that sounded suspiciously like a raspberry. Todd’s face was a study of embarrassment, surprise, and … awakening delight.

  He jumped up again and looked at the seat, then picked up the black-seat-colored whoopee cushion between two fingers. “That is damned impressive, Maya. Where did you find it?”

  I snatched it back from him and stuffed it in my pocket. “Trade secret.”

  Gazing at me delightedly, Todd sat back down, but before he could order and I could be rude to him, Chucha swept in the door and made a beeline for me.

  “Hey Maya!” she said, in a bright, almost girly voice that I wouldn’t have expected from her. She was smiling ear to ear.

  “Hey Chucha,” I said, glad, but puzzled. “How are you doing?”

  “Gassed!” she cried, and then laughed. No, she giggled. She plopped herself down next to Todd, who was looking at her in some alarm, and pulled her backpack around to sit in her lap. Then she
did a double take at Todd, her smile fading, sniffed him, and wrinkled her nose in a half-snarl.

  “Uhhh …” I said, “Chucha, this is Todd.”

  Chucha sniffed again and burred a small, ambivalent-sounding growl. Todd started up from his stool and bolted for the door. For just an instant I thought I saw a bunch of … was that reddish hair? … but he was gone too quickly for me to take another look.

  “What the hell?” I asked the room.

  “Figures,” Chucha grunted.

  I stared at her for a second. I wanted to ask her what she’d smelled, or if she had something against Todd, but it was against Sanctuary rules for any supernat to out another, or to bring their beefs into the Sanctuary. I’d just have to ask Todd himself the next time I saw him.

  “Want something to drink?” I asked her. At my recommendation she ordered a Seven League Cleanse, which was supposed to increase your running speed, but more importantly, couldn’t hurt you. Some of our house mixes could strike people in weird ways.

  I gave Chucha an extended version of my Cocktail show. I thought it might annoy and impress her in equal measure, but she was wholly delighted. She even clapped when I pulled off a particularly gruesome spinning shadow pass (behind and over the shoulder with a spin.) Her inner twelve-year-old was on full display this evening. She was even wearing a ponytail. It struck me as a little strange, but what did I know? She was used to being the baby of a fairly large family and I’d pulled rank on her last time we talked. Maybe she’d accepted her role, and that signaled her to act like a little girl. It worked, too; I found her attitude … cute, god help me.

  After she’d tried out her drink and pronounced it “Bomb!” she leaned in confidentially and grin-whispered “Wanna see something?”

  “Sure.”

  She unzipped the top of her pack and, with a bit of a flourish, pulled out the walking stick.

  I was struck speechless for a moment. I’d been pretty sure the San Antonios still had it, which put Chucha in the line of fire, but I hadn’t figured on her being entirely in charge of it now. Goddammit, this didn’t just put her in the line of fire; this made her the shadow’s target.