by Alex Shakar
But Fred’s guess wasn’t even close. As it would turn out, logging into Urth from his mother’s computer two days later, he’d find nothing in Central Florida but a flat, gray plane. The coordinates in the telegram didn’t point there at all, but instead to New York, to what on Urth was just another expanse of gray, and what on a Google satellite map was a building in the Bronx Zoo, obscured by treetops and fuzzed by poor resolution.
Getting to the actual zoo took Fred a few more days. He had his tweezer arraignment and subsequent sentencing to community service to deal with. He had a long, apologetic letter to write to the miniature golf course owner. He had to be grilled by Nelson and Sullivan again, this time in a small room with peeling paint and a two-way mirror. He had job applications to send out; creditors to plead with; injuries which ceased feeling in any way like freedom, causing him to wonder whether his former clarity and perfect joy at being alive had mainly been the result of those massive painkillers.
But soon enough, he got there. And Mira did, too—their first real date, or close enough—her unfastened hair and bare-shouldered sundress catching the breeze. Using a GPS camera Sam had sent from Armation, Fred and Mira traced those coordinates to a point precisely at the south entrance to the Monkey House. They searched the walls for graffitied messages. They peered behind the potted trees, and under the trash can. They pried at the bricks of the walkway, hoping to find a loose one with some kind of clue hid beneath. Uncovering nothing whatsoever, they trekked through the exhibit, scrutinizing the shrivel-faced capuchins and tufty-eared squirrel monkeys, the fuzzy-headed pygmy marmosets and spacey-eyed Bolivian gray titis. And they walked back out, still mystified, and glanced up above the entrance, to find, gazing bemusedly down at them, a menagerie of bas-relief monkeys crouched within the granite pediment; and a proud, sculpted baboon perched atop the apex; and a single word engraved across the entablature:
MONKEYS
They stared at the word.
“That’s it?” she asked. “His parting message?”
“I guess it must be,” he conceded.
They kept staring, in a haze of gloom.
“What do we do now?” Fred finally said.
Mira leaned her head on his shoulder.
“I like giraffes,” she offered.
“Giraffes are awesome,” he agreed.
“And hippos,” she said. “And birds.”
“Yeah.” He nodded. “Toucans.”
“Toucans,” she said. “Totally.”
That night, Mira not quite ready to invite him into the bed she’d shared with her husband, they opted for the futon. And despite some initial fumbling around Fred’s bandages and burns and their lingering, mutual shyness, they began to devise a shared dialect of fingers, lips, and hips. And after, with his hundred trillion cells attuned to the universe, and Mira lying pressed against his back, her arm without the tattoo wrapped around his chest, he gazed at those sandstone angels, faintly aglow in the streetlight through the blinds. And they merged in his thoughts with that proud baboon statue atop the Monkey House. And he remembered having come across certain references in his Hindu mythology research over the last few weeks.
He took her hand and led her to her computer in the study. Together, they read about the monkey god, Hanuman. A divine hero, known for his loyalty, bravery, fortitude, and intelligence. Some, in fact, judged him the most powerful of all the gods. He was famed for his ability to overcome any obstacle—no problem, puzzle, or predicament he couldn’t work his way through. He’d soared over an ocean to fulfill one mission, uprooted and carried off a mountain to complete another. The monkey god’s only vulnerability, it was said, arose from a mild curse placed upon him, whereby he kept forgetting his own miraculous powers, and was unable to recall them until someone else took the trouble to remind him.
Bounding over an ocean …
Shouldering a mountain …
Though mysteriously, in all Fred’s subsequent reading, he would never come across a reference to Hanuman tucking in a city and kissing it goodnight.
But all of that lay in a future so beyond Fred’s imagination and concern that it might as well have been some parallel world. Here and now, in the hospital room that was no longer George’s, that, tonight, wasn’t anyone’s, Fred stood up and took one last look around. The picture of Gretta and the Bush brothers still hung high on the wall. He let it hang, and switched off the overhead fluorescence. In the remaining wedge of illumination from the hall, a little red trash can with a biohazard symbol shone.
Leaning into the hip of his tired-looking mother, a balding boy in the elevator eyed Fred’s swathed, half-shaved head with a mixture of sympathy and fear, fingers rising to shield his own scalp. Perhaps as an excuse to stare, the boy asked what floor Fred was going to. And removing his hand from his pocket, Fred showed the boy his bandaged but otherwise empty palm, swiped it along the panel, made a fist, held it out, and rained elevator buttons into the boy’s open hands.
Then the doors opened on the ground floor, and Fred headed down the corridor, through the passageway from the old building to the new. The night watchman nodded to Fred as he crossed the lobby, and Fred nodded back. He was trying to piece together the strange patches of the last few days: The boiler room sojourn. The walk to Ground Zero after that. He kept coming to the last moment he could recall before waking up in the hospital bed. Not really a moment, not really a part of time at all, but a point at which all that too-bright light had given way to an infinite, lustrous black. It wasn’t right to say he’d been in it. He’d been it. Not even nothing. The dream abated. The Big Inky.
Heading out the revolving door, the lit-up city, to his eyes, seemed so suspiciously like the one he was made for, he had to stop and wonder if he’d really woken up at all, if he weren’t just in some bed, dreaming some coma dream. Or if, in fact, he’d never returned from that nowhere/ nowhen/nohow at all. Or if, in truth, he’d ever issued from it to start.
Though if he hasn’t left it, I’m sorry to break it to you, but reason dictates that all his ghosts and angels—all we inner voices, loving presences, and phantom listeners—haven’t left it either.
So perhaps, for the sake of argument, the lot of us would do best to assume that the void can’t stay void for long. That its hunger for adventure is as hopeless as ours. That its loneliness is even more so. And that thus, time and again, with a sally of doubt, the Dreamer’s the Dreamer, and we’re us, brushing eyebrows with it, and back we go.
Let’s picture our return together, believing as we doubt, doubting as we believe:
One.
Let’s bring back the stars. Scatter them into place with a single toss.
Two.
Let’s bring back the Earth, the sun. Plunge our hands into the folds of spacetime and pull them out.
Three.
Let’s bring back the city—if not forever, at least for now. Just whistle and here it gallops, a glittering creature of armor and lights. Just point and watch its trillion parts stream down to their spot on the globe.
Four.
Now it’s our turn. Down we dive as the land rolls into sunlight.
Down we fly over the cut-crystal island.
Dodging the spear point of the Empire State Building.
Slaloming between the pyramid tops of the Zeckendorf.
Swooping over the broad steps of Union Square.
Lower still through the Broadway canyon.
Through a maze of buildings, to the sudden absence of buildings.
And a bandstand, and news trucks, and a crowd.
And Fred’s kneeling, night-haired, moon-faced love.
And his own closed eyes. An inch away. A centimeter. He can make it from here.
Now let’s pull back up, about a hundred stories or so, staying focused on the furor below:
The ring of memorial mourners, hawkers, gawkers, spinners.
The raw red wound around which they gyre, clockwise, counterclockwise.
The crazy whirl. The
void within.
There’s our mission.
Awake our twin.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author wishes to thank Bill Clegg for coming back from the dead, and for, with so much sagacity and dedication, guiding this book back, too.
And to thank Mark Doten, editor extraordinaire, whose stellar insights and subatomic attentions were more help than a writer could hope for.
And Michael Madonick, without whose quixotic championing, well, Madonick will be happy to tell you the rest; and Joseph Skibell for the faithful dialogue; and more other reader-advisors than can be named here, but for a start: Dale Barrigar, Olivia Block, Garin Cycholl, Philip Graham, Susan Golumb, David Langendoen, Cris Mazza, Blue Montakhab, Barry Pearce, Curtis Perry, Richard Powers, Aaron Roston, and Diane and Martin Shakar.
And for technical and research assistance: Andrew Ervin, Robert Gehorsam, Spencer Grey, Det. Paul Grudzinski, Sol Lorenzo, Aaron Madrigal, Damon Osgood, John Paul, Dr. Ron Pies, Greg Shakar, Ben Stephens, Mallory O. Sullivan, Esq., Harry Yu, and again, many more.
And Saul Diskin for his loving memoir, The End of the Twins, from which a couple of childhood dynamics were adapted herein.
And Justin Hargett, Bronwen Hruska, Ailen Lujo, and the rest of the crackerjack team at Soho Press. And Janine Agro, Kapo Ng, and Elyse Strongin for their design magic. And Ivonne Karamoy for her icons, and radiance.
And the University of Illnois Research Board, and the Mellon Faculty Foundation, for financial support.
And you, for reading. For those interested in further reading about various topics broached herein, a few suggestions can be found at alexshakar.com