That was how Mina and Jelly ended up at the Christian school run by the American nuns, sitting in front of the gigantic English dictionary. Between her feet was Raphael's big sack, full of solid-state drives from Alseny's e-waste computers: drives that were encrypted, so that they were useless to Alseny. Light streamed down onto Jelly through a window that had been nearly filled with a cheap plastic facsimile of stained glass, showing the miracle of the loaves and fishes. Television-blue light fell on the top of page 680, CINCTURE to CINQUEFOIL. Jelly, perched on the sill of the dictionary's carved wooden stand, pored over the pages that to him were as big as carpets. If it had been safe to bring him close to an internet hotspot again, he could probably have completed this process in a tenth of a second, but instead they had to spend hour after tedious hour here every morning before work. The nun who kept an eye on the library thought Mina was very studious.
Jelly stirred, and Mina reached out to turn the page for him, but he said, “I think I've got one: CINNAMON123.”
“Cinnamon, what's that?”
“Cannelier de Ceylan, the spice. It's probably the name of their cat or something.”
Mina smiled and shook her head. It still amazed her that so many of the rich foreigners could be so dumb, especially after they got to go to school until they were eighteen or twenty. Why would they go to all the trouble of encrypting their drives, but then choose a password that was basically just a word from the dictionary? No doubt when Jelly got farther through the alphabet he'd get hits like PASSWORD123 and SECRET123.
“Okay, which one?”
“I can find it. Open the bag.”
She checked to make sure that the nun wasn't peeking in from the hall, then held the sack open in her lap so that Jelly could go in. His front paws dug like a dog's through the jumble. He had memorized a small part of each drive, like going to a library and memorizing one page out of each book. If he could decrypt the sample using CINNAMON123, he could probably decrypt the whole thing.
“This one,” he squeaked from inside the bag, and pointed with his nose. She cabled him up to the drive through the port in his mouth.
He held still for a moment, then nodded and spoke—he could still talk even when his mouth was full. “Yes, that's working. I've got it all decrypted. Emails . . . banking . . .”
Raphael had a new system for handling money, something involving prepaid phone cards and a hawala in Cairo. Tomorrow he'd be at the cashier's window in the basement of the hospital with another small pile of ten-k notes.
“Ah, tres bien, mon petit chou.” Jelly came out of the bag, looking proud. Mina stroked his head, and he wiggled his tailless rump and rubbed the side of his stubby little snout against her belly. He knew it, and Mina knew it too: Jelly had been kicked over the threshold.
Copyright © 2010 Benjamin Crowell
[Back to Table of Contents]
* * *
Short Story: MONKEY DO
by Kit Reed
Kit Reed has stories appearing in Postscripts, Kenyon Review, and several anthologies this year, with a collection coming from PS Publishing in 2011. Publishers Weekly praised Enclave (2009) as “a gripping dystopian thriller.” Other novels include The Baby Merchant, J. Eden, and Thinner Than Thou, which won an ALA Alex award. A Guggenheim fellow and the first American recipient of a five-year literary grant from the Abraham Woursell Foundation, she is Resident Writer at Wesleyan University. Readers will find a sardonic depiction of an “author” and his “muse” in Kit's latest tale for us.
Every writer wants to be famous, at least just once. I've been at it since before the dog died but it's an animal planet, so what do you expect? If a hundred monkeys typing for a thousand years would probably produce a novel, what could one monkey do with a computer and the right software?
That is, a computer-literate monkey like Spud.
I never liked the monkey. I brought it home because I was stuck on certain points in my monkey planet novel and needed a specimen to observe firsthand. In a one-room apartment, gorillas are out of the question and chimps are too annoying to have around. Plus, baboons are evil incarnate, which you'd know if you'd ever looked one in the eye. Ergo, Spud.
He was quiet, he was small enough to fit in a shopping bag if he scrunched, so what could go wrong?
He had bad habits, his breath was vile but I thought, cool. Bestseller at any cost. Instant movie. Fame! I finished the book, ok, I even got paid. I did all the right things to promote it even though they weren't paying squat. I touched all the miserable bases, up to and including being snubbed at cons and sitting at bookstore tables for hours waiting to sign Rhesus Planet for fans who never showed up. Nice poster featuring Spud attracted a few ladies, but they awwww-ed and moved on.
My novel tanked but the monkey is still around.
It's not like I wanted to keep the monkey. It sat around scratching its belly and mocking me, and I could swear it was grunting, failure. I saw pity in its eyes.
You bet I was over Spud. In fact the first thing I did after the book was done was take him back to the pet store for a refund, but the dealer said he didn't accept returns. I tried to trade him in for an anaconda, but a sarcastic, second-hand rhesus monkey with white eyebrows and a white goatee and white hair on its butt like a second beard around its asshole turns out to be a drug on the market.
So I donated him to the local zoo. They took him on a trial basis. We hugged goodbye. I thought good riddance, but he was back on my doorstep in less than a week. There was a note attached to his carrier: BAD INFLUENCE. I was embarrassed, but not surprised.
I tried to take him out in the wild and set him free, and he was okay in the car until I turned off the freeway. Stupid jerk, he started to cry. Never mind, I found him a nice field with lots of growing things that he could eat if he wasn't so fussy, a nice pond and trees he could jump around in. God knows I tried to turn him loose. I put him down and gave him a little pat on the butt. “Go, be free!” Instead he locked his arms and legs around my shin and no matter how hard I kicked to shake him off he clung, going ook-ook-oook so pathetically that I picked him up and we went home.
As a result Spud is still around, a constant reminder of whatever is the most recent failure, and believe me, there have been a few too many since Rhesus Planet, the unsuccessful Cockatoo Nation being one. At least the dealer let me turn in the bird for a goldfish, which mysteriously disappeared the day I brought it home.
Never mind. I did what you do in the wake of failure, which pretty much happens every time I try. I sat down at the computer and started another novel, but when nobody likes you it's hard, thinking up new words to push around the screen.
You get distracted, and the monkey was no help. Spud got bored or jealous or some damn thing whenever I sat down to write. Worse, every time I walked away to get coffee or look out the window for inspiration, which was often, he hopped up on the table and started bopping away at my keyboard with his little fists, bonka-bonka-bonka, and one day when I came back from gazing into the bathroom mirror, I found words.
HELO BILY
Well, he spelled it all wrong, but I'm here to tell you: never condescend to a monkey. It turns out the little fuckers are clever. Plus they are easily bored and idle hands can delete an entire chapter just while you're in the bathroom, examining your zits.
I had to come up with a distraction if I was ever going to finish this rotten book. If I could just get Spud onto something that kept him busy, he wouldn't have to spring up on my keyboard every time I turned my back, like, when I came back to work I wouldn't have to deal with him crouching on top of the bookcase with that reproachful look, oook-oooking every time I quit typing because I was trying to think.
It was inhibiting, all that judgmental hopping and oooking and worse, knowing that he was watching my every move with those sober eyes. I could swear he knew every time I switched screens to see if my Amazon figures had improved or went looking for signs of life on my Facebook page; if I started to blog the ook-ooking slipp
ed into a positively spiteful screeeee.
The monkey was judging me. If I wanted to get anywhere with Koala Galaxy, I needed to get Spud the sententious rhesus monkey off my case. Monkey see, monkey do? Fine. I would create a diversion.
I dragged out the laptop Mom bought me when she first found out that I was going to be a famous writer. If it takes a hundred monkeys a thousand years to type a novel and I only had one, how wrong could it go?
I gave my old klunker to the monkey.
Oh, he bonked out a few words but he was no threat to me, for I am an artist. While he was plinking away I managed to crank out Gibbous Moon, 3,000,004 on Amazon last time I looked, and Screaming Meemies, my first horror novel which, in case you're interested, is in its fifth year on offer, for mysterious reasons, and therefore still available.
And Spud? Oh, he banged out a few hundred words, no big deal, but pretty damn good for a monkey. At least his spelling improved. His little screeds weren't worth squat, but seeing how lame they were compared to my work absolutely cheered me up. I would pat him on the back and praise him and I don't think he knew for a minute that my tone was maybe a little bit condescending, for he is the monkey and I am the pro.
He got good enough that I started printing out some of his stuff and at night, after we'd both eaten and I was sick of playing World of Warcraft and fluffing up my MySpace page, I workshopped the stuff with him, or I tried to. If you want to know the truth, Spud's always been a little too thin-skinned about criticism to be a real writer. One harsh word out of me, one little suggestion and he started ook-oook-ooooking so loud that we had complaints from the neighbors and the super gave me an or-else speech.
“Very well,” I said to the monkey finally, and I'm sorry to say that he took it very badly, “if you can't handle a little constructive criticism, shut up or get out of the kitchen.”
How was I supposed to know he was so thin-skinned that he would sulk? When I next looked at his laptop screen the ungrateful brute had typed—never mind what he typed, it was insulting and unprintable. I shouted, “language!” but he didn't care.
I told him what he could do with his copy and went back to work, and if the next time I peeked Spud had written a villanelle, well—never mind. “Oook-oook-oook,” I said to him after I printed it. “This is what I think of your villanelle.” He cried when I tore it to bits and threw the pieces away. At least I think that's what he was doing. I sneaked a peek at his screen, which is how he usually communicates, but it was blank so I never found out what he was thinking.
For the next few days he pretty much abandoned the laptop. Whether I was working or not, he sat in a corner and kept his back to me. He wouldn't eat, at least not while I was watching, and he wouldn't touch the keyboard—plus, every once in a while I could swear I heard him moan, but with monkeys, you never know. He was sulking for sure.
In a way, it was a relief. It was a lot easier to work without him watching. I managed to finish Dam of the Unconscionable, my first literary novel. My feeling is, I never sold many copies because I've always been a hybrid and the world resents a literary novelist, but I could gain respect. I thought Dam of the Unconscionable would make me famous. I wrote my heart out on that book! It was so intense that I just knew it would win a couple of prizes; this was going to be the novel that would break me out.
Meanwhile Spud was languishing. He wouldn't type, didn't write, wouldn't celebrate with me when a small press gave me a contract for my novel. He wouldn't touch the laptop even though I gave him inspiring speeches about perseverance. Frankly, it was depressing, seeing him dragging around with his shoulders hunched, and I would do anything to buck him up. I even told him he showed promise and slid the open laptop in front of him, hoping to lure him back to his escritoire. The ungrateful bastard just sat on the windowsill, looking into his paws. I hate the sober little jerk but that expression made me feel bad for him and a tad bit guilty too, for letting him type away on that laptop with nary an honest or even a hypocritical kind word.
“You're good,” I told him, and I tried my best not to sound condescending this time. “You're really good.” But he just looked at me the way he did and I knew that he knew.
Then Dam of the Unconscionable tanked. The small press wouldn't even give my money back. I brought home the only copy they printed and I shook it in Spud's face. I'm afraid I shouted: “Well, are you happy now?” I could tell he was still sulking. He wouldn't even oook at me.
So for months Spud sat around and brooded; he was shedding, like every clump of fur was a little reproach. Have you ever tried to sit down and get serious about your novel in the presence of a living reproach? It's like typing on the deck of the Ark the day it starts raining in earnest. Everything shorts out.
If I was ever going to finish Screed of the Outrageous and get famous, Spud was a problem that had to be solved.
I couldn't get rid of the guy, too much has gone down between us, so I had to make him happy. Whatever it took.
Then inspiration struck. I was surfing—okay, I was mousing along thinking, the way you do when things aren't going well inside your head, and I came upon this amazing product.
I clicked on this page and it said in big letters all the way across the top, NOVEL WRITING WAS NEVER EASIER. I thought, oh boy, lead me to it, for if I haven't mentioned it, a writer's life is consummate hell. The ad read:
Create and track your characters.
Invent situations that work.
Consummate climaxes.
Triumph over conclusions.
Pay for our software out of your first royalty check.
Everything you need to be a successful novelist for five hundred dollars.
Naturally I clicked through to find out more about this miracle and on the next opening in Ta-DAAA print I got its name:
Success guaranteed with . . .
STORYGRINDER
Lead me to it, I thought. Of course electronic miracles are not for me, for I am an artist, but given that Mom had just sent me one of her inspiration bonus checks I thought it might be just the thing for Spud. Plus, if I downloaded it for him I could look over the monkey's shoulder and see if Storygrinder knew any tricks, like: five hundred dollars, is there anything in that black bag for me?
So I read the fumpf out loud, thinking to get Spud's attention. “Success guaranteed,” I read. “Spud, get a load of this. They can show you how to write Bright Lights, Big City,” I told him, which, unfortunately, didn't get a rise out of him, not so much as an ooook.
Then I said, “Or if you wanted, maybe even the Bible.”
Nothing. “Or . . . Or . . .” Then I was inspired. “A book like Animal Farm.”
Bingo. Spud's head came up.
I thought, if a hundred monkeys typing take a thousand years to write a novel, this software ought to be enough to keep this one off my back for thirty years, which is about as long as these labor-intensive rhesus guys are supposed to last.
I bought Storygrinder for the monkey. One look and it was clear the software was not for me. It was, frankly, simplistic. One click and I could write The Last of the Mohicans, which, hel-LO, has already been done.
“Here you go, dude,” I told him, and on the premise that monkey see, monkey do, I walked him through the first stages.
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” I wrote, like Charles Dickens, although the application gave me options that would let me write like one of the Brontes. A flag popped up:
DID YOU MEAN TO REPEAT YOURSELF? FIX.
So I wrote, “Call me Ishmael.” Naturally it questioned my spelling, but what the hey, Spud sidled over to watch.
Then I started writing a book that began, “It was love at first sight. The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him,” and the monkey's interest in life came back with a jerk.
“Oook!” Spud said and he hurtled in and shoved me out of the way with the force of his entire body. “Oook-ooook!”
“Good boy.” Although i
t would have been fun to play with the software at least a little bit I backed off, relieved and delighted to see him distracted and busy for a change. “Go to it, little dude. Onward,” I said, “and upward with the arts.”
His eyes lit up.
I said helpfully, “I'd click on the button that says, start my book.”
For the first time since I brought him home to my apartment, Spud sounded positively joyful. “Oook!”
It did my heart good to see him pounding away with both fists, and better yet, given the nature of the buttons and whistles attached to this new application, which not only tracks your spelling and punctuation but also tells you when you're depending too heavily on certain verbs or using an adjective like “magnificent” more than once in your whole entire novel, the little bugger is a genius with the mouse.
A month with Storygrinder and Spud bounded past the pound-and-click method and into proper keyboarding before I noticed what was up. For the first time since I gave him the laptop he started using his tiny fingers. To my surprise the animal has a stretch that any concert pianist would envy and, man, you ought to see his attack! After a month he was up to speed and the next thing I knew he had outrun me, typing so fast that there was no telling where it would end. Next time I checked his output almost matched mine, and as I was in the final third of my next attempt after Screed of the Outrageous and, frankly, my best shot at going for the gold, what I had thought of as a gimmick to keep Spud out of my hair ended up with us in a footrace for fame.
Asimov's SF, June 2010 Page 7