Shelf Monkey

by Corey Redekop

  SHELF MONKEY

  COREY REDEKOP

  ECW Press

  Copyright © Corey Redekop, 2007

  Published by ECW PRESS

  2120 Queen Street East, Suite 200, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4E 1E2

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any process — electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise — without the prior written permission of the copyright owners and ECW press.

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Redekop, Corey

  Shelf monkey / Corey Redekop.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-55022-766-6

  ISBN-10: 1-55022-766-1

  i. Title.

  PS8635.E338S54 2007 C813’.6 C2006-906797-X

  Editor: Jennifer Hale

  Cover Design: David Gee

  Text Design: Tania Craan

  Production: Mary Bowness

  Printing: Transcontinental

  The publication of Shelf Monkey has been generously supported by the Canada Council, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry

  DISTRIBUTION

  CANADA : Jaguar Book Group, 100 Armstrong Ave., Georgetown, ON L7G 5S4

  PRINTED AND BOUND IN CANADA

  For Cathy,

  who never left.

  For Nikki,

  who left too soon.

  For the Monkeys,

  who won’t leave me alone.

  Acknowledgements

  Writing a book is a solitary experience. Getting it suitable for public consumption requires a great deal of outside help.

  So with that in mind, I would like to extend my thanks:

  To Cathy Cotter, who always believes in me, especially when I don’t;

  To Miriam Toews, the first person to read the novel as a whole, and whose encouragement and excitement went far beyond the call of duty;

  To my parents Marilyn and Ted, and my siblings Lisa, Nikki, and Teddy — a warm, loving, and understanding family who cannot in any way be blamed for the way I turned out;

  To Morley Walker, for giving me a job at my lowest point, and actually paying me to read;

  To Jen Hale, for being an exceptionally patient and understanding editor, and the rest of the ECW staff;

  To Oprah;

  To the publishers and staff of the 3-Day Novel Contest, whose seventy-two hours of caffeine-fuelled literary mayhem gave birth to the kernel of what Shelf Monkey turned out to be;

  To the authors of every book I’ve ever read;

  And to all my friends who suggested that I some day write a book. If you must blame someone, blame them.

  Beware the man of only one book

  — Chinese proverb

  From Associated Press

  SURPRISE DEBUT AT NUMBER ONE

  AP — Despite not having been reviewed in any major newspaper, a small, unheralded novel has debuted at the number 1 position on practically every bestseller list in North America.

  My Baby, My Love, a novel by neophyte author Agnes Coleman, was released last week to little fanfare, the inaugural publication of television host Munroe Purvis’s new imprint, MuPu Inc. Purvis trumpeted Coleman’s novel last month on his talk show The Munroe Purvis Show, yet industry analysts held out little hope of the novel making any sort of impact in what has so far been a dismal publishing season.

  “This is a phenomenon; I’ve never seen anything like it,” Coleman’s agent Harold Kura crowed in an interview with Associated Press. “These are Harry Potter numbers we are seeing here. It bodes very well for Agnes, as well as MuPu.”

  In a press release, Munroe admits no surprise at the novel’s sudden success. “For too long, people have been told what to like, what to read, what to think. I see this novel as proof that critics are out of touch with their audiences. Miss Coleman’s novel is one of great warmth and wisdom, and the only surprise I see is that people are surprised by its success.”

  Scrambling to catch up to its popularity, late reviews of My Baby, My Love have begun to surface. Most are intensely negative, with many critics labelling the book as awful or worse. A New York Times review called the book “facile,” “borderline insulting in its banality,” and “almost staggeringly idiotic.”

  Riding the unexpected wave of popularity, MuPu has announced that its upcoming second release, Milk and Hugs, will be released substantially sooner than anticipated, with its initial print run raised to 500,000 copies.

  FILE # 09978

  DOCUMENT INSERT: Journal entry of Thomas Friesen.

  From patient files of Dr. Lyle Newhire

  Tommy? Tommy-boy? Hey, Tommy! TOOOMMMMMMYYYYY?

  Well, Doc, there it is. That’s the voice that haunts my dreams. At the movies, during work, having dinner, enjoying infrequent sexual relations. Weeks, months pass with complete silence, life has resumed its normality, and then — ah, there you are, you little parasite, howling from your cave in the memory receptacles of my brain, sending shivers of dread down and up my spinal column, causing instantaneous paralysis and near-pants-wetting anguish.

  I don’t know if this is what you want, asking me to do homework on whatever strikes me as being important. Christ, are you so lazy I can’t talk about this in group? I have to waste my free time writing papers to satisfy some half-baked psychiatric theory? Write it down, just put down whatever springs to mind, hey, it’ll be a reverse literary Rorschach. What do you see, Doc? Repressed memories of patriarchal abuse? Childhood sexual favours with strangers in exchange for a Skor bar? A game of touch football with schoolyard chums that got a bit too, oh, shall we say, chummy? If you want to know what’s bothering me, Doc, ask me, don’t pussy around with this ‘what I did during my summer vacation’ bullshit. Write about how I feel. You’ve got, what, twelve years of medical training, and you’ve got the professional range of a substitute teacher. There’s money well spent.

  I wouldn’t be so sensitive about this if you weren’t so insistent that I not censor myself. I’m not normally so obstinate, calling you “Doc” with a snide overtone of contempt, not like me at all. Maybe something snapped loose on impact. The ganglia that monitored social interactivity severed, useless, sputtering sparks of cerebrospinal fluid all over my braincase. But hey, that’s the point, right? Get all the anger out, let the ink do the shouting, then we can talk about what’s really bugging Thomas lately, why he decided to not look both ways, why he just doesn’t seem to be so happy anymore. Talk out the depression, diagnose, and then drug his cares away. Eradicate, then medicate. Know what? I don’t feel like writing about it just this second. I’m not running from my problems, I’m postponing the inevitable. I’ll face up to it when I’m ready. My dementia, my schedule.

  anger issues — sees me as surrogate enemy? — could result in violent behaviour — would hospital stay be appropriate?

  Tommy-boy! Hey, asshole!

  Boy, he’s insistent, isn’t he? Much as I’d like to just scrap this whole thing, tell you to fuck off (wait, does that count as telling you to fuck off? If so, good, if not, fuck off), you lucked out and got one of those rare people who simply cannot not do their homework. Always on time, always typed, title page and plastic binder, that’s me.

  Do you know what depression is, Doc? Not your textbook definition, do you know what it really is? Depression is a nasty little boy sitting behind you in math class, flicking boogers at your head. It’s standing blindfolded before the firing squad, praying that you don’t shit your pants when they execute you. It’s realizing that you’re not you anymore, this isn’t your world, you’re Holden Caulfield now, lost and lonely in New York, and you hate absolutely everything and everyone for being such phonies and don’t ev
en care to figure out why. It’s waking up every four minutes, insomnia grating away the world until it’s a jagged smudge of motion that holds no relevance to you anymore. It’s a malignant boulder in the throat that you cannot talk around. If you can squeeze a word past the granite, and oh God it’s agony to speak, even a little is like a drink of scalding oil, the words are accompanied by a rush of tears that you just cannot stop! So you’re quiet all the time, because you can’t possibly make conversation in such a state. Can’t even go to a Timmy Ho’s for a coffee. Can’t order a double double without freaking out and scaring the server, and once it starts, only exhaustion stems the flow.

  Well, back to it, shall we? Got to hand this in, get my gold star.

  Thomas, Tom, Tommy!

  No one calls me that anymore, I am insistent on that. Thomas, thank you ever so much, or Mr. Friesen, if you fancy the more formal address, but I prefer not to stand on ceremony. If you’re one of those psychologists who strives to uncover the one defining moment in a person’s life that ends up ruining that person forever, writing your doctoral thesis on the after-effects of the detritus you can fish out of one poor soul’s past, well Doc, congratulations, mission accomplished, high-fives all round.

  The voice even has a name, lest you conclude this is one of those anonymous bogeymen content to reside themselves in childhood closets and under bunk beds. Vikram Mansur. One of those kids everyone just knew was going to turn out juuuussst fine. Smart, composed, and oh so smooth as to be frictionless. Even by grade 5, he had already perfected the smile that wins over teachers, parents, students. The grin, slightly crooked, teeth gleaming yet not too gleaming. Open and inviting, with just a hint of veiled violence to balance the equation. An iconic smile. A smile to gain trust, cajole enemies, weaken knees, spread thighs, and ultimately save mankind. The smile of a leader, captain of the softball team, bmoc, head of the Conservative Party, CEO of one of those planet-destroying multi-conglomerates that everybody loves, like Wal-Mart or Old Navy. The menacing smirk of a bully, although only a few of us ever fully understood how bottomless the well of his cruelty really was.

  TOOOOOMMMMMMYYYYYYYY!

  There’s no denying it, I was a nerd, full-bore and classic. Homework done on time, conscientious and hard-working to a fault, uncomprehending that being singled out for praise by Mr. Waldmo was tantamount to joyfully pissing on the heads of my classmates. “Attention, everyone, Thomas has just written the most remarkable essay on what he did last summer at band camp. Thomas, do come up to the front, will you? Come, recite your magnum opus for the class, and be sure to speak slowly, so that your fellow students will have ample time in which to plot your death. It helps build character!” Why do teachers do that? Do they take some PTA-approved mind-altering drug during their education degrees that effectively erases all memories of elementary school? Only a few remarkable children in this universe can take such praise from an adult without paying for it later.

  Oh, the myriad ways it comes back at you, Doc.

  Sniggering and name-calling. Nice essay, dickwad.

  Thrown erasers at the back of the head.

  An “accidental” shove into a wall of lockers.

  A full-bore ass-thumping on the way home after class, caught in the back alleys where you hoped you wouldn’t be seen but knew that you would. My nose is still slightly bent from one of those encounters; not Vikram, Douglas Benderchuk that time. Cunt. It’s minor, really, a ding, a flaw among many, an irregularly shaped pebble in a sandbox, but every photograph magnifies the curve into something approaching the sharp 90-degree turn of a surprise off-ramp.

  Fuck.

  But that was grade 4. By grade 5, largely due to the steep learning curve of my proper place in the universe, I had almost perfected the art of being unseen. Muted colours were my forte; old jeans, brown sweaters, nothing new, nothing remotely threatening to others. I was invisible, the shadow of a student, absent in all but the merest hint of pale saggy flesh. A vague outline dressed in corduroy. A black-belt sensei of early teen-years camouflage. My shoulders and back had devolved, forming the omnipresent turtle-shell hump of the eternally picked-on. Eye contact was taboo. Silence was compulsory. Even my odour was practically nonexistent, a delicate musk of stale air and faint terror, easily eclipsed by the bathtubs of eau de toilette the girls washed themselves in. Jocks looked right through me. I was smoke, irritating their eyes until they could focus on a target for their mindless wrath, by which time I would be long gone and some poor luckless dupe had taken my place. If it weren’t for morning roll call, I would have eventually forgotten I had the power of speech.

  Present!

  Vikram, though, Vikram saw me. He saw me. In a life already devoid of everything but cool waters and smooth sailing, I was that one hidden reef he kept bumping up against. Vikram’s personal mote, that’s what I became — the eyelash lodged firmly in his iris, fine sand that scoured his lens and blurred his vision until he went lunatic with anguish. He couldn’t sleep until I had been excised from his life. My being allowed to exist was offensive to his sense of self. Why? Who knows? Go look him up if you’re so interested. Maybe he was sexually abused or something. Is it wrong of me to hope that this was the case?

  Yo, Tommy, you motherfucker, look up!

  I can’t remember how we all ended up in the school library. Someone was sick maybe, or it was raining outside, so we all had to spend recess indoors. The library was always my sanctuary. No one of importance ever hung around there, or if they did, there were enough aisles and shelves to conceal myself behind until they had gone. It was home away from home. Better than home. Warmer. A home free of worry, of the incessant probing of parents, poking into every facet of my day, well-meaning but clueless as to the factual horror life had become. My house was where I slept, where society dictated I must consume evening meals, bathe, and make small talk. The library was my home. I was not judged by the stories I read; I judged them. I was the father, scolding the novels that let me down, contemptuous of my sons Joe and Frank for solving a mystery in one hundred pages when I had figured it out in thirty, admonishing them, “Go play with that Drew girl down the street, take Encyclopedia Brown while you’re at it, stop wasting my time, I’ve got a Roald Dahl I’m trying to get through here!” By the end of eighth grade, I had read the fiction section in its entirety. Miss White, the head librarian, would just hand new books directly to me as they arrived, a little gleam of recognition in her eyes.

  mother figure?

  I knew a kindred soul even then, and Miss White and I were on the same page. She had that look of uncertain fear when some of the older students wandered through, asking her stunningly obtuse research questions for their papers that seemed obvious to illiterates, so stupid these gorillas were. “Yeah, uh, where’s the, you know, cyclopedias? I need somethin on rocks.” Then they’d snort back a monstrous amount of snot, swallowing it with a loud glug.

  classic inferiority complex

  She could have destroyed these plankton. She wanted to; I could sense her desire to impart the wrong information, to give them bad grades, to fail them into early marriages and low-income housing and gas jockeydom. She never did, and I never summoned up the courage to ask why. We were both losers. She had reconciled herself to this. I, however, would listen closely from behind the kindergarten section, grimacing as she spelled out the exact title and author and location in the library so these worms could find their books. Then, quickly and quietly, taking such pain to remain invisible, to keep myself vague, I crept to the shelves they were looking for, and took the books away. I like to think that there exist a few Fs and Incompletes on someone’s transcript as a result of my mock-heroics. Helps me believe school wasn’t a complete waste of my time. Some people may split atoms, cure cancer, or fight terrorism, but me? I got Gord Folbert to repeat the eighth grade. Good times.

  You ever get lost in a book, Dr. Newhire? I mean, so into the pages, into the ink and the words and the metaphors and symbolism, just so into the story, that
there is nothing else? You and the book, that’s all that exist anymore. People have commented that I’m too obsessed with books, a pack rat of literature. Of course, these are the same people who come in their pants when heavily armoured figure skaters manage to flick a lump of rubber into a goal with a piece of wood. Others get themselves addicted to live-feed Internet sites, watching someone else’s life unfold via digital camera and blog as they ignore the tragedy that is their own. So, who’s right, in the end?

  The philosophers are absolutely correct, we create our own realities, and right at that moment, in those pages, your reality is Vanity Fair, or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, or Less than Zero, or I Am the Cheese, whatever floats your goat. These novels do not belong to the author anymore, they’ve been incorporated into the collective unconscious. They have become my realities, my experiences, my lives. I am T.S. Garp. I am? I was, rather. I’ve changed my mind, the philosophers are dead wrong, I do not create my reality. Didn’t even have a hand in it. Vikram is the creator. He is the Supreme Being, he is God, and no matter what Nietzsche would have us believe, the asshole still exists. And from the POV of an eleven-year-old book geek — acne already setting up base camp for a stay of upward of a decade until they decide to retreat, leaving only residual forces behind to keep the villagers in line — for that boy, Vikram was a tyrant, a God of wrath and maliciousness.

  TOMMY! TOMMYTOMMYTOMMYTOMMYTOMMY!

  How could I ignore it? He sat there, two desks behind, with his coterie of greasy-haired flunkies and over-eyeshadowed prebimbos.

  Hey, I’m talking to you.

  I know you can hear me.

  Flicking paperclips at my head. Lounging about like this was his world to rule. It was mine! My terrain! Where was Miss White? I should have fought him for it, should have stood up to him, taken the beating, done something! I watch the scene unfold now, this paper in front of me, and I scream at my younger self, FIGHT! DON’T COWER! you fucking wuss! But Thomas the loser just shrinks into his chair, his hair now barely visible over its moulded plastic back. I Am the Cheese, that wonderful novel, it is now the only refuge Thomas has, it’s too small to cower behind, it’s only a cheap Scholastic paperback edition, even a boy as slight as Thomas can’t hide behind it, but it doesn’t deter him, he won’t budge, won’t move, won’t acknowledge the taunting, now multiplied by many, a chorus of high-pitched voices, all yelling,