Shelf Monkey

by Corey Redekop

  Eventually, the offerings dried up, a pile of books lying meekly at Aubrey’s feet. Michael Crichton’s Airframe. Crucible by Mel Odom. Naomi Campbell’s Swan. Paulo Coelho’s Eleven Minutes, a montag I couldn’t wait to immolate. Something called Angry Housewives Eating Bon Bons. Danae’s offering, Bushnell’s 4 Blondes, a ’tag seconded by Hagar, thirded by Lady Fuchsia.

  “The Shelf Monkeys have chosen,” Aubrey sang out, “and it is good.” He poked the embers of the fire with a stick. A throng of tiny combustibles leapt into the wind. Gathering the novels in his arms, he turned to us, the wind pulling back his hood, letting his hair lash about, flagellating his face with flaming whips.

  “We are in agreement, then?”

  “We are.”

  “Ubf!”

  “The evil must be destroyed?” Aubrey’s voice had risen, becoming a ghostly shriek on the wind. He was in his element, the dreadlocks standing at attention, a mixture of Christ and Pilate, demanding sacrifice in the name of the greater good.

  “YES!” the monkeys shouted back.

  “Was Montag right?”

  “YES!”

  “Ubf!”

  “Is it a pleasure to burn?”

  “YES!”

  He pitched the books into the pyre, sending flames and fireflies rocketing into orbit. Ink swiftly altered its chemical composition, melting down the pages, becoming molecules of gas. Inexpensive paper curled, changed colours, settled on black. Glue popped and boiled. Ideas evaporated. Characters died in agony. Leaves of sin filled the sky, joining the stars.

  What do you know? Montag was right. It was a pleasure to burn.

  Exhausted, exhilarated, purified, we set out for home. Danae sidled up next to me as I strode homeward, sliding her cool fingers into mine and whispering into my ear. “Do you get it now?” she teased. I nodded. Unquestionably, I got it. When the pages had caught fire, I had a woody the likes of which I hadn’t possessed since going on the meds. The kiss, the flirting, the physical lust, all made sense now; it was foreplay to the main event. We had shared an experience that brought us closer than sex ever could. We began to walk. Danae linked her arm through mine and rested her head on my shoulder. A crisp breeze bit through our clothes, nipped at our souls, reminding us of the glory of the world. We said nothing. We were beyond the power of words; we had proved it that night. Outside Danae’s apartment, we held each other close for a few seconds, an undemanding hug that far surpassed any post-coital clinches I had enjoyed in the past. Animals were never meant to be alone, I know that now. The simple act of embracing someone, feeling your dual heartbeats slowly synchronize, that’s all it takes to achieve true happiness. We muttered some non-committal pleasantries, promised to see each other later, and I walked homeward, not a thought in my head. Once home, I immediately went for my bookshelves, grabbed my battered paperback copy of Catch-22, collapsed on the sofa, held the Heller to my heart, and fell blissfully asleep.

  I’d never felt better in my life.

  It was an opiate, more satisfying than tobacco, more addictive than heroin. At the end of the day, wrung out from inane questions, unruly kids — “Why do you keep the graphic novels behind the Special Orders desk? I’ll buy one, I promise this time! No one’s looking, c’mon, just one Manga, please? Asshole!” — and the malignant chunky cranium of Munroe Purvis wordlessly mocking our efforts from open to close, burning books was the ultimate in stress release. There were rules, of course. You could not steal from a library, that was the first. Libraries are the holy sanctuaries of Shelf Monkeys, and their purity must not be corrupted by our peccadilloes. Neither could we take advantage of the small independent bookstores, or sellers of used books. No, the books must be purloined from the biggies, which gave me Chapters and READ to choose from. At first, I shamefacedly purchased my montags, fearing the wrath of Page should my bibliokleptomania be discovered. Bargain bins were a treasure trove of the accursed, and with my employee discount, practically a steal unto itself. Aubrey shamed and emboldened me with his fortitude, smuggling books out within the tangles of his hair, sometimes wearing a rainbow Rastafarian hat to hide the edges of the covers. Legerdemain, that’s what Aubrey called it. Misdirection and subterfuge. Always carry a bag, that’s the standard ruse. During frequent employee searches (probably forbidden under the Charter, but I was in no position to complain), Page and her associates would always search a suspicious bag to the exclusion of everything else; say, unusually baggy khakis with multiple deep pockets.

  As reverent as we were toward the booksellers who were eking out a living against the superstorification of the world, the authors we treated far less kindly. I had asked, rather meekly, whether the independent author should be respected as well, the author who struggles to get the book published, using small presses and likely never seeing a dime. Couldn’t we, shouldn’t we show some leniency in this instance? Was the well-meaning hack not worthy of some extra consideration?

  “I understand your concern,” Aubrey said when I broached the subject. “It’s too easy. It’s like punching a child.”

  “Exactly. Sure, torch the big sellers, or the authors from Knopf and Penguin. They got something out of it. But isn’t there something, well, unseemly about taking pot shots at someone’s labour of love? Authors like that don’t write for profit, they write for the love of it.”

  “If you feel like arguing this point in front of the others, be my guest. But don’t be surprised if you’re shouted down. A poor self-published novel wastes as much of your life as a poor Globe & Mail top ten selection.” He could see I wasn’t convinced. “Try this, Thomas. Knowing now what you do, if you had the chance, would you kill Hitler, or Hussein, or Milosevic, before they came to power? Wouldn’t you have the responsibility to do everything you possibly could to stop these monsters?” I agreed it was possible I might. “Now, again with the benefit of hindsight, if you could have stopped Jackie Collins before she had a chance to destroy a whole generation of bored housewives, well, wouldn’t you have at least tried to convince her of the merits of a life devoted to something more appropriate to her talents? Like a travel agent?” I humbly agreed that I would, ashamed of my timidity in the face of such wickedness. If the loss of the royalties on one book could be enough to curb the next Fern Michaels, I didn’t see as I had a choice.

  As the weeks went on, my courage bolstered by our hidden rebellion, I smuggled out more and more ’tags from READ. The oil drum was an abattoir. We charred our enemies by the armful. Emily eventually granted Mr. Fischer a stay of execution for being too talented to warrant inclusion on the pyre of the damned, settling for a more worthy Wilbur Smith tome that was begging for the purification only the glory of fire could provide. Michael Slade provided enough warmth to heat my apartment for a month. Steve Alten dazzled us with his prose-laden pyrotechnics. Tim LaHaye and his repugnant little Left Behind bestsellers? Ahh, that feels good. Richard Marcinko? Toss another on the barbie! Pat Robertson? Man, does that warm my going-to-Hell little heart. Bill O’Reilly? Did you know he actually had the gall to write fiction, and actually admit that it was such? The flames burned extra bright that night. Oh, it was all so sweet and tasty, it just had to be fattening. And if it turned out that our nominations did indeed display a slight political bent to them, c’est la vie, and who the fuck cares? All in good, clean, biased fun.

  “Why Offred?” I asked Danae one day. I had cornered her at her desk with yet another blatant attempt at taking our relationship to another level. I said that the burnings were better than sex, and I stand by that statement; however, just because you like Space Mountain doesn’t mean you don’t want to try the Log Ride.

  “Why what?” she asked, her head buried in some sales reports.

  “Why Offred?”

  “Well, why Yossarian?”

  I shrugged. “I didn’t have a lot of time to choose, and it popped into my head. Accidental.”

  “Nothing is accidental, Thomas; we all went through the same thing.” She put the file down and lea
ned back in her chair, propping her feet up on the desk in a relaxed yet businesslike gesture that I found disturbingly erotic. “When Aubrey first came up with the idea, it was just a bullshitting session one night at his house. The three of us, we were, well, high, and Aubrey started going off as he does on the ineffectiveness of our lives, the poor quality of writing, the unfairness that people would rather waste their money on trash than challenge themselves. I remember this, he actually threw a book into his fireplace, it was The Celestine Prophecy, why we had a copy I don’t know, and the three of us, we just sat there forever, watching it burn. It was like getting a glimpse of Heaven, although that might have been the pot talking.

  “Anyway, that’s where it started, the whole ‘secret society’ thing. It was Warren’s idea to dress it up like a cult, he had been rereading Cat’s Cradle, I think it was a Bokonism thing. We agreed on the basics, but the thing just seemed, I don’t know, forbidden. We needed the names to take some of the pressure off. We decided to take a name of a character, but it had to be an immediate choice. Something about the subconscious mind culling forth the character we most identify with. Again, we were high. Aubrey came up with Don Quixote, no surprises there.”

  “Windmills?” I asked.

  “Big-time tilting at them. Warren took Kilgore, I guess with the idea that he’s an unappreciated genius who ignores society and believes in secret cults and societies, or something. You ask me, I think he just likes the idea of behaving like a drunken reprobate.”

  “And Offred?”

  Danae ducked her head in embarrassment. “I know, the whole feminazi patriarchal slave-to-males thing, right? Maybe there’s something to that. I don’t feel particularly oppressed, but I do like the idea of taking control of myself. I guess the world is overwhelming, and she fought back. All I know is, Offred was the only name I could think of. Make of it what you will. The others, I’m sure they have their own explanations. I don’t see much of Hagar Shipley in Emily, and August is as far as you could get from Valentine Michael Smith. Weirdly, Burt is Gandalf, but I couldn’t tell you why.” She levelled a finger at me. “Now, the question becomes, why Yossarian, Thomas? Do you identify with him, or was it simply the last book you had read?”

  I rubbed my forehead for a minute. “You know, I have no idea,” I admitted. “Being surrounded by insanity, maybe, or being powerless.”

  Danae smiled. “It’ll come to you.”

  “Do you like the name?”

  “I think it suits you. Again, don’t ask me why.”

  “Do you think it’s sexy?”

  She bit her bottom lip, shaking her head in exasperation. “Thomas, it’s —”

  “— not you, it’s me,” I finished. “I think I’ll get that tattooed on my arm.”

  “Ooh, tattoos are sexy.”

  “Really?”

  “No.”

  I tried to quit Danae, look elsewhere for sexual release, but the pickings were slim at READ, and aside from the job and the meetings, there was nowhere else I ever went. I wandered the stacks, my eyes glazed over with lust as I imagined Danae and I performing acts that would cripple the cast of Cirque du Soleil. READ became my own intimate gargantuan love nest. I added literary themes to our lovemaking; whichever book I laid eyes on was used for sexual inspiration. Tom Clancy sex was mechanical, very technical, dry and republican, heavily reliant on manuals. Fucking by Dashiell Hammett, we traded quips and witticisms along with our spit. Orwellian sex was clinical yet desperate, alongside a picnic of fresh jam and coffee. Jane Austen was a letdown; I had to tempt Danae, take my time, be a gentleman, woo her with flowers and courtly conduct, and in the end, no sex was forthcoming. Those were the rules. We popped pills with William S. Burroughs, drank scotch and rum with Hemingway, and just plain fucked each other raw with Henry Miller. You can’t even imagine what we did in front of Bukowski. We named our body parts. I’d start in on the Brontë sisters while Danae fondled my Balzac, then I’d move my attentions south toward her Anaïs Nin, and she’d reciprocate by stroking my Dickens.

  And at the end of every session of congress, we would respectfully remove the visage of Munroe Purvis from its perch, and violate it in indescribable ways.

  I tried to keep such lovely fantasies to a minimum, as the sizable maypole I erected during each daydream was threatening to become a constant feature of my physical makeup. That, and Danae once questioned me as to why I was blushing as I stacked new Anaïs Nin editions on the shelves. I hurriedly squeaked out an excuse, occurrence of the flu, perhaps I was feverish, or maybe the store’s heating system was on the fritz, all the time imagining Danae straddled over my bookcart.

  Good times. I wonder if we wo

  From Associated Press

  MUNROE PURVIS FUGITIVE IDENTIFIED

  SAN FRANCISCO — Thomas Friesen, missing fugitive in the ongoing Munroe Purvis case, was recognized yesterday at the Golden Gate Valley library in San Francisco, California.

  “I knew it was him,” Head Reference Librarian Hanley Jones told Associated Press. “He was crouched over the computer for hours. Never looked up once, which kind of looked suspicious. We unfortunately get a lot of homeless men in here looking up pornography on the Internet, and he seemed the type.

  “Then, just as it was coming to me, he gathered up his stuff and left. Well, when it hit me who he was, I immediately called the police.”

  Police have confirmed, through the library’s video surveillance recordings of the lobby, that Friesen was indeed in the building.

  Representatives of the Munroe Purvis estate, along with donations from Fox Television and the 700 Club, have increased the offered reward for information leading to the apprehension of Friesen to one million dollars.

  “I don’t even want the money,” said Mr. Jones. “I just want Munroe to get well, and for Mr. Friesen to get the punishment he deserves.”

  Detective Amanda Daimler, an FBI agent who is heading up the investigation, admits confusion as to Friesen’s whereabouts.

  “Until now, we had been operating under the assumption that Mr. Friesen had remained in Canada, perhaps still in his hometown of Winnipeg. It appears that he is far more resourceful than we had anticipated.”

  Police are advising local citizenry to be on the lookout for a young man, Caucasian, bearded, possibly brown hair, wearing a Niner’s baseball cap.

  TO: ermccorm@yahoo.ca

  FROM: iamashelfmonkey@gmail.com

  SUBJECT: Missed me

  Dear Eric,

  Sorry that last e-mail cut off like that. An hour after I fled the library (oh, and how galling is that? A librarian, turning me in! You’d think if anyone was going to sympathize . . .) federal agents had sealed off the building. I watched from across the street, it was very impressive in its thoroughness. I’ve seen my face on every television and newspaper lately, flyers are on every lamppost, there’s a one-million-dollar bounty on my head for my capture or, failing that, death.

  I’d ask for the money in cash.

  The weeks passed. Books were sold. Montags were captured, tortured for information, and destroyed. The four of us began congregating at Aubrey’s every few nights after work, discussing books, music, the news, whatever. When Rex Murphy held one of his biannual radio programs on the year in books, we treated the day as some would treat the Stanley Cup playoffs, chowing down on nachos and giving rousing cheers whenever Rex would verbally gut a caller. “I apologize, caller, I must have misheard you, did you just have the utter temerity to wax eloquent on the literary treacle that is Mitch Albom?” We cheered as if Gretzky himself had come out of retirement, or, in our sphere of knowledge, J.D. Salinger.

  It became routine, but there was joy in it; there was never the fear that it could become boring. Some nights we’d read silently to ourselves, content to simply be in the others’ company. Other nights, we would challenge ourselves with the kinds of games only nerds can enjoy. I would mention a title, Aubrey supplied the author, Danae and Warren would try and keep up.

&
nbsp; “Books and authors, Thomas,” Aubrey would start. “Go.”

  “The Jonah Kit.” I challenged.

  “Ian Watson. Six Easy Pieces.”

  “Oh, uh . . . Walter Mosley. The Unlimited Dream Company?”

  “Come on, give me a hard one. J.G. Ballard. Shroud.”

  “Oh, that’s . . . I know this one, John Banville, ha!”

  “Okay, brother, give me a hard one now.”

  “A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia.”

  “Victor Pelevin.”

  “No way,” Warren said. “No way you knew that, Aubrey, no way!”

  “He’s right,” I admitted. Aubrey bowed to the applause, and the game would continue.

  Warren disappeared for days at a time, reappearing with new ailments: his legs had healed, but as a trade-off, he was now completely bald. “A bold new choice of hairstyle,” he called it. Sadly, in contrast to the sculpted symmetrical bulk of his body, his head was a lumpy mess, lending him less the air of a cool Bruce Willis/action hero–type, and more the charisma of a mental patient out on a day pass. Danae and I continued our playful banter, but I felt I was making progress. With every weekly meeting of the Shelf Monkeys, she became more and more enamoured of me, barely containing her excitement as I argued against and burned to cinders page after page of Larry Bond and Janette Oke and Elizabeth Lowell. Myself, I would have done anything for her by that time. I was starting to feel whole again, myself again, a sensation I hadn’t recognized in months, maybe years.

  Munroe rapidly elevated himself in our ranks to the top of our hit list. By assent, the meetings now began in Aubrey’s house, where a pre-taped copy of the latest Munroe Book Club was screened to whip us into a righteous froth of vengeance. We’d launch spitballs and bottlecaps at the screen as Munroe read portions of whatever offal he was pimping that week, his baritone wavering tremulously as he choked back his tears. Heartily incensed, we’d run out into the night, burning the books, igniting Munroe himself in symbolic effigy, again, and again, and again.