Death is the Monkey Butler

SENSITIVE CONTENT: Illness, death, grief

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The crystals were everywhere in the house suddenly. I woke up on Tuesday and they were just there. Ranging from a pale yellow to a deep honey color. Sharp and angular they glinted in the light. Most of them were about the size of my hand, but they varied in size and there were a few very large ones the size of my own head and lots and lots of smaller ones too. They covered the sofa, until there was no place to sit. They scattered, brilliant, across the floor. I stepped on a few that first day, yelling bloody murder, and then took to wearing my crummy slip-on tennis shoes all the time.

This morning, when I woke up, there were about twenty of them, egg-sized and heavy, on top of my quilt. It made me angry, this feeling of being held there, against my will, and I flung them aside with all the blankets. They made a racket where they struck the dresser and the wall. I shoved my feet into my dirty white tennis shoes without untying them and headed out to the living room; grabbing my old dark blue robe from the hook on the door as I went. As I put it on, I felt a heaviness in the pockets. Incensed, I turned the pockets out, spilling many smaller yellow crystals onto the wooden hallway floor with a clatter.

When I opened the door to call Charlie, my aging orange tomcat, in from his latest prowl around the yard, the breeze made the crystals hum and tinkle, just slightly. “Charlie!” I called, looking for that flash of orange, that would be him running toward his breakfast. Where was he? He usually stayed close enough to hear me call him. I glanced at the woods that started where the yard ended. It looked dark in there still, even though the yard was bathed in light—like time moved slower amidst the old trees.

Well, he’d come meowing around when he was hungry, I guess. Maybe he didn’t like the yellow crystals covering everything, any more than I did.

I shut the door and carefully walked into the kitchen, shuffling my feet and kicking some of the yellow crystals aside as I went. Kicking them produced an almost-music; the tinkling notes coalescing into a melancholy little melody. Where had I heard something like it before? I shoved them around with my foot, listening to the sound. It made me think of the time my brother and I snuck out to go see a traveling circus. We got up very early, it must have been 5am or even earlier and we silently got ready and quietly shut the front door behind us in the near darkness. When we got outside we looked at each other, trying not to crack up. We ran to the street and up the block, before finally throwing our heads back and laughing as we reached the intersection. Exhilarated that we had made this plan and pulled it off. I said, “I don’t think I’ve ever been up this early before! It’s barely light!”

“Quiet,” Jake said. Stern, but underneath, smiling. “Come on!”

We reached the field where the traveling circus was to perform. It was transformed. The tent had sprung up in the night like a giant fantastical mushroom. In the early morning light it looked blue with inky black stripes. That tinkly, magical music was emanating from somewhere behind the tent…along with eerie sliding notes, like I’d never heard before. Jake grabbed my arm and turned me sharply to the left, just in time to see a baby elephant disappearing behind a caravan. We laughed again and he grabbed my hand and we ran toward the ticket booth near the shoulder of the road.

We saw a lot of amazing things in that tent, but the one that stuck with me the most was during a set piece with the clowns. I noticed a sad clown in a tattered black tuxedo and top hat, with an oversized bow tie, setting up an ornate folding wooden table off to the side—while the rest of the clowns were doing bits involving a see-saw, that had the audience laughing. He looked like a sad, cartoon hobo. A millionaire, down on his luck.

The sad clown set up the whole table with goblets, then filled them with different colored water to varying heights. Finally, he made a big show of cracking his knuckles and pushing his sleeves back. He dipped his fingers in water and started rubbing the edges of different glasses, creating an eerie and beautiful music. Jake and I looked at each other: the sound we’d heard earlier!

The other clowns all stopped what they were doing and listened in an exaggerated way. They started swaying together to the music, as one big group. The song went on and became quite complex. Finally one of the clowns from the main group, broke away and joined the sad clown and also started playing with him, from the other side of the table. But he tapped the glasses with small metal rods, making a syncopated tinkling underneath the main eerie melody. He was wearing a pale blue tuxedo and tophat, a pale blue shadow of the other clown.

I’d never heard anything like it, before or really since. I didn’t often use the term “magical”, but it was. Jake and I applauded until our hands hurt when they were done. We locked eyes and he mouthed “wow” at me.

I shook my head to clear it and looked around the kitchen. My pockets dragged my robe down again, and I once again turned them out, spilling more crystals out. They spilled down my legs and onto my dirty white tennis shoes, where they bounced onto the light blue linoleum floor and rolled away, into the larger sea of glinting shapes.

The kitchen counters were covered with the heavy yellow crystals—as was the stove, the floor— everywhere I looked. I shuffled over and grabbed the coffee pot. Crystals rattled around inside it. I dumped them in the sink and rinsed it out. What are these things?

I made the coffee and waited for it to brew, looking out the window at the back yard and the woods beyond again. No sign of Charlie. The woods still looked overly dark; the night was like a guest who overstayed their welcome and refused to leave. I started to smell the coffee aroma, and reached for my mug. It was completely filled with one large crystal. I dumped it unceremoniously on the floor and rinsed the mug in the sink for good measure. The crystals I’d thrown in the sink from the coffee pot earlier gathered together at the drain stopper, huddling together like they were scared; whispering and nudging one another as the water hit them. I shut the water off in annoyance.

Suddenly the phone rang, piercing the air with it’s sharp cry. It seemed as if it echoed slightly through the crystals after the sound, like a very faint Greek chorus. RING! “the phone, the phone, shhhh, the phone” RING! “the phone, the phone, the, the phone, the”

I shuffled over and grabbed it out of it’s cradle from the little wooden table in the kitchen. “Hello?”

“You holding up?” My sister, Marty, never said hello, but just started phone conversations. Sometimes she even started in the middle somewhere, as if she’d already been talking to a shadow version of you for quite some time—always presuming that you would know what that shadowy you had been saying earlier. It was like someone getting mad at you because you did something they didn’t like in a dream they’d had.

“I’m ok,” I said dully. I grabbed my coffee and took it and the phone back out into the living room. I swept a pile of crystals off of one of the light green upholstered chairs and sat down, sighing a little.

I didn’t really feel like talking to Marty right now. I wanted to sit here and drink my coffee and stare into space for a few minutes. From the line I heard Marty’s husband, Mac, in the background, “Martha! Are we out of granola?” He must have been peeved, to call her Martha. A muffling sound as she covered the receiver to yell “it’s still in the grocery bag; on the floor, in the pantry”. Then she uncovered the phone and said “Maybe you should come visit us for a few days.”

Then she continued without waiting for an answer, “you know how I told you…that I called Jake that last morning and somehow he answered his phone?”

“No,” I said. I looked into my coffee cup, watching the reflection of the overhead light on the surface of the liquid. It wavered there, an unreal reflection of the world I inhabited. I wished I could go there instead…into that tiny world in a cup. The world felt too large—and I felt like I was expanding to try to fill it. “You didn’t mention that. I would have thought he’d have been on too many pain drugs to even work the phone…”

“Yes, I definitely did tell you, remember? And you said you were glad I managed to do it. I frowned and shook my head, “no”, even though she couldn’t see me do it.

“But I didn’t tell you what he said. He said that he was very anxious, and that I had to stop calling him over and over. He said I’d been calling him all morning and that he just needed to rest. He just wanted to sleep, but that he had so many things he needed to take care of…”

She paused and sighed.

“But I hadn’t called him, until then. He… thanked me for ‘being an amazing sister’. He said to tell you something too…but it’s odd.”

I sat, silent, and waited for her to continue.

“He said to tell you…to remember that time is not real. I think he was hallucinating or something. They said that very low sodium could cause that kind of thing. Remember when he was talking about that monkey in the room? And it was supposed to be his butler or something? Dressed up in a little suit, standing there ready for his every order…”

“Yes…the monkey butler. I really thought that was an effect of the morphine, but it was just a lack of…salt? I mean that’s…I didn’t know it was a symptom…I thought it was an effect of the drugs. Remember all the songs I sang about how great morphine was when I had it that one time in the ER?”

“Yes, you were cracking the nurses up. But no, it was apparently super-low levels of sodium. I guess we’re all just, you know, a bag of salt water, when you get down to it.”

“So he wanted you to tell me…or remind me…that time is not real. That’s what he said?”

“Right. And he said that we are all still there in the house on 52nd Street and…still living in ALL the moments.”

“That’s…”

“I know, it’s strange, right?”

“I was going to say, ‘that’s true’.”

“Oh? That makes sense to you?” She sounded mad, like she was being barred from a restaurant she wanted to enter.

“Yes”, I said quietly.

“Oh. Well, ok. That’s what he said. And he said you would understand, and I guess you do.”

“It’s just…you know. Time is just a concept…”

“Yeah, I got that much, Lainey. But we use time…all the time! Ha. I mean every day, you know. How could it not be real?”

“Look”, I said. “Let’s talk about this more later, ok? Have your, um, monkey butler contact mine and we’ll set up a time…”

“Ok. Well…” She laughed a little, as I’d hoped she would. “Think about coming to visit, will you? Soon. You know…soon, if there was such a thing as time! Ha.”

“Ok, I will, thanks Marty. I’m going to go now.”

“Yeah.” She hung up. She ended phone conversations as abruptly as she began them. This was actually quite a lot of closure for her.

I hung up the phone and threw it onto the other chair. I didn’t want to cry over Jake again. I didn’t want to think about anything for a moment.

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I open my eyes. Before I know what I'm doing, I jump up and head into the kitchen. I jerk open the drawer with the tools in it and yank out the hammer. I grab a fat, cantaloupe-sized, very pale yellow crystal on the counter and drag it closer. I hold it steady and try hitting it with the hammer. It bounces away out of my grasp, unharmed. I lodge it in the corner of the counter near the wall and try again. This time I hit it hard enough that it cracks. A thin white line appears from the top and trails down into the center. Suddenly, I remember Charlie as a kitten, when I first brought him home in a cardboard box. He was so little! A little ball of orange fur. I hit the crystal again and it shatters, pieces flying everywhere. I shut my eyes as a piece hits my face. I really should have put on some safety goggles.

Now, why did I remember Charlie? But as I search again for my earliest memory of him, I can’t…find it. When did I get him? Did he just show up at the door one day? I remember holding him inside my shirt, while I worked on my computer. Did someone give him to me?

I grab another nearby crystal. This one is a deeper yellow and about the size of a goose egg. I tap it sharply with the hammer and it cracks in two almost perfectly mirrored pieces. Like a deviled egg. I think about Jake on one of the last video calls we’d had. He is so thin, it physically hurts to look at him. He looks like the survivor of a concentration camp. He is tired and holding his head up to talk to me, trying to joke about something.

My chest hurts thinking about him, as if a splinter of crystal had lodged there somehow. I smash the right half of the crystal, closing my eyes against the flying pieces.

I think about Jake on the video screen again, but now the memory seems jumbled. Like a television that isn’t tuned in right. Was it because I smashed part of the crystal? It didn’t make any sense, but it definitely hurt less.

I open the tool drawer again and dig around for the safety goggles. I put them on and start hammering the crystals, like a crazy person. Some of them are only cracked a little and I remember things: tree leaves moving in the wind that cast a complicated moving shadow on the sidewalk, layered and strangely beautiful; a man waving to me from across the street, calling me by the wrong name, the first time I tasted sardines, Jake telling me his diagnosis. But I quickly smash them into bits and these things fade away.

I smash as many as I can. It’s hard work. But I feel better and better each time another one is demolished. Finally, I can’t find any left whole. I sit on the sofa and drop the hammer to the floor at my feet and remove the goggles. I lie down and turn my face toward the back of the sofa. I close my eyes and sleep.

When I wake up, I’m not sure where I am. I stand up and look around at the unfamiliar house. I find my way to the kitchen and drink some water. I look at the powder of yellow dust covering everything. What happened here?

Looking out the window, the sun is bright; illuminating a small yard with green grass. Where the grass ends, a forest grows, dark and dense.

I open the back door and step down a few steps onto a small cement patio. I cross it and walk over the lawn toward the trees. Suddenly I feel that the pockets of my robe are weighed down, their contents bumping my legs painfully, so I empty the them. Yellow crystals fall out onto the grass. I stare at them, wondering why I would be carrying them around with me. I notice an orange cat walking gingerly through the grass toward the patio. It doesn’t look in my direction.

I tie the belt of the robe around me, knotting it. Salt water streams from my eyes, but I ignore it. I squint and see what looks like a little man standing in the shadowy woods near a tree. I can barely see him through my watery eyes. He seems to be wearing a suit. It makes me laugh a little, as I realize he’s actually a monkey; his tail curls around him and away, around him and away—constantly moving. But he otherwise stands very still and solemn. And he wears white gloves. He looks at me, as if awaiting my command. Thrusting my hands in my empty pockets, I prepare to step over the line between the bright light of the yard and into the woods.

I am standing there still.