Date: Sun, 24 Dec 2006 14:54:49 -0800
Reply-To: Jim Felder <felder@KNOLOGY.NET>
Sender: Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From: Jim Felder <felder@KNOLOGY.NET>
Subject: Re: Writers aren't artists
In-Reply-To: <C1B412CC.2477%npoole@telus.net>
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It seemed after maybe a week of pacing a rough oval around the
sparsely-furnished room that he could not watch the monkey for
another five minutes, much less another three days. Watching the
monkey seemed to consist mostly of not watching the monkey, of
getting his mind out of that room, out of Winnipeg, out of this
country at last. Did he need the money badly enough to keep doing it
until payday came around? What if it never came around? He had had
plenty of time to think about that. There wasn't much distinction
between day an night in the interior atrium that bottomed out in an
alley slick with grease from the restaurant three stories below. In
that horribly calculated ambivalence between day and night, between
thought and dreaming, between fear of the monkey running out of
sedative and awakening in a rage and even getting caught with the
sleeping monkey and the need for the money it would take to get back
to Mumbai, the only thing that really got through clearly to Assam
was the thought that there might be no money. Just the monkey, at the
end of the ten days. After all, he had never met the monkey's owner,
or so he now thought. The man who handed him the bundle in the bus
station may not have been the owner. He dressed in a theatrical way
like a man who might actually travel with a monkey for some kind of
entertainment, but this monkey was too large for an organ grinder's
sidekick. He was dangerous looking, too, and Assam had been terrified
of him since before the monkey awoke from his tranquilized state. His
mouth hung open like a dying man's, but much more terrifying. The
blanket the monkey had been wrapped in was so soaked by the monkey's
drooling mouth that Assam shook as he signed the register the week
before he had holed up here. He shook at the time because of his fear
at the time of being questioned by the man behind the desk. The
dripping of his only set of clothes, drying slowly over a plastic bag
on the floor in the dim corner, reminded him of that awful mouth and
that wet blanket containing the sleeping monkey and the cans of cat
food and sedative that stood between Assam and the rage of this
monster, panting shallowly, that he feared but knew nothing about.
Fear and discomfort. That's what the last seven days and the next
three were to mean for Assam. He found himself pacing again to keep
warm while his clothes slowly dripped in the near-dark. As his feet
shuffled he imagined a potato-shaped path, visible in the dust on the
ceiling below him, that traced the furthest possible extent of the
path that he could possible take around the monkey lying on the table
in the center of the room. He imagined spies in the room below, too,
or at least one spy or enemy. Could he have sunk so low in the short
time and the relatively few miles since fleeing the Ashram in San
Francisco without the intervention of someone who hated him terribly?
Were old enemies from Mumbai following him to extract revenge for the
money he had taken from wealthy Korean and English and American
expatriates looking for enlightenment? Were the man at the bus
station, the monkey's purported owner, and the man behind the counter
downstairs the same person? They certainly could be. He could be
captive here, awaiting his assassin or even worse. And what was the
difference between money and monkey, besides the letter K? Did that
explain why he was in room K? Or the fact that bundle contained a
letter with the cat food cans with instructions for his charge,
signed by K? He shivered and ran to the window. A three story fall
wouldn't kill him, but they might injure him badly enough to get him
into the hands of someone, anyone, who could save him.
The wind blew hard and the cabinet door squeaked on the cold breeze.
A voice that seemed to come from the monkey's poisoned cat food
hissed "do it. Assam! Do it." The breath behind the voice smelled
like the cat food itself, the only thing in this room that screamed
louder at him than the odor of the sleeping monkey.
He reflexively reached for and possibly suddenly understood the
purpose of the heretofore inexplicable item from the bundle, the one
item that was not acknowledged in the fastidious instructions from K.
The room was no longer dim, but clear, and his thought was at once
brilliant and plain. His future, at least the next ten seconds of it,
were as obvious to him as the instructions on the shampoo bottle that
had been his only reading material, besides the note from K, for a week.
Assam reached for the hammer.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
Jim
On Dec 24, 2006, at 11:19 AM, Nathaniel Poole wrote:
> On 12/24/06 10:34 AM, "Joy Hecht" <jhecht@ALUM.MIT.EDU> wrote:
>
>> Yeah, and writing, though I don't quite think of that as artsy.
>
>
> WHHHAT? I don't know whether to have an attack of the vapours and
> faint or
> fall on the floor laughing maniacally and foaming at the mouth. :)
>
> But I think the best enlightenment I can offer is an assignment.
> Write a two
> page story that must contain a monkey, a hammer, a naked fakir in a
> seedy
> Winnipeg hotel room, and a talking, philosophical cat food can.
>
> Due by boxing day. Lets see what ya got.
>
> Nathaniel
>
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