Another Monkey Tale

 

by Pa Rock

Sympathetic Primate

There are reports out this morning that one of the forty-three monkeys who escaped from a research lab in the backwoods of South Carolina (and whom I wrote about yesterday) has been captured and returned to the research facility where she will be used to test a variety of horrors concocted in the mind of man.  Investigators believe the other forty-two are close by, perhaps within yards of their "home." 

I had heard about the monkeys fleeing their lifelong captivity several days earlier, but had intentionally chosen not to write about it because the circumstance of cruelty to those beautiful little creatures brought to mind something that I had read in a fictional novel about the Vietnam War, a passage so moving that it has stuck with me ever since I first encountered it more than a decade ago.  But now that I have breached that very painful literary encounter, I have decided that the best way to deal with it is to share the troublesome passage here and pass it on to others.

The novel, Tree of Smoke, by Denis Johnson, is approximately 700 pages long and tells the story of the Vietnam War roughly over the period of time that the United States was involved and a few years beyond.  The characters in Tree of Smoke are fictitious, but the speak mighty truths.  The writing is elegant and at times poetic, and the story portrays the savagery of war in a way that can never be replicated through news accounts.  Tree of Smoke won the National Book Award in 2007.

The novel begins not in Vietnam but on an island in the Philippines on which a contingent of US Navy personnel are stationed in what appears to be some sort of preparation for the big war in Vietnam that would soon follow.   The year is 1963 and it is just hours after word has arrived of the assassination of President Kennedy in the United States.  A young Navy seaman by the name of Houston who is stationed on that Philippine Island, decides that he wants to go out into the jungle and hunt wild boars, perhaps as a way of dealing with the shock of Kennedy's death as well as all that is occurring around him.  After carefully picking his way through the humid jungle for an extended time, the young seaman places his rifle next to a tree and takes a break, and while he is resting he suddenly sees movement in a tree.

(The following five paragraphs were taken from pages four and five of the copy of Tree of Smoke which I still own and cherish.  If this scene does not break your heart, it is doubtful that you ever had one.)

"He kept his vision on the spot where he'd seen it among the branches of a rubber tree, putting his hand out for the rifle without altering the direction of his gaze.  It moved again.  Now he saw that it was some sort of monkey, not much bigger than a Chihuahua dog.  Not precisely a wild boar, but it presented itself as something to be looked at, clinging by its left hand and both feet to the tree's trunk and digging at the thin rind with an air of tiny, exasperated haste.  Seaman Houston took the monkey's meager back under the rifle's sight.  He raised the barrel a few degrees and took the monkey's head into the sight.  Without really thinking about anything at all, he squeezed the trigger.

"The monkey flattened itself out against the tree, spreading its arms and legs enthusiastically, and then, reaching around with both hands as if trying to scratch its back, it tumbled down to the ground.  Seaman Houston was terrified to witness its convulsions there.  It hoisted itself, pushing off the ground with one arm, and sat back against the tree trunk with its legs spread out before it, like somebody resting from a difficult job of labor.

"Seaman Houston took himself a few steps nearer, and, from the distance of only a few yards, he saw that the monkey's fur was very shiny and held a henna tint in the shadows and a blond tint in the light, as the leaves moved above it.  It looked from side to side, its breath coming in great rapid gulps, its belly expanding tremendously with every breath like a balloon.   The shot had been low, exiting from the abdomen.

"Seaman Houston felt his own stomach tear itself in two.  "Jesus Christ!" he shouted at the monkey, as if it might do something about it's embarrassing and hateful condition.  He thought his head would explode, if the forenoon kept burning into the jungle all around him and the gulls kept screaming and the monkey kept regarding its surroundings carefully, moving its head and black eyes from side to side like someone following the progress of some kind of conversation, with some kind of debate, some kind of struggle that the jungle - the morning - the moment - was having with itself.  Seaman Houston walked over to the monkey and laid the rifle down beside it and lifted the animal up in his two hands, holding its buttocks in one and cradling its head with the other.  With fascination, then with revulsion, he realized that the monkey was crying.   Its breath came out in sobs and tears welled out of its eyes when it blinked.  It looked here and there, appearing no more interested in him than in anything else it might be seeing.  "Hey," Houston said, but the monkey didn't seem to hear.

"As he held the animal in his hands, its heart stopped beating.  He gave it a shake, but he knew it was useless.  He felt as if everything was all his fault, and with no one around to know about it, he let himself cry like a child.  He was eighteen years old."

Animals and children stumbling around in a world ravaged by the hate-riddled mind of man - and trying to survive and make sense of it all.

There, I've purged.  The little monkey is now yours.