Little White Monkeys

The woman lays the ultrasound results on her doctor’s table, to the right of the desk calendar advertising low-hormone birth control pills and next to the life-sized model of the female reproductive system, on which protuberant black peas represent various stages of fibroid growth, a yellow pea shows an ectopic pregnancy, and a pink pea is a correctly attached embryo. The ultrasound results confirm that the procedure went off without a hitch. You’ll need to take it easy for a while, says the doctor, writing up a prescription with a ball-point pen flashing the same logo for birth control that’s on the calendar. He jots down her medications on the pad and recommends sexual abstinence. The woman is on edge but still listening to her doctor as she glances at the wall clock. But by the time the appointment is over, his words are barely distinguishable in the pressurized tick … tock … tick … tock ….

Into the bustle of the street, the woman is relieved to dive in. On her way home, she stops at a bar. The local bartender has a stutter, but because of it, either that or despite it, he listens well to strangers. Today, though, the woman is not in the mood for talking. She notices the lifelike image of a crumpled bottle of cola on the bartender’s arm. Her blood alcohol level is rising, but not fast enough; that’s why the thought that takes shape in her mind as she lays eyes on that tattoo still manages to make a modicum of sense: she thinks the bottle is empty and crumpled, but it still has a name, even though whatever it was that once made this thing a bottle of cola is not there anymore.

From the corner of her eye, the woman catches movement on the tiny stage, where a longhaired man is tuning his guitar. The woman listens to a few hit songs sung by a guy who’s straining with a hoarse, breathy voice; he’s singing like he’s trying too hard to sound like Kurt Cobain, or maybe Steven Tyler. She listens until he loses his footing and—she’s the only one who notices—he drawls out three false notes in a row. That night, after a long respite, a little white monkey appears to her.

—❉—

But the woman is more of an opera buff. There’s no heavy thump of pointe like in ballet. Although the local opera troupe sings like a bunch of understudies: false, dark, breathless notes. The woman can’t feel for Margarita if she can’t pull out the high notes as she goes to her own execution, while Faust and Mephistopheles hide backstage. But Alberto Rinaldi and Inva Mula are only accessible to her on YouTube, and no matter how divine their voices, it’s never the same as live music. The orchestra is flawless, though. The pit isn’t visible from where the woman is sitting, and it feels as if the music is materializing of its own accord from deep underneath the theater. In a moment of distraction, she looks over the set. During the first act, she tries to keep track of how many people are part of the production. By her count, it’s close to seventy, including the musicians, the lighting operators, and the extras and such. Three times during the two-hundred-minute show, she feels an almost physical ecstasy; on the way home, she multiplies three by twenty seconds (her sense is that that was how long each bout of ecstasy lasted) and she comes up with sixty, which, of course, equals one minute. In the dark street, the woman is amazed, and she stops in her tracks under a double-headed lamp, inside a liquid pool of light. Seventy people had to labor for three hours to make her feel good for one minute. That night the little monkeys leave her in peace, but they’re back again the following night.

Contrary to her doctor’s recommendation, the sexual abstinence lasts not two weeks, but six months, and the woman has no idea how much longer it will continue. She’s sure it has nothing to do with any kind of moral qualm, self-loathing, or feelings of guilt, but physical contact with her partner feels unwanted; it feels like danger, as if there are consequences for her, but not for him, and all he has to do is brush up against her body the slightest bit and a little red alarm bulb goes off in her brain. To compound matters, the little monkeys have made their way into her dreams. She makes one single attempt to tell her partner about them and it fails; he advises her to seek professional help if a man’s touch is so repulsive to her.

“‘You make each of the three notes distinct, understood? Now, you listen, I’ll play. Then you’ll try. If it doesn’t sound right, just try to play more like me.’ The teacher picks up the violin and plays masterfully, tastefully. The conservatory years have calloused the pads of her fingers, like those ancient statues of Buddhist deities with cracked stone fingers, eroded, imagine stone statues get the idea to come to life and play violin. The little cracks of her calluses have clogged up with rosin dust, so her fingers are tinged an ash yellow. She plays after her teacher finishes. ‘No! Can’t you hear yourself! Like me! You’ll never play like me, make it your own, no, not like that!’ The teacher talks and talks and talks and she spastically flips over the sheet music, sending the pages flying.

I disconnect and can no longer hear. The teacher’s words are muffled, they bleed into each other, it feels like a TV is on in the background. I’ve been disconnecting since first grade. It’s like sleeping with your eyes open, or like turning your gaze inside out.”

Facing the woman, a psychologist wearing a gray jacket and a gray skirt is sitting with her legs crossed. The two top buttons of her white shirt are unbuttoned. If the woman ever decided to role-play with her partner, she would certainly be inspired by this outfit: a shirt left on but unbuttoned easily and a skirt that tears off effortlessly. The psychologist has a caring face, with a professionally calibrated expression of empathy, just enough to make a client open up, but not so much to give them the feeling someone is inexorably crawling inside their soul.

The woman surveys the office. The walls are hung with certificates and diplomas. Her eyes catch on the digital desk clock. Their first session lasted a full three minutes—the woman could not bear the ticking. For their second session, the psychologist replaces the clock with a noiseless one, but she ends up having to put that away too, since rather than simply saying “thank you,” the woman lets her know that there is no such thing as a noiseless clock. Years of music lessons have trained her ears to pick up the faintest of clicks, too faint for normal human hearing. The woman turns to face the psychologist, still somehow feeling the lingering echo of each flashing green digit, but for once she doesn’t feel like arguing.

Before she starts talking about the little monkeys, the woman wants to be sure she really wants this. She is now sitting across from the only person in the world who wasn’t surprised and didn’t laugh at her when she heard about them. In fact, the psychologist is actually very interested in the little monkeys and asks when they first appeared. The woman says she doesn’t remember. The psychologist insists that it’s important. She then says something about the subconscious—she repeats this word a few times, and uses other words like “desire,” “inhibition,” and “attraction.” The psychologist’s quest to reduce the woman’s self to her first sexual desire puts the woman in a bit of a funk. She regrets talking about the little monkeys because talking about them means conceding that they exist.

“There were these little caged monkeys at the zoo in Tashkent, one was preening another one’s fur, looking for lice or fleas, oh, you didn’t know? Monkeys are plagued by those little suckers all the time. They’re just like people. When the monkey found one, she’d eat it. The second one sat blissfully still for a while, but then when she tried to get away, the first one, the one that was cleaning her fur, smacked her across the back of the head, and this subdued the second one. On the way back I asked Mama if I could have some ice cream, and I was scary thirsty too, she said we didn’t have money, but I kept nagging, it must have been over 100 degrees outside. I started crying, and Mama couldn’t bear the sound of a child crying, she became a bundle of nerves, almost hysterical. Right at that moment we happened to pass a house where a man was in his yard watering the trees with a hose. I ran up and drank and Mama slapped me on the back of the head, but the man stuck up for me. Then suddenly I heard the sound of laughter, it was a little monkey, a little white one. It was sitting in a tree, pointing at me and laughing.”

The little monkeys usually come around on a night when she’s up at all hours, a night when she can’t fall asleep and she chain smokes, the cigarette butts don’t fit in the ashtray, the room is saturated with fumes, and she can feel them coming but does nothing about it. Just stares at the clock and waits. Last time they dragged in some tennis balls that were the acid color of unripe apples, the very sight of which made the woman’s jaws clamp shut. The basket of dirty laundry is sitting in its place; the woman has been making an effort to tidy up more often. She did the laundry not two days ago, but a monkey is already deep-diving through the dirty clothes, with only its mangy little tail visible. The woman’s mind is racing, thinking about all the laundry that has managed to pile up over the past two days, and suddenly a monkey has, with two fingers, fished out a minuscule pair of underwear, grinning repulsively—the underwear was a present from her partner for International Women’s Day.

—❉—

An invitation to a friend’s birthday party is for the woman a respite. The little monkeys never appear in front of other people. She and her partner go together. He asks, won’t they violate Diana and Bianca’s self-imposed isolation? And why did she decide to give Bulat a bottle of Jack Daniel’s Honey for his birthday? Is that what you call a present? Not finding the words to answer him, the woman keeps her mouth shut. They walk the rest of the way to the four-story building in silence. Bulat is standing on the balcony and comes downstairs as soon as he sees them. She passes him the bottle of whiskey, and the three of them go inside together. His loft doubles as a workshop. But it’s not a stylish loft, it’s the genuine article: there’s a leaky roof, plaster has peeled off the walls in random places, exposing the brick underneath, the balcony windows are tall and dirty and block nearly all the light, haphazard piles of paintings are thrown about, along with sculptures, there’s an old stereo system with a soundbar, and overlooking everything is a set of high-hung speakers from which a piteous saxophone is moaning out a tune.

The woman goes over to a low corner table and sits on an intricately decorated felt rug, leaning against the wall. Her partner sits next to her. Candles are flickering on the upper shelves, between the books, next to some tinsel left over from New Year’s, and cups full of pencils. She sees Diana standing next to the stereo system and waves to her. Her partner looks around, notices Bianca in a red dress, and walks over to her to say hi. Rid of him, finally, the woman takes a breath and stretches her legs under the little table.

Bulat comes over, sets the bottle of whiskey on the table, and hands her a tumbler. They drink in silence, without making much eye contact. Grabbing a couple more tumblers, he goes to pass out drinks to the others. Diana puts on Brubeck’s “Take Five” and respectfully asks everyone to shut their mouths, she’s trying to listen. The acoustics are actually incredible. Burning her mouth with a long gulp of whiskey, the woman languidly watches with half-closed lids as Bianca steers the woman’s partner through rows of her work. They stop in front of one of her paintings from last year, “Pasiphaë and the Bull.” In the woman’s opinion, this is Bianca’s worst piece. It looks as if a three-year-old girl decided to paint something she didn’t have the slightest knowledge of. Her partner stares at it with his mouth slightly ajar. Now he’s surely asking her who Pasiphaë is. The woman knows her friend has been in love with him since forever, but her partner has apparently just figured it out. Bianca whispers something in his ear, then it’s his turn to move his lips for a while.

The song is over, and Diana tells Bulat, who has migrated over to the sound system, that she wants to hear some Billie Holiday. The cigarette smoke is drawn languidly toward the ceiling. In the dim light, Bianca’s sculptures give the illusion of a phantasmagorical crowd, and at a certain point the woman can no longer distinguish who is standing where. The combination of whiskey and jazz sends her into a state in which words and actions are stripped of meaning. Billie Holiday is singing. Billie Holiday can still make a person’s heartbeat erratic. The woman sees her partner dancing with someone through the smoke. The blur of a red dress appears in her vision. She closes her eyes and surrenders to the throaty contralto. The jazz is too good to worry about a nothingburger. The singer’s voice stops, and the piercing saxophone steps in, the climax is nearing. The guitar echoes the saxophone, then a trumpet cuts through, the last gasp before the denouement, three rising notes, then—release and the deafening silence that always follows good jazz.

The next track comes on. Time stops, then skips. The woman brings her tumbler up to her eyes and surveys the room through the convex glass. The flickering candles have nearly melted down to nothing. Diana and Bulat are on the balcony. Their silhouettes show through the window. The woman’s blink is like a camera shutter. Her partner is on the couch, and beside him is Bianca, barefoot and laughing. The woman rises from her corner, takes the bottle from the table with what whiskey is left, and goes outside, quietly closing the door behind her.

The street exists deep in a dream until the street cleaning truck comes through. The woman opens the ventilation pane, and a thin stream of warm air flows into the room. Her eyes bore into her cigarette cherry, then she stubs it out into the ashtray. Her eyes sting. The woman pulls the blinds and lies down in bed, covering herself to her chin.

First comes one—tennis ball in hand. The little monkey sits on its haunches, looks around sheepishly, and starts throwing the ball against the wall. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. The woman kicks the little monkey and it flies off the bed. It turns and sits on the floor. The woman reluctantly gets up and goes to the bathroom to splash some cold water on her face (the splashing-water thing hasn’t worked for a while now, a delay tactic). The monkey is gone when she returns. She gets back into bed, but doesn’t close her eyes. She knows there are more monkeys around, they’re lurking in the dark. All she can do is wait for them.

At present there are three. The one on the left is holding a sheet of notes in her hand. She crumples it; the sound is grating. Another one lowers her tiny fingers into the ashtray and starts crushing cigarette butts, filling the room with a nostalgic smell. The third one takes a seat on her belly and starts squeaking. The woman knows she should try to calm them down before they go completely wild, but there’s something hypnotic about them. It’s as if she has fallen into a trance. On nights like this, she lies there and weakly observes them multiply, she watches as they grimace and laugh, as they carry on about the walls and the ceiling, filling out the emptiness of the room. They play the trumpet, bang on drums, clap their hands, pull the strings of a one-eighth-size violin, squeak out a staccato rhythm. The woman breathes heavily. Somewhere in the subcortical part of her brain, where her subconscious is nestled, she is keeping track of time: tick … tock … tick … tock …. She closes her eyes, but the little monkeys can’t be fooled. One of them sits on her chest and peels open the woman’s lids with its fingers. The woman tries to disconnect, turn her gaze inside out, but it won’t work. Her eyes are wide open and tears are welling. The little white figures are rushing from side to side, screaming out names, digging through the laundry bin, laughing, poking at her face with their dry, cracked fingers. And all at once they fall silent. In the white-noise silence the woman makes out the distant rumble of the cleaning truck. She flings off her blanket wildly (a few little monkeys spill onto the floor) and she looks at her cellphone. She lowers her head to the pillow. Takes one last look around in the pre-dawn light. Shuts her eyes.