Oh,
Monkeys!
“Oh, monkeys!” is not a phrase I’m accustomed to hearing first thing in the morning. I’m much more used to waking up to the sounds of trucks or trains or birds and wind and the echoes of my dreams fading like faerie gold in the winter sun. I’m also not accustomed to waking up strapped to a table in a spooky mad scientist laboratory, but there I was – strapped to a table in a spooky mad scientist laboratory. And the first thing I remember hearing was
“Oh, monkeys!”
There was a vague, quasi-German accent to the voice. Not real German but more like a cartoon stereotype German. Villianous German. Mad Scientist German. I craned my neck around to see if I could locate the speaker.
Sure enough, I saw him. He was clearly a mad scientist. His bald head was large and ovoid like a comic book genius and he had tufts of white hair over each ear. His eyes squinted from behind huge wire rimmed glasses at something on his clipboard.
“Monkeys, monkeys, monkeys!”
He was talking to himself. That was clear. He reached into one of the many pockets in his bluish white labcoat and produced a pen which he used to scribble notes as he continued speaking and pacing back and forth in front of his gigantic booping silver machines.
“Vhy can I never get zees right za first time? I alvays get ze math wrong unt zen I have to shtart over. Monkeys!”
I cleared my throat. “Excuse me?”
“Unt he’ll be avake any minute unt I’ve not even calibrated the machines to his… Oh!” The mad scientist turned his attention to me. “Monkeys! You’re avake!”
“Yes. I’m awake and very puzzled. Why do you keep saying ‘monkeys’?”
He removed his glasses and rubbed his tiny eyes as though he hadn’t slept… ever. “Vhat do you mean I keep sayink ‘mahnkeys’?” His accent was getting sillier by the minute.
“I mean that you keep saying the word monkeys. You’ve said it like half a dozen times since I’ve been awake.”
“So?”
“Sssooo… I find that odd.”
“You know vhat I find odd?” the mad scientist smiled at me.
I shook my head no.
“I find it odd,” he continued, “zat you vake up strapped to a table in a strange place vit a strange man who tells you he is about to plug you into a machine unt ze only sing you can sink to ask is vhy I keep sayink ze vord ‘meenkies’!” His voice rose to a shrill falsetto.
“You’re right.” I would’ve rubbed my chin thoughtfully but my arms were still strapped to the table. “That is odd.”
“Yes, vell, zis is vhy you vere chosen.” The mad scientist turned around and began fiddling with his machines. He turned dials and pushed buttons and pulled levers seemingly at random. He must have pushed a hundred buttons on a few dozen machines. It was dizzying to watch.
“I was chosen?” I was still groggy from sleep and not entirely sure I had actually woken up at all. “Chosen by whom? And for what?”
He answered without looking at me. “You vere chosen by me – Professor Haalk. Unt you vere chosen for… ze Experiment.” Professor Haalk spoke those last words as though we were about to cut to a commercial. I could almost hear the jarring organ music.
“But I don’t…”
“Zis item hyea vill fit around ze skull,” Professor Haalk interrupted. He held up what looked rather like a colander with industrial hose attached to it.
“What does it do? Suck out my brain?”
“In a matter of speaking… yes. It vill go into ze brain unt find ze information I require unt shend it hyea.” He indicated a floppy disk drive. It was one of the really old fashioned five and a quarter inch drives. I turned my head sideways to try and read the logo on the front.
“Is that a 1541?” I asked.
“Yes. Now, hold shtill.” Professor Haalk slid the colander over the top of my head and tightened a few bolts. “Zere. Now, zis item vill attach to ze wrist.” The Professor held up a clamp type item. It had wires running off it which led to one of the chrome booping boxes that filled the room. He clamped it onto my left wrist and tightened it.
“Unt zis,” He held up a wicked looking instrument with spikes and needles all over its curling fingers. “Zis attaches to… ze testicles.” A loud clap of thunder punctuated his sentence.
Lightning flashed outside the small, rectangular windows which sat high on the walls as in a basement. I noticed then that it was raining. I love the rain. I love the way it smells. I love the colors…or lack thereof. A hundred shades of grey fill the world when it rains, washing away the ink to start over. Maybe that’s what rainbows are for. Maybe they…
“Vhat is it vith you?” Professor Haalk waved the torturous claw thingy in my face. “I tell you zat I’m goink to attach zis monster to your groin unt you go off on some tangent about ze rain? Monkeys!”
“A ha!” I shouted. “You said it again!”
“Vhat?” he sighed. “Vhat did I say again?” The mad scientist was growing exasperated.
“You said ‘monkeys’ again! What the hell does that mean? Is it like a nervous tick? And how did you know I was thinking about rain?”
The Professor spun the table around so I could see what was behind me. The wall that had been behind my head was stacked floor to ceiling with a few dozen monitors of all shapes and sizes. They showed infinity. A wall of monitors inside monitors all from my point of view. It reminded me of a Robyn Hitchcock song. Queen Elvis. “Two mirrors make infinity. In the mirror, you and me.”
“You see? I see your thoughts on ze monitors.” Professor Haalk tapped a monitor with his pen. It showed a photo of Robyn Hitchcock smiling. It was from the back cover of the Moss Elixir album.
“Cool. So whatever I think of… if I think of J. Edgar Hoover, J. Edgar Hoover will appear on the monitor?”
“Ze technology is not exact yet unt I’ve not finished calibrating it to your brainwaves, but yes, ze machines vill do zeir best to display your thoughts. Go ahead. Think of somesink.” The Professor twiddled a few more knobs and flipped a few more switches. I tried to think of something basic. A window. My window with the tie-dyed curtains and the Pink Panther stuffed animal hanging from the latch with Laura’s old nametag on him from when she worked at the movie theater. And there it was on the monitor. My window. Panther and all.
Then I remembered something. Instantly, the image on the monitors switched to the mass of hooks and needles the Mad Scientist had just been holding. “You’re not really hooking that up to my groin, are you?” I asked, wincing in pain as the monitors revealed my fears coming true.
“Oh, monkeys, no! Zat vas just to shkare you a little. I mean, I am ze villian in zis shtory, right?”
“Probably. Kinda lame so far though. I mean, yes, you kidnapped me and that’s sort of evil. But really all you’ve done so far is talk funny.”
“OK. How about zis? If you fail to give me vhat I vant, I will hook zis up to… your testicles!” Again, a huge thunderclap dotted the little man’s exlamation point.
“That’s a little better. So what’s this about? This experiment of yours, I mean. What is it that you want from me?”
“I vant your story ideas. I vill steal the story concepts from your mind unt write zem myself unt become vorld famous!”
“Do you really think my ideas will make you famous? I’m not really that good at writing stories. I mean, I’m writing this and it’s kind of interesting, I guess, but it needs a lot of work. Maybe you should go kidnap Grant Morrison or Alan Moore or J. Michael Straczynski.” I glanced at the monitor and saw flashes of psychadelic grenades and Centauri warships and ink blot faces. I saw sexy telepaths and men with guns and newborn kittens. I saw Big Ben exploding. I saw Londo smile sadly. “Those guys can write circles around me, dude.”
“Nein. I have chosen you unt you it shall be. My tests show zat you are bright unt creative unt imaginative unt funny. You shall be ze one… Unt don’t call me dude.”
From what I could gather from my position lying strapped to the table, a few hours had passed. The Mad Scientist was still calibrating his machines and murmuring gibberish to himself. He continued to blurt out “Monkeys!” once in a while. It seemed to indicate exasperation, the way one might say “Dang!” or “Shazbot!” or “Good heavens!”
I mainly occupied myself by watching the monitors while I thought of various things. I wondered if I thought hard enough and clearly enough about The Empire Strikes Back if I could make the film run on the monitors in its entirety. It started to work. The Lucasfilm logo came up, followed by “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…” but I couldn’t remember the exact wording of the opening crawl so it had a lot of “Blah blah Hoth blah blah Vader blah blah Rebellion.”
My mind must have wandered a bit during the movie because there were quite a few more hot mexican girls in short skirts than I remember seeing at the Hoth Rebel Base. Also, I don’t remember C-3PO cursing quite so often. At any rate, it was a pretty interesting version of the movie I was broadcasting. I asked the Professor if he could hook up a VCR to those monitors and record this weird new version of the movie but he ignored me and kept flipping switches and scribbling on his clipboard.
Just when I was at the part where Lando Calrissian and Lobot fend off a zombie attack while Chewbacca and Princess Leia (played by Salma Hayek) reassemble C-3PO (also played by Salma Hayek), Professor Haalk interrupted me.
“OK. I sink it is ready. I vill now… Is zat Shtar Vars?” He cocked his head at the wall of monitors.
“Yeah. Well, sort of. I’m adding a few things to the story.” I tried to keep concentrating but it was hard to project a whole movie and carry a conversation at the same time.
“Vhy is Londo wrestling vith a corpse? Unt vhy is his mustache so big?” The Mad scientist wrinkled his nose in dissatisfaction.
“You think
it’s too big?” I focused on the monitors
and watched Lando’s mustache grow a few inches.
“How about now?
And his name is Lando – with an “a”.
Londo with an “o” is from
The Mad
Scientist looked up at the monitors again.
Lando Calrissian had been replaced by Londo Mollari. He was wearing his black suit – the one from
Season 3 when he really starts down the path of the dark side. He was wrestling with a zombie alongside
Lobot, who now looked suspiciously like Kosh.
In fact the whole thing was starting to resemble
“Forget it. Now it’s ruined.” I gave up. The monitors went blank for a moment. Then they went back to their default state of showing my point of view of the room. The wall of monitors stretched backwards into infinity again. I looked over at my captor, his giant head filling the monitors. “So, you said you’re ready now? You’re going to steal my story ideas?”
“Yes, I sink it is ready. Hopefully, it vill show me your ideas unt store zem on ze disk drive unt zen I vill write zem down unt become a famous writer.” His eyes glazed over as he thought of his impending fame.
“Hang on.” I pointed to the disk drive I’d seen earlier. “You said that was a 1541. Each five and a quarter floppy disk will only hold like, what, a hundred and fifty K?”
“Von seventy K, I sink. Vhat of it?”
“Well, it’s not very much. I don’t know what format your machines here are saving my thoughts as, but it seems to me that something as complex as a human thought process would take up at least as much room as a comparable avi file. A hundred seventy K? Heck, this story right now, in it’s half finished first draft is already over 30 K. I expect it to be close to 60 when it’s done and it’s just text.”
“I am using ze mpeg technology to compress your thoughts. I don’t need ze whole shtory on ze disk, I vill vatch the monitors vile you sink zem unt the basic shtructure vill be saved to disk in ze form of an outline.” The Mad Scientist tapped his garganutan comic book villian cranium. “I vill zen fill in ze gaps in ze outline vith my memories of vhat I see on ze monitors. Zat vay, it will be more in my voice and less likely to be recognized as plagiarism. Now, sink of a shtory.”
“About what? You want me to just come with a story off the top of my head?”
“Vell, vhat about shtuff you’ve started writing but never got around to finishing? Hmm? Let’s see some of zat shtuff.” Professor Haalk clapped his hands together excitedly at the premise of finally getting down to business.
I thought about all the stories I’d starting writing. Some of them were fantasy, some were movie ideas, some were role-playing game scenarios. The monitors seemed to be able to latch on to these ideas individually and soon the wall was ablaze with dozens of different stories.
I saw my half-finished Seinfeld episode about the Lyndon Crow Fest, Blackjack Love – the Shaft parody, the story about the assassin who takes out other assassins, the futuristic chrome and neon version of Moby Dick, the musical based on The Prisoner, the story about the Fog People, my unfinished novel about Shihoko and her battles against Lovecraftian monster-gods, they were all here. It was a jumbled mass of unfinished ideas and character studies that went nowhere.
“It’s too much!” The Mad Scientist was clutching his hair in exasperation. “Von at a time! Show me von at a time!”
But it was too late. The stories were bleeding into one another. I watched fascinated as my Eskimo warrior princess stepped onto the set of Jerry Seinfeld’s apartment, sword drawn, the tattoo on her palm glowing a soft green. I saw myself, aged 16, listening to Guns ‘N’ Roses at top volume in my car along with Murry Pitz – the overweight, balding antique store owner whose grandparents had been devoured by the Fog People years ago. Each monitor was just a mess of stories plowing through each other.
Professor Haalk was frantically shutting everything down. He pulled levers and pushed buttons. He flicked switches and spun dials. The story ideas were getting more and more bizarre. Just as I was beginning to watch the cast of my futuristic Moby Dick wander into a Kung Fu flick Dave and I made when we were kids, the Professor yanked the collander off my head. The monitors all went blank.
“Monkeys! Zat is not vhat vas shupposed to happen!”
“Why do you say that?”
“Vhat?” he snapped. He was nearly insane with disappointment.
“Monkeys. You say monkeys a lot. You did it just then. Did you suffer a monkey-related trauma when you were a kid or something?”
“You vant to know vhy I keep sayink ‘monkeys’ all ze time? You really vant to know?” He pulled a stool over next to my table and sat down. “Zen I vill tell you.”
“You vant to know vhy I keep sayink ‘monkeys’ all ze time? It is because monkeys are ze source of all of my problemses. I vill exshplain. In my past exshperiments, I often utilized monkeys. I had many monkeys all locked in nice cages unt von day zey all eshcaped. I opened ze door to ze lab unt it vas filled with rampaging monkeys, destroying all my vork, shredding all my shtory ideas. I vas traumatized. I vas ruined. I was lucky to eshcape vith my life. Unt zat is vhy I need you. OK?”
“What kind of experiments? What did you need a whole lab full of monkeys for?”
“For writing, of course! I got ze monkeys, I gave zem typewriters unt I let zem type. Ze ones zat showed promise I treated vith a special creativity enhancing drug unt also cerebral booshters to amplify ze intelligence.”
“You were trying to get a roomful of monkeys to write Shakespeare?”
“Vell, not Shakespeare, per say. I just vanted somesink publishable, really unt I had heard ze shtory about ze monkeys unt ze typewriters unt ze fabulous results zat vill eventually come of such a thing.” The Professor smiled weakly.
“I think that’s more of a metaphor for the improbable possibilites provided by a universe filled with infinite possibilities than a scientific fact. For every one monkey that does write Hamlet purely by chance, an infinite number will just bang on the typewriter at random and probably break the keys off and eat them or something.”
“Yes, but I figured zat as I am a fictional character in a shtory, perhaps the laws of probability vould favour me unt I would shtumble upon zat golden monkey, not by chance, but because it vould enhance ze plot.”
“You think that’s how it works? Well, if you’re the villian of this story, then I must be the hero. Therefore, you won’t suceed and I will be freed in the end, probably in an ironic way that you wouldn’t at first expect but that will appear completely obvious in hindsight.”
Professor Haalk scratched his bald head. “Like how?”
I thought for a moment. “Well, the totally obvious thing to happen is that the monkeys that you say escaped will show up here somehow. Maybe by chance, maybe looking for revenge, or maybe for some other reason that will become clear in the next chapter, which, by the way, will be the last.”
“Hmmm. Yes, that does seem like the kind of sing zat vould happen to a villian such as myself in a pedestrian short shtory such as zis. Unt I did mention ze drugs vich make the monkeys more creative unt intelligent… So they could track me here vithout too much trouble.” He looked scared for a moment, but then shook his huge egg-shaped head. “No. Zat’s too dumb, even for zis shtory. Ze monkeys vill not be crashing through ze vindows, coming to your resc…”
CRASH! Glass shards flew everywhere as dozens of monkeys burst in through the high rectangular windows that lined the top of all four walls of the laboratory. They surrounded the Mad Scientist, who by this time was pressed up against my table. After about 50 monkeys had entered the room and formed an ever diminishing circle around us, a large monkey, clearly the leader, squeezed through one of the windows and dropped to the floor. As he walked towards the Mad Scientist, teeth glistening in a menacing smile, his soldiers parted, allowing him to pass through them towards my now cowering abductor.
“Monkeys!” the Mad Scientist whispered. “Monkeys! Monkeys! Monkeys!”
“Yeah.” I said. “Me too.” I gulped, the way the hero always does at the end of a cliffhanger. “Monkeys!”
“So, Professor Haalk. We meet again.” It was the head monkey that spoke. He sounded a bit like Tony Randall… only more evil. “This time there will be no escape.” His band of 50 monkeys hooted excitedly. Some of them slapped their hands on the cold floor of the laboratory.
“Holy Apeshit, Batman! That monkey can talk!” I was flabbergasted. The Mad Scientist just stared in horror, muttering the word “monkeys” under his breath as his own creation closed in on him.
“Of course I can talk, dear boy. And I’m not a monkey. I’m an ape. We are all apes.” He gestured to his simian armada which had surrounded the table I’d been strapped to for the last several hours. “You’ll notice that none of us have tails and therefore we are not monkeys but are in fact chimpanzees.”
“Can the rest of them talk? Or just you?”
“I’m the only one who has mastered your language but most of my friends here know American Sign Language. I was the favourite of Professor Haalk here and was always first to get injected with whatever new cerebral enhancer he’d come up with. When I had reached the level of intelligence necessary to understand that we were slaves, I freed my brothers and sisters and destroyed the lab.”
“And now you’ve come here to take your revenge on him?” I asked, nodding vaguely towards the Mad Scientist.
The leader of the monk… I mean apes shook his head. “No. At least not in the way that you think. We’ve come here seeking the fame that is owed to us. He was going to have us produce a great story and then publish it himself. Now he’s trying to do the same to you. But now that we’ve found you, that won’t happen.”
“So, you’re here to free me from this machine?”
“No, dear boy,” the ape chuckled. “We’re hear to steal your story ideas and publish them ourselves.”
I was outraged. “But then you’re no better than him! Don’t you see? You’ll just be stealing his idea and my stories and nothing you publish will really be yours. Besides, you don’t want me. My stories never have endings. I’ve been writing this one off and on for over 3 years now and it’s only 9 pages long and it’s just getting more and more farfetched as it goes. This can’t be what you want.”
“Ahh, but you see, this is our idea. Back in the lab, the story idea I had before I engineered our escape was about a Mad Scientist who kidnaps a brilliant young writer and uses a wacky machine to extract his story ideas so he can publish them himself. Professor Haalk read the beginning of that story before I destroyed the lab and has now stolen it from me.” The ape scowled as he gestured about the laboratory. “You, him, this machine, all of this! It’s mine! It’s mine and I’m taking it back.”
“Okay. If it’s your story, how does it end? Because I’m clueless as to where it goes from here. You’ve subdued the Mad Scientest. He’s just babbling “monkeys” to himself. I’m still strapped to the table and so far this machine hasn’t really worked. Now that you’re here, tell me how it ends.”
“Let’s find out!” The ape leader reached up and put the colander back on my head. Immediately, the screens sprang to life, displaying a room of infinite monkeys. Professor Haalk shrieked, his gargantuan brain clearly on monkey overload. It was really annoying. I found myself wishing that one of the monkeys… sorry… one of the apes would silence him.
The Professor’s machine responded and showed one of the apes punching him in the jaw, knocking him unconscious. The apes in the room jumped up and down and hooted excitedly at this. Then one of them did hit the Professor, just as the TV version of himself had done in my mind a few seconds earlier.
The ape leader shrugged his hairy shoulders. “Now, get on with it. Show us this story from the beginning and we will see how it ends.”
“Okay,” I smiled. A plan was forming. I thought about how I had awoken strapped to this table and sure enough, the image of me strapped to the table appeared on the monitors. I sent the story as I remembered it from my brain onto the screens. It unfolded almost exactly as it had happened although Professor Haalk sometimes looked more than a little like Salma Hayek. I projected the jumble of story ideas, the Professor’s tale about the monkeys and the typewriters and the dramatic window-shattering entrance of the ape armada.
I thought of the ape leader explaining to me that we were going to see how this story ends. I thought of Professor Haalk screaming the last of his sanity away and rough hairy hands knocking him into silence. I thought of the ape leader putting the colander back on my head and of my projecting the story onto the screens with the apes all watching.
The monitors now showed a captive ape audience watching this story unfold a second time. Everything happened just as before and eventually came full circle, pushing in another level revealing a second ape audience.
“What is this?” The ape leader interrupted. “You call that an ending? It’s just looping!”
“I’m afraid so,” I replied. “It’s what we call a ‘frame-tale’. As in ‘Once upon a time there was a story that began once upon a time there was a story that began once upon a time’ et cetera. There is no ending.”
“That won’t do at all. We need an ending. Can you change it? Can you give us an ending? Something… unexpected.”
“I think I can arrange that,” I said smiling. I hoped that he wasn’t so cerebrally enhanced that he’d see through my plan and stop me. I also hoped that his fellow apes were as compliant – obedient even – as they seemed to be. I returned my attention to the monitors and resumed the story.
This time around, when it came to the looping point, I projected the new ending. In the new version, the apes grew tired of watching the same story over and over. They started signing to each other about how frustrating it was and how not exciting the story was turning out to be. I glanced over to the real apes in the room. They too were beginning to lose interest in the looping story. I pushed them further towards displeasure. The story apes started booing and jumping up and down. Sure enough, the real apes followed suit.
It was time.
One of the story apes, at my urging, pointed a finger accusingly towards the ape leader. The others hooted in agreement and moved to surround him. The real apes again obeyed my suggestion and closed in on the ape leader. He tried to protest but they quickly subdued him. Once he was unconscious, I had the TV apes climb out of the laboratory – all except one, who undid the straps holding me to the table.
Once I was free, I watched the last of the apes climb out the windows and then moved to stand over the limp form of the ape leader. “You weren’t expecting that, were you?” I smirked, proud of my cool final scene one-liner and walked towards the laboratory door, leaving the two unconscious villians - arch enemies no less - laying on the floor. I opened the door and headed up the stairs, not caring which would wake up first, knowing only that I would be far away from here when it happened.