Huzzay, Huzzay! Whistle, whistle, feet stamping.

Next?

On 12/24/06 2:54 PM, "Jim Felder" <felder@knology.net> wrote:

> 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
>>
>