Michael Kobre
3023 Airlie St.
Charlotte, NC 28205
(704) 566-8354
kobrem@queens.ed

                                                                                                    Monkeyboy

So this morning when I check on him Monkeyboy is lying on his side again. He’s all curled up in the back of his cage on a pile of straw. At first I think maybe he’s dead, he’s so still and quiet, and something clutches deep down in my guts. But then I move closer and I see he’s breathing. The fur on his side is moving a little, and I can hear that raspy sound he makes as his breath wheezes out of those pinched little holes on his face that don’t really look like a monkey’s snout but kind of like a person’s nose would if somebody took a hammer to it and jammed it all the way back into his face."Hey, Monkeyboy," I call out to him, "you okay?"

But he doesn’t stir, so I walk around in front of him, keeping as far as I can from that wicked-smelling pail in the corner with the flies buzzing around it. That’s when I see that his eyes are open, he’s not asleep, just staring at something through the flap in the back of the tent. "What’s the matter?" I ask. "Ain’t you feeling okay?" I don’t like to look in his eyes if I can help it. They’re like these deep black pools with something flashing below the surface, with these little green pinpricks shining up from the bottom of all that darkness. They’re not like any other monkey’s either. "You gonna lie around like this all day?" For just a moment I crouch down beside him and try to figure out what he’s staring at, but all I see is a patch of dirt with some old candy wrappers and cigarette butts scattered around it. Not much to look at, I guess. Still, who knows what’ll keep him interested in something?When he doesn’t eat any of his breakfast later, I know I’m gonna have to tell Sherman. Of course, Sherman’ll act like it’s all my fault again, just the way he still blames me for Monkeyboy’s teeth. "Do you know how much the vet charged us for that, Yank?" he says every time I tell him something new about Monkeyboy.And sure enough, as soon as he sees me at the door of his trailer, Sherman looks mad. There’s a bottle of some thick pink stuff over by a pile of bills that he keeps taking these long swigs from, and his mouth is all twisted like he had a bad taste in it that he couldn’t swallow. "Did you clean out his pail before you brought him his food?" he asks, ‘cause he knows how much I hate to touch that thing any more. Sherman is a big skinny guy who’s all stooped over and can’t ever eat much of anything. He’s hardly got any hair left, but he lets it grow real long in the back and tries to comb it over in front like he’s fooling someone. Sometimes I think it means something that me and him are cousins, second or third or something like that, but I guess it’s like my mom always told me, how his side of the family thinks they’re so much better ‘cause nobody there ever ran away from his wife and kids like my old man did. Not that Sherman’s any big success either, forty-some-years-old and no family, just running a two-bit circus like this and hoping that some day he can buy a couple of McDonalds restaurants somewhere and join the Rotary Club before he keels over dead of a heart attack or something. Still, he acts like he’s done me this big favor ‘cause he gave me a job cleaning up after his stupid monkey. All he really cares about is how much anything is gonna cost him, sitting in his trailer all day hunched over his desk like some old bird grubbing for worms."That’s great," he says now. "Only our second night in this dump too." He takes another long pull from the pink bottle, then hunches his shoulders and rustles through the papers on his desk. When he says something again his breath smells like he’s been sucking on a piece of chalk. "You better get him up," he tells me. "I don’t care how, but you make sure he does his show tonight. I don’t want any of my acts closed up tonight. Do you understand me?"So I leave him sitting there, figuring up all his bills, and I go back to Monkeyboy’s tent. He’s still lying there on his side, just the same as when I left him, staring off into space, the eggs and potatoes on his plate all cold and hard and greasy. "Ain’t you gonna eat anything?" I ask. "Come on, Monkeyboy, you know you’ve gotta eat if you’re gonna do the show tonight." But he just lifts one of them long arms a second and lets it drop to his side again as if he was shooing away a fly. At least he’s moving, I think, that’s a good sign. If I can only get him to look alive a little. "Wanna see one of your comics?" I try. Most of the time Monkeyboy loves those comics, even if they’re all old and torn up. Sherman picked them up at a flea market about six months ago. He bought them with a bunch of other stuff, but even he didn’t know what to do with the comics. The box they came in was water-damaged and the kid who owned them had written his name all over the covers, Barry, Barry, everywhere you looked Barry in big crooked letters with the crayon smeared and waxy. You couldn’t give ‘em away as prizes or anything, so Sherman gave them to me and I gave them to Monkeyboy.But this morning Monkeyboy hardly even looks at them. Though I drag the box over to him and crouch down beside his head, he only looks up at me for a second, blinks his eyes a few times, and then stares off again through the flap in the tent like he was trying to count every piece of trash that the crowd left on the ground last night. "Hey, look at this, Monkeyboy," I say, reaching into the box. "Magnus, Robot-Fighter. Come on now, you know you like this one." I flip open the pages and hold it up in front of him and see a picture of a guy in a shiny red tunic with white go-go boots karate-chopping a robot. It even looks kind of cool to me, but all Monkeyboy does is shift his weight a little and move the straw around.

Mrs. Manawatta thinks that Monkeyboy actually reads his comics, but I always figured he just looks at the pictures ‘cause he lives in a cage and he’s really an animal, isn’t he? I mean, just watch him one night after the show’s over, flipping the pages back and forth like it don’t matter to him if it’s the beginning or the end of the story. Sometimes he even picks up one of those books and smells it like he thought it might be something to eat. Mrs. Manawatta says he’s smarter than he looks though, even if he don’t talk. "You ever noticed how long he looks at those things, Yank?" she asked me once. "I’ve seen him up half the night with those comics, looking over every little picture." She nodded her head and the big rolls of fat around her neck shook up and down. "Why, he probably reads better than you or me." But today he doesn’t want to look at any of the pictures and he sure isn’t gonna read anything. I keep pulling them out of the box and waving them in front of his nose—The Flash, T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents, Mystery in Space—and he just lies there, like he’s too old and tired even to be interested any more.Not that anybody actually knows how old he is, not really. Even the doctor who pulled all those rotten teeth a couple of months ago didn’t know. He figured Monkeyboy could be anywhere from twelve to forty, but it depended on whether you were calculating in human years or ape years. Sherman said he didn’t know either, and when the doctor asked him where Monkeyboy had come from, he just pulled some papers out of his filing cabinet and said real quick that he bought Monkeyboy fair and square from "a reputable dealer in rare animals" six years ago. The doctor just sighed then. He was an older guy with gray hair and a barrel chest and a lot of lines in his face, and he told Sherman that most of the time he worked with horses and pigs. This was out of his league, he said. But Sherman just asked the doctor how much he wanted for Monkeyboy’s teeth. He would send the check out tomorrow, he promised, first thing.Everybody here has a different idea about where Monkeyboy came from. John Courage, the animal trainer, says it was definitely Asia. I asked him about it once when he was getting ready for his show, putting on his little white jacket and the helmet that kind of looks like a soup bowl and watching himself so carefully in the mirror. Monkeyboy, he told me, had all the markings of some rare species—I forget the name—that was found in the Indonesian rain forest. But Flip the Clown says Monkeyboy escaped from a government lab where they were doing secret experiments on orphans and street people. "That’s why he don’t talk, but he don’t act like the other animals either," Flip told me. "They brainwashed him so he couldn’t tell what they done to him." Mrs. Manawatta laughed at that though. She said she’d seen plenty like him back in West Virginia. "You go on back in them hollows in the mountains," she said, "where brothers and sisters and cousins marry one another. You’ll see plenty of monkeyboys then."Me, I’d never seen anything like him before that day last year after his old handler had gone and quit on him. Sherman took me over to his cage right after I got off the bus, didn’t even give me any time to put my duffel bag somewhere, and the first thing I see is this figure, about four feet tall, with long arms and short legs and hair all over his body, just sitting on a stool real close to the bars of his cage, looking out at me, calm as you like, as if he was gonna ask me a few questions himself before I got the job. Well, I just stood there and looked back at him for a couple of moments because he wasn’t like any chimpanzee or gorilla I’d ever seen. His face was kind of flat, without a snout or hardly any nose at all, not rounded like a monkey’s, and his mouth had lips almost, just like a person’s, only with long yellow teeth inside, all pointy and sharp like an animal’s. And then there were those deep black eyes with that flash of color at the center. They didn’t look like anything else, just him. I couldn’t figure out if he was for real, like those mangy old lions that John Courage uses in his act, or if all this—the cage, the straw, the pail—was some kind of act too. But that didn’t make any sense either, ‘cause if it was an act why would he let Sherman lock him up like this? You keep animals in cages. You make animals sleep on straw and shit in buckets. Finally, when I heard Sherman clear his throat like he was tired of waiting, I said something. "What is he?" I asked."What do you mean?" Sherman said. "Can’t you read the sign? He’s a monkeyboy."At first Monkeyboy and me got along real well. I made sure I got him his food whenever he wanted it and I kept his pail clean and changed his straw every couple of days. And he put on a good show every night. He knew just when to throw himself at the bars of the cage while the tape warned the crowd to Beware the fearsome Monkeyboy! and I turned off the lights as they scattered and ran for the exits. You could always see the crowd getting scared when he started beating his arms on his head and charging the bars. He was kind of a skinny ape, but he could move. He would hurl his body forward with those long arms arms and then let his big feet pedal a couple more steps while he smacked his palms against his head and let out these shrieks and calls. All the rubes would always back away from his cage when he did that.

But then, about three or four months later, he got in one of his moods for the first time. Or at least the first time with me. Instead of going through his act, Monkeyboy just sat there on his stool, looking out at the crowd like he’d come here himself just to look at all of them. The tape was playing, Step back from the cage! Keep away from those powerful hands! and he just sat there while the crowd got more and more restless. That’s when this teenager started yelling at him, a big rangy kid with red hair and squinty eyes and this hoarse cackle for a voice, calling him a stupid monkey, a dirty ape. The kid had this girl with him, real skinny in a halter top with dirty blonde hair and all these bracelets and rings, who was laughing at everything he said. He was yelling and she was laughing and then Monkeyboy got up and loped over to the pail in the back of the cage and squatted down on top of it. In a second you could smell it and all the parents in the crowd hustled their children out of the tent. "Man, that’s the worst shit I’ve ever smelled," the kid said as his girlfriend let out a little squeal and grabbed his arm. But before I could shut off the tape and get them out of the tent Monkeyboy had dragged his pail up to the bars and then stuck one of his fingers in it. "Oh God, Tommy, I’m gonna be sick," the girl whined and the kid kind of laughed like he wasn’t sure if this was gonna be funny or not. "Goddamn monkey plays with his own shit," he said, till the first bunch hit him in the face. Then he started coughing and spitting and the girl dragged him out of there as Monkeyboy kept throwing it at them, just flinging little streaks of it off that one long finger, hitting them in the back and the shoulders and the hair before they could get away.Of course, Sherman gave me hell about that.

Bad enough Monkeyboy was closed down for the rest of the night but he had to give those kids some money to stop them from telling the Sheriff. "The last thing we need is trouble with the law," he said after he stopped yelling at me and telling me how stupid I was. "Or the animal control people. What if they come around and want to see papers for everything?" Sherman looked like he was gonna have a stroke, he was so mad, and I just slunk back to my trailer to drink some beers and try to forget about it. But I couldn’t. I knocked them back and tried to watch some TV, but everything only made me feel mean. Even my TV, an old beat-up portable with a coat hangar that I used for an antenna, wasn’t working. I couldn’t ever get more than two or three channels anyway, and now nothing was coming in clear. The picture waved and bent and these little clouds of static kept floating up from the bottom of the screen, rippling through the sound too, buzzing and crackling so that half the time you couldn’t hear what anybody was saying. I could kind of see a man and a woman kissing on one channel and a car chase on another, but nothing made any sense to me. The woman I knew was beautiful though, nothing like that skinny girl before with the bracelets, and she was kissing the man on the screen hard on the mouth, and I kind of hated them too ‘cause I could see that the clothes they were tearing off of each other cost a lot of money. But I couldn’t stop watching either, so I tried everything that night to make the TV work. I pulled the coat hanger out and shoved it down into the slot again. I picked the set up and tried moving it around till I couldn’t hardly take a step in the trailer and the cord was almost pulled out of the socket, but nothing worked. All I could do was finish the twelve-pack before the ice melted in the cooler and the beer got all sour and warm.Sometime later, I don’t know how long it was, I was standing outside Monkeyboy’s cage with a hose in my hands. "Hey, you dirty ape," I said, "I’ve come to wash the shit off you." Then I heard the water hit him and send him tumbling across the cage and I laughed and let it out. I heard the pail go clattering and his stool turn over as the straw scattered everywhere. "Stupid monkeyboy," I said, feeling the pressure shooting from my hands, "I’ll teach you to do your tricks right. I’ll show you who’s the master."And then I turned it off and it was quiet. All I could hear was a few drops trickling out of the end of the hose and the pail rolling a little on its side. He was just lying there against the bars at the other end of the cage, the water running off him. He didn’t act scared and he didn’t get up and charge either. He just looked at me, his eyes as black as stones, that dank animal smell coming off his fur. "I know what you are," I said. "I know what you are."So today I tell myself that’s all it is, one of his moods again, when I go back and check on him at lunch time. He’s just being difficult so he doesn’t have to do the show, I think. And sure enough, when I get back to the tent, he’s still lying there, same as when I left him, not moving but not sleeping either, looking like an old ratty carpet that was tossed over a pile of bones."How you feeling, Monkeyboy? You ready to eat something?" I ask as I unlock the door and step into the cage, hoping that he’ll get up, wishing that he would even snap at me, like he did a couple of times after I’d used the hose on him that night. "How about some grub?" As I kneel beside him and run a hand through his fur I can’t help but notice how thin he is, how tight his leathery hide is wrapped around his bones."You’re gonna do a good show tonight, right?" I say as I force open his mouth and check his teeth. The ones that are left are yellow, a few dull spikes stuck in those withered gums. I stick my finger inside his mouth and poke around to see if any of them are loose, but nothing’s wrong here. "You’re gonna scare ‘em, right? Make the girls scream, make the little kids wet their pants. Grrr! Grrr!" I say, crouching down before him and shaking my arms a little like I had to teach him how to do his act. "You’re a mean old monkeyboy, ain’t you?" But he just closes his eyes and kind of sighs a little like I was embarrassing him or something and he wanted to pretend I wasn’t there.When he’s still not up though a few hours before showtime, I ask Flip for help. He’s sitting in his trailer with his greasepaint on and his wig on the table, shaking up the seltzer in his water bottle. After I explain the problem he tells me to see Jerry at the Tilt-a-Whirl. "You ask Jerry to get something out of his little medicine cabinet," Flip says. "He’s got what you need. Why when I was feeling down a while ago, like Monkeyboy is, I took a few of Jerry’s pep pills and perked right up." Flip fastens the big green wig on his head like he was a soldier getting ready for battle. "Best show I ever did," he says.But Jerry’s suspicious when I ask. He wants to know who told me he had stuff like this, and when I say Flip’s name he swears something and spits in the dirt in front of the Tilt-a-Whirl. Most of the time the performers keep their distance from the guys who work the rides. Jerry looks me up and down a couple of times like he wasn’t sure if he should laugh or crack me on the head with the dirty wrench that’s shoved into the back pocket of his jeans. Then he bunches up his fists and spits again. "You got ten dollars?" he asks at last.When I get to the tent it’s easy enough to force the pills down Monkeyboy’s throat, he’s so weak and tired, and then all I can do is wait and think about everything that can go wrong. About an hour before showtime though, he picks himself up. He rolls to his feet, lets his arms drag on the floor, and looks around his cage like he wasn’t sure where he was. "You want something to eat?" I ask, but he just picks at the plate of ground beef I bring him and then starts moving around the cage, checking out everything. He picks up the straw and lets it drift through his fingers. He sniffs at his pail. He turns his stool on its side, tries rolling it, then shuffles over to the box of comic books and looks at them for a second. "Feeling better now, huh?" I say, but he ignores me.By the time the crowd has started to fill up the tent he seems like his old self again, squatting on his haunches in the shadows at the back of the cage, waiting for the tape to begin. Normally, this is the time I like best, these moments before the show starts, when the crowd is big like it is tonight and the little kids grab at their parents’ legs and teenage girls giggle and whisper to one another and the smell of their popcorn and cotton candy almost hides the smells in the cage. It should be a good night. But when I look out now I see Sherman standing in the back, checking up on me, this look on his face like he’d just put one of his feet in Monkeyboy’s pail and was hoping that nobody saw it. From my spot behind the board that runs the sound and the lights I watch him looking around the tent and counting heads. Then I turn on the tape and the drums start.Back before the dawn of civilization, the voice begins, our ancestors lived in the trees. Life was savage and cruel then, and they only survived because they were savage and cruel too. They were beasts who killed their prey with their bare hands and tore open the still-warm flesh with their teeth. This is when Monkeyboy should start to move around, I think, but he hasn’t budged yet. Have the pills quit already? You see before you now the last specimen of that long lost time, the missing link to our prehistoric past. He was discovered only five years ago by the Windsor Expedition into the darkest jungles of central Africa. Now, at last, he gets up and ambles forward to the front of the cage like he’s supposed to. Presented to you here tonight through special arrangement with The Gould Family Entertainment Corporation, we are proud to offer you this unique and educational opportunity to . . . . Right on cue, he reaches out a hand, thrusting it through the bars at his audience, and I hear a little murmur go through the crowd. Maybe it’ll be okay after all, I think. Wait, ladies and gentlemen! Please! Step back from the cage! Keep away from those powerful hands! Don’t you see the murderous look in his eye? But it’s not okay. Instead of turning around and starting to charge the crowd, Monkeyboy presses his face against the bars like he was trying to see them better. Then he reaches a hand through the bars again and places two fingers above and below his eye, stretching back the skin so that it kind of pops out at them and they can see the pink watery stuff around it. In the back of the crowd Sherman looks like he wants to kill me, but up in front a little girl in shorts and a dirty t-shirt is laughing and pulling at her own eye like Monkeyboy. Keep back, ladies and gentleman! His sharp teeth can rip through flesh like paper! Stay out of his reach! Now he sticks his fingers in his mouth, feeling around like I did a few hours ago, while here and there in the crowd people kind of shift their feet and look at one another like they were all wondering if this was what they really wanted to see. Then Monkeyboy holds open his mouth, showing off the gaps in those old yellow teeth, and the first few head for the exit. He’s in a frenzy, ladies and gentleman, the blood-lust of a killer beast! Can you feel his rage? Stay back! But no one pays any attention to the tape. The little girl is holding her mouth open too and following Monkeyboy as he paces up and down in front of the cage and in the back of the tent I can see Sherman working on some kind of frenzy himself as he watches everyone leave. Beware the fearsome Monkeyboy! the voice warns though all I hear are groans and laughter from the few people who are left when I turn off the lights."What the hell did you do to him?" Sherman yells as soon as the tent is empty. He stands over me as he talks, keeping me pinned in the corner behind the board. "Why’s he acting this way?" So I tell him I just wanted to have a good show tonight. I tell him I just did what I thought he wanted. As I talk Monkeyboy starts circling the cage, letting one arm go limp and drag behind him, like he was trying to pace out exactly its size. Sherman just looks restless though. He belches and huffs and I can hear all the bitter juices gurgling in his stomach. So I give it up. Pills, I say. I got some pills from Jerry to make him do his show.Of course, we cancel the other shows for the night. And when Sherman comes back to the tent with Jerry, Jerry gives me this look like I was dead to him, some piece of trash to leave by the side of the road when we pack up and move on to another town. But pretty soon me and him manage to grab Monkeyboy and shove some more pills in his mouth to calm him down while Sherman stands there with his arms folded across his chest and watches. He hasn’t said a thing to me since he brought Jerry over, but I know it’s coming the same way that some junkyard dog just waits for its master’s kick. And sure enough, as soon Monkeyboy finally lies down on his straw again, Jerry’s gone. It’s just me and Sherman standing by ourselves in front of the cage like we were a pair of rubes waiting for the show to start."I’m only trying to keep us in business," he says at last, his voice real quiet and slow in that tone he uses sometimes to tell me how important he is, how hard he’s got it. I don’t like it when he’s calmed down. I wish he’d just yell at me instead, tell me I was stupid and lazy and then stomp off like he usually does. "You don’t know all the things I have to deal with, with all this equipment to move from town to town, all these people. A small show like ours doesn’t draw in the big cities. The margin is always tight. And now this. You know what it’ll cost tonight, paying out all these refunds?" He shakes his head for a moment and then looks down in the dirt like he thought somebody in the crowd might have dropped some spare change. Then he glances up at me again, this sorry kind of look on his face, and over at the corner of his mouth I see a little crust of that pink stuff he drinks for his stomach. "So what am I supposed to do? Your act is just costing me money these days. Put yourself in my place. Try to see it my way. What would you do?"I wait for a second, figuring he’ll just keep talking himself, but instead he only stands there and stares at me. What am I supposed to say? I wonder. Yeah, okay, he’s got all his excuses for treating me the way he does, his hard times and stuff, but what do I really know about any of that? I’m not gonna tell him he ought to fire me if that’s what he wants. I dig my foot around in the dirt, shove my hands deep into the pockets of my jeans. "I don’t know," I say. "That’s kind of tough."Sherman smiles for a moment, the first time I’ve seen him do that all day, and that just makes me more worried. "Yeah, it is," he says, his voice real cold and quiet. "I’ll let you know what I decide in a few days. But for now, Yank, I’ll tell you one thing for sure. Those refunds are coming out of your paycheck."That night even the beers don’t make me feel any better. It’s as if I had taken one of Jerry’s pep pills myself ‘cause I don’t get tired, no matter how much I put away. I drink one after the other and nothing seems to happen. The knots in my back just get tighter, my mind won’t stop going over everything, and all I can get on the TV is some kind of documentary on the public station. I don’t pay much attention at first ‘cause all I want to do is drink enough to fall asleep, but then I look up again and I see her, the girl in the jungle with the orangutans. She’s some kind of scientist, I guess, but she seems awfully young to me and she looks like one of the girls I see in the crowd sometimes, one of the nice ones who comes in with her little brother maybe and puts her arm around his shoulder when Monkeyboy scares him. And she’s pretty too, the girl on the TV—the scientist, I mean—in her t-shirt and shorts, with her lean arms and her long legs stepping carefully through all the roots and brush. I watch her as she captures the apes, tags them, and turns them loose again. She looks worried at first when her assistants have to cut down the tree in which an orangutan is perched and throw a net over him, but later her face lights up again after they let him go and the ape scrambles back into the jungle. And I don’t hate her, not this girl, because she’s no glamour queen either like all the ones on the other shows, not living out there in the jungle like that, probably even sleeping on the open ground some nights, breathing in the same kind of scents that I smell every time I step into his cage. She’s the kind of girl, if you ever knew her, who you’d want to really like you, not just so you could impress her and get whatever you could from her, but so you could feel different about yourself, so you could try to see yourself like she would see you. You’d want to tell her you did something she’d be proud of, so her face would light up that way for you too.And that’s how I figure out what I’m gonna do, while I’m sitting there watching her on the TV. What do I really have to lose after all? Sherman’s probably just gonna fire me anyway. If I do this for her, I can at least get back at him too. So I stumble out of the chair, feeling the beers now, and hear the door of the trailer slam shut behind me. Then it’s like I just blink and I’m standing in his tent, with a flashlight in my hand but no shoes or socks, and I’m unlocking the door of his cage. "Go on," I say, as the beam from the flashlight reels back and forth in crazy arcs over the dirt and the straw, "get out of here."But he doesn’t move. He just lies there in a heap on the ground, his fur matted, his chest barely moving enough to let you know he’s alive, just like I found him this morning. "Come on, Monkeyboy, you’re free," I say, shining the light now at the open door of the cage. "I’m letting you go. Why don’t you get out of here?" But he hardly even stirs, and I can’t help myself. I grip the flashlight hard, feel how solid and heavy it is, and just for an instant I think about how easy those old bones could break. Why can’t he ever follow a script right? "Come on, you stupid ape. Don’t you know what I’m doing? Don’t you know what I’m giving up?" I know I shouldn’t yell at him like this, that she wouldn’t like it, but I can’t help myself, because this power I have to open or close the door of his cage seems like the only thing that stops me from disappearing completely, from being ground down into nothing, not even a mark in the dirt. "You’re my job," I shout. "You’re the money in my pocket, you damn stupid ape."He just covers his head with his arms though, turns his back to me. And then, I don’t know why, I get in the cage with him. The door is still flung open and the flashlight is still in my hand, heavy and loose like a club, but I’m too tired all of a sudden to keep up that anger. What am I really gonna do anyway? Beat him to death? Let him run away? Nothing makes any sense. Nothing works. Because even if he did get away, I realize now, where could he go after all looking like that? So all I do instead is sit down in the dirt next to him and reach into that box of old comic books—just to pass the time I suppose, just like I’d turn on the TV in my trailer. "Hey, Monkeyboy, look at this," I say, as I turn the flashlight on the comic, see a guy in a blue and white costume snapping some chains around his wrists as a woman in a suit of armor and a red cape hurls herself at his leg. "You wanna hear it? I’ll read it to you." And for just a moment I look up from the comic and out through the bars of the cage at the patch of ground behind it and the flap in the back of the tent that leads nowhere. It seems like the most familiar thing I’ve ever seen. Then I look back down again and I know that the only way you could ever get out of here, just for a little while at least, is sitting there in my lap. "Come on, Monkeyboy, listen to this," I say, as I flip open the cover and shine the flashlight down at the pages. "T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents. This is a good one." But when I glance over at him right before I start reading, he’s just staring straight ahead again, his arms dropped back down to his side. Maybe he’s listening, maybe he’s not. I can’t even hear him breathing any more. All I hear is my own voice now echoing in the empty tent.