Beep, page 21
The mood slowly built, like heat.
“Guilty,” a voice in the masses said, so very gently, a tadpole in a mud puddle. “Feeling guilty.”
“Why should we animals feel guilty?” another voice, louder.
“Because we bring harm. And that is not our way.”
“There will be great forgiving,” our old uncle said. “Though we nearly all share your emotion.”
And yes, it was guilty, but gentle, too. The you-mens on the beach within our view did some shuddering, then evinced a kind of ecstasy. Enormous smiles, some slipping out of their scant garmends, most of them then walking far inland, walking to the corners of fields and barking lots, lying down atop one another, final naps in large deposits. It would be sad for those that remained, the kindly. To them we notioned condolence, but much more important, the promised forgetfulness, a glopal aurora. And we all began the new mood, the world-cure mood, and it was gentle as a tide, incremental, forgiving, and within it, the forgetting began.
Immediately the goer-noise stopped. The roaring and hissing and grinding, all gone. An airmachine high in the sky slowly lost altitude, glided slowly into the sea. And the land conveyances crashed, too, goers stepping from digging equipment, from the shops they had once so enjoyed. In the big cities, this monkey knew, smiling you-men folk, likely naked at the end, climbed into El Vators and glided to the plamet surface and out to their byways and found communal lie-me-downs in oceanic barking lots and fields of sport, great mounds of them napping never to wake, later to richly rot with the help of quadrillions of the most-wee animals, and later still to become soil where plants would grow, and later again forests, their tallest buildings merely cliff faces where falcons might nest along with the pigeons they fed on, forests growing from the tree-lined streets, anyanimal making home there. Including you-mens, plenty of you-mens, for one in a thousand would live.
One in a thousand, the sensitives. And these millions remaining would understand only vaguely what had happened, enough to strive to live in harmony with everyanimal and with their own animal natures. And yes, we monkeys know better than anyanimal that this one eats that one, that violence is part of harmony at times.
Just not all the time, and not so thoroughgoing! Because we’d all be living with and cursed by all the trobble the goers had wrought for future generations untold, the blastics and the secretions and the suddenly aflame, the missing and the blighted and the permanently altered. Post-Panamax vessels would float untended for decades, some of them, eventually to crash and leak and destroy. The plamet was one big booby trap, the booby birds never to return. But little matter: we’d made it better, and better would continue, nature ongoing, the Aarth not immortal. Just not so gravely ill, the disease having been curtailed hard.
One in a thousand, that’s how many true gentles there were, and that’s how many the plamet could handle.
We spent the quietest night anyanimal remembered, just the howlers howling, and the hissers hissing, the bizzers bizzing, and the squawkers squawking.
And Deeps and I, at last coming together to make our own contribution to the ongoing everything. This procreation business, it feels great, let me say. Very clear why the you-mens had overdone it!
Chapter Thirty-Nine
In the monkey morning, well, silence continued to reign, and because the babymaking had felt so good in the night Deeps and I returned to the project, she presenting languidly. The billion animals of our woods had dispersed, largely, but there was an anteater waddling.
“Monkey,” she called up to our roost.
“Anteater,” I said.
“Much delicious this morning,” she said, that amazing tongue flicking up ants to her busy mouth.
Even from up in our tree I could hear them. “Fuck!” And, “Always more of us than you, tongue-twisters!”
Somemonkeys were raiding the you-men dwellings for foodstuffs. Fine. The fresh wouldn’t last long. The ingeniously preserved would feed the remaining you-mens while they reestablished akriculture, all their old ways of staying alive, the grower ways, ways that had simply overgrown, been united with greed, and poison. Not anymore, though the poison would linger.
Sensitives roamed their byways finding other sensitives, mourning abating within the mass forgetting, cooperation aflourish, and their consensus seemed to be to meet at the beach where all along the way they’d built fires, that you-men thing, each with their expertise, none with malice, and on the beaches they prepared food—yes, there was enough stored in their systems to last many adjustment seasons, even complete passages around the sun, even in the rhythmically cold then hot regions, the places like Nyork.
Warm where we were, however, the Home Tree, Deeps and I lounging.
“There’s one place I have to go,” I said after a vast but quick stretch of time had elapsed, the two of us alone. “I mean, if I can find it.”
Deeps was willing. And we retraced my mid-canopy route, each of the trees I’d touched along my way after I left home not so long before, even leapt down to the ground at the termite mounds, feasted upon them, even shat upon the heads of a few peccaries, mirth abounding. And onward, then, Deeps hard behind me, the way burned into my memory, no forgetting of this. The once impossibly impassable high-weigh (as aptly they were called, I’d learned along my quest) was silent, carrs and truggs and all the odd conveyances wrecked and abandoned this way and that in heaps, the foolish alarms gradually winding down, winking out.
“Inga’s howzz was just over there,” I said.
“I thought she was in Nyork. Near Bronzoo.”
“Her family had a dwelling here as well. Impossible to understand in the former times, but I think I get it now—they came here to escape the cold, and in warm seasons to escape the goer frenzy they were part of.”
“Now dead,” Deeps said without particular sentiment, not even around such a joyous thing. The world killers were themselves dead!
“Long live the gentles,” I said. “Inga is not dead.”
And in Inga’s family dwelling we found fresh bananas, the type the you-mens preferred, big tough-clothed yellow things with sweet soft inzide.
In Inga’s bedrooom her dolls and stuffees waited. And a pink-upon-pink basket filled with little bunnies made of choco, it seemed, and sweet, colorful beans nestled in blastic grass. And on the floor of her rooom, garmends, freshly stripped away and thrust aside. And dozens, perhaps hundreds of colorful eggs from a blastic bird hanging from her ceiling on threads, E-stir just as Dabby had promised, may he rest in peace.
“She was here!” I said.
Deeps and I hurried along the mid-canopy toward the beach, the impulse we’d given all the sensitives to go to water. Happy-looking straggler you-mees were headed that direction, naked and walking—even if they’d had cars, useless: their go-ways and high-weighs were former, clogged now with wrecks, their enormous barking lots piled with goer remains, the finish of a perverse rapture.
Back at the beach we followed a line of palm trees down to the sand. And there below, dancing, dancing among a crowd she’d clearly attracted, joyful Inga, those braided ropes of red hair swinging gaily.
I called down, nearly a laugh.
But this monkey’s general moodle had faded, deenergized now that the emergency was over. Hard even to remember Nyork, though an image lingered, the last I’d be able to keep: I, Beep, in Inga’s arms, the two of us snuggled on her pink-upon-pink sleeping raft.
“Inga, Inga,” I called, using my wind voice.
She looked up. Her eyes were so clear. She was among solely sensitives for the first time in all her days. “Hoo-hoo, monkey,” she called. And said it again: “Hoo-hoo, sweet monkey!”
Trade-offs: the forgetting that had given her peace handed me mourning.
A grown unknown female of Inga’s naked new troupe noticed our parley, wafted our way as if on winds, a baby in her arms: Willie! And Willie noticed me when she did, pointed in the baby way, the Willie way, straight at me.
“Beep!” he cried as the auntie laughed, and Inga, too, laughter like wub, the baby going on and on, “Beep-Beep!”
He and I, well, we would be friends for life—his long, mine brief—the only you-men who remembered, though he barely knew what was remembered: just a monkey, just a name, a mood.
The plamet, that thing represented by the glope in Inga’s old dwelling, would recover, despite great, glaring scars. The you-mens themselves would recover, too, but guided by better instincts ingrained in those that remained by some magic of nature, would recover in balance with all things. And far fewer of them, the true magic, the secret of success. And wherever they live, their brilliant little enclaves around the world, compassionate animalian pets—those who’d been sensitives, and so spared, not so many as you might think—were there to watch, provide gentle correction. Move slowly, you-men, only take what you need, enjoy the old-fashioned sharing economy, long-forgotten, now-recovered, what had been and was again the absolute pinnacle of you-mee civilization.
The animals? Slowly, with every phase then every passage of the moon, we all of us lost the easy ability to communicate across lines of kingdom, genera, even species, though the deep undermood did remain, the interconnected everything. We didn’t need the strength and power of the foremood anymore, though it would remain available and this tale, my tale, would continue to be passed along, a kind of cautionary thrum. We were no longer in a defensive position. Our disasters were local, our successes (food, shelter, procreation) local, too. The undermood, though, the interwub, remains, strengthened, percolating, guiding, guarding.
Deeps was not local, but of us, we monkeys, and soon she fit in. Our children and grandchildren and their children take after her, mostly, brown and big and handsome, but with my ears, my inward-bending toes, orangey tufts between.
And they have all the rooom in the world.
Acknowledgments
A warm thank you to Kathy Pories, editor, friend, and animal lover, who believed in Beep and all the denizens of his forest. And ongoing thanks to everyone at Algonquin. This is my fifth book under your star, and I’m so happy to be part of your dazzling galaxy. Betsy Gleick, fearless leader, you are the best. And just look at this cover: thanks Catherine Schott, and the whole art team, including artist Steven Noble, who created the monkey woodcut. Brunson Hoole makes sure every page looks good. And Chris Stamey, heroic copy editor, parsed all things Beep with an able if virtual pencil. Thank you, thank you.
I’m so grateful to Emily Forland, that she deserves her own paragraph here. Calm, loyal, thorough, honest, and so very wise, she’s the best agent from our world to Monkey World and back again! Thank you, Emily, bottom of my heart.
As always I lean on friends to read early drafts. First and foremost Megan Grumbling, who speaks monkey with a poet’s accent. And of course Kate Colby, Melissa Coleman, Melissa Falcon, Alicia Fisher, David Gessner, Chris Hillman, Lauryn Hottinger, Bill Lundgren, and the many, many others who helped me bring this world to life. Especially the Starfish, my literary siblings, the Marching Band, our sweet writing group: Monica Wood, Kate Christensen, Lewis Robinson, and Sarah Braunstein, draft after draft, and all of whom have new books this year, go read! Ann Hood and Michael Ruhlman get special notice, just for being friends, and so inspiring.
Last but not least, abiding thanks to a certain visual artist and to a certain actor, you know who you are. For the rest of you, okay, they are my family, Juliet Karelsen and Elysia Roorbach. And finally a lifelong thanks to my four siblings, Randy, Carol, Doug, and Janet, and to our folks, who art in heaven.
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ALSO BY BILL ROORBACH
Fiction
Big Bend
The Smallest Color
Life Among Giants
The Remedy for Love
The Girl of the Lake
Lucky Turtle
Nonfiction
Summers with Juliet
A Place on Water (with Robert Kimber and Wesley McNair)
Into Woods
Temple Stream: A Rural Odyssey
Instruction
Writing Life Stories: How to Make Memories into Memoirs, Ideas into Essays and Life into Literature
Contemporary Creative Nonfiction: The Art of Truth
Bill Roorbach, Beep
