Fiction Reading
Chris Knapp
In the course of a forty-five minute fiction reading, it’s my strong feeling that, excluding minor gestural movements such as raising one’s hand to one’s face to thoughtfully hold one’s chin, one should feel free to move in one’s seat not more than twice: to cross one’s legs, for example, and then to uncross them and possibly, if it can be accomplished in a fluid, continuous motion, to re-cross them the other way. In the course of a public lecture of the same length, one might be excused for a further uncrossing/re-crossing; the codes that govern such behavior are a function not only of the size of the room and the volume of the event in question, but also of the event’s emotional content: at a recital of chamber music, for example, one should scarcely move at all; and likewise at a poetry reading the most that one should permit oneself is an appreciative throat noise between poems, to demonstrate that one is moved. At a fiction reading, likewise, in addition to the crossing and re-crossing of one’s legs and the thoughtful holding of one’s chin, it’s permissible to occasionally chuckle, in order to demonstrate to the reader and to the rest of the crowd one’s appreciation of a particularly apt observation of, for example, the indignity of human life; or to (on no more than one occasion) pointedly clear one’s throat, to indicate disapproval.
At the fiction reading I attended today, which was indeed scheduled to run to approximately forty-five minutes, I made the foolish mistake of crossing and re-crossing my legs before the reader had even finished her charming prefatory remarks, and this was because I was flustered by the woman in the seat beside me, who had not for a moment since she’d sat down ceased to shift and fidget, not only wantonly crossing and re-crossing and re-re-crossing her legs at will, at the ankle or the knee or both, but also repeatedly looking over her shoulder for the apparent purpose of seeing who might be seated behind her; as well as leaning forward to fetch a scarf from her ample handbag; as well as throwing the scarf over her shoulders; pulling it tight around her; shifting her weight back and forth from one buttock to the other; examining various minor blemishes on the bare skin of her forearms; smoothing her well-groomed eyebrows with one or the other of her thumbs; brushing invisible detritus from her shoulders and chest; folding her bare forearms beneath her scarf; leaning forward to rummage in her ample handbag for a tin of mints; selecting a mint from her tin of mints; in a silent gesture, offering a mint from her tin of mints first to me—an offer I flatly and rather icily ignored—and then to the person seated on the other side of her, who accepted her offer with a nod of thanks; and finally, to my astonishment, intently searching the back of the wool jacket she held in her lap for hairs, picking them singly from the wool and holding them up for inspection, before dropping them onto the floor, where my own jacket was, and where I imagined them collecting in tangles of the precise sort that collected all over our bathroom, the bathroom I shared with this woman, who was after all my wife.
And it was perhaps because she was my wife that it became impossible for me to focus on the content of the reading we had come to hear, a reading that consisted of extremely short works of fiction; if this woman had been a stranger and not someone I was contractually obligated to love until the day I died, it would not have been appropriate for me to become fixated on just how temperamentally ill-suited we were to each other, how impossibly different our respective relationships to the space we took up in the world, how irreconcilable my own disposition to stillness with her aversion to it, my own commitment to invisibility with her commitment to quite the opposite. Before long the reader’s words became nothing more than an atmospheric droning, as I became further and further absorbed in the argument that would ensue between my wife and me as soon as we were alone, and would even before then begin to take shape in the small, passive-aggressive gestures that would pass between us under the scrutiny of the public eye; the exasperation I knew would inflect my every word and would furthermore be manifest bodily in the flexion of my jaw, in the flaring of my nostrils, my ragged breathing, my refusal to meet her eyes with mine. I would, I already knew, allege that she was unable to countenance, on a moment-by-moment basis, a scenario in which she was not the center of attention, and she would insist that I was so inveterately locked in the teeth of a conviction that I was myself the center of everyone else’s attention that even the minutest movements of her own body I regarded as reflections of my character in everyone else’s eyes. It would be at this point, inevitably, confronted with so stark a repudiation of so essential a facet of my character, that in one swift and decisive motion I would break something, a dish or a phone or an electric teakettle, and then, violence having been released into the air, my wife would attack me physically in a tornadic fit of both the bluntest and the sharpest parts of herself, with her fists, with her knees and elbows, her fingernails, with her forehead and with even her teeth if it came to it, which of course it would once it became my only choice to wrap her in my arms and restrain her bodily until we were both exhausted.
And indeed, when the reading of extremely short works of fiction ended, the fight unfolded exactly as I imagined it, with the important difference that, having imagined it so vividly, I’d had the thought that the entire incident might be put to profitable use in an extremely short work of fiction; having had this thought, my entire body had relaxed and I found my festering and admittedly small-minded rage transformed into exultation. It was only later, in the car, when I described the story I would write and explained the mental process that had inspired it, that what began as a levelheaded discussion of certain essential differences between us devolved into the precise ferocious paroxysm I’d spent the length of the reading describing in my head, and had then spent the length of our car ride home describing to my wife in terrific detail—a paroxysm that resolved, finally, just as I’d envisioned, only when our bodies were inextricably entwined.
And it’s only now that we’ve released each other that it occurs to me to tell her: that it’s only since we met that I’ve been turned so intensely inward, that I’ve felt so vulnerable, that in her kinetic presence the static boundaries of self I’ve always lived within have begun to collapse around me. It occurs to me to tell her only now, that is, but of course by now she’s sound asleep, twitching violently as usual, and as usual I’m awake beside her, unable to sleep for her violent twitching, and for my own part motionless apart from the tips of my fingers over the keys, and unable to do anything to make her still again so that I might have some peace.
Tous les Adamas
When, in July, 2016, a twenty-four-year-old black man named Adama Traoré died in police custody following a violent arrest in the Paris suburb of Beaumont-sur-Oise, it sent up chilling echoes of Eric Garner’s death in Staten Island two years before. Traoré’s death wasn’t captured on video, but, according to the arresting officers’ own testimony in the ensuing internal investigation, he was immobilized face down on the ground, under the combined weight of three gendarmes, executing a maneuver known in French as “plaquage ventral,” which is legal in France, though it has been implicated in numerous deaths-in-custody here and has been banned by police departments around the world. Among Adama’s last recorded words, according to the police, was a perfect translation of an all-too familiar phrase. “J’ai du mal à réspirer”: I can’t breathe.
This spring, a little less than four years after Traoré’s death, the murder of George Floyd sent up new echoes of this kind in France. When CNN published the Hennepin County coroner’s report on Floyd’s death, which found that the “autopsy revealed no physical findings that support a diagnosis of traumatic asphyxia or strangulation,” it read almost like a translation of the statements that a district attorney in France put out in the immediate aftermath of Adama’s death, which likewise cited heart troubles, the possible presence of drugs in his bloodstream, and the absence of any evidence that violence caused Adama’s death. Like Floyd’s family, the Traorés had requested an independent autopsy, which forcefully refuted the original. A long series of conflicting medical reports have been issued since, and as it happened, the same day that CNN published the Hennepin County report, Le Monde published the findings of still another medical analysis conducted by French authorities, which concluded that Adama’s death was the result “not of positional asphyxiation,” as an independent analysis had concluded in 2018, “but of a cardiogenic edema.”
That report was the occasion of the protest that Adama’s sister, Assa Traoré, organized the first week of June, which, although the Paris police prefect declared it illegal, drew between twenty and eighty thousand protesters to the Tribunal de Grand Instance de Paris, the city’s the highest court. In the course of her family’s fight to hold the state accountable for her brother’s death, Assa has become the spearhead of a racial justice movement that (despite the tireless work of several generations of activists) had for decades been relegated to the margins of French political life. It’s a battle, she told me when I spoke to her last year, that they waged on three fronts: in the media, in the streets, and in court. In many cases, the court in question has been the Paris TGI.
The protest was scheduled to begin at seven p.m., and by that time, thousands of teens and young adults, dressed in black, many wearing Justice Pour Adama t-shirts, were streaming toward the court from every direction, where there’d already formed a dense crowd at the foot of the building, carrying signs with slogans like “Qui ne dit rien, consent,” and “We Can’t Breathe.” Arriving in groups, in pairs, and all alone, they climbed atop construction equipment, storage containers and traffic lights, and perched in long rows on the rickety temporary fencing police had erected around the building, chanting, “Black lives matter” and “Tout le monde déteste la police.” At the margins, where people were filing in, a sole gilet jaune in a Marvin the Martian hat played a guitar, singing about the evils of capitalism. More than once, the crowd took a knee in unison, raising their fists. Rokhaya, a twenty-four-year-old black woman from Paris, told me it warmed her heart that black people all over the world were rising up to make their voices heard. “I can’t anymore,” she said. “I can’t be afraid for my little brothers, my little cousins, for people who’ve done nothing wrong. And even if they were to do something wrong, I can’t pretend anymore that because of the color of my skin I have to retreat, and accept to be treated like a dog.” With the heels of their shoes, people beat a rhythm against the metal panels of the court building’s ground floor, like a giant bass drum in a marching band. The tower reflected the blue sky, and police stood at the railing on the terrace of the eighth floor, vaping and goofing around. Assa, who typically addresses her supporters over a loudspeaker from a stage or the back of a pickup, moved through the crowd, leading them in chants of Pas de justice, pas de paix. “Everyone here today,” she said to the crowd, “you’ve entered into history. You’ll be able to say you took part in a revolution… This is just the beginning.” [“Vous pourrez dire que vous avez particpé à un renversement” is closer to “…in an overthrow”: but it sounds more natural in French
The Paris TGI is a glass tower in the seventeenth arrondissement, situated just inside the Boulevard Périphérique, the ring road that separates Paris from the banlieues where police harassment and violence are part of daily life. That geographical arrangement, which makes what happens in the banlieues easier for the rest of the country to ignore, is replicated in cities around France. According to a 2016 study by the French government’s own human rights group, the Défenseur des droits, the young black and Arab men who live in them are twenty times more likely than the general population to be stopped by the police for controles d’identité, random ID checks of the sort Adama was trying to avoid the day he died, which are France’s hold-my-beer response to stop-and-frisk. When I asked Mathieu, a Congolese rapper and painter whom I met outside the TGI, about controles in his neighborhood in Aubervilliers, he said it was constant. “For nothing,” he said. He pulled down his mask to show me a mouthful of missing and replaced teeth. “There’s no ‘relationship’ with the police,” he said. “Soi ils nous blessent, soi ils nous baisent.” Either they wound us or they fuck us. “Even the smallest of us get beat… They broke my little brother’s teeth too.”
This kind of harassment and violence has been a matter of fascination in French culture for decades; it was the subject of Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine, which won a Cesar for Best Film a quarter-century ago, and it was the subject of the Ladj Ly’s Les Misérables, which won the Jury Prize at Cannes last year. But in that time, there’s developed little political will to address or even acknowledge the corresponding reality off-screen. Le Monde ran an editorial last month excoriating the systemic racism that both George Floyd’s death and covid-19 have laid bare in the US, without any mention of problems of the same kind in France. “Don’t speak of ‘police violence,’” President Macron has said. “Those words are unacceptable in Rule of Law.” Since George Floyd’s death, as pressure has mounted to the issue, the government has defended all the more vehemently the position that no such issue exists.
Not infrequently, the state reinforces that position in its courts. Just months after Adama’s death, the mayor of Beaumont-sur-Oise threatened to file criminal charges against Assa for comments she’d made on TV, dropping the case only after it emerged that she had tried to appropriate municipal funds to cover her legal fees. Last year, Assa was actually indicted for defamation when she posted a Facebook post naming the officers who arrested her brother as killers. In May, Christophe Castaner, then minister of the interior, scolded Camélia Jordana, a pop singer, on Twitter, when on a talk show she invoked “people who go to work each morning in the banlieues who are massacred in the streets for no other reason than the color of their skin… thousands of people who don’t feel safe in the presence of the police,” “No, madame,” Castaner tweeted. “These untruthful and shameful words feed hate and violence.” The Alliance Police nationale, a major police union, announced its intention to bring a criminal defamation complaint against Jordana, inviting the Ministry of the Interior to join their case.
The next night, a fourteen-year-old, hundred-and-ten-pound boy named Gabriel, by his own account, was planning to steal a scooter with a friend in the Paris suburb of Bondy when a police squad arrived and threw him to the ground, pressing his head and shoulders into the pavement with their knees while they handcuffed him face-down. Before hauling him to his feet, according to Gabriel’s account, one of them held down his legs while another kicked him repeatedly in the face and ribs; they brought him to the police station, with his left eye swollen shut and blood pouring down his face, and detained him for more than an hour before he started vomiting. Only then did they seek medical attention; the bones in his face required reconstructive surgery, and he spent ten days in the hospital. It was the doctor, he said in a TV interview when he returned home, who finally called his mom to let her know where he was. A spokesperson for the Alliance Police nationale says Gabriel fell down.
The day after Gabriel’s arrest, a conservative lawmaker introduced a bill to the Assemblée Nationale that would make it punishable by a fifteen-thousand-euro fine and up to a year in prison to publish images of police in the execution of their duties; that bill was voted down, but its substance was rolled into Macron’s securité globale legislation which passed the Assemblée Nationale, which would make publishing identifiable images of the police punishable by a €45,000 fine and a year in prison, and which has been the subject of a new wave of protests in recent weeks. Castaner promised, if an investigation into Gabriel’s arrest finds any wrongdoing, there would be “an administrative sanction.” (Under Castaner’s replacement, Gerald Darmanin, no sanction has resulted.) Meanwhile, in a demonstration of largesse, Castaner decided not to join the police union’s criminal complaint against Camélia Jordana. “But on the other hand, freedom of public debate does not permit any and everything to be said,” he warned. “It’s out of the question to let the honor of the Republic be sullied.”
Camelia Jordana was among numerous French celebrities who appeared at the protest on June second. As Assa stood nearby, she sang a song invoking the names of Freddie Gray, George Floyd, Adama Traoré. “Revolution has come,” she sang in English. “Time to pick up the gun.”
For a few hours, the protest continued to swell as a seething, unitary mass. But as night fell, the smell of teargas filled the air, and, as a great rush of people hurried away from the Périphe, another rush of people pushed toward it. Great columns of black smoke rose in the sky: while young men and women took turns posing in front of a traffic light that engulfed in flames beside the highway, others set the cab of a backhoe alight, and dragged wooden pallets into a pile nearby, setting those alight as well. (“Even in the United States,” Mathieu had told me minutes earlier, “if they don’t burn cars, no one’s going to move.”) The sound of rocks and chunks of concrete hitting the court building and police vans was countered by the reports of riot guns and the clatter of teargas canisters on the pavement.
From overhead came raucous cheers, and an incessant honking of car horns. Hundreds of protesters had blocked the Périphe in both directions, dragging detritus from the roadside into traffic, and mounting the hoods of cars to dance and pose for photos. One protester lit a flare and waved it around triumphantly. A pair of teenagers, who were white, tried to wrestle a massive block of concrete into traffic, and a man in his twenties scolded them: “There are motorcycles, someone will get hurt.” For a short while, a tailgate atmosphere took hold, a restless sense of anticipation and collective purpose. People milled around, gaping at the spectacle of themselves, clapping their hands and stomping their feet in unison. Drivers inside their cars crept through the crowd, many of them honking their horns and pumping their fists in solidarity. In the median, I met Kyzl Jefferson, a twenty-four-year-old American visual artist who works in Paris as an au pair. Jefferson, who is Black, said she’d been to numerous protests for Adama Traoré in France. She spoke about how important the African diaspora community she’s found in France has been for her. “I feel a little bit like I’m at home,” she said. But we were interrupted as the police began firing teargas and marching toward us from both directions. “That’s when you get down behind the wall,” she said, grinning, as we dashed across the highway. Before we could resume our conversation, her friend, a white American, jumped up on the wall in question, shrieking at bloodcurdling volume, “Fuck the police! FUCK THE POLICE!”
In front of the court, a critical mass of protesters remained in place, but on the other side of the building, more or less incessantly, teargas canisters arced through the sky in one direction, and skittered back across the pavement in the other. Protesters had blocked the tramway and four lanes of traffic on the Boulevards Marécheaux, Paris’s outermost ring of surface roads. Two massive fires raged in the middle Avenue de Clichy. In a thick haze of teargas on Boulevard Bessier, some kids were dragging Uber bikes onto a pile of burning trash. “As you can see,” Fabien, a black college student from the eighteenth, explained, “there’s a bit of everything, whether it’s white, black, Arab, Asian. And unfortunately there have been some skirmishes with the police… They want to be heard. It may not be the best solution, but it’s the solution they have.” From deep in the fog of teargas, chunks of pavement, bottles, and other projectiles rained down against law enforcement’s vans and their Perspex shields. Over the course of the next hour, the police managed to box the bulk of the protesters into a short stretch of Avenue Clichy between the Périphe and the Boulevards Marécheaux, a “kettle” from which there was no escape except over the fence into a large construction site across the street. Every so often, they fired more canisters into the crowd, keeping the teargas fresh. The protesters mostly took it in stride. When they weren’t doubled over, gagging and gasping for breath, they were sitting around calmly, waiting for the next round. “That’s the game,” Fabien said. “You come to a protest, some people throw stones, the police respond.” He shrugged. “Now, as you can see, we’re trapped.”
While we were waiting for the police to let us out, it occurred to me that the last time I’d spoken with Assa in person hadn’t been far from this very spot, after her defamation arraignment late last fall. Assa had arrived in a long coat and Balenciaga sock shoes, twenty-five minutes late, and took a seat in the back row with her lawyer. When the judge called her case, she rose heavily, shrugging off her coat, and in a black Justice pour Adama t-shirt she approached the bench, where she stood with her arms folded across her chest while the judge read an excerpt from the offending text. Even in the flat drone of officialdom, Assa’s rage was bracing: “I accuse the gendarmes, Romain Fontaine, Arnaud Gonzales and Mathias Uhrin, of having killed my brother Adama Traoré, by crushing him with the weight of their bodies. I accuse the gendarmes of failing to rescue my brother Adama Traoré, and of having left him handcuffed face-down on the ground of the gendarmerie instead. I accuse the gendarmes of having refused to uncuff Adama Traoré, claiming he was faking even as he died.”
Afterwards, I was surprised to see how the proceeding lifted Assa’s spirits. She was energized by the prospect of a trial in which she would face the gendarmes in open court (the trial is set for next year). Outside in the sun, her phone informed her that her bus was leaving in two minutes. She looked up at me, and broke into a sprint. We caught the bus just as the driver was closing the doors, and as it swung into traffic, I said I’d noticed that in the French press, accounts of police violence often end with a quote from an official representative of the state. If I were to give her the final word in the piece I was writing, I asked, what would she say?
Assa was still catching her breath, but a sly grin appeared on her face, and she answered without missing a beat.
“Bring it,” she said.
In part, it’s this quality of defiance and fearlessness that’s captivated so many of the young people with whom I’ve spoken about Assa, and given them hope that she can bring about meaningful change. When the police finally let what remained of the crowd out of the kettle that night in June, it was to funnel them, by means of more teargas, under the Périphe and out of Paris, into the invisible banlieues. But the electricity of the moment persisted, the feeling that something was different this time. A group of young black and Arab women walking right behind me toward Porte St.-Ouen could scarcely contain their excitement. “Assa,” one of them, Martine, was saying, “the way she speaks, her words. And did you see how beautiful she is?” Martine is nineteen and this was her first protest. “I think it will make a mark,” she told me. “No one’s going to forget this.”
Her friend, a nineteen-year-old law student from Clichy, who preferred not to give her name, added, “Unlike the USA, where they wear their racism with pride, in France there’s a certain hypocrisy. They’re always ready to point out the racism of others—French journalists are always the first to say, in the United States there’s a problem… But in France we have a problem too, and it’s been going on for a long time… So these manifestations, we’re hoping they shock. It’s the only way… not to be mean, but French middle class, if it doesn’t touch their lives, they don’t give a shit.”
The momentum of that night held through the summer, and, it has held through the fall as well, even as the government has tried to consolidate support for the police in the wake of a pair of isolated terrorist attacks, diverting attention from the problem of systemic racism by drumming up anxiety about radicalization in Muslim communities. It’s true that after the protest in June, Castaner, the former minister of the interior, announced that any suspected act of racism among the police would incur automatic suspension, and that strangulation, as an immobilization technique, would be banned (though not plaquage ventral). But in the weeks that followed, Macron only mentioned the protests by allusion, referring cryptically in a televised address to strains of “separatisme” in the French public. In the lexicon of Macron’s new administration, separatism, multiculturalism, and radical Islam have become synonymous bogeymen, deployed for the rhetorical purpose of blaming the persecution of Black and Arab men—“tous les Adamas,” as Assa Traoré puts it—on the persecuted themselves. As for police violence, Macron continues to promote a bad-apples theory-of-the-case, denying the existence of a systemic problem. “There is no state violence instituted in our country,” his press secretary, Sibeth Ndiaye, said at a press conference the day after the protest in June, adding, with regard the US and France, “I think the situation with our two countries is not really comparable, neither at the level of history nor at the level of the organization of society.”
History isn’t France’s strongest subject. “We’re supposed to self-flaggelate, to feel sorry about colonization, and I don’t know what else,” Prime Minister Jean Castex complained earlier this month. Still, it’s clear that the conversation has changed, and that a reckoning might be in store. The actor Omar Sy published a petition in Le Nouvel Observateur, imploring France, “Let us wake up… let us have the courage to denounce police violence in France,” which drew a hundred thousand signatures in a single day. And it felt unprecedented when Christiane Taubira, the former minister of justice—and a uniquely progressive voice among politicians in France—appeared on Quotidien that week and patiently explained the mechanics of systemic racism; the host, Yann Barthes, seemed to squirm a bit, but he wasn’t prepared to refute what she said. Assa appeared on the show as well, and Taubira addressed her directly. “You are our chance,” she said.
Back in Paris that night after the protest, bars were open for terrace service for the first time since before the pandemic, and, despite a lot of lockdown-era pontificating about le monde d’apres, it looked very much as if the French middle class now crowding around bottles of wine wanted nothing more than for things to return to normal.
So far, no such luck. The country is in lockdown once again, but Assa is still in the streets, with thousands of supporters behind her.
Minkey: A Story of Life and Death
Say it happened this way.
We got the monkey on the way home from a dispiriting visit to the doctor. At precisely the moment we were most susceptible to it, we saw an ad for monkeys in a variety of sizes and inquired without delay. The doctor had said that barring the sort of miracle for which there is no scientific explanation my wife and I could consider it out of the question to ever conceive a child. He knew that we could not afford to adopt, having paid his exorbitant fees out of pocket. I’d said to him that that struck me as a rather irreligious thing to say and he asked me if I was a religious man and I said that I wasn’t personally religious but that I’d read a lot about it and understood why it would offend someone who was personally religious to hear the doctor’s dismissive tone when speaking of religious matters. He blinked theatrically. Further to that, I said, as a matter of professionalism I didn’t think his dismissive tone was any kind of way to speak to a patient with whose genitalia he was intimately familiar, as indeed he was with both the genitalia of myself and my wife. Adopting a bearing of finality, he said that my wife and I could count on never conceiving a child whether we put ourselves in the hands of science or the hands of Any Higher Power However We Conceived Him. Him or Her, I said. Further to that, I said, was it not a tiny bit redundant to specify that a miracle was without scientific explanation? The doctor had a twitchy mustache, and a nice round head. He suggested that we felt more for each other than most people could hope to feel in a lifetime. Was this not enough, he asked, and we told him that it was not. He said, not undismissively, that we should consider getting a pet.
We chose the smallest monkey available. The woman who sold them had braided hair, and her rooms were divided by bead curtains. Does he have a name, we asked her, and she said that he did not have a name, and that there was no need to whisper. She promised us that this small, unnamed monkey was nevertheless fully grown, would not get larger over time, would not undergo any terrific hormonal shifts or transformations of personality. He was not a baby monkey, in other words. Nevertheless, we swaddled him. If it made us uneasy when he looked at us with his big brown eyes, damp with feeling, and said frankly that if it was all the same to us he would prefer not to be swaddled or restrained in any way—well, we had by that point learned to accommodate a little uneasiness. Swaddling calms you, we told him, the wisdom of which he seemed to accept.
And for a time there was solace in holding this tiny monkey in our arms, pacing the floors of our cramped apartment, feeling the warmth of his small body, its fragility, his utter helplessness. In his tiny monkey face, we could see the pleasure he took in being left by the window, or the television, or the radio, with which he could converse happily for hours. As he slept, my wife and I held each other in each other’s arms, as we had not done for years, and watched him. There was solace in this, too. When the monkey woke we fed him apple slices, and ginger ale, and took him to the monkey park, held him in our laps to watch the other monkeys play. We said to each other that the reason we wanted children in the first place was the tremendous fondness that existed between us. We named him Minkey, after the Peter Sellers gag, because it would be easy to remember.
The years that followed were happy years. We made love more, my wife and I, more often and with more vigor than we had at any other point in the long term of our companionship. This was a further solace. Minkey remained tiny, as promised, though we swaddled him less and less, permitted him to roam. He roamed the tops of shelves, the tops of tables, the toilet tank, the cabinets and cupboards. The ants that marched in rows along the window-frames he ate one-by-one, with feeling, as if trying to discern some essential difference between them. Chattering all the while. He was curious in the way of all monkeys, in the way of all living things, but in his case this was especially charming. He sometimes caught us making love, his curiosity about which charmed us to no end.
Our friends and colleagues were supportive, but didn’t necessarily understand our having bought a monkey, didn’t necessarily understand the dynamics of our family life. To a certain extent this tension was inevitable. You judge us, we said, because we treat our Minkey with a love and devotion equal to or greater than the love and devotion you afford your own children. You resent us because while your children are growing older every day, moving ever away from you, refining their contempt for you into a spider’s silk, our Minkey adores us and respects us and depends upon us with a changeless heart.
We don’t begrudge you any of that! they claimed. We’re thrilled to see that you’ve found happiness after so many years of heartbreak!
Our apartment being as small as it was, Minkey naturally heard all of this.
You’re constantly giving us the side-eye! we said. What better sign is there than that of a friend or colleague’s resentment or disdain?
It’s not resentment! they swore up and down. We think it’s creepy that he can talk!
It was true that Minkey could speak and the things he said were not always, had never been, so easy to countenance, as happy as those years were. He had certain ideas about interpersonal relations that were not our own. In wondering where he’d learned them we were reminded that we knew little of his life before we purchased him from the weird hippie lady, about whom he’d say nothing except that he could not imagine another living creature smelling finer. He began to pick the ants off the sill and put them in his mouth not to eat them, but rather to spit them at terrific speeds into the glass, where they’d be killed or knocked unconscious. The change of seasons afflicted him powerfully. He often said during election years that the two-party system was the pinnacle of human stupidity but that no known system of government better reflected the human spirit. Often while we were making love he would make suggestions, which could be distracting, though it must be said that in a few instances the results were spectacular. He kept odd hours, and would sometimes wake us up to report his thoughts, or to ask us if we loved him. Did he not feel loved? we said, the wisdom of which he seemed to accept. We had to ask him not to smoke in the house and he said well then where would we like him to smoke, since we didn’t let him out of the house without his being properly swaddled.
He complained of trouble sleeping and we suggested various techniques for becoming drowsy. Keep your eyes wide open without blinking for as long as you can, we told him. Repeat your name to yourself until you cease to recognize it. Start at your birth, we said, and tell yourself the story of your life in every detail you can remember. He stopped flushing the toilet, and it was easy enough for us to flush it ourselves, but when we did, he’d become sullen. He spent hours bathing himself, so that we were forced to choose between missing appointments, or showing up for appointments unwashed. What had we thought would happen, he claimed to want to know, if we bought a Minkey and brought him home to live with us? Our limbs were growing stiff, it was becoming more difficult for us to rise from chairs. The connection between us was undiminished, but sometimes, when in the late-afternoon my wife was slumped over asleep in her wingback chair, and Minkey was in the shower, I’d find myself looking at photographs we’d kept from the period before we knew him; in these photos my wife was radiant in a kind of longing that I recognized, and which I found myself wishing we could return to, the peculiar sadness of still thinking that despite the odds you might eventually get everything you want from life, that what you want from life is the same as what you think you want from life, that desire of any kind is any more than a form of decay. Her face now was ravaged by gravity, my wife, and by worry over Minkey, who was eating less and talking more. As was my own face, it should be said—indeed.
His suggestions about our lovemaking became demands, became bolder, more depraved, and, as we were not as limber as we had been previously, increasingly difficult to fulfill. We protested that people who really loved each other could not do to each other the sorts of things he required us to do. He blinked theatrically, and we found ourselves trying to explain what we meant by people, love, really. He said that the possibility of real love was as remote as the possibility that a race of aliens would arrive to rescue us from our ruined planet.
The possibility of aliens is a near certainty, we exclaimed, in the context of an infinite universe!
But in the context of an infinite universe, Minkey said, what are the chances that those aliens will ever find us? What would the point be if they did? He said that what we were describing as love was fear. By which he seemed to mean something about the scientifically confirmed isolation of existence that it was love’s purported aim to transcend.
He’s not right, my wife whispered later. Us meeting and falling in love is a miracle for which there is no scientific explanation.
I came to believe that this was the illusion upon which our lives depended. Our mobility only decreased, and it must be said that Minkey in this at least was gracious. He brought us our meals, changed our bedpans, applied ointment to our mattress sores. But he also took the opportunity to smoke indoors with impunity, and had frequent guests, many of whom he seemed to know from the time before we knew him, monkeys and non-monkeys alike. They’d have wild parties, Minkey would throw pillowcases over the lamps, for atmosphere, and they’d take drugs of every description. They’d sit on the edge of our bed, ignoring us, and they were young, these partygoers, younger even than Minkey, and in them my wife and I recognized that sadness that had been ours.
We did love each other, my wife and I, and we were not afraid. In the tumult of these parties, we began to tell each other the stories of our own lives, from beginning to end, including the comparably short time before we knew each other. Start at birth, we said, and tell me everything you can remember from that point forward. It was certain by then that we were close to death. The room was continually full of monkeys, they were more or less permanently installed, and people too, a rotating cast, including the weird hippie lady with braided hair, who sat on the bed and seemed to register our presence with a glimmer of recognition.
Hey Minkey, she called across the room, how much will you take for these two?
Chris Knapp's work has appeared in print at the Paris Review, the New England Review, and online at n + 1 and Granta, among others. He has been a work-study scholar at the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, and earned his MFA in creative writing at University of Virginia. He lives in Paris with his wife, where he teaches in the journalism and new media programs at the Sorbonne.
