The monkey who didn’t write Hamlet
JoJo wrote Hamlet.
JoJo, eater of his own feces. JoJo, chronic and violent masturbator. JoJo, the idiot in a room of a thousand particularly dimwitted monkeys.
Yes, JoJo, my moronic deskmate in chains for three years, accidentally composed the greatest work of literature created by man—an outcome the Masters believed would not occur for eons, if it happened at all. Thus, the Grand Monkey Experiment concluded: well before the heat death of the universe, and with a terrible party.
Everyone was invited, by virtue of the fact that we were already there, shackled to our typewriters. Nevertheless, it was a surprise, for the Masters entered the room well before dinner banana that day. Believing they were to be fed early, my fellow inmates began to shriek, until one of the Masters pressed a button, and the plastic-metallic tubes that preserve us and also keep us under control, kept us under control.
The tallest Master spoke. “One of you has done it. One of you has typed Hamlet!”
For a moment, I panicked. He’d spoken. In English! As if he’d thought we—or perhaps one of us in particular—would understand him. Had I revealed my secret by somehow typing Hamlet in my sleep? I began almost to hope so, if only for the bragging rights.
But the Master must have spoken impulsively. For it was JoJo’s chains that fell away, and his tubes that hoisted him up and over the rest of us, as the Masters clapped and shouted his name. Then they returned JoJo to his seat next to me, distributed three bananas to each monkey, and played music over the speakers that sounded as if it had been written to accompany the torture of children.
Too furious to eat, I watched JoJo and seethed. The imbecile dancing beside me, cramming his face with mush, was being celebrated for a blunder, an incomprehensibly fortunate mistake. I alone understood the implications: JoJo’s thrashing had ended the experiment and won us our freedom. The brute had stolen my glory!
For, you surely see, I am an educated monkey, schooled not only in the English language but also in its greatest practitioners. Three years ago, the Masters captured me outside my caretaker’s compound, believing me to be wild, and brought me here. I protested emphatically, but, as always, what sounded like the Queen’s English in my head, emerged from my mouth as King Kong’s.
So, you see, I could’ve written Hamlet. I could’ve written MacBeth. I could’ve writtenOthello, The Tempest, King Lear, and The Merry goddamn Wives of Windsor before lunch banana on the first day.
But I refused. For I’d been delivered a blessing. At last, after years of study, I had the opportunity to free myself and my brothers, not by aping a man’s art, but by developing a monkey’s literature! If I wished to be the simian Shakespeare, I would need time to perfect my craft. Bound to a desk and sustained by tubes, I had aneternity. I would write the Bard’s Hamlet, someday, but not until I’d written my own.
Then JoJo not only dashed my ambitions, he also shat on my three celebratory bananas. All the while laughing at me, as he always did, as if my very existence were an unceasingly hilarious joke. I began to feel he might be right; that, for once, JoJo had understood something, and I hadn’t.
Overwhelmed by the mess, the Masters sent in a cleaning crew, rather than the usual vacuum robots. As they disposed of JoJo’s piles of waste, they discussed how the end of the experiment would leave them without employment. I cared not, until one of them departed and said to the other, “See you in the morning.”
An idea dawned. If we were to remain overnight, I could yet have a chance at glory greater than JoJo’s. Over the years I had completed nearly two-thirds of a multiple-streams-of-consciousness chronicle of one baboon troop’s revelatory summer, calledMates. I had written new chapters, memorized them, then destroyed them each day to hide the evidence of my genius. But, given the night and my 302-w.p.m. typing speed, I could complete Mates in one fell swoop and deliver it to the Masters in the morning.
I began. The words spilled onto the pages, soaking them with ink. And when the Masters shut off the lights, I typed in the dark. JoJo, angry at losing sleep, swiped at me, but I hissed and kicked back at him, for the first time in my life. For the first time in his, he ceased.
Hours later—or was it mere minutes, as I felt it to be?—the Masters turned on the lights, and I typed the final word of the novel: “sky.” As they unchained my fellow prisoners, I pricked myself and made some small, final corrections using my blood. JoJo watched me, fascinated.
At last, they reached our desk. They ignored me and greeted JoJo as if he understood them, but I sat tall, with my carefully straightened manuscript in my hands. Soon, they would understand.
They released JoJo first. As they led him from the room, he turned to me and spat. I did not spit back. The chains and tubes fell from my body and I looked into the visor of the Master before me, smiled, and held forth a nascent literature.
“Thank you,” he said. Then he took my novel, smiled, and dumped it in the waste bin behind him.
I bit his fucking ear off.
Notes