The Infinite-Monkey Love Machine
- Jun 29, 2018
- 14 min read
by Andrew Mayeda
They put us in a box and made us write. So I went to work, wrote poems. But also grocery lists, thought bubbles, screeds, epistles to the director of the NSA. “Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?” two-thousand six-hundred and forty-nine times. I counted. Then I met Ethel, and everything changed.
It wasn’t love at first sight. She was leaning against a wall, vaping. Smoke rolled from her lips in the shape of moon jellies, Coney-Island carousels, Chinese dragons. Her hair was chopped short on the sides and she wore a checkered work shirt buttoned to the top, and very sensible shoes. Helen of Troy, she is not. But when I close my eyes at night, lying alone, I hear that husky monotone, and I surf it into the blazing forest at the edge of my dreams.
“You’re not supposed to be here,” Ethel said, the first time I heard that voice.
“You mean at these exact geospatial coordinates, or in a more existential sense?” I said.
More smoke, this time in the shape of a stingray. The scent of black cherry Kool-Aid hung in the air. I noticed one of her eyelids was lazy, if that’s possible. It wasn’t clear she was into men that way. That’s cool, because I’m not sure what I’m into, either.
“This is the break area for readers, not writers. You’re supposed to be in the other building. You’re not supposed to wander too far, in case you get distracted. From your writing.”
“I’ve been wondering about that. I don’t see the point of it all.”
“The point is to prove that one of you could reproduce Shakespeare.”
“Did they get his DNA from a quill?”
“They want to see if you churn out something as good as Hamlet. You know, soliloquys to skulls. Iambic pentameter.”
“Iambic pentameter?”
“Fancy flowery stuff. If they put enough chimps like you in a room, and enough time passes, one of you monkeys is bound to write something half decent. Or maybe all of you together will come up with something that doesn’t suck. It’s a theorem.”
“Interesting.”
There was a tree in the courtyard, a maple or something. A crow hopped down from a branch and snatched a crouton-like object. Ethel’s vape resembled a James Bond weapon.
“I guess I wasn’t supposed to tell you that,” she said.
She glanced at the semi-reflective black spheres in the four corners of the courtyard.
“Act surprised,” said Ethel.
“Don’t worry. This conversation never happened.”
A reluctant smile wobbled across her mouth.
Thus our forbidden love was born.
***
Things started making sense after that. Not in an epiphany-type way, but in that slow awkward way you realize you may be flying low. You know what I mean.
Take my job interview. It didn’t go so well. There was the fact I was seven hours late. Owing to the whole Hydrocodone episode the night before. Which melted into the DMT episode. In the morning, seashell noises howled through my head. I looked for the list Dr. Fischer told me to keep on the night stand. It wasn’t on the night stand, so I looked for the list that enumerated likely places to find the original list. Anyway, I couldn’t find either list. I showered and shaved, placing flecks of toilet paper on the bleeding parts. I was half way through breakfast when it occurred to me I should have taken my meds before eating. The howling sounds had migrated to my Cocoa Puffs. I took some pills, but after I finished my cereal, I couldn’t remember how many pills I’d taken, so just to be safe, I doubled the dose. That made me happy but a little woozy, which I blame for only wearing one sock to the interview. I felt so embarrassed, sitting in the middle of the room on a fold-up chair, my left ankle exposed. I thought my neckwear was cool: an extra-wide brown tie showing Yoda giving the finger. On second thought, a more demure option may have been appropriate. Never trust a dealer named Hawk to give you sartorial advice.
None of it bothered the interview lady. She had violet hair and a bulky knit scarf that was supposed to look folksy but seemed expensive. She kept smiling really hard, even when I told her I had no experience. In retrospect, I guess that should have been a red flag. But I needed the work. I’d eaten the last of the Cocoa Puffs, and the fridge was empty except for a bottle of ketchup and two cans of Miller High Life. I checked. Mom threatened to cancel Netflix if I didn’t get a job.
They hired me on the spot.
“Check in at security when you arrive and they’ll give you a badge. Someone will show you to your desk,” said the woman in the scarf.
“Let me get this straight. You want me to sit there and write.”
”Exactly.”
“Whatever pops to mind?”
“Whatever pops to mind. Don’t overthink it.”
“Piece of cake.”
“That’s the spirit!”
The campus was a bunch of glass boxes. Some had concrete tops. My building had a bright lobby with a dark stone reception slab. They had kale chips and pineapple smoothies in the pantry. There was a hangar next door where you could play badminton. My desk was in this massive room with row on row of white polymer desks and ergonomically wonderful chairs. The guy next to me was named Rex. He had soulful eyes and a salt-and-pepper beard. He was peeling a grapefruit and looking at the ceiling.
The machine on the desk had a grey metal body and “Remington” engraved in gold script above the white keys.
“What the hell is this?” I said.
“Reckon it’s a typewriter,” said Rex, still contemplating the ceiling. He spoke with an earthy drawl.
“Is this some kind of joke?”
“That’s what I thought at first. Still haven’t decided.”
There was a stack of paper on the desk. I fed a sheet through the roller and played with the keys. They had a nice weight and a pleasing way of bouncing back against your fingertips. They made a wet snapping sound that I liked.
All work and no play makes … This old man, he played one … It was a dark and stormy night …
That’s when I heard it. Snap snap snap snap snap ding thwuck. I closed my eyes and listened until the clatter of 489 typewriters bloomed into a storm of dragonflies.
***
I tried to get back to the courtyard where I met Ethel, but I couldn’t remember the way. Owing to the breakfast bong hits. Followed by the bag of Funyuns and the Eggos with whipped cream and chocolate sauce. I could hear Mom playing chess in her room. Clop clop clop ping, slapping the clock and walking to the other side of the board. Give her credit: Mom never lost. Clop clop clop ping. This all happened around 3:30 a.m., before I started the Twin Peaks marathon. Let’s just say I wasn’t at my best when I got to the office. I wandered into a meeting on fire safety. I played some ping pong. There was another room with typewriters, bigger than ours. The white desks and frosted privacy panels extended to the vanishing point. I took the stairs to the basement. Passed a lot of exposed wiring and a guy in coveralls chewing on a toothpick. Popped up in a cafeteria, and there was Ethel.
“Oh, hey,” she said.
She was having a summer-sausage sandwich with mustard, along with carrot sticks, two mini Babybel cheeses, and a red-delicious apple.
I applauded her for packing a wholesome lunch.
She’s a blocker on a roller-derby team called the Bad Mama Jamas.
Her best friend was in a suicide cult, and Ethel couldn’t convince her to quit in time.
She doesn’t mind silence.
She doesn’t laugh much, but when she does, it tumbles out of her lungs.
She drives a black Dodge Charger she restored.
She was home schooled until the age of 16.
They picked on her in the cafeteria until she beat a kid unconscious with a tray.
She makes her own beer.
She has a pet turtle named Jeff she saved from the road.
She visits her friend’s grave every March.
I watched her walk to the garbage to toss her apple core, her boxy hips seesawing in her boot-cut khakis. I marveled at her solidity, the way her broad feet connected to the floor, and a weird tingle surged in my body that I couldn’t pinpoint as lust or envy.
“You can’t come here anymore,” she said, applying hypoallergenic lip balm. “There’s a cafeteria on your side. They have fish tacos.”
I wondered if I was just lonely.
***
Sometimes I think: What if I am the second coming of Shakespeare? I checked out the guy’s Wikipedia page. It’s uncanny how much we have in common. I have a mysterious past too. Mom’s story about my father always changed, and when I kept asking, she threw a vodka bottle that missed my head and knocked the hamster’s cage off the beer fridge. Poor Bubbles. Then there’s Shakespeare’s crazy imagination. Again: same here. You wouldn’t believe the dreams I have. The other night I was walking inside a Rubik’s Cube and the squares lit up as I stepped on them and I knew this giant rabid alpaca was chasing me, even though I didn’t turn around, and when I got to the center of the cube, there was row after row of chimpanzees sitting at desks, hitting the keys with one finger or scratching their heads. Sometimes both. The center of the Rubik’s Cube was a huge hall with a bunch of chimps clacking away at typewriters, and at the end of the hall, there was a great rainbow-colored staircase and Ethel was sitting on a golden throne and I could tell what she was saying, even though her head was in the shape of a question mark and she had the body of a toad dressed in a roller-derby uniform. She was saying, “Fix the machine from within.” Only a genius could dream that.
Sometimes I walk into sidewalk signs.
Hawk gave me his copy of the complete illustrated works of Shakespeare.
I sat at my desk, eating roasted chick peas dusted with paprika. I thought about Ethel, and the next thing I know I was hammering the keys on the typewriter.
What if I compared you to a can of Pringles?
You’re delicious and maybe even saltier.
No, no, no. Too commercial.
What if I compared you to Mom’s meatloaf?
Too complicated.
What if I compared you to an asphalt paver?
You’re down to earth and unstoppable.
Bingo.
Then I hit a seam, and the stuff almost wrote itself.
Bae’s eyes ain’t no pools of chocolate sauce
Her lips are kind of pale and puffy.
That blotch on her arm is a little weird.
Her hair would be great for scouring sinks.
Set up the turn, set up the turn. Or the volta, as Hawk calls it.
My girl, when she walks, walks on the ground.
But dang, I’ll take that any day
Over some Photoshopped bullshit.
As I was freestyling, a middle manager with sophisticated eyeglass frames appeared at the edge of my vision and knit his brow in confusion or approval. Rex was staring too. I tried not to let it affect my flow.
Hey, what’s that funky thing in the corner?
It’s a lamp, and Ethel’s the lava.
That night I dreamed Ethel was lying in her bed in her roller-derby uniform, savoring one of the 332 poems I wrote her.
Sorry, 333. I counted.
***
They came from the badminton court. They came from their beanbag chairs. They interrupted the debate on I/O troubleshooting. They came from their huddle on making the world a better place. They came from restrooms and elevator trysts and HR. They hovered as the pile of blank paper on my desk shrunk, and the pile of typewritten pages grew like a really good game of Jenga.
“You’re on fire, man,” said Rex, his jaw slack. “I’ve only seen it once in my 16 years at the company.”
I started with Richard III. Set it on Mars, gave it a culinary twist. “Now is the winter of our mild heartburn” and so forth. Moved on to A Midsummer Night’s Dream and flipped the script so all the characters are donkeys, and Puck gives Bottom a human head. I fast-forwarded Macbeth to the present, dropped them all in this really cut-throat Wall Street firm, and made Lady Macbeth the CEO, because she was always the brains of the operation, right? I hammered out a draft of Hamlet: Man of Action, which I think is less of a downer than the original. I wrote an elaborate version of The Tempest, where the actors step into the audience, then chat with the ushers and the box-office staff and mingle with the parking-lot attendants and the people on the sidewalk until the fourth wall reaches the North Pole and the whole world is Prospero’s island. Not sure I pulled it off. The rest are definitely improvements. For one thing, they’re a lot shorter.
I looked up, and a crowd of people were gawking at me and whispering to each other. Rex was leaning back against the contoured mesh of his ergonomic chair, snapping an elastic band. The manager with the sophisticated frames walked up, placed an espresso on my desk, and nodded. The room was filled with the racket of typewriter keys, and the espresso tasted sludgy, but something was different. Everything seemed possible.
“Keep this up, kid, and the bosses are going to be very happy. That’s good for all of us,” said Rex.
“I’m just doing what I was told to do. They assigned me this desk and told me to write.”
“You’re making all the right moves, kid. People are noticing. Don’t stop now.”
“Who do we work for, anyway?”
“It’s a complex corporate structure. Autonomous, in some ways.”
I tilted my bag of roasted chickpeas and shook it, but it was empty.
“Who was the person you were talking about? The one who went on a roll 16 years ago?”
Rex wrapped the elastic around his forefinger and thumb like a slingshot, and flung an imaginary pebble at the skylight. “You’re looking at him, kid.”
I fed a clean sheet into the roller. I turned the knob until the top of the sheet peeked out the other side. I stared at the page a long time. I tapped random keys. I crossed and uncrossed my legs, and cleared my throat. I didn’t like the way the folds of my shirt were bunching around my chest, but every time I adjusted my shirt, I only became more aware of the uncomfortable friction against my skin. A bead of sweat trickled down my ribs.
I pushed back my chair and speedwalked to the restroom. I got caught between two guys at the urinals, so it took me forever to go pee. I did the whole staring-at-the-wall thing until they left. I washed my hands six times and splashed water on my face.
“What if I don’t want to be The One? Or one of the ones who make up the One?” I said to myself. “What if I just want to watch Netflix, hang out in my room, and commute to a simple, non-stressful job? Clock in, write some shit, clock out?” A stall door opened and a guy in a Viking beard looked at me funny. Guess I was talking out loud.
I plucked a long white hair from the rim of my ear, and tried to examine it between my fingers. But I couldn’t make it out, so I pounded the counter with my fist instead.
It’s her fault. If she hadn’t told me why I’m here, none of this would bother me. I wouldn’t feel the pressure to produce something beautiful. More than beautiful, something for all time. Words that echo across the cosmos. I wouldn’t have worried about Shakespeare. Hawk would still have his complete illustrated works, and I wouldn’t be haunted by the cool dark shadow of the Bard, that absurd neck bulge stalking me everywhere. I would just lounge in my ergonomically spectacular chair and let it flow, feeling the cool concave plastic certainty of the keys under my fingers. Who cares what comes out on the page? Why worry if it’s genius? All that matters is I showed up. I clocked in, and at some point I’ll clock out, and none of the stuff in between would have been such a big deal if Ethel hadn’t stuck her nose in it.
I couldn’t shake the image in my head of Ethel atop her throne, surveying a sea of chimps at their typewriters. I couldn’t stop thinking: fix the machine from within?
***
I was running through the halls. I passed a guy driving a pink Power Wheels Barbie Escalade and a woman walking a rooster, but for some reason everyone was staring at me. I stopped and leaned against the railing. Owing to the 11 years of smoking, hard drugs and no exercise. My head was pounding and it felt like I was coming down with a fever. I pushed off the railing and scampered down the hall until I came to a fork and took a left. Almost bowled over a dude pushing a cart of sushi. Tiptoed through a high-school field trip, tumbled into a book-club meeting. Assured them Eat, Pray, Love was one of my all-time favs, apologized and retraced my steps. I barged through the door to the stairs.
I needed to get out.
I flew down the stairs and bounced around the basement. Staggered through the concrete bowels until I came to a woman in an oxygen mask doing a cardio test on a stationary bike. Gave her a high five and tore down another set of stairs to find another basement with random numbers on the walls. Two guys in lab coats were pushing a white board toward me. I jumped in an elevator and pressed “M.”
The door opened upon a great barrel-vaulted hall. There were shelves stacked with black-spined books. Rows of desks stretched as far as the eye could see. The desks were separated by frosted privacy panels, and each workstation had an elegant steel lamp with an adjustable neck. Hundreds of men and women sat at the desks, reading books with black spines. The room throbbed with library silence.
The elevator doors closed behind me. I trotted along the rows, craning my neck to look for an exit. A woman with chains on her glasses stared down at me from the second floor. My foot caught on something and I hit the floor hard. It was the strap of an office bag, black and practical. I looked up and there was Ethel.
“Are you OK?” she said.
“Fine, totally fine.”
“I heard something crunch when you hit the deck.”
“Nothing I can’t handle.” I brushed off my track pants and tried to mess up my hair in a cool way. She was wearing blue feline glasses that were the wrong shape for her face, which is round. She was reading a book with a black spine. The pages were lined with black type.
“Chimps aren’t monkeys. They’re apes,” I said.
“Sorry?”
“Don’t worry. It’s a common mistake. Also, why did you have to spoil the experiment? I mean, I never even knew it was an experiment. Now things are all stressful and serious. There are all these expectations, and I feel like I have to deliver. All I wanted was for Mom not to cancel Netflix.”
“I didn’t spoil anything. You weren’t supposed to be there. In the courtyard that day.”
My stomach jumped. I could feel my feet sweating. She remembered.
“And you’re not supposed to be here now,” she added, and turned back to her book.
“Fine, ignore me. You’ve already ruined me,” I said.
“Ruined you? Do you think this is easy for me? We sit here all day, and they expect us to notice the tiniest flash of genius in the floes of slush. Every book, exactly the same. Black spine, 20-pound bond, one-inch margin, 12-point size, FF Trixie font. Sometimes the writing is mildly entertaining, but usually it’s drivel. Boilerplate thriller trash. Or bleak Carveresque vignettes of unshaven men drinking at windows. Occasionally it’s poetry, the most ham-fisted saccharine nonsense. Sometimes the pages are blank. Once I read 1,430 straight blank pages. Almost made me miss the poetry. It’s easier to plow through it when you don’t know who’s writing it. Then I met you. Now every time I read a clunky semi-literate sonnet, I wonder if it might be yours.”
The blood was thudding in my temples. I wanted to carefully remove her glasses so I didn’t hurt her hair, sweep away everything on her desk, and do bad stuff to her. Or let her do bad stuff to me. On the desk. Or the floor. You know what I mean.
“I could leave a hint, so you know it’s me,” I said. “I’m told my verse has a certain cadence.”
“But the probability — the chances of me picking what you wrote. They’re infinitesimal.”
The librarian with the chained glasses was shushing us, from her perch on the second floor.
I nodded at the librarian and looked down at Ethel.
Ethel’s eyes were glistening with meaning, a meaning I took as an invitation, maybe even a dare, her index finger resting on the tip of her magnificent bulbous lips.
“Shhhhhhh,” she said. “Talk is cheap.”
***
The ringing filled the room, like the sound of a little man pounding a bell with a brass hammer in my inner ear. A male voice blared from the speakers. Apparently this was not a drill. Which most people seemed to believe, since they were flooding toward the exits. I walked against the flow, grabbing a bag of seaweed strips from the pantry. A musky scent lingered in the air that may have been panic. I nearly collided with Rex as I reached my desk. The pages under his arm were slipping out and drifting to the floor in gentle parabolas. His pupils were tight, and his bottom lip was trembling.
“C’mon kid, gotta go,” he said. “Party’s over.”
“This is what they want,” I said. “They want us to fix it.”
I smiled. Something was tugging on my arm, then it wasn’t.
There was lots of noise and commotion, until there wasn’t.
I slid the carriage to the right. I stared at the page.
I closed my eyes and gave in to the bright warm wave rising out of nothing.
Andrew Mayeda is a journalist based in Washington, D.C., where he covers trade policy. He was born and raised in Toronto.
