Shelf Monkey (24 page)

“How about a smoke bomb?” suggested Andrew. “I looked it up online, not hard to make. Stinky, too.” This garnered several stoned yelps of approval.

“We could hide in the audience with water balloons,” offered Tracey. “Maybe fill them with paint, write something on them, Death to Munroe or something, maybe literary quotations? Aubrey, you could hide a few in your hat.”

Aubrey waved off the suggestion. “Page isn’t gonna let me even near the building that day, so forget about that. Kilgore and Yossarian neither, Munroe’s security will see to that. No, you’re not trying, brothers and sisters. I think we’ll need to go . . .” He stretched his arms apart
“. . . bigger.”

Aubrey had hung back in the corner for the first while, sitting cross-legged and idly scratching Margarita behind her ears, listening to the frankly inane ideas lob themselves about the room. It had been silly fun for the first hour or so, beer and plots flowing at equal measure, joints casually passed from mouth to mouth. Enough smoke had filled the room to qualify it as an environmental hazard. We started with the mundane yet rational approaches, the time-honoured highjinks of our forefathers: protesting outside the store barring him entrance, surreptitiously tripping him as he strode down the aisle to the stage, spitballs shot from various stealthy angles, having pizzas delivered to his hotel room, setting off the fire alarm. William had been pushing his pie idea ever since Aubrey opened the floor to suggestions. My own half-hearted idea, to cut the power in the building, plunging the production into darkness, was summarily dismissed as boring, an act of sabotage too easily rectified, not nearly flashy enough. Which it wasn’t, of course, but I couldn’t think of another act of any sufficient magnitude that wouldn’t get us all into heaps of legal trouble. Dumping pig’s blood on Munroe from the rafters was put up for a vote from Susan, but the idea was abandoned when Danae
remarked that not only did
READ
not
have any rafters from which to attach said bucket of porcine plasma, but were it to succeed, there might be some copyright infringement issues forthcoming by legal representatives of the Stephen King estate. It was all so goddamned silly, plotting our petty vengeances. Nerds living out their
Dungeons & Dragons
fantasies, planning the dreaded bully’s demise through a six-sided die and level 12 charisma. I dared to hope Aubrey’s previous madness had passed itself on, his mania the result of an undigested piece of Dickensian beef or glob of mustard.

“Ideas, everyone, ideas!” Aubrey said. He picked up a beer, his seventh or eighth of the evening judging by the bottles scattered about him, and chugged down a healthy amount. “You’re not going far enough, people. This is not some simple-minded politician who deserves a pathetic comedic comeuppance. A laugh on the news. The act must not be allowed to overshadow its purpose. This is Munfreakinroe. When the antichrist comes to town to claim our souls, brothers and sisters, you had best believe spitballs, pies, and water balloons are not going to dissuade him from his agenda of destruction. We want our position to be loud and clear.
Vi et armis,
everyone. By force and arms we shall prevail. We don’t want humiliation. It’s not enough.” He dragged the back of his hand across his mouth. “It’s not nearly enough.”

Cameron raised his hand. “Uh, Aubrey? If it’s not too much trouble, what
do
we want?” He sniggered, sweet smoke drifting from his nostrils.

Aubrey twirled toward Cameron’s voice. That is, his head twirled; his body followed a second later, in that drunken lurch that always signifies that this person may not yet be completely gone, but he’s racing to leave. But as smashed as he was, Aubrey’s dilated eyes were deserts of calm. “What do we want?” he asked quietly. He threw his head back, and yelled at the ceiling, “We! Want!
Justice!”
Aubrey tornadoed himself about the room, screaming
“Justice!”
in a high voice over and over, Warren and others egging him on until he drunkenly toppled over the back of the sofa, collapsing onto Burt’s lap in a belching heap. He rolled off to the floor, tottered unsteadily on his knees, and crept toward Emily, sitting cross-legged by my feet. “Hagar,” he said, something catching in his throat. “Oh,
Hagar, my dear. You’ve suffered so much.”

Emily looked at the rest of us for help. “I don’t know what you mean,” she said, twisting her braids nervously.

“You’ve suffered for what you believe in,” Aubrey said. He took one of her hands as he laid his head atop her legs. “You fought against such ignorance, and you paid for it, didn’t you?”

“Well, yes, I guess I did,” she said. “That is, I was fired, Page fired me for trying to help people.” Aubrey caressed her cheek, his eyes moist. “I just wanted people to read other things is all. All I heard was Munroe, Munroe, and I couldn’t stand it anymore! There’s more to life than him, that’s all I was doing, telling people to consider something else. Try looking beyond the walls he built. Would it have
killed
them to just try?”

“And Page fired you.”

“Yes,” said Emily, looking down at Aubrey accusingly and shoving his head off her lap. “But you could have stopped her! You own the place, too! You fired me! Why didn’t you say anything?”
Yeah,
I almost piped up, but caught Danae throwing me a questioning look, and held myself back.

“I did, Hagar. I tried, but I can’t win every battle. Page threatened to take me to court if I kept it up. I couldn’t risk losing the store. It’s all I have.”

“Bitch,” Warren said.

Aubrey stared at him for a second, and nodded. “Bitch. She, as much as Munroe, is to blame for our predicament.” He struggled to his feet. “We’ve all got stories like this. We’ve all been victims, haven’t we? Teased for reading books. Beaten up for being smart.” The room took on the hushed tone of a cathedral as we took in his oration. “They were afraid of us, because they
knew
we had something they could never have, and they hated us for it. They still do. The world is run by grade 3 bullies, and we still cower near our lockers, hoping they won’t see us.”

“I never went to the washroom all through high school,” said August. “Every time I went in, I’d be cornered by Mark Kilfoyle. Fuckin’ asshole. Every day I tried, he was always there, the same thing, pushing me into the urinal from behind, soaking my pants.” August began to hiccup as he relived the memory. “I’d have, hu, have wet myself ruh, rather than go in.”

We all nodded in commiseration. Ben Monaghan was my school’s particular tormentor in that area. He practically lived in the Boy’s Room, the troll of the toilets, giving swirlies and worse to whoever dared enter his domain, before he was expelled for threatening a teacher with a knife. I saw him years later, driving through downtown Winnipeg in a rusted pickup held together with spit and hope, a bumper sticker proudly proclaiming, “Kill a Queer for Christ.” Sometimes, Eric, you really can tell how a person’s going to end up.

“Marshall Wiebe threw my books in the mud,” said Susan, stuttering slightly at the memory.

“John French pants’d me in choir practice.”

“Ashley Blake made my life hell!”

“Blair Wallace set fire to my locker!”

Once unlocked, it couldn’t be stopped. It became a litany of our lurking demons, a communal release of the ogres who chased us down darkened hallways, destroyed our textbooks, gave us facewashes in urine-soaked snow. The fiends who found it obligatory to influence our formative years, transforming us into silent wraiths in school, and maladjusted individuals in adulthood.

“Chad Wilton!”

“Wesley Richardson!”

“Jason Gordon!”

“Vikram.” That was mine. My personal Grendel, only I was too timid a Beowulf to fight back.

“Dylan Merchant!”

“Crystal Perry!”

Aubrey smiled. “Page Adler.”

“Assholes! Kill ’em all!” yelled Warren, leaping to his feet and commencing the destruction of his bookish ottoman. “The entire fuckin’ school. They all pissed on me ’cause I wouldn’t play basketball or football. Excuse the fuck outta me for wanting to read a book, y’know? It’s like my going to math class was a cardinal sin or something.”

“That’s right, they hated you,” said Aubrey. “They still hate us. They see us reading on the bus, and they laugh. We don’t know who won last night’s game, and they pelt us with shit. They hate us because they know we’re better than them.

“We have to strike back, and this is the time! Time to settle the score! We have the ringleader in our sights, and all we need to do is pull the trigger. It’ll be the Mother of all Punishments, the decisive blow to all those who have lorded over us through brawn over brain.”

“What do you want to do, Aubrey?” asked Danae. “We’ll do it, I swear.” I shifted uneasily as I watched her. I didn’t care for the glimmer of madness her eyes had taken on.

“I say . . .” Aubrey said, then stopped and looked at us. The Monkeys were beaming in eagerness, teeth bared in a feral anticipation of blood. This was the true beginning of the end, right here. Whatever Aubrey said, it was hereby the word, and the word was good. And the word was —

“. . . fatwa.”
He lengthened the word in a whisper of insanity. “The Shelf Monkeys declare a
fatwa
on Munroe Purvis.”

That put a stop to things in a hurry. Aubrey might as well have pulled open his shirt to reveal a chest wired with explosives. Someone laughed after a moment, Tracey, I think, but the others and I just sat there, uncertain. I wanted to say something, crack a joke, good one Aub, now pull the other one. Aubrey just watched us, daring us to rebuke. No one doubted he was serious.

“Fuckin’ awesome,” said Warren.

“Are you insane?” I’d like to lay claim to this statement, by far the sanest thing said all evening, but Cameron had beat me to the punch. My tongue had taken leave for a few moments to gather itself together. My throat constricted in preparation for a panic attack. I patted my pockets for a pill, but hadn’t brought any with me. I settled for a lengthy drag from my spliff instead.

“Yeah.
Fatwa
,” Warren continued, rolling the word over his tongue like an exotic candy. “A price on his head, a reverse Rushdie. Harsh but fair. Maybe we could take out an ad in
Soldier of Fortune
. Anyone know someone with a gun?”

“Whoa, whoa, Aubrey,” said Burt, flapping away a proffered joint from Warren.
“Fatwa?
Dude, I’m not
that
high.”

“Yeah, Aubrey,” said Andrew, putting down his beer, “I mean, fun is fun, but you’re kidding, right? We want to show our outrage, sure, but I’m not about to hurt anyone over it.”

“Outrage?” Aubrey asked. “You want to show outrage, go join
the Manitoba Writers’ Guild, I hear they’re planning to picket the store, for all the good it will do. Anyone can protest! That’s what they expect us to do, because we’re weak. Signs and placards, coffee and doughnuts afterward for a job well done. It makes our point, and no one gets hurt, right? Screw that! What are we? Are we those pathetic souls who believe putting a flag on their SUVs somehow makes them patriotic? A bumper sticker stops the war? Wearing a ribbon cures aids? A letter to the editor constitutes a viable form of protest, a point made? No!” Aubrey barged around the room, Monkeys scrambling to get out of his way. “I am so tired of people who
mean
well. I am tired of people who talk and talk and talk and don’t
do
anything. This is our time! We have to strike! At his heart! He has offended our beliefs, down to the very core of our being.” He reached toward Emily. “This is your chance, Hagar.”

“For what?” she said, slapping his hands away. “Come on, Aubrey! I miss my job and everything, but fuck you, you think I’m doing something that stupid! Pulling a Rushdie? What, I look like a zealot to you?”

“Hagar —”

“Don’t call me that!” she yelled up at him. “That’s a name we use for fun, it’s not who I am. Don’t you know that? I’m not Hagar, you’re not Quixote, we are all just who we are.”

“Okay, everyone just calm down a little,” I said. “Aubrey’s just venting here, like the rest of us. No one is seriously considering this. This is just the alcohol talking, not you. Fun’s fun, and it’s nice to dream, but we’re none of us killers.” I raised my arms upward, exaggerating a stretch of exhaustion with a complimentary
rowlf
of a yawn. “Well, I’ve got to work in the morning. I guess I’ll be motoring on. Anyone give me a ride? Danae?”

“Wait, we can’t leave,” Danae said. “Thomas, stay. We need to discuss this. Aubrey, how would we do it?”

A tiny voice piped up from near the kitchen. “Could we try poison?” asked Susan timidly. “Maybe slip something into his coffee before he goes on, something like that?”

“Now
that’s
thinking big!” Aubrey enthused. Susan shone with pleasure.

“Poison, yeah!” Gavin said. A dismaying number of the Monkeys nodded their agreement. “A few drops, he goes down,
BOOM
!” He mimed Munroe’s crash to the floor with his arm.

“Do you know anything about poison?” I asked, not without sarcasm. Susan shrugged. “Anyone else here an expert on unidentifiable solutions that kill within seconds and leave no trace? No? Warren, you? Gavin? Muriel? No one watches
CSI
for pointers? Gosh, I guess we’re all just whistling out our asses.”

“Thomas, it’s just an idea,” Danae complained. “It doesn’t
have
to be poison. We’ll think of something to do.”

“We’re not doing it!” I shouted. “Christ, Danae, let’s go already. This is just the marijuana smoke. We can all talk about this after Aubrey’s slept it off.” I grabbed our coats, flustered, tossing Danae’s at her.

She batted it aside. “I’m not leaving. This is important to me, Thomas.”

“No, this is important to
him
,” I said, patting down my pockets. Come on, just one little pill, c’mon! A Paxil, a Xanax, a Niravam, anything! Why do I ever leave home without my meds? “What, Aubrey, you’re serious? We’re not terrorists! We don’t start holy wars, we sell books! We’re fucking
nerds
! We fight with words.
We
don’t do things like this, because
we
are the ones who’re supposed to know better!” Shit, here come the shakes. I pistoned my arms into my pockets, let the anxiety manifest itself in a steadily tapping foot. “Danae? Can we go now?”