Monkey Business

On Tuesday, November 6, during a presidential election that many consider disastrous, forty-three monkeys escaped from a research facility in Yemassee, South Carolina. A red state, as you probably know.

This really happened. Maybe it doesn’t mean anything, but it feels symbolic, don’t you think? Symbolic of what, you’re probably asking, and that’s an interesting question. Of people wanting to escape the country? Lots of people have been talking about that since the election results came in. Or of monkey business, corrupt shenanigans so widespread they’ve become business as usual? Or of the government-sponsored death of science? It occurs to me that the minute reality becomes symbolic, it can mean just about anything.

Unfortunately, half the country doesn’t view the election as a disaster, or monkeys as politically significant. I’m in the half that does. I’m a fifty-something white woman who works in an office in Salt Lake City, Utah, with an eighty-something mother in a retirement home in, maybe you guessed it, South Carolina. We talk on the phone a few times a week, and I have to tell you, it’s wearing, since she’s always complaining about something—mostly things I can’t change or things I could change by calling the retirement home administrators if she’d let me, but she doesn’t.

“They’re thieves, all of them,” she says, since she objects to paying for just about everything. It’s true, the place is expensive, but my brother and I decided she had enough money in the bank, if she doesn’t live until a hundred, and it feels calculating to even think about that, but I figure lots of middle-aged people with aging parents are making exactly the same calculations. So it’s expensive, but it comes with a lot of amenities, really, it’s a lot fancier than the condo where I’m living, and it doesn’t surprise me that they charge extra for the hair salon, or taxis, or trips to the movies, and monitor their over-the-counter medications. But she sputters with fury and rants against them all. Incompetents. Money-grubbers. Fools. Idiots.

The local authorities have told residents to keep their doors and windows closed and to exercise caution until all of the monkeys are rounded up, and my mother has decided that the retirement complex is responsible both for the monkey jailbreak and for capturing the errant monkeys.

“What do they have to do with the research facility?” I ask, and she answers, her tone mysterious: “You’d be surprised.” My mother watches a lot of TV and she’s fond of conspiracy theories, and on the one hand, it’s really annoying, but on the other hand, I have to admire the way she makes her boring life interesting. I mean, what if there are Soviet moles in the retirement complex? Or a pedophile ring at the diner downtown? What if her neighbor really was abducted by aliens? Or there’s a “deep state” tapping her phone?

“I’ll open my windows if I want to,” she fumes, though she never opens her windows usually. In fact, she keeps her blinds closed because she’s afraid the sun will fade the upholstery on her couch and chairs. That’s just one reason it’s depressing to visit her. You can imagine more reasons. I’d describe myself as a mild-mannered person, but my mother can make me hysterical within just fifteen minutes. Especially in person, when I’m trapped in her independent living condo facing her theories and judgments.

“I need you here,” she says now. “Are you really going to leave me alone with all these monkeys on the loose?”

That’s exactly what I intend to do.

“I don’t know what I could do, Mom,” I say. “I’m sure they’re looking out for the residents in your complex. Nothing’s going to happen to you.”

“Do you know how many monkeys there are?” she says.

“How many?” I say, even though I know.

“They’re saying forty, but I’m hearing a lot more. A lot more,” she says. Of course. “They don’t want people to panic, but the monkeys are going to take over the town. They were breeding a master race at that science place. That’s what they say.”

An interesting theory. What if they were to take over state and national politics? Could they make things any worse? I don’t say that to my mother, because talking about politics is a close second to talking about family—my brother’s wife, for example, or my late father’s sister. Or my ex-husband, the “philanderer.” She still begrudges every penny they spent on my wedding. As you can imagine, she’s got decades of grievances stored up.

“I’ll keep an eye on the news,” I tell my mother. “Let me know if you hear more too.”

“Oh, it won’t be on the news,” she says. “They’ll be hiding the truth, as usual.”

“You’ve got that necklace with a button to call the paramedics if a monkey attacks you,” I say. “Throw away your bananas.”

“Oh my god,” she says. “I can change my will, you know. I don’t have to put up with your sick sense of humor.”

Let her change her will. There won’t be any money left by the time she dies anyway.

“I’ll talk to you later this week, Mom. Got to run.”

Let the new administration decide to deport old people. Let them take away their Social Security and health insurance. Let fornicating monkeys descend on my mother’s retirement complex and multiply. Let dead birds rain from the sky and gasping fish litter the beaches. Let the apocalypse begin. She voted for it.