“How can she be so smart and talented,” Bobby demanded, “and then…this?”
“Maybe you are Kahuna,” I said.
“This isn’t funny,” he said, which was a striking statement, because to one degree or another, everything was funny to Bobby.
In the moonlight, the dune grass drooped, no blade so much as trembling in the now windless night. The soft rhythm of the surf, rising from the beach below, was like the murmured chanting of a distant, prayerful crowd.
This Pia business was fascinating, but understandably, I was more interested in the monkeys.
“These last few years,” Bobby said, “with this New Age stuff from Pia…well, sometimes it’s okay, but sometimes it’s like spending days in radical churly-churly.”
Churly-churly is badly churned-up surf heavy with sand and pea gravel, which smacks you in the face when you walk into it. This is not a pleasant surf condition.
“Sometimes,” Bobby said, “when I get off the phone with her, I’m so messed up, missing her, wanting to be with her…I could almost convince myself she is Kaha Huna. She’s so sincere. And she doesn’t rave on about it, you know. It’s this quiet thing with her, which makes it even more disturbing.”
“I didn’t know you got disturbed.”
“I didn’t know it, either.” Sighing, scuffing at the sand with one bare foot, he began to make the connection between Pia and the monkeys: “When I saw the monkey at the window the first time, it was cool, made me laugh. I figured it was someone’s pet that got loose…but the second time I saw more than one. And it was as weird as all this Kaha Huna shit, because they weren’t behaving at all like monkeys.”
“What do you mean?”
“Monkeys are playful, goofing around. These guys…they weren’t playful. Purposeful, solemn, creepy little geeks. Watching me and studying the house, not out of curiosity but with some agenda.”
“What agenda?”
Bobby shrugged. “They were so strange….”
Words seemed to fail him, so I borrowed one from H. P. Lovecraft, for whose stories we’d had such enthusiasm when we were thirteen: “Eldritch.”
“Yeah. They were eldritch to the max. I knew no one was going to believe me. I almost felt I was hallucinating. I grabbed a camera but couldn’t get a picture. You know why?”
“Thumb over the lens?”
“They didn’t want to be photographed. First sight of the camera, they ran for cover, and they’re insanely fast.” He glanced at me, reading my reaction, then looked to the dunes again. “They knew what the camera was.”
I couldn’t resist: “Hey, you’re not anthropomorphizing them, are you? You know—ascribing human attributes and attitudes to animals?”
Ignoring me, he said, “After that night, I didn’t put the camera away in the closet. I kept it on a kitchen counter, close at hand. If they showed up again, I figured I might get a snapshot before they realized what was happening. One night about six weeks ago, it was pumping eight-footers with a good offshore, barrel after barrel, so even though it was way nipple out there, I put on my wet suit and spent a couple of hours totally tucked away. I didn’t take the camera down to the beach with me.”
“Why not?”
“I hadn’t seen the damn monkeys in a week. I figured maybe I’d never see them again. Anyway, when I came back to the house, I stripped out of the neoprene, went into the kitchen, and got a beer. When I turned away from the fridge, there were monkeys at two windows, hanging on the frames outside, looking in at me. So I reached for my camera—and it was gone.”
“You misplaced it.”
“No. It’s gone for good. I left the door unlocked when I went to the beach that night. I don’t leave it unlocked anymore.”
“You’re telling me the monkeys took it?”
He said, “The next day I bought a disposable camera. Put it on the counter by the oven again. That night I left the lights on, locked up, and took my stick down to the beach.”
“Good surf?”
“Slow. But I wanted to give them a chance. And they took it. While I was gone, they broke a pane, unlocked the window, and stole the disposable camera. Nothing else. Just the camera.”
Now I knew why the shotgun was kept in a locked broom closet.
This cottage on the horn, without neighbors, had always appealed to me as a fine retreat. At night, when the surfers left, the sky and the sea formed a sphere in which the house stood like a diorama in one of those glass paperweights that fills with whirling snow when you shake it, though instead of a blizzard there were deep peace and a glorious solitude. Now, however, the nurturing solitude had become an unnerving isolation. Rather than offering a sense of peace, the night was thick and still with expectation.
“And they left me a warning,” Bobby said.
I pictured a threatening note laboriously printed in crude block letters—WATCH YOUR ASS. Signed, THE MONKEYS.
They were too clever to leave a paper trail, however, and even more direct. Bobby said, “One of them crapped on my bed.”
“Oh, nice.”
“They’re secretive, like I said. I’ve decided not even to try to photograph them. If I managed to get a flash shot of them some night…I think they’d be way pissed.”
“You’re afraid of them. I didn’t know you got disturbed, and I didn’t know you were ever afraid. I’m learning a lot about you tonight, bro.”
He didn’t admit to feeling fear.
“You bought the shotgun,” I pressed.
“Because I think it’s good to challenge them from time to time, good to show the little bastards that I’m territorial, and that this is, by God, my territory. But I’m not afraid, really. They’re just monkeys.”
“And then again—they’re not.”
Bobby said, “Some days I wonder if I’ve picked up some New Age virus over the telephone line from Pia, all the way from Waimea—and now while she’s obsessed with being Kaha Huna, I’m obsessed with the monkeys of the new millennium. I suspect that’s what the tabloids would call them, don’t you?”
“The millennium monkeys. Has a ring to it.”
“That’s why I haven’t reported them. I’m not going to make myself a target of the press or anyone. I’m not going to be the geek who saw Bigfoot or extraterrestrials in a spaceship shaped like a four-slice toaster. Life wouldn’t ever be the same for me after that, would it?”
“You’d be a freak like me.”
“Exactly.”
My awareness of being watched became more intense. I almost borrowed a trick from Orson, almost growled low in my throat.
The dog, still standing between Bobby and me, remained alert and quiet, his head raised and one ear pricked. He was no longer shaking, but he was clearly respectful of whatever was observing us from the surrounding night.
“Now that I’ve told you about Angela, you know the monkeys have something to do with what was going on out at Fort Wyvern,” I said. “This isn’t just a tabloid fantasy anymore. This is real, this is totally live, and we can do something about it.”
“Still going on,” he said.
“What?”
“From what Angela told you, Wyvern’s not entirely shut down.”
“But it was abandoned eighteen months ago. If there were still personnel staffing any operations at all out there, we’d know about it. Even if they lived on base, they’d come into town to shop, to go to a movie.”
“You said Angela called this Armageddon. It’s the end of the world, she said.”
“Yeah. So?”
“So maybe if you’re busily working on a project to destroy the world, you don’t have time to come into town for a movie. Anyway, like I said, this is a tsunami, Chris. This is the government. There’s no way to surf these waters and survive.”
I gripped the handlebars of my bike and stood it upright again. “In spite of these monkeys and what you’ve seen, you’re going to just lay back?”
He nodded. “If I stay cool, it’s possible they’ll eventually go away. They’re not here every night, anyway. Once or twice a week. If I wait them out…I might get my life back like it was.”
“Yeah, but maybe Angela wasn’t just smoking something. Maybe there’s no chance, ever again, that anything will be like it was.”
“Then why put on your tights and cape if it’s a lost cause?”
“To XP-Man,” I said with mock solemnity, “there are no lost causes.”
“Kamikaze.”
“Duck.”
“Geek.”
“Decoy,” I said affectionately and walked the bicycle away from the house, through the soft sand.
Orson let out a thin whine of protest as we left the comparative safety of the cottage behind us, but he didn’t try to hold back. He stayed close to me, sniffing the night air as we headed inland.
We’d gone about thirty feet when Bobby, kicking up small clouds of sand, sprinted in front of us and blocked the way. “You know what your problem is?”
I said, “My choice of friends?”
“Your problem is you want to make a mark on the world. You want to leave something behind that says, I was here.”
“I don’t care about that.”
“Bullshit.”
“Watch your language. There’s a dog present.”
“That’s why you write the articles, the books,” he said. “To leave a mark.”
“I write because I enjoy writing.”
“You’re always bitching about it.”
“Because it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but it’s also rewarding.”
“You know why it’s so hard? Because it’s unnatural.”
“Maybe to people who can’t read and write.”
“We’re not here to leave a mark, bro. Monuments, legacies, marks—that’s where we always go wrong. We’re here to revel in the world, to soak in the awesomeness of it, to enjoy the ride.”
“Orson, look, it’s Philosopher Bob again.”
“The world’s maximum perfect as it is, beauty from horizon to horizon. Any mark any of us tries to leave—hell, it’s only graffiti. Nothing can improve on the world we’ve been given. Any mark anyone leaves is no better than vandalism.”
I said, “The music of Mozart.”
“Vandalism,” Bobby said.
“The art of Michelangelo.”
“Graffiti.”
“Renoir,” I said.
“Graffiti.”
“Bach, the Beatles.”
“Aural graffiti,” he said fiercely.
As he followed our conversation, Orson was getting whiplash.
“Matisse, Beethoven, Wallace Stevens, Shakespeare.”
“Vandals, hooligans.”
“Dick Dale,” I said, dropping the sacred name of the King of the Surf Guitar, the father of all surf music.
Bobby blinked but said, “Graffiti.”
“You are a sick man.”
“I’m the healthiest person you know. Drop this insanely useless crusade, Chris.”
“I must really be swimming in a school of slackers when a little curiosity is seen as a crusade.”
“Live life. Soak it up. Enjoy. That’s what you’re here to do.”
“I’m having fun in my own way,” I assured him. “Don’t worry—I’m just as big a bum and jerk-off as you are.”
“You wish.”
When I tried to walk the bike around him, he sidestepped into my path again.
“Okay,” he said resignedly. “All right. But walk the bike with one hand and keep the Glock in the other until you’re back on hard ground and can ride again. Then ride fast.”
I patted my jacket pocket, which sagged with the weight of the pistol. One round fired accidentally at Angela’s. Nine left in the magazine. “But they’re just monkeys,” I said, echoing Bobby himself.
“And they’re not.”
Searching his dark eyes, I said, “You have something else that I should know?”
He chewed on his lower lip. Finally: “Maybe I am Kahuna.”
“That’s not what you were about to tell me.”
“No, but it’s not as fully nutball as what I was going to say.” His gaze traveled over the dunes. “The leader of the troop…I’ve only glimpsed him at a distance, in the darkness, hardly more than a shadow. He’s bigger than the rest.”
“How big?”
His eyes met mine. “I think he’s a dude about my size.”
Earlier, as I had stood on the porch waiting for Bobby to return from his search of the beach scarp, I had glimpsed movement from the corner of my eye: the fuzzy impression of a man loping through the dunes with long fluid strides. When I’d swung around with the Glock, no one had been there.
“A man?” I said. “Running with the millennium monkeys, leading the troop? Our own Moonlight Bay Tarzan?”
“Well, I hope it’s a man.”
“And what’s that supposed to mean?”
Breaking eye contact, Bobby shrugged. “I’m just saying there aren’t only the monkeys I’ve seen. There’s someone or something big out there with them.”
I looked toward the lights of Moonlight Bay. “Feels like there’s a clock ticking somewhere, a bomb clock, and the whole town’s sitting on explosives.”
“That’s my point, bro. Stay out of the blast zone.”
Holding the bike with one hand, I drew the Glock from my jacket pocket.
“As you go about your perilous and foolish adventures, XP-Man,” Bobby said, “here’s something to keep in mind.”
“More boardhead wisdom.”
“Whatever was going on out there at Wyvern—and might still be going on—a big troop of scientists must have been involved. Hugely educated dudes with foreheads higher than your whole face. Government and military types, too, and lots of them. The elite of the system. Movers and shakers. You know why they were part of this before it all went wrong?”
“Bills to pay, families to support?”
“Every last one of them wanted to leave his mark.”
I said, “This isn’t about ambition. I just want to know why my mom and dad had to die.”