Mark Brazaitis

Officially, he was monkey 7,453,884,839,066. But he went by Bobo, the name he’d been given in the Wham-Bam Circus, which used to travel the backroads of America, setting up its big top in small towns such as Fruitland, Idaho, and Cucumber, West Virginia. Bobo was part of the trapeze act.

            The Wham-Bam Circus had been on the brink of bankruptcy for years, so its employees weren’t surprised when they were told that their show in Parachute, Colorado, would be their last. With his usual fatalism, Bobo’s elephant friend, Eeyore, said, “I bet I’ll be shipped off to a third-rate zoo in Iowa or euthanized so my hide can be turned into wallets and my tusks into billiard balls.” He foretold a future for Bobo as a test dummy for a cosmetics company. “Brace your face,” Eeyore said, “for lipstick and blush.”

            But fortune was on Bobo’s side. During the canon act of the final show, Cackles the Clown flew over the safety net and into the third row of bleachers, where he face-planted between the legs of an unsympathetic cowboy. An insensitive joke about oral sex was made. Punches were thrown. Boxes of popcorn and cups of soda were hurled. As bedlam reigned, Bobo slipped out of an exit abandoned by its security guard and bounded into the night.

            He intended to travel south until he reached Guatemala or Costa Rica or Mozambique. He wasn’t sure of his geography, but he was confident he would recognize a tropical paradise when he found it.

Half a day into his journey, two men lured him into their van—their bait was, unimaginatively but effectively, bananas—and drove him to an unending office, populated by an infinite number of his kind propped in front of an infinite number of typewriters. A note taped to each of their desks said: “To win your freedom, you must type the complete works of William Shakespeare.”

He knew Shakespeare. The Wham-Bam Circus’ ringmaster was a former off-Broadway theater director whose career crashed after his all-nude production of The Tempest led to indecency charges. In a melancholy ritual, the ringmaster used to invite his performers into his trailer every night after closing and read aloud to them from a volume of the Bard’s complete works. Bobo always sat next to him, following along with the text. One night, however, an errant flame from the circus’ fire-eater, Billy Blaze, turned the book to ashes.

            The monkeys were divided into sectors of twelve desks. Each desk contained a manual typewriter—Underwood, Olivetti, or Touchmaster Five—and reams of twenty-pound paper. Bobo’s section mates had only a glancing acquaintance with Shakespeare. Rose, a monkey of Bobo’s age who enjoyed listening to tales of his circus days, hailed from a zoo where she occasionally saw one of the Bard’s quotes on a visitor’s T-shirt. Horatio was Danish and claimed that Hamlet was in his DNA, although, when Bobo tested him, he failed to produce the line after “To be or not to be.” Miguel used to live in a park in Ecuador whose outdoor theater twice hosted Shakespeare plays. The performances had been in Spanish, however, and the monkeys were uncertain whether typing Las Obras Completas de Guillermo Shakespeare would liberate them.

            Bobo remembered only pieces of the Shakespeare he’d heard and read: sonnets 18, 118, and 130; the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet; King Lear’s expostulations in the storm. But sleeping on his mattress beneath his desk, he often dreamed of every word—every word save the last in Antony and Cleopatra. The blank space was a canyon into which he fell like a flailing trapeze artist.

            He told no one he was familiar with The Complete Shakespeare. The pressure to reproduce it would have been tremendous. At the same time, he couldn’t help fantasizing about achieving the impossible. Liberating his brothers and sisters would be a thousand times as gratifying as his death-defying flights across netless expanses—and it would gain him everlasting fame, the equivalent in the simian world to what Shakespeare enjoyed in the human.

            Eeyore had cautioned him against equating his self-worth with the amount of adulation he received. “It’s one of the ways our masters keep us docile and complacent—by drugging us with applause,” he said. “You and I—any of us—can only be free when we’re content with the applause we shower on ourselves.” He sighed. “Of course, no animal, with the exception of the jaguar, is an island. And even a jaguar is desirous of a mate.” His sigh, this time, was profound. “What I wouldn’t give to have a companionable trunk entwined with mine.”

            Bobo recalled Eeyore’s sentiments as he sat with Rose during a rare break from their labors. One reason he suspected she was a good listener was because of her ears. They were gigantic.

             At the end of every day, a silver machine the size and shape of a grocery cart sucked up their work from beside their typewriters and scanned it to determine if it contained anything from Shakespeare. When it didn’t, the machine shredded it, excreting its strips from its backside. A larger machine, the same width but three times as tall as its predecessor, followed close at hand, swallowing the shredded paper. A third machine, indistinguishable from the first, discharged new reams of paper on the monkeys’ desks.

Typewriter ribbons were changed every week by officious orangutans, bananas delivered daily by taciturn baboons. Although the monkeys considered them servants, the orangutans and baboons fancied themselves their superiors. As one of the baboons explained, “We have a purpose in life—real goals we can accomplish. You are all Sisyphuses.” Believing he’d been called a sissy, a big, boisterous rhesus macaque named Boomer raised his fist to slug the baboon, but Bobo intervened with an explanation. This failed to quell Boomer’s outrage. “Oh, please,” he fumed. “I can push a fucking rock up a hill.”

If recreating a single work from any esteemed author was the goal, the monkeys would have been free within weeks of Bobo’s arrival. Their earliest success came from the typewriter of Monkey 87,777,434,455, better known as Ollie, who produced a flawless Goodnight, Moon. The children’s book was a far cry from Love’s Labour’s Lost, but it gave everyone hope. And the monkeys now had a book to read to their children.

            Closer to their goal was Rose’s conjuring of the entire last scene of King Lear. But because her ending came from the First Quarto edition, in which Edgar delivers the final lines, rather than from the First Folio edition, in which Albany speaks at the end, the machine rejected it, announcing its decision with a cackle reminiscent of the witches in MacBeth. How could they be expected to type the complete Shakespeare when what constituted the complete Shakespeare was in dispute?

            Tomorrow arrived. So did tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. Monkeys were born. When monkeys died, they were immediately replaced, their typewriter keys not even growing cold before other fingers pounded them.

            Some monkeys gave up on recreating Shakespeare and used their typewriters to compose protest poems and dystopian novels. In an act of black humor, Rose reproduced the entire passenger list of the Titanic. Ollie, the gentle recreator of Goodnight Moon, turned Stephen King. “All work and no play makes Ollie a dull boy,” he wrote and wrote and wrote.

Not all monkeys succumbed to cynicism, escapism, and despair. Some wrote letters to loved ones who may or may not have been part of the endless typing pool. The letters were passed from hand to hand down the never-ending chain of desks in the hope that they would eventually find their addressees. Bobo, meanwhile, typed pages of scenes he remembered from Coriolanus, Measure for Measure, and Othello. Three or five or ten pages in, his memory inevitably failed him, and the machine gobbled up his pages.

            When the Year of the Monkey passed without their liberation, Boomer called for a work stoppage. In the wake of his speech, the noise of clacking typewriters grew softer. The sounds continued to diminish until it seemed there was complete compliance with the strike. But thanks to her large ears, Rose could still hear a persistent clacking of keys, like a rumble of thunder on the other side of the world. Boomer said the strike wouldn’t succeed without total compliance.

“What is to be done?” asked a Russian monkey named Vlad.

            “Strike the strikebreakers!” Rose declared.

            “Leave the scabs with scabs!” Manuel shouted.

            “Dismember non-union members!” howled Horatio.

            Monkey 666, aka the Reverend Jeramiah, turned to the four elderly monkeys who constituted his congregation and announced, “You are my hammer and weapon of war!” With his fist raised, he led his tottering army, two of whom used walkers, out of their sector and into the territory beyond.

            Fearing the bloodshed to come, Bobo retreated to his Olivetti. He confessed to everyone within hearing distance about his experience with The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. He was hoping the imperative to save monkeykind from itself would allow him to recreate it. His words were repeated from monkey to monkey, bouncing across the long and wide expanse of their confinement. Soon, monkeys gathered around him from sectors near and far. Children climbed on the shoulders of their parents. Elderly monkeys and the disabled were invited to sit around his desk.

            Eventually, silence prevailed. Bobo had become a peacemaker by promoting the impossible. But if his ambition made him a fool, he would at least be in the good company of Touchstone and Trinculo.

            As his fingers hovered over the keys, he felt a ghostlike presence over his shoulder. Banquo? Hamlet’s father? Caesar? Shakespeare himself? Whoever it was, it whispered the opening of “Venus and Adonis” to him in the ringmaster’s baleful baritone. As Bobo typed, he repeated the words aloud: “Even as the sun with purple-colored face…” He hadn’t seen the sun, in any color, in years. Some monkeys, born in confinement, had never seen it. One ancient capuchin in the front row, his muzzle as white as a peeled banana, sobbed.

            After Bobo finished “Venus and Adonis,” the machine collected his manuscript. He feared he’d made a typo that would invalidate his labor. But rather than shredding his work, the machine returned it to the space beside his Olivetti and announced, “Success.” The crowd erupted in cheers. He carried on with “The Rape of Lucrece.”

            He didn’t cease typing even when exhaustion threatened to slam his eyelids shut. His fellow monkeys slept, woke up, slept again, woke up again. He labored on, the spectral voice whispering to him. The sonnets. The histories. The comedies. The machine arrived, inhaled his manuscript, and exhaled it to applause.  

            When he came to the last play, Antony and Cleopatra, he felt like he was in the circus again, high above the big-top floor, with no net below him. The ghost was silent. His fingers froze. He turned around, looking for help. Behind him stood a man with a yellow hat. “I know you can do it,” he said. “And when you do, George will be very grateful. Won’t you, George?”

            The Barbary macaque beside him nodded.

            The man dipped his mouth to Bobo’s ear. “I once had my heart set on being an actor in the Royal Shakespeare Company, but I became a famous wildlife poacher instead. The line you’re looking to start with is: ‘Nay, but this dotage of our general’s o’erflows the measure.’”

            The man dissolved. He’d been a hallucination. George, however, was real, and he stretched his curious fingers toward the Olivetti’s keys. A trio of bonobos, self-proclaimed bouncers, pulled George back into the crowd.

Bobo’s fingers flew across the first four acts of Antony and Cleopatra. He could feel the tension in his unending room give way to tentative exaltation. Although he knew trouble awaited, he continued into the fifth act with the same enthusiasm, his fingers dancing, the keys clacking.

            Soon, he arrived at the end—or almost the end. He was one word shy of completing the complete Shakespeare. If he didn’t get the final word right, his entire, exhaustive effort would be for naught. He would have to start over, as tragic as Sisyphus.

            He removed his fingers from the keys and looked around. Applause followed—relieved, resounding, ecstatic. His comrades believed he’d done the impossible. Babies were tossed into the air. Kisses were exchanged. One couple, albeit a couple who’d never needed an excuse to celebrate, slipped under a typing table to engage, as the elders liked to say with a wink, in monkey business. The applause grew. It might have lasted hours.

            “Please, stop.” His voice quivered. “I’m one word short. I don’t know what it is. I never heard the end of the play.” His words were repeated from monkey to monkey, rippling across their claustrophobic galaxy. “You could advise me,” he said.

            He read the final lines aloud:

            “And then to Rome. Come, Dolabella, see
           
High order in this great _______.”

            “It has to rhyme with ‘see,’” he announced. This, too, was repeated endlessly.

            Silence returned. No one, it seemed, wanted to venture a guess when it might prove wrong and therefore disastrous.

            At last, Rose whispered, “Calamity. It describes our lives.”

            “Infamy!” cried Boomer. “It’s what our oppressors deserve to live in!”

            “Chastity,” purred one of the twosome beneath the desk.

            For a long time, Bobo’s fellow monkeys from near and far bombarded the air with words, a large proportion of which didn’t rhyme with ‘see.’

            Atop her mother’s shoulders far back in the crowd was a baby who was too new to the world to have been assigned a typewriter or even a number. She had a distinct, lovely face, one which Bobo could have identified out of a million. “Monkey!” she exclaimed.

            There was laughter and applause from all parts of the vast room. But Bobo knew even Shakespeare wasn’t seer enough to foresee their situation and give monkeys the final word in one of his plays. Besides, the concluding line most likely required ten syllables instead of eight. Nevertheless, a few voices were raised in support of typing what the infant had suggested. A chant rose up: “Mon-key! Mon-key! Mon-key!” This alarmed other members of the troop, who balked at such self-destructive bravado.

            They were at a peculiar and excruciating juncture in the theorem in which they were trapped. While they had a better chance of guessing the last word of Antony and Cleopatra than of typing the entire Shakespeare, the odds were still painfully, unjustly against them. To win their freedom, they still needed a miracle.

            As Bobo’s fingers returned to his keyboard, he felt a certain solemnity. Solemnity? he asked himself. Could the last word be —?

Before he finished the thought, he heard a stupendous pounding, a ground-shaking stomping, a teeth-rattling clomping. He thought the inventor of their linguistic labyrinth had somehow gotten word of his progress and was sending in an army to stop him. But when he realized what—or, rather, who—was making the sound, his heart flooded with joyful recognition. Their wretched drama was about to end not with the bloodshed of Macbeth but with the deus-ex-machina happiness of As You Like It.

“Eeyore!” he shouted as his old friend thundered onto the scene, knocking down typewriters and scattering Bobo’s all-but-finished manuscript to the far corners of eternity.

            “Follow me!” the elephant urged.

            They did, and soon they’d exchanged hell for heaven.

Or for the Pacific coast of Costa Rica, which was heaven enough.

            After his initial ecstasy, Bobo was overcome with disillusionment. Lounging in a coconut tree or nibbling on chan seeds, he felt as inconsequential as he had in the endless room of typewriters. Memories of his near miracle had faded. Even the monkeys who’d had front-row seats to his reproduction of all but a single word from Shakespeare’s oeuvre had forgotten his heroics. Only Rose—she of the long ears and, as he learned, the long memory—recalled his astounding efforts on behalf of monkeykind. “‘Solemnity,’” she whispered one evening. “You were a second from typing it when your buddy stole the show.”

Instead of remaining in Costa Rica to soak up his fame, however, Eeyore had continued south, to the Panama Canal, where he hoped to stow away on a ship bound for Namibia. He dreamed of a reunion with his extended family on the African plains.

Bobo conceived a plan to regain his acclaim. He would move to Manuel Antonio National Park and revive his trapeze act, albeit as a soloist. On the evening before his departure, he sat with Rose in a beach almond tree, watching the sun set into the Pacific. She, too, was considering a change, she told him. She’d received a proposal from a capuchin named Sylvester to join his harem in Monteverde. “The cloud forest?” he said. “You’ll freeze.”

“Without warm company,” she said, “nights can be cold anywhere.” 

He turned to her. When had her ears ceased seeming comically out of proportion to her face and become the quirky imperfection that ratified her beauty? He wanted to share his observation with her. But worried his words would fall short of Shakespearean standards, he hesitated, and soon a pair of dolphins, leaping across the horizon, distracted them.

“Thanks to all the tourists who visit Manual Antonio,” she said, “you’ll be famous again.”

He considered romantic and daring replies: It’s only you whose adoration I want. Or: The applause of a thousand humans isn’t worth one of your smiles. Or: Ditch the polygamist and be with the aerialist. But no words had left his mouth by the time she said goodnight.

In Manuel Antonio, the tourists were enchanted with the howler monkeys who filled the air with their wolf-like wails and, in acts of unconscious comedy, scratched their bellies with the languor of drunk men at bars. They barely acknowledged Bobo’s death-defying dances across expanses of blue sky. His act was only marginally different, he supposed, from what the other monkeys did as matter of routine.

After a month, he returned home under a luminous moon, his humiliation exposed as in a spotlight. He glanced up at the Soncoya tree where Rose usually slept. Her favorite spot, on the highest branch, was empty. To quiet his restlessness, he strolled on the beach, the waves rolling to within inches of his feet. Shakespeare’s words bubbled unbidden out of his mouth: “Farewell! Thou are too dear for my possessing.”

He looked up at the sky and its infinite number of sparkling stars. Which one am I? he asked. He chose one at random. A moment later, the star streaked across the sky, blazing a path into oblivion. Bobo felt his heart pound with fear. So will my life soon go.

He tried to counter his fatalism by reminding himself that to see a shooting star was to be granted a wish.

When he heard someone call his name, he turned to face the shore. Although his wish remained on the tip of his lips, it was already, joyfully, being fulfilled.