nothing about this structure lent it a character different from the
shabby and desolate appearance of hundreds of others throughout the
neighborhood. Even the open front door was not remarkable, most of these
buildings were exposed to the elements.
After dwelling on the house for only a few seconds, the monkey raised
its face toward the gibbous moon. Either its posture conveyed a deep
melancholyor I was overcome by sentimentality, attributing more human
qualities to these rhesuses than made sense.
Then, although I hadn’t moved or made a sound, the wiry beast twitched
sprang erect, lost interest in the sky, and looked again at the
bungalow.
“Don’t monkey with me, ” I murmured.
In a slow rolling gait, it moved out of the street, over the curb, and
onto a sidewalk dappled with the moon shadows of laurel branches, where
it halted.
I resisted the urge to back away from the window. The darkness around me
was as perfect as that in Dracula’s coffin with the lid closed, and I
felt invisible. The overhanging porch roof prevented moonlight from
directly touching my face.
The miserable little geek appeared to be studying not just the window at
which I stood but every aspect of the small house, as though it intended
to locate a Realtor and make an offer for the property.
I am excruciatingly aware of the interplay of light and shadow, which,
for me, is more sensuous than any woman’s body. I am not forbidden to
know the comfort of a woman, but I am denied all but the most meager
light. Therefore, every form of illumination is imbued with a shimmering
erotic quality, and I’m acutely aware of the caress of every beam.
Here in the bungalow, I was confident that I was untouched, beyond
anyone’s ken, as much a part of the blackness as the wing is part of the
bat.
The monkey advanced a few steps, onto the walkway that bisected the
front yard and led to the porch steps. It was no more than twenty feet
from me.
As it turned its head, I caught a glimpse of its gleaming eyes.
Usually muddy yellow and as baleful as the eyes of a tax collector, they
were now fiery orange and even more menacing in this poor light.
They were filled with that luminosity exhibited by the eyes of most
nocturnal animals.
I could barely see the creature in the laurel shadows, but the restless
movement of its jack-o’-lantern eyes indicated that it was curious about
something and that it still hadn’t fixated specifically on my window.
Maybe it had heard the peep or rustle of a mouse in the grass or one of
the tarantulas native to this regionand was hoping only to snare a tasty
treat.
In the street, the other members of the troop were still engaged by the
manhole cover.
Ordinary rhesuses, which live primarily by day, do not exhibit eye shine
in darkness. Members of the Wyvern troop have better night vision than
other monkeys, but in my experience they aren’t remotely as gifted as
owls or cats. Their visual acuity is only fractionally not geometrically
better than that of the common primates from which they were engineered.
In an utterly lightless place, they are nearly as helpless as I am.
The inquisitive monkeymy own Curious George scampered three steps closer,
out of the tree shadow and into moonlight again. When it halted, it was
less than fifteen feet away, within five feet of the porch.
The marginal improvement in their nocturnal sight is probably an
unexpected side effect of the intelligence-enhancement experiment that
spawned them, but as far as I have been able to discern, it isn’t
matched by improvement in their other senses. Ordinary monkeys aren’t
spoortracking animals with keen olfactory powers, like dogs, and neither
are these. They would be able to sniff me out from no greater distance
than I would be able to smell them, which meant from no farther than a
foot or two, even though they were unquestionably a fragrant bunch.
Likewise, these long-tailed terrorists don’t benefit from paranormal
hearing, and they are not able to fly like their screeching brethren who
do dirty work for the Wicked Witch of the West. Although they are