“Yes,” said Monkey, and he scratched himself with his left foot. “I made all this.”
“I am the Lady,” said the woman. “I believe we are going to have to learn to live together.”
“I don’t remember making you,” said Monkey, puzzled. “I made fruit and trees and ponds and sticks and—”
“You certainly didn’t make me,” said the woman.
Monkey scratched himself thoughtfully, this time with his right foot. Then he picked up a plum from the ground, and devoured it with relish, throwing the plum-stone down when he was done. He picked at the mushy remains of plum from the fur on the back of his arm, and sucked at the fruit he retrieved.
“Is that?” asked the Lady, “really acceptable behavior?”
“I’m Monkey,” said Monkey. “I do whatever I want to.”
“I am sure you do,” said the Lady. “But not if you wish to be with me.”
Monkey pondered.
“Do I wish to be with you?” he asked.
The Lady looked at Monkey gravely, then she smiled. It was the smile that did it. Somewhere between the beginning of the smile and the end of it, Monkey decided that spending time in this person’s company would be a fine thing.
Monkey nodded.
“In which case,” she said, “you will need clothes. And you will need manners. And you will need not to do that.”
“What?”
“The thing you are doing with your hands.”
Monkey looked at his hands, guiltily. He was not quite certain what they had been doing. Monkey’s hands were part of him, he knew, but when he was not actually thinking about them they did whatever hands did when you were not watching them. They scratched and they investigated and they poked and they touched. They picked insects from crevices and pulled nuts from bushes.
Behave yourselves, Monkey thought at his hands. In reply one of the hands began to pick at the fingernails of the other.
This would not be easy, he decided. Not even a little. Making stars and trees and volcanoes and thunderclouds was easier. But it would be worth it.
He was almost certain it would be worth it.
Monkey had created everything, so he intuited immediately what clothes were: cloth coverings that people would wear. In order for clothes to exist, he needed to make people to wear them, to exchange them and to sell them.
He created a nearby village, in which there would be clothes, and he filled it with people. He created a little street market, and people who would sell things in the market. He created food stalls, where people made food that sizzled and smelled enticing, and stalls that sold strings of shells and beads.
Monkey saw some clothes on a market stall. They were colorful and strange, and Monkey liked the look of them immediately. He waited until the stallholder’s back was turned, then he swung down and seized the clothes, and ran through the market while people shouted at him in anger or in amusement.
He put the clothes on, just as the humans wore them, and then, awkwardly, he went and found the Lady. She was in a small cafe, near the market.
“It’s me,” said Monkey.
The Lady examined him without approaching. Then she sighed. “It is you,” she said. “And you are wearing clothes. They are very gaudy. But they are clothes.”
“Shall we live together now?” asked Monkey.
In response, the Lady passed Monkey a plate with a cucumber sandwich on it. Monkey took a bite of the sandwich, broke the plate experimentally on a rock, cut himself on a section of broken plate, then peeled apart the sandwich, picked the cucumber from it with bloody fingers and threw the remaining bread onto the cafe floor.
“You will need to do a better impersonation of a person than that,” said the Lady, and she walked away in her gray-leather shoes with buttons up the side.
I created all the people, thought Monkey. I created them as gray dull land-bound things, to make Monkey seem wiser and funnier and freer and more alive. Why should I now pretend to be one?
But he said nothing. He spent the next day, and the day after that, watching people and following them on the earth, almost never climbing walls or trees or flinging himself upwards or across spaces only to catch himself before he fell.
He pretended that he was not Monkey. He decided not to answer to “Monkey” anymore, when anything spoke to him. From now on, he told them, he was “Man.”
He moved awkwardly on the earth. He only managed to conquer the urge to climb everything once he stole shoes and forced them onto his feet, which were not made for shoes. He hid his tail inside his trousers, and now he could only touch the world and move it or change it with his hands or his teeth. Monkey’s hands were better behaved too—more responsible, now that his tail and his feet were hidden, less likely to poke or pry, to rip or to rub.
The Lady was drinking tea in a small cafe near the market, and he sat beside her.
“Sit on the chair,” said the Lady. “Not the table.”
Monkey was not sure he would always be able to tell the difference, but he did as she requested.
“Well?” said Monkey.
“You’re getting there,” said the Lady. “Now you just need a job.”
Monkey frowned and chittered. “A job?” He knew what a job was, of course, because Monkey had created jobs when he had created everything else, rainbows and nebulae and plums and all the things in the oceans, but he had barely paid attention to them even as he created them. They were a joke, something for Monkey and his friends to laugh at.
“A job,” repeated Monkey. “You want me to stop eating whatever I wish, and living where I wish, and sleeping where I wish, and instead to go to work in the mornings and come
