Love in Infant Monkeys Read Free

something?”
    â€œMmm?”
    â€œIs it a hen? Or—”
    â€œRooster! Blimey.”
    What a relief. No eggs.
    He stumped back down the hill, head shaking. Good riddance. She knelt down beside the small body, modest hump of brown and red feathers. It was still beautiful. She put her hand on the feathers. You could feel the slight warm frame beneath them. It was light, almost nothing in there. Birds were like air.
    It had been more beautiful when it wasn’t dead, though. Before it was shot. Which wasn’t true of everyone. Take JFK, even John Lennon. Assassination had matured them like a fine pinot. If you died of old age, besides not leaving a good-looking corpse, all you died for in the end was living. But if you got shot, you were an instant symbol. You must have died for something.
    She was always completely new; that was her secret, albeit an open one. Sure, it was obvious, but no one did it like she did. None of them could touch her when it came to transformation. That was the secret
to her longevity. She wasn’t one megastar; she was a new one constantly. Novelty was what people lived for. Skin-deep, maybe, but so what? Skin was the biggest organ.
    She should envy the bird, actually. Guy said in the wild they died of starvation. Shooting them was a mercy killing. I mean come on—fly, eat worms, fly, lay eggs, fly, starve to death. “Bob’s your uncle.” (You go girl.) Life was not equal for everyone. That was another reason she liked it better in England. They didn’t stand for that Thomas Paine bullshit here, all men were created equal, etc. What a crock. One drive through Alabama was all you needed to take the bloom off that rose. One ride on the subway. (Self: “Tube.” Easy.) Back home, the second you stepped out of a major city you were surrounded by the remnants of Early Man. Here there were some of those, too, but you had to go down the pub to find them. And at least they didn’t run the country.
    All history was the history of class struggle, right? Lenin said that, and he had style. He had a very sharp look. Good tailoring. When the statues came down, she for one was sorry. She always wanted to meet him.
    Maybe if she said a prayer. Yes. It felt right.
    She touched the red string and squatted beside the
bird. She would think holy thoughts about it; she would utter a name of God. She closed her eyes with her fingers resting on the feathers.
    This was a problem she had: When she wasn’t already tired, it was sometimes hard to speed-meditate. Mind kept working, working. A powerful machine. Difficult to rein in. The bird once ate the worms, now worms would eat the bird . . . every word filled with light. That was how it should be. Desire to Receive. Which name? The name to reduce negativity?
    What would help her and Guy, she saw, besides going to the Centre together on a more regular basis, was if Guy understood her more on a spiritual level. If he could just see her interior the way she saw it herself, he would not worry about the shrinking mini-Bings. He would see she was a little girl, secretly. She was a Shirley Temple. She was very pure, despite her sophistication. She believed in the ten luminous emanations. The ladder of awareness. She cherished in the core of herself the beingness of being.
    Immortality for the bird, for all things of beauty. That was what the lager louts could just never capiche . It was right, so right, to know your own beauty and see it was God’s own beauty too. One day the body
would be a giving vessel, not just a receiving. Life could go on forever. They might not be able to understand, the lager louts, what she was, what all of them could be if they gave themselves over to the light instead of, say, the Guinness, but that did not mean there was not room in God for them too. The house of God had many rooms. And through the great windows of these rooms, the golden beams of the divine streamed in.
    Not as many rooms as