THE MONKEY
              TREATMENT
                    George R. R. Martin

  KENNY DORCHESTER WAS A FAT MAN.
  He had not always been a fat man, of course. He had come into the
world a perfectly normal infant of modest weight, but the normalcy was
short-lived in Kenny's case, and before very long he had become a
chubby-cheeked toddler well swaddled in baby fat. From then on it was all
downhill and upscale so far as Kenny was concerned. He became a pudgy
child, a corpulent adolescent, and a positively porcine college student all in
good turn, and by adulthood he had left all those intermediate steps
behind and graduated into full obesity.
   People become obese for a variety of complex reasons, some of them
physiological. Kenny's reason was relatively simple: food. Kenny
Dorchester loved to eat. Often he would paraphrase Will Rogers, winking
broadly, and tell his friends that he had never met a food he didn't like.
This was not precisely true, since Kenny loathed both liver and prune
juice. Perhaps, if his mother had served them more often during his
childhood, he would never have attained the girth and gravity that so
haunted him at maturity. Unfortunately, Gina Dorchester was more
inclined to lasagne and roast turkey with stuffing and sweet potatoes and
chocolate pudding and veal cordon bleu and buttered corn on the cob and
stacks of blueberry pancakes (although not all in one meal) than she was
to liver and prune juice, and once Kenny had expressed his preference in
the matter by retching his liver back onto his plate, she obligingly never
served liver and prune juice again.
  Thus, all unknowing, she set her son on the soft, suety road to the
monkey treatment. But that was long ago, and the poor woman really
cannot be blamed, since it was Kenny himself who ate his way there.
  Kenny loved pepperoni pizza, or plain pizza, or garbage pizza with
everything on it, including anchovies. Kenny could eat an entire slab of
barbecued ribs, either beef or pork, and the spicier the sauce was, the
more he approved. He was fond of rare prime rib and roast chicken and
Rock Cornish game hens stuffed with rice, and he was hardly the sort to
object to a nice sirloin or a platter of fried shrimp or a hunk of kielbasa.
He liked his burgers with everything on them, and fries and onion rings on
the side, please. There was nothing you could do to his friend the potato
that would possibly turn him against it, but he was also partial to pasta
and rice, to yams candied and un-, and even to mashed rutabagas.
   "Desserts are my downfall," he would sometimes say, for he liked sweets
of all varieties, especially devil's food cake and cannelloni and hot apple
pie with cheese (Cheddar, please), or maybe cold strawberry pie with
whipped cream. "Bread is my downfall," he would say at other times, when
it seemed likely that no dessert was forthcoming, and so saying, he would
rip off another chunk of sourdough or butter up another crescent roll or
reach for another slice of garlic bread, which was a particular vice.
   Kenny had a lot of particular vices. He thought himself an authority on
both fine restaurants and fast-food franchises, and could discourse
endlessly and knowledgeably about either. He relished Greek food and
Chinese food and Japanese food and Korean food and German food and
Italian food and French food and Indian food, and was always on the
lookout for new ethnic groups so he might "expand my cultural horizons."
When Saigon fell, Kenny speculated about how many of the Vietnamese
refugees would be likely to open restaurants. When Kenny traveled, he
always made it a point to gorge himself on the area's specialty, and he
could tell you the best places to eat in any of twenty-four major American
cities, while reminiscing fondly about the meals he had enjoyed in each of
them. His favorite writers were James Beard and Calvin Trillin.
   "I live a tasty life!" Kenny Dorchester would proclaim, beaming. And so
he did. But Kenny also had a secret. He did not often think of it and never
spoke it, but it was there nonetheless, down at the heart of him beneath all
those great rolls of flesh, and not all his sauces could drown it, nor could
his trusty fork keep it at bay.
  Kenny Dorchester did not like being fat.
   Kenny was like a man torn between two lovers, for while he loved his
food with an abiding passion, he also dreamed of other loves, of women,
and he knew that in order to secure the one he would have to give up the
other, and that knowledge was his secret pain. Often he wrestled with the
dilemmas posed by his situation. It seemed to Kenny that while it might
be preferable to be slender and have a woman than to be fat and have only
a crawfish bisque, nonetheless the latter was not entirely to be spurned.
Both were sources of happiness, after all, and the real misery fell to those
who gave up the one and failed to obtain the other. Nothing depressed or
saddened Kenny so much as the sight of a fat person eating cottage
cheese. Such pathetic human beings never seemed to get appreciably
skinnier, Kenny thought, and were doomed to go through life bereft of
both women and crawfish, a fate too grim to contemplate.
  Yet despite all his misgivings, at times the secret pain inside Kenny
Dorchester would flare up mightily, and fill him with a sense of resolve
that made him feel as if anything might be possible. The sight of a
particularly beautiful woman or the word of some new, painless, and
wonderfully effective diet were particularly prone to trigger what Kenny
thought of as his "aberrations." When such moods came, Kenny would be
driven to diet.
   Over the years he tried every diet there was, briefly and secretly. He
tried Dr. Atkins's diet and Dr. Stillman's diet, the grapefruit diet and the
brown rice diet. He tried the liquid protein diet, which was truly
disgusting. He lived for a week on nothing but Slender and Sego, until he
had run through all of the flavors and gotten bored. He joined a
Pounds-Off club and attended a few meetings, until he discovered that the
company of fellow dieters did him no good whatsoever, since all they
talked about was food. He went on a hunger strike that lasted until he got
hungry. He tried the fruit juice diet, and the drinking man's diet (even
though he was not a drinking man), and the martinis-and-whipped-cream
diet (he omitted the martinis).
   A hypnotist told him that his favorite foods tasted bad and he wasn't
hungry anyway, but it was a damned lie, and that was that for hypnosis.
He had his behavior modified so he put down his fork between bites, used
small plates that looked full even with tiny portions, and wrote down
everything he ate in a notebook. That left him with stacks of notebooks, a
great many small dishes to wash, and unusual manual dexterity in putting
down and picking up his fork. His favorite diet was the one that said you
could eat all you wanted of your favorite food, so long as you ate nothing
but that. The only problem was that Kenny couldn't decide what was really
his one true favorite, so he wound up eating ribs for a week, and pizza for
a week, and Peking duck for a week (that was an expensive week), and
losing no weight whatsoever, although he did have a great time.
   Most of Kenny Dorchester's aberrations lasted for a week or two. Then,
like a man coming out of a fog, he would look around and realize that he
was absolutely miserable, losing relatively little weight, and in imminent
danger of turning into one of those cottage-cheese fatties he so pitied. At
that point he would chuck the diet, go out for a good meal, and be
restored to his normal self for another six months, until his secret pain
surfaced again.
  Then, one Friday night, he spied Henry Moroney at the Slab.
   The Slab was Kenny's favorite barbecue joint. It specialized in ribs,
charred and meaty and served dripping with a sauce that Kenny approved
of mightily. And on Fridays the Slab offered all the ribs you could eat for
only fifteen dollars, which was prohibitively high for most people but a
bargain for Kenny, who could eat a great many ribs. On that particular
Friday, Kenny had just finished his first slab and was waiting for the
second, sipping beer and eating bread, when he chanced to look up and
realized, with a start, that the slim, haggard fellow in the next booth was,
in fact, Henry Moroney.
   Kenny Dorchester was nonplussed. The last time he had seen Henry
Moroney, they had both been unhappy Pounds-Off members, and
Moroney had been the only one in the club who weighed more than Kenny
did. A great fat whale of a man, Moroney had carried about the cruel
nickname of "Boney," as he confessed to his fellow members. Only now the
nickname seemed to fit. Not only was Moroney skinny enough to hint at a
rib cage under his skin, but the table in front of him was absolutely
littered with bones. That was the detail that intrigued Kenny Dorchester.
All those bones. He began to count, and he lost track before very long,
because all the bones were disordered, strewn about on empty plates in
little puddles of drying sauce. But from the sheer mass of them it was clear
that Moroney had put away at least four slabs of ribs, maybe five.
  It seemed to Kenny Dorchester that Henry "Boney" Moroney knew the
secret. If there were a way to lose hundreds of pounds and still be able to
consume five slabs of ribs at a sitting, that was something Kenny
desperately needed to know. So he rose and walked over to Moroney's
booth and squeezed in opposite him. "It is you," he said.
  Moroney looked up as if he hadn't noticed
   Kenny until that very second. "Oh," he said in a thin, tired voice. "You."
He seemed very weary, but Kenny thought that was probably natural for
someone who had lost so much weight. Moroney's eyes were sunk in deep
gray hollows, his flesh sagged in pale, empty folds, and he was slouching
forward with his elbows on the table as if he were too exhausted to sit up
straight. He looked terrible, but he had lost so much weight. ...
 "You look wonderful!" Kenny blurted. "How did you do it? How? You
must tell me, Henry, really you must."
  "No," Moroney whispered. "No, Kenny. Go away."
   Kenny was taken aback. "Really!" he declared. "That's not very friendly.
I'm not leaving until I know your secret, Henry. You owe it to me. Think of
all the times we've broken bread together."
  "Oh, Kenny," Moroney said, in his faint and terrible voice. "Go, please,
go, you don't want to know, it's too . . . too ..." He stopped in mid-sentence,
and a spasm passed across his face. He moaned. His head twisted wildly to
the side, as if he were having some kind of fit, and his hands beat on the
table. "Oooooo," he said.
  "Henry, what's wrong?" Kenny said, alarmed. He was certain now that
Boney Moroney had overdone this diet.
   "Ohhhh," Moroney sighed in sudden relief. "Nothing, nothing. I'm fine."
His voice had none of the enthusiasm of his words. "I'm wonderful, in fact.
Wonderful, Kenny. I haven't been so slim since . . . since . . . why, never.
It's a miracle." He smiled faintly. "I'll be at my goal soon, and then it will
be over. I think. Think I'll be at my goal. Don't know my weight, really." He
put a hand to his brow. "I am slender, though, truly I am. Don't you think
I look good?"
  "Yes, yes," Kenny agreed impatiently. "But how? You must tell me.
Surely not those Pounds-Off phonies. . . ."
  "No," said Moroney weakly. "No, it was the monkey treatment. Here, I'll
write it down for you." He took out a pencil and scrawled an address on a
napkin.
  Kenny stuffed the napkin into a pocket. "The monkey treatment? I've
never heard of that. What is it?"
   Henry Moroney licked his lips. "They ..." he started, and then another fit
hit him, and his head twitched around grotesquely. "Go," he said to
Kenny, "just go. It works, Kenny, yes, oh. The monkey treatment, yes. I
can't say more. You have the address. Excuse me." He placed his hands
flat on the table and pushed himself to his feet, then walked over to the
cashier, shuffling like a man twice his age. Kenny Dorchester watched him
go, and decided that Moroney had definitely overdone this monkey
treatment, whatever it was. He had never had tics or spasms before, or
whatever that had been.
   "You have to have a sense of proportion about these things," Kenny said
stoutly to himself. He patted his pocket to make sure the napkin was still
there, resolved that he would handle things more sensibly than Boney
Moroney, and returned to his own booth and his second slab of ribs. He
ate four that night, figuring that if he was going to start a diet tomorrow
he had better get in some eating while the eating was good.
   The next day being Saturday, Kenny was free to pursue the monkey
treatment and dream of a new, slender him. He rose early, and
immediately rushed to the bathroom to weigh himself on his digital scale,
which he loved dearly because you didn't have to squint down at the
numbers, since they lit up nice and bright and precise in red. This
morning they lit up as 367. He had gained a few pounds, but he hardly
minded. The monkey treatment would strip them off again soon enough.
  Kenny tried to phone ahead, to make sure this place was open on
Saturday, but that proved to be impossible. Moroney had written nothing
but an address, and there was no diet center at that listing in the Yellow
Pages, nor a health club, nor a doctor. Kenny looked in the white pages
under "Monkey," but that yielded nothing. So there was nothing to do but
go down there in person.
   Even that was troublesome. The address was way down by the docks in
a singularly unsavory neighborhood, and Kenny had a hard time getting a
cab to take him there. He finally got his way by threatening to report the
cabbie to the commissioner. Kenny Dorchester knew his rights.
   Before long, though, he began to have his doubts. The narrow little
streets they wound through were filthy and decaying, altogether
unappetizing, and it occurred to Kenny that any diet center located down
here might offer only dangerous quackery. The block in question was an
old commercial strip gone to seed, and it put his hackles up even more.
Half the stores were boarded closed, and the rest lurked behind filthy dark
windows and iron gates. The cab pulled up in front of an absolutely
miserable old brick storefront, flanked by two vacant lots full of rubble, its
plate glass windows grimed over impenetrably. A faded Coca-Cola sign
swung back and forth, groaning, above the door. But the number was the
number that Boney Moroney had written down.
  "Here you are," the cabbie said impatiently, as Kenny peered out the
taxi window, aghast.
  "This does not look correct," Kenny said. "I will investigate. Kindly wait
here until I am certain this is the place."
  The cabbie nodded, and Kenny slid over and levered himself out of the
taxi. He had taken two steps when he heard the cab shift gears and pull
away from the curb, screeching. He turned and watched in astonishment.
"Here, you can't . . ." he began. But it did. He would most definitely report
that man to the commissioner, he decided.
  But meanwhile he was stranded down here, and it seemed foolish not to
proceed when he had come this far. Whether he took the monkey
treatment or not, no doubt they would let him use a phone to summon
another cab. Kenny screwed up his resolution, and went on into the grimy,
unmarked storefront. A bell tinkled as he opened the door.
   It was dark inside. The dust and, dirt on the windows kept out nearly all
the sunlight, and it took a moment for Kenny's eyes to adjust. When they
did, he saw to his horror that he had walked into someone's living room.
One of those gypsy families that moved into abandoned stores, he thought.
He was standing on a threadbare carpet, and around and about him was a
scatter of old furniture, no doubt the best the Salvation Army had to offer.
An ancient black-and-white TV set crouched in one corner, staring at him
blindly. The room stank of urine. "Sorry," Kenny muttered feebly, terrified
that some dark gypsy youth would come out of the shadows to knife him.
"Sorry." He had stepped backward, groping behind him for the doorknob,
when the man came out of the back room.
   "Ah!" the man said, spying Kenny at once from tiny bright eyes. "Ah,
the monkey treatment!" He rubbed his hands together and grinned. Kenny
was terrified. The man was the fattest, grossest human being that Kenny
had ever laid eyes on. He had squeezed through the door sideways. He was
fatter than Kenny, fatter than Boney Moroney. He literally dripped with
fat. And he was repulsive in other ways as well. He had the complexion of
a mushroom, and minuscule little eyes almost invisible amid rolls of pale
flesh. His corpulence seemed to have overwhelmed even his hair, of which
he had very little. Bare-chested, he displayed vast areas of folded, bulging
skin, and his huge breasts flopped as he came forward quickly and seized
Kenny by the arm. "The monkey treatment!" he repeated eagerly, pulling
Kenny forward. Kenny looked at him in shock, and was struck dumb by his
grin. When the man grinned, his mouth seemed to become half of his face,
a grotesque semicircle full of shining white teeth.
   "No," Kenny said at last, "no, I have changed my mind." Boney Moroney
or no, he didn't think he cared to try this monkey treatment if it was
administered by such as this. In the first place, it clearly could not be very
effective, or else the man would not be so monstrously obese. Besides, it
was probably dangerous, some quack potion of monkey hormones or
something like that. "NO!" Kenny repeated more forcefully, trying to wrest
his arm free from the grasp of the grotesquerie who held it.
  But it was useless. The man was distinctly larger and infinitely stronger
than Kenny, and he propelled him across the room with ease, oblivious to
Kenny's protests, grinning like a maniac all the while. "Fat man," he
burbled, and as if to prove his point, he reached out and seized one of
Kenny's bulges and twisted it painfully. "Fat, fat, fat, no good. Monkey
treatment make you thin."
  "Yes, but . . ."
  "Monkey treatment," the man repeated, and somehow he had gotten
behind Kenny. He put his weight against Kenny's back and pushed, and
Kenny staggered through a curtained doorway into the back room. The
smell of urine was much stronger in there, strong enough to make him
want to retch. It was pitch black, and from all sides Kenny heard rustlings
and scurryings in the darkness. Rats, he thought wildly. Kenny was
deathly afraid of rats. He fumbled about and propelled himself toward the
square dim light that marked the curtain he had come through.
   Before he was quite there, a high-pitched chittering sounded suddenly
from behind him, sharp and rapid as fire from a machine gun. Then
another voice took it up, then a third, and suddenly the dark was alive
with the terrible hammering noise. Kenny put his hands over his ears and
staggered through the curtain, but just as he emerged he felt something
brush the back of his neck, something warm and hairy. "Aieeee!" he
screamed, dancing out into the front room where the tremendous
bare-chested madman was waiting patiently. Kenny hopped from one foot
to the other, screeching, "Aieeee, a rat, a rat on my back. Get it off, get it
off." He was trying to grab for it with both hands, but the thing was very
quick, and shifted around so cleverly that he couldn't get ahold of it. But
he felt it there, alive, moving. "Help me, help me!" he called out. "A rat!"
   The proprietor grinned at him and shook his head, so all his many chins
went bobbing merrily. "No, no," he said. "No rat, fat man. Monkey. You
get the monkey treatment." Then he stepped forward and seized Kenny by
the elbow again, and drew him over to a full-length mirror mounted on
the wall. It was so dim in the room that Kenny could scarcely make out
anything in the mirror, except that it wasn't wide enough and chopped off
both his arms. The man stepped back and yanked a pull-cord dangling
from the ceiling, and a single bare light bulb clicked on overhead. The
bulb swung back and forth, back and forth, so the light shifted crazily.
Kenny Dorchester trembled and stared at the mirror.
  "Oh," he said.
  There was a monkey on his back.
   Actually it was on his shoulders, its legs wrapped around his thick neck
and twined together beneath his triple chin. He could feel its monkey hair
scratching the back of his neck, could feel its warm little monkey paws
lightly grasping his ears. It was a very tiny monkey. As Kenny looked into
the mirror, he saw it peek out from behind his head, grinning hugely. It
had quick darting eyes, coarse brown hair, and altogether too many shiny
white teeth for Kenny's liking. Its long prehensile tail swayed about
restlessly, like some hairy snake that had grown out of the back of Kenny's
skull.
   Kenny's heart was pounding away like some great air hammer lodged in
his chest, and he was altogether distressed by this place, this man, and
this monkey, but he gathered all his reserves and forced himself to be
calm. It wasn't a rat, after all. The little monkey couldn't harm him. It had
to be a trained monkey, the way it had perched on his shoulders. Its owner
must let it ride around like this, and when Kenny had come unwillingly
through that curtain, it had probably mistaken him. All fat men look alike
in the dark.
   Kenny grabbed behind him and tried to pull the monkey loose, but
somehow he couldn't seem to get a grip on it. The mirror, reversing
everything, just made it worse. He jumped up and down ponderously,
shaking the entire room and making the furniture leap around every time
he landed, but the monkey held on tight to his ears and could not be
dislodged.
   Finally, with what Kenny thought was incredible aplomb under the
circumstances, he turned to the gross proprietor and said, "Your monkey,
sir. Kindly help me remove it."
  "No, no," the man said. "Make you skinny. Monkey treatment. You no
want to be skinny?"
   "Of course I do," Kenny said unhappily, "but this is absurd." He was
confused. This monkey on his back seemed to be part of the monkey
treatment, but that certainly didn't make very much sense.
  "Go," the man said. He reached up and snapped off the light with a
sharp tug that sent the bulb careening wildly again. Then he started
toward Kenny, who backpedaled nervously. "Go," the man repeated, as he
grabbed Kenny's arm again.
  "Out, out. You get monkey treatment, you go now."
   "See here!" Kenny said furiously. "Let go of me! Get this monkey off me,
do you hear? I don't want your monkey! Do you hear me? Quit pushing,
sir! I tell you, I have friends with the police department, you aren't going
to get away with this. Here now . . ."
  But all his protestations were useless. The man was a veritable tidal
wave of sweating, smelling pale flesh, and he put his weight against Kenny
and propelled him helplessly toward the door. The bell rang again as he
pulled it open and shoved Kenny out into the garish bright sunlight.
  "I'm not going to pay for this!" Kenny said stoutly, staggering. "Not a
cent, do you hear!"
  "No charge for monkey treatment," the man said, grinning.
   "At least let me call a cab," Kenny began, but it was too late, the man
had closed the door. Kenny stepped forward angrily and tried to yank it
back open, but it did not budge. Locked. "Open up in there!" Kenny
demanded at the top of his lungs. There was no reply. He shouted again,
and grew suddenly and uncomfortably aware that he was being stared at.
Kenny turned around. Across the street three old winos were sitting on the
stoop of a boarded-up store, passing a bottle in a brown paper bag and
regarding him through wary eyes.
  That was when Kenny Dorchester recalled that he was standing there in
the street in broad daylight with a monkey on his back.
   A flush crept up his neck and spread across his cheeks. He felt very silly.
"A pet!" he shouted to the winos, forcing a smile. "Just my little pet!" They
went on staring. Kenny gave a last angry look at the locked door, and set
off down the street, his legs pumping furiously. He had to get to someplace
private.
   Rounding the corner, he came upon a dark, narrow alley behind two
gray old tenement buildings, and ducked inside, wheezing for breath. He
sat down heavily on a trash can, pulled out his handkerchief, and mopped
his brow. The monkey shifted just a bit, and Kenny felt it move. "Off me!"
he shouted, reaching up and back again to try to wrench it off by the
scruff of its neck, only to have it elude him once more. He tucked away his
handkerchief and groped behind his head with both hands, but he just
couldn't get ahold of it. Finally, exhausted, he stopped, and tried to think.
   The legs! he thought. The legs under his chins! That's the ticket! Very
calmly and deliberately, he reached up, felt for the monkey's legs, and
wrapped one big fleshy hand around each of them. He took a deep breath
and then savagely tried to yank them apart, as if they were two ends of a
giant wishbone.
  The monkey attacked him.
  One hand twisted his right ear painfully, until it felt like it was being
pulled clean off his head. The other started hammering against his temple,
beating a furious tattoo. Kenny Dorchester yelped in distress and let go of
the monkey's legs—which he hadn't budged for all his efforts. The monkey
quit beating on him and released his ear. Kenny sobbed, half with relief
and half with frustration. He felt wretched.
   He sat there in that filthy alley for ages, defeated in his efforts to remove
the monkey and afraid to go back to the street where people would point
at him and laugh, or make rude, insulting comments under their breath.
It was difficult enough going through life as a fat man, Kenny thought.
How much worse, then, to face the cruel world as a fat man with a monkey
on his back. Kenny did not want to know. He resolved to sit there on that
trash can in the dark alley until he died or the monkey died, rather than
face shame and ridicule on the streets.
  His resolve endured about an hour. Then Kenny Dorchester began to get
hungry. Maybe people would laugh at him, but they had always laughed at
him, so what did it matter? Kenny rose and dusted himself off, while the
monkey settled itself more comfortably on his neck. He ignored it, and
decided to go in search of a pepperoni pizza.
   He did not find one easily. The abysmal slum in which he had been
stranded had a surfeit of winos, dangerous-looking teenagers, and
burned-out or boarded-up buildings, but it had precious few pizza parlors.
Nor did it have any taxis. Kenny walked down the main thoroughfare with
brisk dignity, looking neither left nor right, heading for safer
neighborhoods as fast as his plump little legs could carry him. Twice he
came upon phone booths, and eagerly fetched out a coin to summon
transportation, but both times the phones proved to be out of order.
Vandals, thought Kenny Dorchester, were as bad as rats.
   Finally, after what seemed like hours of walking, he stumbled upon a
sleazy cafe". The lettering on the window said JOHN'S GRILL, and there
was a neon sign above the door that said, simply, EAT. Kenny was very
familiar with those three lovely letters and he recognized the sign two
blocks off. It called to him like a beacon. Even before he entered, he knew
it was rather unlikely that such a place would include pepperoni pizza on
its menu, but by that time Kenny had ceased to care.
   As he pushed the door aside, Kenny experienced a brief moment of
apprehension, partially because he felt very out of place in the cafe, where
the rest of the diners all appeared to be muggers, and partially because he
was afraid they would refuse to serve him because of the monkey on his
back. Acutely uncomfortable in the doorway, he moved quickly to a small
table in an obscure corner, where he hoped to escape the curious stares. A
gaunt gray-haired waitress in a faded pink uniform moved purposefully
toward him, and Kenny sat with his eyes downcast, playing nervously with
the salt, pepper, ketchup, dreading the moment when she arrived and
said, "Hey, you can't bring that thing in here!"
  But when the waitress reached his table, she simply pulled a pad out of
her apron pocket and stood poised, pencil in hand. "Well?" she demanded.
"What'll it be?"
  Kenny stared up in shock, and smiled. He stammered a bit, then
recovered himself and ordered a cheese omelet with a double side of
bacon, coffee and a large glass of milk, and cinnamon toast. "Do hash
browns come with?" he asked hopefully, but the waitress shook her head
and departed.
 What a marvelous, kind woman, Kenny thought as he waited for his
meal and shredded a paper napkin thoughtfully. What a wonderful place!
Why, they hadn't even mentioned his monkey! How very polite of them.
   The food arrived shortly. "Ahhhh," Kenny said as the waitress laid it out
in front of him on the Formica tabletop. He was ravenous. He selected a
slice of cinnamon toast, and brought it to his mouth.
   And a little monkey darted out from behind his head and snatched it
clean away.
   Kenny Dorchester sat in numb surprise for an instant, his suddenly
empty hand poised before his open mouth. He heard the monkey eating
his toast, chomping noisily. Then, before Kenny had quite comprehended
what was happening, the monkey's great long tail snaked in under his
armpit, curled around his glass of milk, and spirited it up and away in the
blink of an eye.
   Hey!" Kenny said, but he was much too slow. Behind his back he heard
slurping, sucking sounds, and all of a sudden the glass came vaulting over
his left shoulder. He caught it before it fell and smashed, and set it down
unsteadily. The monkey's tail came stealthily around and headed for his
bacon. Kenny grabbed up a fork and stabbed at it, but the monkey was
faster than he was. The bacon vanished, and the tines of the fork bent
against the hard Formica uselessly.
   By then Kenny knew he was in a race. Dropping the bent fork, he used
his spoon to cut off a chunk of the omelet, dripping cheese, and he bent
forward as he lifted it, quick as he could. The monkey was quicker. A little
hand flashed in from somewhere, and the spoon had only a tantalizing gob
of half-melted cheese remaining on it when it reached Kenny's mouth. He
lunged back toward his plate, and loaded up again, but it didn't matter
how fast he tried to be. The monkey had two paws and a tail, and once it
even used a little monkey foot to snatch something away from him. In
hardly any time at all, Kenny Dorchester's meal was gone. He sat there
staring down at the empty, greasy plate, and he felt tears gathering in his
eyes.
  The waitress reappeared without Kenny noticing. "My, you sure are a
hungry one," she said to him, ripping off his check from her pad and
putting it in front of him. "Polished that off quicker than anyone I ever
saw."
   Kenny looked up at her. "But I didn't," he protested. "The monkey ate it
all!"
  The waitress looked at him very oddly. "The monkey?" she said
uncertainly.
   "The monkey," Kenny said. He did not care for the way she was staring
at him, like he was crazy or something.
  "What monkey?" she asked. "You didn't sneak no animals in here, did
you? The board of health don't allow no animals in here, mister."
   "What do you mean, sneak?" Kenny said in annoyance. "Why, the
monkey is right on my—" He never got a chance to finish. Just then the
monkey hit him, a tremendous hard blow on the left side of his face. The
force of it twisted his head half-around, and Kenny yelped in pain and
shock.
  The waitress seemed concerned. "You OK, mister?" she asked. "You
ain't gonna have a fit, are you, twitching like that?"
 "I didn't twitch!" Kenny all but shouted. "The goddamned monkey hit
me! Can't you see?"
 "Oh," said the waitress, taking a step backward. "Oh, of course. Your
monkey hit you. Pesky little things, ain't they?"
   Kenny pounded his fists on the table in frustration. "Never mind," he
said, "just never mind." He snatched up the check—the monkey did not
take that away from him, he noted—and rose. "Here," he said, pulling out
his wallet. "And you have a phone in this place, don't you? Call me a cab,
all right? You can do that, can't you?"
  "Sure," the waitress said, moving to the register to ring up his meal.
Everyone in the cafe was staring at him. "Sure, mister," she muttered. "A
cab. We'll get you a cab right away."
   Kenny waited, fuming. The cab driver made no comment on his
monkey. Instead of going home, he took the cab to his favorite pizza place,
three blocks from his apartment. Then he stormed right in and ordered a
large pepperoni. The monkey ate it all, even when Kenny tried to confuse it
by picking up one slice in each hand and moving them simultaneously
toward his mouth. Unfortunately, the monkey had two hands as well, both
of them faster than Kenny's.
   When the pizza was completely gone, Kenny thought for a moment,
summoned over the waitress, and ordered a second. This time he got a
large anchovy. He thought that was very clever. Kenny Dorchester had
never met anyone else beside himself who liked anchovy pizza. Those little
salty fishes would be his salvation, he thought. To increase the odds, when
the pizza arrived Kenny picked up the hot pepper shaker and covered it
with enough hot peppers to ignite a major conflagration. Then, feeling
confident, he tried to eat a slice.
  The monkey liked anchovy pizza with lots of hot peppers. Kenny
Dorchester almost wept.
   He went from the pizza place to the Slab, from the Slab to a fine Greek
restaurant, from the Greek restaurant to a local McDonald's, from
McDonald's to a bakery that made the most marvelous chocolate eclairs.
Sooner or later, Kenny Dorchester thought, the monkey would be full. It
was only a very little monkey, after all. How much food could it eat? He
would just keep on ordering food, he resolved, and the monkey would
either reach its limits or rupture and die.
  That day Kenny spent more than two hundred dollars on meals.
  He got absolutely nothing to eat.
  The monkey seemed to be a bottomless pit. If it had a capacity, that
capacity was surely greater than the capacity of Kenny's wallet. Finally he
was forced to admit defeat. The monkey could not be stuffed into
submission.
    Kenny cast about for another tactic, and finally hit on it. Monkeys were
stupid, after all, even invisible monkeys with prodigious appetites. Smiling
slyly, Kenny went to a neighborhood supermarket, and picked up a box of
banana pudding (it seemed appropriate) and a box of rat poison.
Humming a spry little tune, he walked on home, and set to work making
the pudding, stirring in liberal amounts of the rat poison as it cooked. The
poison was nicely odorless. The pudding smelled wonderful. Kenny poured
it into some dessert cups to cool, and watched television for an hour or so.
Finally he rose nonchalantly, went to the refrigerator, and got out a
pudding and a nice big spoon. He sat back down in front of the set,
spooned up a generous glob of pudding, and brought it to his open mouth.
Where he paused. And paused. And waited.
  The monkey did nothing.
  Maybe it was full at last, Kenny thought. He put aside the poisoned
pudding and rushed back to his kitchen, where he found a box of vanilla
wafers hiding on a shelf, and a few forlorn Fig Newtons as well.
  The monkey ate all of them.
   A tear trickled down Kenny's cheek. The monkey would let him have all
the poisoned pudding he wanted, it seemed, but nothing else. He reached
back halfheartedly and tried to grab the monkey once again, thinking
maybe all that eating would have slowed it down some, but it was a vain
hope. The monkey evaded him, and when Kenny persisted the monkey bit
his finger. Kenny yowled and snatched his hand back. His finger was
bleeding. He sucked on it. That much, at least, the monkey permitted him.
   When he had washed his finger and wrapped a Band-Aid around it,
Kenny returned to his living room and seated himself heavily, weary and
defeated, in front of his television set. An old rerun of The Galloping
Gourmet was coming on. He couldn't stand it. He jabbed at his remote
control to change the channel, and watched blindly for hours, sunk in
despair, weeping at the Betty Crocker commercials. Finally, during the
late late show, he stirred a little at one of the frequent public service
announcements. That was it, he thought; he had to enlist others, he had to
get help.
  He picked up his phone and punched out the Crisis Line number.
  The woman who answered sounded kind and sympathetic and very
beautiful, and Kenny began to pour out his heart to her, all about the
monkey that wouldn't let him eat, about how nobody else seemed to notice
the monkey, about . . . but he had barely gotten his heart-pouring going
good when the monkey smashed him across the side of the head. Kenny
moaned. "What's wrong?" the woman asked. The monkey yanked his ear.
Kenny tried to ignore the pain and keep on talking, but the monkey kept
hurting him until finally he shuddered and sobbed and hung up the
phone.
   This is a nightmare, Kenny thought, a terrible nightmare. And so
thinking, he pushed himself to his feet and staggered off to bed, hoping
that everything would be normal in the morning, that the monkey would
have been nothing but part of some wretched dream, no doubt brought on
by indigestion.
   The merciless little monkey would not even allow him to sleep properly,
Kenny discovered. He was accustomed to sleeping on his back, with his
hands folded very primly on his stomach. But when he undressed and tried
to assume that position, the monkey fists came raining down on his poor
head like some furious hairy hail. The monkey was not about to be
squashed between Kenny's bulk and the pillows, it seemed. Kenny
squealed with pain and rolled over on his stomach. He was very
uncomfortable this way and had difficulty falling asleep, but it was the
only way the monkey would leave him alone.



   The next morning Kenny Dorchester drifted slowly into wakefulness, his
cheek mashed against the pillows and his right arm still asleep. He was
afraid to move. It was all a dream, he told himself, there is no
monkey—what a silly thing that would be, monkey indeed!—it was only
that Boney Moroney had told him about this "monkey treatment," and he
had slept on it and had a nightmare. He couldn't feel anything on his back,
not a thing. This was just like any other morning. He opened one bleary
eye. His bedroom looked perfectly normal. Still he was afraid to move. It
was very peaceful lying here like this, monkeyless, and he wanted to savor
this feeling. So Kenny lay very still for the longest time, watching the
numbers on his digital clock change slowly.
   Then his stomach growled at him. It was very upset. Kenny gathered up
his courage. "There is no monkey!" he proclaimed loudly, and he sat up in
bed.
  He felt the monkey shift.
  Kenny trembled and almost started to weep again, but he controlled
himself with an effort. No monkey was going to get the best of Kenny
Dorchester, he told himself. Grimacing, he donned his slippers and
plodded into the bathroom.
  The monkey peered out cautiously from behind his head while Kenny
was shaving. He glared at it in the bathroom mirror. It seemed to have
grown a bit, but that was hardly surprising, considering how much it had
eaten yesterday. Kenny toyed with the idea of trying to cut the monkey's
throat, but decided that his Norelco electric shaver was not terribly well
suited to that end. And even if he used a knife, trying to stab behind his
own back while looking in the mirror was a dangerously uncertain
proposition.
  Before leaving the bathroom, Kenny was struck by a whim. He stepped
on his scale.
  The numbers lit up at once: 367. The same as yesterday, he thought.
The monkey weighed nothing. He frowned. No, that had to be wrong. No
doubt the little monkey weighed a pound or two, but its weight was offset
by whatever poundage Kenny had lost. He had to have lost some weight,
he reasoned, since he hadn't been allowed to eat anything for ever so long.
He stepped off the scale, then got back on quickly, just to double-check. It
still read 367. Kenny was certain that he had lost weight. Perhaps some
good would come of his travails after all. The thought made him feel oddly
cheerful.
  Kenny grew even more cheerful at breakfast. For the first time since he
had gotten his monkey, he managed to get some food into his mouth.
   When he arrived at the kitchen, he debated between French toast and
bacon and eggs, but only briefly. Then he decided that he would never get
to taste either. Instead, with a somber fatalism, Kenny fetched down a
bowl and filled it with corn flakes and milk. The monkey would probably
steal it all anyway, he thought, so there was no sense going to any trouble.
   Quick as he could, he hurried the spoon to his mouth. The monkey
grabbed it away. Kenny had expected it, had known it would happen, but
when the monkey hand wrenched the spoon away he nonetheless felt a
sudden and terrible grief. "No," he said uselessly. "No, no, no." He could
hear the corn flakes crunching in that filthy monkey mouth, and he felt
milk dripping down the back of his neck. Tears gathered in his eyes as he
stared down at the bowl of corn flakes, so near and yet so far.
  Then he had an idea.
  Kenny Dorchester lunged forward and stuck his face right down in the
bowl.
   The monkey twisted his ear and shrieked and pounded on his temple,
but Kenny didn't care. He was sucking in milk gleefully and gobbling up as
many corn flakes as his mouth could hold. By the time the monkey's tail
lashed around angrily and sent the bowl sailing from the table to shatter
on the floor, Kenny had a huge wet mouthful. His cheeks bulged and milk
dribbled down his chin, and somehow he'd gotten a corn flake up his right
nostril, but Kenny was in heaven. He chewed and swallowed as fast as he
could, almost choking on the food.
    When it was all gone he licked his lips and rose triumphantly. "Ha, ha,
ha." He walked back to his bedroom with great dignity and dressed,
sneering at the monkey in the full-length bedroom mirror. He had beaten
it.
   In the days and weeks that followed, Kenny Dorchester settled into a
new sort of daily routine and an uneasy accommodation with his monkey.
It proved easier than Kenny might have imagined, except at mealtimes.
When he was not attempting to get food into his mouth, it was almost
possible to forget about the monkey entirely. At work it sat peacefully on
his back while Kenny shuffled his papers and made his phone calls. His
co-workers either failed to notice his monkey or were sufficiently polite so
as not to comment on it. The only difficulty came one day at coffee break,
when Kenny foolhardily approached the coffee vendor in an effort to
secure a cheese Danish. The monkey ate nine of them before Kenny could
stagger away, and the man insisted that Kenny had done it when his back
was turned.
   Simply by avoiding mirrors, a habit that Kenny Dorchester now began
to cultivate as assiduously as any vampire, he was able to keep his mind
off the monkey for most of the day. He had only one difficulty, though it
occurred thrice daily: breakfast, lunch, and dinner. At those times the
monkey asserted itself forcefully, and Kenny was forced to deal with it. As
the weeks passed, he gradually fell into the habit of ordering food that
could be served in bowls, so that he might practice what he termed his
"Kellogg maneuver." By this stratagem, Kenny usually managed to get at
least a few mouthfuls to eat each and every day.
   To be sure, there were problems. People would stare at him rather
strangely when he used the Kellogg maneuver in public, and sometimes
make rude comments on his table manners. At a chili emporium Kenny
liked to frequent, the proprietor assumed he had suffered a heart attack
when Kenny dove toward his chili, and was very angry with him afterward.
On another occasion a bowl of soup left him with facial burns that made it
look as though he were constantly blushing. And the last straw came when
he was thrown bodily out of his favorite seafood restaurant in the world,
simply because he plunged his face into a bowl of crawfish bisque and
began sucking it up noisily. Kenny stood in the street and berated them
loudly and forcefully, reminding them how much money he had spent
there over the years. Thereafter he ate only at home.
   Despite the limited success of his Kellogg maneuver, Kenny Dorchester
still lost nine-tenths of every meal to the voracious monkey on his back. At
first he was constantly hungry, frequently depressed, and full of schemes
for ridding himself of his monkey. The only problem with these schemes
was that none of them seemed to work. One Saturday, Kenny went to the
monkey house at the zoo, hoping that his monkey might hop off to play
with others of its kind, or perhaps go in pursuit of some attractive monkey
of the opposite sex. Instead, no sooner had he entered the monkey house
than all the monkeys imprisoned therein ran to the bars of their cages and
began to chitter and scream and spit and leap up and down madly. His
own monkey answered in kind, and when some of the caged monkeys
began to throw peanut husks and other bits of garbage Kenny clapped his
hands over his ears and fled.
  On another occasion he allowed himself to visit a local saloon, and
ordered a number of boilermakers, a drink he understood to be
particularly devastating. His intent was to get his monkey so blind-drunk
that it might be easily removed. This experiment, too, had rather
unfortunate consequences. The monkey drank the boilermakers as fast as
Kenny could order them, but after the third one it began to keep time to
the disco music from the jukebox by beating on the top of Kenny's head.
The next morning it was Kenny who woke with the pounding headache;
the monkey seemed fine.
   After a time, Kenny finally put all his scheming aside. Failure had
discouraged him, and moreover the matter seemed somehow less urgent
than it had originally. He was seldom hungry after the first week, in fact.
Instead he went through a brief period of weakness, marked by frequent
dizzy spells, and then a kind of euphoria settled over him. He felt just
wonderful, and even better, he was losing weight!
   To be sure, it did not show on his scale. Every morning he climbed up
on it, and every morning it lit up as 367. But that was only because it was
weighing the monkey as well as himself. Kenny knew he was losing; he
could almost feel the pounds and inches just melting away, and some of
his co-workers In the office remarked on it as weff. Kenny owned up to it,
beaming. When they asked him how he was doing it, he winked and
replied, "The monkey treatment! The mysterious monkey treatment!" He
said no more than that. The one time he tried to explain, the monkey
fetched him such as wallop it almost took his head off, and Kenny's friends
began to mutter about his strange spasms.
  Finally the day came when Kenny had to tell his cleaner to take in all his
pants a few inches. That was one of the most delightful tasks of his life, he
thought.
   All the pleasure went right out of the moment when he exited the store,
however, and chanced to glance briefly to his side and see his reflection in
the window. At home Kenny had long since removed all his mirrors, so he
was shocked at the sight of his monkey. It had grown. It was a little thing
no longer. Now it hunched on his back like some evil deformed
chimpanzee, and its grinning face loomed above his head instead of
peering out behind it. The monkey was grossly fat beneath its sparse
brown hair, almost as wide as it was tall, and its great long tail drooped all
the way to the ground. Kenny stared at it with horror, and it grinned back
at him. No wonder he had been having backaches recently, he thought. He
walked home slowly, all the jauntiness gone out of his step, trying to think.
A few neighborhood dogs followed him up the street, barking at his
monkey. Kenny ignored them. He had long since learned that dogs could
see his monkey, just like the monkeys at the zoo. He suspected that drunks
could see it as well. One man had stared at him for a very long time that
night he had visited the saloon. Of course, the fellow might just have been
staring at those vanishing boilermakers.
   Back in his apartment Kenny Dorchester stretched out on his couch on
his stomach, stuck a pillow underneath his chin, and turned on his
television set. He paid no attention to the screen, however. He was trying
to figure things out. Even the Pizza Hut commercials were insufficiently
distracting, although Kenny did absently mutter "Ah-h-h-h" like you were
supposed to when the slice of pizza, dripping long strands of cheese, was
first lifted from the pan.
   When the show ended, Kenny got up and turned off the set and sat
himself down at his dining room table. He found a piece of paper and a
stubby little pencil. Very carefully, he block-printed a formula across the
paper, and stared at it.
  ME + MONKEY = 367 POUNDS
   There were certain disturbing implications in that formula, Kenny
thought. The more he considered them, the less he liked them. He was
definitely losing weight, to be sure, and that was not to be sneered
at—nonetheless, the grim inflexibility of the formula hinted that most of
the gains traditionally attributed to weight loss would never be his to
enjoy. No matter how much fat he shed, he would continue to carry
around 367 pounds, and the strain on his body would be the same. As for
becoming svelte and dashing and attractive to women, how could he even
consider it so long as he had his monkey? Kenny thought of how a dinner
date might go for him, and shuddered. "Where will it all end?" he said
aloud.
  The monkey shifted, and snickered a vile little snicker.
  Kenny pursed his lips in firm disapproval. This could not go on, he
resolved. He decided to go straight to the source on the morrow, and with
that idea planted firmly in his mind, he took himself to bed.
   The next day, after work, Kenny Dorchester returned by cab to the
seedy neighborhood where he had been subjected to the monkey
treatment.
  The storefront was gone.
   Kenny sat in the back seat of the taxi (this time he had the good sense
not to get out, and moreover had tipped the driver handsomely in
advance) and blinked in confusion. A tiny wet blubbery moan escaped his
lips. The address was right, he knew it, he still had the slip of paper that
had brought him there in the first place. But where he had found a grimy
brick storefront adorned by a faded Coca-Cola sign and flanked by two
vacant lots, now there was only one large vacant lot, choked with weeds
and rubbish and broken bricks. "Oh, no," Kenny said. "Oh, no."
  "You OK?" asked the lady driving the cab.
   "Yes," Kenny muttered. "Just. . . just wait, please. I have to think." He
held his head in his hands. He feared he was going to develop a splitting
headache. Suddenly he felt weak and dizzy. And very hungry. The meter
ticked. The cabbie whistled. Kenny thought. The street looked just as he
remembered it, except for the missing storefront. It was just as dirty, the
old winos were still on their stoop, the ...
  Kenny rolled down the window. "You, sir!" he called out to one of the
winos. The man stared at him. "Come here, sir!" Kenny yelled.
  Warily, the old man shuffled across the street.
  Kenny fetched out a dollar bill from his wallet and pressed it into the
man's hand. "Here, friend," he said. "Go and buy yourself some vintage
Thunderbird, if you will."
  "Why you givin' me this?" the wino said suspiciously.
  "I wish you to answer me a question. What has become of the building
that was standing there" —Kenny pointed—"a few weeks ago?"
  The man stuffed the dollar into his pocket quickly. "Ain't been no
buildin' there fo' years," he said.
  "I was afraid of that," Kenny said. "Are you certain? I was here in the
not-so-distant past and I distinctly recall . . ."
   "No buildin'," the wino said firmly. He turned and walked away, but
after a few steps he paused and glanced back. "You're one of them fat
guys," he said accusingly.
  "What do you know about. . . ahem . . . overweight men?"
   "See 'em wanderin' round over there, all the time. Crazy, too. Yellin' at
thin air, playin' with some kind of animals. Yeah. I 'member you. You're
one of them fat guys, all right." He scowled at Kenny, confused. "Looks like
you lost some of that blubber, though. Real good. Thanks for the dollar."
  Kenny Dorchester watched him return to his stoop and begin
conversing animatedly with his colleagues. With a tremulous sigh, Kenny
rolled up the window, glanced at the empty lot again, and bid his driver
take him home. Him and his monkey, that is.
  Weeks went dripping by and Kenny Dorchester lived as if in a trance.
He went to work, shuffled his papers, mumbled pleasantries to his
co-workers, struggled and schemed for his meager mouthfuls of food,
avoided mirrors. The scale read 367. His flesh melted away from him at a
precipitous rate. He developed slack, droopy jowls, and his skin sagged all
about his middle, looking as flaccid and pitiful as a used condom. He
began to have fainting spells, brought on by hunger. At times he staggered
and lurched about the street, his thinning and weakened legs unable to
support the weight of his growing monkey. His vision got blurry.
   Once he even thought that his hair had started to fall out, but that at
least was a false alarm; it was the monkey who was losing hair, thank
goodness. It shed all over the place, ruining his furniture, and even daily
vacuuming didn't seem to help much. Soon Kenny stopped trying to clean
up. He lacked the energy. He lacked the energy for just about everything,
in fact. Rising from a chair was a major undertaking. Cooking dinner was
impossible torment—but he did that anyway, since the monkey beat him
severely when it was not fed. Nothing seemed to matter very much to
Kenny Dorchester. Nothing but the terrible tale of his scale each morning,
and the formula that he had scotch-taped to his bathroom wall.
  ME + MONKEY = 367 POUNDS
   He wondered how much was ME anymore, and how much was
MONKEY, but he did not really want to find out. One day, following the
dictates of a kind of feeble whim, Kenny made a sudden grab for the
monkey's legs under his chin, hoping against hope that it had gotten slow
and obese and that he would be able to yank it from his back. His hands
closed on nothing. On his own pale flesh. The monkey's legs did not seem
to be there, though Kenny could still feel its awful crushing weight. He
patted his neck and breast in dim confusion, staring down at himself, and
noting absently that he could see his feet. He wondered how long that had
been true. They seemed to be perfectly nice feet, Kenny Dorchester
thought, although the legs to which they were attached were alarmingly
gaunt.
   Slowly his mind wandered back to the quandary at hand—what had
become of the monkey's hind legs? Kenny frowned and puzzled and tried
to work it all out in his head, but nothing occurred to him. Finally he slid
his newly discovered feet into a pair of bedroom slippers and shuffled to
the closet where he had stored all of his mirrors. Closing his eyes, he
reached in, fumbled about, and found the full-length mirror that had once
hung on his bedroom wall. It was a large, wide mirror. Working entirely
by touch, Kenny fetched it out, carried it a few feet, and painstakingly
propped it up against a wall. Then he held his breath and opened his eyes.
   There in the mirror stood a gaunt, gray, skeletal-looking fellow,
hunched over and sickly. On his back, grinning, was a thing the size of a
gorilla. A very obese gorilla. It had a long, pale, snakelike tail, and great
long arms, and it was as white as a maggot and entirely hairless. It had no
legs. It was . . . attached to him now, growing right out of his back. Its grin
was terrible, and filled up half of its face. It looked very like the gross
proprietor of the monkey treatment emporium, in fact. Why had he never
noticed that before? Of course, of course.
   Kenny Dorchester turned from the mirror, and cooked the monkey a big
rich dinner before going to bed.
  That night he dreamed of how it all started, back in the Slab when he
had met Boney Moroney. In his nightmare a great evil white thing rode
atop Moroney's shoulders, eating slab after slab of ribs, but Kenny politely
pretended not to notice while he and Boney made bright, sprightly
conversation. Then the thing ran out of ribs, so it reached down and lifted
one of Boney's arms and began to eat his hand. The bones crunched nicely,
and Moroney kept right on talking. The creature had eaten its way up to
the elbow when Kenny woke screaming, covered with a cold sweat. He had
wet his bed, too.
  Agonizingly, he pushed himself up and staggered to the toilet, where he
dry-heaved for ten minutes. The monkey, angry at being wakened, gave
him a desultory slap from time to time.
  And then a furtive light came into Kenny Dorchester's eyes. "Boney," he
whispered. Hurriedly, he scrambled back to his bedroom on hands and
knees, rose, and threw on some clothes. It was three in the morning, but
Kenny knew there was no time to waste. He looked up an address in his
phone book, and called a cab.
   Boney Moroney lived in a tall, modern high-rise by the river, with
moonlight shining brightly off its silver-mirrored flanks. When Kenny
staggered in, he found the night doorman asleep at his station, which was
just as well. Kenny tiptoed past him to the elevators and rode up to the
eighth floor. The monkey on his back had begun stirring now, and seemed
uneasy and ill-tempered.
  Kenny's finger trembled as he pushed the round black button set in the
door to Moroney's apartment, just beneath the eyehole. Musical chimes
sounded loudly within, startling in the morning stillness. Kenny leaned on
the button. The music played on and on. Finally he heard footsteps, heavy
and threatening. The peephole opened and closed again. Then the door
swung open.
   The apartment was black, though the far wall was made entirely of
glass, so the moonlight illuminated the darkness softly. Outlined against
the stars and the lights of the city stood the man who had opened the
door. He was hugely, obscenely fat, and his skin was a pasty fungoid white,
and he had little dark eyes set deep into crinkles in his broad suety face.
He wore nothing but a vast pair of striped shorts. His breasts flopped
about against his chest when he shifted his weight. And when he smiled,
his teeth filled up half his face. A great crescent moon of teeth. He smiled
when he saw Kenny, and Kenny's monkey. Kenny felt sick. The thing in the
door weighed twice as much as the one on his back. Kenny trembled.
"Where is he?" he whispered softly. "Where is Boney? What have you done
to him?"
    The creature laughed, and its pendulous breasts flounced about wildly
as it shook with mirth. The monkey on Kenny's back began to laugh, too, a
higher, thinner laughter as sharp as the edge of a knife. It reached down
and twisted Kenny's ear cruelly. Suddenly a vast fear and a vast anger
filled Kenny Dorchester. He summoned all the strength left in his wasted
body and pushed forward, and somehow, somehow, he barged past the
obese colossus who barred his way and staggered into the interior of the
apartment. "Boney," he called, "where are you, Boney? It's me, Kenny."
  There was no answer. Kenny went from room to room. The apartment
was filthy, a shambles. There was no sign of Boney Moroney anywhere.
When Kenny came panting back to the living room, the monkey shifted
abruptly, and threw him off balance. He stumbled and fell hard. Pain went
shooting up through his knees, and he cut open one outstretched hand on
the edge of the chrome-and-glass coffee table. Kenny began to weep.
  He heard the door close, and the thing that lived here moved slowly
toward him. Kenny blinked back tears and stared at the approach of those
two mammoth legs, pale in the moonlight, sagging all around with fat. He
looked up and it was like gazing up the side of a mountain. Far, far above
him grinned those terrible mocking teeth. " Where is he?" Kenny
Dorchester whispered. "What have you done with poor Boney?"
   The grin did not change. The thing reached down a meaty hand, fingers
as thick as a length of kielbasa, and snagged the waistband of the baggy
striped shorts. It pulled them down clumsily, and they settled to the
ground like a parachute, bunching around its feet.
  "Oh, no," said Kenny Dorchester.
   The thing had no genitals. Hanging down between its legs, almost
touching the carpet now that it had been freed from the confines of the
soiled shorts, was a wrinkled droopy bag of skin, long and gaunt, growing
from the creature's crotch. But as Kenny stared at it in horror, it thrashed
feebly, and stirred, and the loose folds of flesh separated briefly into tiny
arms and legs.
  Then it opened its eyes.
   Kenny Dorchester screamed and suddenly he was back on his feet,
lurching away from the grinning obscenity in the center of the room.
Between its legs, the thing that had been Boney Moroney raised its pitiful
stick-thin arms in supplication. "Oh, nooooo," Kenny moaned, blubbering,
and he danced about wildly, the vast weight of his monkey heavy on his
back. Round and round he danced in the dimness, in the moonlight,
searching for an escape from this madness.
  Beyond the plate glass wall the lights of the city beckoned.
  Kenny paused and panted and stared at them. Somehow the monkey
must have known what he was thinking, for suddenly it began to beat on
him wildly, to twist at his ears, to rain savage blows all around his head.
But Kenny Dorchester paid no mind. With a smile that was almost
beatific, he gathered the last of his strength and rushed pell-mell toward
the moonlight.
   The glass shattered into a million glittering shards, and Kenny smiled
all the way down.



   It was the smell that told him he was still alive, the smell of disinfectant,
and the feel of starched sheets beneath him. A hospital, he thought amidst
a haze of pain. He was in a hospital. Kenny wanted to cry. Why hadn't he
died? Oh, why, oh, why? He opened his eyes and tried to say something.
   Suddenly a nurse was there, standing over him, feeling his brow and
looking down with concern. Kenny wanted to beg her to kill him, but the
words would not come. She went away, and when she came back she had
others with her.
   A chubby young man stood by his side and touched him and prodded
here and there. Kenny's mouth worked soundlessly. "Easy," the doctor
said. "You'll be all right, Mr. Dorchester, but you have a long way to go.
You're in a hospital. You're a very lucky man. You fell eight stories. You
ought to be dead."
  I want to be dead, Kenny thought, and he shaped the words very, very
carefully with his mouth, but no one seemed to hear them. Maybe the
monkey has taken over, he thought. Maybe I can't even talk anymore.
   "He wants to say something," the nurse said. "I can see that," said the
chubby young doctor. "Mr. Dorchester, please don't strain yourself. Really.
If you are trying to ask about your friend, I'm afraid he wasn't as lucky as
you. He was killed by the fall. You would have died as well, but fortunately
you landed on top of him."
   Kenny's fear and confusion must have been obvious, for the nurse put a
gentle hand on his arm. "The other man," she said patiently. "The fat one.
You can thank God he was so fat, too. He broke your fall like a giant
pillow."
  And finally Kenny Dorchester understood what they were saying, and he
began to weep, but now he was weeping for joy, and trembling.
  Three days later, he managed his first word. "Pizza," he said, and it
came weak and hoarse from between his lips, but the sound elated him
and he repeated it, louder, and then louder still, and before long he was
pushing the nurse's call button and shouting and pushing and shouting.
"Pizza, pizza, pizza, pizza," he chanted, and he would not be calm until
they ordered one for him. Nothing had ever tasted so good.



                      AUTHOR'S NOTE
  One of the nicest things about life is that so much of it is unexpected.
One of the worst things about art is that so much of it isn't.
   I grew up loving the horror genre, everything from creature features to
H. P. Lovecraft. I used to sell monster stories to the other kids in the
projects where I lived, and for their nickel they got not only the story but
also my dramatic reading. But it must be admitted, there was a period
where I drifted away. Horror fiction seemed to have lost its savor. The
stories began to seem too much alike. I got bored.
  With the benefit of hindsight, I now understand why. I was bored by the
sheer predictability of the stories I was reading, bored by horror stories
that were only horror stories.
   All good fiction, it seems to me, is about more than what it's about. Like
life, it is full of many different things, and flavored with the full range of
human emotion and experience. The modern publishing industry markets
fiction as if it were ice cream, as if love and horror and laughter and lust
and suspense could be put in little cartons like butter brickie and rocky
road and peanut butter chocolate. Come on in, readers, here we have 31
Emotions, no waiting.
   Well, I've always been the sort who gets scoops of two or even three
different flavors on my sugar cones. Which brings me to the story you just
read.
   I wanted to write a story that was genuinely funny and genuinely
horrifying. In life, horror and humor are not all that far apart. When we
rise in the morning, we don't know if the day will be full of fear, or
laughter, or both. That ought to be true when we pick up a book too.
   Ergo "The Monkey Treatment." A lot of editors didn't know quite what
to make of this story. Some thought it was funny, some thought it was
horrible, some thought it was disgusting. Some thought it was funny and
horrible and disgusting, but told me I couldn't do that, at least not in their
ice cream store. Ed Ferman of F&SF thought it was a good story, and
bought it. Enough readers agreed with him to make the story a Hugo and
Nebula finalist.
  I don't know about you, but I found that very encouraging. It's nice to
know that there are other people out there, like me and Kenny, who
appreciate a wide range of flavors.
  —George R. R. Martin