Monkey Beach

by Eden Robinson

I used to think that if I could talk to the spirit world, I’d get some answers. Ha bloody ha. I wish the dead would just come out and say what they mean instead of being so passive-aggressive about the whole thing.

I never understood Jimmy’s implicit trust that the water would hold him safely.

I snuck my Pac-Man game into my knapsack because anything you had to dress up for couldn’t be fun.

Ba-ba-oo was an asshole. He beat Gran. Instead of sending him away, she sent Mick and Mom to residential school.”

She came right up to me and said, “I think you have something to say to my son.” I knew I was supposed to say sorry. But if Frank wasn’t going to say it, neither was I. “You taste like poo.” “You are a monster,” she said to me. “You are an evil little monster.” “Takes one to know one!” Mick shouted, looking up from his potential date.

Three days later, I answered the front door and Mick’s friend Josh stared down at me. He said, in a loud, tipsy stage whisper, that he had taken care of his nephew Frankie for me. “You want me to bring him over to say sorry, I can do that, too.”

She had forced us to read a book that said that the Indians on the northwest coast of British Columbia had killed and eaten people as religious sacrifices. My teacher had made us each read a paragraph out loud. When my turn came, I sat there shaking, absolutely furious. “Lisa?” she’d said. “Did you hear me? Please read the next paragraph.” “But it’s all lies,” I’d said.

Since I was going to get into trouble anyway, I started singing “Fuck the Oppressors.” The class cheered, more because of the swearing than anything else, and I was promptly dragged, still singing, to the principal’s office.

He let Mick get away with “brainwashing” me because my uncle was one of the only people willing to be my baby-sitter.

A human need to express sympathy with tangibles.

Silvery, slender oolichans are about as long as your hand and a little thicker than your thumb. They are part of the smelt family and are one of the tastiest fish on the planet.

Mom leaned over and dipped her hand in the water, then washed her face. After stubbing out his cigarette, Mick did the same. “When you go up the Kitlope,” Mom said, “you be polite and introduce yourself to the water.”

Ma-ma-oo told Jimmy that feeding crows brought you good luck, so he tried it before a swim meet. It was the first time he won.

Spotty hopped over and moved it two feet to the left, so that when the next car came along, it ran right over the watch.

Spotty wakes me from a dream about Monkey Beach. She is in the greengage tree when I wake up. She screeches, hops, and I hear her hit our roof, then trundle back and forth, her claws clicking against the shingles. La’sda, she says. Go into the water. La’sda, la’sda.

Contacting the dead, lesson one. Sleep is an altered state of consciousness. To fall asleep is to fall into a deep, healing trance. In the spectrum of realities, being awake is on one side and being asleep is way, way on the other. To be absorbed in a movie, a game or work is to enter a light trance. Daydreams, prayers or obsessing are heavier trances. Most people enter trances reflexively. To contact the spirit world, you must control the way you enter this state of being that is somewhere between waking and sleeping.