The Monkey Suit

The Monkey Suit

         I didn’t lay it out the night before. I knew I was going to wear it, so it stayed in the closet until the morning of the interview. I began preparing myself the night before, as well as I could, in mind and body. I stretched all my muscles, especially my legs, so they wouldn’t twitch when I rode the subway in. They had a way of doing that whenever I found myself too closed in with other people. I tried ignoring them, and breathed slowly in and out, but that only seemed to make my legs twitch more. Stretching them helped. They were looser and less easily agitated. I also did some breathing exercises. I sat on my round meditation pillow, filled with buckwheat that cracked and rustled when I shifted my position, and closed my eyes. A small, circular darkness formed and floated just beyond my nose. At first, my thoughts drowned smoothly into black space, but they would then pull back to the suit, limp in the closet.

         After many failed attempts, I was finally able to push the suit from my mind, or at least to hide it in the thick fog at the back of my thoughts. It was still there, but blurred in the dark, and I slept soundly despite the lingering nervousness concerning the interview.

         When the high-pitched beeping of my alarm hammered its way into my dreams, I squinted in the gray morning, not yet aware of the day’s purpose. I looked at the clock. Its face read 7:15 in fat, square numbers, and thoughts of the interview, and the suit hanging in the closet, flashed behind my eyes, pushing out the darkness of sleep. The day’s purpose suddenly flooded around me, soaking into my warm blankets – interview. It tacked itself in the forefront of my mind, despite my attempts to toss it out, to focus on something else and push it away. I had learned a meditation exercise in which I could push all thoughts out of my mind by picturing one image or word and focusing solely on it. I was never very good at it, my mind apt to drift its attention from one image to another, but now I felt a strange sense of focus as the impending interview eclipsed lesser thoughts.

         I showered and cleaned myself up in the bathroom. I turned the small radio, sitting next to the sink on the toilet, to an alternative station and shouted the lyrics of an old Pearl Jam song. Usually, I kept my voice at a certain volume, wary of my unseen neighbors on the second floor, known to me as creaks and thumps in the ceiling, but today I opened my full voice. I tossed fleeting glances at the mirror as I shaved; my face looked thin and drawn. From the bathroom, I shuffled across the cold wooden floor to my bedroom. I opened the closet and took out the suit, laying it across the rumpled sheets of my bed. It would wrinkle if I left it there like that, so I quickly put on my underclothes and a white linen shirt. The powder coal socks felt thin and cold stretched on my legs, an alien feeling compared to the soft puffiness of white cotton.

         The suit pants felt even stranger than the socks, not the coarse wool I knew from my favorite woolen sweater, but cold and airy like Eastern silk. I buttoned the linen shirt and struggled to wrap a red woven tie around my neck. After four failed attempts, I concluded that ties were ridiculous. Previously, I’d only worn ties to funerals, always fighting them into a slightly off-center, but decent knot. It was never an easy process; the tie always seemed to fight back. I fussed with it for twenty minutes, wrapping and knotting it half a dozen times more before I surrendered and hid its unevenness as best I could under the starched collar. If I gave it any more time I would miss the subway and be late to the interview. I looped my black leather belt around my waist and pushed my heels into the shiny leather shoes before completing the suit with the dark, broad jacket.

         The smooth heels of my shoes clicked on the wood floor as I walked back to the bathroom to examine myself. My face still looked drawn, pale, and there was a slight redness creeping through my eyes, caused by putting my contacts in at such an early hour. I straightened my jacket and stood erect, tossing a smile at the mirror. I didn’t look horrible, maybe tired, although at that moment I felt more awake than I had in a week, my heart thumping as if it wanted to rip free from its woolen cage.

         My shoes slapped the sidewalk as I made my way to the subway stop. The walk would do me good, keep me awake, and use up some of the energy that was starting to twist its way into my limbs. The late autumn morning was brisk and clear, and I drank it in as I walked. There was a light breeze, which caused the fallen leaves to scrape and hop along the pavement, and I buttoned my jacket so its sides wouldn’t blow up in the wind. My hands shook as they fastened the button and I shoved them in my pockets. In my left pocket I felt the small round subway tokens I’d bought a couple of days before.

         Warm air rushed out as I pulled the door to the station open. A tiny Asian woman wrapped in a thick coat and a faded pink hat sat tucked by the entrance selling flowers. I thought about buying one, which I did every time I entered the station, but I never stopped to pick one up. Today of course was no day to stop, but for some reason I still paused, for only a second, considering a purchase. Maybe on the way back. I rode the escalator deep into the ground, passing a cluster of female college students wearing backpacks too small to carry books. “Hey,” one of them called. I turned around, my skin becoming hot. “Nice suit.” She chewed the words through her gum and her two friends giggled after she spoke. “God, Sam!” one of them scolded as she slapped her friend playfully on the arm. I smiled in response; my skin burned. I made an effort to continue at the same pace down the escalator, a rush to escape their giggles. I put my token in the slot and walked down to the track.

         People stood alone or in small groups, many stared through the opposite wall with glassy expressions, a performance art piece expressing commuter detachment. They were cows ambling toward the slaughterhouse, drowning acknowledgment of their monotonous routines with small questions, like what to have for dinner or what to bar to stop at after work. I pictured myself suddenly jumping onto a bench, struggling to balance my slick leather shoes on the smooth wood. “Look up! All of you!” I would say. “No one’s looking, you can run home!” But their vacuous eyes would swallow my shouts as they continued to fixate on nothing in particular. And so I stood with them, staring across the track at the blurred words of a beer advertisement.

         The ride into the city was slightly different. Close quarters made signs of anxiety or tension to bubble up from the seated passengers. Intense attention to morning papers or marker scribbled on the walls replaced the listless stares that had waited for the train. I was lucky enough to find a seat next to the door, where I could lean into the metal and away from whoever plopped into the seat at my side. The backs of the seats hugged the curved walls of the tram, so that the passengers ended up facing one another. This arrangement sparked the twitch in my legs. As if they operated independently of my direction, both legs began to shake in the closeness of the train car. I pulled my feet in, sliding my heels under the seat, and pressed them forcefully onto the ribbed floor. The twitching stopped as I sat frozen in my seat, somehow looking between the passengers I faced, a young woman with a short fur coat and a round, middle-aged man whose thin hair floated out above his head like stray electric currents. My eyes settled on my own frame, sitting darkly between the man and woman, reflected by the train car’s yellow lighting. I looked wholly unfamiliar to myself. The reflection colored my skin a sickly greenish-yellow, and shadow created dark holes around my eyes. The specter gazed back at me through hollow eyes, sickly and anxious in his dark suit and starched shirt. I had seen him in subways before, many times, but never so straightly dressed, as if he had drifted into the train from a casket resting in the nearby ground. He watched me without expression while new bodies replaced those of the man and woman who’d sat on either side.

         The tram approached my stop, where I needed to switch from one line to another. I ran the switch through my head, tracing the colored routes from the map I’d downloaded on the computer at home. It was a big station, but arrows on the concrete guided me toward the stop for my second train. Benches surrounded tall maps and support beams, seating a small old woman with an oversized knit sweater and a couple of younger women who rolled baby carriages back and forth over the floor. Men in suits and fall coats stood near the yellow line where the train stopped, pacing or glancing at their cell phones. I stood among them; the idea of sitting became suddenly repulsive, and I doubted that I could pull myself up again. If I sat on the bench now, I would be called out by the suited men around me, and revealed as a pretender. My nerves would shake and twitch until my whole self, skin and suit, would rattle into the subterranean air.

         The second train had me facing forward, in the direction of the car’s movement, with the seat next to me remaining unoccupied. No specter watched me from the window, and my legs rested easily in front of me. I looked out at the darkness and collected my thoughts for the interview. Where did I see myself in five years? I’d blown that question before, an interview two weeks ago for a similar position. I had looked the woman straight in the eye, slapped a clownish grin on my face and said, “why, working here!” She coughed in response, and I knew I needed something else; it was a horrible answer. “Well, you know, pursuing this field at the least. I’m sure about that.” I said “you know” too much, and on top of that I was lying. I wondered if she could tell, but knew she must have seen it when I walked in the door. My composure was a lie, my body language, my interest in her and her company. Back in school somewhere, climbing higher, further away from the world of this woman and her questions, that’s where I wanted to be. At the end of the interview I’d shaken hands with the woman, who spoke sharply, clipping the ends of her words, and I thanked her for seeing me and said that we would be in touch. I then asked to be directed toward the bathroom before I left, where I vomited the oatmeal I’d had for breakfast and loosened a near-unbearable tightness in my stomach. This morning I decided to pass on breakfast altogether.

         I only rode the second train for a short while, and within five minutes it spit me out into another musty station with escalators cycling up to the street. This stop was near the ballpark, and after I climbed the escalator to street level I saw its walls over the tops of closer buildings. The air around me was still crisp, welcome now after the heat of the train car, and snow peeked in and out of the gray sky as it descended into puddles on the pavement.

         I’d spoken to a woman on the phone a few days earlier to set up the time and get directions, and she’d said that the building was just across the street from the ballpark, next to a Barnes and Noble. I headed toward the high walls and sure enough, hanging over the main entryway to a three-story building were the large white letters that identified the book superstore. I crossed the street and walked past a bus stop and into the next building. The lobby’s ceiling rested high above me on thick support pillars, their bases ringed with tall tropical plants. Men and women in dark business uniforms clicked heels and leather soles against the marble floor as they moved smartly from here to there. Everyone’s movement had purpose, and I supposed mine should also, seeing that, if all went well, I would soon be coming in every morning for work.

         The office was on the second floor, down the main hallway and on the left. I concentrated on my breathing as I moved down the hall and saw the sign reading “Grossman Consulting” over the double doors at the far left. While my breaths remained steady, my heart began to beat above their rhythm, and I struggled to keep the two in balance. I opened the door and resigned myself not to wander, or to appear as though I was wandering, but instead thought that I should walk with purpose and direction. Grossman wanted me because I was an intelligent, eager candidate who had everything under control, and who reeked a youthful eagerness for industry.

         As the door clicked shut, it silenced the echoes of shoes on stone and the fog of murmuring voices. I heard a lone woman’s voice carrying softly up the hall, the same voice I’d talked to on the phone, smooth and thick like cream. I followed it into a small waiting area, where the woman sat behind a large desk with the phone’s receiver pinched between her neck and ear. She wore a dark green business suit and too much eye makeup, which circled heavily around her eyes and gave her an intense, glaring expression. They flashed up at me, smiling, and nodded toward the chairs at the opposite wall. I returned her smile and sat down. Despite the woman’s soothing voice, I soon felt a familiar sensation creeping through my legs. I stretched them, reaching my feet toward the woman’s desk. That helped a little. I stared into a tall plant by the doorway, waiting.

         “Oh of course, I completely understand what you mean.” The woman nodded at the phone. She looked middle-aged, her face pulled up in tiny wrinkles when she smiled. Perhaps she wore so much eye makeup to bury the thin lines of crow’s feet that raked out of their corners. “I will make sure to tell him for you. Alright, you have a good day too. Good-bye.” The phone clicked and the woman looked up at me, her black-rimmed eyes jerking me out of my chair like a hooked fish. I stood before her desk and spoke slowly through a weak grin. “Hi, I’m Jon Brighton, I have a 9:30 appointment with Mr. Grossman.” I debated whether or not to mention our previous phone conversation, and decided against it. She sniffed and typed something into her computer. She studied the screen, squinting and moving her neck in toward it. She asked if I had an easy trip in, and I said yes, summarizing the route I’d taken from my apartment.

         “Oh really?” She said, still examining the computer screen. “Well, I used to live out there, and I’m pretty sure you can just take the blue line straight back, no switching trains.” Of course, there was always an easier way, which only seemed to reveal itself to me in bits and pieces. “Jon Brighton you said? Hmm, you don’t seem to be in here.” Her fingers pecked at more keys, hitting each key with more force than the last, as if to broadcast her thoroughness. I stood stiffly before her, heat rising from my neck to my chin. I had to be in the computer. I talked with this woman not three days before to confirm the interview, and, in fact, she had called me. My creased wool pants started to itch my upper legs, and my jacket began to wrap tighter around my ribs. Had it always been so tight? I thought of quickly rubbing my leg while the woman was focused on the computer screen. No, I had to maintain an air of professionalism. If I scratched myself I would be found out. Instead, I gripped my hands into fists, my nails pinching into my greasy palms.
The woman’s lower lip pushed forward in concentration as she hit what looked like random keys on the keyboard, but it soon receded and she nodded to herself, chuckling. “Ah, I found it. Mr. Brighton, you’re here in the computer for a 9:30 meeting with Mr. Grossman next Thursday, not today. In fact,” the woman leaned into the desk, “Mr. Grossman is at a conference today and tomorrow.”

         My face flooded with a red heat, trying to push its way out of the skin. I tightened my fists and breathed in deeply through my nostrils. The air smelled of soapy-sweet berries, probably the woman’s hairspray or shampoo. When she spoke again, the creamlike ease of her voice had soured. “Otherwise, I would have been happy to see if he was available.”

         “Oh I see,” I said. “Well, I guess I just got excited about coming in so I didn’t think to double-check the date.” I laughed at my mistake, and the woman chuckled with me. Her laugh flew through me like a stirring of butterflies in a summer field, and breathing came more easily.

         “I can see how that could happen. I wish there was something I could do. I guess we’ll be seeing you at the same time next Thursday then, Mr. Brighton?”

         “Absolutely,” I said. I felt like running for the door, but held back. “Now you said I can just take the blue line, is that to Bixbury?”

         The woman bit her lip and looked at the ceiling. “The stop after, I’m pretty sure it’s closer to where you’re going.”

         As I walked out of the office, a feeling of calm replaced any nervousness, and my limbs hung loosely as I drifted along the marble floor. Tension dissipated from my shoulders and my leg muscles eased as I walked toward the lobby of the building, and my suit jacket relaxed its hold on my chest. I observed the men and women in suits in a brighter light, each one hopping eagerly about with his or her business. I would see them all again next week, when their purposeful march would no longer seem so stiff and foreign.

         Upon leaving the building, I noticed a young man walking toward me from the direction of the T station, or, more accurately, I noticed his jeans, tacked low on his hips, and his shaggy blue and green striped sweater. I felt suddenly out of place. It was as if, by leaving the building, I’d crossed through a gateway, and my suit transformed from the uniform of a young man of industry into a clownish costume of pretension. The man in the sweater stood before me like a mirror, a reflection of myself. He walked at an ambling pace, seeming to shuffle along the pavement without lifting his feet, and wore my clothes. His face lacked the intensity that I felt in my own now, and was instead a calm lake of green eyes. To avoid being called out, I turned from him and marched to the T station. I would not interview today, so there was no reason for me to wear their clothes. I should be in jeans and a sweater, floating on the air from here to there. The suit covered me like an iron shroud; it weighed on my shoulders and forced my body to move a certain way, my joints stiff and mechanical. At the same time, I needed to wear it. I had to put my college degree to work, to land a job and start making money. That had been the whole reason I’d gone to school in the first place. In college, I’d only studied as much as a reasonable, but not exceptional, grade report required, just enough to get a degree. A degree and a suit, the gloves with which I grabbed the bottom rung of the corporate finance ladder. The wool fibers of my pants clawed into my legs, dragging them down like a pack of lions ripping into a timid antelope. The backs of my fine shoes rubbed into my heels, causing blisters that made me walk with smaller, quicker steps down the stairs to the subway.

         My hand prickled in my pocket, feeling around for tokens, as I approached the turnstile. I shoed it deep into the tip of my pocket, scratching against my leg and around my wallet, but could feel no tiny coins. My face flushed, and everyone I passed seemed to toss me sideways glances. My index finger pierced down into my pocket, and ran through a small hole at the bottom. They must have slipped out, now hidden in the seat cushions in Grossman’s lobby. I walked up to the booth and tugged a five dollar bill from my wallet, my only cash, and shoved it beyond the murky glass window to the large black woman sitting on the other side. She busied herself tracing the groves in a role of quarters with her curved scarlet nails, and hummed a slow melody from deep in her throat. She bit her lip as the five slid toward her, and looked up at me, shaking her head.
“How many?” she grunted, nodding her chin to accent each syllable. I looked at her, waiting for a signal, a chuckle or roll of the eyes to hint that she knew I’d lost my tokens, that my suit was coming apart, and that I had trouble tying my tie this morning. I thought of my room, of my dresser gagging on all the comfortable clothes I had shoved inside – my heavy wool socks with the brown toes, the gray sweatshirt with no string in the hood. “Um, four please.” I would get extras again, put them in my wallet.

         The woman coughed, and her phlegm-rattled breath carried through the speaker in the center of the dirty window. She sat hunched low, counting out tokens; a forgotten exhibit in a neglected stall. My jacket began to push on my shoulders once more. Even someone so confined, so easily observed by passersby, seemed freer than I felt in the suit. I knew why. I was the exhibit, carting myself from the receptionist’s desk to the token-counter’s booth with an off-center tie-knot, an amateur sideshow attraction released from his booth prematurely. I was running loose, escaped from the security of my house and thrust into the wild. I envied the woman in her booth, who had discovered a way to combine her two worlds and hum from the safety of her stall, divided from the flow of bodies by a thick, smeared sheet of glass.

         The area past the turnstiles and escalators, dipping down to the tracks from a ledge of yellow tile, seemed only an echo of its earlier self. No more than a handful of bodies shuffled back and forth along the ledge, loitering near the benches. A wire-bearded man sat crumpled against the subway map, poking at the keys of an accordion and nodding out of time with the music. The notes spiked from the instrument without rhythm, one and then another, then a hesitation, carrying up to the domed ceiling. I stood away from him and swelled my chest to keep a regular breathing rhythm, fearing the random notes would alter it, twist it to conform to their halting ejection from the accordion. No one else in the tunnel seemed to notice the atonic spew of noise, or if they did, they remained outwardly stoic and unaware. A couple people had mp3 players, with thin cords snaking up from their pockets and into their ears. They stood taller than the others, secure in their isolated sonic worlds. A middle-aged woman in a thick coat picked through her purse, searching for nothing in particular, while the young man I’d passed by outside the office building looked up at the wall across the tracks, his head tilted to one side in thought. Both the young man and the woman could hear the accordion, I knew they could, but they’d adapted enough to push it to the edge of their consciousness, or make it appear so. I pulled air in through my nostrils, dank and musty in the tunnel, and pushed it out again slowly. Meditation hadn’t yet given me the peace that they seemed to convey naturally. The far side of the tunnel began to rumble, and the woman zipped her purse as we all moved toward the ledge, awaiting the train.

         The train car was almost empty, but the lack of bodies in the dark padded seats only magnified the difference between me and the few other passengers – none of them wore business clothes. I was out-of-sync with the day’s rhythm, a dark suit marching between office and home, a dim resonance of the morning’s commute. The suit weighed on me differently than it had when I first left my house, or even as I walked out of the office building. I sat staring at the specter trapped in the window across from me, and as I drank in his hollow eyes I knew that I’d been found out. My performance as a working man had flickered as the morning wore on, until now I rose like smoke in the train car, sitting in defiance of the daily routine. I knew there was a real go-getter in a car at this time of day, scuttling to an appointment, foaming sycophantic drivel into his cell phone. But not in this car. I had strained to impress an air of industry in every action, since my fine shoes had first clicked the sidewalk as I left my house in the early morning haze. I could feign an appointment now, pressing back my jacket sleeve to study my watch in urgency, to offer some explanation for my anomalous presence. The specter glanced at the other people in the car, searching their expressions to see if the guise was worth my effort. He settled on the young man in the striped sweater, sitting near the car’s far end, and chewed his lip as if to say that any such performance was unnecessary – they already knew.

         I looked around the car, searching the people to either confirm or deny the specter’s conclusion. The middle-aged woman examined the subway map posted over the doors, her purse resting upright in her lap. The young man in the sweater read a paper he picked off of a seat, holding it in front of him like a shield. Other passengers read from papers or advertisements on the car walls. One girl nodded in time with the buzzing of her headphones. They knew, they must have noticed when we first stepped onto the train, but they had to maintain their respective appearances to one another, so no single one could call me out.

         As the car doors opened at the stop before mine, a thick-necked man in a wide gray sweatshirt sauntered onto the train, as if he challenged the train to move before he got on. His sweatshirt’s large hood hid most of his face, and he moved in a slow shuffle, his head bobbing from one shoulder to the other, toward the row of seats across from me. He slid into a seat and spat lyrics to the gritty noise coming from his headphones, a hip-hop acolyte nodding and shaking his head to his gritty gospel. The older woman put a hand on her purse, tipping it onto its side and pressing it against her thigh. I continued to stare at the phantom in front of me, into the black voids where his eyes appeared and disappeared as the train car’s lights flickered bright and dim. This man would know, he would call me out despite the others, who seemed to churn in him a similar reaction of derision. But he hadn’t really seen me. Drum and bass and urban rhymes buried him in their deep, throbbing flow. Nervousness kindled inside my stomach and I stretched out my legs to keep them from twitching. I inhaled a deep breath, wary of the discordant rhythms crackling from his headphones. They began to choke me as the train slowed to my stop.

         I stood up to leave, drawing the man’s attention. He froze, silent, and whipped his head up at me. His eyes raged as they thrashed about, striking at me from their sockets, as I stood near the door damming his flow. It was my suit, ripping into my skin, the hole in my pocket and the tokens that had escaped. It was my tangled tie-knot. The knot gave it all away. I had wrapped and tugged it around my neck for almost half an hour, never able to agree to it and settle on the face in the mirror. My skin glowed with white heat, which caught the suit and melted away the dark wool. I was completely exposed, and I stood, transfixed, waiting.

         The acolyte licked his lips and kicked his chin out, pushing air into my chest. “Get the fuck off my train, monkey boy,” he said, shouting over his headphones. He then crouched lower in his seat and walled himself apart from the other passengers as he resumed spitting lyrics. The woman’s eyes widened as she clutched her purse, and a couple of passengers rustled their papers.

         I stepped off of the train, and a weight lifted from my shoulders as the iron shroud crumbled into cloth. I had been called out. My fear ebbed down the ledge and onto the tracks, into the darkness of the subway tunnel. I remained in the suit, but it became a costume that I had put on for fun, as a joke, and I could shed it like an unwanted skin. The world had told me to take it off; I saw its disgust in the skulker’s eyes. His contempt for the suit, for me in it, was not my own, but it justified my desire to change out of it. The affirmation made me grow inside the tight wool and step broader in the polished leather shoes, ignoring the stinging rawness around my ankles. I would walk home as quickly as I could, tear the suit off of me and wrap myself in soft cotton. Jeans and a sweater. As I walked through the turnstile, I saw people spilling down the escalator, a gaggle of college girls with their necks covered in Burberry. Anxiety returned as I stepped onto the escalator and started moving up to the street, facing tiers of new eyes that flew around the suit. No matter how I hurried along the sidewalk, my shoes snapping the concrete, the walk home would stretch on too long. When I got home I would shove it into the far back in my closet, smother the fine wool with rows of denim and wrinkled cotton. All too soon would I have to pick it out again, wrench it from its still corner into life. It will drape over my pinched shoulders in the early morning like a heavy woolen veil, and I will once again walk into the streets, my palms slick with sweat, a pretender to industry.