Seize the Night

moon.
    These weren't options, because either choice guaranteed an identical Outcome. The worst kook surfer knows that whether you get sucked over the falls on a fully macking shore break or just get pitched off the board and do a face plant in some seaweed soup, the result is the same, wipeout.
    Another monkey leaped onto the sill at the second window.
    Like most of us in this movie-besotted, Hollywood-corrupted world, if I succumbed to the narcissist in me and listened to my mind's ear, I could probably hear a film score underlying my every waking moment, gluey sentimental string-section indulgences when I am stricken by sadness or sorrow, tear-evoking, heart-stirring full-orchestra rhapsodies when I enjoy a triumph, droll piano riffs during my not infrequent spells of foolishness. Sasha insists that I look like the late James Dean, and even though I don't see the resemblance, I am appalled and ashamed to say that at times I take pleasure in this supposed resemblance to such a celebrated figure, indeed, it would require little effort for me to conduct periods of my life with the edgy score of Rebel Without a Cause swelling in my mind. At the door a moment earlier, when the monkey shadow swooped up the window, Hear the violins shriek from the shower scene in Psycho . Now, as I considered my next move, with monkeys closing in all around me, Imagine low, ominous, pulsing tones plucked from a bass fiddle, threaded through by a single attenuated but muted high note from a clarinet.
    Although I am as capable of self-delusion as the next guy, I decided against the most cinematic of my options, electing not to swashbuckle into the night. After all, though charismatic, James Dean is no Harrison Ford. In the majority of his handful of movies, sooner or later he got the crap beaten out of him.
    I quickly sidled across the floor, away from the windows, but also away from the entrance to the dining room. Within a few feet, I bumped into cabinetry.
    These cabinets would match those in every house in Dead Town, plain but sturdy, with birch frames, their shiplap doors painted so often that the shallow grooves created by the overlapping joints had all but disappeared under the many coats. The work counters would be laminated with one color or another of speckled Formica.
    Before any of the troop entered the kitchen from the front of the house, I needed to get off the floor. If I stood with my back to a wall, pressed into a corner, dead motionless, breathing as noiselessly as a fish passing water through its gills, I was still certain to give myself away. The linoleum was so curled and so undermined by tiny pockets of air that it would crackle and pop from any unintentional shift of weight, from no more than a heavy thought . The betraying sound was sure to come precisely when the monkeys were stone still and ready to hear it.
    In spite of darkness so thick that it seemed viscous, and in spite of a stench of decomposition strong enough to mask any scent of me that they might otherwise detect, I didn't think I'd have much chance of escaping the troop's notice during a search of the kitchen, even if they conducted it strictly by touch. Nevertheless, I had to give it a try.
    If I climbed onto the countertop, I would be restricted by the narrow space between the Formica and the upper cabinets. I'd have to lie on my left side, facing out toward the room. After drawing my knees toward my chest, curling compactly into the fetal position, so as to occupy as small a space as possible and to make myself more difficult to locate, I wouldn't be in an ideal posture to fight back if I was found by one of those walking condominiums for lice.
    By body contact alone, I followed the cabinetry to the corner, where the kitchen in every one of these bungalows features a broom closet with a tall lower compartment and a single shelf at the top. If I was able to squeeze into that narrow space and close the door after me, at least I would be off the treacherous linoleum and beyond easy reach if the troop probed-poked-groped-tapped its way around the room.
    At the end of the cabinet row, I discovered the broom closet where I'd expected it to be—but the door was missing. With dismay, I felt one bent and broken hinge, then the other, and patted air where the door should have been, as though just the right series of magical gestures would charm the door into existence again.
    Unless the horde of monkeys that had followed Curious George onto the front porch was