It’s eighty degrees on November 6th. I get a push notification that seventy-seven rhesus macaque monkeys broke out of the Alpha Gen facility up the road. None have been accounted for. These are primates with extensive curiosity and impressive dexterity, the text says. Please lock your windows.

When I drive over to Aunt Jackie’s with her food for the week, lasagna and shepherd’s pie and sloppy joe portioned and packed and frozen in blue-lidded Tupperware, the door is already unlocked. She’s inside, dead on the kitchen floor. I call 911 and sit with her, holding her hand, the grey laminate flooring of her shag-carpeted and cement-rooted mobile home cool and slick against my ass cheeks. Eventually though, I get bored and unload the food, stacking it in the freezer. The paramedics arrive and I tell them she has a DNR order—Do Not Resuscitate—but they ignore me.

“What is she, seventy?” the tall one asks. His partner is younger and hairier. I wonder whether Aunt Jackie’s windows are locked or not. The young and hairy paramedic is leaning over Aunt Jackie, or, I guess, her body, and when he leans especially far I can see an Italian flag tattooed at the base of his neck. The tall one pokes a kitchen cabinet, the kind with a spring inside so there’s no visible handles, open and closed with his shiny black boot toe. “She could still be of use,” he tells me. “We can bring those ones back if we want. Just don’t tell her she was full dead.”

They pack her up into the ambulance and tell me I can meet them at the hospital but to make sure I have cash on hand. “To tip the parking attendants,” the young, hairy paramedic tells me.

Aunt Jackie was sort of a mother to me growing up. Thus the Tupperwares now, though the Aunt Jackie I remember as a kid was a lot better than the one I follow to the hospital. Lately, she’s been smoking in bed. She can’t decide what causes hurricanes: abortion or ecotourism. She has a lot of thoughts about the way I chop onions. I think she needs something to do to busy herself. After my father lost interest in raising me and Mom died—listeria—I assume I wasn’t particularly useful or pleasant to have around either, though, so she’s bought herself a few years of home-cooked frozen meals.

#

Patients wander the halls like thunder-dazed flightless birds. On the way to nothing. Outbound from nowhere. When I get inside, Aunt Jackie is sitting upright watching TV and no longer dead. The monkeys are still on the run. Local officials make heavy use of the word “baffled.” The Alpha Gen suit they push in front of cameras begins his statement by reminding the viewing public that the Fifth Amendment is an outlook we can adopt, not just legal stricture. Passersby report that the monkeys are stockpiling bricks and stealing stop signs.

A doctor reads numbers to me. I watch Aunt Jackie, who is presumably also listening, though I suspect she is still focused only on the TV and the monkeys contained within. The doctor provides me with phrases like “returned to herself” and “technically not unprecedented” to describe the situation. Aunt Jackie nods vigorously and I am happy to see her finally paying attention to her own prognosis. But, when I shift toward the TV, I see an anchor reporting that the monkeys are still all at large. When a commercial for copper-lined retractable garden hoses comes on, Aunt Jackie goes glossy-eyed again.

“Does that all make sense?” the doctor asks. Her hair keeps falling into her eyes. Why don’t doctors have to wear hairnets, the way service workers at fast food restaurants do? I will have to investigate later.

“Absolutely,” I lie.

Much to my initial chagrin, the mind inside Aunt Jackie’s body is not Aunt Jackie’s. As soon as the doctor leaves, briefly opening our cell door, through which I glimpse a burn victim carrying a vase of pollen-laden lilies, she comes clean. “I’m so sorry,” Aunt Jackie tells me. I am told by Aunt Jackie’s body. Something like that. “I do not know quite who you are. I’m not supposed to be in here, I think.”

“Amnesia?” I ask. “They told me not to tell you but you were a little dead when I found you.”

“No. I remember where I was. Who I was. And now I’m in here.”

“Not full dead,” I clarify. Still worrying.

“A little or all the way,” she says. “This isn’t who I started as.”

I fill Aunt Jackie’s body in—the DNR, the kitchen floor, the paternalistic paramedics. My childhood, listeria, the frozen dinners. “You’ve been awful to me lately,” I say. “But I loved you.” I begin thinking about the tiered parking pricing in the hospital garage.

“Jesus Christ,” says Aunt Jackie. “That’s all kind of fucked, huh?”

We decide that there’s no use in trying to explain any of this to the doctors. What could they even do about it?

“What is in there?” I ask. “Consciousness? Soul?”

“I don’t think there’s a good name for it yet,” Aunt Jackie’s body tells me.

We watch TV for a few hours and wait to be told what to do next. The monkeys are blamed for all sorts of traffic delays. A CEO on trial for massive medical fraud, on the steps of the county courthouse, floats the idea that his prosecution is because the powers-that-be want to assert control over society, to subsume the plain evidence—provided by things like loose macaques—that their guidance has led to nothing but chaos and division. He almost forgets to brag that he was found not guilty, his case dismissed on a technicality. Those still living had no standing, the judge declared. A group of widowers protesting the trial result are thrown face-first to the marble stairs in the background. You can almost hear their teeth against the stone.

Whoever is inside Aunt Jackie’s body was an aspiring veterinarian. “I don’t think I would have ever gotten there, though,” she says. “There’s no hope for people like me. My parents were both professors in a college town in Vermont. We lived in a house full of antique mechanical clocks.”

“Uh huh,” I say. “For sure.” When you first meet a stranger, it’s easy to act nice, but the effect is wearing off.

“I’m not sure I’ve ever had a purpose. I find it hard to believe that any of us do. I would have said my parents had their purpose—education, knowing what time it was, raising children, experiencing the seasons—but they quit their jobs to be roadies for a televangelist. Suddenly that was their purpose. And that left me at sixteen with a dying dog and a pet insurance deductible so high we could have put a mechanical skeleton into her out-of-pocket and still not seen payouts. It’s the type of thing that, for a different person, might have set my life on a sure course. But I discovered edibles and taking big naps, and they don’t let just anyone practice medicine on animals. Even scarier, it’s quite possible I’m just chasing the wrong dream. If your perfect life was chalked out on the sidewalk in front of you, do you think you’d be able to follow it? Would you meet the moment? Would you recognize the moment? I’d like to think I would but there’s no way to know, and anyway I think I’ve let my moment pass. I had a moment to find out, and I didn’t.”

I try to imagine how whoever is speaking to me from Aunt Jackie’s body might have died. I find myself getting mean with the scenarios. On the monitor above us, an unkempt man broadcasting from what is very clearly a bedroom with a corner staged for TV hits joins a CNN panel to complain that everyone is missing the point about the monkeys. “They are Alpha Gen’s intellectual property,” he says. “All this talk about what should happen to them, or whether they should be released, or whether they should have been experimented on at all, it’s all, and you’ll pardon my language, it’s all bullshit.”

A bald man on the opposite side of the screen presses his thin pink lips together to show disapproval of the language. Or the sentiment. It is unclear.

“They are Alpha Gen’s to do what they wish to,” the other guy continues. “And it is my contention that Alpha Gen deserves nothing less than the full cooperation of the citizenry and the full bore power of local, state, and possibly even federal governments at their disposal until their company—that means jobs, by the way, Craig—is made whole again.”

Aunt Jackie’s body reaches out and touches my wrist. I make a conscious decision not to recoil, but not before I flinch a little. “Maybe, though, this is how I find some purpose,” she posits. “Not to be morbid. I’m sorry about your aunt. But maybe …”

“Uh huh,” I say. “Maybe.” I exit to the hallway and walk around until I run into Aunt Jackie’s doctor. “You’re not going to believe me, but you have to go back in there,” I tell her. “There’s been a mix-up. Someone else is inside my aunt’s body and if it wasn’t someone pleasant, that would be totally okay, my aunt wasn’t the best to be around either, but this new lady is really bumming me out. I’d like the original soul returned to Aunt Jackie’s body, if possible. Or at least another swap.”

The doctor looks at me like a pile of burnt hair. “Your aunt died,” she says. “You think she’ll come back regular? If you’re living right, you’ll wake up every day a brand new person. Each day we live unchanged is a day we may as well have died. There’s nothing setting us apart from the dead but our faculty for change.”

Too much philosophizing for my taste. “I can’t emphasize enough how much I don’t like the new soul inside her body,” I say.

“I’m going to discharge the two of you as soon as I can. You’re getting on my nerves,” she tells me.

I sit in the hospital for the rest of the day. What else is there to do? It is unsettling, and comforting, to talk to Aunt Jackie’s body and the new soul housed there. Familiar form. New essence. The young doctor returns, tersely, to announce that Aunt Jackie can leave if she feels comfortable. There is no explanation for her recovery. Something unexpected but not unheard of.

“I’ll go get the car,” I say, springing out of the room. As if by reflex, in the doorway, I stop and say: “Love you!”

On the TV in the corner of the room, one of the loose monkeys has been captured, but authorities are worried that he was a decoy. The monkey has a distinct grin as he is hog-tied and carried to the back of an unmarked van.

“I can say it back,” Aunt Jackie’s body says. “If that would be helpful.”

I flag the doctor down and tell her that Aunt Jackie is going to stay overnight for further monitoring.

#

We take the highway back to Aunt Jackie’s trailer in the morning. I imagine us as the GPS satellite, heaven-high and whipping through cold quiet space, must see us: a dot returning home, eating its own progress from the day before. Return. Reversal. Regression. I fiddle with the radio but nothing’s on but Christian rock and weather updates. All record highs and omens.

“What was it like?” I ask Aunt Jackie. “Being dead?” She’s sitting in the passenger seat, tapping her hospital bracelet against the window at the threshold of each new intersection.

“It’s the not knowing that makes it worth it for most of us,” she says. “If you knew how it ended up, you’d never get there.”

“I’d still like to know.”

She swears me to secrecy, then tells me. I feel like nothing’s changed.

“Your kindness will carry you through the curtain,” Aunt Jackie’s body tells me. Then she’s silent. This, I decide, is the final sign: there’s no remnant in there that knows me. None of Aunt Jackie’s penetrating eye, the one that would sniff out and resent kindness born of obligation. The kind that is not kindness at all, but guilt in a borrowed shirt.

When I reach the top step, keys in hand, I can sense something is wrong. I expect the trailer to be quiet, but effortlessly. We have stepped into a quiet that is by design. I wonder: Did I close the windows on the way out? I push the door open slowly, bracing for an attack, a tossed vase, a bootheel pressing the door back into me.

Seventy-six rhesus macaque monkeys avoid making eye contact with me. “Good Lord,” I say, and shut the door. “Jesus fucking Christ.”

“What is it?” asks Aunt Jackie’s body. She steps forward, replacing me at the top of the landing, and I slide to the final step. The sun is screened by a wispy grey cloud and for a moment I can see it plainly, a white disc compelled forward on its track through the sky. I cannot decide what to think or do and so I wait nothingly on the bottom step while Aunt Jackie’s body slips back inside her trailer and closes the door behind her. I hear her voice, muffled past comprehension, and some measured returns of hoots and screeches. I think of Vermont and clocks and televangelists, of the real Aunt Jackie’s Sunday staples, spaghetti squash and canned biscuits, of cold grey floors. I notice for the first time that Aunt Jackie has a hummingbird feeder out, hung on the side of the trailer on a metal spike driven into the ground. It is directly outside the open window and the sun strikes it like a destination just as noon arrives.

Aunt Jackie reappears, closes the trailer door behind herself. In her left hand, she’s holding my car keys. In her right hand, she’s separated my copy of the keys to Aunt Jackie’s trailer. “Have you ever asked yourself why something happened to you?” she asks me.

I step back to ground level. I think of bad deli meat and class-action lawsuits. Of Christmas on a guest bed. Of being thirty-three forever. Of learning how to tie a necktie from a classmate’s older brother. I don’t even remember whose. Of frozen lasagna, drowning back to life in a lukewarm bowl of water on the kitchen counter. “No,” I lie.

Aunt Jackie takes my hand for the last time. “I think I know what it feels like,” she says, “to know.” She hands me my car keys then steps inside the trailer. I sit in my car with no particular place to go. The clouds above stretch and fold, pulled together and ripped apart by invisible tweezers. It is seventy-nine degrees on November 7th. I realize I’m not even sure if I’ve ever seen a hummingbird.