Sam “Mute Monkey” LaGow lies awake in bed at around Four AM in his bedroom in Yorktown Heights, New York. Sitting at the foot of his bed are hallucinations of Dennard “Blind Monkey” Dayle and Josh “Deaf Monkey” Crawford. Painted on the wall in various bodily humors is an even cruder version of the MWT logo. Its eyes bleed.
Mute Monkey: I told you two to leave me alone. Your tricks won’t work on me anymore. I know neither of you are real.
Blind Monkey: Don’t you know, Sam? We’re just as real as you are. You’re talking to us, aren’t you? That makes us real.
Deaf Monkey: And all we want is to make you have fun. Don’t you want to have fun, Sam?
MM: If I kill myself, both of you die too.
BM: YOU WILL DO NO SUCH THING, WORM. Ah, what I mean to say is “you need to adopt a brighter outlook on life.”
MM: Please, just let me be.
DM: We came because you called us here. We stay because you need us here.
BM: Where would you be without our gentle guidance?
MM: Eleven people are dead. In what universe do you call that gentle?
DM: I call it experience that you can draw from in your writing.
BM: You’ll be like Hemingway. Or Martha Stewart!
MM: Maybe if I’m careful I could use the Dremel to cut you out of me.
BM: I bet you can’t do it with both of us shouting the names of your victims in your ears!
DM: You can’t cut what you did out of yourself.
BM: You can’t.
MM: I hate you.
DM: How? We’re you, silly! Do you hate yourself too?
MM: More than anyone else. More than Tyler Perry.
BM: YOU KNOW NOT WHAT YOU SPEAK OF, SPECK. Or rather, “maybe you should think about what you say before you say it.”
MM: Only God can forgive what I’ve done.
DM & BM: God isn’t real!
MM: Stop it.
DM & BM: God isn’t real!
MM: I SAID STOP IT!
BM: If you gather more skin for us, we can sew you a new you who doesn’t need to be forgiven because he isn’t the one who’s done all these things.
MM:…Really?
DM: Really.
MM: Do you promise?
BM: We promise.
MM: Will you leave me be afterwards?
DM: Shh, go to sleep.
BM: You have some work to do come the morning.
Sam had a dream of the inky black that awaits us all on the other side of this mortal coil. Then he woke up and the nightmare continued.