Free Trials of the Monkey by Matthew Chapman

oblong, glancing at me now and then and adjusting themselves. The one who works here, a tall, slender girl with a long, flat face, casually lights her cigarette by bending back a match on a book of matches and striking it with her thumb. It’s a stylish, deliberate move. Having lit her cigarette, she tosses the matches onto the bar, but, to her surprise, the match keeps burning and now she has to make a decision: admit defeat and retrieve it, or wait for the whole thing to explode. She laughs and lets it burn. The barman stubs it amiably. The young, who I find interesting because they’re so uncluttered, find themselves uninteresting for the same reason. Their mannerisms and affectations, the lighting of the match, the way they dress, the belly-button rings, which I love, all these are there to take the place of scars earned in the process of life.
    The blonde girl moves a shoulder bag so the strap bisects her breasts diagonally, and glances at me again. She’s wearing a white shirt and she’s not yet twenty. After a while, they leave. I go in search of a ‘Duelling Piano Bar’ I’ve been told about where two blues pianists face off on opposite pianos, but I cannot find it so I return to the hotel and go to bed. In the morning I rent a car and set off for Dayton to do my bit for history.
    Through America Online I’ve made contact with a woman who runs a bed-and-breakfast in Dayton called the Magnolia House. Her name is Gloria and her AOL profile reads:

    Marital Status: not married, not good at it. Hobbies: horses, field trials, bird hunting, antiques, cooking, fun, skeet shooting, shopping, people, life. Personal Quote: most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be, not knowing when the dawn will come, i open every door. i am a sweet thing. i do not like to be teased …

    On the phone, she had a smoky, flirtatious voice and one of those laughs that comes hacking out in sudden nervous bursts. Later, she e-mails me some pictures of herself. She’s blonde and appears to be in her late thirties. Some of the photographs show her with horses. Another group of four show her wearing a tight leather dress—and she looks good—but then there’s a picture of her standing on a bridge and she does not look quite so good.
    The second time I call, closer to my arrival, she tells me she’s selling up. Things haven’t worked out somehow and she’s leaving town. I’m to be the last guest at the Magnolia House.
    After about forty-five minutes driving along a highway littered with yet more warnings of Christ’s imminent return (it really is astonishing how obsessed they are by this) I arrive outside Dayton. The road around which the town grew has been atrophied by Highway 27, which, like a big artery, bypasses Dayton along the eastern edge. The cholesterol of modern life, Arby’s, McDonalds, Kentucky Fried Chicken, clusters around the new highway. I fork left off the highway and take the old varicose vein into town.
    Dayton lies in eastern Tennessee alongside the Tennessee River. Before the whites arrived, Tennessee and the Carolinas were home to 40,000 Cherokee Indians. The Cherokee Nation consisted of about 200 red and white towns. The red towns were war towns, the white, peace towns. The chiefs of each town answered to a supreme chief of either war or peace who lived in the headquarters of the tribe. The white towns were sanctuaries, and the similarity of these to Hebrew ‘cities of refuge’ is why some people believe American Indians are descended from one of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel.
    I wonder what would happen if it turned out to be the other way around, that the Jews were in fact descended from American Indians? The true spiritual home of the Jews would then become Nashville instead of Jerusalem, and a Holocaust Museum would have to be erected there to commemorate another genocidal episode in their history, an episode which, during an epidemic of memorial building, is conveniently