Triumph Over Tragedy: an anthology for the victims of Hurricane Sandy

by R. T. Kaelin

  Two technicians will come tomorrow to help us mount cameras in the grove.

  * *** *

  Hal Vendelmans died last night. According to Judy, who phoned Dave Yost, it was very peaceful right at the end, an easy release. Yost and I broke the news to the alpha chimps just after breakfast. No euphemisms, just the straight news. Ramona made a few hooting sounds and looked as if she might cry, but she was the only one who seemed emotionally upset. Leo gave me a long, deep look of what was almost certainly compassion, and then he hugged me very hard. Grimsky wandered away and seemed to be signing to himself in the new system. Now a meeting seems to be assembling in the oak grove, the first one in more than a week.

  The cameras are in place. Even if we can’t decipher the new signs, we can at least tape them and subject them to computer analysis until we begin to understand.

  * *** *

  Now we’ve watched the first tapes of a grove meeting, but I can’t say we know a lot more than we did before.

  For one thing, they disabled two of the cameras right at the outset. Attila spotted them and sent Gonzo and Claudius up into the trees to yank them out. I suppose the remaining cameras went unnoticed; but by accident or deliberate diabolical craftiness, the chimps positioned themselves in such a way that none of the cameras had a clear angle. We did record a few statements from Leo and some give-and-take between Alice and Anna Livia. They spoke in a mixture of standard signs and the new ones, but, without a sense of the context, we’ve found it impossible to generate any sequence of meanings. Stray signs such as “shirt,” “hat,” “human,” “change” and “banana fly,” interspersed with undecipherable stuff, seem to be adding up to something, but no one is sure what. We observed no mention of Hal Vendelmans nor any direct references to death. We may be misleading ourselves entirely about the significance of all this.

  Or perhaps not. We codified some of the new signs, and this afternoon I asked Ramona what one of them meant. She fidgeted and hooted and looked uncomfortable—and not simply because I was asking her to do a tough abstract thing like giving a definition. She was worried. She looked around for Leo, and when she saw him she made that sign at him. He came bounding over and shoved Ramona away. Then he began to tell me how wise and good and gentle I am. He may be a genius, but even a genius chimp is still a chimp, and I told him I wasn’t fooled by all his flattery. Then I asked him what the new sign meant.

  “Jump high come again,” Leo signed.

  A simple chimpy phrase referring to fun and frolic? So I thought at first, and so did many of my colleagues. But Dave Yost said, “Then why was Ramona so evasive about defining it?”

  “Defining isn’t easy for them,” Beth Rankin said.

  “Ramona’s one of the five brightest. She’s capable of it. Especially since the sign can be defined by use of four other established signs, as Leo proceeded to do.”

  “What are you getting at, Dave?” I asked.

  Yost said, ‘Jump high come again’ might be about a game they like to play, but it could also be an eschatological reference, sacred talk, a concise metaphorical way to speak of death and resurrection, no?”

  Mick Falkenburg snorted. “Jesus, Dave, of all the nutty Jesuitical bullshit—”

  “Is it?”

  “It’s possible sometimes to be too subtle in your analysis,” Falkenburg said. “You’re suggesting that these chimpanzees have a theology?”

  “I’m suggesting that they may be in the process of evolving a religion,” Yost replied.

  Can it be?

  Sometimes we lose our perspective with these animals, as Mick indicated, and we overestimate their intelligence; but just as often, I think, we underestimate them.

  Jump high come again.

  I wonder. Secret sacred talk? A chimpanzee theology? Belief in life after death? A religion?

  * *** *

  They know that human beings have a body of ritual and belief that they call religion, though how much they really comprehend about it is hard to tell. Dave Yost, in his metaphysical discussions with Leo and some of the other alphas, introduced the concept long ago. He drew a hierarchy that began with God and ran downward through human beings and chimpanzees to dogs and cats and onward to insects and frogs, by way of giving the chimps some sense of the great chain of life. They had seen bugs and frogs and cats and dogs, but they wanted Dave to show them God, and he was forced to tell them that God is not actually tangible and accessible, but lives high overhead although His essence penetrates all things. I doubt that they grasped much of that. Leo, whose nimble and probing intelligence is a constant illumination to us, wanted Yost to explain how we talked to God and how God talked to us if He wasn’t around to make signs, and Yost said that we had a thing called religion, which was a system of communicating with God. And that was where he left it, a long while back.

  Now we are on guard for any indications of a developing religious consciousness among our troop. Even the scoffers—Mick Falkenburg, Beth, to some degree, Charley Damiano—are paying close heed. After all, one of the underlying purposes of this project is to reach an understanding of how the first hominids managed to cross the intellectual boundary that we like to think separates the animals from humanity. We can’t reconstruct a bunch of Australopithecines and study them; but we can watch chimpanzees who have been given the gift of language build a quasi-protohuman society, and it is the closest thing to traveling back in time that we are apt to achieve. Yost thinks, I think, Burt Christensen is beginning to think, that we have inadvertently kindled an awareness of the divine, of the numinous force that must be worshipped, by allowing them to see that their gods—us—can be struck down and slain by an even higher power.

  The evidence so far is slim. The attention given Vendelmans and Judy; the solitary meditations of Leo and Grimsky; the large gatherings in the grove; the greatly accelerated use of modified sign language in chimp-to-chimp talk at those gatherings; the potentially eschatological reference we think we see in the sign that Leo translated as “jump high come again.” That’s it. To those of us who want to interpret that as the foundations of religion, it seems indicative of what we want to see; to the rest, it all looks like coincidence and fantasy. The problem is that we are dealing with nonhuman intelligence and we must take care not to impose our own thought-constructs. We can never be certain if we are operating from a value system anything like that of the chimps. The built-in ambiguities of the sign-language grammar we must use with them complicate the issue. Consider the phrase “banana fly” that Leo used in a speech—a sermon?—in the oak grove, and remember Ramona’s reference to the sick Vendelmans as “rotten banana.” If we take fly to be a verb, “banana fly” might be considered a metaphorical description of Vendelman’s ascent to heaven. If we take it to be a noun, Leo might have been talking about the Drosophila flies that feed on decaying fruit, a metaphor for the corruption of the flesh after death. On the other hand, he may simply have been making a comment about the current state of our garbage dump.

  We have agreed for the moment not to engage the chimpanzees in any direct interrogation about any of this. The Heisenberg principle is eternally our rule here: the observer can too easily perturb the thing observed, so we must make only the most delicate of measurements. Even so, of course, our presence among the chimps is bound to have its impact, but we do what we can to minimize it by avoiding leading questions and watching in silence.

  * *** *

  Two unusual things today. Taken each by each, they would be interesting without being significant; but if we use each to illuminate the other, we begin to see things in a strange new light, perhaps.

  One thing is an increase in vocalizing, noticed by nearly everyone, among the chimps. We know that chimpanzees in the wild have a kind of rudimentary spoken language—a greeting call, a defiance call, the grunts that mean “I like the taste of this,” the male chimp’s territorial hoot, and such—nothing very complex, really not qualitatively much beyond the language of birds and dogs. They also
have a fairly rich nonverbal language, a vocabulary of gestures and facial expressions. But it was not until the first experiments decades ago in teaching chimpanzees human sign language that any important linguistic capacity became apparent in them. Here at the research station, the chimps communicate almost wholly in signs, as they have been trained to do for generations and as they have taught their young ones to do; they revert to hoots and grunts only in the most elemental situations. We ourselves communicate mainly in signs when we are talking to each other while working with the chimps, and even in our humans-only conferences, we use signs as much as speech, from long habit. But suddenly the chimps are making sounds at each other. Odd sounds, unfamiliar sounds, weird, clumsy imitations, one might say, of human speech. Nothing that we can understand, naturally: the chimpanzee larynx is simply incapable of duplicating the phonemes humans use. But these new grunts, these tortured blurts of sound, seem intended to mimic our speech. It was Damiano who showed us, as we were watching a tape of a grove session, how Attila was twisting his lips with his hands in what appeared unmistakably to be an attempt to make human sounds come out.

  Why?

  The second thing is that Leo has started wearing a shirt and a hat. There is nothing remarkable about a chimp in clothing; although we have never encouraged such anthropomorphization here, various animals have taken a fancy from time to time to some item of clothing, have begged it from its owner and have worn it for a few days or even weeks. The novelty here is that the shirt and the hat belonged to Hal Vendelmans, and that Leo wears them only when the chimps are gathered in the oak grove, which Dave Yost has lately begun calling the “holy grove.” Leo found them in the toolshed beyond the vegetable garden. The shirt is ten sizes too big, Vendelmans having been so brawny, but Leo ties the sleeves across his chest and lets the rest dangle down over his back almost like a cloak.

  What shall we make of this?

  Jan is the specialist in chimp verbal processes. At the meeting tonight she said, “It sounds to me as if they’re trying to duplicate the rhythms of human speech even though they can’t reproduce the actual sounds. They’re playing at being human.”

  “Talking the god-talk,” said Dave Yost.

  “What do you mean?” Jan asked.

  “Chimps talk with their hands. Humans do, too, when speaking with chimps, but when humans talk to humans, they use their voices. Humans are gods to chimps, remember. Talking in the way the gods talk is one way of remaking yourself in the image of the gods, of putting on divine attributes.”

  “But that’s nonsense,” Jan said. “I can’t possibly—”

  “Wearing human clothing,” I broke in excitedly, “would also be a kind of putting on divine attributes, in the most literal sense of the phrase. Especially if the clothes—”

  “—had belonged to Hal Vendelmans,” said Christensen.

  “The dead god,” Yost said.

  We looked at each other in amazement.

  Charley Damiano said, not in his usual skeptical way, but in a kind of wonder, “Dave, are you hypothesizing that Leo functions as some sort of priest, that those are his sacred garments?”

  “More than just a priest,” Yost said. “A high priest, I think. A pope. The pope of the chimps.”

  * *** *

  Grimsky is suddenly looking very feeble. Yesterday we saw him moving slowly through the meadow by himself, making a long circuit of the grounds as far out as the pond and the little waterfall, then solemnly and ponderously staggering back to the meeting place at the far side of the grove. Today he has been sitting quietly by the stream, occasionally rocking slowly back and forth, now and then dipping his feet in. I checked the records: he is forty-three years old, well along for a chimp, although some have been known to live fifty years and more. Mick wanted to take him to the infirmary, but we decided against it; if he is dying, and by all appearances he is, we ought to let him do it with dignity in his own way. Jan went down to the grove to visit him and reported that he shows no apparent signs of disease. His eyes are clear; his face feels cool. Age has withered him and his time is at hand. I feel an enormous sense of loss, for he has a keen intelligence, a long memory, a shrewd and thoughtful nature. He was the alpha male of the troop for many years, but a decade ago, when Leo came of age, Grimsky abdicated in his favor with no sign of a struggle. Behind Grimsky’s grizzled forehead, there must lay a wealth of subtle and mysterious perceptions, concepts and insights about which we know practically nothing, and very soon all that will be lost. Let us hope he’s managed to teach his wisdom to Leo and Attila and Alice and Ramona.

  * *** *

  Today’s oddity: a ritual distribution of meat.

  Meat is not very important in the diet of chimps, but they do like to have some, and as far back as I can remember, Wednesday has been meat-day here, when we give them a side of beef or some slabs of mutton or something of that sort. The procedure for dividing up the meat betrays the chimps’ wild heritage, for the alpha males eat their fill first while the others watch, and then the weaker males beg for a share and are allowed to move in to grab, and finally the females and young ones get the scraps. Today was meat-day. Leo, as usual, helped himself first, but what happened after that was astounding. He let Attila feed, and then told Attila to offer some meat to Grimsky, who is even weaker today and brushed it aside. Then Leo put on Vendelmans’s hat and began to parcel out scraps of meat to the others. One by one they came up to him in the current order of ranking and went through the standard begging maneuver, hand beneath chin, palm upward, and Leo gave each one a strip of meat.

  “Like taking communion,” Charley Damiano muttered. “With Leo the celebrant at the Mass.”

  Unless our assumptions are totally off base, there is a real religion going on here, perhaps created by Grimsky and under Leo’s governance. And Hal Vendelmans’s faded old blue work hat is the tiara of the pope.

  * *** *

  Beth Rankin woke me at dawn and said, “Come fast. They’re doing something strange with old Grimsky.”

  I was up and dressed and awake in a hurry. We have a closed-circuit system now that pipes the events in the grove back to us, and we paused at the screen so that I could see what was going on. Grimsky sat on his knees at the edge of the stream, eyes closed, barely moving. Leo, wearing the hat, was beside him, elaborately tying Vendelmans’s shirt over Grimsky’s shoulders. A dozen or more of the other adult chimps were squatting in a semicircle in front of them.

  Burt Christensen said, “What’s going on? Is Leo making Grimsky the assistant pope?”

  “I think Leo is giving Grimsky the last rites,” I said.

  What else could it have been? Leo wore the sacred headdress. He spoke at length using the new signs—the ecclesiastical language, the chimpanzee equivalent of Latin or Hebrew or Sanskrit—and as his oration went on and on, the congregation replied periodically with outbursts of—I suppose—response and approval, some in signs, some with grunting garbled pseudohuman sounds that Dave Yost thought was their version of godtalk. Throughout it all Grimsky was—silent and remote, though occasionally he nodded or murmured or tapped both his shoulders in a gesture whose meaning was unknown to us. The ceremony went on for more than an hour. Then Grimsky leaned forward, and Kong and Chump took him by the arms and eased him down until he was lying with his cheek against the ground.

  For two, three, five minutes all the chimpanzees were still. At last, Leo came forward and removed his hat, setting it on the ground beside Grimsky, and with great delicacy, he untied the shirt Grimsky wore. Grimsky did not move. Leo draped the shirt over his own shoulders and donned the hat again.

  He turned to the watching chimps and signed, using the old signs that were completely intelligible to us, “Grimsky now be human being.”

  We stared at each other in awe and astonishment. A couple of us were sobbing. No one could speak.

  The funeral ceremony seemed to be over. The chimps were dispersing. We saw Leo sauntering away, hat casually dangling from one hand, the
shirt in the other, trailing over the ground: Grimsky alone remained by the stream. We waited ten minutes and went down to the grove. Grimsky seemed to be sleeping very peacefully, but he was dead, and we gathered him up—Burt and I carried him; he seemed to weigh almost nothing—and took him back to the lab for the autopsy.

  In mid-morning, the sky darkened and lightning leaped across the hills to the north. There was a tremendous crack of thunder almost instantly and sudden tempestuous rain. Jan pointed to the meadow. The male chimps were doing a bizarre dance, roaring, swaying, slapping their feet against the ground, hammering their hands against the trunks of the trees, ripping off branches and flailing the earth with them. Grief? Terror? Joy at the translation of Grimsky to a divine state? Who could tell? I had never been frightened by our animals before—I knew them too well, I regarded them as little hairy cousins—but now they were terrifying creatures and this was a scene out of time’s dawn, as Gonzo and Kong and Attila and Chump and Buster and Claudius and even Pope Leo himself went thrashing about in that horrendous rain, pounding out the steps of some unfathomable rite.

  The lightning ceased and the rain moved southward as quickly as it had come, and the dancers went slinking away, each to his favorite tree. By noon the day was bright and warm and it was as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

  * *** *

  Two days after Grimsky’s death I was awakened again at dawn, this time by Mick Falkenburg. He shook my shoulder and yelled at me to wake up, and as I sat there blinking he said, “Chicory’s dead! I was out for an early walk and I found her near the place where Grimsky died.”