by Rick Moody
“Wherever it lands, there’s going to be people who see it.”
“What did you do after you lost the arm?” his father asked.
“We went to drop the van back at Vienna’s place, figuring we could pick up my car, but I guess that was a mistake,” Jean-Paul said, and his concern was evident. “But there was a note from her parents asking her to drop the van off at the rally downtown, so we took it down there. They needed it for something. And then we came straight here.”
“Did you tell them about it? Did you tell anyone else about it?”
“We didn’t tell anyone.”
“You must keep it that way for now,” Koo said. “You and the girl must probably stay in one place for a few days and limit contact. Most people who have had contact are being quarantined. And you will have to call the Robertses and alert them, and let us hope they use antibacterial agents or avoid that van. Now, go find some clothes for yourself and the girl, and come downstairs and help me to burn these items. A son should help his father with these things.”
A long night has passed and now the bright dawn is upon me, Morton scrawled in his childish hand, and scarcely have I experienced a night so long, at least not in recent memory. Is it a long night simply because it is the night in which I have declared my feelings? Is it possible that this world is ready for a love so profane, a chimpanzee’s love for a human woman? I am well aware, or at least these were my thoughts through the harsh night of the primate laboratory where I live, that as a chimpanzee, as part of a species in the midst of being hunted from the globe, that the human animal is not the animal I should lavish with my affections. I am aware of this. But a primate will love what a primate will love. Desire, as I have been experiencing it, is a disconcerting riot of feelings. Just as one feeling, one color, one hue, becomes nameable, it is succeeded by its obverse. There is a dynamic opposition between loves practical and impractical. In practical love, I resolve to keep to myself what I have already partly declared so as to be able to live comfortably in my world of experimental medical protocols. In impractical love, I throw my caution to the wind, as a chimpanzee often must do, and just attempt the inadvisable thing, the vulnerability of desire. Neither of these solutions to my predicament stays with me, or this was what I came to believe in the course of the long night I am describing. I wrestled myself to and fro trying to find ways to feel comfortable sleeping. My only comfort lay in the possibility that I might be able to speak with Noelle further. While waiting, I contented myself with the fact that I now possess the kinds of feelings that have given us the greatest poems. Songs too. For example, I recently heard a song on the computer entitled “More Than a Woman,” I believe that was the title. The frail, trembling falsetto of the men singing the song moved me greatly. Perhaps one day I too shall be able to contribute to the enormous legacy of descriptions of love.
It was Larry, the other graduate student, who arrived first at the lab in the morning. Not bright and early, as Morton had hoped, but when it damn well suited him, perhaps an hour before his lunch break. Morton had tolerated Larry in the past, no more. It was simply unjust that he had to deal with Larry on this day of all days. Let it be said, first of all, that Larry smoked something, some sedative or mild hallucinogen, on the far side of the mirror. Morton believed that Larry smoked something most days. There was always some vegetal odor that leaked under the lab door. Morton was not yet worldly enough to identify it, though he had ideas. Morton no longer wished to be exposed to the battery of human intoxicants with which they seemed to fill their days. Now that he employed the English language in his own way, now that he was capable of the helix of desire and consciousness that enabled the one primate to feel that it can subdue the others, he had no interest whatsoever in dulling himself. He would, with a clear mind, with a will to power, wrest life to his purposes.
After a good half hour of rooting around on the other side of the observation mirror, dropping things and then rearranging whatever it was that he had dropped, calling his pals to ask them to pick up more pseudoephedrine so that he could modify it in the laboratory bathroom, or so Morton believed, Larry at last entered the cell area.
“What’s it going to be today?” the researcher said, yawning. “A little screen time, big guy? There was a really big mess at the rally over on Stone. Want to watch a little of that? There’s footage on the Net. There were helicopters on the scene, that kind of shit. Probably some live feed from the police department. Wake you right up.”
Should Morton tell him? Should Morton tell Larry to please flee back into the observation room and masturbate himself, or whatever it was this deadbeat human did in order to pass the time? Defecate in his desk drawer? Should Morton tell him in no uncertain terms that now was not the time? Morton turned the pros and cons over in his rationalizing mind. He couldn’t, in point of fact, determine any reason to speak with Larry at all. Larry was simply not someone with whom Morton wished to speak. In fact, it occurred to him that he should ball up the piece of construction paper on which he’d been writing down his thoughts. He balled up his notes (feeling grateful that he hadn’t written the love poem he’d contemplated there, since anything he wrote was liable to be somewhat historic, especially if he used the sonnet form). He batted around the wadded-up ball of diaristic notes just the way a chimpanzee would do it and knocked this ball into the trash bin.
Nothing could be harder, now that Morton was waked, than to return to the life of an impoverished slave. A proper time and place beckoned, from which to reveal the extent of his accomplishments, but he was willing to entertain, temporarily, the notion of gradualism. At least until Noelle returned for her shift.
Morton ambled casually over to the computer console, took control of the joystick, and selected the site of one of the left-leaning newspapers in Europe. His knowledge of European history was spotty. For example, Morton could not name all the British monarchs between Victoria and Elizabeth II. He knew there was an abdication in there somewhere, and some deadbeats. It was really rather embarrassing. Time to apply himself to his studies.
Larry, who stood around like an idiot, said, “Look, bub, the notes from Noelle are all missing, from last night. In the office? You didn’t take those notes, did you? We got to keep the notes really organized for Dr. Koo. He’s very particular about having all the notes. It’s, like, uh, the one thing he insists on. I mean, the guy’s not here very often; I don’t know if he even bothers to publish his experimental results, but he sure wants the notes. Did you take those?”
Morton gaped at Larry, as if he didn’t understand a word of his tedious blather.
“Never mind, then. What do you want for breakfast, pal? I’ve got some bananas, some mangos, some cold cereal. I brought in some cereal. For myself. You want some cold cereal? I like the really mushy shit. Where it’s like there’s paper pulp in the bowl.”
This kind of talk was not to be withstood. Some human beings, it appeared to Morton, talked like complete imbeciles. Everything was baby talk, all the day long, and it always came back to scatological terminologies, the constant allusion to waste products. Everything was either going in or coming out. That was it. Humans were just big organ sacks, made for extruding fluids, and then discussing, endlessly, the extrusion thereof. While Morton was considering this tendency, which he termed feco-narcissism, for a forthcoming treatise on same, the imbecile Larry came back in with bananas. Morton selected one critically. A potassium delivery system. They weren’t giving Morton enough roughage in his diet, and chimpanzees occasionally experienced irregularity in the same way humans did. Maybe he should tell the imbecile to fix him up a proper bowl of oat bran.
Upon finishing the banana, however, Morton elected to do a little light reading, checked some of the stock prices on the Nikkei and the Hang Seng exchanges. It was true that Morton had no actual stock portfolio, because he was not paid for the labor he performed, but he was interested in learning about the way the securities market functioned, so that when the day came he would be
prepared. It wasn’t enough, as he understood it, to perform at the market level. He needed to outearn the human beings. Which would require highly leveraged investments.
After the market updates, he went to a few online dating services where he had constructed profiles for himself. It was not that he believed he would meet anyone in this way, since he had no online photograph and referred to himself as extremely hirsute in his profiles, but he could practice his language skills there, as well as the rules of social interaction. Throughout all of this, however, all this time-wasting, there was the grand, unfulfilled feeling swelling in his chest. Was it an adolescent feeling, this sensation that he wanted only to gaze upon the woman indwelling in his heart? Could he do none of the things he had done before, such as perform in experimental medical regimens? Could he not be a worker among workers, no matter how unfair the environment in which he toiled?
Larry came back out and, muttering something about animal enrichment, indicated that he intended to play some ball with Morton, the ball in question being a lightweight foam-rubber basketball of some kind. Larry had dragged in a small backboard, of the sort that one bought for youngsters, nonregulation, and he was in the process of steadying this backboard against one wall, when he began regaling Morton with some cultural insights, Larry-style.
“You know, this is really a great game in terms of exercise, all that. I’m not really able to play it as well as I used to, because I got some meniscal damage, ACL damage, and so forth, from when I played back in college, but I still feel like nothing is better for you. In terms of aerobic workout. So I’ve brought this in today to see if I can explain the basic strategy of the game to you. I’m just going to make a little free throw line here with this. And always remember that you have to have your game face when you’re…”
Larry spun the ball in his palm, as though this were a nervous tic.
“… and then this is the other shooting line, what’s the name of that, the three-point line? Okay, the three-point line, this box marks it; if you can sink one from beyond here you get three points, and this is one-on-one, and the important thing in one-on-one is to watch the physical part of the game, right, pal? No contact in the game at all; it’s all done without touching each other. That’s one of the laws of the game. So I won’t touch you, and you won’t touch me. And I recognize that the ball won’t bounce particularly well in this enclosed little space, but you’re kind of supposed to dribble the ball, you know, not carry it; there’s something called double-dribbling, and traveling. We won’t go too far into those finer points. Just try not to do those things, you got it? You shoot from back there, and you get two or three points, depending on where you are. Ready?”
Morton had watched and listened with galloping feelings of irritation. He’d been reading up, among his other threads of research, on an organization known as the International Humanist and Ethical Union, which had recently managed to have itself adopted as the official state religion in Great Britain (following the death of the last of the British line of monarchs and the abdication of her grandchildren), founded on the idea that every human being was unique and complex and not capable of being reduced to repetitive and unflattering stereotypes, and yet Morton was challenged, to say the least, his uniqueness was challenged by Larry, by the way that Larry was treating him. Larry threw him the basketball, which Morton dropped. It rolled into a corner.
“Pal, you got to do better than that.” And here Larry, from the corner, carefully lofted the lightweight basketball up so that it made a gentle swish, which Morton believed was the proper term, passing through the basketball net unperturbed. “There’s an agility part of the game, a gracefulness, I’ll grant you that,” Larry said. “But the main thing with the game is the part that has to do with wanting it. You have to want the game, pal. Don’t just sit there thinking you’re a chimpanzee and you’re on the gravy train here, with the free room and board, and you have interesting and brilliant people who want to come in here day in and day out to ask you questions. You can’t just accept that arrangement, pal. You have to try to make more of yourself than that. Some people just never get past the free room and board, and they become a drag on federal resources. You don’t want that.”
He passed the ball to Morton, and this time Morton successfully caught the ball, and then, without dribbling, Morton, with the ball gathered into him as though it were a little baby chimp, headed straight for the basket. Upon standing under the basket, where he intended to shoot the ball, according to what he understood of the game, Morton instead collided with Larry, who batted the ball out of his grasp, so that it again bounced away, caroming off the trash bin on the other side of the cell.
“What did I tell you? I told you that you had to try to dribble, somehow. That means you have to bounce it. Every step or so. You think you can try to do that? I’m going to make some notes, for Dr. Koo, about your physical agility here, you know, so maybe you can try to do a little bit better than how you’re doing.”
When the ball rolled back from the wall, Morton snatched it up. He tried to throw the ball at the backboard, but it bounced harmlessly from the wall nearby. The basketball then fell into human control, and the human being bounced it around a little bit, according to the strictures of dribbling, before brazenly, premeditatedly fouling the chimp, with his upper body. That is, Larry knocked Morton onto his posterior. While Morton rested in that condition, Larry went in for the layup. He grabbed the rim when he was through with the shot. This, Morton later understood, was known as the dunk.
“Okay, bub, you are obviously not wanting it sufficiently,” Larry said. “And that means that I am going to have to tell you a little bit about what you’re up against here. What you are up against is a well-armed opponent, an opponent who has all the rules and who has made up all the rules, the kinds of rules that basically insure that he is going to win in every situation. The opponent has even determined that you are playing, even though you have said nothing consensual about wanting to play. Your opponent has decided that your not saying anything about playing means you are playing, and that the man basically can do whatever the hell he wants to do. And he isn’t even going to bother to give you all the rules.”
Larry moved in close to Morton.
Later, Morton would plead that despite the evidence to the contrary, he was still a chimpanzee. However substantial his language skills. The human animal was his rival. There would always be a moment in the chimpanzee’s life when the chimpanzee felt this, felt the antagonistic force of the human animal, and in this oppositional moment, the chimpanzee feels the boiling in his blood that in human circles signifies impulse control difficulties, though there is no reason to believe that the same terminology should apply to the chimpanzee, in whose world there are no laws for anger management. On the contrary, the chimpanzee celebrates impulse control issues. He (or she) has accepted that free and complete acquiescence to the impulse is how the primate lives. A chimpanzee will be slaughtered by the members of the tribe that he or she has only lately frolicked with, and the tears shed by his or her acquaintances will be brief, if in fact there are any. Which doesn’t mean that the chimpanzee doesn’t care, but simply that the chimpanzee embraces the violent gesture. This was why Morton, having attempted only hours before his first love poem, didn’t consider, not even briefly, suppressing his urge to smack Larry around. With upper body strength five times what Larry was capable of, it wasn’t at all difficult, upon approaching the human animal, for Morton to push him against the wall with inordinate force, so that the back of Larry’s head struck the wall with an unsettling thud, whereupon Larry, completely unsuspecting, lost his footing immediately. Larry was putty before Morton, who seized him by the shoulders, lifted him up, and then shoved him rudely to the ground anew. There was some protesting from Larry—Pal, listen to me, I was trying to help! I was trying to tell you the kinds of things you’re facing in the laboratory, I swear. I wasn’t—but Morton was no longer listening to this human rationalizing, and he took
Larry’s hand, deprived it of the basketball it held (which now bounced to a stationary position across the cell as the physical conflict raged), and bit it nearly as hard as he could bite it. This bite immediately raised a half circle of bloody perforations on Larry, which in turn caused the human adversary to cry out, as if the video cameras in the laboratory could help him now. Still, this was in the category of flesh wounds, as far as Morton was concerned. After all, chimpanzees were in the habit, occasionally, of eating their enemies, or at least parts of them. Although Morton didn’t want to eat Larry, he could do so if he had to. There were viands associated with the human animal that might be palatable. The eyeball of the human animal would perhaps make a good snack, a little jelly snack. And despite his omnivorous fondness for melons and other fresh fruits, he would have to admit that he had a more primitive and atavistic taste for the liver. The liver was high in cholesterol, Morton understood, but when he looked at Larry, he imagined a large, doughy liver full of residuary toxins. The violence of the removal of Larry’s liver held a certain attraction, however, and there were perhaps a few other parts that might be rather tasty too. A kidney belonging to Larry, for example, once voided of its contents, which voiding would likely take place as soon as Larry verified that he was about to be eaten, could taste pretty good. You didn’t have to cook kidneys, really. Indeed, this human obsession with cooking things, that was for animals who were conflicted about being primates. Once you committed to having the innards of the enemy all over you, the fluids lacquering you, the organs laid out around you on the forest floor like a meats department display, then you were really happy with the freshness of the steaks as they were harvested straight from the organ cavity of the enemy. If you could eat the heart, Morton supposed, while it was still beating, or at the briefest possible interval after its last beating, if you could eat the heart having lately watched it pump its last gush of oxygenated blood out into the room, then, Morton supposed, the heart would be at its most succulent. With these delectations in mind, Morton decided to finish Larry off by bashing his head apart on the floor of the cell.