Such is the nature of a raid, I guess. The Big Branch makes the call and we get ready. We eat bushbaby meat, rape some females in our troop. The bushbaby meat and the raping saps us a little, but so what? We might not be back for a while. Is this shocking you? I don’t want to shock you. I just want to be honest about who I am and what I’ve done in the service of my troop, and not just my troop, but other troops as well, done, in fact, for every chimp who yearns for true forest freedom but suffers under the yoke of Mingo and his Mingo-ish ideology.
God, listen to me. I sound like one of those fat chimps in the Big Branch, the ones who drove my father to the other side of the river all those years ago. Doubtless as a scientist you’ve also witnessed your share of nature being cruel and indifferent and just plain not giving a shit about anything but itself, because that’s the nature of nature, or so Gilbert says, but I also know, from conversations I’ve overheard near your campsite, that unlike some of your colleagues, including your husband, you cannot accept the premiss that chimps are as sick and calculating as men.
This is partly what makes me love you so much, along with your smooth, lightly freckled arms and your soft auburn hair, not to mention the dainty way you pluck burrs and bugs and things from my scalp fur, and it’s why telling you the truth about why I won’t be coming by the river for a while is so painful, so, I don’t know, is fraught the word? I’m still pretty shaky with this language stuff, but I think fraught might be the word. You see, my dear sweet beautiful primatologist lady, I want you to love me as I love you, but I fear you could never love me as I truly am, that Mike will never find a place in your heart as ‘Ari’ has. And so my great ape heart is breaking.
So be it then. I will learn to ‘accept’ this fact, just as I heard you say to your husband the other night while I crouched beside your tent that you would learn to ‘accept’ his dalliances with Cindy the Grad Student. (Though if you’d seen them behind the generator the other night, doing things that even your average kink-drunk pornobo would find distasteful, you might not be so accepting.) But please know that I would swing through every tree in every forest to find the perfect banana leaf for you to wear in your beautiful hair, or use as a platter for a delectable selection of termites I would also be thrilled to provide, or, if you preferred, you could use the leaf to scrape the fragrant lady poop from your sumptuous rump. It’s all the same to me, though you should know I’ve never been a real tree-chimp. I’m better on the ground, biting, pummeling. Pummeling’s my specialty. I love to pummel. Clubbing with logs, or stones, that’s okay. But pummeling, or any situation calling for pummeling, that’s where this chimp comes alive. Anyway, that’s not my point. My point is I love you and would do anything for you, including pummel your prick of a spouse into forest mulch, though I know you are too gentle a soul to wish that on him. I love you, Miss Primatologist Lady in the Bushes Sometimes, and I’m scared. I’m scared I will never see you again. I’m scared that Mingo will prove too tough. We lost my best friend Lychee to poachers on the last raid, and always we live in fear of the bullet, or fist, or tooth, with our name on it (even though we technically would not be able to read our name on it, of course).
I’m scared I’m losing faith, too. I never used to question my orders from Gilbert and the Big Branch, but I’m beginning to see the bigger picture. Hell, maybe I don’t have to pummel. Maybe those little orgy fiends the bonobos have the right idea. Maybe it’s better to fuck your fights out. What I know for sure is that it’s frightening to suddenly have thoughts that are my thoughts and not Gilbert’s or the Big Branch’s. All those afternoons we groomed and played you must have been growing a new chimp deep inside of me.
Remember that time you cradled me and picked burrs from my scalp and stroked my head and told me all about the human world, the one you fled because everything was too fake and murderous and shiny, the one where you couldn’t find any kinds of creatures you could stand, and said, ‘My little Ari,’ you said, ‘what kind of creature are you?’ If I could have answered you then, if I’d known I could, I would have told you I was the kind of creature who was never happier than during that moment with you, even as I felt this vague ripple of sadness under my fur, the sense that everything was already too late, that nature always got the head start, that nurture never had a shot. Or remember that time you picked more burrs and maybe some twigs out of my scalp, and said, ‘Oh, my Ari, deep in your heart you are a kind, loving chimp, aren’t you?’ Well, I didn’t quite have the language yet, but if I had, I would have said, ‘Yes! Or, no, not yet! But I want to be! I really do!’
Still, maybe wanting is not enough. Maybe I’ll never be more than what the Big Branch made me: a machine for turning living, breathing brothers into heaps of hair and bone. I don’t want your pity, save your pity for the hair heaps, but I guess I am mostly afraid that since now you know the truth, ‘Mike’ has forever destroyed your feelings for ‘Ari’. Even as I nibble on some post-rape bushbaby meat, I feel a teardrop nestling in my cheek fuzz. It is a tear for you, my darling, but maybe more a tear for me. I cannot deny my chimphood. You could never love a chimp that would. But still I pray we meet again, that the braver, better ape inside me gets another chance to grow.
Yours truly,
Mike ‘Ari’
[The following letter, folded into a small square, was found affixed to the first with an unidentified animal hide glue, possibly primate.]
Dear Bush Bitch,
Goddamn you, data-collecting whore of Babylon. How dare you come here and head-hump one of my best pummellers! That’s right, this ain’t your lover ape, this is Gilbert. Or should I say Pushkin? (Pushkin! I did a tour at the Language Research Center in Georgia, America so don’t try to hoity-toit me. Have you even read Eugene Onegin?)
Good thing I found this note before you did, because I really think it’s time I made my two-cent deposit. By the time you read this Mike and I and the rest of the ol’ death squad will have already set out to do what we were put in this freaking forest to do, namely de-Mingoise our buffer zones. I respect my chimps so I’ll let the kid’s words stand, but I do believe a little addendum is in order. You see, we may all seem alike to you, but the fact remains that Mingo represents a grave threat to our freedom (and don’t give me any of that seditious conspiracy jive about the Big Branch’s plans for mussanga fruit access.) Furthermore, I hate to shatter your theories, but sometimes we kill just for the thrill of it, or to maintain our murder chops. As we like to put it: One chimp rusted, the whole troop dusted.
Well, do with that intel what you will. I trust you’ll bury it. If chimps are as bad as people, then maybe people aren’t bad or good. That’ll throw your precious moral system out of whack. But what I really want to talk about is Mike. Look, he’s just a dumbass youngster. It’s me you want. A chimp with experience, a rough-knuckled hard-swinging ape’s ape that knows how to stick his dick in the anthill of life. Listen, honey, I know I scare you. But I know I excite you, too. You can’t hide that. And you can’t hide from me. I’ll be home soon, but I have a weird feeling in my gut that your love monkey Ari might not make it back. I worry that ‘fraught’ will indeed be the word for his furry ass. The fog of war, etc. Don’t get me wrong, we’ll all be sad. And after I take care of your two-timing husband, you and I will be sad together, beside the river. We’ll get our sad on like you can’t believe.
’Til then,
Push
PANOS KARNEZIS
When I first saw you, I have to admit, I mistook you for a stranger, perhaps because I had been living on my own for such a long time, a voluntary isolation that was beginning to affect my speech as well as my vision. But then I had a better look at your reflection on the water, rippled by the swan gliding across the pond, and I saw clearly the short hair, the long nose, the familiar coat: we knew each other from somewhere. After a futile year, I had begun to take daily afternoon walks in the park to lessen the torment of loneliness, which was devised to punish the weak of this world, along a route that too
k me past the pond, where I fed the ducks, past the Hill, past the Edwardian Pergola, stopping to sit briefly on one of the benches dedicated to the dead.
It was a brief encounter. Then I did not see you again for several months, and I was beginning to convince myself that, after all, you were one of the accidental ghosts that roam the park at any time of the day, mystifying the dogs by their ethereal presence, surprising the sleeping anglers and angering the gardeners by trampling all over the flowerbeds, until we bumped into each other again the following spring. Christmas had passed without escape from the despair, watching cartoons and merciless repeats of comedy on television that could not even make amnesiacs laugh. January had not been better either. Work had been slow, and the joy of writing had given way to a routine that was beginning to resemble the life of a pearl diver. Nothing happened in February either, a month invented only to delay the coming of spring, but then in March I had the providential idea to come into town for a matinee. After the play, being too early to return home, I mixed with the twilight crowd, walking with their umbrellas in the rain, going in and out of shops, restaurants, amusement arcades. Then, suddenly, there you were again, splendid and palpable in a shop window, among the sinister mannequins, the clouds of exhaust fumes and the stalls of the street vendors.
At the time I lived on the first floor of a red-brick house in north London, in a small flat where the bath was in the kitchen, so that I did the laundry, bathed and washed the dishes in the same water in order to save on expenses. Late every afternoon, the landlady came to inspect the property, going from floor to floor in her army general’s walk, sniffing the air because smoking was strictly forbidden, before paying a visit to her daughter and son-in-law, who stayed in the garden flat. A well-built Frenchwoman, my landlady had been stranded in England after marrying an English wine merchant who died of cirrhosis five years later, leaving her with a daughter and the freehold of the big house. She converted it into flats and since then had rented them out to young professionals. Once a month, when she came to collect the rent, she warned me, in her precise French accent that tolerated no dissent, that I am a guest, even though I always paid on time and put the rubbish out every Sunday night, as she had instructed me, the black bin bag tied with a silk ribbon and a thank-you note addressed to the dustmen, who would otherwise not collect it.
This was the world before I met you, and if I had not gone insane I owed it to my tenacity. I had come to London with the intention of becoming a writer, without a contract, without a plan, without even a plot for a book, on the strength of a good word about my stories from someone who soon proved to be more courteous than sincere. I had saved enough money to last me six months and given up a good job, an easy decision because that job meant nothing to me. Convinced I was destined for greater things, I had shaken hands with my boss, a thin man with tired eyes, a captain’s beard and a northern accent, who had sent me away with his blessing: ‘You’re fucking crazy.’ I moved into the flat in north London and shut myself off from the world, hoping that inspiration would save me from the foretold fate of aspiring writers. A year later my optimism had all but run out, and I had been left with a growing fear that I was wasting my time. I was making ends meet by working a few hours a week in an old bookshop where people seeking shelter from the rain and innocent tourists were cowed into buying first editions of the classics and rare prints made in China a few weeks earlier.
The second time I came across you, that evening in town, I tried speaking to you, but as soon as I turned round you vanished. I stood in the middle of the torrent of Saturday shoppers, listening to the honking of cars and the bloodcurdling shouts of cabbies telling me, inter alia, to get out of the way, and for the first time I experienced an oppressive loneliness that I had not felt since my coming to London. After that I looked for you from the moment I stepped out of the door until I returned home late in the evening, in the park, in the street, at the shops, and kept a diary of unconfirmed sightings, which was soon filled with details of the date, the time and place I thought I saw you. I ate little, just enough to sustain my hope but not my body, and soon I was losing weight. I slept badly, waiting all night for morning to come, when I could leave the house and roam the streets in the rain, without an umbrella, walking for miles, further and further from home each day, and coming back in the evening, tired, disappointed and wet through. I was stopped by the police, dogs barked at me and I earned the reputation of a man one should stay clear of: the Stranger.
Weeks went by and the weather improved. The branches of the trees on either side of the streets spread out, and the leaves formed dense canopies lit up from above by the early-evening light. Peace reigned over the neighbourhood that was disrupted only by the purring of lawnmowers. At weekends happy crowds poured into the park, lost their way through the meadows, where the grass had grown several feet tall, and were never seen again, the place echoing with their heart-rending cries. I had stopped changing my clothes, bathing or shaving. If I could have afforded to, I would have taken a holiday in order to soothe my grief and take a break from the eternal search, but instead I stayed home, where I suffered the ordeal of a heat wave the like of which had not been seen before. In August, when my landlady knocked on my door to collect the rent, she wrinkled up her nose and gave me a look of disapproval. I decided that I had to spruce myself up. That evening I sat in the scalding water of the big bath in the kitchen, perfumed with oils of lavender, peppermint and jasmine, and fell asleep while thinking of you. When I woke up, the water had turned cold and my teeth were chattering. I dried myself off and went to shave. I have a cut-throat razor, bought on a sentimental impulse, a beautiful antique with a whalebone handle and a Sheffield-steel blade I sharpen once a week. I lathered my face and began to shave. Then, as soon as I finished, washed the razor under the tap and raised my head, lo and behold, I saw you in the mirror, looking back at me.
I do not know how you found me, an unimportant man in a city that has no time for insignificance, but however you did it, it was the happiest surprise of my life. I looked in the mirror with admiration and as much satisfaction as if I had drawn you there myself. Then I put on cologne and ironed clothes, polished my shoes, combed my hair and carried my old clothes to the bottom of the garden, where I burned them in a ceremony that felt like an immolation, the only witness my landlady’s son-in-law, watching me with his sad slave’s eyes from inside his flat.
I knew what else I had to do. The following morning I went to the bank, where I withdrew the last of my savings and spent them all on mirrors, big and small, square, round and rectangular. After I had them framed in gold, like portraits by the Old Masters, I hung them round my flat: in the kitchen, the bedroom, the living-room, the toilet, from the ceiling, everywhere, so that I could see you in any direction I turned to.
Autumn brought relief from the heat. The traffic wardens, doomed to walk eternally the streets of the borough, ploughed through the dry leaves and were still giving tickets. I rarely went to the park any more, preferring to stay at home with you instead. In the morning I had coffee, listening to the news on the radio for a while, and then I sat at my desk. Suddenly work was going well. I was writing non-stop, without having to wait for inspiration, without self-doubt, without effort, the pen flowing like a boat caught in a tail wind. At one o’clock, I stopped for a light snack and a brief afternoon nap, a Mediterranean habit that no amount of coffee could exorcise. I left the windows open, so that I could fall asleep listening to the wind carrying the melodies of songbirds and the learned discourses of parrots which had escaped their cages and lived in the park. One day, in the middle of my nap, a gust of wind blew through the flat, and a heavy mirror fell to the floor and broke into pieces. I woke with a start. The noise alarmed my landlady too, doing the rounds of the house at the time, and a moment later she banged on my door. ‘Open up!’ she demanded. ‘In the name of the Housing Act.’
I had no choice but to comply. I tiptoed to the door, dressed in my best gown, and opened the door
, forcing a big smile. My landlady frowned and tried to see behind me. When she finally saw the mirrors that covered the walls from floor to ceiling, she let out a scream: ‘Mon Dieu!’ Then she recovered herself and added: ‘I want you out by Friday. This is a reputable house.’
I tried to convince her that she was wrong, that there was nothing sinister or immoral about the mirrors, but I did not dare to tell her about you in case she thought I was subletting the flat, a terrible crime punishable by death. The mirrors, I said, were a simple way to brighten up the place in a country where light was brought over from Africa to be sold by the bucket load. She did not believe me. ‘Out! Out!’ she kept repeating in her precise voice, incensed and resolute, even after I shut the door in her face. When it was quiet again, I heaved a sigh of relief. I took the dustpan and brushed the broken glass, I made coffee, I sat at my desk, and it was some time before I looked in a mirror and saw that you were not there. I tried another mirror, then another until I had looked in all of them. To my horror, all I could see was my reflection multiplied countless times: you were gone.
There was no point searching for you. I knew by then that you would only be found if you wanted to be found, and what I had to do was simply to wait. The following Friday I moved out of the red-brick house, watched over by my landlady, who withheld my deposit without an explanation, and found a basement bedsit. Then I sold my mirrors to a travelling funfair to build a house of mirrors, which some time later the police shut down because it was too terrifying for children. I kept only one mirror, out of hope as well as necessity, which I hung above the bathroom sink in order to shave. Every time I lather my face, I look deep in it, hoping one day you will again come up from the bottom of the glass.
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