Conjunctions 64: Natural Causes

by Natural Causes- The Nature Issue (retail) (epub)

  When NewsHour ended, the guy asked Audrey’s mother if she would switch the channel to football, and she did, and although he watched it he didn’t appear too invested in the game. Audrey’s mother began chatting with him.

  He had been a professor at the University of Washington, he said, when asked what he did.

  “For twenty-nine years. Just retired.”

  “Congratulations!”

  He raised his glass of beer at her.

  “One of my sons lives in Seattle,” her mother offered. “So we’ve been there to visit now and then. He’s a lawyer. Says he loves it out there. Beautiful city. Rains all the damn time, though.”

  “That is true.”

  William Burns had been a professor of, as he put it, animal behavioral ethology—Audrey learned this from listening in over her calculus, and, as she learned more about him, she began to listen more closely.

  What is behavioral ethology?

  The study of the social behavior of animals, essentially. Usually in the wild, though not necessarily. He had spent much of his career and life studying baboons—

  “Baboons?”

  “Right, baboons.”

  And although he was now retired, he still frequently published research, he said, and still in the summers visited “his troop” in Botswana. He referred to this troop of baboons in the possessive, he said, because he had been studying this same group of animals since the 1970s, and felt they were his. He had observed the short-arc narratives of individuals and the long arcs of generations, rising, bending, and rising again. Childhoods, courtships, friendships, motherhoods, fatherhoods, surrogate mother- and fatherhoods, alliances and grievances, favors and revenges, dominations and submissions, power struggles, politics, rebel insurgencies, coups d’état and de grâce, hostile takeovers, gang warfare, rape, murder, infanticide, matricide, patricide, fratricide, cannibalism, altruism, mercy, mourning, forgiveness, kindness, grief, and grace: He had seen it all.

  “Most of the baboons’ day is spent annoying and harassing each other to no particular end. They’re ornery critters.”

  Mr. Burns—“Dr. Burns?”—handshake—“Bill”—Bill had also done research with other nonhuman primates, a phrase that appeared to confuse Audrey’s mother. He had that mildly autistic air of someone whose depth of devotion to a particular subject blinds him to facial expressions and social cues: He could not see that other people might not find the subject as fascinating as he did, or even, for that matter, know what the hell he was talking about. Audrey’s mother tried to steer the conversation away from baboons, attempted more casual small talk with him, but he fumbled to put words together when asked about the basic things anyone could talk about—how he liked living in Bainbridge Island, the fact that it was often rainy there, and so on. To him, Bainbridge Island was a place. A place where people lived. Just like this was a place where people lived.

  “I like it there,” was all she got out of him about it. Though he had grown up in Ohio, he put in after. It seemed to him that Ohio and Washington were perfectly interchangeable. He very much enjoyed, however, his summers in Botswana, when he did his field research with the baboons. He spoke of Botswana without exoticizing it: He went there simply because it was where the baboons happened to be. And so the road had curved back around to baboons, and he was rattling away again. Audrey, who by then had been sitting on the stool next to him at the bar for some time with a Coke, supplied this baboon expert with an interviewer and an audience, which Audrey’s mother was grateful for, as she had gotten a bit bored with this monkey professor and meanwhile the bar had gotten busier. Audrey fed him questions, kept him talking, motivated nine parts by interest and one by her desire to stay down here with the grownups. (As a child, Audrey had been uninterested in childhood, and now, at seventeen, something inside her was coiled tight with the impatience to be rid of adolescence, like a windup toy so wound up the key’s become hard to turn.) Audrey’s mother let her sit in the bar downstairs and do her homework when it wasn’t busy, but shoved her out later when business picked up.*

  Bill Burns, who had introduced himself to her by then, was telling her about some experiment he and his wife had done—his wife, Deborah, whom he’d been married to for thirty-five years, was also his research partner and former colleague at the University of Washington—in which they’d gone around scooping up the feces of female baboons to measure their glucose content. When an animal’s stress level rises, so does the glucose content in its feces. Over time, they were able to graph the spikes and drops of the averaged stress levels of the female baboons in the troop. As predicted, the line rose dramatically every time a socially significant event occurred. Because, you see, female baboons tend to stay within their troop, whereas male baboons travel from one to another. Once in a while a new male baboon comes around, tries to become alpha male. If he’s defeated, he usually leaves to go pick another fight elsewhere. If he’s accepted as alpha male, often, but not always, the first thing he does is kill all the infants. Which makes perfect sense from the perspective of evolution: Get the competition out of the gene pool. But the new alpha males only do this some of the time. Whenever a new male joined the troop, or there was a change of leadership from within, the stress levels of the females (especially the mothers of infants) would go through the roof during the period of uncertainty when they didn’t know whether the new alpha was the kill-all-the-babies type or not. Their stress went down after he’d either killed all the babies or enough time had passed they felt assured he wasn’t going to.

  “Why do the new alpha males kill the babies only some of the time? Why not all the time?”

  “Ah! Now, that’s behavioral ethology! In order to take the next step, you’ve got to assume that animals are not soulless little robots enslaved to instinct, as Descartes believed, but creatures with some degree of consciousness.”

  Audrey knew three things about Descartes: “I think, therefore I am,” that he sort of invented the grid, and that there was a Latin poem inscribed in cursive on his skull. Audrey appreciated that Bill didn’t talk down to her. Still, though, she didn’t quite know what he was talking about.

  When she asked him about Descartes, he said, “Oh, well—backing up a bit. Descartes argued that animals have no souls. That they’re automata, driven only by instinct, whereas humans have souls—that is, consciousness—the ability to make decisions and act on them. I find that most people still think this way about animals, even the ones who don’t feel that way. We don’t like to think they think, or feel, or have whatever it is we call ‘consciousness.’ Philosophers talk about finding the ‘edge’ of consciousness. Is it language? Is it the ability to recognize yourself in a mirror? I say, who says there’s an edge? Whoever said there’s some line somewhere, where, on this side of it you put human beings, chimpanzees, gorillas, and, uh, why not throw in dolphins while we’re at it?—and you put all the other animals on the other side of the line? I’m sorry, but it makes no fucking sense!”

  He’d carried himself away. Audrey’s mother shot him a look when he cursed.

  “Sorry!” he said, covering his mouth, embarrassed.

  “Gonna have to wash her ears out, Professor.”

  “Mom, I’ve heard the word ‘fuck’ before. Am I five?”

  “Have you finished your homework?”

  Audrey didn’t answer, and the kitchen bell in the window dinged, calling her mother away. Bill made a worried face that Audrey found adorable.

  “Don’t worry, she’s not mad.”

  “Anyway”—he searched for his bearings—“where was I?”

  “Descartes? Animal souls? Baboons killing babies?”

  “Right! So, I’m anthropomorphizing here, I know, but bear with me. Say you’re the new alpha male of a baboon troop. If you start killing everyone’s babies right off the bat, that’s not going to engender a lot of trust and goodwill in you as a leader, is it? As Machi
avelli said, it is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both. Killing the babies will make them fear you, but it certainly won’t make them love you. For you, it’s a high-risk, high-confidence gamble. Because it might make them want to gang up and kill you, and then you’re out of the gene pool for good. So, a lot of the time, bullies get their way. But just as often, it pays off to be nice—or at least merciful.”

  The bar was filling up, and Audrey was getting a tingling that her mother would kick her upstairs at any moment. She saw that Bill, who was still talking excitedly about baboons and had had a couple of beers, could not sense this anxiety in her. Though maybe he would if he could only measure the glucose content in her feces. She did not want to leave his conversation. Having grown up in a small town, and poised at the cusp of finally getting to leave that small town, Audrey had a powerful hunger for conversation with people whom she had not known all her life, and for subjects of conversation that were not also those same people. It wasn’t that she had no ear for gossip, but only that she was heavy bored with the gossip available. It was far more interesting to hear this spectacularly unself-conscious man ramble on about his baboons.

  What had brought him to town, however, was “the Sasquatch”: for that was his preferred way of referring to the nonexistent animal that most people called Bigfoot and was known locally as the Black Rock Monster. He seemed to regard “the Sasquatch” as the most respectful and correct name for him, the way thoughtful people say “Native American” instead of “Indian.”

  At his first mention of the Sasquatch, Audrey felt her heart turning away from him, disappointed. It turned out this fascinating man from the Outside must also be: a loser.

  He was a real scientist, though, which confused her.

  “Oh, I would never publish anything about the Sasquatch, unless I had a slam dunk on my hands. I’d be laughed out of town. No major journal would ever publish my papers again.”

  “So it’s more of—?”

  “It’s kind of a hobby, I suppose. But it’s not so crazy. Do you know when the mountain gorilla was ‘discovered’?”

  He put the word “discovered” in finger quotations of contempt.

  “Because, ‘discovered by white people’ is what ‘discovered’ usually means. Any guesses? Not until 1902! That late! Before that, the animal’s existence was regarded as an unsubstantiated rumor, some spooky legend cooked up in the primitive brains of savage Africans, not to be trusted. Now think about that and consider all the Native American folklore about the Sasquatch.”

  There was a poignant pause. Audrey wondered what to say in response, before Bill saved her by starting up again. He was on a roll. He reached out and lightly touched her arm.

  “How much do you know about Gigantopithecus?”

  “I don’t know,” said Audrey. “I’ve never been asked that.”

  “Gigantopithecus was a hominid ape, thought to be extinct, that stood about ten feet tall, probably weighed around a thousand pounds, and may very well have walked upright. It’s hard to tell from the incomplete fossil evidence we have. Gigantopithecus is the largest ape known to have lived on earth. All the fossils have been found in Asia so far, and radiocarbon dating puts the last of them at around a hundred thousand years ago. Totally contemporaneous with modern humans. Now we think that modern humans crossed the Bering Land Bridge about twenty thousand years ago. So that’s a gap in time of about eighty thousand years between when we think Gigantopithecus went extinct and the time when we think humans crossed into North America. That is a blink of an eye in geologic time. Blink—of—an—eye.”

  “So—do you believe in Bigfoot?”

  “Do I believe it is entirely possible that a very small but viable breeding population of Gigantopithecus could have survived far longer than we thought, long enough for some of them to cross the land bridge into North America, along with modern humans and countless other species, during the Last Glacial Maximum? Yes. Do I believe it is entirely possible that some of them survive even to this day? Yes.”

  “But do you believe in Bigfoot?”

  “What, I ask you, is the difference between a monster and an animal? Is it possible that it’s only the difference between the unknown and the known? When you see those old maps of the ocean, with sea monsters coming out of the waves, and it says, ‘There be monsters here …’ Well, say you’re a sailor in the Middle Ages, and you happen to see a giant squid. This is an animal that can grow up to sixty feet long—eyes the size of dinner plates. Up to this day, it’s never been photographed alive. We only know they can get that big from the size of sucker marks around the mouths of beached sperm whales. So you happen to see this creature in a prescientific era—before Darwin, before Linnaeus—before we know ‘That’s not the Kraken, that’s Architeuthis dux’—before all that. What have you seen, if not a monster? Isaac Newton believed in alchemy. The same guy who wrote Principia Mathematica spent a lot of time trying to turn lead into gold. And why not? How many things have made the leap from magic to understood natural phenomena because of science—because somebody asked, ‘Why not?’ The spirit of science is not, This is crazy, this is unbelievable, this cannot be so! It’s—it’s asking—‘Well, why not?’ Let’s entertain the possibility, let’s do some exploring and some experiments, let’s try to figure it out. My point is, we know much, much less about the natural world than we think we do. Let’s not be arrogant.”

  “But do you believe in Bigfoot?”

  Bill sighed, a bit theatrically. He gave up, shrugged.

  “No. I wouldn’t say, categorically, that I believe in the Sasquatch. Personally, I’ve never seen anything I would call direct, convincing evidence. But I want them to be real. I don’t know. I’ve always been a romantic at heart.”

  The offices of the Howler were the back corner of an English classroom, where a row of beige Power Macintosh 6100s were obscured behind a low, gray wall of cubicle partitions. The low drop ceiling was made of those gray-white speckled panels rumored to contain asbestos, and the floor was thin, mottled carpeting the color of a rotten orange. During eighth period—Journalism, the last period of the day—the classroom turned into the newspaper office. The newspaper had to share the space with the yearbook staff (the sign on the door read “English 103/Publications”), which wasn’t much of an issue, as the yearbook was extracurricular—they only worked after school, and they only really worked in the spring semester. There was an overlap between the newspaper and the yearbook kids, and Audrey wasn’t a part of it: She regarded the yearbook as a once-annual organ of frivolous propaganda. The newspaper was for truth—a necessary check on the power structure, not its fangless cheerleader. This, she knew, is a difficult thing for a high-school newspaper to do. It is almost impossible, really, to teach a real journalism class that produces a high-school newspaper. Real journalism must be independent from the state, and a high-school newspaper owes its existence to the state: Because the state is paying for it, it has the power to censor or suppress the newspaper whenever it wants. And, as Lord Northcliffe said, “News is something someone wants suppressed. Everything else is just advertising.” This was one of Audrey’s many impatiences: the impatience to be through with high school so that she might write for more serious publications that would allow her to write more seriously.

  Mrs. Bond-Simmons had encouraged her to write a story about the recent Black Rock Monster sightings. Audrey would have never written such an article, but having met Bill the night before had given her an idea. She approached Mrs. Bond-Simmons and described Bill, the baboon expert who had a side interest in Bigfoot, and had come to Black Rock to investigate the recent uptick of sightings. Mrs. Bond-Simmons loved the idea.

  “Write it as a personal-interest feature!” she bubbled. She might as well have added, “Won’t that be adorable?”

  What Audrey had in mind was more of a meditative profile piece, admiring but not uncritical of its subject—sort of i
n the vein of Gay Talese’s “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold.” She envisioned an intimate piece about an eccentric man on a quixotic journey, which would fold in on itself to reflect on larger questions about the curse of devoted ambition, the line between inquisitiveness and folly, the interior battle of skepticism and animal faith.

  Sometimes, years later, in still moments while sitting at her work spaces in the offices of the various newspapers and magazines she would write for and edit, she would remember the production of the Howler as being charmingly primitive. It was a product of perpetual obsession, that biweekly eight-page tabloid newspaper with a print run of five hundred and a readership smaller than that. Audrey was the Howler’s midwife from the first editorial meeting through its design, production, printing, and distribution. She assigned the stories, wrote several of them herself while also editing everyone else’s articles, drove the finished galleys to the printer in the middle of the night and came back at the crack of dawn to pick them up, arrived at school with a carload of the bound bundles of newspapers, snapped the plastic bands with a box cutter, and handed them to the rest of the newspaper staff, who were gathered waiting for her by the main doors of the building early on Friday mornings before first period, and they in turn would distribute them around the school (which Audrey also helped with). The Howler was Audrey’s obsession. Other kids worried about their boyfriends and girlfriends, grades, sex, parties, bands, drugs, college applications, etc.—things Audrey found trite and tiresome. She had no interest in these things.

  The Thursday night before the paper went to press was always a sleepless one for Audrey. They would usually be working on it until midnight, one, two, sometimes three in the morning, ordering pizza, drinking black coffee under harsh fluorescent lights in English 103/Publications in an otherwise dark building long after the night janitor had gone home. They printed out their columns on perforated computer paper, carefully cut them out with scissors and pasted the pages together on the galleys, 11" x 17" tabloid sheets, drew the dividing lines in the picas by hand with fine-tip pen and ruler. Audrey developed a jeweler’s eye for detail, became a black belt with Wite-Out. When a page came to completion it was usually Audrey’s hands that, taking the delicate and precious object gingerly by the edges, laid it flat in the galley box, which, when all the galleys were finished, was closed like a sarcophagus lid and secured with rubber bands. Audrey would tuck it under her arm and in the company of whoever else had made it to the end of the night (but more frequently alone) make the thirty-minute drive out to Elk Park, where the printer would scan the galleys and print the newspaper. She relished her brief, transactional conversations with the guy who worked at the printer. They made her feel adult. Is it that strange and strikingly ugly men are drawn to night jobs, or is it the night jobs that make them that way? The guy at the printer was a young man who already looked old, with a bad limp and bad teeth, a soft pack of Lucky Strikes in his breast pocket, arms gray black with newspaper ink up to the elbows, and finger smudges all over his crooked face. Audrey had a little bit of a crush on him. She admired him because she guessed he was only a few years older than she was, and was working a physical job dealing with concrete matter, a job that made him a necessary node in the chain of connections that lead a fact from occurrence to reportage to information on the page to a reader’s eyes. He’d slide the lid off the galley box on the counter of the small, dim office, printing machines clacking, whirring, and creaking in the next room through the door he’d jammed open with a brick, flip through the pages quickly, and mark down their order on Black Rock High School’s tab in his ledger book. The conversation usually passed almost without words. Audrey would come back at dawn, sometimes after a quick nap at home or in her car in the parking lot if it was a warm night, but usually after a few hours spent drinking coffee at Denny’s. She would drive up to the back of the building, by the garage doors and the loading dock. He would be tooling around the vast concrete floor on a forklift. The room smelled of ink and machine oil. The enormous printing press shuffled and hummed, fresh copies of newspapers moving rapid-fire along the conveyor belt. She would pick up the bundles of the Howler, stacked into a cube next to a much larger stacked cube of the Daily Prospector, and load them into the back of her car. When she was done, she waved at him, and he waved back at her from the forklift. To Audrey, whose god was truth and journalism its religion, this building was a church, and this man its Quasimodo—lonely, deformed, ringing its bells in the middle of the night.