Whatever it is, it stands nearly three stories high, and the high-pitched angry drone of it drowns out every other sound. The longer I look at it, the more details come into focus, and it begins to look like some bastard monster, the likes of which I’ve never seen, and comprising all the monsters this furious planet, Capra II, has seen fit to throw at us. It rises up on the jets of the swamp muck, even though we are clearly in the bunker, and out of its undulating torso sprout robot manacles and the hairy-tufted arms of the bunker beasts. Where there should be a head there’s that stereoscopic stalk, and in the center of that pulses the cold, red eye of a robot.
Any minute now I expect to see Ricky come running past me only to get his damn fool head lasered off by that red eye and then the rest of him shoved into the open, swampy craw of that thing, but it doesn’t happen. There’s no one else around. There’s only it and only me.
I stand in front of it waiting for something to happen because I’m sure as hell not going to be the jackass who makes the first move against this thing, but all it does is pulse and undulate and sway, and after a while I get the sense that we’re two players playing at the same game. That it can wait as long as I can wait, and that nothing will happen for an eternity until one of us makes something happen. I also get the sense—or not even the sense, but the clear and certain knowledge—that on the other side of this is Becky and her fine ass and her commissary uniform and her sweet smile and a life of goodness without reproach. And while I can stand here as solid and still as stone and never risk inevitable death and dismemberment, I know, too, that in this eternity of stillness never will I find true love in the sympathetic heart of a beautiful woman, and when it comes down to it, that’s the only thing I want.
Here is the future I see for us. Here is how things are going to go from this moment forward:
Things are going to go south. Between me and whatever that thing is that is between me and Becky, things will definitely go south, but not so far south as to go hopeless. I’m a trained soldier in the New Worlds Army, after all, and resourceful, and strong, and if there’s one thing I know now, it’s this: The love of a good woman will change a man, and the faintly attainable nature of that love will make him capable of implausible, death-defying acts.
Then—big bad beastie dispatched of—I will find my lovely lady, will stumble blindly toward her desk in the commissary, will crash unceremoniously, yet bravely, into the doorway, will slump down but not quite all the way down to the floor, will softly call her name, will close my eyes, will wait for her tentative, gentle touch. When she holds me in her arms and lowers me to the floor, I will open my eyes and look deep into her own and smile a rakish smile. She will say something along the lines of “You came” or “I didn’t think you’d come.” I will open my mouth to say something along the lines of “I could never leave you behind” or “I’ll always come for you,” but before I can say anything, she’ll silence me with the soft pressure of her finger against my lips, and I will pull her down to me and push her finger aside for her lips, which will crush against my own. And in that moment, nothing else will matter in even the slightest way. Then I will pull myself to my feet, buoyed by that kiss and her true love and her sympathetic heart. I will stand and pull her close to me and I will hold her in my arms and we will gaze at the unforgiving landscape laid out before us and I will say, “Let them do their worst,” and we’ll laugh and pull each other closer, and together we will root out what is evil about this place, root it out and cast it aside, and unearth that small something of goodness that must exist in every new planet, and by the power of our love, this tiny rock will flourish.
But even I know what really lies in store for us. Even I know I won’t get that far. Won’t make it five steps before that thing grabs me by my nethers and tears me in two and stuffs me down its craw and seeks out every last one of us and sunders the planet itself, but what do I care? With Becky on the other side of it, what other choice do I have but to close my eyes, throw down my knife, and make my run for it?
Juan Refugio Rocha: A Meritorious Life
ROCHA, JUAN REFUGIO (b. 1957). Zookeeper, animal trainer. Place of birth: Antigua, Guatemala. Very little is known about the 1979 Fuego del Zoológico Público, only that the grounds caught fire in the early morning of October 18, 1979, that the fire consumed the entire grounds and all its structures by daybreak, and that, in the fire, only four animals perished—one howler monkey, one chimpanzee, and two gorillas, one male and one female. The man who freed the animals from their cages and herded them out of their habitats was Juan Refugio Rocha, a twenty-two-year-old Guatemalan who had been working at the zoo for six months, during which time he had been trying to teach the gorillas to speak.
As a child, Rocha had been adept at communicating with animals through clicks, whistles, taps, nudges, snaps, and squeezes. His father had owned donkeys, which Rocha had cared for and which the family had used to earn money for food and clothing, renting the beasts out as transportation and pack animals. Rocha had trained each animal, and in all his years as keeper of the donkeys, no one was thrown, no packs were lost.
In 1974, Rocha left his parents’ house and moved to Mexico City. From there, he moved to the state of Chihuahua, where he worked intermittently for carnival acts, training dogs and elephants and jungle cats. In the late spring of 1979, he got word of a public zoo in need of a keeper whose duties also involved light veterinarian work. By May, Rocha had taken the position, and in a few days found himself obsessed with the gorillas.
Rocha, having never seen a gorilla before, knew little of their behaviors and nothing about their habitats. Through study of their personalities and through close observation of their physical characteristics, Rocha determined that the zoo owned one male western lowland gorilla and one female western lowland gorilla. He spent his days at the zoo caring for the animals, and the nights he spent in his room or at the library, studying their behavior. He went to great lengths to acquire the bamboo shoots, thistles, wild celery, and tubers that they ate. He constructed a realistic environment similar to the western African lowlands in design and humidity and greenery, and he gave them grasses and branches with which to build nests.
Once the two gorillas were settled, he made his first steps toward establishing a line of communication. Witnesses reported that when Rocha entered the habitat screeching and hooting and clicking to get the animals’ attention, the gorillas began to squawk and let out a high piercing keen. The animals charged at him, running on their hind legs, “like people,” with surprising dexterity and swiftness. They worked as a team, flanking and herding Rocha into a corner, and once he was trapped between the two, they began to kick and punch him in the back and in the head. Three men, groundskeepers who had been standing by to watch the animal trainer, finally managed to pull him out of the habitat, by which time Rocha had suffered a minor concussion and two broken ribs.
Rocha did not give up. Over the next six months, he entered the gorilla habitat no fewer than ten times, and the animals continued to greet him with the same volatility and aggression. The gorillas took the food he offered them, lived in the habitat he created for them, and in that habitat they were peaceful. Once he entered their world, however, as if they had been trained for it, the gorillas circled him, trapped him, ignored him as he spoke, and then beat him. After five or ten minutes, Rocha needed to be pulled from the cage, with a broken arm, broken fingers, broken ribs, badly bruised skin, cuts, contusions, abrasions, or minor concussions.
When the fire started, Rocha was with the gorillas, standing outside their habitat talking to them, as he often did, from a safe distance. He hooted and chirped and howled at them for a full fifteen minutes before leaving to attend to the other animals in the park. By the time help had arrived and the other animals had been freed from their cages and environments, the fire raged out of control, burning until dawn, when the last embers snuffed out and all that was left—the zoo, the
howler monkey, the chimp, and the gorillas—was ash.
The Disappearance of the Sebali Tribe
I.
In the summer of 1974, two young anthropologists, Joseph Hammond and Marcus Alexander Grant, published, to very high praise, an article in the journal Dialectic Studies in Anthropology entitled “The Drameção Ritual: Silent Conflicts of the Sebali Prepubescent Male.” Through the success of this article, and based on proposals for continued research on the Sebali tribe, Hammond and Grant received research funding from the National Science Foundation and the Sloan Foundation, and the two young men were each offered positions teaching anthropology and sociology, Grant at Yale University, and Hammond at his alma mater, Harvard University. The article and their subsequent findings were then published as a book, The Sebali Continuum, which included color and black-and-white photographs of the tribe as well as detailed observations and analyses of the tribe’s history, its health and system of caring for the sick and the old, religious beliefs, mating rituals, community mores and taboos, agricultural practices, the birth and death rates of the tribe, the passage of the tribe’s collective memory (through oral history, storytelling, and pictographs), and the rituals for burying tribal leaders once they have died. The book became an immediate success. Grant was thirty-two years old and Hammond was thirty-four, and together they had been studying the Sebali tribe for five and a half years.
One year later, they both disappeared.
At the time, the two young men had been planning a last extended visit to the small South Pacific island where the members of the Sebali tribe lived. After their departure date came and went, it was assumed that the two—commonly absentminded—had left without saying good-bye. When, after some months had passed, no one had yet heard from them, friends and colleagues began to worry that something might have happened to them both. A year passed without word, and many speculated that the two had been killed, either en route to or while with the Sebali tribe.
Their disappearance caused a furor, and search committees were formed and papers were published, and a rift formed between those who, as delicately as they could, implied that Hammond and Grant got no less than they deserved and that there had been a long line of anthropologists who had meddled or “gone native” to bad and sometimes fatal effect, and those who argued that Hammond and Grant died honorably in the service of their science and for the betterment of our understanding of our place in this world and its history.
Such arguments and speculations continued for another three years until it was proven almost single-handedly by a twenty-four-year-old actor turned anthropologist, Denise Gibson, that Hammond and Grant were fakes, that the Sebali tribe did not exist and had never existed other than in the minds of its creators. This discovery left suspicions that linger in the anthropology community even today, and raised questions, for those close to Hammond and Grant, for their friends and colleagues, as to who Hammond and Grant really were and what they had hoped to gain.
II.
Denise Gibson has lived in Boston for the past five years. She is now a graduate student in the Boston University anthropology department, although when she first heard about Hammond and Grant, their work on the Sebali tribe, their book, and their disappearance, she was an undergraduate student. She is small and attractive, with a soft voice and blue eyes that often look, during the overcast months of a New England fall or winter, gray. She has short brown hair, and though I only saw her wearing them once, she sometimes wears glasses, and when I picture her, I picture her in those glasses. Born in Texas (when I asked her if she thought it odd that she and Grant hail from the same state, she smirked at me in a way I have found particular to Texans and said, “It is a big state, you know”), Denise had plans of becoming an actress, attending, for the first two years of college, the University of Texas at Austin, where she studied theater. After two years, however, she applied to be and was accepted as a transfer student at BU, where she began her career as a student of anthropology. When pressed, she will admit that there are universities and colleges in Texas that have decent anthropology programs, but that she left because she felt, after a lifetime spent in Texas, the place had become suddenly small, and that she needed a change.
Though a keen observer of people, a skill I am sure good actors should possess, she has a studious, shy, quiet quality about her, and an ability to focus her attention that seems better suited to scholarly work. The first time we met, I found her sitting at a table reading an issue of the Annual Review of Anthropology, so enrapt in her article that I had sat down with my coffee and cake, and cleared my throat, only to go unnoticed by her. Unwilling to interrupt someone quite so deeply involved in anything, I waited a few more moments until, as I watched as the hour we had arranged for the interview slipped effortlessly by, I scraped my chair against the floor, banged my coffee mug onto the table, and said, rather too loudly, “So you must be Denise.” At which point she looked up from her journal, smiled at me, and said, “I was beginning to worry you weren’t going to show.” Many people, when they find out Denise once aspired to be an actor, will ask her to perform impressions, which, she informed me early into our interview, are the domain not of actors but of stand-up comedians. “I will give you the benefit of the doubt,” she told me, “and assume you weren’t going to ask me to do my best Katharine Hepburn.”
If you were to ask her, as I did, how it felt knowing that she had helped uncover the Sebali tribe hoax, she might shake her head and smile, somewhat ruefully, and say, “I hardly did a thing about it, really.” She might then ask you where you’re from, if you’d had a nice trip, if you needed another cup of coffee, if you’d ever been to Boston before, if you’d made a visit to the Common yet, “which is really much nicer in the spring and early summer,” she might go on to say, “but we just had a good snow, and you should really go see the park before too many other people go tramping through it.” And then she might mention Frederick Law Olmsted, who, she will explain, is best known for his design of Central Park in Manhattan, but who also designed a series of parks joining the Boston Common to its outlying neighbors, which is called the Emerald Necklace, and then she might suggest that you visit Jamaica Pond, a component of the Emerald Necklace, located in Jamaica Plain, “which hardly anyone ever goes to anymore,” she will continue, “because the neighborhood’s been run down a bit, but it’s a nice park, really, and if you go at the right time, it’s quiet and empty, and you can sit on a bench and look out over the pond that is there and sometimes see a goose or a swan or a cormorant, even. But if you go there, then you’ve got to visit El Oriental for lunch, and since the thought of anyone else going to El Oriental only makes me want to go there, too, then I just might have to join you,” which is how I eventually found myself sitting with her, one recent afternoon, in a small Cuban restaurant (El Oriental de Cuba) in Jamaica Plain, a Puerto Rican, Dominican, and Cuban neighborhood located on the south side of Boston. While she finished with great relish her lunch and I sipped on a small, Styrofoam cup of café con leche, I tried my best to figure out how this small, unassuming young woman from Abilene, Texas, uncovered the truth behind one of the largest anthropological scams of the past fifty years.
III.
Joseph Hammond was born in 1942, the third of eight children. He was born Joseph Farrow. The name Hammond was his mother’s maiden name. The family lived in Salina, Kansas, where Joseph’s father worked as a salesman, trading in brushes, shaving kits, aftershave lotions, makeup, hair dyes, and other such items. His mother worked as an occasional housekeeper, but spent the majority of her time at home, raising her children. Most of his family members—those few I could track down—refused to return my phone calls. And when they did agree to speak to me, they would not comment further than to reaffirm certain biographical information already publicly known and now assumed mostly false.
The only information I was able to confirm was that Joseph left home at the age of fifteen and that he was
not heard from again for almost three years. Little is known about what actually happened during those years. According to Hammond’s own account, he spent them traveling by railroad from Dallas through the Southwestern states until he reached California, where he spent one year at the Anthropology Library on the UC Berkeley campus. There he read such works as Liden’s The Living Earth and Kelley’s Studies in Javanese Paganisms. After a year, he left California, again by railway, and traveled to Alaska, where he worked for two years on a fishing boat, netting Alaskan king salmon. Within days of his arrival in Alaska, Hammond met an Inuit couple with whom he quickly became friends. Most of his time was spent on the fishing boats, and any time off the boats Hammond then spent with the Inuit at their home, among their neighbors, observing their daily lives and learning their customs. In a short, unpublished essay—what some believe to have been the beginnings of a memoir—Hammond recounts the times that he went “in the icy, choppy waters, using only handmade canoes . . . fishing with Prepayit for seal and walrus, with sharp and hardened spears, tipped, sometimes, with our own blood for good luck.”
It was during this time, again according to his own accounts of his life, that Hammond decided to pursue full-time studies in the fields of anthropology and sociology. It was also during this time, according to an interview with LIFE magazine, that Hammond decided to apply to Harvard University:
And you were accepted?
Yes. They accepted me, but I didn’t know about it for almost three months. I had left for another fishing trip, my last one, and the acceptance letter arrived on the day after I left. It was quite a shock coming home to that letter.
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