Theory of Bastards

by Audrey Schulman

  Partway down the hall was a machine. It was colored brightly and looked a bit like the type of strength test found at a country fair, except displayed as its metric were various primate silhouettes from a bush baby all the way up to a mountain gorilla. Instead of a target to be hit with a mallet, there was a handgrip to squeeze.

  Explain, she said.

  He looked at her and then the machine. He said, It’s a way of comparing your strength to other primates. No need to try it.

  The handgrip was similar to the hand-strengthening equipment that ex-jocks squeezed while talking on the phone.

  She had a hard time bypassing any challenge. Also her feet felt a little far away. The idea of grabbing onto something solid was attractive. Stopping, she wrapped her fingers round its molded grip, inhaled and compressed the spring as hard as she could. Determination was a quality she did not lack. She watched the needle swing upwards from Bush Baby to Tarsier and past Tamarin.

  It stopped at Ring-tailed Lemur—avg. weight, 5 lbs.

  They both looked at the result, neither saying anything. She let her hand fall to her side.

  She asked, How much do the bonobos weigh?

  The females, he said, About 70 pounds.

  She turned to him and at her expression, he stepped forward, took hold of the handgrip and squeezed. She could see the effort rising into his shoulder. Being in the military left its impact on a person’s posture and attitude. Stotts would stand out in a crowd, like a fox in a group of Pekingese. Alert, coiled and capable. There was the sense he wouldn’t slouch on the sofa watching a movie, unaware of what was happening behind him. He could not do less than his best.

  The needle stopped at Macaque—avg. weight, 25 lbs.

  Rather than look upset, his eyes were pleased. He said proud, Once I made it all the way to mandrill.

  She glanced at his left hand, saw the wedding ring.

  You have kids, she asked.

  He turned to her, The sweetest four-year-old on the planet. Why?

  She said, Seemed like you should.

  Given her well-known research, comments about reproduction could be taken many ways.

  He filed this statement away for consideration and gestured to the machine.

  Humans, he said, Have a fair amount of muscle fiber, but we’re like . . . He paused, thinking, We’re like a bank account where you can’t take all the cash out in one day. The other primates can. Or at least that’s the current theory, why you hear of chimps being able to rip a human’s arm off. What they’re doing is withdrawing all their money. Occasionally you hear of a human exhibiting sudden strength—a mom lifting a car off her kid—but it’s rare.

  He said, For other apes, it’s automatic. They can do it any day of the week. Just afterwards they’re very tired.

  The word, tired, echoed in her ears and she touched her fingers to her sternum, feeling her breath.

  He watched her. When he spoke again, his voice was quieter. Perhaps he thought she felt fear.

  He said, Bonobos are different from chimps. They don’t go to war with rival groups; they’ve never been recorded to kill. Even when they struggle for dominance inside their own group, there’s almost no violence, just a lot of yelling and slapping things around. Worst I’ve ever seen was a male getting bit. Three drops of blood and they were all so surprised. Every one of them came over to inspect the cut several times.

  Stotts the ex-soldier said with respect, They are the most gentle creatures.

  The locked door was now perhaps 15 feet away. She swung her foot forward, aiming for it.

  When she spoke, her voice echoed in her head as though from another room, Why were you pleased with the results?

  The results?

  She said, The strength test.

  Ahh, he said.

  He looked at the door ahead and answered, Ma’am, I like challenges. I am twice the size of the bonobos and I’m strong for a human. Yet even the smallest female could beat me up. I respect these apes. They keep me awake.

  He continued, Every day I try that machine and I never get close to their strength.

  Even as slowly as he walked, he was now half a pace ahead, while he considered how to make this point clear, momentarily inattentive of her progress or pallor.

  He said, We keep them caged here, but they aren’t like lab rats where we can force them to do what we want. They are smart and very strong. You have to ask, to persuade. In the enclosure and research room, the rules aren’t made by humans or bonobos. Instead they’re somewhere in between, some compromise we all constantly negotiate.

  At the word negotiate, the static rose, engulfing her hearing. Her vision tunneled. She had practice at this, had already let her knees go, was falling with some control. She sat down hard on the floor.

  Her gut and the incision jarred.

  A harsh light, sound whistling, space empty. This type of pain, she didn’t mind that much. It didn’t last. She leaned into the light and waited it out.

  From some faraway universe he called, Dr. Burk, you’re fainting. Put your head down.

  She thought, No duh.

  She felt him place one hand on the back of her head, folding her over, his other arm wrapped around her. Shivering, she could feel his warmth through her shirt.

  Three

  Frankie had been born in Hamilton, Ontario, and baptized Francine Burk. Francine was the name she went by until after college.

  Her parents—Canadians—didn’t discuss politics, sex or bowel movements. Their voices were carefully modulated, every consonant clear as a bell. They took a brisk walk once a day and ate a well-cooked vegetable with dinner. As Protestants, they considered a visit to the doctor somewhat suspect, a lack of fortitude. Their only medicine was an occasional aspirin taken with a glass of water, preferably out of sight of anyone except an observant child. When asked, they always replied they were doing well, thank you. In Hamilton, they blended in seamlessly with their neighbors, perhaps that was the point.

  When she was seven, however, her father took a job with an American company and they moved to Manhattan. The cultural change was surprisingly large. The word please was not half as common. Strangers voiced their opinions with gusto. She remembered a dinner party early on where her father was seated beside aged Mr. Schwartz who (when asked how he was) began describing his prolapsed hernia. Both of her parents strove to keep whatever feelings they felt within the range of what they considered allowable. Within this narrow range, her father’s expression was as shocked as if Mr. Schwartz had fondled himself at the table.

  She was enrolled in second grade at P.S. 116 in Midtown. First thing that first day, the whole class got to its feet, placed hands on hearts and recited the Pledge of Allegiance in one voice. She wasn’t quite sure how she should act and so stood by her desk, her head lowered as though she were in church. Basically she was baffled. No one in Ontario ever pledged allegiance to anything and they were asked to sing O Canada so infrequently that, after the first stanza, most had to resort to indistinct humming.

  She waited until recess to approach her new teacher, Miss Sanchez. In her crisp Ontario voice, Francine explained she was a citizen of another country and inquired what was the proper way to act while the rest of the class repeated the Pledge.

  Put your hand on your heart and say the Pledge, said the teacher while putting her papers away.

  Francine repeated for clarity, But I’m Canadian.

  As fast as that Sanchez’s eyes flashed. She leaned in and stated in a no-nonsense adult voice that so long as Francine was lucky enough to be in this great country, she would recite the Pledge each morning and be grateful for the opportunity.

  Later Francine learned Sanchez’s youngest brother had recently lost a leg in Iraq. Although easily a third of the students in the class were not citizens, every one of them was forced to pledge allegiance daily.


  That afternoon it was Gerard from Haiti who taught Francine the preferred coping strategy.

  From then on, she recited each morning along with the class, her hand over her heart, I led the pigeons to the flag . . .

  This was her first lesson in the utility of lying.

  *

  After Frankie recovered from half-fainting, she had Stotts wheel her to the tourists’ area in front of the bonobo enclosure and leave her there. It had the best view of the animals and she could rest.

  She sat there, watching with attention. In order to see around the hips and elbows of the people, she rolled forward until her knees were pressed against the glass. In the first few minutes, a six-year-old girl tried to wiggle between Frankie’s knees and the glass to get a better view of the bonobos. Frankie kneed her in the back just hard enough for the girl to regard her solemnly and then retreat.

  A lot of the children ignored the bonobos in order to play with the sign-language kiosk. Whoever designed it had intended one person to press one button at a time, carefully building each sentence. Me human. Look stick. Stick on ground. Perhaps the designer had even imagined the bonobos responding by picking the stick up or signing back. A moment of interspecies communication.

  Instead however the children clustered around the kiosk, slapping at the buttons, thrilled by the obedient toy, making the bonobo avatar on the plexiglass say sentences like, Stick stick stick stick stick stick human human human. Stick stick stick stick stick ground.

  The voice was loud, even outside the enclosure. The bonobos ignored the avatar, aside from staying away from the immediate area near the speakers.

  Frankie figured she could start working. She said, Ok Bindi, show desktop.

  On her contact Lenses, appeared her desktop icons, arrayed around the periphery of her visual field—allowing her to still see the physical world in front of her. Applications on the left, files on the right, the trash can in the corner. Moving her right hand up so her Bindi could track it, she centered her index finger over the file for the 14 bonobos and double-tapped. The file opened up, centered in her vision. Her Bindi at this point monitored the area around her for any objects headed for her, clicking her desktop off in case of danger—too many cases those first few years of people stepping out in front of a moving car while on a Sim-call.

  She flicked her finger through the pages. She wasn’t self-conscious, because half the adults around her were tapping and flicking and talking to their Bindis.

  The photo for each bonobo had a passing resemblance to a mug shot: a close-up of the face with the name and description below, hairy perpetrators in jail. If she clicked on a photo and tugged on its corners, the photo expanded, so large and high-res she could see every skin pore. Unaided, she’d never be able to keep a face this close and in focus at the same time. The colors also popped: the brown of the eyes, the grey of the face, the pink of the lips.

  The problem Frankie found was, after a day of work on her Lenses, reality appeared a little disappointing. In comparison to their photos, the bonobos themselves seemed less real. And her Lenses weren’t even the newest version. Technology had now reached the limits of human vision. Soon, she’d been told, the Lenses would bypass the eyes to connect straight to the visual cortex.

  One by one, she stared at each photo, then pinched her fingers together, shrinking the photo down and flicking it up to the top of her Lenses, out of the way, so she could search for the bonobo who matched the photo.

  Mama was easy to recognize because she was bald. Frankie assumed the juvenile who Mama held was Tooch, a two-year-old male, since he was listed as her youngest offspring. Tooch kept trying to sneak closer to the plexiglass, fascinated by the tourists. Mama stopped him each time, pursing her lips and making a noise in her throat that made him halt mid-stride. The fifth time he tried to sneak away, she simply picked him up by one foot and dangled him out in the air like a fish. Tooch squealed and wiggled and tried to climb his own leg, but soon gave up, hanging there limp, waiting for her to put him down. She lowered him into her lap where he sat, staring at the tourists with a wistful expression. Mama was not a mother to trifle with.

  Of all the bonobos, the only one younger than Tooch was Id, a one-year-old female. She was easy to spot since she was tiny: all pencil-thin limbs, wispy fur and large eyes. She was bouncing maniacally on the trampoline of her mother’s belly. From the document, Frankie learned the mother’s name was Houdina. Her knees jumped involuntarily each time the baby Id landed. In comparison to Mama, Houdina was younger and hairier and didn’t seem to be half as tough. She grunted with each bounce and held up her hands, protecting her tender areas.

  Frankie tried to identify the other bonobos from their photos but couldn’t. They all looked like hairy apes to her at this point. The only feature she could easily distinguish was gender since the nether regions were large and hairless and disturbingly on display. For most of the adult females, the area between the vagina and anus was hairless and swollen into something between a softball and a cantaloupe, advertising their potential fertility to all nearby males. The skin over this balloon appeared so tight and thin that, each time the females sat down, Frankie flinched.

  After a while she gave up trying to tell which individual was which. She let herself watch them as a group, absorbing their actions, getting the feel for them, their bright eyes, their knuckled walk, the way they bathed in the pond, lying back in the water and letting their arms float, squirting water out of their mouths. Their voices reminded her of the finches she used to work with, high-pitched cheeps or squeaks.

  They spent an enormous amount of time combing their fingers through each other’s hair, bored hairstylists on a slow day, the face of the groomed bonobo slack with pleasure. Even though Mama had little hair, she was groomed the most. The others would approach her to clap their hands in front of her, requesting the honor. If she accepted, she would offer them part of her body. After finishing, the groomer would sometimes crouch low with pouting lips. If Mama felt generous, she would tilt her chin up and close her eyes so the groomer could give her a wet kiss on the chin. The scene reminded Frankie of a royal court, an inbred hive of shifting alliances, the lesser nobility approaching the Queen with gifts.

  Every once in awhile the juveniles played what looked like tag, barreling after each other on all fours, a breathless charge, a blistering speed that didn’t change at all even when the chase switched from running across the ground to bolting 30 feet straight up the side of the metal climbing structure. The athleticism was impressive since they weren’t tiny like squirrel monkeys, but had real heft—the slaps of their palms on the metal audible even through the plexiglass.

  Anytime more than one of the bonobos disappeared behind the concrete hill on the far side of the enclosure, Frankie would say, Ok Bindi, and with a few brisk gestures enlarge and center on her Lenses the video feed from the Foundation cameras on the other side of the hill. Considering the standards for video these days, the feed was remarkably grainy, intended only for the researchers working on the Foundation. However at least this way she could watch the hidden bonobos to make sure she didn’t miss a mating or other interesting behavior.

  After she’d spent a few hours watching the bonobos, someone jostled Frankie’s wheelchair and she turned in irritation to the tourists behind her. For a moment she paused, surprised by her own species. It was like turning from a broadcast about Olympic gymnasts to look at the viewers sprawled on the couch.

  Of course current events were partly to blame. The drought in California and across the southern U.S. still hadn’t broken, and the escalating violence in the Middle East had doubled prices for petroleum. Prices for everything had skyrocketed. These days, a lot of Americans were relying on Fritos and soda, while working overtime at whatever jobs they could find.

  The bonobos, on the other hand, ate almost entirely fresh fruit flown in from the tropics. The cost of the fruit, along with ve
t bills, was the primary reason Frankie was here. With her recent award and publicity, the Foundation could attract more grants. Her award exchanged for mangos and medicine. These days everyone did whatever was needed in order to cope.

  *

  An hour before closing time, the bonobos became restless, crowding into the area in front of the balcony, competing for the best spot, staring upward, waiting.

  Irritated with all the pushing, Mama grabbed one of the milk crates and slammed it on the ground—whack. She dragged it behind her as she galloped around, the rattle of it along the ground impressive, Tooch on her shoulder faced into the wind like a jockey. The bonobos quieted and cleared a wide space for her. She knuckled forward into the space, assuming her position in the front.

  Then the keeper stepped out onto the balcony with the food, the same woman who’d fed them before, wearing Foundation coveralls.

  The male bonobos stood up, knees apart to display their sudden erections, skinny and pink and pointing straight up. The bonobos began mounting each other, businesslike as salesmen shaking hands.

  Id, standing on her mother’s back, jounced around by all the action, occasionally reached down with curiosity to finger one pink area or another.

  And the tourists fled—the stroller wheels wobbling with the speed, the parents singing out promises to their children about the Snack Shack and popsicles. A few older children remained for a moment, staring, before running after the adults, calling out questions.

  Frankie leaned forward, intent. In a few days, once she had learned all the names of the bonobos, she would start keeping notes about each mating, checking that the choice of sexual partner was truly random. If it was, she would design a study investigating how the species continued to breed healthy offspring. One of the most basic tenets of evolution was that there must be strong mating criteria—that a bonobo would step past whoever was closest to copulate with another who was healthier or smarter or stronger. However, from what she’d seen so far, these bonobos weren’t even particular about gender.