Menaced Assassin

by Joe Gores

  At first I think, My beloved! But then I remember that she has no way of knowing where I am or what I am doing.

  “You have come to the wrong room,” I exclaim, very puritanical, shaking the sleeping woman awake. “You must leave.”

  She mumbles something and rolls aside so I can jump out of bed. I find the light switch, but the fixture in the high ceiling has a very dim pink bulb, so it furnishes ambiance but little illumination. The woman is tall and comely, her body beautifully shaped under a filmy blue negligee. Because of the dim light, however, I cannot see her face as she comes toward me.

  She slides the negligee down off her shoulders to bare for my ecstasy her beautiful breasts, nipples erect with sexual anticipation, and I realize she is my beloved! I put my arms around her hips and crouch to bury my face between those breasts, my own sex already thrusting out stiffly in its excitement.

  “One need only be faithful unto death,” she murmurs in an astounded, suddenly fading voice.

  And I am crouching in the middle of that strange barren pinkly lit hotel room with a ridiculous hard-on, clutching only an empty blue negligee, the texture of my beloved’s departed flesh still burning my lips. I hear mocking male laughter dissipating into thin air above my head.

  Lips burning. Face wet. I think with tears, but when I bring down my hand it is stained with something dark. I stagger into the bathroom, look in the mirror. My face is smeared with blood like the face of a vampire.

  End of dream. I awake in my Berkeley motel room, heart pounding, fearing I have missed the next murder, fearing I have slain my beloved. I sit on the edge of my bed, face buried in my hands. I bring my hands down. They are red with blood. I run into the bathroom, look in the mirror. My face is smeared with blood like the face of a vampire.

  The bed is bloodstained, too, but… empty. Void take me, my beloved is not dead by my hand after all! I merely have had my first nosebleed since I was a child.

  I have checked out and am driving toward Will Dalton’s assassination, feeling confused, when I recall that departing male laughter above my head. God’s laughter-God, in Whose existence, you will not be surprised to hear, I have very little faith. Suddenly I am enraged at this God I do not believe in.

  “Why do You do things like this to people?” I demand, but reasonably at first. “They pray, they try to live good lives, they give love to other people… and then You destroy them.”

  No answer. He never answers, as those of you who engage in the futile exercise of prayer well know. You must take it on faith that some cosmic ear is up there listening. Louder now.

  “What do You get out of it? You claim to be all-powerful. Why do You need the humiliation and destruction of human beings? Of all living things?”

  No answer. I wait. Louder again. I am pounding my fist on the steering wheel by this time. My face, caught in the rearview mirror, is contorted with rage.

  “WHY? DOES IT MAKE YOU FEEL GOOD? DO YOU ENJOY THE SCREAMS OF HUMAN PAIN? DOES IT MAKE YOU FEEL ALL WARM AND TOASTY INSIDE? DOES IT MAKE YOU FEEL LIKE A BIG MAN?”

  No answer. I am at a stoplight. The woman in the next car is looking over at me. She cannot hear me through our closed windows, so perhaps she thinks I am singing along with some operatic aria-with Rome’s sinister chief of police, Scarpia, let’s say, plotting Cavaradossi’s murder in the church of Sant’ Andrea before cynically falling on his knees to pray.

  I shriek, “ANSWER ME, GODDAM YOU! OR DON’T YOU HAVE THE GUTS?” No answer. The light changes. Traffic moves. I scream: “ALL RIGHT THEN, FUCK YOU! I’LL KILL YOU TOO, YOU FUCKER, SO YOU CAN ROT IN YOUR OWN HELL!”

  No answer. Because there is no answer He can make.

  And God has the balls to claim He created us in His image!

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  “‘So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.’”

  Will paused and looked around the room full of scientists, most of whom had little sympathy with the Genesis story of the beginnings of life. But the room was still, almost tense.

  “So there we have it, folks. The creation of man. And woman. And dominion over the earth. But when did we become us? How far back were Adam and Eve? We left our hominid ancestor, Lucy, with our cousins the chimps at the edge of the savannah, venturing out of the forest into the open. Why? Well, remember the dinosaurs rushing to fill the niches left empty when the proto-reptiles went extinct? Remember the mammals rushing in to fill the dinosaurs’ niches after the Great Dying?

  “For the chimps and their siblings, the hominids, failing rainfalls and shrinking forests meant new challenges to be met, new ways of life to test out there in the grasslands, had one the courage or sense of adventure to go. Including the meat-eating way of life. Can we seriously contend that we, unlike the chimps, shrank from the challenge of hunting other animals?

  “Yet that is what most scientific thought holds today. This is partially in reaction to the hunting hypothesis that held sway from the mid-sixties to the mid-eighties, until ‘Hurricane Lew’ Binford pointed out that a three-and-a-half-foot creature weighing ninety pounds, with no claws, no fangs, no weapons and a negligible brain, could not have been much of a hunter.

  “But could it have had the beginnings of an imagination?

  “Lucy, or at least her descendant Homo habilis, lived some sort of scavenging/gathering way of life. The astonishing fieldwork of such ecological archeologists as Rob Blumenschine and his student, John Cavallo, certainly suggests it. But the belief in scavenging, and only scavenging, is now in danger of becoming as doctrinaire as the hunting hypothesis was in its day.

  “ No hunting for A. afarensis or even H. habilis? Can we really believe that Lucy’s kind, and more especially habilis, already a meat-eater, would not have snatched up any small or weakened animals they chanced upon, would not have figured out some way to kill and eat this helpless prey? Do we truly believe there was no envy and admiration, to go along with their fear, of the mighty predators whose kills they scavenged? No attempt, in their own negligible way, to copy them? To ape them, in a word?

  “The human psyche is the result of evolution; we come by our genocides honestly. Our propensity to kill-especially to kill our own species-is one of our evolutionary heritages. But not… not from our hominid ancestors. It predates Lucy. It comes from our primate heritage.

  “We’ll probably never know for sure what Lucy and her kin thought or felt or imagined. But the chimp, sharing 99 percent of his DNA with us, who came out of the trees with us and has rituals of dominance and submission like other mammals that keep him short of violence against his own kind, contemplates killing. So we must consider the possibility that he is not far from contemplating murder. Because his codes-taboos-seem to crack under the pressures of hunt ing and those territorial games we call, in chimps and in ourselves, war.

  “Yes, war. The chimp does what no other animal besides man does: he wages war-for three years in one known instance, for ten years in another-with adjacent bands of chimps. My troop at Kibale doesn’t, but they have no contact with other chimps. The war ends only when the adversary males are dead, the females seized, and the enemies’ territory annexed by the victors.

  “My observations suggest the chimp also contemplates death-or at least wonders about it. He returns to an animal he has killed, pokes it, prods it, studies it, thinks about it. I believe he does this because he has a vivid imagination, and the power to create symbols. Can we believe less of Lucy’s people?

  “Poor discredited Ardrey actually had the right idea-man is a creature innately dedicated to violence. Ardrey just had the wrong mechanism. He thought little fruit-eating Lucy and her kind were killer apes. No. They had the genetic capacity to be so, but not yet the conditions, p
ersonal or environmental, to trigger it.

  “I believe habilis, the first true human, was a hunter, not just a scavenger. The groundbreaking studies of Kathy Schick and Nicholas Toth show that many of the flake tools that habilis created were used not only to break open bones for their high-protein life-giving marrow (a scavenger’s technique), but to remove the meat from the bones of quite large animals (Schick and Toth butchered a dead elephant using only habilis flake tools!). Scavengers have only hunters’ scraps to process; hunters have carcasses with enough meat on them to require butchering.

  “Whatever his way of life, meat and marrow fed his big brain so it could grow bigger yet, more complex. Habilis probably was developing a rudimentary language (perhaps not sentences but sounds that indicated concrete things-tree, fruit, wildebeest, perhaps even you and me). Eventually he evolved into Homo erectus. Erectus almost surely could speak, surely had fire.

  “Part of our nature is to hunt other animals to live. We are, after all, omnivores-we will eat almost anything. By the time of that true Homo sapiens, Cro-Magnon man, some forty thousand years ago and virtually indistinguishable from us, we had become the most deadly hunter the world had ever seen. Crossing the land bridge into the Americas, we decimated vast herds of big-game animals, driving most of them to extinction.

  “But now let us go beyond hunting and killing to the next logical step, in imagination, at least. We know Lucy evolved into Homo habilis probably through the hominid Australopithecus africanus. But other australopithecines, called variously robustus, boisei, aethiopius, or paranthropus — seed and grass eaters with huge jaws and enormous grinding molars (but no canines)-were contemporaries of habilis. They disappeared from the fossil record just when habilis was becoming erectus.

  “What happened to them? What happened to Neanderthal? What happened to all of the other ‘archaic’ humans who were around when the Homo sapiens explosion occurred?

  “We are told that these various early human species were ‘absorbed’ by modern man. Mated with us, we fed into the gene pool. But there is no shred of DNA or other scientific evidence to show this is so. Indeed, the latest studies, based on links between language patterns and genetic traits in European populations, posits a single, probably African, origin for all modern humans. These scientists are confident that Neanderthal had nothing significant to do with modern human evolution.

  “Of course there is no evidence to show earlier homos were annihilated by our line, either. Species can decline below a ‘survival line’ and go extinct all by themselves. But modern man has a great genetic capability for violence against his own kind, up to and including genocide on a massive scale. The chimps show we’ve had this capability since we were apes. Can we really just dismiss as nonsense the possibility that we got here, alone, because we killed off our relatives along the way?

  “Crime statisticians can draw a picture of the average jump-out-of-the-bushes rapist with remarkable accuracy. The profile cuts across race, nationality, country of residence. Our rapist is predictably mid-twenties, not married, already involved in other criminal or antisocial activities, and a socioeconomic wreck. He usually stops raping by the age of forty.

  “Remember the young rapist orang? Unmated. Equivalent in age to mid-twenties in humans. No economic base. And he stops raping and starts mating when he reaches full maturity.

  “The murder statistics are comparable. The perpetrators are in the same age group as rapists, already criminal, from a lousy socioeconomic background. Murderers and rapists have several other things in common. Most are criminally inclined before and after committing their rapes or murders. They have a record of criminal offenses. They want something they aren’t getting. They operate outside the controls of their societies.

  “Males kill their own kind forty to one over females. Among apes, among men. If a human female kills, it is usually her spouse.

  “Ape males kill the infants of females just joining their troop; the female, deprived of her infant, immediately comes into heat again and is impregnated by the males who thus ‘know’ the offspring is theirs. Human stepfathers kill infants seventy to one over blood fathers (in the U.S. it is one hundred to one). The killings usually occur when a male-ape or man-is recruiting a new female.

  “If a female kills her own infant-ape or human-she is usually young, unmated, and her resources are limited. A female with an infant-human or ape-has less of a chance to mate and reproduce than the same female without an infant.

  “Finally, war. Since we left the hunting way of life to hold land and till the earth, which led to permanent shelters and then towns and finally cities, war has been our central preoccupation. Once there was something to be taken away from someone else, we began doing it on a massive scale.

  “War is ordered by alpha males, in chimps, in men, and is always fought for the same things: resources. Chimps, led by their alpha males, set out to annihilate another chimp community-wage war upon it-because they think they can win territory, wealth, and females for reproductive purposes. Nobody starts a war he doesn’t think he can win.

  “Rape. Murder. War. They are in our blood, in our genes, from long before we started to become man. Until we accept this, we cannot hope to make progress against violence.

  “The chimp’s ability to wage war against his own kind grows out of his imagination-he can imagine doing it, so he does it. But imagination is positive as well as negative. Sometimes, as the evening light faded in the Kibale Forest, my troop of chimps, each one in its own nest in its own tree for the night, would begin to hoot softly into the gathering darkness, and would begin drumming, with its hands. Chanting, and thoughtfully drumming.

  “Prayer? Not likely. But some aesthetic is at work here, probably to announce one’s self and also one’s solidarity with those around one. Comfort, perhaps. African tribesmen drum to the darkness; soldiers play ‘Taps’ to the sunset; we used to chant Evensong, Vespers, and Angelus. Why all these? Comfort.

  “At the outbreak of huge thunderstorms, I have seen my male chimps charge up and down forested hillsides, hooting wildly, grabbing up fallen branches and striking the trees with them just as the wind and rain are doing. Huddled in the trees above are the females and children, watching the display. It is defiance of the storm. It is theater. It is also a rain dance.

  “I have seen my troop start walking around a lightning-shattered stump in the center of a moonlit glade. First walking, then marching, then trotting around and around the stump, in rhythm, stamping hard with one foot, lightly with the other-in unison. Dancing.

  “Could their dancing grounds be the first faint stirrings of reverence for the sacred? Must not Lucy and her kin have danced beneath the full moon in the same way? With no thought of deity yet, of course, but perhaps with an… unease at some faint glimmering of something beyond the leaf, the rock, the fig, beyond the pain and the pleasure of the now.

  “Out on the edge of the unknown. How frightful and how exhilarating, all at once! It is for us. How much more so for a chimp, a Lucy, a habilis, without a brain big enough or complex enough to spin a tale about it and so master it.

  “We certainly know that Lucy’s descendants danced; around the campfire, once we had fire; around the hearth, around the threshing floor. Learned how to drum, how to sing, how to re-create the day’s events. Then came the solo dance-the alpha male leaping into the center of the circle, his performance incarnating (literally, making flesh) the spirit of the prey.

  “To Dudley Young, the dance became a dialectic of energies, love and hatred, expansion and contraction of the spirit. Until once, sometime, that alpha male in his pride in the center of the dance slipped, fell — and was fallen upon by the other dancers in their frenzy. And torn apart. And devoured, because he had become the prey whose spirit he previously had only represented.

  “And man had holy communion. Frenzy, with remorse only later, when the frenzy had passed. All of it haunting echoes of the chimp hunting-and ritualistically devouring his prey.

>   “Since I am expert only in our primate brothers, and in our earliest hominid selves, I can only speak of who we were and of what we did in those earliest formative years. But I do know this about Homo sapiens sapiens: somewhere we have gone astray. We have written dead end across myth’s guidelines, forgotten their psychological truths. We have killed all the old gods of the spirit, embraced the gods of the material. But science now says the material is not real, it is merely a fistful of energy.

  “I think Teilhard de Chardin was right, our evolution now is as social and psychological beings. This evolution is going on at a bewildering rate, each new complexity spawning a geometric progression of complexities. Perhaps this is how we can return to ourselves, find out who we were. Know that, and we can know who we are. Know that, we will know why we act as we do.

  “Why we, with our big brains, cannot control our violence, is the wrong question. We should try to understand how we, with our big brain exaggerating all our natural genetic tendencies, are able to control our violence as well as we do.”

  Will Dalton paused, a strange look on his face. To Dante it seemed a look of surprise, as if what he was going to say next was not what he had intended to say. It could even have been regret; or even fear.

  “Anarchy stalks but does not rule our world. It is only the beginnings of a start, but I can only believe that as a species we are just at the threshold, not about to be swept out the back door of extinction by our own hand. I believe that by looking backward as well as forward, we can control our genetic heritage. I believe we are in a race with our own destructive nature, learning, evolving ways to cope with our own violence, and I believe that we will win that race. I believe that we, as a species, are that smart.

  “Thank you for your attention here tonight. I will take questions…”

  As an enraged female voice in the first row began, “How can you possibly suggest that…” Dante tuned out. Nothing had happened. Dante had miscalculated.