Rotterdam zoo was the first in the world to introduce interactive video displays, simulating an environment the majority of the animals had no experience of. Soon enough, video was upgraded to 3D holographs that responded to the animals’ behaviour and to testosterone, oestrogen and adrenaline levels. The programmers boasted authentic background representations that changed in real time – weather systems, collapsing trees – and dextrous foreground simulations where other species appeared unpredictably. Trials involving virtual reality headsets were a great success, inducing false memories of emotional and physical satisfaction – bond-making, courtship, genuine exertion – with the effect that the animals showed lower levels of depression and anxiety.
Zookeepers tried to stop the primates exhibiting damaged behaviour: dragging from one end of the enclosure to the other, regurgitating and reconsuming their favourite meal, in deadening boredom, even eating parts of their own body. Visitors found it worrying and alarming, apparently because it seemed to suggest unhappiness, specifically an imaginative capacity and the total frustration of the desire to act on anything within it. Those animals that didn’t pace, that didn’t demonstrate, affected by the feeling of a past inside them, a planted satisfaction, were less harrowing to watch, more lucrative. The next step – the only available step – was direct electrical manipulation of the chimpanzee and bonobo brain.
For all the money spent on digital and pharmacological hallucination, one of the most effective primate stimulants remained a bowl of water. Chimps gathered around rain puddles. All enclosures were built to slope onto a raised base, forming a trough. Standing water attracted the animals, who stared into their own urine puddles. The water amplified the limited space, creating extra virtual zones through the angles of reflection. One of the observed changes in captive bonobos was their greater self-recognition. Research on this – a comedy of mirrors and dabbed spots of red paint – had been mixed at best, but the captive animals seemed unusually focused on their own reflections. This may have been an indirect effect of changed diet, over time. But it may also have been related to a reconfiguration of internal and external space.
I lay in my tent thinking in circles while the night drifted on, unsure again if I’d managed to sleep. I could feel that my thoughts were different, straying into odd territory; I now expected the nausea daily, just before the morning. I pictured things turning themselves out, a surface splitting open and curving back along an outside. I shuddered at it, this horrible amalgam of expressed soft tissue and whorls of harder shell. I knew that my thinking would become twisted and knotted, that I would see strange pictures that frightened me and came from me, but the anticipation didn’t lessen the effects. I panicked every time. I worried I’d contracted a cerebral virus, a virulent malarial strain, that, haunted by tactile impressions of my own brain, my mind had turned exclusively upon itself, its own basis. I had no symptoms other than this – no aches, cramps, high temperatures or exhaustion beyond that which could be expected.
I left, I vomited, I came back in from the trees, stepping over the twigs and leaves, rinsed my mouth with water and spat out. I did it again, but it wasn’t enough. I washed my teeth a second time, but I could still sense the vomit around some inaccessible part of my mouth. I was too aware of my mouth, stretching it and toying with it. My teeth were obtrusive; my tongue was swollen. I worried I was going to choke. I turned to Jane’s tent and in my headlamp saw her razor outside. I picked it up and turned it to my face. Attached to the razor, on its other side, was a fold-out pocket mirror. I held it to my opened mouth expecting to see something ghastly and amorphous, an outsize mass of tissue hanging from my palate to my gums. But to my surprise, and relief, the picture was familiar. Nothing was wrong. I packed the kit away and returned to my tent.
IX
Standing in the vestibule, he looked at the row of coats and at the boots and trainers lined up under the worktop. He ran his hands over the nearest item – a dark-green waterproof wax coat. He measured his arm against it and saw the sleeve was too big. He tried it on still; the material draped over his shoulders and dangled past the ends of his fingers. The zip made a rapid cutting sound; with a hurry he removed the coat and returned it to the peg. He was sure this didn’t belong to him. He opened up the pockets and was relieved to find no effects inside.
Four further coats hung on the wall. Two of these seemed to fit, more or less. He found three different sizes of boots, additionally one pair of shoes so small they must have belonged to a child.
He was unsettled by the prospect of peripheral activity, events taking place while he existed far away in the dead state induced by the sedatives. He was still adjusting to the medication, one of the effects of which was to take away all sense of duration in the night, leaving him, when he woke, without the experience of any time having passed. He simply took the capsule, lay down and fell almost instantly to sleep. Suddenly his eyes were open, nine, ten, eleven hours later. At first he was so unsettled and disoriented that he sought out every time display in the house, checking there hadn’t been a mistake. His body – especially on the right side – was stiff, his head remote, dull and sore, but other than that he remained alienated from sleep, with the uncanny certainty that no part of him whatsoever had observed it. Nothing had stirred or stretched, nothing had turned, nothing had listened to or reacted to the faint autonomous sounds generated by the cottage – the walls, ceilings and floors acting under the pressure of the sustained, suspended precipitation in the weather – to the faint humming of the wall heaters and the fridge and freezer, to the drizzle of the pipes, to the sounds outside too, sounds, in the nights before he was given the sedatives, he remembered as odd, faint, unidentifiable animal calling. He peered through the curtains – despite the doctor always reminding him he should keep away from the light – checking that the night had passed, that another day really had come, that all of this was enduring, when really what it felt like was that he had laid his head gently, cautiously on the pillow, closed his eyes and immediately opened them again. Under such conditions – prone, unwitting, anaesthetised – it was possible some other activity was performed in the house. The wax coat, the heavy and unfamiliar boots, the child’s shoes. Had they been left in error? Why hadn’t he noticed them before? Did someone have a key? Was the house being used, during the night, to host something, a series of events whose nature and purpose he couldn’t imagine?
Sometimes, in the mornings before the doctor arrived or in the afternoons or evenings after he had gone, he experienced strange, unaccountable flashes – not memories, exactly, not scenes that he was able to identify and place as familiar, as belonging to him, but images which remained remote, unclear and hard to place. These, he thought, would be effects from the sedatives; the fact that for several nights he had slept devoid of all experience, all sensation, that he could neither say that he had dreamed or had not dreamed, the fact that nothing in the sleeping period came to him at all, must surely do something to him. These brief flashes – accompanied by dread, a paralysing fear, a frustrated inability to understand what was happening – would be like compressed slices of a dream, shards of subconscious material released during the daytime, in his waking state. Boiling the kettle, getting up from the chair, suddenly he would hear or feel something – a door thudding closed; a warmth on his neck; one or more voices whispering around him – and then freeze. It wasn’t real; he had already accounted for the phenomenon. But still, spending all this time alone, having so many questions about what exactly had happened, he couldn’t get away from the idea that these flashes meant something, that they might really be significant, that, even if they were prompted by his medication, that didn’t mean they weren’t instructive. Why these images, these sensations, in particular? Who did the whispering, chattering voices belong to? Why a door closing? Why a warmth specifically on his neck? He pressed lightly against the wound, sucked in his breath.
He tried to dismiss these strangers, the unseen other people with some claim on t
he house. Still, the unfamiliar clothing, the sense, as well, of a mild disorder in certain parts of the house when he went downstairs in the morning, the impression that one or two things – the lay of the cushions on the sofa, the fridge door left ajar, a chair pulled out at the table when the last thing he did each night was push them firmly underneath – were not as he had left them. He studied the two empty rooms upstairs, dreading the appearance of footprints in the carpet. He pictured someone faceless, unfamiliar and unauthorised, entering the house and living there.
But it could only be himself. He must have moved. He must have sat up in the night, got up, left the room. Walked slowly, unconsciously, down the stairs and through the kitchen. He had checked the food in the fridge; he had approached the table and pulled out a chair, looking ahead at the wall, the covered window, the lines of fungus reaching in, moving stiffly and slowly and seeing nothing. He observed the image with a combination of pity and terror – the lax muscles and awkward locomotion, the raised, swollen head, the unfamiliar features of his face. What was it that disturbed his sleep and took him to the stairs? The doctor had issued the course of sedatives to ‘prohibit’, as he said, ‘unconscious, involuntary movement’. And so far, in the most obvious respect at least, they had; the wounds appeared to be healing. Perhaps the sedatives instilled a different, quieter, still dangerous form of automatism, bringing him to the stairs, where no monitoring system could stop his fall, taking him down to the chair, the table, where he waited, apparently, though unwittingly, for the doctor.
X
It wasn’t long after sunrise. There had already been new flux between sub-groups, making it harder to count. I’d switched with Jane, now following her group. I focused on two animals whose interaction immediately appeared odd. The younger of the two walked directly into an older female. This female, estimated age around thirty years, had thin hair across torso and breasts, large laterally protruding ears and very little hair across her head, leaving her scalp exposed. The muscles across her wide, strong thighs were clear, standing upright along the water’s edge. The animals didn’t look at each other. This was the strangest detail, the identical lack of awareness. They walked into each other, as if not recognising the other was there. If something like this happened, we’d expect an outburst – powerful females were known to threaten and attack, even tearing and biting off body parts. But I saw no retribution: the older female stopped only for a moment, on the brief impact of the bodies, then continued, now moving with more speed, and launched into the trees, while the younger ape slowly ambled across the ground.
I was beginning to think that Jane might be right. Something odd was taking place in the behaviour of her group. She had insisted that Alice and I take turns watching them. The miscount remained, reaffirming the additional animal. Focusing on the younger animal now, it was clear something was wrong, and that she didn’t correspond to any of the identities we had so far noted. She was malnourished and appeared to be engaging in self-harm, tearing large clumps of hair from her shoulders and her chest, hair which she chewed on, swallowed and regurgitated. We saw her do this again and again; I imagined she was replaying something, perhaps trying to capture something that had passed. Several of her nails had been broken off and she stumbled while she moved. Her head was cast down; she rarely walked bipedally, her arms only poorly supported her moving through the branches. She should have been easy to follow, but one of the problems I found, over the following days, was that she kept disappearing. She rarely vocalised or interacted at all, making only brief wheezy noises which the other animals ignored. You saw her – rather a glimpse of her – though the trees and then somehow, despite what was clear at other times to be her impeded movement, she was gone.
She was worryingly thin. Sometimes as she reappeared I would take her at first for some other animal, an unknown species. She looked younger than she was – closer examination showed her to be adolescent, nine to ten years – not fully completed, in some light partly translucent, as if manifesting before us through the air. Likely, of course, she was shifting in the other direction, un-forming. I thought the rest of her subgroup walked and swung in a sort of stilted way, as if moving through some difficulty or resistance. It was like she dragged them back. They tried not to look to her though they knew that she was there. The juveniles played, but with less abandon, and their mothers remained permanently close. And then there was the food. At first, this seemed like a breakthrough, a positive sign: her group had left two intact junglesop fruits behind, in an area easy to reach. This was the first direct communication I’d seen in three days observing her. She came slowly, gathered the fruits – long, yellow, each weighing around five kilograms, easy to process, with seeds the animals either spat or threw away – sniffed them, clutched them to her and shifted away. But nothing developed from this. Instead, the same two or three animals left her a small amount of food each day, at the end of their foraging. Unlike in more routine food-sharing, these fruits, nuts and leaves were given intact, a further suggestion of reluctant, ambivalent association. They didn’t directly share. They didn’t take from the same source. Each time, she waited until she was alone before gathering the food, inspecting it and moving off, refusing to eat in front of them.
Far from a sign of acceptance and integration, this strange behaviour seemed to increase her isolation. I was struck again, watching her move hesitantly forward, by the idea that they didn’t know what she was. Sometimes it seemed the other animals – even the lowest subordinate male – refused to acknowledge her as living. In almost all aspects they acted as if she was not present. But there were signs. Despite casual sub-group fluidity, her own group remained fixed. For this reason, I thought they were broadly protective of her. Equally possible, and as their countenance sometimes suggested, they were afraid. Leaving the food could almost have been an act of tribute, a token left for a strange, remote thing that could not eat it. We were worried about disease – her diminishing stature, the hair loss and the way that they avoided her. Possibly a cerebral strain, accounting for the odd compulsive symptoms in her behaviour too. She cleaned herself obsessively and engaged in other ritualised behaviour, including patting her left shoulder three times when she prepared to pass a certain tree. Alice and I debated the extent to which we could call this magical thinking. Did she believe her rituals were effective? What was it, exactly, she was trying to control? We’d witnessed no sexual activity involving her – another extraordinary and exceptional observation. Most worryingly, we still had no adequate explanation for where she had come from.
I woke to a rising, thickening nausea, my head full of the sound of the calls above me in the trees. I was already on my knees and my hands were clawing uselessly at the tent partition. I found the zip and yanked it down too quickly – the sensation, of something rapidly and unnaturally opening up, gave me the awful feeling that the world had spilled over – and I vomited silently, capaciously, onto the black mud outside the entrance to the tent.
I wondered if this – the nausea and the fatigue – might be a result of the vaccinations. There were many possibilities, the pills too. Though I had never previously experienced physiological effects from the malaria prophylactic, that didn’t necessarily mean I wasn’t suffering them now. I brightened at the idea this was the entire explanation. I put my headlamp onto the lowest setting, and slowly and carefully stepped outside. The stench was awful. It had collected into a circular pool and, turning away first and drawing in my breath, I divided it in two, scooped my hands into the wet mud beneath it, lifted the mess up into both arms and carried it away. I walked slowly into the trees, turning my head to make a full sweep with the light, tempted to laugh at the ridiculous image, carrying this bundle in my arms, as if it were dear to me. But I was here to bury it. I dropped it on the ground and returned quickly with the rest of the loose, falling slop, now forcing it down lower into the ground with the topsoil and the leaves I sprinkled over it, now stomping onto the conspicuous mound with my boot. I finished
: you could no longer see anything, and I wasn’t sure who, or what – my colleagues, myself, the other animals in the forest – I was hiding the sight from.
Their ears were identical. Of course. This was a daughter, her daughter, and she had come back. She wasn’t new to the troop – she was returning. Her malnourished condition and the unfamiliarity of her conspecifics suggested she’d been gone for months at least. The age was exactly right. She had left in order to join another troop, and she had roamed the park and come back because there was nothing else. After reaching menarche, females abandoned the natal group, the sub-group and the cluster entirely. The journey, travelling however far to attach to an external troop, was the single vital element driving bonobo society, maintaining affiliative relations between remote troops and keeping the species genetically viable by restricting inbreeding. Other than chance meetings when their roaming territories briefly overlapped, a daughter never saw her natal group again. This exile, or emigration, was definitive, had been ongoing for up to two million years. And now it was failing. The emigration was frustrated, and the daughter came home broken and starved, where she was no longer recognised.
We had no way of knowing where exactly she had been, how far she had travelled within the park, how her food sources had changed, what new potential predators she’d faced. Alice noted an awkwardness in her gait suggesting poorly healed limb fractures. We could expect this pattern to repeat through later females. The stress, even the shame of the failed journey, would affect health, exacerbating genetic defects brought on by the inbreeding. I’d imagined, before I came here, that some preparation for exile might persist, but hadn’t considered they would still attempt a full journey. The longer we spent at Westenra, the more forcefully it was pressed on us that the troop wasn’t at threat from any single agent. The animals were being attacked simultaneously from several sides.
Gathering Evidence Page 11
