by Colin McAdam
For those who lost their pets, there was meant to be comfort for lonely moments.
Walt and Judy had kept the brochure.
He’s happy now sweetheart. I know he is.
I want him to forgive us.
Judy had nerve damage and a permanent swelling on one side of her face. Larry had to travel on a mobility scooter. Walt still met him a couple of times a month.
Walt took Judy to a speech therapist for two years after the attack, and it always felt like Looee was sitting in the backseat of the car, staring at them, threatening them, silent.
Neither Larry nor Judy could remember much of that night, and Walt selectively focused on having pointed his rifle at him, Looee trying to hide from the gun in the corner with his arms protecting his head. Years after the violence and shock, they felt ashamed.
There were reporters and intrusions for a while and then long silence. Producers of a TV show approached them one day to be part of a feature on animal awareness. Judy thought it would be an opportunity to tell their story. She spoke for hours and showed them photos, and took them into Looee’s house, which she had avoided for a very long time. The feature ended up being called Wild Love. It had dramatic, cautionary music, blurred re-enactments, and focused on people who foolishly raised tigers, panthers, violent and endangered animals. Larry was shown toodling around Burlington on his scooter looking sad and fat. Walt looked even fatter. Stills of Looee’s house were flashed on the screen in a way that made it look like a dungeon. Hours of Judy’s conversation had been edited to a few short sentences. She held a picture of him when he was four, saying he was just so cute … He tore the house down … I miss his hugs. Her face was disfigured. They were three suitably bloated freaks on the fringes of America.
At Viv’s the question was asked.
What the fuck were they thinking.
Walt had a dream, more a sensation than a dream, that woke him up regularly. He was against a body. Lips, hair, warm breath on his face. Arms that were strong on his behalf, a father’s or a friend’s. It was Looee, but it wasn’t.
Most of their friends avoided them. Mr. Wiley remained an unexpectedly good neighbour. Soon after he died they moved to Burlington. Judy said she wanted to leave the woods. Some days they thought there was too much colour and noise in the city. Walt felt oppressed by opinions on the news, but delivered more himself.
They went out to the mall on a sunny Saturday and someone bumped into Walt’s shoulder and walked on without apology. Judy said cheer up. I’ll buy you some shorts. She wore a lot of makeup and said I’m not covering up. I just like playing the game. Clerks in stores tried not to look at her face.
She stayed positive. She lifted Walt’s chin. She felt pleasure in survival; not survival in terms of overcoming injury but survival as the process that few people notice and none can control, the hum of energy that fuels the machine. Survival isn’t always an act of will, and when she realized that, when she was carried through the years and felt healed, she began to see beauty in all those things we try to run away from. There was beauty in the loss of beauty, in loneliness, in sorrow, some inarticulate vitality that was greater than the celebrated signs of joy, a different joy not obvious but more constant. To see herself as a body in the mirror, death in the middle of life, was to see a beautiful truth. This is me and it is not how I see myself.
She and Walt hold hands and know what each other is thinking. Walt goes to the freezer and Judy says we know the address. I’ve thought about driving down there and buying him ice cream.
Their apartment looks over a quiet street. Usually it’s the same people who pass below, different clothes through the seasons. Their neighbours have a five-year-old boy who was frightened of Judy. He stared at her face and hugged his mother’s legs. Judy crouched down and laughed, and said I know you.
They stare at the brochure from Girdish and say would he still be there. Is he still alive.
They used to puzzle through that night with Larry, wondering what had set him off. He was excited and confused and wanted to be at a party. Rooms lit by candles, surprises coming in from somewhere behind the door.
thirty-two
She loves the way he limps.
She really wants friends.
Pink skies grow gold and the upsides of leaves flash white in the sun.
She is scared and small and growing bigger and she wants them all to be her friends.
She is first out in the morning.
She loves Fifi and sits beside her and they hug.
Jonathan sees how the new one is growing.
The researchers note that with each monthly cycle her swelling grows larger and more roseate.
She is last out in the morning.
She calls the yek through a thornbush of plekter.
She hates Bootie.
She loves them all.
Jonathan scares her and Burke is everything she cannot see in the dark.
She walks lightly through the World. Her knuckles tell some that there is more to get from this ground.
She and Mama stare less at the wall and more at the yek.
A researcher goes home and feels there is possibility everywhere. She wants to have children despite a preponderance of misery on TV and she buys her boyfriend a T-shirt that says 98.4% CHIMP.
The generation, diversion and ruin of life stand proudly embodied as Jonathan looms and swaggers near the new one, he will be her beginning and end.
It is common for adult males to threaten young females as they reach adolescence. You may feel the world is yours because I want you, but it is mine it is mine it is mine.
Jonathan rips a weak and leafy branch from a tree and whips the wind and jumps on all fours from tree to tree, and kicks to show that he can bring each down.
He takes a heavier stick and beats the ground near the new one until she adopts a submissive posture.
At this time of year the moon shines in through the skylights above the sleeping quarters.
You who stand on the tower, can you hear their whispered orisons, their heads full of mice. Can you depose these tyrants or do tyrants stand untouchable on towers.
The moon is on a stem.
It illumines white flowers.
David Kennedy thinks of them all as his family. He loves them and wants to let them be. He wants to leave them alone completely, as much as we are left alone in our neighbourhoods and countries. Don’t you see that cruelty and forgiveness are everyone’s inheritance, that this is a neighbourhood and a country.
Their fights make him sad and fill him with worry, yet everything gets resolved more quickly than with humans.
He reminds his staff repeatedly not to intervene, no matter how attached they become. But he lets them intervene sometimes because our attachment is another shared inheritance. Empathy comes from a fear of being hurt oneself, but it’s still a beautiful thing. He saw Mama find an injured crow one day. She gently picked up the bird and climbed a tree, put the bird to her mouth and dropped it so it could fly again, its one good wing taking it just beyond the wall.
He and his staff have always decorated the sleeping quarters and provided enrichment and treats. They planted moonflowers across from the cages and they have grown to ten feet.
The flowers bloom at night and Mama and Looee, in separate spaces, stare at them.
Looee can still feel the pressure of the floating cagefloor at CID. His bones remember it, even though they rest comfortably on blankets now. Every night he waits for his cage to be tagged.
Mama didn’t like today and is worried about tomorrow.
Worry lights fires in this ape-ruled earth and runs cold in all the pipes. Worry seeks the death of itself and makes tomorrow better.
Looee’s eyes grow bigger as he stares at the bloomed moonflowers. He and Mama, at different times, make the noise of a man who is modestly surprised by something happy he has discovered.
Hmh.
The flowers are very pretty.
The women who wheeled
their dinner trolleys to them, their salad, peppers, bananas and beef stew, said goodnight crazy lovelies, and, be good to each other tomorrow.
From the tower David watches Mama kiss and hug the other females and gather their support. He sees her act as a peacemaker. She goes to Ghoul and grooms him and Ghoul wears a nervous grin. David can feel Ghoul’s excitement from the tower and he feels his own when he watches Mama going back and forth between Jonathan and Ghoul. He can feel how much they wanted to be touched.
Ghoul and Jonathan groom each other. It’s the first time he has seen this for more than eighteen months.
He has his stopwatch and timesheet, and it is all being recorded. He will have to describe it in the language of his trade and the data will have to be mapped. With his colleagues he will talk about side interventions, new coalitions, eye contact and posterior grooming. His assistants will help him put a paper together.
For now he feels happy seeing a group of women deciding that they have had enough. While Mama brings about the reconciliation of Jonathan and Ghoul, Fifi prevents Burke from doing any harm. She settles his display and takes a rock from his hand that he had been hiding behind his back.
He struggles to describe them sometimes, to make the larger world feel the way he feels. When he sees a reconciliation like this he feels it in his chest. His papers and data are dust and chips of ice.
He wants to describe Mama at rest. One hundred and thirty pounds of vitality. Fear, humour, jealousy and peace. Every day he sees empathy, shame, the will to heal, but he fights sometimes to discuss these things credibly with those who have no sense of their own bodies.
Lobbyists.
What lobbyist thinks of himself as an ape, one who brings other people’s hands together for the sake of something fruitful. Isn’t Mama, here, a lobbyist. An ambassador.
Are there ambassadors—in Savile Row suits, heads full of histories of Byzantium and Talleyrand—who think of themselves as apes. Do apes wear suits and dine with Kissinger.
Is Kissinger not a man obsessed with power, who boasts of women, who does indeed digest food, and need to have the respect of certain people.
What do I know of Kissinger, yet I speak of him. What do families arguing around dinner tables know about the president, yet they fight over who he is. We are born with the need for a leader, someone to control the conflict between each individual’s need. An alpha in the house, an alpha at work, an alpha in the church and in the White House.
Mama reminds him that the women have equal power. Beaten and despised, but just as strong as the men because the men can do nothing without them. He thinks of that Aristophanes play where the women end the war by withholding sexual favours.
My mother was ninety pounds when she died. She fell asleep drunk and her cigarette lit the chair on fire. Ninety pounds but her coffin weighed so much I thought my brother and I would drop it. Tiny charred woman inside, ragged bird in an iron box.
I went to a conference once where a man delivered a paper claiming that all scientists were looking for their mothers. He named it the Call of the Inquisitor. We all want to know how it started. We want our mother to tell us. We’ll get it right if we can only know how we began.
Mama rejoins the women, and, after Jonathan and Ghoul stop grooming, Looee walks to Ghoul and offers what can only be described as a human handshake.
Fifi and Mama rub their asses together.
At work he occasionally thinks of masturbating in the bathroom. His assistant Sarah taking her glasses off, cute short hair and a flash in her eyes.
The day is done when he says it is done. So many years of hard work.
I have my own family. I have a daughter whom I want to be strong and confident. But this is my family too. I worry and wonder.
He has kept the project going from his own pocket, those times when funding was scarce. They thought about raising Burke as their own, remember, when Rosie didn’t want him.
Mother.
He lives in Jackson Heights, a suburb forty-five minutes away. There’s time for thinking each way, morning for planning, afternoon for contemplation or not thinking at all. Dad was a salesman and said that sitting still wasn’t natural, wasn’t the way we’re meant to be. He thinks of that often. It’s abundance that keeps us still. Abundance of food, abundance of love. Or fear that both are lacking and at least we have this house.
With chimps it’s the girls that wander away. The men travel to fight and claim territory and the girls travel to find new men and friends.
We have good friends in the house two doors away. It’s her second marriage. She said with her first husband, they moved into a house and he said I love this place so much. I want to live here forever. When she heard him say that, she said she couldn’t breathe.
Looee has a favourite spot outside, near the eucalyptus and its smell of menthol. It is where Podo lay, dead after his fight with Jonathan. Mr. Ghoul sits uneasily when Looee rests there. He wants to go to him and he wants to watch, and some inarticulate speculations make him move and sit and move again.
Looee walks to Mr. Ghoul. They sit and look at each other testily, and groom. Looee sits behind Mr. Ghoul and his fingers make Mr. Ghoul drift off, nod into soft pools of sleep.
Looee looks around. He goes back to the tree and watches the others. Some are thinking. Some are sleeping. Some are watching him watch.
He walks, and the new one thinks that he walks like no other.
David watches from the tower and also thinks that Looee has a strange walk. It’s more than the product of injuries. He ducks and stretches, hides and yearns, acts like something he isn’t.
The observation posts are considered part of their territory by some of the apes. When new staff members appeared over the years they would sometimes be treated to stones and pieces of wood, missiles being thrown at their heads, usually by Podo.
There is a calm today that everybody senses.
Looee looks up at David and reaches out a hand.
You want to come up.
I’ve seen lots of human-raised chimps, and few of them get along with their own species. When Washoe, in Oklahoma, first met other chimps, she used sign language to call them black bugs. It’s an ape characteristic to look down on other apes.
Looee wants to use the man’s binoculars. He wants to climb up the tower to look. He climbs a tree to the height of the tower and he softly trumpets an ache and a fragile feeling of peace.
David likes him.
There is always a third enemy, who keeps the others together. Like Russia or China. When Podo was alive, he and Mr. Ghoul had Jonathan to villainize. Then Jonathan and Burke used Ghoul to keep themselves from fighting. If we don’t choose enemies we fear there won’t be peace.
Looee climbs down from the tree. He feels sick.
David has a budget meeting to attend. He has three papers to edit. Debate at the University of Florida. This house believes that science is unethical.
There’s so much noise, he thinks.
Everybody thinking our small concerns are the height of useful inquiry. Everybody thinking that everything we make, once made, cannot be a fiction.
Looee wants to climb again to look over the wall, but he’s tired.
thirty-three
I try to think of this house as shelter, my daughter as my offspring, and my wife as my temporary companion. I try to be reductive and realize I am an animal with animal needs and nothing will ever be perfect. But every corner of my house means something more than shelter. I believe in love and beauty. I’ve known them and felt them, and even if I reduce them to the hunger for procreation and power I’m unable to cancel the warmth I feel.
Complete consciousness is unattainable. I’m aware of the things in my life that are fictions but I enjoy them nonetheless. I understand my motives, and my wife’s and Tilly’s. Understanding rarely stops any of us from doing what we do.
Knowing I am an ape doesn’t stop me from being an ape.
We’ve done all kinds of tests to sho
w that chimps are self-aware. Not just that they recognize themselves in a mirror but that they are aware of the consequences of their actions. And they therefore must act despite themselves, sometimes, because the consequences aren’t always what they would want.
I’m not sure what I am looking for anymore, except comfort.
I like being the boss.
Sometimes David is afraid of sleep. He worries about his daughter and his wife being hurt, and on very few occasions he thinks of the attrition and cirrhosis of those invisible organs he normally takes for granted.
His wife is doing a residency in Seattle for eight weeks, and it is the longest they have ever been apart.
Each time they talk on the phone she reveals some new pleasure she has found in being alone.
I like not eating so much meat she says.
He gets a little drunk some nights when they are apart.
It’s funny, isn’t it she says. Seeing things on your own for a change.
She has always said that talking makes everyone feel better. He says talking is the equivalent of grooming. The tongue and fingers are governed by the same parts of the brain. He marvels at how close they can be some nights on the phone and how words really are the equal of touch. Bakelite pressed hard against his ear.
She says it’s not just the freedom from him and from their daughter. I feel some sort of opening. I saw things so clearly today.
He thinks about the solitary figure in every religion, the monks, saints and shamans in every tradition who walk out into wilderness on their own and find revelation.
It’s what solitude does to a social animal he says.
People talk of recognizing something greater than themselves when they’re alone because we finally have to realize how helpless we are as individuals. There’s a freedom, a sense of wonder in feeling for a moment that we don’t have to please anyone or adjust to the needs of others. And there’s a fear in realizing how small we are, how much those distant others normally insulate us from seeing the limits of our mostly incompetent bodies. When we’re on our own we seek solutions and speculate and fictionalize because that’s what we do when we’re confronted with survival. That’s revelation.
