The Counterfeit Murder in the Museum of Man (27 page)

I taught myself to read quite by happenstance. Like many of my brethren, I had taken part in the farce conducted by Damon Drex in which we picked at keyboards in an attempt to prove, for no good reason, that, with a finite number of monkeys (or at least of chimpanzees) and with a finite amount of time, you could produce one line of the literary canon and through that, by extrapolation, all of the world’s great literature.

But that was during a part of my life I call pre-procedure. Like the others I was chiefly interested in the M&M’s with which they rewarded us. More than the others, I think I had an inkling of what was going on. I had noticed people reading magazines and the prevalence of the little markings called letters on books, signs, and, of course, the computer screen.

Upon gaining sapience, I began to think of these little markings as a kind of code, though I had no word for it. And I might not have gotten very far if I hadn’t come across a child’s alphabet book that someone had left behind just outside my cage.

I pretended not to know what it was for. I treated it like a kind of security blanket and if any human was around, I would look at it upside down. Because if anyone had figured out what I was doing, they would apply for a grant, put me in a cage of my own, and bore me speechless with exercises designed to show results they could publish in a paper.

The alphabet book had large letters and simple words.
It didn’t take me long to understand that G for GIRL could be combined with A for ANT, O for OSTRICH, and T for TREE to make the word GOAT. It took me a while to comprehend that the number of combinations was essentially endless.

I had difficulty grasping that words not only stood for things, but for actions, descriptions, and things other than things. There were simple sentences in another child’s book someone left behind and, after a while, I had learned them by heart. It took me some effort to understand the words
a
and
the
. They occurred so often, I thought they must be greatly important and that I was missing something essential.

But once I mastered the basic skill of reading, I tried to read everything I could get my hands on, which wasn’t much, but people do leave stuff around. Bus schedules. Pamphlets of various sorts. Even a pornographic magazine, which I took for one of those how-to manuals. I would pretend to look at the pictures in regular magazines, all the while trying to learn words from their context.

At the same time, I failed to link the complicated noises people make with their mouths to the words and sentences I was learning. Then, one day in the rec room Damon Drex had provided for his “writers,” I happened to be watching a television news program. One of my fellow chimps got hold of the remote and pressed the
MUTE
button. Words began to scroll beneath the person who had continued to talk, but soundlessly.

The significance struck me like a bad fall out of a tree: The words on paper, these combinations of letters, matched the vocalizations people were producing in
their mouths. My own species communicate with sounds and gestures, of course, but nothing like this. I realized that people live in a sea of language, in a verbal medium that is the equivalent of air or water.

I was thrown again into one of those despairs provoked by an agitation of hope, expectation, and fear of failure. Because I knew I could never imitate the human range of sound with my own vocal equipment, I scarcely knew how to go about learning to understand what was being said.

And again, I had to proceed carefully lest some graduate student or postdoc hear what I was doing and start some infernal “research” project. I still had my alphabet book with its big letters and simple words. I decided to find someone I could trust to help me. Through bad luck, I chose Yvette, a sweet, smiling Haitian woman on the cleaning crew. She had always been kind to us and especially to me.

She laughed when I showed her the black-and-white animal under the word
cow
and pointed to her lips.
“Vache,”
she said finally, still giggling. Then
“chien.”
Then
“arbre.”

Luckily for my purposes, a different company took over the cleaning work, otherwise I would have been utterly muddled, not knowing that there is more than one human language. Luckily, too, Dr. Simone happened to witness this exchange with Yvette while reviewing one of the monitor tapes. Imagine my relief when, instead of some dumb researcher, she assigned herself and several others to teach me to understand words. It became a kind of game. I knew some research worked its way into our sessions, especially when they tested me, usually
with pictures of things I would point to when they said the corresponding word, but I didn’t mind.

Then came sentences. Short and simple at first. I began to appreciate the level at which humans operate. I noticed how people used words to give each other commands, to explain things, to make jokes, to vent anger, to be nice. It helped that I could sense emotions very acutely. I noticed that people often say one thing while feeling another.

How I wanted to join the conversation! How I wanted to express my … my chimpness, my situation, and my yearning, above all, to be free. I went in and out of despair. Exulted one moment at what I was learning, morbid the next at the thought I could not speak. The dark song of suicide sang in me as never before. But how to do it? I knew I wouldn’t have the self-discipline to hang myself, as we creatures of the trees have long powerful arms with which to reach above us and keep from strangling in a noose. I would be like a fish trying to drown itself. Nor did they allow any sharp objects with which I might sever an artery. No poison pills, either.

So I determined once again to escape even if I had nowhere to escape to. There are no tropical forests at these latitudes. There are no chimp halfway houses. It didn’t matter. If I had to die trying, I was bent on escaping. Not that any of this signified: There was no way of escaping.

Until the afternoon when Jacobus, a very old chimp with a bad heart, suffered either a stroke or cardiac arrest. Alarms went off and before long a couple of
guys in medic-like uniforms arrived with a stretcher, put Jacobus on it, fitted an oxygen mask to his face, covered him with a blanket up to his neck, and took him away.

I heard someone say they were taking him to the hospital at the Middling County Zoo. I heard someone use the word
euthanize
, which took me a minute to figure out. Hell, I thought, I’d settle for that.

I went about my plans with all the cunning of the desperate. I pretended not to be hungry. I kept myself awake at night and easily feigned listlessness during the day. I knew I was succeeding from the comments of the staff about me. “Looks like Alphus isn’t himself today.” “Yeah, he hasn’t been feeling so hot lately.” “Hell I’d get like that if they kept me cooped up in that place.”

A few days later, in the presence of some of my more excitable brethren and a couple of human beings, I fell from a low bar and clutched at my chest, faking a heart attack. I struggled to get up, but fell back again. With predictable panic, my cell mates screeched and hooted. I heard someone say, “Oh, God, it’s Alphus. Get Doctor Simone.”

Right on cue, the medics arrived. I, too, was given an oxygen mask and blood pressure monitor. But, critically, no restraints were put on me as I was loaded onto the stretcher and borne out to the waiting ambulance.

One of the EMTs drove while the other one, a burly fellow with a red face, tended to me. “Don’t worry, pal,” he said, “We’ll get you there.” Then, to the driver. “I don’t see why they don’t just give them the old needle right there.”

“Yeah. But it ain’t as much fun.”

“What do you mean?”

“Hell, Frank didn’t use a needle on the last one we brought over. You know, the old one.”

“Really.”

“Nah. He fed him to the leopards. I don’t think it was even dead. He said the big cats went crazy.”

My heart felt like it had stopped. And then began to thump painfully. I cannot even look at a picture of one of those beasts without suffering a deep, atavistic terror. Dying is one thing. Being killed and eaten by leopards quite another.

The burly guy said, “Boy, this guy’s pulse just jumped off the chart. And, you know, his blood pressure’s been normal. If he wasn’t some kind of ape, I’d say he was faking it.”

Through the slits of my eyes, I could see, up through the windows in the double back doors of the vehicle, that we had entered some kind of forest. With one abrupt movement, I ripped off my oxygen mask and pulled off the blood pressure cuff.

“Hey,” my startled attendant cried, and reached to restrain me. But even strong men are weaklings compared with chimpanzees. I quickly overpowered him. The vehicle slewed to a sudden stop. I opened the door and fled on all fours to a glorious haven in the upper branches of towering, well-leafed maples.