The Four Fingers of Death (62 page)

These and other difficulties improved when she started working with the primates. Runaround Sue was her first charge, an ill-mannered chimp from Saint Louis, MO. She’d been born in captivity there, had never swung from the tree branches like a chimpanzee ought in the Congo. Runaround Sue specialized in eating and watching television, and in threatening whatever human being was responsible for her by baring her teeth. According to reports from Saint Louis, Sue had never once been a chimpanzee of status in the group. Other women chimps ignored her. She ate and slept and, on occasion, copulated with lower-status males. Such was the life of the prisoner.

The Runaround Sue who arrived in Rio Blanco had some kind of relapsing and remitting neurological complaint. Maybe her aggressiveness was meant to deflect attention from her weakness. Noelle had trouble not projecting her feelings onto the chimp. She even took umbrage at Sue’s name, which had been bestowed on her because despite her status she had been good at mating in captivity and producing children, most of them now full grown and removed to medical facilities elsewhere. Noelle hated Sue’s name, but she sympathized, as she also understood when Sue was prideful and confrontational at the moments when pity and sympathy were coming back at her.

Sue, like the apes who would follow her at URB, was not an alpha animal. The chimps at URB had lots of scars and were missing fingers, had chronic diarrhea, or were, apparently, parkinsonian. These were the animals that had already exhausted the patience of researchers across the country. Noelle loved the outcast apes, though, and spoke to them with tolerance and equanimity. She said to Runaround Sue, e.g.: “You can’t believe what they got up to at the
omnium gatherum
this weekend. They’re trying to dig a hole from here to Mexico. Fifty-eight miles. They were saying a blessing for the digging, and there was some kind of traditional ritual with tortillas. The earth movers are going to have to go down like fifty feet or something to be below the level that the border patrol uses. They had a shaman dig the first shovelful. And then he broke up some tortillas and handed around crumbs.”

Sometimes the conversations got more personal.

“This guy wanted to go to a golf driving range. Like he thought a driving range was so old-fashioned! Like old-fashioned was
good
. There’s legislation pending, Sue, that would, you know, deed all the golf courses in city limits to the Union of Homeless Citizens. What a great tent community you could set up on those golf courses. No varmints. And this guy wanted to go to a driving range. Are you kidding me? And then he’d probably want me to sit and watch him take shots. When he hit a really good one, I could give him a kiss.”

Not that Noelle had forgotten that the goal with the primates (and it wasn’t just apes; there’d been occasional spider monkeys and rhesus macaques) was
experimental
. Runaround Sue hated getting her injections—they all did—and the shock of her hatred of needles roused in Noelle feelings of great pity. But she was paid to administer injections, and so she did. Noelle was never entirely certain afterward what the preparation was that they gave to the chimp. With Koo it didn’t do any good to ask. He would offer some rationale heavy with rhetoric: the injection was to test “whether the introduction of computer-enhanced umbilical-cord stem cells, which promoted mild regrowth colonies in paraplegics, could impede brain lesion reproductive events associated with MS.” The kind of language that was found in grant applications, with the solecisms of ESL decorating its obfuscations. Who knew what the experiments measured? Who knew?

What was clear was that from the first injection Runaround Sue got worse. One leg developed a tremor. Then the leg stopped working altogether. In her cage, without Noelle or Larry, the other graduate student, Sue’s expression, as easy to read as if it had been the face of your own grandmother, was fearful and uncertain. But once Noelle entered the cage (as opposed to hiding out on the far side of the two-way mirror), it got even worse. Despite the failure of motor function in her leg, Sue resumed her ill-tempered provocations—to the best of her ability. Noelle, for example, was hit with a fresh, watery helping of stool nearly every day.

Nothing was worse than watching a nonhuman animal suffer. It was a matter of a few weeks before they gave Sue the lethal injection, and in that time there were losses of muscular function and excretory function, accelerated organ failures, you name it. It was exactly like losing someone you cared about. Koo seemed oddly even-tempered about the whole thing, like he knew what was going to happen. But it didn’t make him happy either. He said things like “It is the nature of this life that what dies fertilizes what lives and causes it to grow better. Maybe what is living also makes stronger what is dead. The living and the dead are not so easy to tease apart. This is a braid of mutual dependence, life and death. With technological advances we can improve on these interdependencies.”

Other primates followed; for example, Alfonse, the orangutan, who was pleasant enough, but who had a completely different type of illness (cirrhosis). Then there was the strange case of the bonobo, Cherry, who was just on the far side of adolescence. It was very hard to do experiments upon bonobos, because they were so affable. In general, unless a zoo had a surplus and couldn’t find a place to send an animal, it was not often that you would find a bonobo for sale. Cherry, to make matters worse, took a shine to Noelle. It was a solid ten months that Cherry lived at URB, and in that time Noelle went from being a relatively dispassionate participant in animal experimentation to being a conflicted, miserable participant. Because bonobo civilization is matrilineal. The female bonobos rally against the males; they do what needs to be done while maintaining a leisurely life of food gathering and group sex. It was like life in Rio Blanco, see. Bonobo social life was like the life envisioned by the
omnium gatherum
. Whose online broadsides Noelle took to printing out for Cherry, when it was convenient to do so.

Noelle would bring in the computer and joystick (Cherry liked anything travel related and was oddly comforted by alpine scenery), and then, while the bonobo was involved with her haphazard web searches, Noelle would read out broadsides about the coming convergence of the idea of the human body with the idea of
geology
, and how the body and the
geologic
truth could meet somewhere, and then the body would be better able to withstand vicissitudes of the heart, intermittencies of the human relations. “O citizens of the ever-enlarging desert, join us this weekend for a ritual of bloodletting and passionate ecstatic release to celebrate the coming of the cyborg!”

Noelle Stern could not be sure that Cherry understood. Nor could she be sure that the bonobo comprehended the news articles she read her about nightly blackouts, periodic military exercises in the sky over Rio Blanco, armed uprisings by would-be emigrants, or the restive homeless army that was mustering in town. Experimental method, the stuff of Noelle’s years in graduate school, argued against mythologies or nonempirical belief systems.

The erroneous belief in the appearance of affect in unfeeling nonhuman animals, for example, according to the theorists of post-postmodernist sociology, is a sign of a weakened cultural apparatus. Animals, in an economy of post-historical global interdependence, exist for the dominance of humans, who are their stewards. Animals are a resource, and they exist in a permanent state of mitigated volition because of insufficient processing power. This was written down in the best known pedagogical text on the subject:
The Proper Exercise of Power
, by Lyman Johns et al. Noelle had consumed it in year one of medical school, and it was with such violent antipathy that she read the arguments there that she kept the book close ever after. She tried reading some of it to Cherry, just to see, and the bonobo took it away from her, ripped out a great number of its pages, and then rubbed her vulva across the embossed dust jacket. Exactly the kind of highly symbolic activity that the book argued against. In this and other ways, Noelle had come to suspect that Cherry was attempting to communicate more directly with her female researcher, perhaps according to the rules of matrilineal bonobo society. A period followed in which Noelle asked Cherry everything, whether to date a certain guy, whom to vote for in the upcoming midterm elections, just to see whether there were genuine responses. A variety of interpretable and ambiguous responses ensued: Cherry offered her part of her meal. Cherry grabbed her in a headlock; Cherry attempted to rub her pudenda, that horrible word, against Noelle.

It was a brutal shock, therefore, when Cherry suffered mortally what was described by Koo, peremptorily, as congestive heart failure. Apparently, there was some kind of long-standing defect. Even more upsetting, it didn’t take the senior faculty member on the project long to spirit away the body. When, in the weeks after, there was a stray
foot
in the lab that had electrodes attached to it for laser modeling, Noelle was almost certain it was Cherry’s foot. Koo managed to get the foot to wiggle its toes on its own. With no body attached. Other grad students had a good time using the severed foot of Cherry for practical jokes.

Noelle missed Cherry. Missed her like she missed the friends of her high school years. Missed Cherry like she missed the cool air when the 120-plus-degree days of summer came around again. Missed Cherry like she missed a sibling, her brother who had died overseas ten years ago. She missed Cherry, and she wasn’t sure if it would be possible to go on to the next animal, a chimpanzee called Morton. Maybe there was a point at which you just couldn’t go on.

Over at the
omnium gatherum
, they had begun a project that involved hot-air ballooning. The
omnium gatherum
wanted to send up hot-air balloons so as to warn the citizens of the Southwest about a repressive police state apparatus that was now hovering everywhere around them, concealed in washes and behind underpasses. With a flotilla of hot-air balloons, like a series of jewels in the cloudless skies, the
omnium gatherum
would be able to radio back to Earth, with personal wireless handsets, the exact whereabouts of agents of the INS, the DEA, the ATF, and so forth. The flotilla could also use a doctor, they said, to minister to those brave souls who intended to live in this post-nationalist milieu, and perhaps she wished to be the doctor.

While she made up her mind, she had the simplest responsibility remaining to her. She had to go in and observe Morton. In the aftermath of some experimental injection. What the experimental protocol was, she didn’t ask. She’d given a lot of injections, and she didn’t ask what they were, and she didn’t ask when she was directed to observe. To relieve some of the tedium, she’d saved a treat for herself. She had some decent, locally prepared hash, and she was going to smoke it with Larry in the observation room behind the two-way mirror. This ought to have been the night when Noelle Stern’s lack of ambition, her lack of desire to be a doctor in the way that her father had been a doctor, should have come back to haunt her. Because smoking hash in the observation room could really fuck up experimental results. Morton could turn out to be one of those rare serial-killing chimpanzees who had recently been written up in the
National Geographic
, chimps who for no reason would randomly select other chimps and kill them, rip out their testes and their organs, and feast on the relevant parts. Morton was one of these, she said to Larry, passing the hookah back to him, and he was going to smash the two-way mirror and dismember both of them.

“A depraved imagination,” Larry said. “You sure the doc isn’t coming through here tonight?”

“He’s taking Jean-Paul to see his lawyer. Jean-Paul has an idea for a business.”

“Bet he makes more off of it than the old man did.”

“Koo dosed the animal earlier. And took off,” Noelle said. “He gives a shit at first. But he has sort of mediocre follow-through. Or maybe he just can’t bear to watch.”