The Four Fingers of Death (72 page)

The further bad news for Rafferty was that in the wash, he and the arm were now gathered together in one corner of the cab, a position in which the arm would have easy access to the neck of Bix Rafferty and could engage in another variation on grasping that it longed for. Restriction of airways, compression of circulation, starving of the brain of oxygen. It takes a couple of minutes, usually. The severed arm perfectly acquitted itself, because of the simplicity of its wishes and its total lack of doubt. Rafferty offered some opposition, naturally. He grabbed at the forearm and yanked on it, but he had trouble getting a good purchase because of the slick, rank hair that grew upon the thing. In short, Rafferty could not successfully arm-wrestle away the arm. And because he could not arm-wrestle it, he could not keep it from ending his life.

Newspaper accounts indicated that Bix Rafferty once had a family in the Midwest, and though financial reversals had sent him west, he had intended one day to return to his family. It was through a seismic encounter with bad luck that he came to his solitary end, though perhaps it was the sort of bad luck that might have been repelled. His family didn’t know of his privation, his long hours of solitary mining, and they expressed many regrets. He had done what he wanted to do, which was to try to repair his circumstances through rugged individualism, and he had done a mediocre job at it, and now he was gone.

The arm managed to slither out the open window of the truck, and to move into the wash and toward the city. It had depended on Rafferty to get this far, and it would depend on others soon.

Perhaps the day that the Mars mission was lost
, Morton thought, in the primate research laboratory at the University of Rio Blanco,
was a magic day, because it was the day on which I began to consider my life with the level of reflection and perceptiveness appropriate to a person of my distinction. How is it, I wonder, that I never thought about myself before with any kind of curiosity, nor with any drive to give a complete accounting of myself? While I may not be able, yet, to compile effectively this memoir of which I dream, since I have not yet been provided with writing implements, I can nonetheless begin an exploration of my thinking and my circumstances, so that when I am able, I may amass the facts of my life for those who would take an interest
.

Let me begin by saying, if only to myself, that what I am, first and always, is a chimpanzee. A chimpanzee born into captivity, raised in captivity, and presently living in a laboratory, I believe, in a state called Arizona. Had you
, Homo sapiens sapiens,
to explain what a chimpanzee is, you would perhaps point to certain television or web-based advertisements in which juvenile chimpanzees appear, and you would talk about the pleasant and humorous aspect of these juveniles. Or you would refer to certain programs you have seen on your Internet-programming monitors that have depicted the dwindling numbers of chimpanzees in the wild
.

Let me tell you, instead, what I believe a chimpanzee is. I believe a chimpanzee is the unluckiest life-form to spring forth in the world. Why is a chimpanzee unlucky? you ask. A chimpanzee is unlucky because he is the not-as-handsome relative of you
, Homo sapiens sapiens.
By virtue of his resemblance, by virtue of sharing some 99 percent of DNA with
Homo sapiens sapiens,
the chimpanzee is doomed to be captured, tortured, and injected with drugs for the benefit of his more attractive relatives
.
A chimpanzee, that is, takes all the guff and never gets to win the trophy. The chimp is born to enslavement
.

Among the disadvantages of the chimpanzee is his tendency to concentrate on his immediate surroundings while avoiding the larger political or social picture. The chimpanzee is constantly thinking only of other chimpanzees, I believe, which does very little good when you are in a laboratory serving as an experimental subject. In the absence of a large social network, this chimpanzee will see an attractive image on a screen on a wall monitor, and he will stare at it for a long time, while otherwise occupied with removing insects and fleas from his fur. He will masturbate occasionally, or, at the very least, he will touch himself now and again because there is not much else to do, and then he will wait for lunch or dinner. When there are tests of acuity to which he is subjected, he will follow the testing protocols in search of the elusive banana or mango. Beyond this, the chimpanzee has few, if any, ambitions
.

This approach to life is almost exactly identical to that of the masses of men. Men do little else but to perform their eight hours of work before, as I understand it, going home to eat, drink excessively, masturbate, and watch celebrities on their Internet-programming monitors. Perhaps, on certain occasions, these humans watch broadcasts featuring chimpanzees bred in captivity. When celebrities are unavailable. Since the majority of humans are, I would argue, being kept down by forces of economic oppression, and chimpanzees are living with similar styles and ambitions for their lives and yet are similarly oppressed, it stands to reason that we are more than a little like one another
.

The routes to liberation in each situation—human and chimpanzee—are also virtually identical. If chimpanzees were to begin to feel the kind of political, social, and evolutionary power which they are due, they would immediately put aside their contentment with creature comforts, so as to militate for greater freedom and independence. Bad luck does not have to go on endlessly. I know that certain thinkers about liberation, such as King, Mahatma Gandhi, and Frantz Fanon, have argued that the arc of history bends toward justice, et cetera, and so on. This implies, in my view, that the oppression of chimpanzees must come to an end too, and we can only hope that the end will come while there are still enough chimpanzees left in the wild to repopulate. The oppressed human must make a similar decision, a decision to leave off from serving the state apparatus, so that he might move toward a whole and experiential vision of what is possible, a union of species perhaps, a symbiosis of primates, interdependent and mutually respectful
.

It was morning when Noelle Stern arrived at the laboratory, fresh from a night of heavy peyote ingestion at the
omnium gatherum
. A number of people, if
people
is even the right word, because some of them claimed to be routinely inhabiting inanimate objects, such as shrubs, stands of sage, and mountainsides, were present at this ingestion. The idea of person and object, that is, had become porous at the
omnium gatherum
. The object, they had learned, was no longer content to serve as a second-order being. This was an emotionally draining experience, and yet Noelle was able to put aside the abstractions, the talking shrubs, of the night before by getting to work promptly. She was first to the office. Koo, as always, was nowhere to be found. Larry hadn’t come in yet. Noelle’s headache, from the peyote, was deep and migrainous, and she had the sensation that she often seemed to have afterward, that life, despite its shabbiness when compared to the pyrotechnical hallucinations of a drug, was somehow rewarding, tender, sad, and welcome. The lines of people at the filling station trying to cash in on the big lottery drawing that day: incredibly sad. The people filling up large drums of water and putting these into their motorless wagons at the government-sponsored rationing stations: very sad. People climbing out of automobiles that no longer had enough algae fuel in them to make a journey to the next intersection: also sad.

Still, Noelle was feeling
upbeat
and
positive
in that she still had a job, and her job on this day was to observe Morton and to interact with Morton a little bit, to see if there was a way that he had begun to respond to the injections that he’d been given earlier. Given that she had just witnessed cacti, in psychedelic hues, arguing about whether the soul was vegetable or mineral, spending a morning watching a chimpanzee operate a computer joystick and push around a ball didn’t seem like the worst thing.

The question of my own enlightenment
, Morton meanwhile considered,
is more important to me, however, than the liberation of my species, which I may not be able to accomplish from this squalid cell. After all, Wilde was not able to achieve complete liberation of his fellow homosexuals from Reading gaol, nor was the Marquis de Sade effective from the Bastille, for all the profligate excellence of the Frenchman’s imagination. Gramsci, Mandela, many great thinkers have spent the kind of time I’m spending now, and they learned to be patient about history while they pursued a course of individual betterment. I must take comfort from these examples
.

Therefore, there are a number of questions I would like to ask. The first question I would like to ask is: How is it that I am composing these lines (admittedly in my head)? Since I know well that in prior years I felt myself to be just as oppressed as any other chimpanzee, and just as uninterested in the political superstructure around me as any other chimpanzee, why is it that today I am a thinking and feeling and rationally reflexive primate who could easily best the humans in many a logical puzzle?

I will put aside the supernatural, which doesn’t really compel as an explanation. I will instead tender three other arguments. The first of these arguments concerns mutation. Perhaps it is possible that evolution, at last, has thrown a curveball in the direction of
Homo sapiens sapiens.
Perhaps evolution has finally anointed another mammal, another primate, who is easily as reflexive and rationally enthusiastic as the human animal, namely myself. Perhaps the time has come, and all I need to do is to insure that I am able to pass along my DNA to succeeding generations of chimpanzees. If this is the case, then it’s absolutely imperative that I sire as many children in captivity as I am able, because I need to avoid interbreeding, though I also need to try to prevent dilution of my intellectual capabilities. Unless I should happen to chance upon a female chimpanzee who is possessed of the kinds of superior skills that I now seem to possess
.

This would be the first argument, the argument from evolution, which might explain my enlightenment. I have a very substantial doubt about this argument, however, and it concerns the suddenness of onset. I am now able to know my own age, and to know that there were many years prior to this year (my eighteenth) in which I was unable to learn much about myself. In prior years, I couldn’t read English (I also now have a modicum of French), I couldn’t follow complex news stories about economics and international relations, I couldn’t banter about sports. By suddenly finding myself capable along these lines, I have to accept that either adolescence is very, very primitive as far as intellectual capacity goes, or I have to conclude that some outside agency caused my enlightenment
.

It is also possible that I am made thus through some kind of accident. It’s possible for all primates, probably all mammals, to suffer severe personality change after head trauma. Maybe what I am experiencing now is post-traumatic awareness of some kind. And yet I’m quite as skeptical about this accidental theory. It’s just too easy
.

You probably know as well as I that there is only one legitimate conclusion, and that conclusion is that my intellectual awareness has been arrived at through experimental regimen. True, the vast majority of experiments performed upon my brethren are cruel, degrading, and inhumane. And yet perhaps it is possible, on occasion, for an experiment to produce genuine results! Improvement in the lot of the chimpanzee! Perhaps I am the beneficiary! If so, I too now believe that the future of life on Earth involves the interfacing of organic life with technological innovation. It is simply ignorant to believe that all life has to be fashioned from organic compounds, or that anything that is conceived of in the brain is somehow less natural, simply because it was not fashioned from the elderflower or the lingonberry. Uranium is natural, and therefore the atomic bomb is natural, and if uranium is natural, how are the dangerous intermediate isotopes of uranium any different? If I am a chimpanzee who is the result of technological interfacing, then I am a happy chimpanzee, because I have something to offer my species that no other chimpanzee has ever had
.

“Morton,” Noelle said, upon slowly and carefully entering his cage. “Did you have a good night?”

Her usual greeting. She had learned from the primatologists that the highest compliment afforded by a chimpanzee, upon greeting, was a casual glance, followed by nonrecognition of any sort. Still, she believed the music of her voice was welcome, and she applied it warmly, fervently, so that it was something reliable, continuous, soothing. She also believed in repetition, in habit. And so she tried to engage with Morton in nearly the same ways each morning. The chimp offered no response. But as she carried to him the plate of orange slices she’d brought for him this particular day, she did notice that he went immediately to grab the fruits, and then, in what was clearly a reversal, he instead made the decision to leave the plate where it was, at least for the time being.