The Four Fingers of Death (85 page)

Nothing could be harder, now that Morton was waked, than to return to the life of an impoverished slave. A proper time and place beckoned, from which to reveal the extent of his accomplishments, but he was willing to entertain, temporarily, the notion of gradualism. At least until Noelle returned for her shift.

Morton ambled casually over to the computer console, took control of the joystick, and selected the site of one of the left-leaning newspapers in Europe. His knowledge of European history was spotty. For example, Morton could not name all the British monarchs between Victoria and Elizabeth II. He knew there was an abdication in there somewhere, and some deadbeats. It was really rather embarrassing. Time to apply himself to his studies.

Larry, who stood around like an idiot, said, “Look, bub, the notes from Noelle are all missing, from last night. In the office? You didn’t take those notes, did you? We got to keep the notes really organized for Dr. Koo. He’s very particular about having all the notes. It’s, like, uh, the one thing he insists on. I mean, the guy’s not here very often; I don’t know if he even bothers to publish his experimental results, but he sure wants the notes. Did you take those?”

Morton gaped at Larry, as if he didn’t understand a word of his tedious blather.

“Never mind, then. What do you want for breakfast, pal? I’ve got some bananas, some mangos, some cold cereal. I brought in some cereal. For myself. You want some cold cereal? I like the really mushy shit. Where it’s like there’s paper pulp in the bowl.”

This kind of talk was not to be withstood. Some human beings, it appeared to Morton, talked like complete imbeciles. Everything was baby talk, all the day long, and it always came back to scatological terminologies, the constant allusion to waste products. Everything was either going in or coming out. That was it. Humans were just big organ sacks, made for extruding fluids, and then discussing, endlessly, the extrusion thereof. While Morton was considering this tendency, which he termed
feco-narcissism
, for a forthcoming treatise on same, the imbecile Larry came back in with bananas. Morton selected one critically. A potassium delivery system. They weren’t giving Morton enough roughage in his diet, and chimpanzees occasionally experienced irregularity in the same way humans did. Maybe he should tell the imbecile to fix him up a proper bowl of oat bran.

Upon finishing the banana, however, Morton elected to do a little light reading, checked some of the stock prices on the Nikkei and the Hang Seng exchanges. It was true that Morton had no actual stock portfolio, because he was not paid for the labor he performed, but he was interested in learning about the way the securities market functioned, so that when the day came he would be prepared. It wasn’t enough, as he understood it, to perform at the market level. He needed to
outearn
the human beings. Which would require highly leveraged investments.

After the market updates, he went to a few online dating services where he had constructed profiles for himself. It was not that he believed he would meet anyone in this way, since he had no online photograph and referred to himself as
extremely hirsute
in his profiles, but he could practice his language skills there, as well as the rules of social interaction. Throughout all of this, however, all this time-wasting, there was the grand, unfulfilled feeling swelling in his chest. Was it an adolescent feeling, this sensation that he wanted only to gaze upon the woman indwelling in his heart? Could he do none of the things he had done before, such as perform in experimental medical regimens? Could he not be a worker among workers, no matter how unfair the environment in which he toiled?

Larry came back out and, muttering something about
animal enrichment
, indicated that he intended to
play some ball
with Morton, the ball in question being a lightweight foam-rubber basketball of some kind. Larry had dragged in a small backboard, of the sort that one bought for youngsters, nonregulation, and he was in the process of steadying this backboard against one wall, when he began regaling Morton with some cultural insights, Larry-style.

“You know, this is really a great game in terms of exercise, all that. I’m not really able to play it as well as I used to, because I got some meniscal damage, ACL damage, and so forth, from when I played back in college, but I still feel like nothing is better for you. In terms of aerobic workout. So I’ve brought this in today to see if I can explain the basic strategy of the game to you. I’m just going to make a little free throw line here with this. And always remember that you have to have your game face when you’re…”

Larry spun the ball in his palm, as though this were a nervous tic.

“… and then this is the other shooting line, what’s the name of that, the three-point line? Okay, the three-point line, this box marks it; if you can sink one from beyond here you get three points, and this is one-on-one, and the important thing in one-on-one is to watch the physical part of the game, right, pal? No contact in the game at all; it’s all done without touching each other. That’s one of the laws of the game. So I won’t touch you, and you won’t touch me. And I recognize that the ball won’t bounce particularly well in this enclosed little space, but you’re kind of supposed to dribble the ball, you know, not carry it; there’s something called double-dribbling, and traveling. We won’t go too far into those finer points. Just try not to do those things, you got it? You shoot from back there, and you get two or three points, depending on where you are. Ready?”

Morton had watched and listened with galloping feelings of irritation. He’d been reading up, among his other threads of research, on an organization known as the International Humanist and Ethical Union, which had recently managed to have itself adopted as the official state religion in Great Britain (following the death of the last of the British line of monarchs and the abdication of her grandchildren), founded on the idea that every human being was unique and complex and not capable of being reduced to repetitive and unflattering stereotypes, and yet Morton was challenged, to say the least, his uniqueness was challenged by Larry, by the way that Larry was treating him. Larry threw him the basketball, which Morton dropped. It rolled into a corner.

“Pal, you got to do better than that.” And here Larry, from the corner, carefully lofted the lightweight basketball up so that it made a gentle
swish
, which Morton believed was the proper term, passing through the basketball net unperturbed. “There’s an agility part of the game, a gracefulness, I’ll grant you that,” Larry said. “But the main thing with the game is the part that has to do with
wanting it
. You have to
want
the game, pal. Don’t just sit there thinking you’re a chimpanzee and you’re on the gravy train here, with the free room and board, and you have interesting and brilliant people who want to come in here day in and day out to ask you questions. You can’t just accept that arrangement, pal. You have to try to make more of yourself than that. Some people just never get past the free room and board, and they become a drag on federal resources. You don’t want that.”

He passed the ball to Morton, and this time Morton successfully caught the ball, and then, without dribbling, Morton, with the ball gathered into him as though it were a little baby chimp, headed straight for the basket. Upon standing under the basket, where he intended to shoot the ball, according to what he understood of the game, Morton instead collided with Larry, who batted the ball out of his grasp, so that it again bounced away, caroming off the trash bin on the other side of the cell.

“What did I tell you? I told you that you had to try to dribble, somehow. That means you have to bounce it. Every step or so. You think you can try to do that? I’m going to make some notes, for Dr. Koo, about your physical agility here, you know, so maybe you can try to do a little bit better than how you’re doing.”

When the ball rolled back from the wall, Morton snatched it up. He tried to throw the ball at the backboard, but it bounced harmlessly from the wall nearby. The basketball then fell into human control, and the human being bounced it around a little bit, according to the strictures of dribbling, before brazenly, premeditatedly
fouling
the chimp, with his upper body. That is, Larry knocked Morton onto his posterior. While Morton rested in that condition, Larry went in for the layup. He grabbed the rim when he was through with the shot. This, Morton later understood, was known as the
dunk
.

“Okay, bub, you are obviously not
wanting it
sufficiently,” Larry said. “And that means that I am going to have to tell you a little bit about what you’re up against here. What you are up against is a well-armed opponent, an opponent who has all the rules and who has made up all the rules, the kinds of rules that basically insure that he is going to win in every situation. The opponent has even determined that you are playing, even though you have said nothing consensual about
wanting
to play. Your opponent has decided that your not saying anything about playing means you
are
playing, and that
the man
basically can do whatever the hell he wants to do. And he isn’t even going to bother to give you all the rules.”

Larry moved in close to Morton.

Later, Morton would plead that despite the evidence to the contrary, he was still a chimpanzee. However substantial his language skills. The human animal was his rival. There would always be a moment in the chimpanzee’s life when the chimpanzee felt this, felt the antagonistic force of the human animal, and in this oppositional moment, the chimpanzee feels the boiling in his blood that in human circles signifies
impulse control difficulties
, though there is no reason to believe that the same terminology should apply to the chimpanzee, in whose world there are no laws for
anger management
. On the contrary, the chimpanzee celebrates
impulse control issues
. He (or she) has accepted that free and complete acquiescence to the impulse is how the primate lives. A chimpanzee will be slaughtered by the members of the tribe that he or she has only lately frolicked with, and the tears shed by his or her acquaintances will be brief, if in fact there are any. Which doesn’t mean that the chimpanzee doesn’t
care
, but simply that the chimpanzee embraces the violent gesture. This was why Morton, having attempted only hours before his first love poem, didn’t consider, not even briefly, suppressing his urge to smack Larry around. With upper body strength five times what Larry was capable of, it wasn’t at all difficult, upon approaching the human animal, for Morton to push him against the wall with inordinate force, so that the back of Larry’s head struck the wall with an unsettling thud, whereupon Larry, completely unsuspecting, lost his footing immediately. Larry was putty before Morton, who seized him by the shoulders, lifted him up, and then shoved him rudely to the ground anew. There was some protesting from Larry—
Pal, listen to me, I was trying to help! I was trying to tell you the kinds of things you’re facing in the laboratory, I swear. I wasn’t—
but Morton was no longer listening to this human rationalizing, and he took Larry’s hand, deprived it of the basketball it held (which now bounced to a stationary position across the cell as the physical conflict raged), and bit it nearly as hard as he could bite it. This bite immediately raised a half circle of bloody perforations on Larry, which in turn caused the human adversary to cry out, as if the video cameras in the laboratory could help him now. Still, this was in the category of flesh wounds, as far as Morton was concerned. After all, chimpanzees were in the habit, occasionally, of
eating
their enemies, or at least parts of them. Although Morton didn’t want to eat Larry, he could do so if he had to. There were viands associated with the human animal that might be palatable. The eyeball of the human animal would perhaps make a good snack, a little jelly snack. And despite his omnivorous fondness for melons and other fresh fruits, he would have to admit that he had a more primitive and atavistic taste for the liver. The liver was high in cholesterol, Morton understood, but when he looked at Larry, he imagined a large, doughy liver full of residuary toxins. The violence of the removal of Larry’s liver held a certain attraction, however, and there were perhaps a few other parts that might be rather tasty too. A kidney belonging to Larry, for example, once voided of its contents, which voiding would likely take place as soon as Larry verified that he was about to be eaten, could taste pretty good. You didn’t have to cook kidneys, really. Indeed, this human obsession with cooking things, that was for animals who were conflicted about being primates. Once you committed to having the innards of the enemy
all over you
, the fluids lacquering you, the organs laid out around you on the forest floor like a meats department display, then you were really happy with the freshness of the steaks as they were harvested straight from the organ cavity of the enemy. If you could eat the heart, Morton supposed, while it was still beating, or at the briefest possible interval after its last beating, if you could eat the heart having lately watched it pump its last gush of oxygenated blood out into the room, then, Morton supposed, the heart would be at its most succulent. With these delectations in mind, Morton decided to finish Larry off by bashing his head apart on the floor of the cell.