The Murder in the Museum of Man (7 page)

Because this Fessing business is getting to everyone. There’s a poison in the air. I had the distinct feeling when I went into the cafeteria this morning to fetch my usual cup of coffee that people lowered their voices. How to explain to them that Lieutenant Tracy’s visits to me are “routine”? All the more reason, I find, to pursue my own investigation and to keep up an honest, brave front.

Is writer’s block, of the short-term kind at least, nothing more than memory block? I had been sitting here watching the sunset — a glorious shelfing of clouds underlit by ethereal reds and somber mauves — and feeling heavy with the accumulated events of the day, which the practiced diarist needs discharge into words. Only I could remember nothing. Or, to be precise, I could remember nothing when I took keyboard in hand, so to speak, and tried to write. I had to reconstruct my day, starting with breakfast, my morning walk through the arboretum (where a goldfinch, my favorite bird, flew in its roller-coaster flight from a clump of forsythia, as though a part of the bush had broken off and taken wing), then my cup of coffee from the cafeteria, which, as usual, provoked a productive visit to the men’s room, at which point in my retrospective musings, I was quite deluged with recollections of the rest of the day.

As part of my own inquiry into the murder of Dean Fessing, I made an appointment to follow up on numerous requests to tour Pan House, as the troglodyte floor of the Primate Pavilion is now called. Although I have never thought much of all that Freudian business (bad science and worse art), I may in fact have repressed
my memory of what happened because of what I saw and heard in the south wing of the Museum of Man.

I was met at the entrance to Pan House (What next, a coat of arms?) by a smilingly unctuous Damon Drex (“Norman, Norman, my friend, how good you come”). He was accompanied by his assistant, the same youngish man I saw him with at the service for Dean Fessing. Frans or Franz Snyders, as he introduced himself, has, I heard somewhere, some kind of connection with the Wainscott English Department. He shook my hand and spoke in a slow, toneless voice in which I detected a note of insinuating knowingness. I found something vaguely disturbing about his strongly featured face — nose, eyes, and teeth all prominent under a shag of dark hair — and the way his ostensible seriousness appeared to mask a kind of malignant facetiousness, making him seem an amused, toothy Svengali.

“Franz or Frans?” I asked. “With a z or an s?”

“Either.” He smiled.

Well, small wonder eyebrows have been raised of late about Mr. Drex’s spending. Gone are the dismal cages where the poor beasts used to hang forlornly on the bars. This was more like a suite of offices. A fluorescent-lit corridor led between glassed-in cubicles, each equipped with a kind of chimp desk, to which was secured a keyboard much like the one I am using now except larger. I could see the animals busily typing away with great seriousness, pausing only to glance up at color monitors filled with all manner of moving signs. In fact, it wouldn’t have appeared much different from any number of business offices I have been in except for, well, mostly, the droppings.

We paused outside the cubicle of Howler, where I noticed that, at a certain signal on the screen, the ape would inspect a small compartment with a hinged door next to the keyboard. The assistant explained that the animals love M&M’s and that one or two of these candies is programmed to fall into the compartment
when they do something conducive to the production of literature. For instance, he told me, simply by spending enough time “typing” on the keyboard, animals will receive an M&M every half hour. They are also rewarded if, at suitable intervals, they press the space bar. If they press it too much, of course, they are not rewarded. But, he continued, as though amused by it somehow, if they learn to alternate vowels and consonants, they are further rewarded. Certain combinations, such as
ate, ead, pre, tion, ack, eck, ick, ock, uck
, and so on, garner small windfalls of M&M’s, as does the typing of actual words. “In a way,” he said with a sly smile, “it’s not all that different from how nonchimp writers work.”

We stopped at another “office,” where a large and ferocious-looking male was bent over the keyboard. “This is Royd,” Drex’s assistant said. “He’s the alpha male, and we have great expectations for him.”

As you might imagine, I was quite aghast at all this. I am not exaggerating when I say that the reconstruction, with all the new lighting, glass work (actually, shatterproof plastic), and electronic systems, must have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Who paid for all this? I wanted to ask. Where is oversight when we need it?

The corridor opened onto a “rec” room equipped with a television set, in front of which some of the residents sat quietly watching reruns of
I Love Lucy
. Franz or Frans told me that they limit the amount of television the chimps are allowed to watch. “We are concerned,” he said, “about the adverse effect exposure to television, especially the prime-time shows, could have on their intelligence.” Again the faint, goofy, sidelong smile, leaving me to feel as though I were walking through the middle of a bad joke. We watched a couple of animals playing a game of table tennis that he called, with open amusement, “pong-pong.” Right next to the rec room was a food preparation area that looked to
me like any large and well-stocked kitchen. Marge Littlefield has mentioned that the pavilion has held, at considerable expense, catered dinners for its residents.

As we were about to move along, a door just in front of us swung open. A maintenance worker brought a dolly loaded with boxes across the threshold, and I managed to glimpse a remnant of the old pavilion. I could see a truncated double row of dim cages with their inmates gazing numbly through the bars, a veritable dungeon compared with the fluorescent dazzle of the renovated area. In front of the cages I saw a gurney on which lay what appeared to be a draped form. Not far beyond, I realized as I got my bearings, was the crematorium. The assistant quickly shut the door,
RESTRICTED
, a sign on it stated in red letters.
AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY
. I nearly asked if the unfortunate denizens of that place were authorized personnel. “What goes on in there?” I asked instead.

The two men exchanged glances. “It’s AIDS work.”

“With the Medical School?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Strange,” I said. “I’ve not heard about us doing any research on AIDS at the MOM.”

“It’s very hush-hush,” the assistant said, and with a key he opened another door to a driveway outside, where a large vehicle was parked. “That’s what we call our Pan Van,” he went on, obviously to distract my attention. “We use it to take the writing group for outings.” And he gave his miserable laugh.

“It stirs their brains,” Drex said. “Most extraordinary, yes,” he went on as we entered his office, which I took at first to be another, somewhat enlarged cubicle for one of the chimpanzees. “But you must protect with your hat, Norman.”

“My hat?” I said.

“Keep it to yourself,” the assistant interpreted.

“Keep what to myself?” I asked, preoccupied by a previously
unconscious prickling of recognition nearly emerging as a tantalizing realization: Drex reminds me of someone I know but can’t quite place. Drex is on the squat side, with a longish torso, long arms, and short, powerful legs. His skull slopes down to bushy eyebrows that beetle over prominent supraorbital ridges, under which his eyes seem to have withdrawn as though into caves. Then there’s a lump of a nose, a wide mouth full of big, square teeth, and a weak chin, but maddeningly, neither could I then nor can I now recall who it is he reminds me of.

He took my arm just at the elbow and said, “Our project, Norman, our project. We show the world how random is random. We show … How you say …?”

His assistant interceded again, the flattened tones of a professional translator not quite concealing the note of manic glee. “We are in the process of demonstrating that random text creation by a finite number of text-producing entities using state-of-the-art text-recording equipment can, within acceptable parameters, produce enough textual material from which to reliably extrapolate the amount of time and producers it would take for the production of the entire literary canon as it is variously described.”

It took a moment to sink in. “You mean the old monkeys and typewriters thing?” I was appalled.

“Not monkeys,” Drex said.

The assistant smiled.

“Whatever will be your criterion?” I asked, incredulous.

Drex released my arm finally. “We settle standards, yes, Franz?”

The assistant nodded. “We are using a combination of actual text and mathematical extrapolation. The output from each of the writers is being fed into the mainframe, the same one we all use. Each morning Dr. Drex and I go over the output from the day before. We have a text-recognition program that underlines
anything that looks like it might be from the canon.” Then he quickly added, “Of course, the canon isn’t what it used to be, so it shouldn’t be that difficult. The Modern Language Association has already expressed an interest in publishing the results.”

“But what is the point of that?” I asked, incredulous as ever.

The dull gleam of Damon Drex’s narrowed, remote eyes had an edge of mania. “Point, Norman? You ask point?” Then he laughed. “Point, ha, ha, how you say, a fun pun, is break the balloon of man’s prideness.”

“But it will just be random,” I protested.

“Yes, yes, random.”

I laughed myself, deprecatingly of course. But when he took my jeer as assent to his craziness, I shook my head. “But literature is not random.” I groped for meaning myself. “If anything at all, literature is an attempt to render coherent the seeming chaos of life.” I know I sounded like a Sunday school teacher, but in the face of such mocking nihilism, I didn’t know what else to say. “I mean, literature at least
tries
to give form to what happens — from the founding myths of the world and its tribes to the little domestic melodramas of today. Literature encompasses our most noble thoughts and sentiments.… It gives purpose … and pleasure of the most exalted kind. It’s what makes us human.”

Damon Drex’s large, grotesque head went from side to side, and I recoiled from his repellent smile. “Oh, Norman, my friend Norman,” he cooed, his condescension like an oily ooze in the air, “we make you to see the light.”

“A dim light,” I replied. “More like the darkness.”

He liked that. He poked his assistant. “Yes, yes, Frank, ha, ha.… We make Norman to see the darkness.”

Because I could not keep the disgust from my face, I turned away. I gestured out the door. “How are you getting funding for this …” I nearly said “nonsense.”

The man’s brows furrowed for a moment, and his eyes went
hard and suspicious before he recovered his unctuous affability. “We have our means. But we are only begin, yes, Franz? Monkeys and pigeons do same. But no. Franz will say, how, we make history real …”

The younger man’s nod was like a shrug of modesty. “Dr. Drex is alluding to the second, concurrent stage of our experiment. Once the writers have learned to manipulate the keys and built their vocabularies, we will start teaching them to write their own sentences.”

“Why?” I asked. With what I was hearing, with the smells and the animals screeching about something right next door, I truly felt I had landed in a madhouse.

The assistant shrugged again. “Actually, it’s nothing that new. Chimps were taught to use computers back in the seventies.”

Damon Drex was nodding vigorously. “Yes, yes, Frank is right. Remember you Lana, a chimpanzee schooled in Nevada. She make sentence, ‘You green shit …’ ”

“But that’s not part of the canon,” the assistant interrupted. “Not yet, anyway.”

“But we land beyond, yes, Frank?”

His switching of names made it seem he was speaking to two or more people. And in the craziness of the moment, it all seemed part of it.

“Oh, of course. We expect to get nothing less than chimpanzee poetry, short stories, novels, screenplays, murder mysteries, even theory and criticism. We expect to produce nothing less than a pongid literature.” That mocking, toothsome rictus again, and yet he sounded utterly convincing as he added, “We are even thinking of starting a creative writing program.”

“What in the world do you think they will write about?” I asked.

He appeared to speculate for a moment. “I guess they’ll probably write a lot about their relationships with other chimps.
Chimp love stories. Chimp coming-of-age stories. Oh, you know, accounts by young male chimps of how they worked through their relationships with their fathers. I imagine the female chimps will also write about relationships, failed love affairs and parenting and grooming and their relationships with their mothers. I see chimps writing about how tough it is to be chimps.”

“Yes, yes,” Drex was saying, bouncing on the balls of his feet. “Yes, Franz, tell Norman plans for —”

But Frans or Franz or Frank was shaking his head. “Later,” he said.