The implication was twofold. On the one hand, this was a heavily armed (with uranium-tipped explosives and armor-piercing bullets, Tasers, proton disrupters, and every other kind of infernal killing device) military detachment that was not to be trifled with; on the other hand, the captain and Rafferty had achieved an understanding. The substance of the understanding was that the federal rules did not apply. The ability of the government to enforce its dictates was understood to be limited. The government could threaten. But in the desert a certain casual feeling about the rule of law was the law, and order was best maintained through a system of mutual interdependencies, these being based upon a seesawing of trust, distrust, and money.
Rafferty, understanding the request, immediately hauled one of the computer chassis out of the back of his truck, set it at the feet of the captain, and remarked that he’d kind of been hoping “to put the thing on the wall” in his trailer. Some busted-down private shone a lamplight in the truck and plucked out some wiring. The men then had a laugh, before the captain reminded Rafferty that he had been ordered to evacuate and that this order was serious, given “the nature of what we’re dealing with.”
“Which is what?” Rafferty said.
“You’re liable to find out before long, and that’s all I can say to you at present. But I’m asking you to observe this request, seriously, because it’s not only for yourself, but for all the people who live here in the valley. We don’t know exactly what we’re dealing with yet, but we have a large population in this county, and a very fluid one, and we don’t want whatever was in this crash site getting out into that large population. Your silence on the subject is also appreciated. Now, I don’t have to worry any further, am I right?”
The ranking officers present as well as the enlisted men all remember the conversation as recounted here, and so there can be little doubt. Rafferty was warned. Rafferty, with the sangfroid of a seasoned low-stakes gambler, had turned back some computer junk to the personnel involved in the salvage operation with the intention of keeping the severed arm, which was, as yet, wrapped in the old advertising circular and lying, at this moment, in the foot well of his flaking, rusting pickup truck.
It is reasonable to surmise that Rafferty chuckled to himself upon climbing back into the front of the truck and turning on the satellite radio, which he had dialed to a station that played country and western and Native American music. He threw the vehicle into drive. He looked down at the arm and repeated aloud his belief, in his impaired state, that he had heard the arm moving earlier, though it now seemed quite still.
The drive across the prairie in the direction of the Forsaken Mining Corp. and its attendant home office, which Rafferty had no intention of evacuating, was a short one, since the operator was running the vehicle on algaenated fumes. And yet it was even shorter than usual. For it was only seconds after Rafferty took his eyes off the arm that it began using a creeping technique that involved grasping with its rather long fingernails for surfaces onto which it could find a secure handhold, moving up onto the seat and toward Rafferty; that is, the arm ventured across the bench-style front seat of the cab of Rafferty’s pickup truck (more than 200,000 miles on the odometer), and its arachnid-style scuttling was slow and circumspect at first, as if it might possibly have understood that it needed to move imperceptibly to avoid detection. It dug in its nails, into the vinyl surface of the banquette—plainly evident to forensics experts upon the scene later—and in this way it propelled itself quietly forward, leaving behind a drizzled trail of caked, congealed blood.
Rafferty was wearing, that night, a heavily stained mechanic’s jumpsuit, one he may have purchased secondhand at one of the many used-clothing outlets of Rio Blanco. He had nothing on underneath except a T-shirt. There were some old black work shoes found on the body later, and some grimy athletic socks. The arm, through dead reckoning, launched itself on the nearest fleshy site, and that was the right thigh of the miner, the thigh that was, at the moment of the assault, controlling the accelerator of the truck. Apparently, the arm had no idea of the import of its actions, because jeopardizing the operation of the truck, in which the arm was itself carried, right alongside Bix Rafferty, was not something that was in the arm’s interest. And yet the arm went straight for the thigh, and even more the arm seemed intent, according to the forensics experts, on passing over the thigh, traversing the thigh, on the way to harrying the unprotected groin of Bix Rafferty. The arm clawed at the leg of Bix Rafferty, who was driving, and who was whistling along with some country and western song about lost women and found whiskey, and Rafferty, at that blinding moment, took his eyes off the dirt track. And he saw that the arm was now upon him. With an arm of his own, he attempted to seize the bloody stump end of the severed arm and to fling it from him. Rafferty, in a condition of mortal dread, his veins now sluices of adrenal fluid, was powerfully alert to the necessities of self-preservation. And yet the severed arm too was breathtakingly strong. The severed arm had no purpose but its intention to grasp, and so it had no reason not to give this task its personal best. When it dug its longish nails into something, it really dug them in, and in this case, the nails were puncturing the jumpsuit, pinching the inner thigh of Rafferty, and attempting, moreover, to make probing, stabbing motions in the direction of his genitals, and he was kicking wildly and screaming and attempting to dislodge the arm, to no avail, and now the arm was attempting to climb the front of Rafferty, up along the rusty zipper of the jumpsuit, as though the zipper were one of the freight rails that bisected Rio Blanco and the arm were intent on walking alongside it. The variety of curses uttered by Rafferty would be too numerous to include, and a catalogue of these oaths would distract from his understanding of the danger he was in. In effect, the arm sobered him, cleared his head, so that he could see what a mistake he had made by spiriting away the arm, and perhaps this was his last thought, before the truck, which had long since left the comfort of the unpaved road that led to Rafferty’s operation and was now teetering in a wash, encountered a toppled saguaro or rock, lifted up on one side, and then rolled. The truck went twice over in the wash.
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 modi
cum 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.