The Four Fingers of Death

  “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.

  “Is there anything you particularly want this morning, Morton? I suppose I could give you more of the paints, but I think you have used up most of the paints for now. Until we get more. Unless you are interested in chartreuse. Or mauve. We loaded some new alphabetical software on the computer, and you could work with that for a while. There’s also a copy of a personality index called the Myerson-Goldberg Multiple Choice Index. You could fill that out, and we could see if you have sociopathic qualities. Dr. Koo wants you to take the test at some point. But there’s not a lot of pressure there. Or I could just read to you a little bit from this book I’m reading about medieval diseases. Any of these things of interest?”

  Morton looked at Noelle, looked down at his chimpanzee hands, as if to express chagrin at the shape of them, and then, unless she was mistaken, he looked right at her and sighed. How to describe the sigh? Some sighs have hundreds of years of history in them. Noelle was sure that Morton’s sigh was one of these, and she believed it had to do with his hands. It was true that she had not quite got over the “thumb broad” prank, and she still believed Larry was lying when he said that he hadn’t painted the word thumb over dumb on the pad. She realized that it was a not infrequent side effect of hallucinogens that regular life began to be corroded by the bizarre certainties of the drug theater. Maybe, again, she was believing that Morton was sighing in an expressive way because she had taken powerful hallucinogenic drugs the night before. And maybe Morton was leaning down and looking at her shoe, and was nonetheless attempting to tie her shoe for her, and maybe all of this had nothing to do with the hallucinogens or anything else. Maybe it was just part of life in the animal research laboratory. The big black fingers of the chimpanzee, imperfectly calibrated to the fine workmanship of shoe tying, pursued the intricacies of the butterfly knot, the loops and the inside and outside of negative space, in a way that truly must have had something in common with the famous typing monkeys, because Morton did exceedingly well with the butterfly knot at first, if slowly. While she, still bent forward at the waist like some sufferer of osteopetrosis, waited, the ape crouched at her sneakered foot (these sneakers were rainbow hued and had been purchased used), and she could smell his breath. Their breaths, their inhalations and exhalations, met and commingled as the ape labored with her shoe. Their breaths were one.

  At last, however, Morton let go of the butterfly knot that he was struggling so badly to keep in his hand, sighed additionally, and he lumbered over to one wall of the cage instead, where there was a nasty, oily stain, probably a fecal smear from some primate who antedated Morton. He stood there, as if expectant. As if beckoning to her.

  “Giving up on the laces so soon? Do you want to clean the wall? Is that what you’re trying to tell me? Because you know, if you wanted to assume some of my maintenance responsibilities, I’d be only too happy to let you take up the slack.”

  She didn’t wait for an answer, because all conversation with Morton, or virtually all conversation, was rhetorical. Instead, Noelle slipped out of the cage, went down the empty hall to the supply closet, and brought the mop, the bucket, and some sponges.

  Pursuing the legal remedies that will grant me my freedom, Morton pondered, before the bucket arrived, will require that I reveal myself to the world, that I demonstrate my linguistic and reasoning skills, but that will bring down upon me a great deal of attention. Truly, one of the great blessings of modern life, especially now, is anonymity, and it’s a certainty that my anonymity, which is part of my life here in the laboratory, will be challenged by the kind of media circus that’s bound to ensue, once people know about my skills. Given that I cannot help but be a standard-bearer for my species, it may be that I simply have to accept this as part of my lot. However, there is one very high cost, as regards my becoming a well-known political thinker and statesman, and that cost relates to my growing feelings about this woman.

  When I think back to the period before and the period now, there is only one constant that connects these two periods. Only one person was there before—this I know indisputably—and is here now. Her name, so as not to be rude about the whole business, is Noelle, which I think is a very beautiful name, a name that has a lot in common with the wintertime celebration of lights known as Christmas. That I remember her from before is perhaps part of why I cannot seem to overcome my surging ardor with respect to Noelle. Perhaps I am suffering with what I believe is called in human circles a “crush.” Of course, we have these in the chimpanzee world too, but they are temporary, and also potentially very dangerous. Should you unwisely elect to fall in love with a female who is already spoken for by one of the high-ranking chimpanzees of the group, you are liable to receive a serious, I believe the expression is known as smackdown.

  Because I am the only chimpanzee in the laboratory right now, there is no danger of my crush resulting in bodily harm of any kind. Perhaps for this reason my feelings about Noelle, the ones that date to the earlier period in which she took care of a primitive and adolescent Morton, have become more acute now that I possess the language with which to elaborate upon their specifics. For example, now I have experienced what I refer to as the Night Cherishing. Night, when I am alone in the cell and there are few visits, except perhaps from the learning-disabled night janitor who happens by periodically, is the worst time, because there is very little stimulus, and yet it is also the time in which I am left alone with my thoughts, and I am therefore at liberty to think about the garments that Noelle may have been wearing this day. I try to avoid thinking about her in an unchaste way, but in the midst of Night Cherishing I recall the little gestures that she has made, or displayed; I wouldn’t refer to them as mating gestures or mating rituals at all. On the contrary. In a way, it’s exactly the unrequited nature of my feelings about Noelle that motivates me during the Night Cherishing. She cocks her head in a certain fashion when I feel sure she is being ironic. Recently she asked me whether I was tired of having lunch with her and whether we should invite others to our daily lunch gatherings, and I understood her question to be facetious, and yet the adorable way that she cocked her head while she was saying it, it was just very sweet. I was eating peanut butter, by the way, which was causing me to lick my lips in that way that human beings seem to find so amusing, and I was kind of ashamed of myself, and therefore I decided to put off finishing the peanut butter sandwich, which in any event was creamy as opposed to chunky, and this does not meet with my approval. Because I was putting off eating, Noelle asked if I would prefer to have some other lunch companion, and this remark occasioned the cocking of the head, and the cocking of the head occasioned, later on, the Night Cherishing. There might also be a certain garment that she’s wearing. For example, today she is wearing these lightweight shoes that are called sneakers, and they are of such fanciful colors, and it’s just very hard for me not to think back on these shoes, I have found, and think of them as something that I am just very, very glad to have in my life.

  Noelle loved the weaving motion of the mop and bucket, and she weaved and careened down the ill-lit laboratory corridor and into the primate research center with her drunken bucket full of soapy water. A couple of sponges lay in the bott
om of the bucket, and these she fished out. Into the dingy, joyless cage, where all her efforts to decorate the space had come to naught, she wheeled the bucket, bringing it to a sloshing halt in front of the animal.

  “It’s your first chance to have a low-paying and difficult job of the kind that any unskilled worker in this country might have. I feel like I shouldn’t really initiate you into this, because if you are able to learn how to be a wage slave, as opposed to a victim of science, then you will just be treated unfairly twice over. But it seemed like you were asking for the bucket, and so I brought it.”

  The response was almost instantaneous. In the past, she had seen chimps, and especially orangutans, express an interest in cleaning solutions when, practically speaking, the only real interest they had was in splashing the cleaning products onto the human who was standing nearest to them. Or perhaps they were inhaling some of the cleaning solution for the purpose of derangement. In this case, Morton’s interest in the cleaning supplies seemed strangely to be about cleaning. He successfully dragged the bucket over toward the wall, he applied water to a sponge, he began massaging the oily brown stains on the wall. It was true, Noelle observed, that he did take special interest in squeezing the water out of the sponge and back into the bucket, and repeating the dipping and squeezing, as if testing the liquid properties of the deluge that resulted. But most indisputable was the interest of the chimp in the actual cleaning of the wall, and the conclusion had to be that this particular chimp, unlike many others that she had seen, preferred a tidy and presentable living space.

  From the office, she sent a message to Koo’s old-fashioned voice mailbox to offer a few comments on the situation, noting that Morton seemed “even more tidy” than he had seemed in the past few days. And then, when she walked back into Morton’s space, he handed the mop back to her, as if he was through with it, and he gestured at the stain on the wall, whose fecal splatter was all but removed now, as if to indicate that he had cleaned it up especially for her, so that she wouldn’t have to work under these unsanitary conditions. Was that possible?

  Was she imagining all of this?

  And was it really true that she had had a conversation with a paloverde tree last night, and that in the conversation with the paloverde tree, she had asked it, well aware that there was a risibility to the whole exchange, whether it was possible to have relationships across species lines? In the aftershock of peyote, she felt herself to be again nothing more than a medical researcher, albeit a medical researcher with certain vague spiritual ideas. She knew that the paloverde (and later the prickly pear) were actual examples of plant life, not beings of volition. Sex with them would not, could not, be very rewarding, if only for the spines. And yet if there were an emotional bond there, then maybe the cross-species difficulties would not be insurmountable. Love made all things possible, she’d said to the paloverde. A tree blowing in a desert breeze could be moving and delightful. It could be a thing of sublime beauty. Why couldn’t there be love? The paloverde tree, however, had been rather brusque, just not very seductive when you got right down to it. He reminded her of a lot of the men in the omnium gatherum, self-involved, falsely casual, somewhat narcissistic. Later, it occurred to her that when she asked the paloverde about interspecies love, she was not, in fact, confining the topic to vegetation.

  “Morton, did you clean that off for me? That’s very kind of you. Because Larry, you know, usually leaves the cleaning for me, as if he’s certain that even though we have the same pay grade, my being a woman somehow makes me better at cleaning stuff. Listen, I know that the bonobos are much more about the matrilineal, matriarchal thing than the chimps are, but I’m going to give you some insight here into the situation with humans, and maybe that will help you as you go forward in your dealings with humans. Okay, Morton, the situation is that the male of the species is always looking for ways to dominate the woman. That’s just my opinion, and maybe you should consider it my opinion. But that’s how it is. It’s true that in many cases the male of the species is physically larger. Look at me. I’m not a big girl, really. But even when the women are big, and there are all these models that are mainlining designer HGH and stuff, and they’re six feet tall or more, and they look like they just came in from killing wolves out by the fjord, I guarantee you that every guy thinks he’s got something over those Valkyrie maidens. He can order them around, and even if he’s an evolved guy, from the omnium gatherum, and he’s a paloverde under the cover of night, he goes home and he expects the woman to wash the stains from his Y-front briefs. That’s why I’m here, all these hours, all these days, and when there’s shit all over the floor, it’s me who comes to clean up the shit. It’s either me or the janitor guy. Because a woman is lower than an autistic janitor, who is lower than a chimpanzee, who is lower than the lowest, meanest man on the face of the planet. And that’s why I really appreciate your cleaning up the smear.”

  There was an expectancy in his expression again, or else she was really starting to go crazy and ought not to have come into work that morning, and it was the expectancy that made her feel as though she wanted to unburden herself even further. The stool in the cage, on which she sat, screaked, and Morton flinched. It wasn’t easy to do it, what she did next, and she sort of wondered whether in doing it she was just cleaning out the last bit of peyote in her system. She did it anyway.

  “Morton, would it be all right if I told you something that I’m going through right now? I know that you are not really going to have an opinion on this stuff, but there’s something going on at the omnium gatherum, which you know is this spiritual community that I’m involved with, and I just have a bad feeling about it, and I haven’t really told anyone about it. Because, you know, obviously, here at work, nobody believes in that kind of thing. They all think it’s pretty embarrassing. I just feel like I can talk to you about this stuff without feeling, you know, judged or something.”

  It wasn’t until she began to tell him that she realized how much it had been bothering her, how with these alternative ideological systems, you know, the irrational thinking took place a little bit at a time. You didn’t know at first. You just woke up one day, assuming you could still wake effectively, assuming wakefulness was still part of your life, and upon waking you realized that you had gone further than you’d meant to go in alternative culture, and now you were far away, downstream, waving at your family, who stood on the banks. What she was trying to describe to Morton was the feature of the omnium gatherum known as algorithms. They had algorithms for everything now; they had algorithms for playing chess, they had algorithms for dating, they had algorithms to predict chaotic systems like annual rainfall and the apocalypse. People hooked up a bunch of mainframes, and they got into the business of forecasting, because that was the last part of the service economy at which NAFTA still seemed to excel. And there was a reason for that. The reason for that, she started telling Morton, was that NAFTA favored the eschatological. And the guys at the omnium gatherum, because it was always guys who ran these things (she told Morton), had realized there was a spot in the forecasting business model where no one had yet created a lively web presence (besides, what with the Futures Betting Syndicate, it was possible to make a market in the apocalypse).

  And thus were born the algorithms. The algorithms were compiled from all the available statistical data on the end, which is not to say the likes of the Chelsea Clinton senatorial campaign, but the actual predictions of the End from all the ecstatic cults and the declassified intelligence reports. The algorithms, after the big economic collapses of the past twenty years, she told Morton, had become really pretty popular as a web site, although a lot of the traffic was said to be ironic; you know, the people visiting the site didn’t really believe that the End was coming, they just liked reading the updates and looking at the advertising.

  There had been many reckonings of the End over the years. The way to increase market share as a splinter religion was to come up with an attractive idea about the End a
nd to sell it hard. Probably you had to pick a time that wasn’t too far off, not unimaginably far off, like 2112 or 2345 or something, because no one who was alive now gave a shit if the End was going to be in 2345, because their great-great-great-grandchildren would have to worry about that. You had to pick a time that was pretty soon, and then you had to collect a lot of canned goods and other kinds of donations, but not weapons, because when you collected weapons, that attracted the attention of government agencies. You had to stockpile stuff, awaiting the End, and then when the End didn’t come, you had to retire quietly to a condominium somewhere with a nice climate. People were constantly using idiosyncratic calculus to recalibrate. And interpret. This was the word that they liked at the omnium gatherum.

  “Look around you, Morton,” she said. “The world is composed of signs. People laboring in a sandstorm of significations. And it’s their job, they say, to interpret these signs. A bicycle painted white chained on a street corner with garlands upon the seat. No coincidence. The proliferation of coyotes in downtown Rio Blanco. Those are no ordinary coyotes, and they don’t have to do with habitat destruction or the gutting of the Endangered Species Act.”

  And because of all this interpretation, and owing to the popularity of the algorithms, the men of the omnium gatherum had decided that the End was now.

  “Morton, you know and I know that the End is mainly just a silly kind of marketing. It’s attractive because it means that you don’t have to make long-range plans for things, and you don’t have to worry about how you’re going to pay for your kid’s college education, any of that sort of thing. And you don’t have to worry about voting in the next election. The End is adolescent. It’s always teenagers, on harder drugs, not that I have any right to criticize drugs, but it’s always the teenagers who think the End is at hand. Still, you know what, it’s kind of scary when they say it’s now. When people you know socially, and maybe you slept with them once or twice, just to be nice, when these people you know socially are suddenly talking about the End, and it’s now. So the question is, Morton, do you think I should just pay no attention? Should I just say that these are my friends, or some of them are my friends, anyway, and they have some really strange ideas; what do you think? Is that the right approach?”