But there was Hamilton, standing between the grinning wop and the grinning spic, ready to flick a filthy checkered tablecloth off what looked to be a cage behind him. He was beaming like a magician. The monkeys screeched and stank. Sunlight filtered softly through the trees. “Ready, Edward? Voilà!”
The tablecloth fluttered to the ground and the cage stood revealed. Inside was a pale orange aggregation of limbs and hair that looked like nothing so much as a heap of palm husks until it began to stir. O‘Kane saw two liquid eyes, nostrils like gouges in a rubber tire, the naked simian face. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” he said, “what is it?”
“Orang-utan,” the doctor pronounced. “Literally, ‘man of the forest.’ His name is Julius, and he comes to us all the way from Borneo, courtesy of one of Captain Piroscz’s colleagues, Benjamin Butler, of the Siam.” The doctor’s grin ate up his face. “Our first ape.”
O‘Kane took a step back when Hamilton reached down to unlatch the mesh door of the cage. He was thinking of the one-eyed chimp in Donnelly’s and the way it had taken hold of Frank Leary’s hand — and wasn’t that a fine thing for an ape to do?
“It’s all right,” the doctor reassured him, “he’s quite tame. A former pet. Come on, Julius,” he cooed, his voice sweetened to the hypnotic whisper he used on his ravers and lunatics, “come on out now.” A pair of oranges, held seductively aloft, was the inducement.
“Are you sure—?” O‘Kane began.
“Oh, yes, there’s nothing to worry about,” Hamilton said over his shoulder. “They’ve had him on shipboard since he was a baby and they all loved him, the whole crew, and they hated to give him up, but of course now that he’s full-grown it became too dangerous, what with the rigging and pots of hot tar and whatnot…. Come on, that’s a boy.”
Soundlessly, the shabby orange creature unfolded itself from the cage, crouching over its bristling arms like a giant spider. O‘Kane took another step back and the two keepers exchanged a nervous glance — the thing was nearly as big as they were, and it certainly outweighed them. And, of course, like all the rest of the hominoids, it stank like a boatload of drowned men.
Julius didn’t seem much interested in the oranges, but he folded them into the slot in the middle of his plastic face as if they were horse pills and shambled through the dust to where the monkeys and baboons were affixed to the doors of the cages and shrieking themselves breathless. He exchanged various fluids with them, his face drooping and impassive even as they clawed at the mesh and bared their teeth, then sat in the dirt sniffing luxuriously at his fingers and toes before lazily hoisting himself into the nearest tree like a big dangling bug, where he promptly fell asleep. Or died. It was hard to tell which — he was so utterly inanimate and featureless, it was as if someone had tossed a wad of wet carpeting up into the crotch of the tree.
O‘Kane could feel Hamilton’s eyes on him. “Well?” the doctor demanded. “What do you think? Magnificent, isn’t he?”
The two keepers had moved off into the big central enclosure Hamilton had designed as a communal area where his hominoids could “interact,” as he called it, busying themselves with setting up the apparatus for one or another of the doctor’s arcane experiments. The monkeys, locked up in their individual cages, watched them with shining eyes. They knew what the doctor’s experiments meant: eating, fighting and fucking, and not necessarily in that order. O‘Kane was at a loss for words.
“You don’t look terribly enthusiastic, Edward,” Hamilton observed, the beardless jaw paler than the rest of his face, like the etiolated flesh beneath a bandage. His eyes did a quick flip.
“No, it’s not that — I was wondering if you can get more, uh, hominoids like this orange one. It must be pretty rare. I have to admit I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Oh, it is, it is. But apes are what we want, Edward. The Macacus rhesus is a splendid experimental subject, and we’re fortunate to have them, the baboons too, but the apes are our nearest cousins and the more of them we can get, the more thorough — and relevant — my studies will be. Don’t you see that?”
O‘Kane was working the toe of his shoe in the friable yellow dirt, creating a pattern of concentric circles, each one swallowing up the next. He wanted a drink. He wanted a woman. He wanted to be downtown, with Mart and Roscoe LaSource, his elbows propped up on a polished mahogany bar and a dish of salt peanuts within easy reach. “Listen, Dr. Hamilton,” head down, still working his shoe in the dirt, “there’s something I’ve been wondering about, and I don’t mean to sound disrespectful or to question your methods in any way, but I can’t really see how all this is supposed to help Mr. McCormick. What I mean is, the monkeys are out here going through their paces and he’s in there twisted up like a strand of wire, and I may be wrong, but I don’t see him getting any better.”
The doctor let his eyes flip once, twice, and O‘Kane was reminded of a bullfrog trying to swallow something stuck in its craw. There was a long silence, the monkeys chittering softly in anticipation of their release into the larger pen, the breeze shifting ever so subtly to concentrate their odor. O’Kane wondered if he’d gone too far.
“First of all, Edward.” Hamilton said finally, his eyes looming up amphibiously from beneath the gleaming surface of his spectacles, “I want to say how pleased I am to see that you’re taking an active interest in Mr. McCormick’s condition. As I’ve said, he is the key to everything we do here, and we can never lose sight of that fact. Dr. Kraepelin may have pronounced him incurable, but both Dr. Meyer and I disagree with that diagnosis — there’s no reason why he shouldn’t experience if not a complete cure then at least an amelioration of his symptoms and a gradual reintegration into society.”
There was a sudden crash from the direction of the big cage, followed by a duet of Mexican and Italian curses—puta/ puttana, puta/ puttana—and O‘Kane glanced up to see the keepers fumbling with a gaily painted wooden structure the size of a piano. He recognized it as the clapboard chute the doctor had designed to test his monkeys’ mental adroitness: there were four exit panels, and the monkeys had to remember which one was unlocked and led to the reward of a banana. In the same instant Hamilton jerked his head angrily round, his voice igniting with fury: “Be careful with that, you incompetent idiots! If you so much as chip the paint I’ll dock your wages, believe me, I will!” and then he broke into Italian — or maybe it was Mexican. The veins stood out in his throat and his face took on the color of the plum tomatoes the wops were growing out back of the cottages. O’Kane was impressed.
He must have raved at them in their own language for a good minute or more, and then he turned back to O‘Kane as if nothing had happened, the coolest man in the world, his voice reduced to its habitual mesmeric whisper. “Certainly Mr. McCormick’s case is a difficult one, Edward, and I can assure you it disturbs me no end to see him as thoroughly blocked as he is now, but that’s all the more reason to take extraordinary measures, to go where no man has gone before in an attempt to uncover the psychological underpinnings of infrahuman behavior — sexual behavior, that is — so that we can apply them to our own species, and, specifically, to Mr. McCormick, whose generosity has made all this possible to begin with.”