Despite my plan, however — which was like a long-faded path through the jungle, nearly overgrown now, with only a few landmarks still recognizable — and despite there being an ostensible goal, a consciously chosen destination that I’d imagined lying at the end of the path, it felt as if I were being mysteriously drawn towards that goal by a magnet, and that the pull was generated out there, in Liberia. Not here, inside me. I was being reeled in. I could say, and had, that I was going out to Liberia to learn what happened to my sons after I left the country those many long years ago and, if possible, to bring them back with me to the States; I could say, and had, that I was going out there to honor my husband’s memory somehow, a private, solitary thing I had to do. I could say that I was going to try to learn what happened to my friends and my husband’s family. I had said these things any number of times — to Anthea, to the other girls at the farm, to the few good citizens of Keene Valley whom I counted as friends. And to myself. I said them especially to myself. All the way across the Atlantic to Abidjan, then in the bush taxi to the border between Côte d’Ivoire and Liberia, and down to the coast from Nimba in the back of the truck, I kept naming my reasons for coming there.
And I will tell you something that at the time made me ashamed, although now it makes a kind of sense. Not moral sense, but psychological, emotional sense. From the beginning, from the day that I decided to leave my farm and return there, I did not once picture my husband Woodrow’s dark, perpetually somber face in my mind; nor did I see the faces of the boys, little Dillon, my crackling smart, hyperactive one, or angelic Paul, my peacemaker, or William, as somber as his father. They were my family — the only husband I have ever had and probably ever will, and my missing sons, my only children, for I know that I will never bear another. I am too old. Old and dried up, a husk of a woman. So they are not just the family of my past; they are the family of my future as well. But it was as if they had become names only. I have their photographs in frames on the sideboard in my living room at the farm, all four faces gazing at me, and another set is on my bedroom dresser. Yet once I had actually departed from the farm and driven in my Honda along the lane to the road and headed down the Northway from the Adirondacks to New York City, once I was on my way to Africa again, I did not, I could not, I would not see their faces. No, the truth is I saw only the faces of my chimpanzees.
On a deep — perhaps the most basic — level, my chimpanzees were drawing me back. Not my husband’s memory, not my sons. My chimpanzees. And during that long night coming down the half-destroyed road from Nimba to Monrovia, enduring the pronged heat under the canvas tarp as if I were inside a covered, black, cast-iron pot baking in an oven, I lay there and remembered the creatures that I had abandoned, my chimpanzees. I did not remember my husband or my sons or our life together. I remembered only those poor, confused creatures whom I had nurtured and protected for so long, the innocents for whom I had been willing to give my life — or so I had believed.
In the early days, when I first set up the sanctuary, I cared mainly for the babies, newborns and infants. I had two helpers more experienced with chimps than I. They took care of the older, more demanding and sometimes dangerous chimps, who often arrived at the sanctuary traumatized by abuse and from afar, found stuffed into packing crates at JFK or LAX or in birdcages or cat carriers on their way to an even more abused life and a mercifully early death in a pharmaceutical laboratory in Vienna or New Jersey. To help them, one needed much more experience and knowledge of animals than I had then. So at first I worked in the nursery, as we called it, and from the appearance and actions of the babies in my care, from the quality of their gazes and the intensity of their attention, I thought it was in their nature to dream, even when awake. From the start I tried to penetrate their consciousness, for it was obvious that they possessed consciousness, and to me its particular quality was the same as what the Australian Aborigines meant by dreamtime — not drifting or soporifically sliding through life, their attention always askew or elsewhere, like ours, but behaving as if they were free to look at every single thing as if it had never been seen before, as if everything, a leaf, an ant, a human ear, were of terrible and wondrous significance. As it is in a dream. Or as it must be for someone suffering from dementia. For them, it seemed there was no consciousness of past or future, only the immediate present, from which nothing could distract them. For us it’s almost the opposite. They are nonhuman animals imprisoned on the far side of speech, but they share nearly ninety-nine percent of our genes and more closely resemble humans than a bluebird from the East Coast of the United States resembles a bluebird from the West. But because they’re mute, from birth to death locked out of spoken language, their powers of concentration appear to exceed ours — except when we dream, when we, too, are mute.
And so I began to call them dreamers. Mornings, when I headed from the house for the lab or later on for the sanctuary, I might say to Woodrow, “I’ve got a new dreamer coming in today, a baby. They found him in a market in Buchanan with a chain around his neck.” At first Woodrow would smile tolerantly in his usual manner, maybe slightly amused by my, to him, eccentric insistence on referring to them as dreamers. But before long he, too, gave up relying on the word chimpanzee or chimp. The boys, even sooner than their father, took to calling them dreamers, especially Dillon, for whom the word seemed to have a special resonance, as if he thought that he himself might be a dreamer. “How were the dreamers today, Mammi? What’s happening with the dreamer that came down from Nimba last week, the one whose mother you said got eaten by the soldiers? Why do they even want to eat dreamers, Mammi? You’d have to be kind of crazy, right?”
Early on in the work at the lab and later at the sanctuary, before it had become my obsession and, in a way, my salvation, I wondered where the word chimpanzee had come from. It was a peculiar word, I thought. Whenever I said it aloud, I heard a combination of sounds that were slightly comical to me. Their name was a little bit ridiculous and thus ridiculing. Once, shortly after I started the sanctuary, I looked the word up in Woodrow’s battered old Webster’s Collegiate, because I hated calling them that, chimpanzees and chimps. Their name seemed to make subtle fun of them, to diminish and demean them, and was not at all a word like human or even like the names we give to other mammals putatively lower on the evolutionary ladder than chimps, like dogs and lions and horses.
It’s a bantu word from the Congo, meaning “mock-man”—a name derived, not from the creature’s own nature, but from its relation to us, to humans, as if its essential nature were a lesser version or a negation of ours. It’s the only species named in such a purposefully distancing way. It’s the not-human. The not-us. The un-man.
Maybe its scientific name would be better, I thought, more democratic somehow, since chimpanzees and humans belong to the same genus, Anthropopithicus. But, no, the zoologists had long ago named the creature Anthropopithicus troglodyte, and every mother’s child knows what a troglodyte is.
Nonetheless, I looked that word up, too, hoping, I suppose, that it would turn out actually to mean something like “a highly intelligent and sociable animal found in sharply decreasing numbers in the jungles of West Africa.” But a troglodyte is “one of various races or tribes of men (chiefly ancient or prehistoric) inhabiting caves or dens.”