Generally speaking, Noelle had problems with men. There was always some guy in sandals and dreadlocks whom she was trying to avoid but whose telephone calls she was still waiting for. She waited long enough that she could watch her impressions of the man in question go from unreasonable appreciation to doubt to contempt. Sometimes in the space of days. She hadn’t even slept with him yet, whoever he was. Jean-Paul, in his refusal to interact, was consistent with earlier findings, and he was just a kid.
These and other difficulties improved when she started working with the primates. Runaround Sue was her first charge, an ill-mannered chimp from Saint Louis, MO. She’d been born in captivity there, had never swung from the tree branches like a chimpanzee ought in the Congo. Runaround Sue specialized in eating and watching television, and in threatening whatever human being was responsible for her by baring her teeth. According to reports from Saint Louis, Sue had never once been a chimpanzee of status in the group. Other women chimps ignored her. She ate and slept and, on occasion, copulated with lower-status males. Such was the life of the prisoner.
The Runaround Sue who arrived in Rio Blanco had some kind of relapsing and remitting neurological complaint. Maybe her aggressiveness was meant to deflect attention from her weakness. Noelle had trouble not projecting her feelings onto the chimp. She even took umbrage at Sue’s name, which had been bestowed on her because despite her status she had been good at mating in captivity and producing children, most of them now full grown and removed to medical facilities elsewhere. Noelle hated Sue’s name, but she sympathized, as she also understood when Sue was prideful and confrontational at the moments when pity and sympathy were coming back at her.
Sue, like the apes who would follow her at URB, was not an alpha animal. The chimps at URB had lots of scars and were missing fingers, had chronic diarrhea, or were, apparently, parkinsonian. These were the animals that had already exhausted the patience of researchers across the country. Noelle loved the outcast apes, though, and spoke to them with tolerance and equanimity. She said to Runaround Sue, e.g.: “You can’t believe what they got up to at the omnium gatherum this weekend. They’re trying to dig a hole from here to Mexico. Fifty-eight miles. They were saying a blessing for the digging, and there was some kind of traditional ritual with tortillas. The earth movers are going to have to go down like fifty feet or something to be below the level that the border patrol uses. They had a shaman dig the first shovelful. And then he broke up some tortillas and handed around crumbs.”
Sometimes the conversations got more personal.
“This guy wanted to go to a golf driving range. Like he thought a driving range was so old-fashioned! Like old-fashioned was good. There’s legislation pending, Sue, that would, you know, deed all the golf courses in city limits to the Union of Homeless Citizens. What a great tent community you could set up on those golf courses. No varmints. And this guy wanted to go to a driving range. Are you kidding me? And then he’d probably want me to sit and watch him take shots. When he hit a really good one, I could give him a kiss.”
Not that Noelle had forgotten that the goal with the primates (and it wasn’t just apes; there’d been occasional spider monkeys and rhesus macaques) was experimental. Runaround Sue hated getting her injections — they all did — and the shock of her hatred of needles roused in Noelle feelings of great pity. But she was paid to administer injections, and so she did. Noelle was never entirely certain afterward what the preparation was that they gave to the chimp. With Koo it didn’t do any good to ask. He would offer some rationale heavy with rhetoric: the injection was to test “whether the introduction of computer-enhanced umbilical-cord stem cells, which promoted mild regrowth colonies in paraplegics, could impede brain lesion reproductive events associated with MS.” The kind of language that was found in grant applications, with the solecisms of ESL decorating its obfuscations. Who knew what the experiments measured? Who knew?
What was clear was that from the first injection Runaround Sue got worse. One leg developed a tremor. Then the leg stopped working altogether. In her cage, without Noelle or Larry, the other graduate student, Sue’s expression, as easy to read as if it had been the face of your own grandmother, was fearful and uncertain. But once Noelle entered the cage (as opposed to hiding out on the far side of the two-way mirror), it got even worse. Despite the failure of motor function in her leg, Sue resumed her ill-tempered provocations — to the best of her ability. Noelle, for example, was hit with a fresh, watery helping of stool nearly every day.
Nothing was worse than watching a nonhuman animal suffer. It was a matter of a few weeks before they gave Sue the lethal injection, and in that time there were losses of muscular function and excretory function, accelerated organ failures, you name it. It was exactly like losing someone you cared about. Koo seemed oddly even-tempered about the whole thing, like he knew what was going to happen. But it didn’t make him happy either. He said things like “It is the nature of this life that what dies fertilizes what lives and causes it to grow better. Maybe what is living also makes stronger what is dead. The living and the dead are not so easy to tease apart. This is a braid of mutual dependence, life and death. With technological advances we can improve on these interdependencies.”
Other primates followed; for example, Alfonse, the orangutan, who was pleasant enough, but who had a completely different type of illness (cirrhosis). Then there was the strange case of the bonobo, Cherry, who was just on the far side of adolescence. It was very hard to do experiments upon bonobos, because they were so affable. In general, unless a zoo had a surplus and couldn’t find a place to send an animal, it was not often that you would find a bonobo for sale. Cherry, to make matters worse, took a shine to Noelle. It was a solid ten months that Cherry lived at URB, and in that time Noelle went from being a relatively dispassionate participant in animal experimentation to being a conflicted, miserable participant. Because bonobo civilization is matrilineal. The female bonobos rally against the males; they do what needs to be done while maintaining a leisurely life of food gathering and group sex. It was like life in Rio Blanco, see. Bonobo social life was like the life envisioned by the omnium gatherum. Whose online broadsides Noelle took to printing out for Cherry, when it was convenient to do so.
Noelle would bring in the computer and joystick (Cherry liked anything travel related and was oddly comforted by alpine scenery), and then, while the bonobo was involved with her haphazard web searches, Noelle would read out broadsides about the coming convergence of the idea of the human body with the idea of geology, and how the body and the geologic truth could meet somewhere, and then the body would be better able to withstand vicissitudes of the heart, intermittencies of the human relations. “O citizens of the ever-enlarging desert, join us this weekend for a ritual of bloodletting and passionate ecstatic release to celebrate the coming of the cyborg!”
Noelle Stern could not be sure that Cherry understood. Nor could she be sure that the bonobo comprehended the news articles she read her about nightly blackouts, periodic military exercises in the sky over Rio Blanco, armed uprisings by would-be emigrants, or the restive homeless army that was mustering in town. Experimental method, the stuff of Noelle’s years in graduate school, argued against mythologies or nonempirical belief systems.