The erroneous belief in the appearance of affect in unfeeling nonhuman animals, for example, according to the theorists of post-postmodernist sociology, is a sign of a weakened cultural apparatus. Animals, in an economy of post-historical global interdependence, exist for the dominance of humans, who are their stewards. Animals are a resource, and they exist in a permanent state of mitigated volition because of insufficient processing power. This was written down in the best known pedagogical text on the subject: The Proper Exercise of Power, by Lyman Johns et al. Noelle had consumed it in year one of medical school, and it was with such violent antipathy that she read the arguments there that she kept the book close ever after. She tried reading some of it to Cherry, just to see, and the bonobo took it away from her, ripped out a great number of its pages, and then rubbed her vulva across the embossed dust jacket. Exactly the kind of highly symbolic activity that the book argued against. In this and other ways, Noelle had come to suspect that Cherry was attempting to communicate more directly with her female researcher, perhaps according to the rules of matrilineal bonobo society. A period followed in which Noelle asked Cherry everything, whether to date a certain guy, whom to vote for in the upcoming midterm elections, just to see whether there were genuine responses. A variety of interpretable and ambiguous responses ensued: Cherry offered her part of her meal. Cherry grabbed her in a headlock; Cherry attempted to rub her pudenda, that horrible word, against Noelle.
It was a brutal shock, therefore, when Cherry suffered mortally what was described by Koo, peremptorily, as congestive heart failure. Apparently, there was some kind of long-standing defect. Even more upsetting, it didn’t take the senior faculty member on the project long to spirit away the body. When, in the weeks after, there was a stray foot in the lab that had electrodes attached to it for laser modeling, Noelle was almost certain it was Cherry’s foot. Koo managed to get the foot to wiggle its toes on its own. With no body attached. Other grad students had a good time using the severed foot of Cherry for practical jokes.
Noelle missed Cherry. Missed her like she missed the friends of her high school years. Missed Cherry like she missed the cool air when the 120-plus-degree days of summer came around again. Missed Cherry like she missed a sibling, her brother who had died overseas ten years ago. She missed Cherry, and she wasn’t sure if it would be possible to go on to the next animal, a chimpanzee called Morton. Maybe there was a point at which you just couldn’t go on.
Over at the omnium gatherum, they had begun a project that involved hot-air ballooning. The omnium gatherum wanted to send up hot-air balloons so as to warn the citizens of the Southwest about a repressive police state apparatus that was now hovering everywhere around them, concealed in washes and behind underpasses. With a flotilla of hot-air balloons, like a series of jewels in the cloudless skies, the omnium gatherum would be able to radio back to Earth, with personal wireless handsets, the exact whereabouts of agents of the INS, the DEA, the ATF, and so forth. The flotilla could also use a doctor, they said, to minister to those brave souls who intended to live in this post-nationalist milieu, and perhaps she wished to be the doctor.
While she made up her mind, she had the simplest responsibility remaining to her. She had to go in and observe Morton. In the aftermath of some experimental injection. What the experimental protocol was, she didn’t ask. She’d given a lot of injections, and she didn’t ask what they were, and she didn’t ask when she was directed to observe. To relieve some of the tedium, she’d saved a treat for herself. She had some decent, locally prepared hash, and she was going to smoke it with Larry in the observation room behind the two-way mirror. This ought to have been the night when Noelle Stern’s lack of ambition, her lack of desire to be a doctor in the way that her father had been a doctor, should have come back to haunt her. Because smoking hash in the observation room could really fuck up experimental results. Morton could turn out to be one of those rare serial-killing chimpanzees who had recently been written up in the National Geographic, chimps who for no reason would randomly select other chimps and kill them, rip out their testes and their organs, and feast on the relevant parts. Morton was one of these, she said to Larry, passing the hookah back to him, and he was going to smash the two-way mirror and dismember both of them.
“A depraved imagination,” Larry said. “You sure the doc isn’t coming through here tonight?”
“He’s taking Jean-Paul to see his lawyer. Jean-Paul has an idea for a business.”
“Bet he makes more off of it than the old man did.”
“Koo dosed the animal earlier. And took off,” Noelle said. “He gives a shit at first. But he has sort of mediocre follow-through. Or maybe he just can’t bear to watch.”
“It’s the poorly paid folks who can bear to watch.”
“The animal can tell that he’s South Korean and doesn’t take him seriously,” Noelle offered.
“The animal thinks he faked the data.”
The giggling contagion passed back and forth.
“You think Morton is smart?” Larry said.
“They’re all smart. But no one is as smart as Cherry was.”
She often wondered, when she was back on another regimen of wondering, Why not Larry, but this inquiry discounted, right from the outset, the fact that Larry had a kind of unflattering mustache, also that he had given in to the idea that guys in their thirties looked most natural when portly and unkempt. These were black marks against him, but still there was a kindness about Larry. His treatment of the animals was evidence of this, of an idea of fair play. Larry didn’t really care about what kind of doctor he became either. He laid an avuncular palm on the backs of the animals, and then, when his work shift was done, he went back to the house on the South Side that he shared with his father. He had a hobby, which was metalwork, and once Larry had invited Noelle over to his place to see the sculptures. She was surprised at the look of commitment and ambition that crossed his face when he showed them to her. Larry occurred to her, in her lonesomeness, and then he didn’t occur to her later on. Like some fleeting weather system. Maybe it was the lot of the human beings in a primate laboratory to fail in their attempts to know one another, because the animals were reserved for a certain kind of complicated relationship, the kind where there was up and there was down, where there was vulnerability and then there was unavailability, where there was the stripping away of layer upon layer of shellac and water stains and self, until the flaws were all transparent, and with this exposure of the flaws came the capacity to brutalize, the capacity to take without mercy, the capacity, in the highest stages of love, to be inhuman, to treat the other person far worse than you would treat the merest stranger; in the laboratory, maybe this love relationship was reserved for the animals, whereas the other human beings you treated with the same disregard that you usually reserved for people’s pets. Larry! Cute guy! Likes to smoke hash! Muss his hair a little bit and tell him he’s cute! Ten minutes later she’d forgotten he was even there. Larry who?
She came out of the tunnel vision of her hash buzz to find herself gazing at Morton fixedly. Chimps resembled the elderly, actually. Even when young they had faces like the elderly. Morton was no exception. He was the kind of weary guy you would expect to see working as a security guard at one of those office buildings in downtown Rio Blanco with a 78 percent vacancy rate. Not a guy with a lot of big plans. The kind of sentience she saw in the chimps was rarely the kind that she associated with raw brilliance. They had a shrewdness, as though they understood things from appearances. They were keen observers. They knew exactly what they didn’t know.