Morton was like this, and she tried to explain it to Larry, who had drifted off to one corner to read online music posts. “Maybe he is one of the really smart ones. Someday we should order at least one of these miraculous talking chimps that proves we’re committing genocide in Congo and Rwanda by letting the species get wiped out.”
“What’s the experimental protocol, anyhow?” Larry muttered.
“Among other things, I think we’re supposed to take finger paints in and see if he wants to paint anything.”
“That’s not asking too much.”
She excused herself to go to the vending station down on the first floor, the vending machine that proved, beyond a shadow of experimental doubt, the relationship between hash and carbohydrate bombardment. While Larry was dragging the paints and the gigantic pad and easel into Morton’s cage, she was buying tube-shaped pastry items filled with creamy stuffing (in her inner ear she kept hearing tube of pastry! tube of pastry!), two different varieties of chocolate chip cookies, and a simulated coffee beverage sweetened with corn syrup, and she was taking these back to the laboratory, all the while experiencing the desire to hide some of these spoils from Larry, lest he take more than his share. When she got back to the lab, Larry’s notes were still on his chair — he had written the word grooming ten or twelve times on Morton’s chart — but he was otherwise nowhere to be found. Meanwhile, Morton was hard at work with the paints and the construction paper. Morton had just about covered himself with red and blue paint, and he was especially interested in flattening his palm against the paper so that he would get a reproduction of his own palm. His chimpanzee palm.
Larry was probably getting soap and water for cleanup. Noelle decided to risk going in and watching from a closer position. She was always willing to try getting in the cage one more time, even when afraid, and it was true that Morton seemed remarkably docile. She pushed the door open slowly, so that Morton could see that a pasty, hairless primate was entering the room, a featherless biped, and as though he were used to researchers, as he probably was (having come from a private university in the Northeast that had closed because of declining enrollment), he paid almost no attention to Noelle at all. A sign of respect, Koo always argued, before attempting to shackle him.
“Morton,” she said, “I’ll be your hapless human researcher for the evening. Anything I can get you?”
His eyes swung abruptly from the paper to Noelle. He held her gaze for a moment, as though he were thinking about how to respond, and then he went back to work, smiling faintly.
“Would it be all right if I looked at what you’re doing?”
He made no show to indicate that anything else would be to his liking, and so she approached, slowly. Upon reaching his side of the canvas, as it were, she saw the requisite handprints. There was also some effective abstract expressionism, which she thought certainly would allow him to be admitted to some guild of macho boy painters from the 1950s.
“I guess you’re into all that drip stuff, huh? You’d probably drink too much, treat your wife badly, and die in a car crash? Well, what about something representational? Like a landscape? You got all this desert around here. Dramatic mountaintops. Night skies. Have you ever been to the desert before, Morton?”
Morton seemed to pause briefly, as if trying to settle the question of whether he was allowed to mate with her, before returning to his painting. There was, in truth, something evasive about Morton, as if despite his dour aspect he just didn’t want to get into any trouble, really. If he’d been a human primate, he would have had a job in maintenance, maybe in Kansas City, where he would have always hoped that everything was running smoothly because he just didn’t like any aggravation. While Noelle Stern was thinking all of this, however, she noticed that there was something unusual about Morton’s painting. She sort of couldn’t believe at first that she was seeing what she thought she was seeing, and she blamed the hash, which, you know, was a lot stronger than when she was a kid. There was something at the top of the sheet of paper exposed on the easel that—
“Uh, Morton, you didn’t, you couldn’t have possibly written something at the top of the page, did you? Did you get some rudimentary instructions on how to do some block letters? Because that looks suspiciously like written English to me. You couldn’t possibly know English, right?”
It would have been one thing had there been just the one word. You could write off one word, or something that resembled one word, as exactly the stuff of monkeys typing, and dumb, which seemed to be the first word, written out with an almost stereotypical backward letter, well, dumb just wasn’t that hard a word to write, you know, and it could have been the kind of thing where Morton had copied it down, having seen it graffitied somewhere near his cage long ago, all in caps, or maybe he just randomly learned a few letters from watching online news networks or something, seeing the scroll or the advertisements at the margins, but the fact was, there was a second word, and the second word was broad, so that it was absolutely certain that the two words worked together, worked in concert, because it appeared to Noelle Stern that Morton had somehow managed to write a sexist putdown with his finger paints, dumb broad, and not just once, because he had made red highlights behind the blue of the letters. He’d written out dumb broad twice, once with each available color.
“Jesus, Morton, please tell me you aren’t a sexist asshole, okay?”
And then she called for Larry as though Larry were the life raft and she the drowning graduate student. “Larry? Larry?” She called and called, and then it occurred to her, as she was desperately calling, that it was all a big joke, a big prank, and then she began to assemble in her mind the techniques required for the prank, the theory and practice. Noelle was an earnest kind of a person, a person who believed in the omnium gatherum and its principles, and she realized that it was possible, even probable, that Larry had snuck the scribbled words onto the pad while she’d been getting her confections, and had ducked out to let her have the revelation in private, ha ha ha ha ha ha ha, and she was so high that she would have believed anything. She had to force herself to find the prank amusing, and she worked hard at it. And she patted Morton on the arm, as the plot and its execution flourished in her, and then she made for the observation room, unsure about whether she was still irritated, and when she got in there, sure enough Larry was doubled over in fits of laughter, and if that weren’t enough, he was eating one of her pastry tubes, licking out all the filling.
It was a really good prank, the kind of thing that would be told for years and years over beers at that bar near campus. It was all in good fun, and everyone could laugh. Except that when the two of them, Larry and Noelle, went back into Morton’s cage to tell the whole story over again, Noelle could have sworn that dumb was crossed out, or it looked a lot like it had been crossed out, and the d replaced with something that looked like the letters t and h. Larry, his eyes bloodshot, unable to contain his guffaws, until the point at which he was beginning to hiccup, he was laughing and insisting that that was exactly what he had written. But she knew better; she knew, at once, that Morton had crossed out dumb, because it was rude. Morton, she knew, didn’t approve of the boorishness and unpleasantness of Larry, the fat and slightly unwashed Larry, the low-status human male who couldn’t even be bothered to mate well.