The arm managed to slither out the open window of the truck, and to move into the wash and toward the city. It had depended on Rafferty to get this far, and it would depend on others soon.
Perhaps the day that the Mars mission was lost, Morton thought, in the primate research laboratory at the University of Rio Blanco, was a magic day, because it was the day on which I began to consider my life with the level of reflection and perceptiveness appropriate to a person of my distinction. How is it, I wonder, that I never thought about myself before with any kind of curiosity, nor with any drive to give a complete accounting of myself? While I may not be able, yet, to compile effectively this memoir of which I dream, since I have not yet been provided with writing implements, I can nonetheless begin an exploration of my thinking and my circumstances, so that when I am able, I may amass the facts of my life for those who would take an interest.
Let me begin by saying, if only to myself, that what I am, first and always, is a chimpanzee. A chimpanzee born into captivity, raised in captivity, and presently living in a laboratory, I believe, in a state called Arizona. Had you, Homo sapiens sapiens, to explain what a chimpanzee is, you would perhaps point to certain television or web-based advertisements in which juvenile chimpanzees appear, and you would talk about the pleasant and humorous aspect of these juveniles. Or you would refer to certain programs you have seen on your Internet-programming monitors that have depicted the dwindling numbers of chimpanzees in the wild.
Let me tell you, instead, what I believe a chimpanzee is. I believe a chimpanzee is the unluckiest life-form to spring forth in the world. Why is a chimpanzee unlucky? you ask. A chimpanzee is unlucky because he is the not-as-handsome relative of you, Homo sapiens sapiens. By virtue of his resemblance, by virtue of sharing some 99 percent of DNA with Homo sapiens sapiens, the chimpanzee is doomed to be captured, tortured, and injected with drugs for the benefit of his more attractive relatives. A chimpanzee, that is, takes all the guff and never gets to win the trophy. The chimp is born to enslavement.
Among the disadvantages of the chimpanzee is his tendency to concentrate on his immediate surroundings while avoiding the larger political or social picture. The chimpanzee is constantly thinking only of other chimpanzees, I believe, which does very little good when you are in a laboratory serving as an experimental subject. In the absence of a large social network, this chimpanzee will see an attractive image on a screen on a wall monitor, and he will stare at it for a long time, while otherwise occupied with removing insects and fleas from his fur. He will masturbate occasionally, or, at the very least, he will touch himself now and again because there is not much else to do, and then he will wait for lunch or dinner. When there are tests of acuity to which he is subjected, he will follow the testing protocols in search of the elusive banana or mango. Beyond this, the chimpanzee has few, if any, ambitions.
This approach to life is almost exactly identical to that of the masses of men. Men do little else but to perform their eight hours of work before, as I understand it, going home to eat, drink excessively, masturbate, and watch celebrities on their Internet-programming monitors. Perhaps, on certain occasions, these humans watch broadcasts featuring chimpanzees bred in captivity. When celebrities are unavailable. Since the majority of humans are, I would argue, being kept down by forces of economic oppression, and chimpanzees are living with similar styles and ambitions for their lives and yet are similarly oppressed, it stands to reason that we are more than a little like one another.
The routes to liberation in each situation — human and chimpanzee — are also virtually identical. If chimpanzees were to begin to feel the kind of political, social, and evolutionary power which they are due, they would immediately put aside their contentment with creature comforts, so as to militate for greater freedom and independence. Bad luck does not have to go on endlessly. I know that certain thinkers about liberation, such as King, Mahatma Gandhi, and Frantz Fanon, have argued that the arc of history bends toward justice, et cetera, and so on. This implies, in my view, that the oppression of chimpanzees must come to an end too, and we can only hope that the end will come while there are still enough chimpanzees left in the wild to repopulate. The oppressed human must make a similar decision, a decision to leave off from serving the state apparatus, so that he might move toward a whole and experiential vision of what is possible, a union of species perhaps, a symbiosis of primates, interdependent and mutually respectful.
It was morning when Noelle Stern arrived at the laboratory, fresh from a night of heavy peyote ingestion at the omnium gatherum. A number of people, if people is even the right word, because some of them claimed to be routinely inhabiting inanimate objects, such as shrubs, stands of sage, and mountainsides, were present at this ingestion. The idea of person and object, that is, had become porous at the omnium gatherum. The object, they had learned, was no longer content to serve as a second-order being. This was an emotionally draining experience, and yet Noelle was able to put aside the abstractions, the talking shrubs, of the night before by getting to work promptly. She was first to the office. Koo, as always, was nowhere to be found. Larry hadn’t come in yet. Noelle’s headache, from the peyote, was deep and migrainous, and she had the sensation that she often seemed to have afterward, that life, despite its shabbiness when compared to the pyrotechnical hallucinations of a drug, was somehow rewarding, tender, sad, and welcome. The lines of people at the filling station trying to cash in on the big lottery drawing that day: incredibly sad. The people filling up large drums of water and putting these into their motorless wagons at the government-sponsored rationing stations: very sad. People climbing out of automobiles that no longer had enough algae fuel in them to make a journey to the next intersection: also sad.
Still, Noelle was feeling upbeat and positive in that she still had a job, and her job on this day was to observe Morton and to interact with Morton a little bit, to see if there was a way that he had begun to respond to the injections that he’d been given earlier. Given that she had just witnessed cacti, in psychedelic hues, arguing about whether the soul was vegetable or mineral, spending a morning watching a chimpanzee operate a computer joystick and push around a ball didn’t seem like the worst thing.
The question of my own enlightenment, Morton meanwhile considered, is more important to me, however, than the liberation of my species, which I may not be able to accomplish from this squalid cell. After all, Wilde was not able to achieve complete liberation of his fellow homosexuals from Reading gaol, nor was the Marquis de Sade effective from the Bastille, for all the profligate excellence of the Frenchman’s imagination. Gramsci, Mandela, many great thinkers have spent the kind of time I’m spending now, and they learned to be patient about history while they pursued a course of individual betterment. I must take comfort from these examples.
Therefore, there are a number of questions I would like to ask. The first question I would like to ask is: How is it that I am composing these lines (admittedly in my head)? Since I know well that in prior years I felt myself to be just as oppressed as any other chimpanzee, and just as uninterested in the political superstructure around me as any other chimpanzee, why is it that today I am a thinking and feeling and rationally reflexive primate who could easily best the humans in many a logical puzzle?