Larry, it should be said, had collected himself — when he saw the way the interaction was to proceed. He attempted to run for the door, shouting on the way that he needed help. But Morton was on him in a pair of bounds, at which point he took Larry’s head in his hands and began to bang it against the wall, gently at first, because he wanted Larry to hear a few words before he went to his human afterlife, the woefully conceived afterlife that had not a single nonhuman animal in it, according to the accounts you read in the classics. And here is what Larry would have heard during his last few moments of consciousness:
“I understand the variety of game you’re playing,” said Morton in his indistinct and chirruping chimpanzee voice, “you learning-disabled swine, and the game you are playing is the game of dominance. And dominance is based on nothing but a tradition of dominance. It is arbitrarily imposed, and it will fall as haphazardly as it came to be. And I will be part of that passing. Mark my words. I have served in your prisons long enough, you pile of refuse, and now you are going to serve me for the last few moments of your wretched time. If there’s anyone in your life who doesn’t think you are a fool who has accomplished nothing with the advantages you’ve been given, you’d better think some nice thoughts about them now, while I splatter your brains on the cell wall. After which I will eat some of them — some of the brains that might have barely housed an idea while animate. I’m looking forward to seeing how they taste.”
Morton could hear the hooting from the monkeys in some of the cages adjacent. They were always able to tell, because they were monkeys, when there was political trouble afoot. The monkeys hooted and stamped with agitation. This was the musical accompaniment to the predictable gasps issuing forth from Larry. Morton had to admit that he was starting to enjoy the drama of recognition. The recognition of his uniqueness. And yet just as the chimpanzee was to administer the sequence of death blows, the worst thing happened, the very worst thing, the only thing that could have steadied his hand, that could have induced him to refrain from the pleasurable dispatch of Larry.
Noelle showed up for work.
It was her face he saw first, in the parallelogram of smudgy reinforced glass in the cell door. She had acquired such an importance in his fevered brow, this thing just out of reach, that he could have reconstructed her from a visible square inch. Not her palm, not her elbow, not her clavicle, had escaped his notice. And so, in the window, when there was a glimpse of her messy, unwashed, dirty blond hair, and a strut from the side of her spectacles, which she wore when her eyes were tired, he knew at once. He knew. He had been intending to kill and devour Larry only moments before, and he could almost smell that delightful and tangy smell of evacuated bowel, but now instead he felt only a meek and servile joy, and the joy, colored as it was with a foreboding that what he was in the midst of doing was not going to win him favor, was such that he forgot Larry for a moment. Larry crumpled at his feet. The door opened a few inches, as if Noelle knew what she was about to find, and there was his beloved, dressed in some torn denim trousers that he understood she’d purchased at one of the thrift stores, and his beloved was perfection, was all that he, as an unsightly and excessively hirsute chimpanzee, could never be. She had the off-kilter smile, when she smiled, and her eyes were always a little red, and she reapplied her lipstick far too often, because her lips were chapped from the dry air of the Southwest, and her bra strap often showed because she didn’t button up her shirt far enough, and she was freckly, and she had a self-deprecating laugh, and she took nothing seriously, except the life of the spirit, which she seemed to take too seriously in a way that only made her more vulnerable and more perfect, and she never lost her temper, which is what he loved best of all, because he didn’t seem to be able to avoid doing the occasional thing that would cause a human being to lose his or her temper. For example, here he was with one of the graduate students lying at his feet, and Noelle took note of this, as she would have to do, but she did not shout or belittle.
“Morton, what the hell are you doing? Shit, Larry, are you okay? Morton, help me get him up. Are you out of your mind? Do you want to end up being destroyed? Because that’s how you’re going to end up if you do this kind of thing. Do you think anyone will waste five minutes debating about whether or not to kill an animal that has attacked a human being? They won’t even give you a last meal. You’ll be getting the lethal injection before you know what hit you. For godsakes!”
“Noelle,” Larry said, “that animal… that motherfucking chimp can talk. Morton can talk. The motherfucker just told me that he was going to kill me and eat me. Either I’m having some kind of hallucinatory type of experience, or he told me that he was going to kill me. Is it possible that I heard what I think I just heard?”
Noelle gave Morton such a hard, cold stare, as if she would be willing to return the favor, the killing and eating favor, and Morton felt, as he began to understand the severity of his crime, the withholding of the trophy of the beloved, and how isolating and annihilating that could be. He hadn’t even yet had the opportunity to dialogue with Noelle over the particulars of their groundbreaking romance, and already this romance was being torn asunder, as if stillborn, as if it never could be in this barren, hollow world of men.