“Larry,” Noelle replied, “have you been smoking some weed?”
“All I know is that I heard that chimpanzee say something to me about killing me and eating me. He was really going to do it.”
“Morton, did you say anything as impolite as that to Larry? When Larry has spent months feeding you and cleaning out your cell and lobbying on your behalf against a medical school that would really like to bombard you with radiation to see if you sprout tumors, or maybe they’d like to try some strong interrogation tactics on you to see what combination of loud music, sleep deprivation, and antipsychotic medication makes you crack? Did you tell Larry you were going to eat him?”
Morton felt he had no recourse but to return to the role of taciturn chimpanzee. It was cowardly, but it was a plan.
“Morton, it’s too late now. That’s not going to work. You’ve already blown your cover, and maybe your experience of human behavior is that you can just pretend you didn’t cause bodily harm to Larry, but that’s not going to work, all right? You’re going to have to apologize.”
Had it not been the beloved, Morton would have attempted to persist in his silence. But it was the beloved, and he was eager to please, so eager to do what was necessary in order to be reinstated into her graces. He attempted to say the words, even if he could not make eye contact while doing so. Indeed, this rule about making eye contact just didn’t seem sensible to him at all.
“Larry,” he commenced, shyly, “I’m really very sorry that I was expressing violent thoughts toward you. It really wasn’t terribly kind, and it just won’t do. I know that civilized people do not do this sort of thing, and I consider myself a civilized person. However, had you not put me through the deliberately unfair basketball game, and treated me like I was some kind of inferior—”
“Morton, honey,” Noelle said, “if you’re going to make an apology to someone, you need to do it in a way that has no strings attached, you know? If you’re going to say ‘I’m sorry, but…,’ then you’re just trying to subdue the person. You’re trying to continue the argument. Larry deserves your apology in full, and there’s very little he could have done that should have resulted in your killing and eating him. We just don’t do that kind of thing to our acquaintances. So try again.”
It required a lot of hard swallowing. It really did.
“Larry, I’m very sorry about my conduct, which was inappropriate and counterproductive, and if you would like to process through the events with me, I’d be open to that, and I hope that we can forge a good working relationship going forward, one that doesn’t get bogged down with past disagreements. Which I regret.”
Larry, who was still breathing with difficulty, and who had sweated clean through his polo shirt, muttered, “Motherfucking chimpanzee talks. When were you going to tell me that he talked? When were you going to tell Koo? You were going to pretend that the motherfucking chimp was just like all the other monkeys?”
“Larry, he’s not a monkey. Are you going to accept the apology that’s just been offered to you?”
“I mean, maybe I can get a few days off, and you can have a few extra shifts with loverboy here. I need to think about this a little bit, you know? I just can’t…”
Morton, having few other options at this point, fell into the solution left over from early childhood among the laboratory chimpanzees and, carefully, slowly, tentatively, made his way across the small, poorly lit cell, site of so much world history in the past twenty-four hours, and, after climbing up on the stool beside Larry, he began attempting to groom the human being, pushing Larry’s unkempt hair aside as he looked for grubs and nits there that could be picked out and snacked upon. Larry, who was informed enough to understand the gesture, waited patiently, if awkwardly.
Noelle said, “Koo is coming in. He’s on his way.”
“I think I have some mescal in my desk, and I think I’m going to take advantage of it, and then I’m going to consult some manuals to figure out how I’m supposed to be interacting with your goddamn talking chimpanzee, okay? And I’m going to take the rest of the day off. You guys can have some goddamned quality time.”
A sigh of profoundest relief escaped from Morton as the door closed behind Larry. And he was left alone with her again, with Noelle. Though it was the thing he’d most hoped for, the pas de deux of romance, now that it was upon him, he found himself oddly unsure, oddly uncertain if he had what it took to love a graduate student who’d grown up in a conventional human family. The deepest sort of love, perhaps, was the kind that destabilized the lover, made him uncertain where he began and where he ended. And this deepest love was made more acute when there was difference, the disequilibrium between the lovers, as there was here. But how could he measure up to what she knew, or what she could have had from any man walking by on the street outside the medical school at the University of Rio Blanco? She was a beautiful woman, Morton believed, and any man would have wanted her, would have found her haunches and her belly thoroughly lick-worthy or bite-worthy, not to mention her private parts, which he had not yet seen, as he would have seen them were she a member of his species, but which he had conjectured about in his insomniac overnight. Any man, from the lowliest street sweeper to the captain of industry, would have wanted her, and what was Morton in the face of such competition? He was an impoverished chimpanzee who seemed to be able to speak, although it was not generally given to his species to do so. He was a freak, a curiosity. No human would think him human, and no chimp would trust him. How could his keeper love him as he loved her?
“Noelle,” he said, “I’m so glad you’re here. There’s so much that I need to tell you and so much that we need to discuss.”
“Morton, I think really that you need to—”
“This complex of feelings that I’m suffering with, this turmoil, it’s just not like anything else that I have experienced in my life, and I don’t know if this means we are just meant to be together, if there is some kind of mental or spiritual relationship that we are destined to have, but I guess I want to thank you for the kindness you have shown me, and to say that if you are available for this conversation, this rap session, in which we discuss our feelings, you know, in a sort of a cocounseling context, then so am I available. Or we could have a mediated discussion, with a licensed social worker, a person who is familiar with the kinds of difficulties that spring up between loving couples—”
“Morton, really—”
“Because I know there are a lot of problems in a relationship like this. I am certain that many human relationships have problems associated with them, and that is the conventional shape of the human relationship. There’s the constant pressure that you would feel as a human being, because you are not accepting of your primatological origins, on, for example, the subject of sexual relations with multiple partners. Probably you are in an almost constant state of desire for multiple partners and are just fighting this off because you don’t understand your primate essence. This is how I felt until recently, this desire for multiple partners, that is until you and I began to experience our unique bond. Once I began to experience the singularity of this bond, then I began to see the precious, frail way that human beings insist on this idea of monogamy. Even though it most often fails to be realized, there’s a crazy, ridiculous lovableness about it. I don’t know if I can live up to it, however. Just so you know. This would definitely be one of the areas we would have to cocounsel about, in regard to our relationship. I feel, for political reasons, that I really need to stay close to my origins in the chimpanzee community, and to honor the separate and parallel cultural evolution that we are developing in the chimpanzee community, and that means, probably, that this monogamous ideal is not going to be possible in the way you are used to. On the upside, however—”