And so all at once, because why belabor the preparations in this account, Morton was outside! All at once: what was inside was not the totality of Morton’s life but was simply a characteristic of a former time in his life. All at once, there was an outside, and if outside was not what he imagined, if he did not have some memory lurking in him of what the outdoors should look like when he inhabited it (an idea that he got from his ancestral, mitochondrial self), if he did not have an idea of it from seeing it in films or through the reinforced windows of his cell, it was no less glorious and no less perfect in the beholding than in his imagination. In fact, the outdoors exceeded his imagination! They gave him a baseball cap, to shield him from the sun, and he attempted to wear Noelle’s sunglasses, though whether this was for him or for whatever humans he might encounter on his first drive through the city of Rio Blanco, he didn’t know, and he didn’t care. When the glasses fell into the foot well of the automobile in which he rode, there in the backseat, he didn’t care, because the window was rolled down, despite the temperatures, nearing one hundred and fifteen (he heard Dr. Koo say), and they sped through the stoplights of the thoroughfare, and what Morton noticed was how many things there were that caught his eye, how reliable was the velocity of contemporary life, and how sad it was. It was sad! There were all manner of wanderers in contemporary life, dressed in privation, come from other places and unable to return there, walking here and there, looking for what? Looking for what lost thing? For the notion of a life that wasn’t lost? They were going in and out of some beleaguered franchise restaurant, Morton thought, to eat some chemically enhanced carbohydrate, and then back out into the heat, to vomit, and then to go drink some more; all was decay, all was decline and fall, but rendered in the pale colors of the desert, which were orange and rose and bleached white and palest green, and everything was scorched by the glorious winds, which carried forth the flame that devoured the region but which also made it feel somehow romantic and perfect, especially when they arrived at last at the interstate, which no longer carried the great snarl of automobiles that it had in the last century (or so Morton was told), because no one could afford to field a fleet of cars anymore, and so when the laboratory sport utility vehicle, modeled on one that had been used by the troops in the Central Asian conflict, hit the interstate, there was nothing that Morton could think of but that movement was itself the source of romance, and freedom was velocity and movement, and freedom, therefore, made possible romance, and that animals in captivity could perhaps be sexual, could perform sexually, having few other activities, but they couldn’t feel desire, because desire was part of a spectrum of feelings, of kinds of self-knowledge that were associated with freedom, that took place among palm trees and rock formations and in the presence of mountain lions; he could feel the mountain lions out there, in their miles and miles of range, and he knew that he could feel them when the human animals no longer could; and yet chief among the possibilities of liberty, in this resplendent desert, with its great cloudless lid of brightest periwinkle, was failure, and that was what made desire possible, the failure implicit in freedom, and it was this that made him want to reach up to touch the shoulder of Noelle in the front passenger seat, the sense that he was going to fail, that his ugliness was unsurpassed, his ugliness, his total inability to understand the clothing and the cooked food, and the repression of glandular needs and wants, he was going to fail; he had come to this point, this plateau of human accomplishment where no experimental animal had ever come, where he could convince his jailers not only to release him but to understand that he was in some way something that they could never be, and this only meant that his failure was that much more undeniable, because he knew what he had to lose now, and that time when he was just another chimp, that was the one perfect time, because freedom was savage, cruel, and he reached up to the front seat, around the headrest, bested by the limitlessness of the desert, and he set his hand on the shoulder of Noelle, and she looked back at Morton, the chimpanzee, and she smiled, and he knew that that smile was intended for him and him alone, and he knew that that smile should have been enough, but it wasn’t enough, and he knew that Noelle wasn’t enough to save him now, and before him he saw the opportunities ahead of him, the dead-end jobs he would try to secure, going into the office to explain to the people in human resources, or whatever you called them and their department, that he wasn’t going to be able to type very fast, because his fingers were too big and clumsy, and then he was going to go to the fast-food restaurant, and he was going to have to point out that he wasn’t able to operate the cash register, which was the job you took when you were unable to perform any other job, the job where you handled the money, and he wasn’t going to be able to handle the money, because his hands were not well enough coordinated to press the buttons properly, and he couldn’t get hold of the small denominations of coinage, and so he would not be able to hold that job, and the public-relations job that involved selling legislators of the Southwest on tax credits for Chinese and Indian manufacturers that wanted to move here, he wasn’t going to be able to take that job, because he didn’t look like the legislators of the Southwest, who would be afraid, even terrified, at the recognition that the lobbyist who was approaching them was a chimpanzee, not a person at all, though he was able to talk like a person (sort of), and so he wasn’t going to be able to take that job, and so unless they were going to be willing to hire him to do some kind of office work at the laboratory at the medical school of URB, there was no job that he was going to be fit for, but it was unlikely that the state apparatus was going to catch him in its tattered safety net, and so what was he going to do, was he going to love this woman? Was he going to content himself with love and give up on work?
Down into the ravine they went, on the far side of the outskirts of town, into some new stratification of rock crumbling on the sides of the road, they hurtled in silence, and the permanence of the rock formations made a mockery of the chimpanzee; he would survive a few more moments, with his hand on the shoulder of the human woman, whispering I felt so strong, just this morning I felt so strong, and now I feel so weak, and I don’t know if I am strong enough now to be out here, in this world of limitless opportunities, which is really a world of poverty and failure, and she smiled and he smiled back at her, a chimpanzee grin, as Koo turned the car around, in the next town, and asked if he wanted something, did he want a soda or something? And the list of things he wanted was so long that Morton sat there in silence, wondering if he could even make a beginning of the description of the something that he wanted, because just as one thirst was slaked, another rose in its stead, and he didn’t know how to call all these needs, all these desires, which were not to be understood as fragmentary and interrupted, but overpowering, because his was a consciousness that appeared ex nihilo, with no self to attach to its fragments, if by self we mean a self that has a story of its coming-to-be, and he cried silently, even as he grinned his chimpanzee grin, with his hand upon Noelle’s shoulder, and perhaps the human animals believed that a chimpanzee weeping was weeping at their success, at the way the chimpanzee was now a part of all that was, the human story, but he was weeping instead at the mess he’d made of things, and the mess that had been made of him, and he couldn’t think of what to say about whether there was something he wanted, so he said he wanted Coca-Cola, which was the most recognized and widely circulated American product, and he had read somewhere that the word was the most commonly understood English-language word, after the word okay, and so maybe Coca-Cola, whatever that was, would make him feel okay, and so he sat in the car, with his hand on Noelle’s shoulder, awaiting his Coca-Cola, and she was so good to let him keep his hand there, as he looked out the window at the desperate and slovenly humans coming and going at the not very convenient convenience store, placating their addictions to small things, that Morton wept, because if he tried to mate with Noelle, the hole in him would spill over across the species boundary, because love was the hole as well as the thing that repaired the hole.