What the fuck could he learn from the fucking chimpanzee, or what could the chimpanzee learn from him? He felt like he should just offer it a kiwi and tell it to get the hell out of his sick chamber, but as soon as it opened its mouth, Jean-Paul found it oddly sympathetic.
“My theory,” Morton said, “which I admit has yet to be proven, is that the bacillus that is infecting you has a very specific effect, and that effect is retro-phylogenetic. If you follow me. Are you familiar with the notion of phylogeny?”
“Could you use some plain fucking words?” Jean-Paul said. He didn’t feel good about it, about being so rude to the chimpanzee, but one of the features of the illness everyone was asking about was profound personality change, and he couldn’t fucking keep his feelings to himself, and he felt like he was going to rip the fucking head off of someone.
“Are you aware,” Morton went on, “that your speech has become difficult to discern? I think maybe it’s better if we try to keep this to very simple communications, binary questions, especially since, as your father will tell you, we believe that the pathogen, which was originally adapted to an earthly ecosystem, mutated on the planet called Mars, and that mutation was lethal, true enough, but now that the pathogen is back on Earth, it seems to have become rather more aggressive. We are therefore pressed for time. I would like to check the facts of my theory against the evidence in your own case. Is that acceptable to you?”
The entire city of Rio Blanco, not to mention the great expanses of the Southwest, maybe even what remained of the United States of America, teetered on the brink of a lethal pandemic, or whatever you’d call it, and yet the chimpanzee took the time to posture a little bit, as if he were dazzled by his own oratory, this oratory that no other chimpanzee had. Also, he seemed especially taken with the woman from the laboratory. It was like everything was for her approval. The chimp practically had a stiffy over her.
“Yeah, go on,” Jean-Paul said.
“Reverse phylogeny would mean that the disease, effectively, has a specific trajectory. The disease wants to roll back the higher organisms. The first sign of this, in effect, would be impulse control. Having experience with a slightly less evolutionarily advanced species, I know that as we move backward through the primate family tree, we begin, first of all, to experience things like murderous rage and reproductive urgency. So I ask: Are you finding, for example, violent impulses in yourself?”
“I’m lying in bed. I’m not able—”
“I’m afraid we can’t understand you.”
“Why the fuck should I fucking talk to a fucking monkey? Dad?”
Morton continued, “I’m not a monkey. And am I to take it that your disinclination to answer the questions is itself a sign of the reverse phylogeny I’m describing?”
“If you want.”
“During the period of contact with the arm, what kind of behavior did you notice? Did you notice that it was, say, aggressive?”
An interesting question, you know. What the fuck did the arm think, if it didn’t have any spot in it where thinking was done, and if it didn’t think, what was it most like, on the big flowchart of the dwindling animals of the world? Was the arm anything like a man? Like a particular man, an astronaut, to whom it used to be attached? The arm, probably, was more like an insect, or maybe like a snake. It was like some kind of particularly stupid Sonoran snake, squirming across the barren desert floor looking for chipmunks and lizards on which to gorge itself, unconcerned about coyotes.
“It didn’t do much. It squeezed things and moved around.”
“Is that an affirmative reply?”
“Uh—”
“And do you feel, about your body, in your illness, a sense of becoming other, moving nearer to instincts and purposes that are other from what we associate with the higher mammals?”
“Wouldn’t know how to answer that.”
“You—”
“Don’t know how to answer,” Jean-Paul said. “I’m not a scientist. I find that shit—”
“He’s saying he can’t answer it,” Vienna Roberts broke in. His girl. She’d donned some rubber gloves and was now at his bedside, holding his hand. Was his inability to recognize that his hand was being held by the ridiculously hot Vienna Roberts a symptom of whatever it was that Morton, the chimpanzee, was trying to claim was the nature of the illness? And how come she didn’t have any symptoms? Did the arm only want to kill men? “He can’t answer the questions, and I don’t see what the point of them is anyhow. Give him the injection, for godsakes.”
One of the guys from NASA, who was even willing to take off his protective mask, so that you could see his exhausted face and heinous comb-over, chimed in too. “Dr. Koo, I can’t say I disagree. We’re losing valuable time here. I think we should be out in the field tracking the arm. This is a national epidemiological emergency we have here, and it’s only four days, presumably, since your son was infected by the remains of Colonel Richards, and—”
Morton stamped his feet petulantly and launched into an elaborate defense. “The arm, ladies and gentlemen, behaves like an animal. That’s your word for the living things that are different from you. The arm behaves like a living thing that is different from you. So it has a very few primitive impulses. The arm doesn’t understand that it is evading its capturers. The arm wishes to overpower, and in this way it is a very pure thing. It is the lofty human being brought down to its simplest layer of activity, of self — the entity that overpowers, the thing that dominates, subdues, and destroys. The arm is just a vestigial bit of the human, and right now, this boy, this young man here, is beginning to move into the gloom that the arm inhabits—”
“I’m not moving into any—”
“Give him the injection, Dr. Koo,” Vienna pleaded.
“I think it’s best that we move our teams out into the field,” the NASA guy said.
“—the twilight of the post-human, post-physiognomic self, the self that is no longer conscious of itself. That twilight is upon us now! It is at hand! Its progress is relentless. It may be that consciousness was just an anomaly on the radar of evolution, and that evolutionary time spent on the consciousness of the human animal is coming to its close. Reflexive self-consciousness has been lorded over the rest of the animal kingdom for millennia, and it has never been just, and it isn’t now. The only surprise, at this stage, is that the rapaciousness of the human animal took so long to be called into question. Maybe it’s ironic that it was something so small, something so microscopic, that accomplished what all the nonhuman life-forms have so wished for—”
“Morton, please,” said Dr. Koo. “We have more important—”
“Let me talk to him,” Noelle Stern, the graduate student, said. “I think I can—”
“—but if one young man has to be sacrificed,” Morton continued, sweeping his arm over the recumbent form of the younger Koo, “I admit this is regrettable, but this is the order of the epochs as they wheel past. When one species achieves too much dominance, it eventually sows the seeds of its own destruction. In your case, there is your obscene desire to wipe out other nations. Nations! Some group of you organizes itself so as to kill off some other group of yourselves, and in the process you generate this paperwork, fees for passports, that sort of nonsense, when all you want to do is kill one another! That’s a good joke! These borders that you claim mark the divisions from one nation to another? The only animal that observes them is you. What do the rest of us think of this? We think you are drunk on your own obscene power. And when that desire, the desire of nations to wipe out one another, is combined with your despicable interest in plundering a new planet of its resources, having so thoroughly polluted this one, well, then the result is this tiny little pathogen that now threatens—”