“And so I aim to teach you something tonight, you human beings; I aim to teach you something about selflessness, and about love. Because I love this woman right here, Noelle Stern. Are you listening to me, those of you who remain in this room? I love this woman. This woman took care of me when no one would take care of me at all. She brought me my breakfast; she brought me my lunch and dinner. She emptied out my waste products from the cell where I was imprisoned, and she schooled me in the kind of politesse that has made me the man that I am. The man you see before you right now. And while I understand that you do not think I am a man, I use the word advisedly. When she had to administer experimental drugs to me, she did so in a regretful way, and on more than one occasion, I am certain that I saw tears in her eyes. I spoke my very first words to her, and while it is possible that I spoke those words simply because I had some human cells injected into me — yes, that’s right, Noelle, I believe I understand the experiment — in short, yes, it is possible that I am speaking to you because I have those little crystals of a dead person in my brain, but still I choose to think that I began to speak because I finally had something that I very badly needed to say, and that something was about gratitude. I had a need to speak, and that is what language is for, is it not? For me, there were many obstacles — insufficient fine motor control, poor laryngeal function — but I overcame all these things, because my need, my love, was so strong that I had to speak. Was this enough? No! I am here to tell you now that I have lived in both worlds, like Tiresias, in the world of the mute nonhuman animal and in the world of the human animal, and I can confirm that language has its limitations! There are so many things that language cannot express, I say this to you right now—”
Although the arm had been at a safe distance, at the thundering vibrations of Morton’s voice, it began reaching and lunging in his direction, and he was forced to keep himself between Noelle and the arm in order to continue his oratory without interruption.
“For example, I have found that the longing I have felt has been ill served by language. I have tried to get it down, in poetry and in my diary entries, and I have tried using metaphor and simile, all the finest varieties of speech, and there’s just no way that I can properly describe what I’m feeling. For example, there are times of the day when this woman—”
“Morton, we really don’t have time…”
“Just let me finish up,” he said firmly, in dramatic aside. “There are times when I have been in the cell, and you’ve been off duty, when I have felt the traces of you there in the room with me, even though you were off for the day. I have felt you there. I have felt whatever conversation it is that we had earlier, and I have felt you there with me, and I have experienced you as a tightness in the chest, an itchiness of the scalp, an inability to experience the daily pleasures of the world. But do words accurately convey this feeling? I could just as easily be describing heartburn to you, brought on by spicy food or ulcerative colitis, or perhaps some kind of myocardial infarction, but those would not be sensations that one associates with longing, would they? No, they wouldn’t. This language that I have somehow received, this thing that separates me from other animals, it makes me now a miracle of science, but—”
A couple wrestlers dragged themselves up from whatever fog of gang warfare afflicted them or whatever alcoholic poisoning they were temporarily sleeping off, and made unobtrusive exits.
“—this language that I have received is as much curse as blessing. And if language, then, is not sufficient to meet the needs of the likes of me, what is there that remains to me? This is the question I ask myself. In what way can I demonstrate my love? The only way I can demonstrate it is with my actions. That is how we do it in the world of chimpanzees, at least as I understand it — from having met a few chimps over the years and having read a number of books on the subject, as well as watching chimpanzee-themed programs online. We demonstrate our needs quickly — with actions — in a decisive way, and that is what I’m going to do right now.”
With that, Morton took the Taser that he was holding and applied it to the arm, which was flailing madly around in the center of the dusty floor, flailing as if there were a butterfly it was attempting to catch, and the arm came to rest.
“Morton, do you really have to do this?”
And he picked up the arm. Just picked it up as if it were a bough in the woods. Or a scroll from some religious tradition. And he put it under his own arm. Then he accepted, from Noelle, the bag in which the other arm was secreted away. And then, as if they were a couple, he and Noelle, a couple who had been together for years and years, the two of them exchanged and organized the various items in their custody, swapping out of the bag the arm from the cadaver with the infected arm, and they started, in silence, up the grim, lightless way, back toward the apothecary. Those who were left behind evidently wanted to remain, and their needs were no longer a matter of concern for this couple that united the primates into the one common line.
Noelle said, “This really panicked me on the way down.”
Morton said, “I was blindfolded.”
Noelle said, “Did you really have to do that?”
Morton said, “Do what?”
Noelle said, “The arm?”
They covered the distance to the parking lot in half the time, because distance has mostly to do with perception. And then they were out. Which left only the one last chore, the task that they had understood as the purpose of coming here, to the omnium gatherum. They were going to drop off the replacement arm, find the URB van, meet Koo and the others, and drive back into town to a secure location. As it turned out, once upon the main street of Old Rio Blanco, the stage set, they were confronted by Woo Lee Koo, his son, Jean-Paul, Vienna Roberts, her parents (very much out of place and completely dumbfounded, according to Noelle’s first impression), and various members of the department of medicine from the hospital. Who had all, according to Dr. Koo, tracked the two of them with the transponder that Dr. Koo had subdermally implanted in Morton long ago. In his left wrist. Koo had followed the signal to Old Rio Blanco before completely losing track of them somewhere. The signal went dead.
Dr. Koo was nervous about something, incredibly nervous, agitated, distracted, or so it seemed to Noelle. Distracted in a way she had never seen before, short-tempered, and he was saying that they had to leave now, they had to leave as quickly as they were able to leave. There was confusion, he said, confusion at the highest levels, though when had there not been confusion in these recent days? Still, Noelle Stern found that she felt nothing so much as exhaustion, notwithstanding the course of events. What she wanted to do was to lie down somewhere, and maybe throw up, since the migraine she’d been fighting off was still making all the lights dance with their nasty, sinister, impressionistic auras. But Koo was barking orders at everyone and insisting that they keep moving and that there was no time to stop, and when she asked why they had to keep moving, she was told that there was no time to discuss it, they simply needed to get to a van and move out of the immediate area of this valley as quickly as possible, preferably to the other side of the mountains. Morton was still carrying the arm, and Noelle asked what they were meant to do with it, to which Koo said, There’s no time, no time; just throw the arm anywhere, one of the other attending physicians said, and then someone disagreed, no, you just can’t throw it anywhere, you have to dispose of it somehow, or at least leave it with trusted deputies, and we need at least one tissue sample; wait a second, Noelle wanted to say. Didn’t we come here to get the arm for some reason? Wasn’t there a reason for getting the arm, that had to do with something, she couldn’t remember what exactly, with some experiment that Koo was doing? And then she noted that Jean-Paul looked like death warmed over, which she supposed must have been exactly what he was, death warmed over, and he wasn’t saying anything, and he seemed to be bleeding, and why was he out, exactly? What about the quarantine? He moved around the fringes of the group, as they all hastened back toward the omnium gatherum, and he was wearing a ridiculous amount of clothing, he was covered head to toe, though it was probably still somewhere near to a hundred degrees.