“His name was?”
“Huh?”
“The dog.”
“Zimmerman.”
“You came up with this?”
“What?”
“The name.”
“Of the dog?”
Koo said, in the belief that Norris would not follow the subsequent divagations of his reasoning, “Missing someone — who has passed away — is among the most human of feelings.”
“We buried him,” Norris eulogized, more thoughtful than aggrieved. “Behind the house.”
“One day I will be able to restore Zimmerman to you. If there is tissue remaining at the burial site.”
“Huh?” Norris said.
“Bring him back.”
Norris nodded without commitment. The light would not last, and this meant the contagious darkness of Rio Blanco would soon be upon them. Before Koo went home, however, he needed to look in on the laboratory and its primates.
The primates of URB’s laboratory were better looked after than the majority of the men and women of the Southwest, many of whom were living outdoors or in shantytowns and trailer parks. Just a month ago a trailer park outside Rio Blanco had been swept down into a wash south of the Santa Ritas. The residents, those who had not been pincushioned in the forests of cacti, had taken up residence in the stadium where the football team, the Magpies, played at home. Among those living there was a small army of alternative-lifestyle enthusiasts, adherents of the movement named omnium gatherum, who found science and its advances anathema, who were certain that essences of local weeds would treat their medical complaints. Their direct action against the laboratory that housed the primates had become a matter of federal investigation. This was part of the reason the building where Koo worked was run-down. The university, besides putting up cyclone fencing and concrete barriers out in front of the structure, besides vetting all employees more thoroughly than the Central Intelligence Agency vetted their own, could do no more, could afford no more, and so the building, after the firebombing, stood as a monument to the endurance of a certain implacability of human thought in the face of mock-scientific, pseudo-religious psychobabble.
Koo, therefore, looked in on the primates every night, and he treated them with the care and respect that he sometimes failed to show his colleagues or even his graduate students. When Alfonse, the orangutan, had received his innovative liver cell injection three months prior, to relieve the symptoms of cirrhosis with which Koo had afflicted him, Koo stayed with the animal day and night for two weeks. He stayed with the animal as he got weaker and more feverish, and he pleaded with Alfonse to fight harder, to accept this new therapy, to permit his liver to heal, even if there was no hard evidence that a positive attitude had any effect on healing. Koo’s team had needed to let more than three-quarters of the liver perish first, because of the possibility of spontaneous regeneration, and Koo felt certain that Alfonse had become delusional as a result. Now, Alfonse had always preferred the seeds of the pomegranate. And so Koo went to the expensive market on the east side of town himself and brought back the fruits. He harvested the seeds himself. He even juiced them for Alfonse, while conducting long rambling lectures on the great German composers, hiking in the Rio Blanco area, beekeeping in the era of colony collapse disorder, and the like. He didn’t even know what he was saying exactly, only that the words were tumbling out, flash floods in a wash, and it didn’t really matter whether they made sense at all. He was talking to an orangutan. Many were the evenings that he brought the problems of his investigations into the primate laboratory instead of discussing them with Jean-Paul Koo, with whom it would have been more likely. He discussed his hopes and ambitions with spider monkeys, chimpanzees, orangutans, and so forth.
One night: Alfonse, who had often been responsive to music, particularly the more meditative opuses of Satie or Debussy, huddled insensate in a corner while assorted nocturnes in the classical genre enlivened his cell. When his instructor, for this was what Koo believed himself to be when he was in the room with the primates, an instructor in the secrets of evolutionary fact, attempted to put a hand on Alfonse’s shoulder, as he often did, even though the orangutans were known to bite when unhappy, the animal gave him a look that was instantly recognizable by Koo, and this despite that in his years of dealing with animals he’d always resisted the desire to impute language or linear perception to them. Alfonse had looked at Koo, and in his face he’d said, I can’t keep indulging you in this way. Let a fellow go if it’s his time to go.
Was this set of muscular responses to the nocturnes haphazard? Was Koo interpreting what was in no way genuine? Was it the case that if you allowed an orangutan the liberty to behave as he wished for years and years, you would inevitably see in him an arrangement of craniofacial muscles that resembled every possible human expression? Would you say that the orangutan had the look of someone who had cheated at golf? Would you say that the orangutan was chastising you for failing to pick up the wet towels from the bathroom floor? Would the orangutan yearn to see the country of his birth (in this case a laboratory in Chapel Hill, NC, that had a surfeit of orangutans and needed, by way of trade, one of URB’s lemurs)? Would the orangutan laugh with that abandon that is the sign of the truly hopeless? And why, why, why, Koo often wondered, though he knew well the answer, could the primate not explain to him or to someone, some other ape, someone somewhere, what it was that he wanted to say, instead of sitting there like a bumpkin, when the injection was rendered unto him, the liver cells that they had grown in the lab and injected into his side, so that Alfonse yelped, but with a look on his brute face that he would accept this insult too, as he had accepted so much else, without being permitted to go outside, without being permitted much beyond eating and watching nature programming on a large flat-screen mounted in the corner? Koo could not help it, he wept when the injection was rendered unto Alfonse, reproaching the nonhuman animal, Just defend yourself this one time! Alfonse yelped, and Koo felt saline duct excretions down his own cheek, and there was a broth of pity endorphins in him, though this was nothing compared to the suffering he felt upon the night Alfonse gave the last of himself to science, the night when Alfonse, two and a half months ago, collapsed onto his side, and Koo and his graduate assistant Noelle Stern rushed to him from beyond the reinforced glass where they often watched the animals.
Mighty Alfonse, your epitaph, voilà, given to you by your employer, written upon loose-leaf paper, so old-fashioned, included in the file of you that is now relegated to some university hall of records across town. Alfonse, it was clear that you never demanded remuneration and were therefore never paid in full for your sacrifice, and this your employer recognized. Not a dollar, adjusted for inflation or otherwise, was ever amassed in a bank account somewhere with your name on it. Alfonse, you were allowed exercise on certain occasions, and we tried to enrich you with various games, though at the time of your demise you were long past the daybreak of your life when games much interested you. As to the matter of your virility, it would be nearly impossible to assess your virility, because you were separated from your cousins and distant relations in North Carolina, and you never once cohabited with a female orangutan, just a couple of girl baboons and a brace of chimpanzees. Did you know that you missed out on the sweet dance of love, Alfonse? We thought you did. We your employers (Koo wrote, in Korean, and then laboriously translated) suspect that you once knew of love and gave up the habit of it only with a great regret. Because even if you never tasted the delights of sexual congress, you did get the occasional erection, and your erection, Alfonse, was a great and mighty thing, something that delighted you, since you did occasionally attempt to get other primates to pay attention to you when those nerve endings were feeling sensitive. Where did this knowledge of the uses of your erection come from, Alfonse? From your predecessors? Did your mother, before you were weaned, somehow make clear to you that this was how things came and went upon planet Earth, that if you could not frolic on the plains, the grasslands of the veldt, protecting your territory and swinging in the baobabs, at the very least, you could in our laboratory drink a draft of love? Well, Alfonse, we did not provide you with a mate, and that is your additional loss, though we take some solace in our belief that you were not completely deprived of this knowledge. This deprivation is to be lamented, but it is nothing when compared to your larger sacrifice in the matter of research upon varieties of liver disease. You were only twenty years old when you gave your life, and so you were not even old enough to imbibe, and for that reason your liver was as squeaky clean as a liver could be, before we got to it. You never protested, and you lived with your illness without anxiety or fear. You suffered quietly, until the days of your madness and your coma. Your employer would personally like to thank you, therefore, for giving your life to the University of Rio Blanco. You will not be forgotten. Actually, it’s possible you will be largely forgotten, since you have no heirs, and your employer will be sacrificing others of your kind before too much time goes by. Still, this doesn’t mean that there was not heartbreak here in abundance; your employers have shed tears for you, for the bloody vocation in which they are engaged; much grieving there was, and many intoxicants drunk, in silence and awe, as you were shoveled out of the crematorium. Many thanks, good friend.