Had Koo gone soft? He certainly did not want to go soft, and that was why research went on, and it was why research sometimes took place well after the working hours, when Koo’s efforts would not be witnessed by the prying eyes of his graduate students, nor various oversight agencies. And that was why he had settled on a certain rather dangerous experiment with the chimpanzee who was next up for regenerative experiments, the animal known as Morton. Named after Noelle’s nephew, the boy who had asked to have a chimpanzee designated for him. Morton, the nonhuman, was a sour person, if he could be said to be a person, a chimpanzee who would never do as told and who had seemed to take as strong a disliking to Koo as Koo took to this experimental subject. They had spent many an evening on either side of the piece of glass that separated the two stages of primate evolution, each of them suspicious. Morton seemed to laugh at atrocities on the television. Never was there a body count, nor some human limbs dug up in a basement in Ohio, for which Morton didn’t get a bizarre and toothy grin upon his visage, as if to say, Look at my gums! No gum recession! And it was whenever Koo averted his gaze from this spectacle that Morton scooped some of his own redolent fecal material and did his best Jackson Pollock upon the reinforced glass.
He was docile enough under other circumstances, when it suited him, and he was reasonable when Noelle was administering to him, but it was his recalcitrance that persuaded Koo that he was a perfect subject for the off-the-record experiment he intended. If only Morton had been willing somehow to sacrifice himself, as Alfonse had been, if Morton were capable of serving science with an open heart. But no. Animals who tried to challenge the dominance of human animals, those animals needed to perish. Animals ate other animals, or rather, birds ate insects and animals ate birds, and animals ate animals, or animals ate plants and animals ate the animals who ate plants, and then there were three or four stages of animals eating smaller or stupider animals, and then at the top of the mound, Koo liked to remind himself and others, were the humans, ordering takeout. Humans swept through entire catalogues of species, laying waste, casting bones out a car window for a crow to snap up, and this was the order of the universe, and the simpletons who somehow managed to shield themselves from nature’s bloody claws weren’t only ignorant, they were liars: thus there was Morton with his round-the-clock war coverage and his action films.
As to the specifics of the experiment: it had long been Koo’s intention to introduce genetic material from his late wife, his cryogenically frozen wife, into a chimpanzee. In particular, Koo intended to inject cerebral stem cell tissue from his wife into a chimpanzee, in a base of saline and amino acids, in an attempt to get this information past the blood-brain barrier so that it might mix with the genetic material of the primate in question. This was a fairly elementary experimental notion, one that had been practiced in South Korea commonly, or so it was said, though legend, myth, and fact were closely allied in his homeland. Koo’s idea was that by introducing stem cells into the brain of the primate, the primate could perhaps come to contain some portion of his wife’s intellectual residue. Koo preferred the term residue when speaking of what he had kept of his wife these many years. As a former believer in the outlandish tales of Catholicism, he wasn’t comfortable with the idea of a soul, since, as has long been understood, there was nowhere in the body where this soul could be contained, just as he was not comfortable without the notion, because a bit of superstition was evidence of the residue of self, and the residue could not be cast off, no more than a man could cast off a phobia or a taste for olives.
What would be the nature of the residue that would manifest in Morton, the sadistic chimp, when the injection took hold of him? None could say for certain. And that was why the injection of stem cells from Mrs. Fontaine-Koo into Morton could not be included in grant proposals nor even explained fully to Noelle, the charming PhD student whose breasts occasionally caused Koo to fall into fugue state. He was in just such a fugue state, however briefly, when interrupted by Norris, on the celebrated night of the Mars mission splashdown. He had been preparing the serum for the injection, as he had prepared and abandoned it over and over again in the past seven days. Always deciding, in the end, that it was too risky. What was different tonight? Not much was different. Perhaps Koo just had less and less to look forward to. Perhaps he was going to do what he was going to do, whether it was a good idea or not. The finals of the National League of X-treme Lacrosse, the splashdown of the laughable Mars mission, and the injection of human cerebral stem cells into a chimpanzee, these things all had a desperate cast. The desperation in each seemed like one variety of the North American allegiance to lost causes.
He left Norris behind and walked idly down the empty corridors of the building, noting the number of fluorescent bulbs that were flickering, until he found himself in the primate laboratory. The timer on the monitors in each of the cages offered, in fact, a lacrosse game for Morton and the other primates to watch. X-treme lacrosse was noted for the high number of injuries per game, and Morton was, predictably, a fan. He was a fan especially of the team from Indianapolis, which was considered to be among the most violent of all. Koo rapped on the window once, to alert the animal that he was present and intending to enter. In one latex glove, he carried the syringe containing the serum in which the stem cells of his wife’s tissue were stored. He opened the reinforced door that led in among the cages. He whispered incomplete greetings to the other animals as he passed. In Morton’s cell, viewed from the outside, there were, as ever, a few soiled toys on the floor, and some fruit and vegetable remnants and the like. Morton, it should be noted, didn’t particularly like bananas. However, he had a comedian’s allegiance to the risibility potential thereof. He may never yet have used the peels in such a way as to manifest their comic potential, but he collected them as though he were waiting.