“Morton,” Koo said, “I regret to inform you that it is time for your shot.”
If this remark was to be understood by the chimpanzee, it was intended in vain.
“This is a momentous injection, but perhaps that’s all I’m going to say about it.” And why? Why was this all he was going to say? Because Woo Lee Koo believed that nearly every act of human life was, or soon would be, observed by lackluster governmental mainframes housed somewhere in the Midwest, in whose employ he sometimes served, and he therefore rarely said anything of substance in a publicly owned facility, of which these premises were one example. What he had already said in life, in fact, he had said only out of insufficient secretiveness. And he resolved to do better. “I would be more apologetic, but I am sure that you wouldn’t be apologetic with me if the sandals were on the other feet. In the course of human events, it never does any good to be merciful. Mercy rarely results in good science. This is one of the things I have learned, Morton. So this injection takes place, roughly speaking, whether you want it to or not.”
The chimpanzee watched the television monitor without attending to the competing monologue. But once Koo began genuinely readying the injection, Morton, who’d already had a great smorgasbord of injections in his life, began spitting at the great medical researcher. Morton headed for the corner of the cell beneath the television monitor, to cower in an uncourageous fashion. He barked out a plangent chimpanzee cry.
“This won’t do at all!” Koo said. “I am the researcher with numerous grant money at my disposal. I will be victorious. Don’t make me use restraints.”
Morton, when the human hand of science was within reach, began trying to bite it, as he had done on other occasions, having even broken the skin of Noelle on one occasion. That bite had become infected too, and in a medical facility you could never be too careful about infection, what with the antibiotic resistances coursing through the larger hospitals of the nation. Koo, the South Korean researcher, had no choice but to restrain Morton. Luckily there were two sets of shackles in this, the highest-security cage of the primate laboratory. Koo grabbed Morton by the shoulders, after setting the syringe on the table in the cage, and he forcibly shoved the chimpanzee over toward one of the sets of shackles, to which Morton responded by baring his grand set of chompers anew, attempting to bite down on the South Korean researcher’s wrist but making contact only with a portion of his cardigan sweater, shredding one sleeve. Damn you! Koo directed a blow at the animal, in recompense, and he did manage to hit him on the shoulder before tripping over a rubber ball in the cell and plunging to the floor. If Morton could have laughed, then he was laughing now, although Koo had often argued that what appeared to be a chimpanzee laugh was something much more knowing than mirth, that the chimpanzees were much more soulful and melancholy than commonly believed. All except Morton, at any rate, who was now attempting to relieve himself of some fluid backup in the kidneys, a great arc of the urine raining down, in fact, just short of the table where the syringe lay resting.
“You are an unworthy member of the pantheon of higher primates!” Koo expostulated. “You have no gratitude for the fact that you’re still able to serve our branch of the tree of life. I won’t have it!”
Pausing to wipe up with a towel the liquid that pooled on the floor of the cell near the runoff drain, Koo then made for the animal again, throwing himself upon the chimp, reaching for the arm of the chimp and the shackle simultaneously. Just when it seemed as though the battle between doctor and chimpanzee would never be resolved, Koo did get shackle and wrist into his grasp, though this was when Morton again sank his teeth into Koo, getting a mouthful of sweater and polo shirt. Because of the buffering capacity of these synthetic fabrics, it was only a flesh wound. Morton was probably readying a good bite at the human jugular or some other more vulnerable spot, when the South Korean researcher succeeded in shackling one chimpanzee arm.
Morton crumpled up at the recognition of his renewed and never-ending subservience. Morton wound himself into a ball. A ball of submission. The fight went out of him.
“That’s my boy,” said the human animal. “I am grateful.”
He affixed the other restraint, not that it held any joy for him. And there Morton hung, as though martyred, and Koo removed an alcohol swab from his pocket and found the spot on Morton’s eye socket, just below the eyebrow, which is to say into the frontal lobe, that had been shorn of its fur so that the injection could more easily take place. At last, he readied the syringe for its job, squeezing out the remaining air bubble. He had the syringe, he had the serum, he had the idea, he had the patent, or he would soon, he had the stem cell line, he had the primate, he had the time, and now he was depressing the plunger. It seemed like such a little thing in the moment, the abridgement of Morton’s freedom. But that is how it always seems to the oppressor.
* * *
Jean-Paul Koo, multiethnic American teenager, in his convertible, in the desert, without sunscreen. Who the fuck could tell Jean-Paul anything? Fuck whatever anyone was going to fucking tell Jean-Paul. Fuck his fucking father, for example, his father was an ignorant science moron fuck. Fucking concave-chested medical researcher never-got-outside, never-watched-a-sporting-event-not-even-lacrosse-fucking-never-listened-to-a-radio-or-watched-television fuck, with his bullshit fucking animal testing, his fucking skinny-puppy-fucking medical torture, and his fucking ridiculous pocket protector and his awful fucking jazz music, and classical music, and his worship of Jean’s fucking dead mother, people who were all goo-goo-eyed about their mothers and fathers. Fuck all of them. Fuck everyone who believed in romance; romance was for dimwits. Fuck the priests at his fucking religious high school, which was now the most popular high school in Rio Blanco, now that fucking religious education was, hmm, he didn’t know, like fucking as popular as water, because the fucking ridiculous public schools were fucking nothing but some afternoon fucking classes in fucking automotive repair, while the fucking priests at the fucking Catholic school were all about the meaningful fucking glances that meant God loves you and I’ll suck your dick in Jesus’ name. Fuck the priests and the politicians and his fucking father; Jean-Paul was a graduate! He was a high school fucking graduate who was going to take a summer off to work on his business proposal for a booth that would offer self-designed cosmetic surgery blueprints for needy consumers. He was really excited! Fuck! You could just go to this booth at, like, any fucking big-box development store, or downtown by the fucking bus station, or by the fucking paling salons, or any mall, of the few malls that remained, ghost malls, where they still had the fucking speed-walking contests and the fucking wheelchair contests, and you could go into the ridiculously fucking inviting booth, and you could just upload a photo of yourself, or, if you wanted, you could have a picture of you taken with your ridiculously fucking hot girlfriend, like for example he could have a photo taken with his ridiculously hot fucking girlfriend, Vienna Roberts, and then the computer would look at you in the horrible booth photo, and then you could use some kickass software and the online fucking programming, and you could start modifying your fucking horrible appearance, like your saggy old-woman breasts, if that was what you had, or your obese fucking saggy buttocks, if you were the kind of guy who had some totally saggy-ass buttocks, and then you could use the software for the online simulated tuck of your fucking buttocks, and then you could give yourself a face-lift and get rid of your like ten extra chins, and maybe if you were a fucking balding guy who was fucking combing over your fucking repulsive hair, then you could get some fucking plugs, or you could get some stem cell implants in the scalp tissue that would regrow the fuzzy shit. Even though his father was an idiot, his father had helped him with this part, or whatever other operations you could fucking name, cosmetic-surgery-type operations, you could fucking design any of them on the workstation, like if part of your fucking head had been blasted off by some explosive, then maybe you could use the computer to suggest a sculpted silicone-and-titanium fucking head that could go on the blasted-away portion of your head, assuming you were not totally fucking catatonic, or whatever, like a complete fucking drooling flank steak of a dude, because of the blast; anyway, the point was you could get the computer to design anything, any kind of fucking plastic surgery thing you could imagine, and then the computer would spit out a blueprint of the operations, and then it would give you like a fucking market-rate price for all these operations, like in dollars, or in Euros, or in Sino-Indian rupees, and then it would give names of various participating medical institutions that would perform the operations, and then the computer would let these fucking doctors fucking compete,