A Beautiful Truth (18 page)

Podo and Mr. Ghoul groom each other longer than ever before.

My friend.

My past.

Where are we.

Video captures every blow. They play it in slow motion and analyze each movement.

Only 0.6 percent of all confrontation between the males in the colony will lead to an actual fight. It is the threat of a fight that matters.

One of the researchers is writing a paper on warfare. She draws conclusions about the relative paucity of actual conflict through human history versus the constant presence of threat. She wants to print Paolo Uccello’s painting of the Battle of San Romano. Weapons scattered on a perfect grid. Warfare as ritual and posture.

They pause the slow-motion video. When contact is made between Jonathan and Podo, sweat bursts and hangs in the sunlight like a chandelier of needles.

Jonathan runs at Podo, and Podo holds him by a foot as he passes. He bites Jonathan’s leg. Jonathan screams injury and vengeance and he spins. His fist hits Podo’s ear and deafens it.

They roll in black percussion and the women are running back and forth screaming.

They face each other with hungry teeth and roar the inevitable future. Podo hears nothing but a low bright whistle.

Boulders are the muscles of the dead.

They are poised on their haunches and neither will run, but Burke makes noises nearby, behind Podo’s back. Burke rolls and jumps, throws his hands up and screams. He is cheering Jonathan’s fight.

Podo feels Burke’s presence and is fooled into running, and Jonathan runs after. They write an arabic chase across the grass and Jonathan bites at Podo.

Podo feels a hot fist inside his chest.

He runs for the greybald tree. He climbs the bottom and spins, fooling Jonathan into climbing, and drops underneath him. He holds Jonathan’s foot again, bites off a toe and swallows it.

Jonathan scrambles up the tree in a righteous and bewildered panic. He screams down to Burke and holds a hand out towards him and Magda. She is keening in fear, and useless.

Burke is cornered by Fifi, Mama and Mr. Ghoul. There is a silent acknowledgment amidst all the screams that Podo and Jonathan must fight on their own.

Jonathan is upside down along the body of the greybald tree. His face is a breath away from Podo’s and their screams are chilling the wind.

Podo is trying to shake the tree. There’s a darkness in the middle of what he sees.

He was the only one who ever climbed and stayed in the electric tree, hair pointed out towards everything he ruled.

He is the fastest.

He can lift this entire old tree.

He is suddenly terrified of Burke and feels a hand across his jaw. He tries to reach but he can’t feel his arm.

Nobody is near that tree except Jonathan and Podo.

He feels nails inside his chest, and teeth around his arm, and a bite that bursts, orange and hot. Fanta in his chest, Fanta in his eyes.

Glory glory.

The video from the roof shows the alpha holding the tree and then falling backwards, apparently untouched.

Podo is on his back. He looks like he is laughing or afraid, but he doesn’t move.

Podo is filling with silver.

The screaming doesn’t stop, but it changes.

Jonathan leaps down and shouts at Podo’s face, and his fists come down on his chest.

There is no response from Podo.

Jonathan runs with a limp to Magda and hugs her. He runs back to Podo and pounds him, and runs again to Magda.

Mr. Ghoul and Mama are restless and looking at each other in fear.

Podo hasn’t moved.

There is screaming and crying and Jonathan charges again.

The body is left outdoors to study their reactions.

Mama and Fifi lift Podo’s arms. They touch his fingers.

Mr. Ghoul sits near.

Jonathan charges again and pounds the body.

Mama screams at Jonathan, who limps to Magda.

Mr. Ghoul comes nearer and leans close to Podo’s face, three times. He hears nothing. He gently touches Podo’s lips. Mama lifts an arm again and lets it fall.

Fifi, Mama and Mr. Ghoul don’t look at each other.

Mr. Ghoul picks some grass and puts it to Podo’s mouth, hoping he will take it.

Jonathan remains in a frenzy, and his foot hurts.

Everyone wants to go somewhere, but nobody knows where.

Mama comes around to the other side of Podo’s body. She rests
a hand on his belly. His eyes are hard and flat like buttons on a Visitor’s coat.

The new one climbs up Mama and Bootie stares and touches the body, and Burke does not come near.

Mama keeps a hand on Podo’s belly.

Jonathan charges once more.

The body is removed at night with a forklift.

The annual electrocardiogram and serial blood pressure had shown moderate amounts of interstitial myocardial fibrosis. It is registered as sudden cardiac arrest. That day’s video is reviewed and a short paper is prepared, with a focus on IMF among captive chimpanzees.

In the morning they go to the greybald tree and smell the ground.

Jonathan will not go near it. He had nightmares in his bedroom.

They do not greet each other.

Mama plays with the new one.

Fifi eats.

Magda wants something.

Mr. Ghoul has a feeling in his throat.

He sits at the foot of the greybald tree.

He spends most of his days there.

He looks at nothing and everything and the everything amounts to nothing but a tree is a tree is a tree. He thinks and sees pictures.

He does this for twenty-nine days.

When Mr. Ghoul was smaller, Dave took him for drives to the forest in a van.

Dave had put a string around his neck as if he needed to be held back and they stepped into the woods, Mr. Ghoul’s first time feeling dirt and branches underfoot.

He was terrified and excited and wanted to be carried by Dave but Dave said

You’re too heavy.

Dave brought the keyboard and Mr. Ghoul tapped on pictures and he squirted white on his leg.

That tree.

That tree.

A stick was a baby tree, a leaf a baby tree, a coloured leaf a flower.

Mr. Ghoul felt shy with everything at first because it was different from the slides and movies and different from the pictures of pictures he tapped on.

A heron flew over and Mr. Ghoul chased it then ran to the pictures that said

That airplane.

He wanted to climb things but felt especially shy near trees.

Mr. Ghoul was at that point twelve years old.

He knew candles and numbers and could remember a random pattern of numbers on a screen and tap them, 5,8,1,9,4,3,11,14, faster than a thirty-five-year-old International Master of chess. And the International Master of chess was sitting on the forest floor asking Ghoul to put it all in a sentence, how many leaves was he holding in his hand.

Dave looked hard at Ghoul and Dave was thinking about time.

This was part of the paper he submitted to Science:

In the woods Dave and Mr. Ghoul shared peanut butter sandwiches. Dave said there’s peanut butter on your face. Mr. Ghoul wiped it off with a leaf.

Dave said you can climb a tree like you can climb the monkey bars in the playroom. Trees are like monkey bars.

Dave spoke and used sign language while he spoke, and he tapped on the lexigrams for tree and up and Ghoul.

Mr. Ghoul stared at Dave and various trees and thought about peanut butter.

Dave stared at Mr. Ghoul and Mr. Ghoul moved and sat and sighed.

David rested his forehead on his hand and fingered his hair, pushed it back and thought about how little hair his fingers felt, and reordered it into his ponytail.

It was the ninety-fifth paper to emerge from his department at Girdish. Over eight years of his work.

Unassailable rigour and control of experiments.

Independent witnesses.

David had set out to defy Noam Chomsky’s assertion that humans were unique for being born with language, born with a sense of grammar. Linguists believed that grammar and syntax were innate and were the preserve of humans like flight is that of angels.

He had video evidence, eyewitness proof of intentionality, rule learning, imitation, fast associative mapping, sequencing, cognition and meta-cognition. When Ghoul comments on what he is eating, what he is watching, there is no clearer sign of self-awareness, of language as a tool for expressing self.

How many times had he wished that he could tie down Chomsky, seat a roomful of Chomskyans, behaviourists, petty-minded linguists, behind that glass in the observation area and demonstrate that it is not a uniquely human ability to do something so utterly pointless as putting a blue hat inside a microwave because you have kindly been asked to.

The editors at Science called his conclusion an “over-interpretation of stimulus and response” and refused to publish the paper. It was doomed for some other journal in the gutters of the Citation Index.

Language emerged with our early ancestors as a way of coordinating action. That is what David and others believed. The more complex our social life became, the more there was a need to make needs known and to act in unison. This was the real syntax, the real putting together. And as complexity grew, so too did syntax. Ghoul and Mama were demonstrating its rudiments.

But by mentioning syntax and grammar he drew criticism from linguists. For linguists, language is words, not communication. They ignore what words were made for.

After the first visit to the woods on their own, David had trouble persuading Mr. Ghoul to return to the van.

David took hold of the leash and pulled and it may as well have been tied to a tree.

He knew better than to try force.

I wonder what Mama is doing he said.

Mr. Ghoul wouldn’t look at him.

I bet Mama and Podo are playing Pac-Man he said.

Mr. Ghoul walked with him to the van.

They won’t do anything they don’t want to do. That has always been part of the problem with ape language research.

So even if he sat Chomsky or Terrace down in the observation room, it would no doubt be a day when Ghoul was tired or sick or ornery like he has been more and more.

And people only see what they want to see.