A Beautiful Truth (27 page)

He holds a low pipe that protrudes from the wall, too low for him to swing around it. He moves to and fro and tries to break the pipe and he jumps again onto the mesh and screams.

Where Burke walked, Jonathan runs, pounding randomly on the walls, and there seems to be no end to his mania.

He runs unseeing into the pipe mouth-first and knocks himself backwards and flat.

Looee meets Mr. Ghoul the same day, who finds Jonathan’s tooth on the floor.

He watches Mr. Ghoul walk out to a sunny garden. Looee has been naked for years but not outside.

When food is brought to him later he tries to tell the man that he wants clothes.

The new one waits outside the door some days. She wants to see the yek again.

Jonathan watches her with suspicion. She has grown and is beginning to ripen. Jonathan sits with Burke and they groom each other.

Mr. Ghoul is trying to rest. Burke had hit him so hard yesterday that he cannot see properly and he has trouble standing.

Jonathan and Burke allow him to pay them obeisance but there is no benefit to him.

After all this time Jonathan occasionally thinks that Podo will emerge from the shady grove and he tries to keep them all from going in. The new one looks in and tries to understand. Bootie goes to Burke when the others go into the grove. He wants Burke to like him so he acts as an informant.

When Jonathan and Burke are having naps, the others feel more free. Fifi and Mr. Ghoul have snuck into the grove together. There is a single cure for most fear and worry, one answer to most questions. Their sounds blow birds into the sky.

Jonathan awakes, and when he sees them coming out of the grove and knows they have been together he screams as if a thick stick is being forced up his ass. He pounds the ground and cries like a child.

Jonathan has been throwing these tantrums more and more. He knows he can’t hit Fifi because she and Mama will turn on him, and if he attacks Mr. Ghoul right now it will be the same as beating Fifi.

Burke will not console him through his tantrum. The new one goes to Jonathan and hugs him from behind. Closer to childhood, she understands his behaviour better than the others. The spectacle of Jonathan being hugged from behind by the girl makes Burke feel powerful.

Burke later beats Mr. Ghoul and runs at Fifi as she tries to sit with Mama. He and Jonathan sit apart, the older man looking over his shoulder and trying to look big.

The same cast of animals enters the room over the coming weeks and Looee watches them on TV. There are long periods of stillness interrupted by noisy fights, and he doesn’t understand what happens.

He gets stronger but David remarks his many tics. Looee’s stare grows absent and he has pulled off some of his fingernails.

David thinks it’s a good idea to let him out into the enclosure on his own so he gets a real sense of it. If the others are around he will be attacked.

They keep the night cages locked in the morning so the others can’t go outside. Looee is brought to the outdoor side of the
introduction room. The low iron door is raised and the sun shines in horizontally.

Looee walks tentatively to the doorway. He sits down beside it, looking back into the room, and he won’t go outside. He stares at the rectangle of sun on the floor and feels the room warm up.

He wants to go back to his cell.

He hears local birds and cicadas making sounds he has never heard. He peers out and sees the beautiful garden he has seen on TV. He can’t see any of the dogpeople.

He stands on the concrete ledge and leans forward, touching the dirt with his knuckles. He doesn’t understand whether this is television or not.

Fresh air blows softly into his face and something awakens. He sits back and breathes and stares out at the sunny garden. He cautiously sighs, a pensive ape in a concrete frame. A camera captures him looking out from the doorway, a postcard from one of evolution’s abandoned neighbourhoods.

David has had the courage to touch his hands through the bars. He sensed that Looee is comfortable with people and surmises that he spent time in a human environment. His records have long been lost.

We trust each other. I tell him that. I trust you Looee.

I bet you could tell me stories.

Looee’s eyes follow him, and look away before David turns to leave.

He willingly enters transfer boxes and presents his limbs for injection.

He has been broken.

David believed that there was value in trying to communicate with other apes, but that more could be gained by trying not to fit them
into human culture. Seeing how they communicated among themselves seemed a less narcissistic sort of inquiry than trying to make them communicate with us.

He and his staff have thousands of hours of video footage and volumes of meticulously noted interactions, upon which hundreds of papers have been generated—papers on customs, politics, empathy, conflict, child-rearing, personality, topics so far-reaching that he is often invited to speak at conferences that ostensibly have nothing to do with chimpanzees.

Occasionally they test social behaviour in various ways—dropping melons or nutritious foliage into the enclosure, for example, to see whether they share and what sort of conflict arises. For the most part they try to let life unfold without interference.

Outdoors there are five acres of land including several species of trees. The climate is so like their natural habitat that there is seldom need for prolonged indoor housing, but their sleeping quarters are easily modified in the winter.

A concrete wall surrounds part of the enclosure, with two observation posts. Its base is moated because chimpanzees cannot swim and are generally afraid of water. At the end is an electrified fence. One of the old sweetgum trees, which could provide escape over the wall, has also been electrified.

The population has largely been static—most of the babies were delivered in clinic and taken away for other studies in Girdish. This is one of the institute’s longest-running projects.

He responds to the name Looee but sometimes wonders whom people are calling. He remembers Looee, who lived in a house.

They no longer introduce the apes by name. The female born in the colony to Mama was never named, though the staff call her Beanie. David points out, obviously, that names don’t exist
in the wild. I wouldn’t be David if my grandmother hadn’t been Welsh.

Looee walks tentatively out into the sun.

Jonathan runs and throws a handful of shit at him.

Looee retreats inside and they make the iron door slide down.

He goes to the corner and tries to sleep.

A system of tunnels is controlled from within.

During power struggles and times of uncertainty, fights can escalate to the point of fatality. Individuals and groups are carefully monitored. As much as the staff try to keep their hands off, they don’t want them to die.

Looee is anaesthetized and moved to the sleeping quarters. He wakes up in a very large cage with a concrete floor. It is nine feet tall with an elevated platform. There is room to nest on the floor or on the platform.

The iron grids are broadly spaced and there are large high windows and skylights in the room. A catwalk traverses the cages and leads to the various tunnels. The cages are opened or closed with electric locks. The chimps amble at will along the catwalk and find their own cages.

When Looee wakes up he finds new blankets and a GI Joe doll.

His cage is where Podo last slept.

He is excited by the prospect of sunshine but is nervous about being naked outside. He knows that even on warm days the mountains share their chill with the valleys and campfires are needed in the woods.

He finds his way nervously through a tunnel, touches the dirt and feels grass and sun. Hot sun and summer smells.

Jonathan and Magda see the yek emerge and they raise the alarm. Magda screams and throws her hands in the air and runs to the women and Bootie.

Looee sees a dogperson running at him and it looks like he won’t stop. It’s the crazy one who lost the tooth. He gets hit and is scared despite feeling that he shouldn’t be afraid of these animals. He cowers while he is hit, and then runs.

Jonathan runs after him but not to catch him. Jonathan makes sure that others are backing him. He watches the yek stop running at the bank of the pokol-fear.

Looee looks at all of them screaming and bustling. He is weak and sweating. He scoops water from the moat into his hands and drinks. He quickly plunges his head underwater like Walt taught him when they went fishing.

They watch him emerge from doing what no one has done and they scream and Magda hugs Jonathan. He jumps and screams and runs to others for a touch of hands.

Looee looks at a nearby eucalypt, the likes of which he has never seen. He pulls his broken body up the branches.

Jonathan hools and drums the base of the greybald tree and knows he can climb but doesn’t. He runs through the rest of them and hits Mr. Ghoul and shows the World who truly sits atop it. His violent run stirs many and Mama is in ¡harag!

She hates the men’s constant abuse of Mr. Ghoul, and the presence of the yek is a brief new perspective, a momentary catalyst for correcting the state of the World. Soon there is a fight involving six of them.

Above the noise, no violence worse than that of his adult life, Looee sways on a naked branch, a fruit reclaimed by the sun. As the fight plays out and some uneasiness flares about this strange new space below, he feels the heat on his face and smells fresh air.
He sees fields and buildings and cars and people. No one can see his face.

He sways at the top and the tree nods and dips like an absurd and sage old dancer. The long melancholy sound like wind through wide pipes is Looee’s nervous song of joy, too soft for anyone to hear.

Mr. Ghoul’s bedroom is next to the yek’s. He wants to show him that you can fold back the upper platform and have more space.

Everyone has underestimated Burke. He has grown faster, cannier and stronger by the year. They redraw the hierarchy and sociograms and wonder how the introduction of Looee will affect the colony.

Burke and Jonathan corner the yek at the wall of the Hard and they beat him, fists like axes to wood.

There is a dedicated infirmary to deal with illness and injury. Both are carefully monitored but selectively treated. The chimps help each other and have learned to indicate when other help is needed. Some of them are able to apply ointment on themselves or others.

The philosophy of the project, though altered over time, is to see how these apes behave when they are well fed, well housed and benefit from medical care, but the latter is only offered when injury or illness is grave.

Video footage shows Ghoul sitting by Looee’s inert body as he had with Podo.

Staff were alerted and Looee was taken to the infirmary. Three of his ribs were broken, a lung was punctured, and his face had several lacerations.

The facial injuries are left unstitched because such wounds are common and heal surprisingly quickly.

There is a television in the infirmary where they play Sesame Street and Gorillas in the Mist.

Looee is strapped to a bed at forty-five degrees. There is television and good food and when he is not sedated he spends much of the time in a tethered panic.

For these, his past, and most of the rest of his days, he does not know where he is. A diplomat’s son.

He is not Looee. He is not a number. He is not he without others to need and define him.

There is a truth in every corner of Girdish. Every ape has a home and leaves it; every ape is lost without other apes.

He wants to climb again in that warm sun to verify that all the mountains have truly disappeared.

When he is returned to his cage, his neighbour is repeatedly raising and lowering his platform bed, and pointing to a board with symbols on it.

Looee wearily pushes the platform bed against the cagewall and feels there is much more space. He makes a nest on the floor with his blankets.

Mr. Ghoul is lazily, autistically, pointing at the symbols for up and window and vodka, meaning that when the bed is up you can look through the windows at the moon.

Looee relaxes on his blankets despite the noises of others. Fourteen years of nightmares have made this warm and easy.

He nonetheless has nightmares. He wakes in the middle of the night, sweating and screaming and believing that labtechs are aiming at him with guns.

Mr. Ghoul and several others wake up and wish that Looee would be quiet.

In front of each of their cages is a trolley with a small supply of food. They reach out and take what they want. In the morning they go outside as they please. A large quantity of food is laid out for them in the vestibule and outside the tunnel doors, so they are usually motivated to leave the sleeping quarters.

Cameras film their behaviour during these communal feeding sessions. Who eats first, who shares with whom, what conflicts result and how are they resolved.

Looee’s liver and kidneys are damaged from the years of biomedical challenges and his appetite wavers. He is often nervous and nauseated and eats things selectively. He only eats the skin of apples. The clinical staff know that the skin is rich in quercetin and is good for the liver. They know that Looee doesn’t know this, of course, and they ask if all knowledge is truly seated in the brain.