A Beautiful Truth (3 page)

Everything that Mr. Ghoul wanted and learned began with the lever and the machine.

David was his friend.

? Machine make Dave tickle Ghoul

They used to smoke together.

Some of the people used sticks in those days and there were rules and customs which he can’t find anymore.

When he got things right, the machine gave him pieces of apple.

One of the pokol-people who smelled like vodka would come in the morning and rattle Ghoul’s bedroom with a stick, gangalang. And Ghoul would not want to go so the man would hit him with
the stick. Sometimes the people were good and he would walk with them down the hall and hold their hand.

Dave would pick him up and put him on the desk and show him how the pictures on the machine lit up. Dave took his finger and they pressed each picture together and different things would happen.

The machine made milk. A small white room and a machine with lights and colours. None of it remains.

He spent his days in that small space, the Hardest of the Hard. Sometimes they put Mama in there with him. Also, for a while, they put the gentle idiot Orang in there with him. Ghoul had little interest in the machine when Orang was there for company.

Mr. Ghoul used to think of Orang.

The machine was the means by which the people taught them words. There were no words on the machine, but there were pictures which were pictures of words but not pictures of the things that the words were meant to picture.

This is an apple: Ж.

At first if he wanted an apple he learned to press that picture and the machine would give him a piece of apple. It soon became more complex. The picture for apple was in a different place on the machine one day, and the next was in yet another. Ghoul had to find the picture. And later he had to make sentences, which are the longest routes to getting what you want.

Dave would say put it in a sentence.

Please machine give apple.

Dave was in another room with a window and would communicate in the big Dave voice and then through the machine. He made Ghoul’s machine light up from the other side of the wall and Ghoul could see the pictures inside Dave.

Dave was full of questions.

? What does Ghoul want.

? What is name-of this which-is black.

And Ghoul had to answer in a certain way or Dave would not understand.

Banana give Ghoul which-is black.

That is not right.

Please machine give Ghoul banana which-is black.

He grew very tired. He tried to stay out of ¡harag! but it was sometimes much too hard. The machine was very strong and Ghoul could never smash it. He banged his goon on the wall sometimes and for a while his favourite thing was to throw Coke at the machine and listen to the fizz.

The machine was turned on by the lever marked GO. Ghoul pulled the lever and conversed with Dave and sometimes other people. They would punish him if he made a mess or if he played when they didn’t want him to play. They locked the lever so he couldn’t move it, and without the machine he could neither eat nor drink nor get tall Dave to come into the room for a tickle or a swing.

Mr. Ghoul jumped around the room, wanting chomp and not understanding a sentence. Mama wasn’t good at the machine but she knew everything Mr. Ghoul wanted. She tried to pull the machine off the wall, and nothing ever happened unless they made a dirty sentence.

Please machine put dirty cabbage outside.

Mama was a friend he wanted in those days, but they took her out of the room like Orang because he didn’t use the machine as much when she was there.

He liked Dave very much.

? What does Ghoul want.

Make Dave into room.

? Ghoul wants Dave in room.

Dave tickle Ghoul.

They would do what each other wanted, as long as Ghoul found the sentence.

The World is not the World.

He ate well. Each time he made a sentence he got a raisin or an M&M, a Coke, a coffee, a thing he can’t remember the name for. Lettuce.

He learned to love Twizzlers and vodka and smokes.

The machine did more and more.

Please machine make music.

Please Dave dance with Ghoul.

He wanted the machine to make music while he and Dave made sentences but in the earliest days the dirty machine could not. There were simple things that the words, the machine and Dave could never understand. Things in Ghoul that were part of the World.

A sentence is not a sentence without a period

Please machine make vodka sentence.

? What does Ghoul want.

Make vodka. Dave. Make sentence.

? Ghoul wants sentence or Ghoul wants vodka.

Vodka sentence

That is not right.

Please Dave vodka sentence Dave.

Dave does not understand.

?

? Ghoul wants vodka.

No.

? Ghoul not make sentence.

No. No No No No No

? Mr. Ghoul wants a raisin.

The machine learned more and more and Dave and Mr. Ghoul understood many things and the machine got bigger.

Sometimes he could see Dave through Dave’s window and sometimes he could not.

A man would wake him up with his stick and walk down the hall and he wouldn’t let Ghoul take his hand. Ghoul learned the sounds of pokol-people, the filthy dogsmell cunt, and on those mornings when he was led into the Hardest and could not see Dave in the window it was lonely. He pulled the lever marked GO, the machine lit up, and even though he knew that someone was behind the machine he was alone.

Please machine put dirty radish behind-the-room.

He liked saying that because Dave would have to come into the room and open the drawer on the machine with the radish in it and take it out, and when Dave came in they would laugh because they both hated radish and Dave would touch him and hug. He could only do that once a day, and then Dave stopped putting radish in the machine because he no longer enjoyed the game.

When he walked by Mama’s bedroom at night they touched fingers through the plekter, if the people let them. Their bedrooms were smaller then. There weren’t many soft things, except the yellow duck, the small grey boy.

But there was music.

Smoke on the water.

And movies.

Ghoul would get tired from all the questions and so full of raisins and coffee that he filled the room with urulek and the Fool would hit him with the stick. And sometimes as he grew tired and full there was nothing he liked more than a movie.

Please machine make movie.

Movies were like being swung very gently by hands you cannot feel. When he learned what a movie was, and that it was called a movie, he wanted to share it. Every now and then he got up and typed on the machine:

Movie name-of this.

He wanted to remark how special it was.

He liked the movie about fish.

And the machine made things called slides as well, which were a feast of apples.

? Ghoul what is name-of this.

Horse name-of this.

Out came a piece of apple.

When Dave was in the room in the morning, Ghoul was very happy. Dave taught him to wave hello and goodbye, how to give him five, play peek-a-boo, which he never tired of. Ghoul liked Dave’s smile, and learned to make one. He smiled with people whenever he could.

And the World was not the World.

Sleep after sleep and some of it grew less frightening. They put a new window in the Hardest, which looked into another room, behind-the-room, and another window behind-the-room looked out into the open, and Ghoul kept learning that the World was not the World.

They put a new phrase in a picture,
, which meant open-the-window. The blind over the window rolled up when he put that picture in a sentence, and Ghoul could see into the other room and outside.

He and Dave developed a beautiful game together. Ghoul would say

Please Dave go behind-the-room.

And Dave would say

? Ghoul wants Dave behind-the-room.

And Ghoul would say

Yes.

So Dave would stare through Dave’s window and smile and he would disappear. But he would knock on the other side of the walls, and Ghoul would follow the sounds around the room feeling heegly, and then Dave would knock on the new closed window.

So Ghoul would then go back to the machine and say

Please machine make open-the-window.

And the blind would roll up and there was Dave and he was always doing something funny. Once he tied his long thick hair back on his goon so it looked like the ass of a horse. And once he wasn’t there and then he sprang up from below and poured Fanta over himself. And the one Ghoul liked the most was when Dave was there on the other side of the window with a smoke, and with his yalamak and lips he made shapes with the smoke that came out. Beautiful shapes like circles.

He can taste that game.

Mr. Ghoul can make smoke rings.

What do you see when you look at me.

The Girdish Institute had its origins in the 1920s, when William Girdish made a trip to Buenos Aires. He had heard of a large private zoo owned by a wealthy woman in that city, and it was there that he saw his first chimpanzees. He was beguiled by them and endeavoured to learn as much as he could about their nature and habitat. He heard stories from the staff and zookeeper and witnessed their obvious empathy and charming curiosity, and he bonded with one in particular.

At dinners in the US he would tell stories from this place, like the one about the chimp who developed an attraction to one of the pretty cooks of the household. This chimp would watch her in the kitchen from his cage with obvious desire, and over time she grew unsettled by his attention. She asked one of the staff to erect a barrier to his view, and boards were nailed to the outside of his cage. The man with the boards who took away the sight of his beloved was attacked a year later. The chimpanzee had harboured a
grudge all that time, and found an opportunity when the man was doing repairs to the door of his cage.

Girdish set about gathering his own collection of chimps and other primates, bringing them over to one of his properties in Florida, near Jacksonville. He was a gentleman amateur, the only son of a land-owning family, and he had property throughout the South.

He believed that much could be learned from primates, chimps in particular, that they were a link to our past and could explain much of our behaviour. In this respect he was ahead of his time, and there were few in the world who knew as much about apes as he did. He travelled and sent envoys to Africa and housed a growing collection of apes and monkeys in and around the greenhouse, observatory and staff buildings of that property.

He established the institute and started a breeding program. He developed a philosophy of what the ideal research subject would be in terms of health, size and character. He and his colleagues steadily developed tests, both mental and physical, which slowly confirmed, in demonstrable scientific terms, how closely we were linked to these creatures.

When he died in the 1940s he left a large endowment and his work was carried on. Through the development of breakthrough drugs the institute attracted funding from the federal government and from companies around the world.

The old observatory and staff buildings were kept and it was here that behavioural studies remained and the field station developed. The new main building expanded and the biomedical studies became the lucrative focus of the institute. But the beating heart for many was the field station.

The original buildings had an Art Deco quality, soon hidden by various additions. There were the sleeping quarters, which had
expanded over time, a winter playroom and a large safe area where cognitive tests took place. There were kitchens, offices, bedrooms, a garden which supplied some of the produce for the chimps, and numerous old rooms whose purposes changed over time.

David Kennedy eventually became director of the field station, and oversaw its expansion. Since the late 1970s you could say that this part of the institute mimicked the life of a man. Its early days were of directionless and unlimited enthusiasm and were shaped over time by conflict, financial reality and the needs of others. When David realized his personality, where his true interests lay, the field station took its present shape. But while curiosity sometimes dies and old enthusiasms seem foolish, the nature of the field station prevented it from ever being static, and passion never diminished.

Even when the population settled, nothing was ever settled.

In vivid memory, his family were Podo, Jonathan, Burke and Mr. Ghoul. Bootie, Magda, Mama and Beanie. Fifi and her open heart. All the names he didn’t want to give them and the sadness that he didn’t want to see.

David tells his assistants, when they first arrive, that they can never choose favourites. Observe, but never judge. He knows that it is an ideal—as if any ape can look without assessment: fruit is never fruit, it is either ripe or rotten. People are never people.

He had an assistant once whose logs were always coloured by her distaste for promiscuity. It was never simply
Jonathan mounts Fifi
; there was always a hint of morality, a suggestion of wantonness or assault. He sat her down and said do you have a boyfriend. She was twenty-nine and had been married for seven years.