Tim Curran - The Devil Next Door

Louis was way too tired for thinking, for anything this heavy. “We evolved from a killer ape, I guess. Not that I’m really surprised.”

“ Yes, basically,” Earl said, very excited to be lecturing once again. “The innate depravity of our species comes directly from the killer ape. Civilization is only an attractive cloak, for beneath we are murderous beasts. We are territorial, aggressive, and murderous. To our species and every other, this is why we wage war, this is the foundation of mass murder, serial killings, genocide, and our instinctive cruelty. We are killers. Listen to me, Louis. Dart further suggested that we did not evolve intelligence and then turn to killing, we evolved intelligence because we turned to killing. At some point, our ancestors branched off from their non-aggressive cousins. These early hominids became predatory probably because of the scarcity of food and probably by imitating other predators as primitives will do. We learned to stand erect to hunt, to give chase to our prey. Hands free to grip and tear, but lacking teeth or claws, we developed weapons. Crude imitations from bone, rock, wood. Ah, now the use of weapons entails great coordination, thus our nervous systems were challenged and our brains enlarged. The development of hunting tactics enlarged our brains still further. We are men today, Louis, because our ancestors were killers. As Robert Ardrey said in African Genesis, man had not fathered the weapon, the weapon fathered man.”

Earl said the “Killer Ape” theory was controversial as hell. Many anthropologists dismissed it and probably because it pretty much swept their conservative, bloodless little theories into the wastebasket where they belonged. But there was no need to doubt it now. Because out there, in the streets, the killer apes were running wild.

“The devil, as it were, has risen up from our chromosomes, Louis. Like certain diseases, cancers that are hereditary in nature, the genetic impulse to regress is irresistible. Fighting against it will be like fighting against the color of your eyes. It’s preset, preprogrammed, and absolutely immutable.”

Louis sighed. “But why did Macy regress and come out of it again? Why did you? Why haven’t I gone native yet?”

“Who can say, Louis? The gene may have been bred out of your family line at some point. There may be thousands like you or only a handful. As to me and the girl…I fear that the reassertion of reason is only temporary. A remission of sorts, if you will.”

There was nothing Louis could say to that. It was wild and impossible, but it was probably also true. And that was the most disturbing thing of all. For man was a beast at heart and civilization, at best, was an illusion. As Earl said, a fancy cloak you could drape over the ugly monster within…and you could hide those claws and those teeth and that bloodthirsty appetite in its folds, but it was still there. Waiting to get out. As Earl also said, it got out pretty commonly on an individual basis and now and again on a communal level. But this, what was happening here, was probably one of the first times it had reached such a proportion, had infected and degenerated so many in such a short span of time, gone global. But it had always been coming, right from the beginning. Now and then the gene was activated-accidentally, no doubt-and you had a serious body count. But the big one, the Big Bang, the Doomsday Effect, of the human race had not come until now.

To think that all man had strived for and accomplished was now being destroyed by a primitive gene, by biochemical reactions deep in microscopic cells. That was scary.

“I’m frightened for the race, Louis. Terribly, deeply frightened. For what if this regression continues?” Earl pondered. “What will a year bring? Will we continue to devolve? Those people out there, they still have language skills and reasoning powers. But I’d say they’re rapidly devolving from Homo sapiens to Homo erectus. That’s just a guess, of course. But what will we be like in five or ten years? Will our culture completely have been forgotten? Will we have degraded into Australopithecine hunting groups, forging tools from animal bones, roaming the veldt, forest, and grassland with our ancestral bloodlust intact while our cities slowly turn to rubble and memory?”

“I don’t know, Earl. I can’t think anymore.”

Earl shook his head. “This is what the Greeks call hubris, Louis.”

“Hubris?”

“Yes, hubris. If man lifts his head too high or raises his achievements and ambitions to a godlike level, the gods will be threatened. And threatened, will react in kind by destroying him. And we’ve-all of us-have certainly acted like gods, haven’t we? Killing one another, waging wars, raping the planet, exterminating other species, crushing any that stand in our way…yes, certainly the province of gods not men. And now nature or God or what have you is putting us in our place. If that’s not karma, I don’t know what is.”

Louis felt like crying as he waited here on the threshold of doomsday. He wanted to weep at the sullen marble grave of civilization and mankind. Jesus, the absolute horror of it all.

Earl sighed. “My head hurts. Dear Christ, but my head hurts. I need to use your bathroom, Louis. I have to wash my face. And piss. Yes, piss in a toilet like a man and not against a tree to mark my trail.” He got up, started walking out of the living room and then turned back. “You’ve been a good neighbor, Louis. The very best. I always thought you were special and now I know that you are.”

But Louis shook his head. “I’m not. I’m nothing special.”

“Oh, but you are,” the old man said. “You haven’t lost it like the rest of us. Not even for a moment. It hasn’t been able to get its claws in you and that makes you special, Louis. Very special. You may be the last of the reasonable men. A species nearing extinction. The last man to study other men rather than simply killing them. What a waste. The nature of man is to study the nature of man, I always thought. But I was wrong. The nature of man is to kill. The territorial imperative, Louis.”

“I don’t know what you mean, Earl. I don’t understand.”

“Learned response, cultural instinct, my friend. These things make up the basis of any creature’s behavior. You have to be taught how to make a paper airplane, but no one has to teach you how to make a weapon. You know. It’s instinctive. Just like the desire to kill.”

“They are making weapons, Earl…spears, clubs, you name it. And you know what? They work. I would think making a spear that could be thrown and actually hit its target might be an art form of sorts. There’s engineering involved. You wouldn’t think those savages could figure it out so quickly.”

“They didn’t have to, Louis. They knew instinctively.”

Earl gave him a quick example. In France, in the Rhone valley, beavers made their dams and lodges for centuries, right back to-and before-antiquity same as beavers did everywhere. But then with the coming of the European fur trade, the beavers were hunted to near-extinction. Only a few remained. For several hundred years, no dams, no lodges. Then the French government extended protection to the small beaver population in the Rhone valley. Their numbers swelled over a period of decades. Then, for the first time in several hundred years, the beavers began building dams and lodges in the tributaries of the Rhone River. Building dams and lodges is a very complex, communal effort…yet, no one had to teach the beavers how to do it, they knew. And those dams in the Rhone were perfectly identical to those built by American and Canadian beavers. Cultural instinct at work.

“And our friends out there, Louis. Nobody has to teach them what their ancestors knew. It’s race memory. They know how to survive. How to kill, how to make weapons, how to dress a carcass and peel a hide. Cultural instinct.”