Дуглас Престон - Jennie

While Hugo worked, Jennie made the rounds. She stopped at office doors and knocked. This was no polite tap, mind you, but a pounding and kicking that threatened to separate the door from its hinges. She was an unruly child, like that bad girl in the children’s books, Eloise. When she came swaggering into your office, man alive, you had better batten down the hatches, for anything loose was going to get broken, eaten, or stolen.

You may wonder why we all put up with her. The answer is simple: everyone adored her. I take that back; there was one fellow who did not like Jennie. He was the elevator man, a sour old Scotsman named Will. To this poor man’s sorrow, Jennie learned how useful the elevator was. She seemed to be under the impression that the more she pushed the elevator call button, the sooner the elevator would come. I’d see Jennie at the elevator, pressing the button, and I’d hear Will’s voice echoing up the shaft (I hope I can do justice to his brogue): “All right, I’m coming, I’m coming! Knock off, you bluidy ape! Have done!” [Laughs.]

Jennie often stopped by my office. We were great pals, Jennie and I. I’d hear the rattle of the trike and a tattoo of pounding would shake the office. She immediately demanded a hug, her arms outstretched. That vital business being taken care of, she wandered about, poking at papers, picking up things and putting them in her mouth, climbing on tables and chairs, making the odd snatch at my pipe. She was determined to have that pipe! But I was too quick for the hairy devil. I kept a stack of old Natural History magazines and she poured over those, turning the pages and running her fingers over the photographs. As if verifying their two-dimensionality. Very interesting. She had a bad habit of tearing out pages. She favored pictures of animals, but pictures of humans held no interest for her.

One issue had an article on chimpanzees, and I showed it to her as a kind of experiment. Her reaction was extremely interesting. The first picture stopped her cold. By this time she knew what she looked like, having seen herself in the mirror.

She scrutinized the photographs, turning the pages back and forth, holding the magazine up to her nose. She then touched her face. It was as if she were trying to see if the pictures were a reflection of her. She made a low “oooooo ooo” sound — a sound she made only when she was intensely curious. She spent a good half hour examining the pictures before moving on to something else. And my friend, half an hour for Jennie was quite a long time.

She lunched with Hugo in the staff dining room, at the curators’ table. She occupied the seat of honor. Hugo and I often went to lunch together. As we approached the dining room Jennie became more and more excited, riding ahead on her tricycle, pedaling furiously, her maniacal hoots echoing along the corridor. There was a bump, a ridge, on the stone floor right before the dining room entrance. Most of the time Jennie would stop and carry her trike over the ridge, but in her excitement once in a while she forgot. She whizzed along, hooting away, her legs pumping, and she turned the corner and we heard a clunk! crash! and then an eruption of screams. We would try to warn her, calling: “Look out, Jennie! Don’t fall!” But when she was hungry she never minded anyone. When she was full she never minded. She never minded, period.

When she heard the clatter of the dishes, and smelled the food, and saw the place crowded with people, she broke into excited screams of joy, and so loud and piercing! All conversation in the dining room ceased. Jennie had arrived! Those who knew Jennie, of course, were amused. But more than once I saw visiting curators or new employees spill food on themselves when Jennie screamed her arrival.

Jennie sat in a high chair at the curators’ table, where she ate with impeccable manners. Well, perhaps not quite so impeccable. When we finished eating, many of the curators took out their cigarettes. Jennie loved to light cigarettes. She went around the table with a box of kitchen matches and lit each curator’s cigarette. These were the days, mind you, when everyone still smoked. One day a curator offered Jennie a cigarette, and she tried to smoke it while sitting in his lap, but it didn’t agree with her. The curator paid for his poor judgment with a lapful of ape vomit.

During that first year and a half, I found myself observing Jennie with growing interest, I mean scientific interest. Simia quam similis . She was so very human-like . She appeared to understand at least as much as a human child her age. She showed astonishing intelligence. I’ll give you two examples. There was a woman who came in three days a week who did “public relations” for the museum. She was really quite marvelous, a real type , with the bouffant hairdo, high heels, long red nails, lots of makeup. When she first saw Jennie she screamed, which frightened Jennie and made her scream, which made the woman scream even louder. It was not a felicitous beginning!

Jennie knew right away this woman disliked her. Whenever she passed the woman’s office on her trike, she would stop, quietly open the door, and issue a sudden hoot. You could hear the woman inside give a big shriek, and then her voice yelling, “Get out of here! Stop that noise! Somebody get that animal out of here!” When the woman began locking her office door, Jennie gave the door a kick on her way by.

Now I can see you think this is very funny. And it was. But stop for a moment and think, if you will, about what this behavior involved. Let us dissect what Jennie had to know in order to torment this woman. First, it showed Jennie had the ability to impute a state of mind to another human being. Forgive me, I mean a human being. She knew this person disliked her presence. This was sophisticated reasoning, my friend! This was not a dog biting an unfriendly man. Jennie deliberately tormented her, making her startled and angry. It showed that she had the ability to manipulate a human being’s state of mind. It showed a mastery of human psychology that I found extraordinary.

The second incident was even more unusual. It occurred after Jennie had been at the museum a year. For a while she had a Barbie doll which she carried around, dressed, undressed, fed, kissed, and so forth. Sometimes she would hand you the doll for a hug, and then take it back. One day, Hugo called me down to his office. Jennie was there, sitting in her wing chair, apparently cradling her doll. Only there wasn’t any doll. She’d forgotten it, left it at home. Instead, she was cradling an imaginary doll, chattering to it, stroking it. Hugo said, “Jennie, hug.” Jennie got up, still cradling the doll , and came over to Hugo. Hugo hugged her and then Jennie offered Hugo the imaginary doll to hug . Hugo hugged it and Jennie took back the pretend doll.

Do you see the significance of this? I saw it immediately. I felt my skin crawl. You see, ethologists had always believed that one of the traits distinguishing humans from animals was the ability to imagine and to create. Creativity was supposed to be one of the defining characteristics of what it means to be human.

What we had just witnessed was nothing less than the toppling of this grand idea.

Let me get a little technical here. If it’s too much for your readers you can edit this out.

There are people who continue to insist on the uniqueness of the human animal, who continue to feel that man stands in isolated splendor. They come in two types: religious zealots and ethologists. The religious bigots can be dismissed out of hand, but the ethologists require a serious response.

These ethologists — I will name no names — have criticized much of the research done on chimpanzees. They say that by using words like “imagination,” we are anthropomorphizing the animal’s behavior. We are attaching human traits to an animal’s behavior. Their argument goes like this: How can you know the animal is using “imagination” or “creativity,” when you can’t really know the animal’s state of mind? It could just as easily be elaborate imitative behavior. And besides, how do you define the word “creativity” anyway? Aren’t you imposing human assumptions on an animal’s behavior? Thus, they brand us with the sin of anthropomorphization, one of the egregious sins of ethology.