Rick Moody - The Four Fingers of Death

Larry, who was still breathing with difficulty, and who had sweated clean through his polo shirt, muttered, “Motherfucking chimpanzee talks . When were you going to tell me that he talked? When were you going to tell Koo? You were going to pretend that the motherfucking chimp was just like all the other monkeys?”

“Larry, he’s not a monkey. Are you going to accept the apology that’s just been offered to you?”

“I mean, maybe I can get a few days off, and you can have a few extra shifts with loverboy here. I need to think about this a little bit, you know? I just can’t…”

Morton, having few other options at this point, fell into the solution left over from early childhood among the laboratory chimpanzees and, carefully, slowly, tentatively, made his way across the small, poorly lit cell, site of so much world history in the past twenty-four hours, and, after climbing up on the stool beside Larry, he began attempting to groom the human being, pushing Larry’s unkempt hair aside as he looked for grubs and nits there that could be picked out and snacked upon. Larry, who was informed enough to understand the gesture, waited patiently, if awkwardly.

Noelle said, “Koo is coming in. He’s on his way.”

“I think I have some mescal in my desk, and I think I’m going to take advantage of it, and then I’m going to consult some manuals to figure out how I’m supposed to be interacting with your goddamn talking chimpanzee, okay? And I’m going to take the rest of the day off. You guys can have some goddamned quality time.”

A sigh of profoundest relief escaped from Morton as the door closed behind Larry. And he was left alone with her again, with Noelle. Though it was the thing he’d most hoped for, the pas de deux of romance, now that it was upon him, he found himself oddly unsure, oddly uncertain if he had what it took to love a graduate student who’d grown up in a conventional human family. The deepest sort of love, perhaps, was the kind that destabilized the lover, made him uncertain where he began and where he ended. And this deepest love was made more acute when there was difference , the disequilibrium between the lovers, as there was here. But how could he measure up to what she knew, or what she could have had from any man walking by on the street outside the medical school at the University of Rio Blanco? She was a beautiful woman, Morton believed, and any man would have wanted her, would have found her haunches and her belly thoroughly lick-worthy or bite-worthy, not to mention her private parts, which he had not yet seen, as he would have seen them were she a member of his species, but which he had conjectured about in his insomniac overnight. Any man, from the lowliest street sweeper to the captain of industry, would have wanted her, and what was Morton in the face of such competition? He was an impoverished chimpanzee who seemed to be able to speak, although it was not generally given to his species to do so. He was a freak, a curiosity. No human would think him human, and no chimp would trust him. How could his keeper love him as he loved her?

“Noelle,” he said, “I’m so glad you’re here. There’s so much that I need to tell you and so much that we need to discuss.”

“Morton, I think really that you need to—”

“This complex of feelings that I’m suffering with, this turmoil, it’s just not like anything else that I have experienced in my life, and I don’t know if this means we are just meant to be together, if there is some kind of mental or spiritual relationship that we are destined to have, but I guess I want to thank you for the kindness you have shown me, and to say that if you are available for this conversation, this rap session , in which we discuss our feelings, you know, in a sort of a cocounseling context, then so am I available. Or we could have a mediated discussion, with a licensed social worker, a person who is familiar with the kinds of difficulties that spring up between loving couples—”

“Morton, really—”

“Because I know there are a lot of problems in a relationship like this. I am certain that many human relationships have problems associated with them, and that is the conventional shape of the human relationship. There’s the constant pressure that you would feel as a human being, because you are not accepting of your primatological origins, on, for example, the subject of sexual relations with multiple partners. Probably you are in an almost constant state of desire for multiple partners and are just fighting this off because you don’t understand your primate essence. This is how I felt until recently, this desire for multiple partners, that is until you and I began to experience our unique bond. Once I began to experience the singularity of this bond, then I began to see the precious, frail way that human beings insist on this idea of monogamy. Even though it most often fails to be realized, there’s a crazy, ridiculous lovableness about it. I don’t know if I can live up to it, however. Just so you know. This would definitely be one of the areas we would have to cocounsel about, in regard to our relationship. I feel, for political reasons, that I really need to stay close to my origins in the chimpanzee community, and to honor the separate and parallel cultural evolution that we are developing in the chimpanzee community, and that means, probably, that this monogamous ideal is not going to be possible in the way you are used to. On the upside, however—”

“Morton, Dr. Koo is going to be here any minute, and he’s going to have to examine you in order to determine—”

“I don’t really have any preconceptions about your serving me, in the way that human females are sometimes meant to serve the males, because I am a male of my species and you are a woman from yours. While it’s true that women are lower status in chimpanzee communities, I have read enough about my bonobo relatives to understand that matriarchal primate communities do exist, and that patriarchy is really an accident of history as much as anything. So if you need to have a certain amount of independence, a room of your own, in the context of our relationship, that’s really all right with me. I don’t expect anything more. You don’t need to cook for me, because I really am observing a raw food diet these days, which is healthier anyway, and you certainly don’t need to do my laundry, because I don’t have any clothes and don’t like wearing them much. It’s really just the status issue, I suppose. I am used to a little bit of deference, because I am a male, and because I’m large and strong by human standards, and because I can grab things with my feet, which you are simply unable to do. So there will be some areas where my status needs to be acknowledged, and we will have to agree on that. But I am willing to grow and learn, you know, especially if there are sexual techniques and positions that you want to teach me. Really, chimpanzees don’t have a lot of ideas about sexual positions. It’s kind of the same thing all of the time. A steady diet of what I believe you refer to as doggy style — which is a genuinely unappealing term. However you want to instruct me in this secret language of sexual relations, I am your happy pupil.

“Also, I am happy to listen to your story of coming to awareness in the sisterhood of the feminine. I am actually a very good listener, which I understand is not often the case with the males of your species. I don’t think, for example, that Larry is a very good listener, but I am a good listener because, for the time being, I am learning a lot about your language, and I am incredibly interested in your language, and I would like to learn more.”

“Stop, please, Morton, stop.”

“What I hear you saying is that in the context of this conversation I haven’t given you much room to express your point of view. I understand. I do. But I’ve been rather angry today. I was a little bit angry with Larry earlier, and I just need to be able to talk through some of this, within the cocounseling paradigm. There will be time for you to speak in a minute or two. As far as anger goes, I’m thinking that you’re going to recommend some anger-management modality, and I want to say that on that subject I have done a little bit of reading, on primal scream therapy, and I can see how that might be very useful for the kind of anger issues I’ve been experiencing. If I could perhaps purchase — or maybe the university could purchase for me — some of the foam bats that are used in the primal scream therapeutic scenario, I might really be able to make some progress, so that you won’t have to feel disappointed in how I express my anger. I want you to know that I would never be one of those fellows who would use my power to threaten a gentle and sweet woman who is the object of my love. That’s not the way that I am.