Lydia Millet - Love in Infant Monkeys

He snorted.

“You seen the others? Guy? Was he with you?”

“Nah. Went off on me own.” He was turning away.

“Wait! Can you tell me something?”

“Mmm?”

“Is it a hen? Or—”

“Rooster! Blimey.”

What a relief. No eggs.

He stumped back down the hill, head shaking. Good riddance. She knelt down beside the small body, modest hump of brown and red feathers. It was still beautiful. She put her hand on the feathers. You could feel the slight warm frame beneath them. It was light, almost nothing in there. Birds were like air.

It had been more beautiful when it wasn’t dead, though. Before it was shot. Which wasn’t true of everyone. Take JFK, even John Lennon. Assassination had matured them like a fine pinot. If you died of old age, besides not leaving a good-looking corpse, all you died for in the end was living. But if you got shot, you were an instant symbol. You must have died for something.

She was always completely new; that was her secret, albeit an open one. Sure, it was obvious, but no one did it like she did. None of them could touch her when it came to transformation. That was the secret to her longevity. She wasn’t one megastar; she was a new one constantly. Novelty was what people lived for. Skin-deep, maybe, but so what? Skin was the biggest organ.

She should envy the bird, actually. Guy said in the wild they died of starvation. Shooting them was a mercy killing. I mean come on — fly, eat worms, fly, lay eggs, fly, starve to death. “Bob’s your uncle.” (You go girl.) Life was not equal for everyone. That was another reason she liked it better in England. They didn’t stand for that Thomas Paine bullshit here, all men were created equal, etc. What a crock. One drive through Alabama was all you needed to take the bloom off that rose. One ride on the subway. (Self: “Tube.” Easy.) Back home, the second you stepped out of a major city you were surrounded by the remnants of Early Man. Here there were some of those, too, but you had to go down the pub to find them. And at least they didn’t run the country.

All history was the history of class struggle, right? Lenin said that, and he had style. He had a very sharp look. Good tailoring. When the statues came down, she for one was sorry. She always wanted to meet him.

Maybe if she said a prayer. Yes. It felt right.

She touched the red string and squatted beside the bird. She would think holy thoughts about it; she would utter a name of God. She closed her eyes with her fingers resting on the feathers.

This was a problem she had: When she wasn’t already tired, it was sometimes hard to speed-meditate. Mind kept working, working. A powerful machine. Difficult to rein in. The bird once ate the worms, now worms would eat the bird. . every word filled with light. That was how it should be. Desire to Receive. Which name? The name to reduce negativity?

What would help her and Guy, she saw, besides going to the Centre together on a more regular basis, was if Guy understood her more on a spiritual level. If he could just see her interior the way she saw it herself, he would not worry about the shrinking mini-Bings. He would see she was a little girl, secretly. She was a Shirley Temple. She was very pure, despite her sophistication. She believed in the ten luminous emanations. The ladder of awareness. She cherished in the core of herself the beingness of being.

Immortality for the bird, for all things of beauty. That was what the lager louts could just never capiche . It was right, so right, to know your own beauty and see it was God’s own beauty too. One day the body would be a giving vessel, not just a receiving. Life could go on forever. They might not be able to understand, the lager louts, what she was, what all of them could be if they gave themselves over to the light instead of, say, the Guinness, but that did not mean there was not room in God for them too. The house of God had many rooms. And through the great windows of these rooms, the golden beams of the divine streamed in.

Not as many rooms as Ashcombe, possibly. Joke! Joke to self. The house of God was never-ending.

The word for healing. .?

But you couldn’t heal dead.

She rose, still looking down at the bird. It was peaceful at last. She had killed it, but she was also sorry. In the end, that was all that mattered. Do not have violence in your heart.

“I love you now,” she said.

She heard voices and turned. The hunting party stood at the edge of the trees, too far away to distinguish. But she thought she saw Guy with them. Nearby stood the dogs, their tails wagging. The men’s faces were small white blurs. She saw hands raise. First she thought they were raised in greeting, hailing her from afar. She raised her own right arm and waved back. But then she caught flashes of silver in the sun. Flasks raised to their faces. One of them stepped back from the group, staggering and falling. They had apparently not ceased to drink the whole time. Their laughter was carrying.

She felt annoyed, but then a surge of forgiving. She could not blame them for their alcoholism. They were so small! All of them. Pity warmed her, a generous blossoming. It was so hard to be small.

THE MAN CALLED GEORGE Adamson lived a long life, long and rough and most of it in the African bush. He set up house in a tent with a thatch roof and dirt floor, full of liquor and books. He smoked a pipe with a long stem, sported a white goatee and went around bare-chested in khaki shorts — a small, fit man, deeply tanned. He was murdered in his eighty-third year by Somali lion poachers.

Joy Adamson, his wife and the author of Born Free , had been stabbed to death a few years before. She bled out alone, on the road where she fell. They were somewhat estranged by the time of Joy’s death. They had cats instead of children — George had raised scores of lions, while Joy had moved on from lions to cheetahs to leopards — and lions and leopards could not cohabit, so George and Joy lived apart. They maintained contact, but they were hundreds of miles distant.

Two of George’s adoptive children, Girl and Boy, had come to live with him in the early nineteen-sixties. This was in Kenya, where the Second Battalion of the Scots Guards was stationed to fight a mutiny in Dares-Salaam. It was the tail end of the British empire in East Africa.

When Girl and Boy were nine months old, the Scots Guards brought them to the plains beneath Mount Kenya, to a farm where a British company was filming Born Free . Along with twenty-two other lions, Girl and Boy had roles in the movie. Afterward most of the lions were sent to zoos, where they would live out their lives in narrow spaces. But Girl and Boy were given to Adamson, who had become attached to them during filming. He took them to a place named Meru, where he made a camp.

Meru was in red-earth country, with reticulated giraffes browsing among the acacia and thornbush. Zebras roamed in families and the odd solitary rhino passed through the brush; there were ostriches, too, and an aging elephant named Rudkin, who plundered tomatoes.

Girl was one of Adamson’s success stories whereas her brother, Boy, was an extravagant failure; yet Boy was the one that Adamson deeply loved.

Girl had been fed all her life, but she took readily to the hunt. Her first kill was a jeering baboon, her second an eland with a broken leg, her third a baby zebra. From there she took down a full-grown cow eland and was soon accomplished. Meanwhile Boy did not feel moved to kill for himself; he merely feasted off the animals she brought down.