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"I'm afraid you'll have to be hanged," they had told me. "Hanged?" I had replied, dutifully. "What in hell for?" "Manifest Indifference. Treason. Enforcing impossibly low standards." Incarceration is one of those things that makes it fairly impossible to kill Boyle's monkeys. I remember I had awoken in the evening to the other three squad leaders--two boys and a girl--rustling the bunk in which I lay, and jumping up and down on the bunk, and punching me in the arm with balled-up, feverish fists. "Don't you know that we all four squad leaders are wanted by the Institute Police, that is to say, other students like ourselves, for Manifest Indifference, Treason, Enforcing impossibly low standards?" I didn't know. I had been asleep, dreaming of plausible alternatives. "Well," I said, "such behavior cannot be tolerated in squad leaders, and when such behavior is found out, it should be made immediately punishable." They flushed, looked at me seething and lustful (Janis, the female squad leader, would probably go to bed with a chimpanzee for that little remark). Then, realizing that I myself was guilty of said behavior (which is not to say most guilty of the four. I was quite popular at the Institute), I shifted easily to the opposite faction of thought and decided that we should escape to the forests, the swamps, the sea. After supervising the packing of rucks, drawing out a schematic of the escape plan, and appointing myself leader by unquestionably superior aptitude (so much so, in fact, that for purposes of ceremony the concept of self-doubt was raised and dismissed), I led the fugitives out under cover of broad daylight. There were monkeys everywhere, mostly chimpanzees but some gorillas and orangutans as well. Their attention was on the various girls walking to and from class, for they leered, joked with each other rudely, proffered boxes of chocolates, roses, condoms. Boxes of Respect. Promises. Boxes of Love At First Sight. Many of the girls giggled and smiled the uneasy smile of wanting acceptance, and a few were led toward private quarters by smug primates with keys in hand. The impotent rage in my eyes was noticed by my fellow escapees, apparently, for Jerome said to me: "Yo, man, don't be a playa' hata.'" I ever so gently rubbed the muzzle of my sidearm against his right eyeball, and allowed him to walk point. Janis, too, needed motivation, as she was giggling inanely at the pursuit of a chimp who held in his disproportional fist a massive tube-shaped red organ. A moderately wooded hill. Lights from a football field in the distance, maybe a thousand yards away. Snaps of freeze-dried forest dried all around me, and I thought to myself that the other three squad leaders (Janis, Jerome, and a nameless face) had no fucking concept whatever of noise discipline. Hounds in the distance. Quickly, I left the others at the top of the hill and raced downward, downward down the side, away from the football fields. I heard the sound of three cadets on their knees surrounded by shotguned Institute Police behind me. Rusted barbed-wire opened up to a swamp. Then a house built on a clearing of the swamp. Then barking. Panting in front of a locked door. Then barking. Then blackness. I awoke in my bunk in the mid-afternoon. I was alone in the room with my hangover. Taped to the outside of my window was my wanted poster. Luckily, I had taken an elective on reading backwards, and could proficiently read backwards English, Dutch, Aramaic, French, Russian, Inner-Mongolian. "Wanted: For Manifest Indifference, Treason, the Enforcing of Impossibly Low Standards." I leaped from my bunk and dressed, at last sliding on my black market grey General Issue trenchcoat (coat, trench, grey) and headed out the door towards the auditorium. Every square foot it seemed, monkeys, monkeys and their louds, seismic monkey music, monkeys self-segregated and with intentional limps. Monkeys speaking the trashy monkey dialect (which was also taught as an elective, located at the sign-up sheet between Anti-Intellectualism: Taking Pride in Your Ignorance and Blind Tolerance 101). Get out, get out. Up the steps of the auditorium, second door on the left to the Grey Trenchcoat Embassy, and freedom. Immunity. Sanctuary. Innocence As A Form Of Legality. Now up the steps of the auditorium to armed Institute Police. Matching and not unnatractive leg and arm shackles. Somebody Talked. And as I walked, was lead, the sound of hounds receded to an expansive room of monkey chirps, monkey jumps, monkey hand-slapping, muffled monkey intercourse. At the center of the room, the gallows, and the slowest walk of my life. On the wall opposite the entrance, in monolithic brass letters hundreds of years old, read the Institute's creed: "Always Do What Is Right, But Do So Ambiguously." My guards (the only non-primates in the vicinity, it seemed) told me I looked quite a bit like Alan Rickman, in my various shackles. I woke up in Boyle's house in the swamp. I knew that there was a nytroglycerin tablet hidden in the blankets of Boyle's guest bed in the attic, in which I lay. Boyle bred his monkeys here, but he wasn't far along in the experiment just yet. I knew the girls of the Institute still had lustrous hair and, at times, button noses, and were in Study Hall lockdown in their rooms (sweatpanted walks to the bathrooms in the crisp, sunny January morning, and without a thought for anything but college and the boys of the Institute). I knew that the den, living room, and kitchen of Boyle's house were filled with a 5-day propane leak. I knew the basement was a lake of gasoline. I smiled. Outside, the howl-cackle of the very first batch of Boyle's monkeys, swinging from trees that I knew were wrapped from top to bottom with detonation chord.
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