The Counterfeit Murder in the Museum of Man (26 page)
Read The Counterfeit Murder in the Museum of Man Online
Authors: Alfred Alcorn
We paused to watch an eagle turning in a gyre over a sunlit headland. When we resumed our walking, Izzy went on, “Alas, Norman, relativism and fads have grown so persuasive in my discipline that it now matters more who said or wrote something than what is said or written. And if the real, in the form of truth or beauty, is no longer believed to exist, what’s the point in searching for it?”
We rejoined the party for a last glass of wine. We clinked glasses.
“In vino veritas,”
he proffered.
“Sometimes,” I said, “sometimes.”
Now, as I try to record the events of the day, I find myself sinking into a depthless funk. Was it Izzy’s pessimism, I wondered, sitting there in the growing gloom of a summer evening. It could have been the invidious comparison between my wifeless, childless state and the happy people at the party. I was in thrall to Hamlet’s plaint, “How weary, flat, stale and unprofitable / seem to me all the uses of this world.”
Because nothing seemed real. The face I stared at in the bathroom mirror I saw as an apparition in silvered glass. And even if I achieved everything I wanted, I knew it would not stand the acid of time. Most especially, I asked myself, how real is this that I write? Are not words themselves a kind of counterfeiting insofar as they are a substitute for the real, a secondhand reality at best, a mere shadow, a pale reflection? Except, perhaps, for great poetry, wherever it is found. In that instance words achieve, I
would like to believe, the crystalline solidity of living rock. Or is that just another of the necessary fictions by which we live?
A slow, agonizing week passed. I was soon trapped in my own routines, and in my predicaments, my house like a prison with a work-release program called the office. The weekend arrived for the day of the concert. I could not escape conjuring in my fevered imagination what Diantha might be doing with her hip-hopping ex-swain. A gig. No doubt with a party afterward with lots of drugs. What had she said? I’m a normal young woman. I need a man.
I was determined not to call the cottage to see if in fact she had decided to go the concert. She scarcely answers my phone calls, anyway. And when she does, she scarcely speaks to me. Things have deteriorated between us. She’s adamant about one thing: Alphus must go. Period. My appeals are in vain. If only she knew him. He wouldn’t hurt a soul. He could speak to Elsie in her own language.
I was determined not to drink, not even one of the cans of beer Alphus and Ridley were having as they sat in front of the television watching the Red Sox.
Instead I made myself a cup of green tea. It’s supposed to be good for you. But I don’t like the taste. It gives me a sense of futility. I tried. I sipped the wretched brew. I looked at the clock on the wall. I recalled the picnic at Izzy’s. But it was no good. I picked up the phone and punched in the number for the landline at the cottage.
Bella answered. “No, I am sorry, Mr. Norman, Miss Diantha is not here. She tell me she be back tomorrow. Elsie is fine. We are watching Walter Disney.”
If I still had my revolver, I might have been tempted to drive
several hours to their tryst, find them, and kill him. Which fantasy only depressed me further. To the point of uncorking my Cork Dry Gin and setting up to mix a near-lethal potion. I was going about this with grim resolution when Alphus came into the kitchen with a sheaf of papers, put them on the table, and signed “Memoirs. A first sketch.”
Misery has its own momentum, and right then I didn’t want to interrupt my own. I wanted the solipsism of gin, enough to take me down to the small death of sleep and the smaller resurrection of waking. But in the active mode of mixing the drink, I happened to glance at the first few lines. Mechanically, I poured gin over ice. I sat down. A touch of vermouth. I sipped and read.
I remember first of all birdsound and the warmth of my mother’s furry breast. She was high in the hierarchy of our troop, and the members paid court to her through me, their faces big and friendly as they loomed over us, their hands reaching out to touch me under my mother’s wary eye.
I remember her love and care and how she sheltered me from the pelting rains and the flashing light and thunderous noise of storms that came in from where the sun rose. I must have been about a year old, big for my age but still vulnerable, when, seemingly out of nowhere, a muscular leopard came with deadly speed up the trunk of the tree we were sitting in. In one quick motion my mother grabbed me and swung out of danger onto an overhead branch. One of my older cousins didn’t act quickly enough. There was an awful scream and brief struggle before he lay limp, his head in the cruel grip of the cat’s fangs.
The rest of us shrieked and hooted from a safe distance,
throwing anything to hand, including you know what, to little effect at the leopard, which calmly dismembered and ate our fellow chimp with feline efficiency.
I experienced several such adventures. I once came close to being bitten by a black mamba that we disturbed on our way through a cape fig tree toward clusters of ripe fruit. Several times marauding males from a neighboring troop of chimps came by looking to steal my mother and more than likely murder me.
But nothing compared to our dread of human hunting parties. Oh, but they were smart and brutal. They would come from one direction making noise so that we fled right into where their comrades lay in ambush. We thought of the gun as having magic powers. It’s true they make a terrific noise. But from far away. The noise would sound and someone close by would grunt, lose his grip and fall, the body bouncing off limbs before it thudded to the ground. We would all try to hide in the foliage and stay as still as though we were already dead.
That’s how it happened. My mother was holding me, high in a tree where she had been feeding. A group of hunters came up stealthily and stood in a small clearing just at the base of the trunk. The sound of the gun and the thud of the slug hitting the back of my mother’s head came at the same time. I clung to her and, I believe, she clung to me, shielding me even in death as we fell and fell until we landed near the hunters, three black men in khaki shorts and shirts. I screamed at them, baring my small fangs. I heard them laugh and then darkness closed in as they dropped a burlap bag over me and hoisted me up, still screaming and struggling.
I paused at this point, the gin hardly touched in the melting ice. My eyes had misted over, and I wanted to go in and give him a hug. I read on as Alphus described at some length a sad litany of abuse, by turns caged and chained as he was bought and sold, ending up in a German circus at the age of ten. This began what he called the best years of his life until taking up residence at Sign House. I’ll let him tell it in his words.
Our trainer, a dour, self-tortured Scot named Campbell McDonald, treated all of us kindly, but regarded me as his favorite. I think he was lonely. Some nights he would bring me to his compartment on the train, where we drank Scotch neat in small glasses. But slowly, the bottle stoppered and unstoppered for yet another one until he fell asleep. I would curl up on a blanket on the floor, but couldn’t sleep very well, not with the big-cat cages just a few cars from ours.
Camp, for that was his nickname, and I did a couple of skits together. In one of them, I played a dentist and he was my patient. I wore a surgical mask and he had his jaw wrapped in a big bandage tied at the top of his head. I did a pantomime of persuasion to get him to sit down in a padded reclining chair. He would roll his eyes fearfully as I strapped him down. I then produced a gigantic needle and forced it into his mouth. Then, after a pretend injection, he would squirm in mock horror as I used a pair of pliers to take out a tooth, which I showed him. He would shake his head. I kept taking out teeth and showing them to him. He would shake his head. I would put the tooth into a cup. Until, finally, I had the right tooth. He would nod happily and pay me
large handfuls of fake money before leaving and taking his cupful of teeth with him.
We brought the house or at least the tent down with our bordello scene. In that skit, Camp played an American pimp. He wore a floppy hat, a gaudy suit, and lots of fake gold chains around his neck. As his conservatively dressed “john” I would consider a series of beautiful young women all dressed like tarts that he would parade in front of me. No matter how attractive they were, and some were very attractive by human standards, I would shake my head after giving them a once-over. Until he brought out the hairy lady from the sideshow. I would put on a show of great excitement, would nod up and down, pay him great wads of fake money, take her by the hand, and walk off our improvised stage.
I was particularly moved when I read his account of the experiments performed on him by that crazed scientist Stoddard Gottling. In an attempt to create nothing less than a new human phenotype, Gottling and his associates treated Alphus and his fellow chimps as though they did not experience pain. “Trauma,” Alphus writes, “scarcely describes the endless medical tortures men and women in lab coats put us through.” He was, however, heavily sedated when undergoing the angioplasty in the carotid artery in an attempt to increase blood flow to his brain.
Here is Alphus’s account of waking from sedation after the procedure to a level of consciousness he had only dimly intuited before.
I gradually realized as the anesthesia wore off that I had become a highly sapient being, but one trapped in an
ape’s body and with an ape’s instincts. For weeks I lived in a state of panic. I tried to think of ways to kill myself. But, remember, I still had the predilections of a “lower” primate. And deliberate self-destruction is unknown to chimpanzees. I had all these thoughts but no way of communicating them. Worst, I knew I would be imprisoned for the rest of my life with my poor, benighted brethren.
I despaired until the day that one of the students who was studying us brought in a boom box and played, very loudly, Ravel’s
Bolero
. I was dumbstruck. I was agonized with a painful joy. Not only did I find it beautiful beyond my meager collection of words, but in its slow, building, louder rhythms, it mirrored my own dawning intellectual growth. I clung to it like a psychic life preserver. Using clumsy gestures, I persuaded the student, a pretty Asian girl, to play it again and again.
She came back a few days later with other classical music. I hung there in a state of fearful aesthetic bliss as she played operatic overtures, movements from Beethoven symphonies, something by Stockhausen, which I didn’t care for much, arias from Verdi, and once again
Bolero
.
My caged companions scarcely listened. They were far more interested in the chocolate-covered raisins that the researcher, whose name was Debra, rewarded them with if they wore headphones and then played with the volume.
I say “fearful aesthetic bliss” because I knew that what happened would happen. One day Debra packed up her things, gave us some extra candy, and left, never to return again. It was then that I knew I had to escape.
I put the manuscript down and went back through it making some small edits and suggestions. I took it into the living room where Alphus and Ridley were watching the game. I began to tell him how moving and well done I found his memoir.
He waved me aside and pointed to the screen. The Sox were trailing the Yankees five to four in the ninth inning with two out and a man on third.
I returned to the kitchen in a far better frame of mind. I had not only been moved by this fragment of his memoir, I was hopeful that, with help, he would be able to find a publisher, make some money, and afford a home and keeper of his own.
Time can wound as well as heal. In the days following the Sixpack concert, which played to such effect on the stage and backstage of my imagination, I burned in the fire of time so well set by Delmore Schwartz. Time does, finally, consume us, but slowly, so slowly, especially when we are suffering. And suffering I was, racked by jealousy, loss, and despair.
To forestall madness, I kept busy. I drafted a letter to Elgin Warwick graciously declining his generous offer. But didn’t send it. I brooded endlessly. I grew gaunt, at least in spirit, walking the streets of Seaboard like a living ghost haunting its own time. I worked in the small garden we have behind the house. I researched other places Alphus could comfortably stay. I investigated the murder of Heinrich von Grümh.
To this end, I phoned Professor Colin Saunders late one afternoon and invited him over to my office for an update on the investigation. He responded with suspicion. “What do I need to come there for? Can’t you just tell me over the phone?”
“It’s confidential information,” I said. “I’d rather do it face-to-face.”
“I’m sorry, but I’m very busy. Have your girl type it up and send it to me by registered mail.”
When I related this to Lieutenant Tracy, he told me not to worry. They would bring him in for questioning. Alphus and I could be on the other side of the one-way mirror.
“But he’ll have a lawyer with him. He won’t say anything.”
“Leave that to me.”
So, at an appointed time, I drove, with Alphus on a proper leash, to police headquarters on the bypass. Per usual, we raised a few eyebrows as we went through the metal detector and took the elevator to the second floor. There the lieutenant gave us two chairs in front of the window looking into the interrogation room.
Presently, an indignant-looking Saunders and Gavin Miffkin, a red-faced, middle-aged lawyer in an expensive suit, were ushered in by Lieutenant Tracy and Sergeant Lemure.
The professor did not hide the kind of disdain a lot of upper-middle-class people feel is their prerogative when it comes to the police. He scarcely acknowledged the lieutenant when the latter reintroduced himself and the sergeant.
“We want to go over your statement about your movements on the evening Heinrich von Grümh was murdered.”
“We’ve been through this at least twice,” Saunders said. “I really do have other things to do.”
“We won’t take long.” Lieutenant Tracy spoke equably. “Some routine questions.”