The Counterfeit Murder in the Museum of Man_ A Norman De Ratour Mystery - Alfred Alcorn [89]
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