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By Root 2353 0

reconstruct the memory knowing what I now know—was a woman’s hat, a woman’s sun hat. It was beige, wide-brimmed, shallow-crowned and flat, made of straw—tightly woven slats of thin shiny straw. It was festive, festooned with a wide band of diaphanous silk on which was printed a design of blue and red and purple flowers, which wrapped around the crown of the hat and was secured in place with a bow. Perhaps at the time Céleste and I imagined—as I now imagine—that this hat had previously lived on top of the head of a beautiful woman. There were even—as I recall—a few long threads of human hair caught in the interstices of the hat’s weave, possibly red hair, almost invisible except upon close viewing, sleek and strong, as long as my forearm and well-nigh impossible to break with the hands. This hat was a magical object to us, a portent from the gods lying on the ground: beautiful, weird, otherworldly, bright.

Two young chimps, looking at a hat lying on the grass of their habitat. One, Céleste, the younger, is smaller with very dark fur, and her big ears stick far out of her head like wingflaps. The other, Bruno, the elder, has lighter and coarser reddish fur that he has inherited from Red Peter, his father, and smaller ears that lay flatter against the sides of his head. Both of them have the round heads and snowy beard-tufts of preadolescence.

At first we were a little afraid of it. What is this thing? Whence did it come? We look up—we cast our humble gazes upon the foreboding thing we have seen every day of our brief existences: the Wall. Massive, starkly unadorned and unreachable, the cold, gray, steeply sloping bowl of concrete, over and beyond which lies the unknown part of the universe. This must have come from beyond the Wall, a place purported to exist, but for which we have as yet no a priori proof. The only things we know exist are the ones we see marching past the Wall. Are they the things of this world, or only their shadows? We don’t know. But the hat: this is no shadow of a hat, this is a hat itself. Only we do not know that it is called “hat.” We do not know what it is. We do not know what it does. Is it friend or foe? For a while we observe the hat from a safe distance. Then I, the young Bruno—who at this point is simply another baby chimp of no particularly remarkable genius—warily approach the thing. A hand reaches out, followed by a thin hirsute arm—to touch it. I only barely brush the edge of the object with the tips of my fingers, and reflexively jerk my hand back at once. Wait!… It did me no harm, no harm. Tentatively, tentatively, the hand reaches out to touch it again. The hand makes contact, and there it remains. Emboldened, I go so far as to pick it up. Céleste approaches now. She places her head on my right shoulder, looks on at the thing, which is now in my hands—my God!—it’s so light, nearly effortless to lift. Céleste puts her hand on the brim of the hat. We touch it together, peacefully, we explorers, we two little scientists, we run our fingers along its contours, its edges, its angles, its convexities and concavities, feeling its texture, the taut bouncy waxen feeling of the tightly woven lacquered straw, the smooth and delicate feeling of the silken hatband, bespangled with the images of blue and red and purple flowers.

There was probably, as these episodes tend to go, a cluster of humans gathered by now at the ledge of the Wall, snapping their photographs, pointing at us and swooning with remarks about the adorableness of our behavior toward the hat. As my attentions at the moment were directed far, far elsewhere, I cannot recall if anyone noticed us or not, but if they did, Céleste and I paid them no heed. And it was Céleste, Céleste who discovered what the thing was, in the human sense, “for”: she was putting various parts of her body into the bowl of the hat, until finally she put the top of her head into it, and when she removed her hands the hat remained there of its own accord. I gasped—in shock and laughter, I gasped at the sight of Céleste “wearing” the hat, and pointed, and collapsed