of a van. I could not see out of it. I guessed the last leg of my forced journey—that which was by road—to take about an hour’s duration. I could see nothing. The men conversed in the front seats, but for the throbbing engine of the van I could not hear them. We moved along quickly at times and crept slowly at others. The van eventually stopped, with a whine of brakes and the motor shuddering off. I shut my eyes. The doors opened and they picked me up and carried me, heaving and grunting. I opened my eye a cautious slit, enough to see that I was being carried into a building—a cool, large, clean, institutional building, a kind of place I was more familiar with than I would have liked to be. They carried me through the brightly lit hallways. I heard the two men’s boots scrunching on the hard shiny floors. Hallway, elevator, hallway, doors. They carried me down a long corridor and into a dim, cavernous room. The concrete floor sloped in the middle into a shallow valley with grimy iron drains in it, and the room smelled thick and perfect with the odors of animal excrement. But the sounds of the room: a cacophony of yelps, howls, hoots, screams, clicks, scrapes, scratches, chatters, rattles and bangs rose up like so much auditory vomit in the foul and filthy air from both sides of the room—we were descending, as if led by the hand of Virgil down the grotto steps into the Inferno, abandon all hope ye who enter here—these were the noises of the dungeon, like sounds suggested by a Hieronymus Bosch painting of unending pain, of suffering, of Hell. There were cages, and inside the cages twisted, screaming faces, the mocks and mows of apes with foreheads villainous low. On either side of the room stood three long rows of metal cages stacked one on top of the next, and each cage contained a chimp. This room was a prison, a torture garden, a madhouse for the dirty, for the crazed, for the rage-rankled and diseased creatures in it, locked up in four-by-four-foot cells forever till death deliver them from their pain, imprisoned and tortured for crimes unknown to them. Sick curiosity got the better of my caution, and out of horror I let both my eyes open. I saw them: I saw their rangy, sickness-ridden, parasite-bitten and malnourished arms and fingers dangling, weak, limp, pathetic, from between the bars of their cages, their eyes murky piss-yellow with jaundice, wracked with who knows what artificially injected illnesses—AIDS, hepatitis—their minds and bodies ravaged with hate and sadness and madness and fear. They shook, they shivered, they banged their fists against their heads and throttled the bars of their cages, they cried out in despair. This was the place where I had been brought. I shut my eyes.
I would not stay in this place. No. I refused. My pride would not let me. Pride? Or was it my vanity? Fine, then: call it my vanity. To say nothing of my fear. I do not care what you call my motive for escape, but I had to escape. I would not live in there, I would not die in there. I thought: you fuckers cannot keep me here. I will find a way out—I will claw and chew and fight my way out if I have to, and I do not care in the least who I hurt in the process. You do not own me. I will not give my life to science. I will not give my life to human medicine. If my body could provide the data that cure every disease in the world, I still would not let you touch it. No, Man, you shall not have dominion over me.
The two men who had brought me here stopped and lowered my cage onto the piss-stained cement floor.
“Careful when we transfer him. We don’t want him waking up and giving us any trouble.” I felt the gaze of the man looking at me through the bars of the cage. “Aw,” he said. “This little baldheaded guy’s sleeping like a baby.”
“Good.”
I felt and heard the cage door being unlocked. It squeaked open. The man prodded my falsely sleeping flank with an experimental finger.
“He’s out cold.”
“So c’mon then. Let’s do this.”
Two big hot human hands entered my cage and took hold of my arms. Though my heart hammered at my ribs and my stomach