house.) I shielded my eyes with a hand cupped against the glass to block my reflection. The glass had a faint blue-green tint. Beside me, a few paces away, there was a woman and a child. The woman looked middle-aged and middle-class, and wore a candy-apple-red coat with thick black buttons, a blue sweater, and glasses, and her brown hair was tied loosely back. There was a stroller beside her. It contained a soft fuzzy blue blanket and a stuffed animal, but other than that it was vacant—its presumed occupant was crawling around on the floor, wearing the standard uniform of an infant: a one-piece jumpsuit with a button-up door in the hindquarters for easy diaper-changing; the jumpsuit was blue, which we for some reason consider a color that connotes the innocence of infancy while still being appropriately masculine—oh, what an odd thing it is that humans begin to sexualize their young even when they’re scarcely washed of womb-goo!—before they’re born, even! (Perhaps this note should go somewhere in the blurb of species information on the human? No! No room for such details! That’s where the devil is. Gwen—there’s simply too much to say! There’s too much to say!) This child, this presumably male human infant, was padding around, hands and feet slapping like four fat little flippers on the floor of the human observer’s area of the Primate House of the Lincoln Park Zoo. Oh, God, he was beautiful. He was a beautiful baby, plump, bald, smooth-skinned, bright and Buddha-like, a creature at that stage of pure and perfect passions, the needle of his emotional meter capable of swinging instantaneously from bliss to despair and back to bliss on account of stimuli so easy as the touch of his mother’s skin. Sometimes I see a baby and I nearly cry. Why? Why does the sight of a baby make me cry? Is it because I know too much about the world he’s been born into? No, that’s much too insipidly romantic, that can’t be it. The sight of a baby fills me instantly with desperate, insane, boundless love. I love human babies! I love the animals! I love the world!… but—I hate it! I love and I hate the world with equal passion! That’s why I cry when I see a baby! The hot and cold fronts in my soul slam together and make a storm—a tempest!—and I cry!
This child, this baby in the zoo, was too young to speak. His consciousness was still at the level of an animal’s, that of an uneducated ape. He was babbling, being at the prelinguistic stage of early childhood when a baby is perpetually fascinated anew by his own ability to make noise, and so he spends every spare waking second he can get with his mouth busily spewing a nonteleological flux of cooing, humming, burbling, gurgling, and singing. In constant song! Music always precedes meaning! Music before meaning! On and on and on he babbled and sang, employing every technique available to the infant’s cantatory repertoire. First he sang a high, constant note while repeatedly cupping and releasing a hand over his mouth to create an autohypnotic ululating effect. Soon he decided to modify this technique by rapidly flapping his fingers over his lower lip while dropping his voice to a hum, which made a noise like the low idling of an engine, and after tiring of that he took the same concept and kicked it into higher gear by increasing the pressure of his outward breath while rapidly vibrating his smiling lips; this last technique quickly led to an excess of drool leaking over his chin—ah, but he cared not.
The bottom three feet of the glass wall that looked into the chimp exhibit was foggy with little handprints, and soon this child began adding his own to the fog. He crawled up onto the short step that ran beneath the bottom of the glass, and pressed himself to the window to get a better look. He was still making a motorboat noise with his reverberating lips, absentmindedly, or maybe to make himself a little music to accompany the sight. He squished his tiny hands flat against the glass as he peered through it at the chimps. Inside the exhibit, eight or ten feet away from the window, the female chimp whom