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By Root 2400 0

I did not recognize had slumped over backward onto the damp floor of cedar planting chips—not from fatigue, but probably from boredom—and the infant chimp whom she had been holding scrambled out of her arms, clambered over her hairy protuberant belly, and began to make his way on thin spindly arms and stumpy legs across the floor of the exhibit toward the window. The baby chimp crawled right up to the baby human. The chimp pressed his own hands against the glass and looked directly out the window into the face of the human child on the other side. Two babies, two species, inches apart, looked at one another through the glass. They were about the same size. Young chimps look even more humanlike (or rather, humans look like neotenic chimps): they have big eyes, big round heads, and small faces. I watched as these two primates, as these two children from slightly different species, looked at one another through the wall of blue-green glass, each with hands pressed flat to the window, each big-headed and big-eyed, each without language. At that moment—at this stage of their respective developments—it seemed completely arbitrary who was on which side of the glass. Each of them only knew that a glass wall divided them, and neither understood why.

The child’s (I mean the human child’s) mother eventually decided it was time to go, and she picked him up and deposited him in his stroller for transport.

As his mother was wheeling him out of the room, the human child peered over the rim of his stroller, looked back at the ape behind the glass, and waved.

They left. I remained. I stood in front of the glass and watched the chimps all afternoon.

I must have cut a strange figure that afternoon: a man, a hairless and somewhat deformed dwarf, in a coat and black fedora with a suitcase in his hand, standing all day in front of the chimp exhibit at the Lincoln Park Zoo. No one bothered me, though. The other chimps one by one roused from the naps they were taking on that high shelf in the upper corner of the exhibit, yawned, sleepily stretched their long hairy arms and scrabbled down the ropes and nets that hung from the ceiling to the floor. They putzed around, they chased one another, they groomed one another, they batted their hands at one another, they occasionally broke into rapid exchanges of howls and squeaks, they climbed their ropes, they nibbled at the food pellets they found in the planting chips on the floor. I watched my old family for hours. They never recognized me. I was a stranger to them. And why should they have recognized me? I was not an animal like them anymore. I was hairless, I was upright, I was clothed, I was nosed. That is why I stood on my side of the glass, and they on theirs. Their Bruno was a man now.

I noticed that Céleste was not among them. I looked outside, and did not see her there, either. I wondered if she had been transferred to another zoo for some reason. Wherever she was, she was not there.

I wondered long and hard if I regretted anything. I tried to imagine what my life would have been like if I had remained in the zoo with my original family. If I was with them still, still relegated to being the lowest-ranking male in the social group, never knowing anything of the world but this infinitesimally small patch of it. Never falling from innocence or stepping out of the darkness. Never knowing language, never feeling that strange alteration in me, to degree of reason in my inward powers, nor thenceforth to speculations high or deep to turn my thoughts, and with capacious mind consider all things visible in heaven, or earth, or middle, all things fair and good. The idea was now so foreign to me that it almost caused me to laugh. It was an aimless wondering, leading me nowhere. These animals were now so alien to my consciousness that I could no longer fathom what was going on inside their minds. Their behavior, the mental processes of these animals, had become as opaque to me as lead. Now I could only see them through a glass, darkly.

XLVII

I left the zoo that afternoon with a feeling in