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By Root 2365 0

off from the rest of the planet by that high metal fence. But whenever I am outside in the forest, feeling the heat of the Georgia sun on my face, sucking this wet Southern air into my lungs, listening to the calls of the birds, who are free to fly where they will and to sing their songs beyond mankind, something restless in my heart induces my gaze to tip curiously skyward, to the top of that razor-wire-topped chain-link fence that surrounds the grounds of the Zastrow National Primate Research Center. However, Gwen, these are only dreams, which are the children of an idle brain, begot of nothing but vain fantasy. These seeds of my dreams of escape never germinate past the first saplings of vague plots and plans in the mischief-rich soil of my devious mind: plots and plans of somehow getting over or under that fence, or past the door that I see you walk in and out of every day you come to visit me—and get out. There must be a way out.

The world is large. I know that I am not fit to live in human society. But then again, who is? There may still come a day, Gwen, when Bruno Littlemore is free to walk the world again.

Today, Gwen, this Scheherazade will officially fall silent for you for the last time, but I hope this will not be your last visit, because, as you’ve probably noticed, I have fallen in love with you.

That aside, earlier this morning, before you came to me today to complete your project, I was reading the Book of Psalms. No, please don’t expect this narrative to end with some sort of Dostoyevskian last-minute prison conversion. Unlike Hilarious Lily, I have never been a religious ape. I was and remain the chimp of the perverse. But in my long hours of solitude and quiet reflection I have taken to reading the Bible. I admit sometimes it can be very beautiful. There is a dark and primitive energy in its words that sometimes, if I allow them to, can put a shiver in my spine, can make me feel as if my blood has turned to ice. And sometimes, too, I read it only to enrage me. I read it to make my blood sing out with violent fury in my heart at all humankind. It is an unusual text that can produce both awe and rage in me at once.

And I was flipping through the double-column-texted, tissue-thin and gold-edged pages of that famous book—the “Good Book”—and I landed on the Psalms (which as it so happens I read often, because they come right after Job, which is the book of the Bible I reread the most), and I came across this:

When I look at thy heavens, the work of thy fingers,

the moon and the stars which thou hast established;

what is man that thou art mindful of him,

and the son of man that thou dost care for him?

Yet thou hast made him little less than angels,

and dost crown him with glory and honor.

Thou hast given him dominion over the works of thy hands;

thou hast put all things under his feet,

all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field,

the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea,

whatever passes along the paths of the sea.

When I read those words, it was not that feeling of awe that came to me, but a feeling of rage.

Little less than angels?

No! No, no, NO! Not little less than angels! Little more than apes! No! Nothing more than apes! Apes! Just apes! Arrogant, self-deluding, talking… apes! And now I am one of you. I am one of you, and I cannot ever go back! Go tell your God what I would give to unlearn your language! To go back to being an animal!

No, I can never go back! I can never go back again. I cannot unlearn my humanity. For evolution, perversely, moves forward. I do not mean it progresses, but only that it cannot be turned back like the hands of a clock. We cannot walk backward through time. We cannot put all our words into a pot and boil them down to a salty residue of grunts and howls and shrieks and gestures, we cannot retreat back across the ancient savannahs, grow our arms long again and climb back into the trees, let our spines stretch out into tails and let our stereoscopic eyes slowly recede to the sides of our heads, shake