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By Root 2216 0

with my surrounding chimp face. If you look very closely you can still trace the pale perimeter of scar tissue around my nose. Today I simply threw on this ratty old bathrobe, but, even in captivity, I usually take enough pride in my appearance not to dress too sloppily. My clothes are getting thin and threadbare at the elbows and knees, but even a cursory examination of my wardrobe reveals my tasteful and elegant fashion sense. I keep asking for new clothes, and the research center keeps promising them to me and then forgetting (or ignoring) their promise. I have to have my clothes specially tailored because my frame is of such irregular proportions. For instance, my arms are longer than my legs.

Would you like a glass of wine, Gwen? Leon convinced them to let me drink wine, but they forbid me hard liquor. I know it’s not yet noon, but in my enforced retirement, I’m long past feeling the oppressive obligation to remain sober in the daytime. Why bother?

I have struggled with the demons in the bottle ever since they first seduced me. I struggle with them, and usually I let them win. So what? Imagine this: it’s as if there’s a hideous grating noise constantly roaring in your head, and alcohol muffles it a little. Why should I be made to feel embarrassed or guilty or ashamed when I imbibe? The world’s got its own problems. Who is the world to judge? Like most drunkards, I feel most alive when I’m killing myself. You would not so opprobriously condemn me for always wanting to drown my brain in wine if you knew how easily my mind races headlong into dangerous places without it, if you could feel how my palms ooze sweat, how my stomach recoils, how my heart flutters in my chest like a wounded bird when I am not drunk. If you ever have children, tell them they must always be drunk. Drunk on love, drunk on poetry, drunk on wine, it doesn’t matter. This world is too goddamn painful to waste a second of your existence sober.

Onward, then.

One day (it must have been, what?—November?), one day in the fall of a year that must have been around 1989, at the end of the day, Lydia carried me out of the Behavioral Biology Laboratory on the third floor of the Erman Biology Center in the northeast corner of the main quad of the University of Chicago campus, away from my cage and away from my nights of jabbering with Haywood, wrapped in my fuzzy blue blanket, my arms wrapped around her neck. It was November, definitely November, and already murderously cold outside. Lydia was wearing a black wool peacoat, a knit cap, and a green flannel scarf tucked into the breast of her coat. The serpent of winter had bitten Chicago and bitten it bad, injecting it with the icy venom that whistled and shrieked through the city’s veins and arteries. It was time for streams dribbling from gutter pipes to solidify in midbraid, time for sooty snow and sludgy sidewalks. It was time for thick blankets. It was time for hats and boots. It was time for mugs of warm, viscous liquids to be sipped beside the soulful pulse of a fire, time for comfortable armchairs and good books and ice-fractals to form on the exterior surfaces of foggy windows, time for the soporific interior calm of a Midwestern winter.

I had been in Lydia’s car only once, when she had spirited me away from the zoo many months before (or was it years?—I’ve no way of estimating how much time had passed). Her car was an inauspicious thing, four-doored, flat, aerodynamically designed, dark blue. Under the blanket I scratched my face against the coarse material of Lydia’s woolen coat, and I licked one of its hard plastic buttons. I felt her chest moving beneath it, sucking in and pushing out her breath. My bare feet stuck out from under the blanket and quickly became numb from the cold. She opened the passenger door of the car and placed me inside, swaddled in the front seat in my blanket. She drew the straps of the seat belt across me and buckled it, tucked the diagonal strap under my chin and the horizontal one over my knees, kissed the top of my head, and shut the door. It was silent and deathly cold