I do not remember anything, after the wreck, until I put my finger to my ear.
And felt the fur scratch against my hairy neck.
The fur from the back of my hand.
Later, after I had tried to rip the bandages from my head, and from somewhere behind me a needle had descended and pricked me, and I passed out; later, I awoke.
I lay still. I was on my back and watched the rise and fall of my smooth chest. My head was ringing from the drug used on me. Little blue circles swirled like a gnat swarm in my eyes. Slowly I raised my hand into my line of sight and saw its hairy back, like a glove made from a shag rug.
I pulled it to my head, found the edges of the bandages which started just above my brow. The brow was thick and long as a bicycle handlebar.
I lay back. Even that small movement caused my head to scream and slip sideways, and I went over.
Late for showtime. Critic's screening of new, solid blockbuster movie, seventeen stars, studio hype. Wet night, slick streets. Down the Canyon road, around the turn, headlights catch a dog or a cat or a small child, stomp the brake, good Michelin tires grab the road, Triumph says good-bye highway, sailing, sailing the lights of LA look nice tonight and are they getting close no time to scream now...
I come up from the memory and shiver to find I have awakened myself groaning.
The groan is a hurricane inside an echo chamber, long, low, wet, with lungs and strength, hurt strength behind it.
The head pain is gone. Again, I look down at my body at the hugeness, the shagginess, the alienness. My body.
I need to take a dump. I cannot move well enough to get—where? To the corner of the cage. For I am barred in. It is ten body lengths long, five wide. Through one corner is a slanted running trough of water. Through the other, a fountain with a steel foot pedal. Outside the cage is dark. It is night, or the lights are off.
I am hurt. I do not understand what has happened. I do not think I am still dreaming. So this is what it is like to begin to lose the mind. I am afraid. I try to cry.
I see him staring at me while I open my eyes. The place is bright again and the light hurts.
He looks like Albert Einstein. He looks like a thousand mad scientists. He looks like ... he has a large nose, unkempt white mustache, a fringe of hair from the temples around his head. His eyes are grey and quite gone. I have seen those tombstone eyes on the Strip, asking for change to support a habit. I saw them once in the Army, in Nam, on a guy who'd lived through an ambush when on one else had. He was over the edge. He was gone. His eyes looked like those in photographs of factory workers from the 189o's, all shiny like little steel balls.
Little steel balls with lights burning inside them.
"Tuleg! Tuleg!” He yells. “He is awake."
I twitched from the loudness of his voice. The blue gnats threaten my sight, then subside.
I try to move.
He watches me. He does not say anything. He studies the way I try to use my fingers. I cannot place them flat so I can push myself up. I realize I am trying to use them as my own hands. And that will not work. These are twice as large.
A door opens somewhere. My vision is still fuzzy. Beyond the bars of the cage is a blur. Light comes from somewhere, then goes.
And before me stands the Evil Assistant.
He is huge, he must be huge. He looks like an oak stump stretched out by chains. He is bald, a muscular Erich von Stroheim, and he moves like an acrobat. He is wearing khaki pants (I can only see the waistband. The cage is raised about a meter off the flooring of the—room?—the cage is in) and a real undershirt, the kind with thin shoulder straps and no sleeves. He is rubbing pizza sauce from his mouth as he walks in. He looks at me and scratches his chest with his right hand.
"So?” he says to the madman.
"So!?” says the other. “I have succeeded. You helped with the operation, you saw! A man's brain in the body of a gorilla. He lives! He will live, of that I'm sure."
"Mmm,” grunted the man. He turned to leave. “Call me if you really need me."
I listened to them talk. I could not believe it. Was I making up this dialogue? Was I still asleep?
I looked at the Mad Scientist. He stared back as if I were golden, silver, a flying saucer, the Loch Ness monster.
The Evil Assistant went out the door. There was something about him I did not like. He seemed familiar.
Rondo Hatton. He reminded me of Rondo Hatton, the Creeper. He did not need acromegaly. He was an ugly man.
The Mad Scientist leaned on the cage and stared at me.
Time passed and the scientist was gone. I managed to get up and hobble my way to the trough. I took a dump.
Gorilla shit is dry, almost all the liquid is gone from it. What I had eaten, or rather what the former owner of the body had last eaten, I do not know.
When I finished I lay back down. My head hurt. My body hurt. I sank into slumbers.
Sometimes later I felt another needle go into my skin. I was too weak to fight back. My sleep was filled with dim nightmares.
I saw beyond the cage a hospital stand with an empty IV bottle attached. Intravenous feeding, saves time, saves trouble.
I stood, went to the latrine, shuffled my weight across to the water fountain, stepped on the pedal and doused my face with water.
It did not feel the same as it did when I had done it ... when I was a man. It felt as if the skin there were made of leather sewn on the outside of my normal face. I pushed on it, pulled at it with my clumsy hands. I pulled my fingers and tried my toes.
I stepped on the pedal, ran water into the fountain. I held my hairy, notebook-sized hand over the drain. There was light, from an indirect source, in the room.
I watched the drain fill, the water rise over my hand like a river flood covering a forest. Then I took my foot away from the handle.
I stared into the basin.
Gorilla eyes. Tiny. Brow swept back to a sagittal crest. Head like a cinderblock. Thick. Ugly.
I sat on the floor, my toes curled in. I could not believe it. I sat that way until I realized how I must look. Like a gorilla. A gorilla trying to solve the mysteries of the universe. I got up and began to pace the cage, slowly. Then I stood with my hands through the bars. Gorillas don't do that. Humans do that.
gorilla gorilla.
The most nearly human, the most frightening primate. No one believed the stories the natives told. Old men of the woods. They lived there, they beat their chests, they drive you off. They kill. They have teeth the size of knives. Pliny wrote about them. The Romans knew them, and later the Spanish and the Portugee. And they did not believe, either.
Two gorillas. The lowland, first, the one of the rain forest, and the mountain gorilla, he of the open hillsides. Dying, now, the bands breaking down, to the bulldozer, the city, the poachers.
Huge, the gorilla. Fierce-looking. Bestial, perhaps because he is so close to man, yet so far away. So strong, so heavy. Men twisted by nightmares.
The gorilla will fight, is shy. The beating of the chest is liable to be replaced by some other harmless activity. The males will protect the young and the females. They usually run and do not charge.
See the gorilla. Terror of the jungle. Killer of the Congo. King of the Apes. gorilla gorilla.
The Mad Scientist was named Hudson.
The Evil Assistant called him that next day.
I watched them come into the room while they talked.
Then I stood.
"You see?” said Hudson. “He stands on two legs."
I walked to the bars. I motioned with my hands. I wanted to know why?
Hudson watched me.
"You see?” he said to Tuleg. “He understands. He is still a man."
I was clumsy. I couldn't walk so well on two legs. I didn't know how to walk on all fours. You can't walk on four legs like a man would. I couldn't do anything right. I sat down.
"He is uncoordinated,” said Hudson. “He can learn, though."
"So, who's gonna teach him?” asked Tuleg.
"We are,” said Hudson.
For the first time, there was authority in his voice.
The days passed. At first they still gave me intravenous feedings and kept me groggy with drugs.
Then Hudson began to speak to me, like a child.
I tried to talk. What came out was nnnngmnnnnnnnnng.
I wanted to write. I moved my hands like writing.
Hudson handed me a pen and paper, happy as a child.
My fingers were like tree limbs. My thumb was like a sledgehammer. One letter took up most of the page. I tried.
"You will get better with it,” said the Mad Scientist. “Don't worry."
I threw the pen down, tore the paper, clumsily, in half. I couldn't even do that well.
"Nod if you understand me,” he said.
I nodded.
Hudson laughed and clapped his hands. “You do!” he said, dancing in little steps. “You do!"
I nodded again, my insides were turning with joy.
"Wait until I tell Tuleg!” he said, and ran from the room. I stood dumbfounded. We had been communicating, no matter how crudely. And he left. He left.
I did not want to be alone. I roared. I yelled, I shook the bars until my head began to spin and I had to sit. I sank to the floor and shivered.
I found that gorillas can cry.
I held the ballpoint pen in my hand and rocked myself to sleep.
The next morning, I realized what was wrong. Dr. Hudson was crazy, really mad. I had never thought of the meaning of the words “mad scientist” before. He must be mad to experiment so. But his madness did not end there. No. He is mad. He walked away when we were ready to communicate. He works to make me a gorilla, then he works to bring the man back out. And at the instant he does, he forgets me. He is mad.
Tuleg walked in by himself and shut the door.
I sat with the ballpoint in my hand, toes curled in, my knuckles flat on the floor. I stared back at him.
He stood with his arms akimbo. With his bald head, in the daylight, he reminded me of Boris Karloff in Tower of London. Mord, the Executioner.
He said nothing. Then he went to the cabinet in the far corner and drew out a long thin stick.
I jumped. I had seen one like it before.
"Ha ha ha,” he said. His eyes said, “So you recognize the cattle prod, eh?"
He came toward me, moving his head to always keep eye contact with me through the bars. He reached the prod in and the sharp spark leapt like a knife. I felt as if I had been stabbed and clubbed at the same time. Smoke curled, and there was the smell of burnt hair in the air. I roared and leapt away from him.
But he moved far faster than I, and the prod touched again and again and again and
I wrote with the pen, though he shocked me each second or so, and laughed as he did. I was quivering.
NO, I wrote, and he saw it, and knocked the pen from my hand. I reached for it, and he struck at me. The spark made my hand go numb. I watched the hair burn. I looked into his eyes.
"Fight me,” he said. “Why don't you fight me?” He stuck the prod at my face. I tried to push it away.
Its touch blasted through my elbows to my teeth. I was crying, whimpering now. I lay down and curled up as best I could. He kept jabbing me, sending pain into me. I almost let go at each jolt. I bit my tongue in pain, felt blood run under my teeth.
The pain stopped.
"Damn you,” he said, throwing the prod on the cabinet shelf. “Damn you to hell, why don't you fight me?"
He left. His words ran through my head. Why don't you fight me?
Because I am a man. Because...
The Evil Assistant was evil. Evil with all its connotations. Evil has motive. Evil strikes without warning. Sadism is an evil which needs no motivation. To give pain is human. Perhaps Tuleg gets sexual release in giving pain? I couldn't tell. I did not give him whatever he needed. I will not. Not ever.
I have learned the meaning of the word evil. I do not like it.
There were hands on me.
Tiny hands.
I opened my eyes and winced where one of the prod burns had seared the flesh of my brow. I moaned and rolled to my side.
"You poor thing,” she said. “You frightened thing."
Why, why, why when there is a gorilla, and a mad scientist, and an evil assistant, why...
why must there be a beautiful woman?
I have seen all this before, I tell myself, as the doctor and the beautiful woman tend my wounds. I am so hurt, so stunned I can do nothing but lie and shiver. I am running a fever. My eyes feel made of grit and sand. I shake. Inside, I cry. They cover me with a blanket. I become dank, and cold by turns, and then burn for hours. I pass in and out of fever dreams. I see a jungle.
It is later, and I hear the Mad Doctor talk to the Beautiful Woman.
"I wouldn't have brought you here if I didn't want you to see it,” he said. “I wouldn't have, if I had known what Tuleg was going to do. The brute! I hope he fries in hell. I'm going to send him away the moment he returns."
"I told you when he came to work for you that he was a terrible man,” she said, her voice soft like an unswept floor.
"Well, he was a great help."
"I'm sure.” Her voice sounded as if she had turned her back on him. “He helped you. Oh, Father,” her voice quavered, then she continued. “Why?” she asked. “Why do something as stupid, as pointless as this? What use is it? What can you prove by it? What?"
"But, Blanche,” he said. “If you could have known the heartache, the toil, the hours..."
"Can you imagine,” she asked, turning toward him sharply, “what that poor man is going through? Can you?"
"He will make me immortal, Blanche."
"Oh Father, Father,” she said. I heard her footsteps and the door open and close, hard.
"She doesn't understand. She just doesn't understand,” said the old man, and moved some apparatus (the tinkling of glass and metal) around on the workbench.
I slept.
Tuleg must have come back sometime during the night. I opened my eyes and he was walking around the room, preparing food and tasting it as he put it in a bowl.
He brought it over to the cage.
"Here,” he said, putting it in through the bars. “Eat."
He went back to the workbench. He took down, and began to clean, a Thompson submachine gun. He looked at me from time to time as he worked with it. “Eat, I said."
I went to the bowl. It was filled with rolled oats, raisins, bits of celery and apple, sugar. I tried it and found it good. I was still running a fever, but I put the food in my mouth anyway.
My hand brushed my incisors. I felt them both. Long, curved, they were really there. They could crunch through meat as easily as a pair of pruning shears. They could punch open a tin can. They could kill a man. I shook my head.
I finished eating.
Hudson came in. He and Tuleg must have talked before, because the scientist was not surprised to see him.
"Today,” he said to me, “we begin to teach you."
"You were Roger Ildell,” said Dr. Hudson.
I nodded.
"You were killed in a wreck just beyond my home,” he said. “At least, your body was. I was able to remove your brain before deterioration set in. I saved it. I saved your conscious mind."
I nodded again.
"I used to read your reviews,” said Blanche, who was sitting at her father's side. “The police are still looking for your body. My father and Tuleg removed all traces. They were very thorough. They were very methodical,” she said.
"We have to begin all over with you,” said her father. “She tells me you were an intelligent man. There should be no problem. You'll be able to write again, though you'll never be able to talk. I regret that,” he said. Then quietly, “I regret that."
I opened my hands wide, held them out towards the scientist. And his daughter. Why? Why?
Hudson was puzzled.
Tuleg snorted and left the room. He still wore the stained undershirt he'd had on the first time I'd seen him.
I made motions of writing. The gorilla body I wore was struggling with itself. I wanted to tell them, I wanted to ask them. What was wrong? Was my mind crippled in the wreck? Why couldn't I speak!? Why couldn't I write?
Blanche handed me a large pencil and a piece of paper the size of a tabloid. I wrote as best as I could, taking up most of the sheet, slipping, straining to make myself understood.
WHY ME? WHY DO THIS TO ME?
Blanche read it and looked deep into my piggy anthropoid eyes.
"Oh, Father!” she said, and turned to the Mad Scientist.
He stared at me with his Einstein looks, his fringe of hair.
"I did it to save your life! Don't you understand? You would have died out there!” He began to shout. Lines of saliva hung inside his mouth as it opened and closed. “I have to teach you! I have to! You have lived so I could carry on my research! Yarr!” he screamed, and fell to the floor in a convulsion.
I watched. Blanche screamed for Tuleg. Together, they got the madman up off the floor and out the doorway of the laboratory. After a while, Blanche came back.
"You poor man, you,” she said. She came to the bars of the cage. She put her hand through and touched my hairy fingers.
I jerked as if with the shock from the cattle prod.
"No!” she said. “Don't. I'll help you all I can."
She leaned closer, still holding my hand.
"My father is not well,” she said, staring at my eyes. “He is a sick man in many ways."
She kissed my fingers just above the nails, and licked the hair between the thumb and index finger.
Mad. She, too, is mad.
I sit in the corner of the cage, my back against the bars, my feet and legs sticking out before me. I look at my bent legs, at my hairy knees, the flat pad where the bottoms of my feet begin.
I think.
First, there are the movies. I saw them all, in that other life. The gorillas is the image of terror, the anthropoid killer of men and children, the despoiler of women.
(The penis of the male adult gorilla is only a couple of inches long. Ask me.)
Gorilla at Large. White Pongo. Nabongo. Killer Gorilla. In Poe's “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” I was Old Man Pong, the orangutan. In the film, I was gorilla. Bela Lugosi. Poor, tired old Bela, shambling through role after role in which he had nothing to do but menace and laugh. The Ape. Return of the Ape Man. The Ape Girl. Captive Wild Woman. They put a horn on my head for Flash Gordon. Konga. Unknown Island. Mighty Joe Young.
King Kong.
I think of Blanche and I dream of Fay Wray. She does not look anything like her. I see Skull Island. I fight Tyrannosaurus for her. Through the dim eyes of the beast I pull the wings off the pterodactyl. I throw men from the log over the ravine to the waiting spiders. I roar my challenge from the Empire State Building.
I fall to the streets below.
Why does the gorilla always lust after the beautiful girl?
Why?
Why?
Tuleg has hurt me again.
Blanche found me quivering and shaking.
She came into the cage with me, opening it with a key from the workbench. I lay moaning.
"Oh, Roger, Roger,” she said, cradling my head in her lap. “I'll kill him. “I'll kill him if ever he hurts you again! My father will get rid of him."
She washes away the scored and scorched places, soothes me, rubs my chest where the prod has not bitten.
I DIDN'T FIGHT, I write.
"I know,” she says, rocking me. “I know. It'll be all right."
But it is not all right. Tuleg comes into the room.
He stops dead still when he sees her in the cage with me.
"Get out of there!” he yells, and runs into the cage, pulling her away from me. He slams the door. The key falls to the floor and he kicks it away. I try to get up. I hurt too much.
I struggle up.
"Your father is dead,” says Tuleg. “He went crazy and died."
"Oh no,” she said, and ran up the stairs.
Tuleg followed her.
In a few moments, there is a scream, a woman's scream, and then another and another.
"No. No!” yells Blanche as she falls through the door, her clothes torn from her. I hear Tuleg laughing outside, and he comes into the room, still holding part of her dress.
I shamble to my feet and roar. I slam against the cage. Tuleg laughs, then grabs Blanche by the hair and pulls her backward behind the workbench.
I mash my fist to paste against the door as I catch it between my shoulder and the bars. And still I push against it.
And still.
And still.
I have to watch the murder. And then the rape.
Then, only then, do I see the keys. I can't reach them. I try. Tuleg is not through with Blanche, though Blanche is finished with everything.
He is groaning.
The ballpoint pen. I find it with my hand. I stick it through the bars. Tuleg surely hears the jingle as I spear the brass ring. But he is busy, and finishing up.
I have the keys now, and I put them inside the cage lock.
I turn the key. The lock grates. “No,” says Tuleg, as he looks up from behind the bench, his face twisted in release. He jerks from the body.
He is going for the submachine gun.
I am there first, cutting him off. He is half naked. He bolts for the door. He slams it shut. His feet run up the stairs.
The doors part for me like a curtain, flinders flying each way.
It is a beautiful house, and Tuleg has made it to a phone. He is screaming an address into it. He turns, and his eyes go strange as he tries to stick a knife in me.
I do not feel it. I grab him by the ankle and pull him down. I am four hundred pounds of muscle and sinew, and he is a paper doll. The phone smashes against the bannister. Tuleg tries to scream.
I use him like a pogo stick, my foot and weight on his neck, while I hold to his kicking feet. One jump, two. Snap crunch snap. I like the sound as his neck goes soft like a pair of socks. Then I smash his head, and use the knife like a hoe in his stomach.
I carry the body of Blanche Hudson, and the air is filled with sirens, all coming toward us.
I carry her into the garden, where there is a gazebo. It looks out over the rest of the Canyon, and above me, that must be where my car plunged over.
I also carry the Thompson submachine gun in my hand.
I place the body of Blanche on the floor of the grape arbor, and lay her dress over her as neatly as possible. She is sweet in death, if you ignore the blood.
The house is beginning to burn. Tuleg's smoke will rise up to Hell forever, like the doctor said.
Fire trucks, police cars, and spectators arrive around front.
Ah.
Two policemen run toward me, yelling.
It is night, and they could not have seen me. One turns the corner of the garden house and sees Blanche's body (the beautiful daughter of the Mad Scientist) and stops. His eyes go wide as I bite through his throat, my hand on his face in a grip like a vise.
One banana, two banana, three banana, four.
The second cop sees me and draws his pistol.
I break his arm and knock in his head with the butt of the Thompson.
There is a stinging on my cheek, and the sound of a bee going by. Bullets. Oh so many of them. Pop pop pop.
I turn and say my name, but it must sound like a roar to them.
I turn the selector switch on automatic and open fire.
The Thompson says its name.
(A: A gorilla with a submachine gun.)
There is the sound of glass exploding and brick dust powdering wherever I point. Tinkle tinkle crash.
Little points of light wink, and the air fills with whines and screams. I fire again, and run into the bushes where the yard ends.
They are after me. I show them. They are afraid for what I am. I'll show them how near they are to me. I show them my teeth, up close.
Someone gets in the way and I kill him as I run.
I have the machine gun. They will not take me alive. You have sent me after the Three Stooges. You have visited my nightmare form on Abbott and Costello. You have run me across a footbridge where I snarled at Laurel and Hardy.
I am funny. Gorillas are funny.
I will show you funny.
This ape can think. It can pick locks and plant dynamite charges and use an m16. Oh, there will be deaths! Run, Kong, shamble away before they catch you.
Careful, there. Almost crouched as I ran. Have to watch it.
Not to go on all fours. That is the Law.