Dear Miss Primatologist Lady in the Bushes Sometimes,
Shhhh. Do not be afraid, my sweet. Please just read this. Try to glimpse my heart through the awful ape-ish scrawl.
Thing is, I shouldn’t be telling you this, literally shouldn’t, as I haven’t acquired the capacity for language, let alone writing, none of us have, but to hell with language. I must speak. I may never return to this little patch of forest again. I may never find occasion to lope over to your moss-soft blind beside the river, to feign wariness and a creeping hard-won trust, to let you cradle me and pick burrs from my scalp and call me by the name you have apparently bestowed on me, ‘Ari’.
If such is the case, if I do not return, I want you to know how much I, your faithful Ari, will miss our afternoons by the river. Who cares that my name is actually Mike?
Oddly enough, I once worried you would be the one to go, that after you’d come to understand our ways, or thought you had, you’d pack up your cameras, your notebooks and laptops and camp chairs, leave for ever, maybe to study those ridiculous bonobos. (We are well aware of the bonobo craze among you humans, though none of us can guess what knowledge you hope to glean from those fucked-out party monkeys.)
But, as fate would have it, I am the one who must go, who’s getting, as they say, or, I guess, you say, shipped out. Worse, I know that the reason I am leaving will horrify you, so that even if I do return (and, as they say, or, I guess, we say, nothing’s certain under the canopy), you might not be able to look at me the same way again.
You see, Miss Primatologist Lady in the Bushes Sometimes, word has come down from the Big Branch. We’re off to kill a chimp named Mingo. We don’t need language to liquidate. We’ve got opposable thumbs, a complex system of screeches. We’re incredibly strong. So’s Mingo. He’s one tough bastard, or so our intel would have us believe, and our intel is pretty decent as far as simian networks are concerned, or so I’ve been told. I’m not sure how we’ll handle Mingo once we cross into his territory and find him. Maybe we’ll do a bait-and-pummel. Maybe we’ll just beat him with a log. We’ll definitely bite his balls off. Our raid leader, Gilbert, will make sure of that. You know Gilbert. He’s the one you call Pushkin. He loves to bite off balls.
Please don’t ask why we are going to kill Mingo. Probably even Gilbert doesn’t know. I’m sure there is a good reason. The Big Branch wouldn’t send us off without a good reason. Why do chimps kill chimps? Somehow Mingo must be threatening our way of life, not to mention our balls, and the balls of our children. But ours is not to wonder why. Ours is to bite Mingo’s balls off first, and maybe also beat him repeatedly with a log.
Such is the nature of a raid, I guess. The Big Branch makes the call and we get ready. We eat bushbaby meat, rape some females in our troop. The bushbaby meat and the raping saps us a little, but so what? We might not be back for a while. Is this shocking you? I don’t want to shock you. I just want to be honest about who I am and what I’ve done in the service of my troop, and not just my troop, but other troops as well, done, in fact, for every chimp who yearns for true forest freedom but suffers under the yoke of Mingo and his Mingo-ish ideology.
God, listen to me. I sound like one of those fat chimps in the Big Branch, the ones who drove my father to the other side of the river all those years ago. Doubtless as a scientist you’ve also witnessed your share of nature being cruel and indifferent and just plain not giving a shit about anything but itself, because that’s the nature of nature, or so Gilbert says, but I also know, from conversations I’ve overheard near your campsite, that unlike some of your colleagues, including your husband, you cannot accept the premiss that chimps are as sick and calculating as men.
This is partly what makes me love you so much, along with your smooth, lightly freckled arms and your soft auburn hair, not to mention the dainty way you pluck burrs and bugs and things from my scalp fur, and it’s why telling you the truth about why I won’t be coming by the river for a while is so painful, so, I don’t know, is fraught the word? I’m still pretty shaky with this language stuff, but I think fraught might be the word. You see, my dear sweet beautiful primatologist lady, I want you to love me as I love you, but I fear you could never love me as I truly am, that Mike will never find a place in your heart as ‘Ari’ has. And so my great ape heart is breaking.
So be it then. I will learn to ‘accept’ this fact, just as I heard you say to your husband the other night while I crouched beside your tent that you would learn to ‘accept’ his dalliances with Cindy the Grad Student. (Though if you’d seen them behind the generator the other night, doing things that even your average kink-drunk pornobo would find distasteful, you might not be so accepting.) But please know that I would swing through every tree in every forest to find the perfect banana leaf for you to wear in your beautiful hair, or use as a platter for a delectable selection of termites I would also be thrilled to provide, or, if you preferred, you could use the leaf to scrape the fragrant lady poop from your sumptuous rump. It’s all the same to me, though you should know I’ve never been a real tree-chimp. I’m better on the ground, biting, pummeling. Pummeling’s my specialty. I love to pummel. Clubbing with logs, or stones, that’s okay. But pummeling, or any situation calling for pummeling, that’s where this chimp comes alive. Anyway, that’s not my point. My point is I love you and would do anything for you, including pummel your prick of a spouse into forest mulch, though I know you are too gentle a soul to wish that on him. I love you, Miss Primatologist Lady in the Bushes Sometimes, and I’m scared. I’m scared I will never see you again. I’m scared that Mingo will prove too tough. We lost my best friend Lychee to poachers on the last raid, and always we live in fear of the bullet, or fist, or tooth, with our name on it (even though we technically would not be able to read our name on it, of course).
I’m scared I’m losing faith, too. I never used to question my orders from Gilbert and the Big Branch, but I’m beginning to see the bigger picture. Hell, maybe I don’t have to pummel. Maybe those little orgy fiends the bonobos have the right idea. Maybe it’s better to fuck your fights out. What I know for sure is that it’s frightening to suddenly have thoughts that are my thoughts and not Gilbert’s or the Big Branch’s. All those afternoons we groomed and played you must have been growing a new chimp deep inside of me.
Remember that time you cradled me and picked burrs from my scalp and stroked my head and told me all about the human world, the one you fled because everything was too fake and murderous and shiny, the one where you couldn’t find any kinds of creatures you could stand, and said, ‘My little Ari,’ you said, ‘what kind of creature are you?’ If I could have answered you then, if I’d known I could, I would have told you I was the kind of creature who was never happier than during that moment with you, even as I felt this vague ripple of sadness under my fur, the sense that everything was already too late, that nature always got the head start, that nurture never had a shot. Or remember that time you picked more burrs and maybe some twigs out of my scalp, and said, ‘Oh, my Ari, deep in your heart you are a kind, loving chimp, aren’t you?’ Well, I didn’t quite have the language yet, but if I had, I would have said, ‘Yes! Or, no, not yet! But I want to be! I really do!’
Still, maybe wanting is not enough. Maybe I’ll never be more than what the Big Branch made me: a machine for turning living, breathing brothers into heaps of hair and bone. I don’t want your pity, save your pity for the hair heaps, but I guess I am mostly afraid that since now you know the truth, ‘Mike’ has forever destroyed your feelings for ‘Ari’. Even as I nibble on some post-rape bushbaby meat, I feel a teardrop nestling in my cheek fuzz. It is a tear for you, my darling, but maybe more a tear for me. I cannot deny my chimphood. You could never love a chimp that would. But still I pray we meet again, that the braver, better ape inside me gets another chance to grow.
Yours truly,
Mike ‘Ari’
[The following letter, folded into a small square, was found affixed to the first with an unidentified animal hide glue, possibly primate.]
Dear Bush Bitch,
Goddamn you, data-collecting whore of Babylon. How dare you come here and head-hump one of my best pummellers! That’s right, this ain’t your lover ape, this is Gilbert. Or should I say Pushkin? (Pushkin! I did a tour at the Language Research Center in Georgia, America so don’t try to hoity-toit me. Have you even read Eugene Onegin?)
Good thing I found this note before you did, because I really think it’s time I made my two-cent deposit. By the time you read this Mike and I and the rest of the ol’ death squad will have already set out to do what we were put in this freaking forest to do, namely de-Mingoise our buffer zones. I respect my chimps so I’ll let the kid’s words stand, but I do believe a little addendum is in order. You see, we may all seem alike to you, but the fact remains that Mingo represents a grave threat to our freedom (and don’t give me any of that seditious conspiracy jive about the Big Branch’s plans for mussanga fruit access.) Furthermore, I hate to shatter your theories, but sometimes we kill just for the thrill of it, or to maintain our murder chops. As we like to put it: One chimp rusted, the whole troop dusted.
Well, do with that intel what you will. I trust you’ll bury it. If chimps are as bad as people, then maybe people aren’t bad or good. That’ll throw your precious moral system out of whack. But what I really want to talk about is Mike. Look, he’s just a dumbass youngster. It’s me you want. A chimp with experience, a rough-knuckled hard-swinging ape’s ape that knows how to stick his dick in the anthill of life. Listen, honey, I know I scare you. But I know I excite you, too. You can’t hide that. And you can’t hide from me. I’ll be home soon, but I have a weird feeling in my gut that your love monkey Ari might not make it back. I worry that ‘fraught’ will indeed be the word for his furry ass. The fog of war, etc. Don’t get me wrong, we’ll all be sad. And after I take care of your two-timing husband, you and I will be sad together, beside the river. We’ll get our sad on like you can’t believe.
’Til then,
Push