Great Apes (36 page)

The second episode involved a number of vases that Simon had taken from around the house. The Busners had so many ornaments that their absence wasn't noticed, until one morning when they came raining down on to the sub-adult males who
were mock-displaying on the back patio. “Waaaa-Wraaaaf!” Simon screamed, hurling blue-glass flute after tubby porcelain pot. No one was hit directly, but several chimps were cut by flying glass, including Charlotte.

This was too much for the old ape. He'd swung himself up to the guest room, which Simon had fled to, and administered a sharp, salutary beating to the madchimp. Charlotte had been fairly calm, but Busner felt beholden to offer to have Simon taken back into hospital. ‘ “Euch-euch” I have to admit it looks as if you were right, my dear, and this fellow really is too disturbed to cope with any semblance of ordinary life –'

‘But Zack, darling scragg, do you think that you're actually “huuu” getting anywhere with him?'

‘Well, I did …'

‘In that case he must stay – it's our duty.'

‘Yes, it's our duty “gru-nnn”!' Mary and Nicola – respectively theta and iota females – added. They were sharing their alpha's nest that night.

It was true that there had been further progress. Simon was prepared to go out and encounter the world, but each trip left him obviously debilitated and morose. Dr Jane Bowen came to Redington Road as frequently as her schedule allowed. Simon found her the most sympathetic of his keepers – she was gentler and less inclined to physical admonishment than the great ape.

Bowen took Simon – usually in the early morning or late evening – out for knuckle-walks on the Heath. Here she encouraged him to try a little brachiating and to get more
quadrumanous. Sometimes these outings were successful – but other times they ended in hysteria, as when Simon witnessed – without realising what it was – the end of one of the astonishingly long conga-lines of buggery, that gay chimps formed in the dense thickets of trees below Jack Straw's Castle.

Bowen always toted a camcorder on these trips and observed her unusual ward with all the techniques of objectivity that an anthropologist might have used, following wild humans in the African bush. She was becoming convinced that Simon's human delusion had a definable symptomatology – the possibility of an important academic paper beckoned.

Simon also moved into the spare room – under some duress. When Busner pressed him as to why he found the room so disturbing, Simon stabbed at the charming PreRaphaelite painting of a beautiful young female, half-submerged in aqueous morbidity, her William Morris swelling-protector garlanded with deathly lilies, and signed contemptuously, ‘This fucking travesty.'

Busner got the point and had it replaced with an abstract.

After their trip to the zoo, Busner also instructed Gambol to trawl up as much material as possible on the human, and the other anthropoids. ‘I want everything you can lay your hands on,' he showed the treacherous epsilon, ‘works of theoretical anthropology, field studies, fictional works –'

‘ “Huuu” and films as well, Boss?'

‘Naturally, films, television documentaries, still photographs as well. You can get a proper computer in here as well – link us up to that web thingy “euch-euch”; the most up-to-date human research will have been computerised. I
want to see all the material available and delineate it. I also think that this odd study project will bring Dykes and me more fusion.'

So it was that Gambol, cursing inwardly at this abuse of his intellect, physically trawled through the libraries and archives of London – and virtually trawled through electronic space. But even he was surprised by the rich morass of human references there were to be uncovered.

He brought back Robert Yerkes' classic 1927 study, titled simply
Humans
, the first field study of the wild human. He bought all of Jane Goodall's books on the wild humans of Gombe. He went to Videocity in Notting Hill Gate and bought the
Planet of the Humans
videos – all four of them – and set up a video and television in Simon's room, so that the artist and his therapist could watch them while resting.

Gambol also obtained more recondite texts. A facsimile edition of Edward Tyson's classic anatomical study – published in 1699 – of an immature human specimen brought from Angola:
Orang-utang, sive Pongid sylvestris. Or, THE ANATOMY OF A PYGMIE Compared With That of a Monkey, an Ape, and a Man.
This text had a most interesting effect on Simon Dykes. It sparked something deep inside the artist – or so Busner hypothesised. A forgotten, but originally conscious memory of the first meaningful encounters between the humans and Western civilization; or perhaps even a buried, phyletic memory, riven from the artist's waking mind in the same way that the great riving of the Rift Valley itself separated human from chimpanzee, leaving the former in the evolutionary cul-de-sac of the jungle; and the latter ranging free over the patchwork of
ecosystems that cranked up the accelerating process of allopatric speciation.

Simon's acute interest was all the more interesting because Tyson's text marked the formal entry of the anthropoid human into Western consciousness. Some commentators believed that Tyson should be put on the same pedestal as Vesalius and Darwin
⁶
. But his classification of the human – he placed it within the chain of being somewhere above the Hottentot, according the species effective chimpunity – had a slow-burning impact. It took fifty years and the
mythos
of the Noble Savage, for the anthropoid humans to become material evidence in the great eighteenth-century trials between the anatomists and the Augustinians.

Busner, observing the zest with which Simon fell upon the Tyson facsimile, began to keep pace with his patient. He had given notice to the Trust that he was working on a most interesting case. ‘Confidentially,' he had inparted Archer, the senior administrator at Heath Hospital, as they picked over each others ischial rats' tails in the canteen, ‘this patient I've “chup-chupp” acquired from Whatley at Charing Cross is something of a coup. His human delusion may have an organic basis that will reveal more about the relation between chimp consciousness and chimp physiology than a busload of ordinary neurological patients.'

It would have been stretching a point to sign that Archer had seen it all before where Busner was concerned, but this wasn't the first time the former television personality had
flagged a Significant Breakthrough, and Archer knew it wouldn't be the last. Wouldn't be while Busner retained the network of alliances that had enabled his return to favour. But then alliances are always only provisional – and what goes up can come down again.

So, Busner delegated his teaching responsibilities, and handed over his nominal caseload to a pushy work theta, an SR who was on the make. Apart from the occasional trip out to attend unavoidable meetings and untouchable grooming sessions, he remained at Redington Road during the day.

Gambol had set up the large first-floor back room Busner used as a study so that Simon would feel as comfortable as possible there. All the pictures and photographs that gibed with Simon's delusional state – the ones depicting chimpanzees in what Simon regarded as irreducibly human contexts – were removed. Even Busner's collection of appalling clay sculptures, executed by coprophiliac patients, were tidied away. Strict instructions were posted on the kitchen bulletin board that no group member could enter the study while the patient was there. Displaying and mating activities were to be confined to the kitchen and the sub-adults' ground-floor rumpus room. Lap ponies had to be severely reined in.

Gambol also cleared the desk so that Simon could have his own side: position his papers and effects – such as they were – to create a notion of his own space. At Busner's suggestion, Gambol even obtained some sketch pads, pencils and charcoals, and laid them out in case the artist decided to resume his work.

‘You can never know,' Busner had gestured to Simon,
the signs falling in among the carefully arranged art supplies, ‘when the muse might feel called upon to visit you.'

‘ “Hoo-euch-euch” yeah,' Simon snapped back ‘and what should I “euch-euch” do if she does “huuu”? Give her a really thorough grooming?'

Busner, sensing that physical admonition would only provoke more insolence, let this lie.

Thus the two of them sat, ape trying to imagine the mind of man, man labouring to accommodate the body of the ape. They would leaf through the books, study the photographs, and hunch in front of the new computer, taking it in turns to click their way around the virtual world of anthropology.

They garnered information from the directory of human research colonies at American universities. They visited the web site for the Uganda Six Day Human Safari; the Extant Animal Skulls, Human and Chimpanzee; the Human Zone – limited editions of human art, where Simon was able to see examples of humans' paintings, titled by the animals themselves.

They browsed through the on-line files of the Human and Chimpanzee Gesticulation Institute, checking out the biographies of Washoe and the other famous humans who had been taught to sign by the Fouts
⁷
. And of course they dropped into Dr Jane Goodall's Institute web site, where Simon tooth-clacked to discover the existence of a ‘Human Ambassador Learning Kit'.

There was so much human information on the web it was bewildering. You could get a job working with humans via the net – as long as you had a negative hepatitis B, surface antigen test. And naturally you could contact human rights activists. Simply plugging the sign ‘human' into the search engine produced over four thousand different links to sites.

As this was both Busner's and Simon's first experience of the web, they both began to conceive of the global electronic gesticulation system as being entirely occupied by humans; a jungle of bytes. More than ever, observing the preoccupation of chimpunity with their soon-to-be-extinct closest living relative, Busner wondered whether in his patient's condition the
Zeitgeist
had been fused with psychosis.

From time to time they would adjourn, crawling to Simon's cramped quarters to watch videos. But Simon could never stay with it for that long. It was as if each day he arose, determined to make something of his predicament, but as the morning wore on, it wore him down. Usually, after second lunch, just like some pathetic, captive human, Simon would get up and come round to Busner's side of the desk, proferring his crooked, lank-furred arm. Busner would know what the ape man wanted; would lead him back to his room, push him down on to the nest, prepare the syringe full of Valium and push needle into Simon, plunger slowly into barrel, so that the neuroleptic infused, and pushed Simon down into dream.

For if on the one hand the artist was making believably insightful – albeit obsessional – attempts to understand his psychic condition, so his physical being credibly failed to fit
in. He still walked, like a travesty of a minstrel bonobo, quiveringly erect. His gait – even to a quinquagenarian like Busner – was gnawingly slow. What had appeared, initially, to both Busner and Jane Bowen, as a physical hypertrophy or hysterical paralysis was worsening. Simon seemed to be unable to get to grips with things. His feet never grasped. His extroception remained focused resolutely forward, in a tight conical beam, rendering his perception of the external world – or so Busner hazarded – like that of a car driver deprived of rearview and wing mirrors and unable to turn round.

The patient's reporting of his own physical state remained puzzlingly incoherent. At times he accepted the testimony of his own senses; that he was possessed of fur, devoid of proboscis, and big on ears. But at other times the strange, bodily agnosia – or even diplopia – was fully in play. Simon saw himself as taller than everyone around him, smoother, and like some chimp who has fallen to earth – unutterably beautiful.

‘It has occurred to me,' Zack Busner signed one evening to Peter Wiltshire, with whom at last he had managed to arrange a proper grooming session, ‘that this “gru-nnn” acute impression Dykes has of inhabiting a human body might be some sort of phantom evolutionary memory. After all, if the chimpanzee foetus undergoes a series of morphological changes that parallel phylogenesis, then why not the psyche “huuu”?'

‘It's an interesting notion, Zack. D'you “huuu” mind – ?' Wiltshire gestured in the direction of the drinks cabinet.

‘Of course, of course …' Busner took the glass and swaggered across the room, his fulsome scrotum jiggling.
Wiltshire got down from his chair and joined him, cradling his old ally's balls gently with one hand while Busner poured them both a generous measure of Laphroaig and added water.

‘But what do you intend to do with Dykes now, Zack “huuu”? Will this particular psycho-physical approach go on indefinitely? And if so what do you expect to find out “huu”? Surely not just neurological data, because if that's what you wanted there's really no need for all of this … I don't know how to be tactful about it … but this chopping of the air –' Wiltshire signed, chopping the air to illustrate the point.

‘I know, I know. I'm not convinced that there is anything to find out necessarily, it's just that the more time that I spend with him, the more interesting and unusual perspectives on chimpunity he throws up.'

‘And what of
his
feelings, Zack? “Huuu” what about his infants – he must want to see them “huuu”? And his consort?'

Busner took a long pull on his drink, and let the brackish douche sluice around his teeth before countersigning, ‘Yes, what of them, that is a problem. If it's a true psychosis then contact with his offspring isn't going to help matters at all – might even impede any progress. But if it's an organic problem –'