At Esquire, Ian Frisch writes of the love he and his mom share for poker, and of how his mother turned to the game not only as a way to deal with the hand life dealt her, but also to attempt to support him and his sister after the sudden death of their father.
My mother had first started playing poker for the fun and for the intellectual challenge. Returning to competition twenty years later, she rediscovered old pleasures. She was playing not only to make money but also as an emotional escape. At the table, she wasn’t a single mother without a steady job mourning her husband’s death. It was the only place she felt comfortable playing the villain, cutthroat and cruel, lying to strangers’ faces and getting paid for it. “I love having a nemesis at the table,” she once told me. “It gives me purpose.” To this day, at every table, she picks a player and slowly, steadily, hand by hand, tries to destroy them.
Playing poker with my mother has made me realize that life isn’t anything more than a series of well-timed bets, and that sometimes things don’t work out and there’s nothing you can do about it. A run of bad cards—during a poker game or in life—cannot be escaped, only endured.
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A baseball hat is more than just protection for your noggin and shade for your eyes. That structured object of cotton, wool, and/or polyester can speak volumes. Michael Clair’s fascinating dive into the simple headwear explores how teams came to adopt it in the first place, and — most interestingly — how a utilitarian piece of uniform crossed over into the fashion realm. (The visuals are great, too. From older styles to portraits of rappers donning their favorite caps, there’s a nice mix of vintage and modern.) I won’t look at my own collection quite the same.
“We can go to a seminal moment in the late ’80s when NWA emerges, particularly when Eazy E emerges in the White Sox hat,” Dr. Jabari Evans, an Assistant Professor of Race and Media at the University of South Carolina, said. “It’s one of those things that went from being something that was associated very strongly with where you’re from, and very strongly with being a fan of the sport, to transcending that and saying a statement about cool and saying a statement about aesthetics and saying a statement about athleisure and lifestyle.”
No longer was the cap merely a way to talk about your favorite ballclub, or even about the city you were from. It had now become a piece of fashion — one that was often synonymous with the people wearing them.
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Ken Eto was a numbers kingpin for Chicago’s biggest organized-crime syndicate — until that syndicate sent two hitmen after him in an empty parking lot. From an Idaho detainment camp to the streets of the Windy City, Dan O’Sullivan serves up an absolute barnburner of a story about the man known as Tokyo Joe.
“The sole goal of organized crime is to enrich the members. That’s all they care about,” says John J. Binder, author of Al Capone’s Beer Wars. And, while not Italian, Ken Eto was one of its biggest moneymakers. Eto’s lofty position in the Chicago underworld was unusual for an outsider, but the syndicate had always been more farsighted than other crime families in promoting gangsters of other ethnicities.
It was less a mark of tolerance than proof of its ambition. Ever since Capone first employed his squad of “American Boys” — a gang of Midwestern killers who looked more like police officers than Mafia hit men — non-Italians had occupied important positions in the Outfit. But all these men had been white. Ken Eto was not. And he wasn’t some despised underling; he was one of the bosses.
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Talk to any music journalist and you’ll hear a story of a song that entranced them on first listen, only to disappear into the ether forever. For The Believer — welcome back! — Ross Scarano pulls together a veritable Moth session of such stories, from a lost Johnny Cash number to a Kelis track that lives only on YouTube. A perfect reminder that for any cultural text we consume, an iceberg of what-could’ve-been lurks below.
In 2013, her favorite artist at the time, the Atlanta rapper and heart-on-his-sleeve balladeer Future, played an in-progress version of his sophomore album Honest for the magazine’s staff. One track, a gem of brooding horniness called “Good Morning,” imprinted on her in such a way that when a version of the song, with a similar melody and different lyrics, appeared months later as the Beyoncé single “Drunk in Love,” she felt as heartsick as she did proud. Both songs were produced by Detail and seemingly written around the same time, with the bigger star unsurprisingly winning rights to its release. (Future does not have a writing credit on Beyoncé’s song.) “‘Drunk in Love’ is an incredible song,” she says, “but it felt tragic that Future never released his version, which I thought proved his talent beautifully and which I had been waiting to hear again for months.” “Good Morning” was never commercially released, but there are rips and performances of it online. A decade later, Future remains a chart topper, but the real heads will always wonder about the path not taken.
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Kickstart your weekend by getting the week’s best reads, hand-picked and introduced by Longreads editors, delivered to your inbox every Friday morning.
A year in the life of a grieving mother. An afternoon of outcry. A peek into the life of a celebrity ghostwriter. A witness to a monarch migration. And the friendship behind sushi’s arrival in the U.S. Our favorite reads of the week (and a bit of pickled ginger for after), chosen from all of our editors’ picks.
Skip Hollandsworth | Texas Monthly | May 8, 2023 | 7,580 words
Years from now, when I think about this story — which will happen, because it’s that good — I will hear, no, feel the pounding of feet. Skip Hollandsworth’s profile of Kimberly Mata-Rubio opens with the subject jogging through Uvalde, Texas, pausing at a mural of her daughter, Lexi. The scene echoes the moment when, immediately after learning that there had been a mass shooting at Robb Elementary School, Mata-Rubio began to run, barefoot over asphalt and through traffic, toward the building where her daughter was in the fourth grade, only to learn that Lexi was dead. “Kim could feel her feet throbbing,” Hollandsworth writes. “They were so bloodied and bruised she could barely walk.” A year after the massacre, the jog past Lexi’s mural is one of several ritual motions Mata-Rubio has adopted. She also goes to her daughter’s grave once, sometimes twice a day, never leaving Lexi alone for more than 24 hours, and regularly drives to the state Capitol to lobby for gun control. Mural, grave, Austin: Mata-Rubio goes and returns, again and again, like the tide. Other Uvalde parents do the same. Their patterns, like those of so many people who have lost loved ones in mass shootings, remind me of a Robert Frost poem: “The heart can think of no devotion / Greater than being shore to ocean / Holding the curve of one position / Counting an endless repetition.” How many more parents, children, spouses, friends will join this grieving army in their aching, unspeakable form of love? Will you be one of them? Will I? —SD
When Jordan Neely was killed on a New York City subway car last week, a special kind of ugliness broke the surface of our society. I don’t mean afterward, when columnists and commentators used Daniel Penny’s lethal chokehold as some kind of ideological litmus test. I mean the killing itself. At the time, it was hard for me to articulate what exactly that ugliness was, but Arielle Isack clearly had no such difficulty: Her searing piece for n+1, which chronicles a subway platform vigil-turned-demonstration, makes no secret of her anger and hurt, and is all the better for it. Isack manages to render events and emotions with equal clarity, even as her sentences careen headlong through the afternoon, propelled by their own power. “A man in a faded Saints cap and glasses that magnified his eyes into giant watery lakes wailed 450,000 EMPTY APARTMENTS IN NEW YORK CITY! a figure that arced over the commotion and landed in the very center of our rage,” she writes of one moment. “I heard that number again and again throughout the afternoon; it focused everything into a dizzying lucidity we were thankful for, and furious about.” This isn’t argument, it’s testimony. It’s catharsis even in the absence of redemption or justice. And above all, it’s a call to remember that agitation — the very thing that supposedly made Jordan Neely a threat — is sometimes the only possible human reaction. —PR
J.R. Moehringer | The New Yorker | May 8, 2023 | 6,850 words
In mid-January, you may have noticed a little memoir called Spare hit the shelves. (If you were perusing certain Spanish bookshops, you might have noticed it even earlier.) The accompanying giant roar of publicity meant that even if you didn’t read the book, you couldn’t escape Prince Harry’s tales of fisticuffs with his brother, behind-the-pub escapades, and even his frostbitten penis. While the stories may have been his, though, the words were distinctly collaborative — and in this fascinating essay, ghostwriter J.R. Moehringer illuminates what it’s like to write for somebody else. Yes, he talks about Harry stuff, but he also addresses his own writing career and struggles with the anonymity of ghostwriting (at one point screaming “Say my name!” at a TV in a B&B). I enjoyed Moehringer’s honesty, self-awareness, and thoughtful analysis of the particular psychology this sort of writing requires — as well as the tidbits of gossip about people who are hell to work with. Moehringer got lucky with Harry; they had the right chemistry, and the success of Spare has brought the art of ghostwriting out of the shadows. (If you want to read about Harry’s blink-and-you-miss-it appearance at King Charles III’s coronation last weekend, along with some joyful descriptions of hats, I recommend Helen Lewis’ wonderfully amusing “King Charles’ Very Hobbity Coronation” from The Atlantic.) —CW
Romina Cenisio | Atmos | May 8, 2023 | 3,526 words
I once visited the butterfly garden at our local zoo. Witnessing so many of these colorful, delicate beings in person was a magical experience. The peace and tranquility in that space was palpable, something I wanted to bottle and release as needed. Romina Cenisio’s Atmos piece on the monarch butterfly migration recalls the singular joy that butterflies bring, along with critically important reminders of our role as humans to ensure the well-being of butterflies for generations to come. “As I lie on the ground with my eyes closed, a sound reminiscent of light rain surrounds me, subdues me,” she writes. “Yet unlike the steady drum of rain, the sound seems to move around from left to right, up and down, in both unison and disorder. At times a ticklish, ASMR sensation overcomes me as the sound gets closer, but no raindrops land on me. Opening my eyes moves me out of this gentle trance, reminding me that there is no rain; rather, there are millions of monarch butterflies shimmering overhead.” —KS
Daniel Miller | Los Angeles Times | May 3, 2023 | 3,855 words
In 1965, Noritoshi Kanai and Harry Wolff Jr. were on a trip to Japan, looking for an interesting food product to import to the U.S. Instead, one of their dinners in Tokyo led them to another idea: sushi. Daniel Miller recounts how the two men brought the Japanese cuisine to Los Angeles, at a time when the city felt primed for something new. Which restauranteurs and chefs were the first to add sushi to their menus? When were the sushi bar and the California roll invented? Accompanied by lovely illustrations by Yuko Shimuzu, this is a fun piece of regional foodie history — one that ultimately explores whether food can truly bring different people and cultures together. —CLR
Audience Award
It’s time for the piece our readers loved most this week — and the oversized trophy goes to:
Kate Wagner | The Baffler | May 9, 2023 | 3,375 words
In this smart critical essay, Kate Wagner, the writer behind the popular blog McMansion Hell, examines the McMansion: the uniquely American, 3,000-square-foot-plus, made-to-order home that’s a “durable emblem of our American way of life.”
Wagner explores the aesthetic of the latest generation of McMansions (from manufactured modern farmhouse to Disneyfied Craftsman), the evolution of its floor plan, its enduring popularity, and its alternatives in a time of environmental crisis. —CLR
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In something straight out of “The Great British Bake Off,” King Charles III declared an official quiche for his coronation. Helen Lewis ruminates on this and other glorious frivolities in this lovely essay, where she demonstrates a particular aptitude for hat descriptions. A piece that will get you quietly chortling, in a polite British way.
Petronella Wyatt offered my single favorite paragraph on the whole hoopla: “It is particularly disturbing that the Earl of Derby has not been asked to provide falcons, as his family have done since the 16th Century. These little things deprive people of their purpose in life.”
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It’s true that the national media, spurred in large part by culture-war opportunism, has unfairly painted San Francisco as a city in a death spiral. However, it’s also true that in certain quarters, gutted by the pandemic and vaporizing tech money and apathy, the most palpable vital sign is human misery. What that means for the city at large remains an unanswered question — but Elizabeth Weil’s Curbed piece, one of the few national stories written by an actual SF resident, tries to engage with it as well as one person can.
A note to my fellow San Franciscians: I’m sorry. I know. There’s always some story in the east-coast press about how our city is dying. San Franciscians hate—HATE—these pieces. You’re a stooge and a traitor for writing one. When I set out reporting, I wanted to write a debunking-the-doom piece myself. Yet to live in San Francisco right now, to watch its streets, is to realize that no one will catch you if you fall. In the first three months of 2023, 200 San Franciscans OD’ed, up 41 percent from last year.“It’s like a wasteland,” the guard said when I asked how San Francisco looked to him. “It’s like the only way to describe it. It’s like a video game — like made-up shit. Have you ever played Fallout?”
I shook my head.
“There’s this thing in the game called feral ghouls, and they’re like rotted. They’re like zombies.” There’s only so much pain a person can take before you disintegrate, grow paranoid, or turn numb. “I go home and play with my wife, and we’re like, ‘Ah, hahahaha, this is SF.’”
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In 1965, Noritoshi Kanai and Harry Wolff Jr. were on a trip to Japan, looking for an interesting food product to import to the U.S. Instead, one of their dinners in Tokyo led them to another idea: sushi. Daniel Miller recounts how the two friends and business partners brought the Japanese cuisine to Los Angeles, at a time when the city felt primed for something new. How did sushi spread across the region? Which restaurants jumped on board right from the start? When were the exact moments that the sushi bar and the California roll were invented? This is an entertaining piece of regional foodie history, and explores whether food can truly bring different people — and cultures — together.
Sushi was, of course, known to Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans in L.A. well before the efforts of Wolff and Kanai, but it was typically simple and homespun. Among the items frequently served in Japanese American homes, Matsumoto said, were inari sushi, a fried tofu pocket stuffed with rice; and futomaki sushi, a thick roll usually filled with vegetables and sometimes cooked seafood.
Their timing was impeccable. In the 1950s and ’60s, Rath said, three innovations made it much easier to import products from Japan: refrigerated shipping containers, regular and direct transpacific flights, and the globalization of Japan’s fishing fleet.
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Colin Dickey gives a detailed account of the legend of the Bell witch of Tennessee, before questioning why this story has lingered throughout the centuries, finding the answer in the anxieties that define American culture. A scary tale and a cultural analysis in one, what more could you want?
This complexity could be why we can’t look away from the story of the Bell Witch amid all the other ghost stories that drift in and out of the American consciousness. Storytellers look for explanation, resolution, clarity. The only clarity in the story of the Bell Witch and its endurance over more than a century is the way it taps into white, male American anxieties, anxieties that are of culture’s own making.
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British colonialism spread the idea that dogs are only legitimate if they belong to a breed, while others are inferior, dirty creatures who should be culled. India has the world’s largest population of street dogs, which were historically labeled as “pariahs” and “strays” by the British and ultimately viewed as a symbol of the decline of India.
But as Krithika Srinivasan explains in this piece, dogs existed before breeds, before fancy dog shows, and before the upper class groomed them as they wished. Shouldn’t India’s street dogs be free to live in public places and coexist with its human inhabitants? Despite the need to find their own food, water, and shelter, and their exposure to mostly human-made harms like traffic and cruelty, these free-living dogs actually live autonomous and peaceful lives. Srinivasan challenges us to reconsider the long-held idea that dogs are meant to be human companions, and to rethink how humans can coexist with other beings on the planet.
Too often in the West, dogs are seen through the prism of pedigree, and connected to their owner via collars and leashes. All too often, the realities of how dogs and humans live together in the Global South are overlooked. As a country with a significant street-dog population, India is a good place from which to explore how humans and canines share street life in cooperative ways that move beyond images of free-living dogs as dangerous.
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Sadly, as of July 2022, monarch butterflies have become another member of the endangered species list. At Atmos Magazine Romina Cenisio visits the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve in Mexico to learn about the hazards and odds these amazing creatures face for survival and what some humans are doing to help them thrive.
Though the butterflies’ numbers fluctuate yearly, they’ve been trending downward. In July 2022, monarch butterflies officially joined the endangered species list.
From loss of habitat to the instability and unpredictability of climate change, the butterflies’ vast migration that traverses Canada, the U.S., and Mexico faces a patchwork of different threats. In the U.S., habitat loss and pesticides threaten milkweed, a native perennial flowering plant that’s a crucial piece of the migratory species’s survival. It’s the one plant on which monarchs lay their eggs and the one food source for the monarch caterpillars during the spring migration. In Mexico, deforestation due to illegal logging threatens the butterflies’ winter home. With such mounting challenges, the very survival of the monarch butterflies is at stake.
Their awe-inspiring migration is a cycle that repeats each year, spanning three countries. This journey is part of a deeply interconnected symbiosis with other species that ultimately supports us too. From grasslands to roadsides to forests, monarchs are essential pollinators that enrich diversity in flowering plants across North America.
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Welcome to 1980s Bulgaria, a country on the brink of economic collapse and a hotbed of computer viruses. In an excerpt from his new book, Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks, Scott J. Shapiro details the work of a notorious virus creator known only as the Dark Avenger, who wreaked havoc on computer systems because, well, he could:
Others had been pumping out viruses for months, but Dark Avenger built his to be lethal. His first creation would be known as Eddie. When a user ran a program infected with Eddie, the virus would not start by attacking other files. It would lurk in computer memory and hand back control to the original program. However, when a user loaded another program, skulking Eddie would spring into action and infect that program. These infected programs would be Eddie’s new carriers.
Eddie also packed a payload that slowly and silently destroyed every file it touched. When the infected program was run the 16th time, the virus overwrote a random section of the disk in the computer with its calling card: “Eddie lives … somewhere in time.” After enough of these indiscriminate changes, programs on the disk stopped loading.
Destructive viruses were not new. Vienna, for example, destroyed every eighth file. But Eddie was far more malicious. Because Eddie infections took a while to produce symptoms, users spread the virus and backed up contaminated files. When users discovered that their disk had turned into digital sawdust, they also learned that their backups were badly damaged. Dark Avenger had invented what are now called “data diddling” viruses — viruses that alter data in files.
Dark Avenger was proud of his cruel creation and claimed credit in the code. First, he inserted an ironic copyright notice: “This program was written in the city of Sofia (C) 1988–89 Dark Avenger.” The “Eddie lives” string that wreaked such destruction was a tribute to his love of heavy metal music. “Eddie” refers to the skeletal mascot of the band Iron Maiden; Somewhere in Timeis the name of Iron Maiden’s sixth album, in which Eddie appears on the cover as a muscular cyborg in a Blade Runner setting, next to graffiti that reads “Eddie lives.”
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Kimberly Mata-Rubio didn’t consider herself a political person. She voted, but she wasn’t an activist; she had opinions, but she was soft-spoken. Then her daughter Lexi was murdered at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, on May 24, 2022, along with 18 other students and two teachers. In the year that followed, Kim got political. She got loud. With her husband, Felix, at her side, Kim joined the ever-growing ranks of parents whose children have been killed by guns in schools, malls, parks, and homes — parents who, touched by unspeakable tragedy, are begging for U.S. politicians to enact serious gun control:
Kim and Felix each wore a button with Lexi’s image on it. [Ted] Cruz sat casually, with one of his trademark cowboy boots crossed over his knee. A staffer handed him a Diet Dr Pepper.
Felix pulled out his cellphone and showed Cruz a photo of Lexi in her casket. “That’s our daughter who was murdered at Robb Elementary.” Kim then said she and Felix hoped they could count on the senator’s support for an assault weapons ban. She was about to say more, but Cruz jumped in and told Kim and Felix about his own plan to stop school shootings: he wanted to put more law enforcement officers and more mental health services on school campuses.
A staffer gently interrupted the senator to say he had another appointment. The meeting had lasted less than five minutes, and Kim was not happy. As Cruz stood up to leave, Kim also rose, looked him in the eye, and snapped “You have no idea what you’re talking about, and I’m going to do everything I can to make sure you are not reelected.” Before Cruz had a chance to say anything else, Kim walked out of the office, followed by Felix. A spokesman for the senator later said the senator “saw firsthand” the Rubios’ “pain and grief.” But Cruz wasn’t changing his position on guns. In fact, the spokesman said, right after his meeting with the Rubios, Cruz went to the Senate floor “to fight for his school safety legislation.”
Kim was so dismayed by the meeting with Cruz that she began wearing a T-shirt—yellow for Lexi—with the phrase “You f@#ked with the wrong mom” on the back. She had a tattoo artist ink one of Lexi’s drawings of her and Lexi on her upper left arm, and she rolled up her sleeves so that anyone could see it. “The inaction of our political leaders is the reason my daughter is no longer here,” she told me. “And I am never going to let them forget that.”
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In this smart critical essay, Kate Wagner, the writer behind the popular blog McMansion Hell, examines the McMansion: the uniquely American, 3,000-square-foot-plus, made-to-order home that’s a “durable emblem of our American way of life.”
Wagner explores the aesthetic of the latest generation of McMansions (from manufactured modern farmhouse to Disneyfied Craftsman), the evolution of its floor plan, its enduring popularity, and its alternatives in a time of environmental crisis.
We need, quite literally, a revolution. And every revolution, lest we forget, is an architectural revolution. The Industrial Revolution brought about the dawn of modernism; the Russian Revolution initially saw the demise of bourgeois opulence in favor of Constructivism. The French revolutionaries looked upon the palace of Versailles with disgust, for it represented everything loathsome about monarchist French society: inequality, waste, and excessive filigree. So, too, under increasingly dire material conditions spurred by climate change and intersecting political catastrophes, will we look upon the McMansion. Maybe sooner than we think.
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“The problem with the right to land is that it’s all been taken.” This thought-provoking essay discusses Georgism, land-value tax, and anti-landlordism, and asks whether our descendants will look back on our time and view land ownership as immoral. The piece is part of Wired‘s Next Normal series, which explores the “future of morality and how our ethical beliefs may change in the years to come.”
Everyone today is born with a kind of existential debt. From the moment you emerge, you’re in a space that belongs to someone else, and from then on, money is spent each day to give you access to the space you require to exist. Land ownership, and the accompanying system of sales and rentals, merely allows some people to make money by gatekeeping a resource that no more belongs to one of us than any of us. Economists call this “rent seeking,” and most of us call it “immoral.”
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In 2019, hackers used SolarWinds software as a vector into thousands of the company’s customers to steal data from U.S. federal government agencies and tech giants like Intel, Cisco, and Microsoft. For WIRED Kim Zetter recounts what little is known about the hackers, their intents, and the repercussions, four years later.
Adair and his colleagues dubbed the second gang of thieves “Dark Halo” and booted them from the network. But soon they were back. As it turned out, the hackers had planted a backdoor on the network three years earlier—malicious code that opened a secret portal, allowing them to enter or communicate with infected machines. Now, for the first time, they were using it. “We shut down one door, and they quickly went to the other,” Adair says.
The perpetrators had indeed hacked SolarWinds’ software. Using techniques that investigators had never seen before, the hackers gained access to thousands of the company’s customers. Among the infected were at least eight other federal agencies, including the US Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, and the Treasury Department, as well as top tech and security firms, including Intel, Cisco, and Palo Alto Networks—though none of them knew it yet. Even Microsoft and Mandiant were on the victims list.
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Andreessen Horowitz is more than just a Silicon Valley investment firm — it’s a media hype machine. Its tech-can-do-no-wrong mentality bolstered some of the most charismatic CEOs of our era, including now-disgraced founders like Elizabeth Holmes (Theranos) and Adam Neumann (WeWork). As Elizabeth Lopatto points out in The Verge, this strategy is ill-suited to a post-pandemic landscape of tech layoffs and higher interest rates, yet the firm presses on, making recent investments in Neumann’s new venture, as well as Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover. Can Andreessen continue using the same tired script or will they be able to pivot to the times? As is always true in Silicon Valley, it’s the returns that will have the final say.
In many ways, a16z created the playbook for the boom times in tech. During the era of fawning tech journalism and low interest rates, valuations of private companies exploded. Founders were “geniuses” and “rockstars”; it was easy to raise and easy to spend. There were herds of “unicorns,” companies that are valued at more than $1 billion. (This is to say nothing of “decacorns.”) Startups stopped running lean and instead got fat, attempting to outspend their competition.
This strategy is now at least two vibe shifts behind.
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Dan Musgrave | Longreads | May 4, 2023 | 21 minutes (6,022 words)
I had been volunteering at the ape house for four months before I was invited to meet Nathan. It was December and I’d just spent my first Christmas with the apes. Everyone but the director and I had left for the day. The night sky spilled over the glass-ceilinged, central atrium we called the greenhouse. Despite the snow outside, the greenhouse air was warm and ample. Moving toward the padlocked cage door, I felt light, as if I was about to float up into that dotted black expanse above me, rather than enter a room I’d cleaned feces and orange peels out of hours earlier.
I juggled my keys and the offering I’d brought with me — a tub of yogurt, a couple of bananas, Gatorade, and some blankets. With the two padlocks removed, I entered, sat, and arranged the gifts in an arc around me. Even though I was planted firmly on the glazed concrete floor, I swayed.
In the adjacent room, watching everything I did through the glass portion of a mechanical sliding door, was Nathan. Five years old to my 21. He was stout, wide-shouldered, with thick muscled arms, but almost twiggy legs. Nathan was, simply put, a cool little dude. We studied one another as we waited for my supervisor to turn the key and remove the barrier between us. His eyes were as big and soft as three-quarter moons, always holding a question. Though, more often than not, that question was really a dare.
Sitting in the greenhouse, everything in the world was in alignment. It was right that Nathan would be the first ape I ever truly met. While the adult males still made crashing displays of warning at me, and the adult females mostly ignored me or found me to be a mildly useful, but mostly superfluous, component of the building, Nathan had always welcomed me warmly. I was a new playmate, willing to run back and forth along his enclosure in games of chase, over-eager to please.
A racking ka-chunk filled the greenhouse as the mechanical door separating us was activated. It rocked and then jerked to the side in its steel track. The doors had been created for use in prisons, originally, and they were always jamming on us. The third or fourth time we called a repairman out, he’d said we needed to take it easier on them — they hadn’t been designed to open so often.
My breath stilled. I saw Nathan behind the door, then I saw the night sky. Nothing in between. I was on my back like some upturned turtle, my legs still crossed but now pointed at the stars. He was a heat-seeking missile. The impressions of both his feet were on my chest; the last breath I’d taken in a Homo-centric world evicted from my lungs. When I levered my body upright, I saw him waiting, peering at me from a foot or so away, head cocked. The air that rushed back into me was sweeter, lighter, than what had been there before.
“Hi,” I said, grinning.
I guess I passed the test. He plopped himself in the bowl of my still-crossed legs, plucked the lid from the yogurt, and began to pour the thickness down his throat. He peeped contentedly and put his spare hand around the back of my neck. Where everything had been so fast that I couldn’t take it in seconds before, now time was suspended. He smelled so clean, like construction paper and newly fallen leaves. We sat there, me running my fingers through the hair of his back, he slurping yogurt. Eventually, he pulled the blankets into a corner to construct his night nest. The director told me that meant it was bedtime. I told Nathan goodnight and we parted for the evening.
I’d initially applied to the ape house because I believed in their stated scientific mission: to communicate across the species boundary and illuminate the nonhuman and human mind. I had been one of those children at the zoo that try to make the right sound to get the animals to speak back. Now I was that kind of adult.
Not long after meeting and warming to the eight bonobos who were essentially my bosses, the science became much more personal. I was having trouble at college. My small rural campus felt like my cage. Though the school marketed itself as a home for outcasts looking for their place, I never felt entirely welcome there. I was shy and anxious to the level of needing therapy and medication (not receiving either), but I looked like a jock. When I did venture beyond my dorm room on weekends, I usually drank until I could approach and socialize with others (read: too much).
In the ape house, amongst the bonobos, I found the refuge my alma mater had promised to be. There, nothing rested on my ability to wrench words from my throat in front of my peers. In fact, my trend toward quiet was an asset while my athleticism was less intimidating than it was an invitation to play. For the first month, I tentatively hoped that the apes would have me. But after that month, had the humans offered me a room in one of the unused enclosures, I would have abandoned my degree and moved in with relief.
I saw Nathan behind the door, then I saw the night sky. Nothing in between. I was on my back like some upturned turtle, my legs still crossed but now pointed at the stars.
In my first weeks there, I asked my supervisor for tips on how to interact with them. “Just treat them like you treat me,” she said. “Speak to them, not about them. Assume they’re listening and can understand. They are and they can. These are people in nonhuman bodies and they know it.” I could handle that. I was familiar with the fallacy that bodies accurately matched the selves they contained.
Likewise, it was comforting to be a part of a project that sought the person in the ape, to whatever degree it was present, rather than force the transformation. My research into the field showed that other ape language experiments had not been so accepting or accommodating. In the majority, the test subjects were taken from their mothers as infants and placed in human homes or labs. This was considered scientific. Rigorous. Rearing was the independent variable. To allow these subjects to remain with their birth families would be a confound.
While that December evening was my first time crossing the divide between Pan and Homo, Nathan had already been doing it for years. He was the third generation and fourth individual entrant into this ape language experiment. His upbringing was unusually casual for an experimental subject, and he spent nearly equal time with both his ape and human family. On a cultural spectrum from wild-caught bonobo (his grandmother and father), to human-reared language apes (his mother and brother), to human experimenter, Nathan sat exactly at the midpoint. He was the fulcrum upon which worlds balanced. The hope for him was that, under the direct tutelage of his mother, and with frequent but unstructured interactions with humans, he would show just how self-sustaining ape symbol use could be across generations. The avoidance of structure was the scientific methodology.
As poetic as I found it that Nathan was my point of first contact, he was simply the logical choice. He was small enough to handle — even if he was already stronger than me — and young enough that it was unlikely he’d attack should I misstep. Culturally, he was also optimally situated to understand my inexperience. He was an interpreter, an emissary. He was my bridge into the ape world.
I got no more training for being with Nathan than that first night. For every meeting thereafter, the only suggestion the director gave me was that I should always use the symbols — easily quantified, discrete images. One per word. There were nouns, verbs, and even references to abstract concepts like time and feelings. The director thought maybe Nathan would help me learn them faster.
It seemed, at the time, that the only complication in Nathan’s life was his big brother, Star, who was so perfect it was offensive. Star was irritatingly handsome, with a smile that smoothed over any and every slight. He spit on me daily but blew kisses to all the female staff. Like many beautiful people, he was given credit for being smarter than he actually was and better behaved than he ever cared to be. Star’s shadow was long and hard to escape. So, if Star showed an interest or proclivity for anything, Nathan either dismissed the activity outright or tried to do it harder/faster/better/stronger than anyone had ever done it before. The symbols were one of these things.
Nathan used the symbols like my father uses text messages, infrequently, out of the blue, and with suspicious competency. I often caught Nathan in the corner of a room, his back to the door, symbol board in his lap. He’d be touching it, talking to himself. Thinking out loud, as it were. Other times, he’d saddle up before one of the touch-screen computer stations containing digital versions of the symbol board and rattle off a string of 20 or 30 symbols so fast the computer got bogged down in its processing and lagged in displaying them. I suspected he always meant exactly what he said, though I had no way of scientifically confirming this.
We ended up with a routine. I pretended that we were part of the experiment, doing important research, and he pretended not to understand what I was saying. A normal conversation between us using the symbols would look something like this:
Me: NATHAN YOU WANT FOOD, QUESTION?
Nathan somersaults into my lap, right over the symbol board.
Me (after extracting the board from under him): WANT FOOD, QUESTION?
Nathan pushes the board away. Hops up and runs away after biting me on my forearm. Playfully, but not without pain.
Me: I GET APPLES, QUESTION? GET CELERY, QUESTION? GET MILK, QUESTION?
Nathan approaches, holds my gaze from under his robust brow. I put the symbol board on the floor between us. He gestures, finger crooked, knuckle between his teeth. [Bite.]
Me: “Nathan, can you use the keyboard please?”
Nathan, hand snapping out: CHASE.
He springs away at full speed, a single fart helping propel him away down the hallway.
Me, following: “Okay, but no fair using rocket boosters.”
He smelled so clean, like construction paper and newly fallen leaves. We sat there, me running my fingers through the hair of his back, he slurping yogurt.
I wasn’t as diligent with the keyboard as I could have been, in part because I never had difficulty simply talking to him. In terms of receptive, rather than productive, competence, Nathan could handle it all. The rub was that he only listened when he felt like it. I often talked to him as I would any other person, except I was more honest and open. I started, genuinely, to consider Nathan one of my best friends.
He helped me work with the other apes, too. I would lay out maneuvers for shifting the apes between rooms and he would facilitate. He’d lead his family, including his grandmother, Worry, and his half-brother, Momo, through the door I’d indicated, then slip back through at the last moment, separating them in the new room while he and I got space to interact.
Me: “Okay, here’s the plan. Nathan, I want Worry and Momo to go to the greenhouse, but I want you to stay here so we can see each other and tickle and chase. Can you help me get them to move and you can stay here?”
Nathan peeps excitedly, and Worry and Momo echo him.
Me: “They will have really good blueberries and lettuce and Gatorade in the greenhouse. We can have some surprises over here. Ready to help me move them? Okay, here we go.”
Nathan sits by the door to the greenhouse, enthusiastic. He peeps to get the others interested. I operate the door and the others follow him into the transfer space between rooms. I start to close the door. At the last moment, Nathan slides through and sits alone in the room.
Me: “Nathan you did it. Great work, man.”
Nathan runs to the mesh for a tummy tickle.
This went both ways, as the other apes used his skills, too. It was hell on data collection. I can’t even count the number of times he ruined an experimental session because the non-language bonobos would drag him to the computer by the hand and wait while he performed their sets. He’d tap at the screen while they sat at the reward dispenser eating fruit chunk after fruit chunk produced for his correct answers.
One afternoon, after we had become full partners in crime, Nathan and I lounged in a pocket of space between the roof of the walk-in fridge and the kitchen ceiling. Sunlight floated lazily through the kitchen windows, warming the stainless steel of the countertops and cabinets, making the room toasty and our eyelids heavy. It was late spring, months since we’d first met, though it felt longer. Something about being with the apes made time less distinct.
When it was me and Nathan together, I could forget I was an employee and Nathan essentially my work. Our relationship had grown through months of one-on-one encounters. With each visit, we gained new privileges until there was hardly an inch of the building not available to us, so long as it wasn’t occupied. It could just be me and my friend. He, a boy, and me, his cool but slightly irresponsible guardian. Gone were my problems at college. Gone were the impenetrable complexities of human relationships. My anxiety around humans was inversely proportional to my comfort in the cage with the bonobos. Apes made so much more sense to me, Nathan most of all. It eventually got to the point where I stopped going to school, seven credits short of a degree, to work with the apes full-time.
Nathan used the symbols like my father uses text messages, infrequently, out of the blue, and with suspicious competency.
Between us in our nest atop the fridge was a pile of empty Diet Coke bottles, Go-GURT tubes, and half a bag of plump, red grapes. There were plenty of vegetables in the fridge under us, but they held little appeal. When Nathan and I went to the kitchen, we were raiders. We descended like locusts and went straight for the good stuff.
The kitchen was our favorite place to go. It held not just food, but choice. There, Nathan could eat whatever he wanted, not what was brought to him by a caretaker. However, the kitchen was, ultimately, a human place, and as a result, I wasn’t able to fully relax. There were all these reminders of how human spaces were not made to accommodate us. Blenders with stainless steel blades, kitchen knives, toxic cleaning agents, gas stove burners. Dangers everywhere.
Nathan dropped the last Diet Coke bottle between us and burped. I retrieved a paper board with the symbols on it. “Nathan,” I asked, pointing to symbols to accompany my words.
WANT MORE COKE? WANT APPLE?
He pushed the board away, then pulled me in for a hug and tickle. If anything, Nathan taught me how impossible the science of ape language was to perform. His whole body was an instrument of expression. He manipulated the space between us like prose, varying the pressure of his teeth on my skin to change the tone of a message, his every touch held its own grammar as questions and statements. Nathan didn’t perform language in a way that would be easy to parse and study, he embodied it. He performed it in the way of a dancer. He lived it.
Nathan preferred gestures. Words filled him up and he had to expel their captive energy through his limbs in a way the symbols couldn’t facilitate. Crooked index finger between his teeth: Bite me. Point at keys hanging from my belt loop on a carabiner: [Keys/Open]. Crooked middle finger twisting at a door: [Open/Unlock]. Hand raised to his neck, motioning as if to let steam out of an Oxford shirt: [Collar].
If he gestured for a collar, I’d ask, “You want to go outside?” Or “You want to go to the kitchen?” He would vocalize in response, then sit with his chin raised to expedite the process. I didn’t really like the collar, but whenever I could, I looped the thick nylon strap around his neck and locked the full-sized padlock that secured it. The heavy pendant hung between the ends of his collarbones. He inspected it with his fingers, adjusting to its heft. The thing was incongruous with this person, this child.
He asked for it every day I saw him. Often repeatedly. Switching between that gesture and the one asking for my keys. He wanted, more than just about anything else, to traverse the boundaries between ape and human space. For every step I took into his world, he was equally desperate — more so, even — to take one into mine. Every time I successfully begged, cajoled, and (sometimes) argued with humans for the opportunity to enter his world, he would greet me by asking for me to take him back to where I’d come from. Get me out of this place, he seemed to say.
So, I traded my discomfort with the collar for the chance to make him happy. He traded the cage he lived in for the one he wore around his neck. The easiest days were the ones when I didn’t have to say “no” to him. When he asked for keys or a collar and I could say “Of course” and we would go gorge ourselves and loiter on top of the walk-in fridge.
I lived for those days of forgetting. The times when we found the right balance between the demands of our worlds and our own desires, but I was lucky if there was enough staff to accommodate us having half the building once every few weeks or so.
Nathan didn’t perform language in a way that would be easy to parse and study, he embodied it. He performed it in the way of a dancer. He lived it.
Though Nathan had been raised to be both bonobo and human, his was a secondary type of personhood. Not like that of a human child. He could enter the kitchen, but only on a leash. He was taught, but could not go to school. He had the language to ask to go outside, but he could never venture beyond the walls of the facility. I kept trying to find ways to make up for that disconnect, but, as a frustratingly junior member of staff, I couldn’t.
One day we lazed on top of the fridge until Nathan stirred and descended. My thoughts came slow in the sun-warmed room. I thought he wanted a different kind of snack until he moved toward the sink. His head disappeared as he ducked under with his leash dragging behind him.
“Nathan, c’mon man,” I said. “Nothing good down there.”
I scrambled down, imagining a montage of him ingesting jugs of cleaning solvents or blinding his eyes with toxic sprays. I approached but before I could reach him, Nathan hung from the sink lip, reared back, and kicked the garbage disposal with all his considerable muscle. He planted several rocking blows to it before I got him turned around.
The spell he cast that made me forget the human world dissipated with the thuds of his feet against metal. I was a human and, worse, an employee. He was an ape then. It hurt to be reminded of that.
I didn’t want to get in trouble. I couldn’t afford to replace the garbage disposal. Worse, I couldn’t afford to have my time with Nathan revoked or reduced to less than it already was. But even more than that, I wanted to prove that we had something. That our connection was real and tangible. I knew he was special, but I wanted us to be special too.
I pulled him away from the sink, my ears hot. He’d never been so blatantly destructive around me before.
“What’s wrong with you?” I used the voice I give to my dogs when they misbehave. “No!”
Nathan didn’t meet my eyes. He squirmed away only to plant another rocking blow on the disposal. I pulled him back into position with firm hands on his shoulders.
“No, Nathan. No! That’s bad.” I was near to shouting.
Nathan’s eyes were hard at the corners. He tested my hold once more, paused, then opened his mouth and screamed. He wailed long strings of ear-splitting EEEs. The whole ape house heard him. They barked, sharp, in response. He screamed so hard and so much that within minutes all his skin had broken out in half-dollar-sized hives. I unhanded him and he left my side to go sulk in a corner, screaming all the while.
The director, who’d heard the commotion, joined us after a few minutes. Nathan sprang into her arms and hugged her close, looking at me the whole time. Using his proximity to her and distance from me to express his displeasure. She soothed him and I explained the situation. Before she returned him to his ape family with a dose of liquid grape children’s Benadryl in him, I apologized. I gave him some M&M’s and a special juice box and, after a pause, he offered his back for a tickle. He would accept my offering, but he wanted me to be sorry for longer.
“Disagreements,” the director said after returning him, “are part of having language.”
The hives were no surprise to her. Nathan often got so worked up that his body rebelled. As if his emotions, same as his words, were too strong for their little container and pushed against his skin to escape.
They were the main reason why we didn’t notice when he got actually sick.
The study of ape language is a field of broken promises. Its history is littered with the allegedly well-meaning intentions of seemingly caring people and the tragic, too early passings of their charges. Their failures are made all the more devastating in that, despite what they call the apes — subjects, participants, entrants — they are the failures of parents toward their children.
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Ape language research, at its heart, seeks to investigate the age-old question of nature versus nurture. Since raising human infants in a context removed from all human influence is ethically impossible, they performed the inverse: raising apes in entirely human environments. That has historically not met the same ethical barriers, despite infants being involved in each case.
Take Gua, adopted by a pair of psychologists, the Kelloggs, who had recently given birth to their first child, Donald. The Kelloggs stressed that for any co-rearing experiment to work, the ape must be treated as human in all regards, to avoid bias. As such, Gua lived in the Kelloggs’ house, ate at the table, and generally did everything with Donald. They were inseparable, like twins, and they developed at almost identical rates in everything but their speech.
Winthrop Kellogg’s original hypothesis, that Gua would develop aspects of human behavior, proved true. What he did not anticipate, however, was that this cultural blending would be a two-way exchange; the spectrum between Pan and Homo traversed in both directions. While Gua grew more human, Donald also took on some of Gua’s apeness, such as extensive biting. The two children met in the middle, the primary contributor to the end of the experiment.
For every step I took into his world, he was equally desperate — more so, even — to take one into mine
In each ape language study, there is one overriding and unspoken promise — we will give you a new family if you become sufficiently like us (but not if our children become like you). Unlike Gua and others, Nathan kept his ape family. Still, the promise of his life was the same, if the terms slightly altered. It all boiled down to this: We will make you one of us.
No study has yet been able to make good on that promise. No matter what the shape, be it a collar, a mesh enclosure, or a house, there is always a cage around the apes involved. They are never truly welcomed into human society. The humans, meanwhile, get to go home at the end of the day.
Of the approximately 100 years of other ape language studies, hardly any of the apes had Nathan’s freedom. These apes were almost all taken from their mothers as infants, some as young as 2 days old, and placed in human homes or labs. Nearly all lived short, tragic lives compared to the potential 60-70 years available to them naturally. As if a stark contrast between the mental and physical self invariably tempts tragedy. Kellogg’s Gua was returned to a research center after nine months in their home (pneumonia, 3); Ladygina-Kohts’ Joni ate paint from the walls of her home (lead poisoning, 3); Hayes’ Viki fell sick during the study period (viral meningitis, 7); Temerlin’s Lucy was released back into the wild after living in a human home in Oklahoma for years (suspected poaching, 23); and Nim Chimpsky was “retired” to a research lab, which sold him into biomedical research, from which he was rescued by an animal sanctuary to live as their sole chimpanzee (heart attack, 26). So many either didn’t survive their studies or barely did. The handful of language apes, like Washoe, Koko, and Kanzi who have lived into and beyond their third decade are rare exceptions.
Several months after the garbage disposal disagreement, factors outside our control interrupted our time together. In the human half of the building, new leadership took over, stiffening the rules about contact with apes. Months passed. Then, just as we were about to renew our one-on-ones, Nathan got sick. I saw him daily during this time but it was always through the mesh of the cage. I pushed so far through it to touch and tickle him that it hurt the web of skin between my fingers.
It came out of nowhere. One day his face just swelled up. His eyes shrank to crescents between his puffy brow and cheeks. No one had any answers for it, not even the vet. Every morning I came in, Nathan looked like he had been in a boxing match the night before. We gave him Benadryl and Claritin over and over. It made him groggy, but it didn’t seem to help his swelling. Nothing seemed to help. We eliminated potential allergens. Changed cleaning solutions, avoided wheat gluten, and banned food with certain dyes. All to no effect.
As the sickness swept through him, he maintained a front of normalcy. When he chose to talk using symbols, it still came out in torrents. When he wanted to chase, he ran as fast as he could, even if the run was more of a tumble and the game didn’t last as long as usual. The vet, whose practice focused primarily on Iowa farm animals, visited often. She did her best, but Nathan was a boy, not a horse.
It didn’t go away. I asked that he see a different doctor, a human one. But in this, he was not human enough. There were ape-specific risks of a more thorough workup and, it was assumed, they outweighed the benefits given his symptoms. A full workup would require sedation and transportation and more. Nathan’s father had died two years earlier from complications with anesthesia for an elective procedure and his loss was still fresh in everyone’s heart.
Over the course of half a year, Nathan’s swelling receded as mysteriously as it had arisen. By the time spring rolled around, he was almost normal, though his hair was a little wirier and his arms had lost some of their beef. His eyes also drooped at the outside, making him look eternally tired. But he was nearly his old self, if more subdued.
By May, with the fields outside bursting with purple, orange, and yellow wildflowers, I finally got the supervisor’s approval to go in again with Nathan. I’d been requesting it for months. Just after I got the green light, however, Nathan stopped eating and our reunion was put on hold. It didn’t matter the meal, he took a couple of bites and set it aside. Then his breathing became labored. He wheezed and coughed so loud I could hear it throughout the building. His energy gone, he spent most of his time napping. I knew I had to see him, so I did.
Nathan was dozing when I entered his room for the first time in over a year. It was late morning. I didn’t ask permission, I simply told the other caretakers that I would need that half of the building.
“Hi, Nathan,” I said as I entered. He was lying on a pile of blankets. He didn’t move at the sound of the door, but as I spoke, he lifted himself and approached. The slump of his shoulders told me just how uncomfortable he was. His swagger was gone. I didn’t think anything could take the strut out of his walk. Now, he was deflated. He hadn’t eaten more than a couple of bites in days.
And yet, he didn’t miss a beat. He hugged me about the legs, slapped my thighs, and sprung away awkwardly. Just like we normally greeted one another, only in slow motion. Now his sprint was more of a lope. I shuffled so I didn’t overtake him. We did one round of this before he led me back to his bed, laid down, and asked me to tickle him. As my fingers probed his ribs, he grunted a laugh that became wheezing and quickly turned into a racking cough. It passed, and he looked at me with his mouth hanging slightly agape as if all the strength required to close it was concentrated at the corners of his wincing eyes. I began to tickle him again, this time softly, but he brushed my hands away.
I shouldn’t have let so much time go by, I thought as we sat there, my back to one wall and Nathan inert across my thighs. It used to take hours before he’d slow down enough that we could relax like this. Today it took barely a minute.
My fingers tentatively massaged him. They met bone much easier than before. The curving mounds of his muscles were reduced, his skin slack. During the worst of his sickness, when the swelling and itching were at their highest, he’d pulled most of his arm hair out. The baldness highlighted his new angularity. I ran my fingers over his bare forehead. His sideburns were plucked clean and what hair was left was brittle stubble, bending and snapping like sun-bleached grass.
Someone brought a scale to get Nathan’s weight for the vet. He didn’t want to move and threatened to bite me when I suggested it. I waited a minute for him to doze off again, then picked him up and carried him to the scale. He’d lost over 20 pounds in under three months.
It came out of nowhere. One day his face just swelled up. His eyes shrank to crescents between his puffy brow and cheeks. No one had any answers for it, not even the vet.
We spent the remainder of the day resting. With me running my hand over his skin, and him in a near-constant adjustment of his position. Intermittently, I’d leave to get him a popsicle or some juice. I took one of his bare feet in my hand and nibbled on his toes. He huffed one laugh as if to humor me, but nothing more. I brought him M&M’s, but these were too hard for him to eat and he set them aside.
That night, I entered his cage with fresh blankets and a bowl of yogurt, an echo of our first meeting. He tried a bit of yogurt, then put the bowl down next to his bed. I’d been asked to get a blood oxygen reading for the vet with a clip that went on the end of Nathan’s finger. I moved to his side while he slipped in and out of an uneasy sleep and took his hand in mine. A coworker threaded the sensor through the mesh. Before I could clamp the device on his index finger, he woke, lunging and snapping at me. He didn’t get me, but the anger in his movements stung as much as a bite would have.
I felt like I was betraying him, putting human obligations above his very clear refusal. He let me hold his hand again. This time I just held it. When he seemed to be fully asleep, I tried again. Once it got a reading, I unclamped it quickly, whispered good night, and slunk out of his room.
Eight hours later, he was carried out of the building on a blanket, finally breaking free of its walls, to get a full medical workup. During the night he had briefly gone into respiratory arrest. The risks of getting him checked out were now outweighed by the seriousness of his condition. They carried him by me, sleeping, but with his hands curled and ready, thumbs against the ends of his drawn index and middle fingers. I saw the potential in them. They were poised as if ready to ask for his Collar or my Keys at the very instant he woke.
In the years since I have often wondered what we accomplished in the ape house. What exactly was it that I was a part of? Did those in charge really believe all that they were saying? I thought we were doing it better, in knowing no one ever needed to tear infant apes from their mothers to learn about the limits of language. The other ape language studies had got the question wrong, I thought. They all asked whether an ape could talk if we made them sufficiently in our image. I thought we were asking if we could understand each other as equals. The true test not being in the apes’ ability to speak but in our capacity to listen.
I thought we were different. Better. But, we were not, our bonobos no more equal than the charges of any other study. Our cages and facilities were simply nicer; our methods softer.
So much of my understanding of language, and its limits, came from Nathan. His silences especially. Language is messy and incomplete and variable and profound and decidedly unscientific. There is no single, controllable, independent variable. After all, there are so many things that are beyond the ability of words to express. So much meaning outside that which is merely spoken.
For example: There was no symbol for CANCER on the symbol keyboard. No one had ever needed to say LYMPHOMA. The lexicon was limited, but HURT was there, and I had never once seen Nathan use it. It wasn’t that he didn’t understand, it was that he would never admit such a thing. He had too big a chip on his shoulder.
For example: The way my coworker’s voice caught on the phone, starting several utterances until “He didn’t make it” could escape, and I had already known what he had to tell me. And the way I made the same stutter stop code of not-quite-shock and not-yet-loss before managing “I’m on my way” in response, and he had already known that as well.
For example: How the people I passed as I walked through the ape house, hood over my head, made soft, unintelligible noises at me. Emitting contributions to the pall over the building. I kept moving, unsure of whether a response was expected. Unable to make one if it was. I just continued walking toward the van that had taken him to the hospital and back, parked at the other end of the facility.
For example: In the van — the gray — the interior gray — sky gray — world gray — the cold of his hand — he — splayed — the coolness of his forehead — kissing the stubble of his forehead — kissing and muttering — same three syllables — waiting for warmth to return.
For example: The stillness of the building as he was carried in and laid before the glass of the greenhouse where his family waited, pressed against the window, shoulders one against another, crowding together. The silence as deep and absolute as the understanding in his mother’s eyes.
Dan Musgrave was raised by animals in rural Kansas. He is a writer and photographer with a particular interest in the intersections of the human and animal world. For nearly seven years, he did linguistic, cognitive, and behavioral research with captive bonobos while they trained him in the art of being a better person.
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