Three Ape Fable
I don’t understand.
I can’t move.
My eyes are open, but I can’t see anything but a white haze. This is panic, but I can’t feel my muscles. Have I been drugged? Am I asleep? Is this sleep paralysis?
Where am I? What is going on? Is this… what am I seeing? I think my eyes are open. But I can’t blink. Everything is out of focus. It’s like all I am is an eye. I don’t like this.
Calm. Calm. What the actual fuck? Okay. Be reason. Take inventory. Categorize. Analyze.
Toes and fingers. I can’t feel my toes and fingers. Okay. Not good. But okay. I can think through this.
Blink. Can’t blink. Can’t see.
Run through the senses. Touch is right out. Taste, no taste. Sight, just a silver blur. Hearing. Hearing, do I have a heartbeat? I think so? Oh my god, that’s my pulse. I think I hear my blood moving. This is so weird.
What’s left? Smell. Requires breathing. Am I breathing? I must be breathing. I’m having thoughts. I’m alive. I’m alive? I’m alive.
Wait. That’s movement. In my periphery. It’s like everything is overlit and muffled. But something moved. I’m not alone here.
Settle down. Find that pulse again. You need a lifeline until you can figure out what’s going on.
***
A long time ago, before you were a tickle between the thighs of your great-great-great-great grandfather’s mother, three apes ruled as kings on a long-lost jungle continent.
The Moon King, who was light gray, was famously clever. The River King, who was dark gray, was revered for his cunning. And the Fog King, who was darkest gray, was whispered to be calculating. Each king kept many wives. And each king ruled his region of this ancient world in relative calm and peace.
One day, a gatherer of the Moon Tribe, out searching for berries, stumbled upon a field of flowers. Each flower stood taller than a horse and had a stout stalk. There were thousands of them. The blossoms were an eerie green with iridescent scales that reflected silver in the sun. The Moon Tribe gatherer had never seen any vegetation quite like this in all his life. He pulled several of the plants up by the roots and carried them with him back to his village.
The wise females of the tribe created teas with the flowers, and brave young males challenged each other to be the first to drink them. After several days, it was discovered that the teas made from the shimmering flowers had remarkable properties. Wounds suffered by the hunters while on expedition healed overnight. Elders with stiffened joints were able to swing from tree branches as if they were young again. A pregnant mother experienced no pain when birthing her child.
The Moon King considered what to do. The field of flowers grew in a land of waterfalls in the center of the continent where the loosely defined borders of the three kingdoms met. According to the gatherers, there were more than enough flowers to provide healing for every ape in existence, of all three tribes, until the day the last descendants of ape-kind watched the sun fall from the sky forever. There was no need to hide the existence of the field from the other kings. In fact, it would be wise to be generous, so favors could be gained.
A council of the kings was convened atop a high hill near the flower field, and the Moon King, River King, and Fog King, as well as their caravans of wives and guards, made the long trek through forests and mountain passes to the meeting place. Ceremonies of respect were performed, and after a day of feasting, the kings met together at a round table cut from the base of a fallen, prehistoric tree.
The Moon King informed the other kings of the discovery and proposed a course of preservation and sharing of the newly discovered resource for the good of all. The River King and Fog King agreed. Each king spoke an oath of solidarity. It was agreed that the details would be worked out by subordinates the next day, and they retired to their respective camps. Music played through the night, and apes from all the tribes danced together around a bonfire under a yellow moon.
As the night went on, the music and the sounds of revelry settled to a low hum, and the Moon King, lying in a body-pile of his females, reflected on the day that had been. The world had changed today, forever, for everyone who lived and who would ever live.
He thought of the suffering he’d witnessed in his many years, of the wounded and aged, how he’d had to be strong in the face of incalculable agonies as members of his own family, children, babies, had died on his watch, in his arms, and all he’d been able to do was to groom the sick and comfort them and to stand proud and tall as a symbol of strength for his people. After today, he would not have to pretend to be unaffected by all this. Surely there would still be death, but it would be a quiet death, an end which could be met without fear..
As his eyes closed and he fell into sleep, strong hands grabbed his arms, he heard the females shriek beneath and around him, there was chaos in the dark as objects fell and kicking bodies were dragged, grunting and shouting. He saw the stars through the trees, and he started to protest, but fierce grips held him tightly as a sharp rock was dragged across his throat, ending him.
***
I think I’m strapped to a table. I can’t quite tell. It’s as if all the nerves in my body are dead. I don’t feel hot or cold, or pain or pleasure. Just, sometimes, a kind of pressure.
The lines on the ceiling are like the lines in the bedroom from my childhood home. And the light across it is like the light from that room’s window combined with the light of my bedside lamp. Strange landscapes of shadow across stucco. So is this a memory? It feels sterile, like a hospital room.
I don’t think time has a function here.
There are human figures above me, coming and going. Human-sized figures, at least, gauzy, I can’t make out any features. Just gray and light-blue bodies approaching, hovering over me, communicating with each other.
Communicating? Speaking? It’s so distant. I think it’s sound. I think they’re words.
Air whispers over my formlessness as if I were covered in fur.
I can remember as a kid, trying to squeeze into a tight spot, there’s a ball under the couch, and I’m tightening my whole body into the gap, and I’m suffocating, I’m claustrophobic, my fingertips so close to the ball but not quite, it’s the most frustrating sensation in the world. But I can’t remember my name.
That. Though. That sensation is pressure. They’re over me, bending in, closer, I can feel a tugging in my center being. It doesn’t hurt, but I really, really want it to stop.
“It thinks we were really its friend,” says one.
“It doesn’t even understand what the joke is,” answers another.
Many voices laughing.
***
The Moon King never suspected that the River King and the Fog King had met secretly before the formal assembly. Their spies had already informed them of the discovery of the magical flowers, and the two had conspired to claim the resource for themselves.
The assassination of the Moon King and all of his guards and delegation had been deemed regrettable but necessary. His wives were spared, only to be sent to the flower field to begin harvesting the medicinal blossoms.
On the second night at camp, the River King sat nervously with his guards around a large meal of fruits, meats, and soups. The work was going mostly to plan, but he had argued with the Fog King earlier in the day about the harvesting. The Moon King had been correct, he’d argued. There were enough flowers for all, assuming that some were left in the ground to continue the cycle of flower, seed, and growth. At the least, give the priests and scholars of the tribes time to understand the nature of the plant and determine whether it could grow in other climates or if it could only thrive in this place of waterfalls and constant mists.
The River King was a humorless male, so he bristled when one of his guards disturbed the silence with a laugh. He gave a disapproving glance, normally more than enough to wither a subordinate. Then, two of his wives also started to laugh, but not quite a laugh, a cough? Around the table, members of his delegation began to hack and paw worriedly at their eyes and mouths.
Then, he felt it himself, a tightness in his throat, which he tried to clear, unsuccessfully. His wives were now foaming at their mouths, and his advisors, faces turning purple, began to writhe on the ground, trying desperately to breathe, unable to cry out. Soon no sounds were made except the kicking of dying bodies. The River King lashed out with his long arms, knocking poisoned mango and fat white grubs onto the ground, where they rolled and gathered dirt.
The Fog King’s loyal guard descended on the group and remaining, unpoisoned River Tribe ancillaries scattered into the trees. Those apes suffering but not yet dead were stuck through with sharp sticks, their last breaths filling their nostrils with the musty perfume from the flower field not far away.
The Fog King demanded that the flower field be cut to the ground and all the blossoms carried back to his tribe’s village, where his apes could fortify. The fields were stripped clean and then salted, and the Fog King had a large oak felled and dragged to a prominent spot in the center of the desolation. He stood atop the massive tree and declared himself the king of all creation. He urinated in a circle, beat his chest and bellowed. There were no challengers from within the milling mass of other apes, now united under a single leader.
Over the next few years, the Fog King guarded his hoard of flowers zealously. Desperate apes would come to his court begging for medicine for their cancerous tumors, their infections, their bloated bellies. The king always refused, saving the cure-all for himself and his closest, most loyal and trusted soldiers.
Eventually, the Fog King began to drink flower tea several times a day, at the slightest hint of a melancholy thought or a hard-to-reach itch. Paranoid, he began to eat the newborn babies his tribe’s women produced and had all but three of his own wives slaughtered and used as fertilizer for bean crops and berry bushes.
As the tribe grew old around him, he stayed young and vigorous but secluded himself to a greater and greater degree, trusting no one. He sent the males of the tribe on raiding and pillaging expeditions for which there was no provocation. Sometimes these small armies would come back bearing relics and artifacts stolen from the other tribes, which made the Fog King jealous. He sent them on missions further and further away, so they were gone for longer and longer months, and more and more often, they didn’t return at all.
After several years, the king had almost exhausted his entire supply of flower blossoms. The tribe had withered and was held together now by only a sense of a shared history not quite lost. He ordered his guard to assemble a group of young males and children to expedition to the land of waterfalls and gather more flowers. Surely, after all this time, they had found a new way to grow.
Weeks passed, and the exploring party didn’t return. Instead, only one young male straggled back to the village, near-dead and exhausted. Everyone else who’d ventured out had died of a disease of fever and loose bowels. There was no field of flowers, not anymore, or maybe, it was whispered, it had always been a myth. The Fog King had the boy stoned to death for daring to return having failed.
One night soon after, six males from the remnants of the tribe snuck into the Fog King’s cave carrying sharp sticks and stones. They stabbed the king repeatedly, and he bled but would not die. The king was still strong and savage. He ripped out the throats of two of the attackers with his sharp fangs and bashed the head of another into a rock. But the other three males at last managed to subdue him. They dragged him outside the cave entrance and threw him into a deep hole. They filled the hole over his head with rocks and coarse sand. The Fog King didn’t make a sound.
Their kingdoms in disarray, the apes scattered and formed small families in the jungle all across the continent. In time, they forgot how to speak, how to read, how to grow crops, and how to make music.
Some nights, some believe, a dreamer may find a shared memory and remember what could have been. But there is no way to ask if it can regret its nature.
***
I can see feminine eyes over a masked face, somewhere closer than where my feet must be. She’s running a catheter into me, I think. I still can’t feel.
A man’s voice: “People like us have to stick together. I’m going to take care of you.” This from a floating smile beneath a mustache, such an obvious lie, why is he saying this? Everyone is laughing at me.
If this is a hospital, where is the beeping? There’s only this “whoosh” sound from time to time, and the laughing, and the voices, and the constantly pulsing blood.
I sense something pushing down on my abdomen, drawing a line. This should be pain.
“There now. Have you ever seen one so hairy?” I feel myself being parted. There’s something pushing into my core, hands cleaving flesh, fingers probing, seeking.
I don’t want to be here.
“Invite it to the party,” comes a woman’s voice from down near my feet. The clearest, loudest laughter yet erupts, and echoes.
I feel the pulling, the tugging, the hands have found something, and I feel like I should push, but I can’t, I’m reflexively holding on tight. There’s a – reverse slurping sound – as the hands extract the meaty thing from my abdomen. It’s not any part of a person. It’s something larval, black, bigger than what should fit in a body. Vaguely simian, and writhing.
“Put it on the scale.”
I can’t see again at all. My mind is rejecting this. I’m completely frozen while the world plays musical chairs around me.
“I hope it hurt.”
I don’t, it didn’t, it makes no sense. Why are people like this? Why can’t they explain?
The woman at the foot of the bed is unmasked now, holding a pan, smiling. “Kiss me in front of it,” she says to someone, not me.
The surgeon bends down close to my face. His unshaven fur brushes against mine, he wants to be heard. “No matter what you hope. No matter what you desire. We’re going to keep you around. You’re hilarious.”
Another laugh, but it’s coming from my own throat. All I want to do is die. “Thank you.”
Finally, if nothing else, a punchline.
***
fable by Neil Oldman
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