We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler

Author:Karen Joy Fowler [Fowler, Karen Joy]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Tags: Contemporary, (¯`'•.¸//(*_*)\\¸.•'´¯)
ISBN: 9780399162091
Publisher: Marian Wood Book
Published: 2013-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Part Four

I’ll say it again: imitating human beings was not something which pleased me. I imitated them because I was looking for a way out, for no other reason.

—FRANZ KAFKA, “A Report for an Academy”

One

TODAY, IN 2012, with the whole of the Internet laid out before me like a Candy Land board (or maybe Chutes and Ladders is the better metaphor—or maybe Sorry!—anyway, one of those games that never ends because you never win), I’ve been trying to find out what happened to other famous cross-fostered chimps. Information about the experiments is easy to come by, not so easy to learn the fates of the subjects. When there is information, it’s often disputed.

One of the earliest chimps, clever, docile little Gua, appears to have died in 1933 from a respiratory infection shortly after the Kellogg family returned her to the Yerkes research lab, where she’d been born. She’d lived in the Kellogg home for about nine months alongside their toddler son, Donald, effortlessly outshining him at using a fork and drinking from a cup. She was two years old at the time of her death.

• • •

VIKI HAYES WAS born in 1947 and died in her home of viral meningitis when she was either six and a half or seven, depending on what website you choose. After her death, her parents divorced; at least one friend said that Viki had been the only thing keeping that marriage together. She was an only child.

• • •

MAYBELLE (BORN IN 1965) and Salome (1971) both died of a severe diarrhea that developed within days of their respective families’ going on vacation and leaving them behind. No underlying physical condition for the diarrhea was found in either case.

• • •

AFTER HIS RETURN to a research facility, Ally (born 1969) also developed a life-threatening diarrhea. He pulled out his own hair and lost the use of one arm, but none of these things killed him. There are rumors, unsubstantiated, that he died in the 1980s in the medical labs, victim of an experimental but fatal dose of insecticide.

• • •

AT TWELVE YEARS OF AGE, Lucy Temerlin (born in 1964) was sent from her home to live with the chimps in Gambia. She’d been raised in Oklahoma by the Temerlin family. Lucy liked Playgirl magazine, tea that she brewed herself, and straight gin. She was a tool-using chimp who took sexual pleasure from the household vacuum. She was a wild girl.

But she knew nothing of life in the wild. She’d been born at the Noell’s Ark Chimp Farm and taken from her mother into a human home two days later. In Gambia, Janis Carter, a psych grad student, took great care over many years trying to gently habituate her. During this time, Lucy suffered a deep depression, lost weight, and pulled out her hair. She was last seen alive, in the company of other chimps and apparently resigned to being so, in 1987.

Some weeks later, her scattered bones were found and collected. The suspicion that she was killed by poachers, into whose arms she eagerly ran, has been widely transmitted.

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