Ornamental by juan Cárdenas

Author:juan Cárdenas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Coffee House Press
Published: 2020-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

13

Lacking obligations, I spend all week in the lab reviewing the four participants’ files. I rewatch the videos taken while the women were on the drug. There’s no audio, so I can only study number 4’s gestures as she makes her pronouncements. Her path through the room describes a clockwise elliptical pattern, though she occasionally pauses to crouch and examine the floor as if leaning over a pond. I’m compelled to reread the transcriptions several times in a row and only stop when I realize obsessive rereading is a sign of frustration.

To clear my head, I go for a walk in the garden, trailed closely by the two monkeys. They move on all fours, steps synchronized, taking everything in with endearing expressions of permanent awe. You’d think they were rediscovering the world again and again. Their motions are so cadenced and graceful, everything in their body language seems so essential, that for a moment I’m tempted to believe there were no errors or adjustments in their evolutionary design. That walk transmits a strange sensation of perfection. It’s true, they are little ninjas.

The dogs bark in the distance. I wonder how the dogs and the monkeys get along. Did the two idiots even consider that?

Once I’ve entered the pine forest, the monkeys scale the trees and survey the area for possible threats. They really are well trained. I sit down and recline against a tree trunk. The dogs are still barking, and I’d like to go see them, but I’m afraid an encounter between the four animals could end in catastrophe. I fantasize about walking the premises surrounded by dogs and monkeys. My father never let me have pets. He said they feminized the character. The closest I ever came to one was the anthill I staged in a glass case at my high school science fair, a prosperous microsociety that, in spite of its markedly militant and manufactural qualities, failed to win my father’s approval. Don’t be a pansy ass, get rid of it, he said when I still had the case in my room weeks after the fair had ended. Come to think of it, maybe my father was so opposed to the anthill because he intuited that inside, a splendid matriarchy was being established, under the rule of an idle queen whose sole enterprises were procreation and being fed by her creatures.

Suddenly the first drops of what’s bound to be a great downpour begin to fall, so I stand and return to the lab, where the transcriptions, the videos of number 4 to be watched in slow motion for the nth time, the minuscule details of that kabuki of mute gestures all await. Later, when the walls of my office cast back the first flashes of lightning, I go to the window. Outside, the thick, leaden afternoon and, at the foot of the building, next to the fountain, the pair of monkeys, standing guard despite the downpour. It makes me a little sad to see them that way, soaking wet and motionless as gargoyles.

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