patient, “because for three years after seminary, I was called to a
mission in Uganda.”
I thought I heard the patient: a muttering that reminded mebut not
quite-of the low cooing of pigeons blended with the more guttural purr
of a cat.
“I’m sure You’ll be all right,” Father Tom continued. “But You really
must stay here a few days so I can administer the antibiotics and
monitor the healing of the wound. Do You understand me?”
With a note of frustration and despair: “Do You understand me at
all?”
As I was about to lean to the right and peer around the wall of boxes,
the Other replied to the priest. The Other. That was how I thought of
the fugitive when I heard it speaking from such close range, because
this was a voice that I was not able to imagine as being either that of
a child or a monkey, or of anything else in God’s Big Book of
Creation.
I froze. My finger tightened on the trigger.
Certainly it sounded partly like a young child, a little girl, and
partly like a monkey. It sounded partly like a lot of things, in fact,
as though a highly creative Hollywood sound technician had been playing
with a library of human and animal voices, mixing them through an audio
console until he’d created the ultimate voice for an
extraterrestrial.
The most affecting thing about the Other’s speech was not the tonal
range of it, not the pattern of inflections, and not even the
earnestness and the emotion that clearly shaped it. Instead, what most
jolted me was the perception that it had meaning. I was not listening
merely to a babble of animal noises. This was not English, of course,
not a word of it; and although I’m not multilingual, I’m certain it
wasn’t any foreign tongue, either, for it was not complex enough to be
a true language. It was, however, a fluent series of exotic sounds
crudely composed like words, a powerful but primitive attempt at
language, with a small polysyllabic vocabulary, marked by urgent
rhythms.
The Other seemed pathetically desperate to communicate. As I listened,
I was surprised to find myself emotionally affected by the longing,
loneliness, and anguish in its voice. These were not qualities that I
imagined. They were as real as the boards beneath my feet, the stacked
boxes against my back, and the heavy beating of MY heart.
When the Other and the priest both fell silent, I wasn’t able to look
around the corner. I suspected that whatever the priest’s visitor
might look like, it would not pass for a real monkey, as did those
members of the original troop that had been tormenting Bobby and that
Orson and I had encountered on the southern horn of the bay. If it
resembled a rhesus at all, the differences would be greater and surely
more numerous than the baleful dark-yellow color of the other monkeys’
eyes.
If I was afraid of what I might see, my fear had nothing whatsoever to
do with the possible hideousness of this laboratory-born Other. My
chest was so tight with emotion that I couldn’t draw deep breaths, and
my throat was so thick that I could swallow only with effort. What I
feared was meeting the gaze of this entity and seeing my own isolation
in its eyes, my own yearning to be normal, which I’d spent twenty-eight
years denying with enough success to be happy with my fate. But my
happiness, like everyone’s, is fragile.
I had heard a terrible longing in this creature’s voice, and I felt
that it was akin to the sharp longing around which I had ages ago
formed a pearl of indifference and quiet resignation; I was afraid that
if I met the Other’s eyes, some resonance between us would shatter that
pearl and leave me vulnerable once more.
I was shaking.
This is also why I cannot, dare not, will not express my pain or my
grief when life wounds me or takes from me someone I love.
Grief too easily leads to despair. In the fertile ground of despair,
self-pity can sprout and thrive. I can’t begin to indulge in