An experiment in flash fiction.
Mr. Bonanza
Mr. Bonanza, the fifty-seven-centimetre Rhesus macaque, shoved the walnuts into his mouth. Imitating a chipmunk - that’s how the team interpreted this strange behaviour - he puffed up his cheeks, tensed up his shoulders, then staggered towards the console.
Monkey hungry me monkey hungry.
The scientists shed tears. Handshakes travelled across the room. The intern came in with the coffee the scientists had requested and was quickly shooed away by the primatologist from Princeton. In the corner, a Sorbonne PhD student asked around for Noam Chomsky’s phone number.
‘We have made significant progress,’ Dr. Hohmann announced, ‘towards unwrapping the language of this creature we call cousin.’
Funding quadrupled. Mr. Bonanza met the president. On Fox News, he participated in a debate on linguistics, making use of his console to submit his answers.
‘And what does Mr. Bonanza think, then,’ a tenured professor said during the now infamous debate, nervous sweat glistening on the edges of his eyebrows, ‘of syntagmatic analysis? Word-order is the rock upon which your moment of glory must founder, Mr. Bonanza. For how is a simple primate,’ here gasps were heard from the audience, ’to understand that language goes above and beyond the simple recognition of signs? Your five minutes of fame are over, I am afraid.’
Mr. Bonanza, with all the poise and decorum of a middle-aged father trying to reach the TV remote, stretched his arms out towards the console.
Man eats dog.
Silence followed. The host crossed his legs over and leaned in, his hand carefully placed on his chin to signal his undivided attention. A stagehand signalled at Camera 3 to get in closer.
Dog eats man.
The professor was found dead in his flat only three weeks later.
‘This is irrefutable proof,’ Hohmann said in a Tübingen lecture following the debate, ‘that Mr. Bonanza understands language and its complexities to the fullest. He understands that language is doubly articulated and syntactically determined. Same as we do, and perhaps, even better.’
He ended the lecture with his condolences to the deceased professor and his family.
-
But the professor hadn’t been entirely in the wrong; soon followed Mr. Bonanza’s fall from fame. Other monkeys came into the spotlight. For how was he to compete with José, the Capuchin, who also understood Spanish? What of Howler, the Howler, who sang opera to thousands attending her performances at La Scala each night? Soon, much of the original team who had trained Mr. Bonanza moved on to other projects. In the Amazon rainforest, some of the scientists who had raised him discovered a spider monkey capable of writing moving, sparkling prose when confronted with a keyboard. Quickly and through global efforts a team of hyper-intelligent monkeys was assembled under the supervision of leading linguists and zoologists, with the spider monkey – now nicknamed Edmund, after Edmund Spenser – heading the project. Sure enough, in a few days’ time and significant redrafting efforts, the monkeys successfully reproduced the entirety of Hamlet with the first-ever monkey actors.
In the meantime, Mr. Bonanza was relegated to working small gigs. He showed up at children’s birthday parties, Hohmann leading him up on stage by hand, where he performed his usual routine with the console to a disinterested group of preschoolers. Some small-town radio stations invited him for interviews, referring to him as the ‘first Miracle Monkey.’ A moving video produced by the Bonanza Foundation, where Mr. Bonanza gave a Christmas speech in front of a roaring fireplace, garnered significant views on YouTube before quickly fizzling out again. Soon enough, Hohmann donated the console back to the Tübingen labs, and chose to adopt Mr. Bonanza as a pet, the two retiring together into a new flat.
In his old age Mr. Bonanza grew grumpy and ill-mannered. He frequently ran into the office and hijacked Hohmann’s computer, toppling over mugs and pen-pots, desperately punching at the German keyboard, having confused it for his console. Soon, as his bladder got weak, Hohmann found it necessary to equip him with a diaper. The old macaque stuck thereafter to simple walks around the flat, growing quieter and quieter on account of his embarrassment. After a small mishap involving the bathtub he lost some function in his right knee, and soon enough Hohmann’s sole job became caretaker.
One night, as Hohmann got ready for bed, Mr. Bonanza managed to climb up next to the aloe vera plants and made himself comfortable on the windowsill. He mesmerised himself by blowing air onto the window and drawing shapes in the condensed vapour. Hohmann went to brush his teeth, and when he came back found the monkey with his face pushed up against the window, mouth wide open, gazing at the stars. Hohmann, too, had gotten old, but mustering up some strength he pulled himself up onto the windowsill and sat next to his friend.
After they had done so for a while Hohmann found Mr. Bonanza watching him with great intent. In his weird, uncanny, human way, the macaque moved closer to the scientist, and warily put his cheek up against his leg. Then he stretched his arms out, yawned, and Hohmann could swear that he saw Mr. Bonanza, very discretely, give his leg a tiny kiss.
‘I wish they could speak the way we speak,’ Hohmann would say during his final lecture at Tübingen, Mr. Bonanza having finally passed only weeks before. ‘That’s what I kept telling myself as a young, aspiring academic. Now I wish for something different, something less naïve. Since, after all, do two humans that speak the same language ever really understand each other? Is there ever a moment, in human history, where unanimous, univocal consensus has been achieved through language?’
‘I wish we could be them,’ he would continue, ‘circumvent the barrier of language, truly step into their shoes. Feel the way they feel. See the world through their eyes.’
‘Then maybe we would know,’ and here he would stumble over his words, ‘how sad they truly are.’