"Enos" by Patrick Nevins
Cameroon
The Chimp came to life at dawn. As a hazy glow filled the canopy, he roused himself in his nest of mangrove leaves and searched the nearby trees for his mother. She was a short distance away, nursing his infant sister, whom he adored. When he gently tickled her chin, she would turn her eyes toward him; they were shimmering black orbs circled in white. Their mother’s eyes. He had not seen any other chimps with eyes like theirs.
Having sighted his family, the Chimp returned his attention to his own nest. He had woven its wide leaves into a thick bed, smoothed out the lumps, and pressed the little mattress into a crook in a mangrove tree so that it made a bowl into which he had curled up as yesterday’s light faded. It was his best work yet. He was of the age that he had not shared his mother’s nest for many rainy seasons, but he was many seasons from when he would test himself against the mature males of his family’s group. It was a critical period in which he was learning the art of nest-making and ant-catching and practicing his displays of power and virility. As it was, the mature chimps paid him little attention; he was a tawny-muzzled youth who built his nests close to his mother and infant sister. He still nursed.
At midday, on the forest floor, the Chimp rocked on his rump, watching his sister nurse and waiting his turn. It was at precisely this moment that the trouble began. Some hidden threat set the mature males to screaming. Their panic was more fevered than any outburst the Chimp had ever witnessed over elephant herds or rogue male chimps. It pressed against his eardrums, and the first tremors of panic pounded in his heart. Then a terrible sound echoed through the forest, breaking it apart. The mature males scattered, as if each were trying to grab hold of his piece of the breaking-apart forest. The mothers struggled to gather their young. The Chimp turned to his mother and a second forest-breaking crack sounded; his mother dropped like a mango falling from a tree. His sister wailed, the whites of her eyes enlarged (the image was imprinted on the Chimp). Then she sprang from their mother’s side and into nearby foliage. The Chimp turned around to see what had frightened her. A strange, white ape grabbed the Chimp by the arm and forced him into a thing for which he had no concept: a cage.
Miami Rare Bird Farm
Since the day the forest was broken, there had been many new concepts that the Chimp had to construct. He built them from what they were not. Human was not animal.They held dominion over animals, in the forest where they slaughtered the mothers and captured the young, in the building where they sheltered and fed the Chimp and the other imprisoned animals, and on the grounds where daily they gawked at and prodded them for pleasure.
The building was another thing. Inside was not outside.Inside was just a bigger cage! Inside, dawn and midday and evening and night were hidden from him. He would not know them except men retrieved him and the other adolescent chimps and gorillas and monkeys from their cages each morning to walk them outside to the grounds. But the grounds were yet a larger cage! The Chimp was permitted to roam freely across a grassy area divided by a canal and dotted with short trees that were totally unfit for climbing or nesting. Waterfowl decorated the canal and the banks, a menagerie of brilliantly colored birds perched in the trees, terrifying long-legged flightless birds stomped around on thick feet,and the adolescent primates flitted about the place, some dressed in children’s clothes. But ultimately the Chimp found himself barred from further movement by a wall. There appeared to be no gaps in this wall, yet visitors entered and exited from some point and walked among the animals—gawking, prodding—as it pleased them. Guests of the Miami Rare Bird Farm. AMERICA’S MOST UNUSUAL ATTRACTION. YOU WILL GET PICTURES UNBELIEVABLE. SEE THEM . . . HOLD THEM . . . PET THEM . . . FEED THEM . . . . Animals were kept; humans were not. Captive was not free.
One day, the Chimp was tossed an orange—something he’d never found in the forest, but which was to be had in abundance in this place. When he finished, a man approached him with a tiny sailor suit. The Chimp had not been selected for this humiliation before and he was not about to let it begin. The man took hold of one of his feet and tried to get him into the little pants, but the Chimp withdrew. The man changed tactics and tried to pull the top over his head, but the Chimp threw his hands up, preventing that course. A second man, who had successfully dressed a female chimp in a jumper, came over to lend a hand. This man, the Chimp could tell, was going to restrain him while the first man dressed him. The Chimp batted the second man’s hands away and bared his teeth and screamed. The second man walked away resigned, and the first tossed the outfit aside. The Chimp, having won this fight, regained his calm and took the first man’s hand to be led to the grounds.
In his exploration of the wall that morning, the Chimp came upon something he’d never seen before: Several birds were gathered around a man’s likeness in stone—but the size of three men! The tableau of St. Francis surrounded by birds was lost upon the Chimp; it only frightened him. It solidified his fear that humans held dominion over animals: the birds, the monkeys, the gorillas, and all of his kind. If he were to escape from the grounds, if he were to find his way back to the forest, would there be any chimps left? Surely men could not have taken them all. They seemed interested only in the young. Surely the mature males had gathered the mothers who had survived and whatever young ones remained and put their group back together. Surely his infant sister had been adopted and was awaiting his return. Surely the forest had been made whole again.
HAM
The Chimp was pulled from his cage one morning, examined, and taken to Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico. There he was known as number 81 of the Holloman Aerospace Medical Center Chimpanzee Colony. The colony lived in rows of cages and were not permitted sunlight or fresh air. 81 preferred the Miami Rare Bird Farm to this, but held onto the hope that should he pass the tests he was subjected to daily, he would be returned to the forest and his infant sister.
Every day the men inflicted new punishments on the chimps. It began with the box: 81 was strapped into a metal box and isolated from the colony. Five minutes. Fifteen minutes. Hours. Then an even more anxiety-inducing test: A man would brush glue onto 81’s muzzle, then fix a mask to him. Mask in place, 81 was bound inside one of the airtight “sleds,” which were previously shot down a track in the desert by rocket power and seconds later brought to a sudden halt, scrambling the brains of its chimpanzee passenger. The Holloman chimps were instead submerged in a pool for various periods. The chimps who had the mental resilience to withstand these terrors were submitted to a final test: the Psychomotor. 81, having not been broken by the box nor the sled, was placed in a chair with a panel in front of him; the only thing restricting his movements were small plates attached to the soles of his feet, which were wired to the panel. On the panel were three squares that lit up red, white, and blue, and three corresponding levers. When one of the squares lit up, 81 had three seconds to pull the corresponding lever. He quickly found that if he didn’t pull the lever in three seconds or pulled the wrong lever—ZAP! The plates delivered a painful shock to the soles of his feet. 81 became very skilled at the Psychomotor.
Menagerie in Flight
Notable space flights before Enos’ orbit: June 11, 1948: A V-2 rocket launches Albert, a rhesus monkey, into space. His successors are also named Albert. Ironically, only Albert VI, on whose rocket one of the Air Force men had painted the words, “Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him well,” returns to earth having not shuffled off his mortal coil. November 3, 1957: On the heels of the basketball-sized satellite that tipped off the Space Race, Sputnik II carries Laika into space to die. The Soviets and their dogs! January 31, 1961: The Holloman Aerospace Medical Center chimpanzee Ham, named after the center, is launched into space—Project Mercury’s test subject for Alan Shepard’s flight. April 12, 1961: The Soviets surprise the United States by sending Yuri Gagarin into space; Gagarin, the first man in space, orbits Earth! May 5, 1961: Shepard becomes the first American to reach space, though he doesn’t orbit; that honor will go to John Glenn on February 20 of the following year.
Enos
On November 21, 1961, 81 was selected as the test subject for the first American to orbit Earth. 81, now called Enos—Hebrew for “man”—ate a breakfast of Jell-O, eggs, and milk, was dressed in his tightly fitted space suit and stitched into the “couch” of his capsule, and was offered some banana pellets as a distraction while a handler inserted a catheter. Enos bit the handler anyway. The capsule was closed and loaded into an Atlas 5 rocket for a scheduled three orbits. Did Enos know the five-hour wait until launch was not another test? That he was selected as the most intelligent chimp in the colony? Early on, Enos had been the most difficult of the chimps; while other apes were tethered to their handlers by one wrist, the fighting-and-biting 81 had required both of his wrists to be tethered. Whether Enos regarded the five-hour wait in the rocket as another test or sensed it was the fulfillment of NASA’s purpose for him (which was a test, too), he remained relaxed, all of his bodily functions reading as normal. Enos achieved a calm dignity through every delay. His self-possession remained through the 6.8 g’s during liftoff and 7.6 g’s as the boosters were jettisoned and the sustainer engine kicked in.
Going into the first orbit, Enos started the Psychomotor tests. The red, white, and blue lights flashed, and Enos quickly pulled the levers. In the first round, he performed as well as he had back at Holloman, receiving many banana pellets for correct responses and only ten shocks for incorrect ones. The shocks were a nuisance, but it was the heat that tested Enos’ self-possession; a malfunction caused the capsule’s temperature to creep up to 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Enos had no choice but to continue with the Psychomotor. Then the Psychomotor malfunctioned. Though Enos performed just as well in round two, the plates on his feet delivered thirty-five shocks; in round three, they gave him forty-one. As the Psychomotor gave shock after shock, President Kennedy joked at a White House press conference that Enos had reported that “everything is perfect and working well.”
The third orbit was cancelled due to the rising temperature. Enos dropped into the Atlantic, where he waited over three hours in the bobbing capsule. His self-possession remained, but it was by now a white-hot, angry thing bent on survival: When the capsule was brought onto the USS Stormes, the NASA men found that Enos had shredded his space suit and removed all the sensors and even pulled out his catheter, the still-inflated balloon be damned. The ribbons that remained of his suit were removed, and he was tethered by both wrists and applauded by the Air Force men on the aircraft carrier’s deck. But Enos’ celebrity would be short-lived: Within three hours, John Glenn was announced as the Mercury astronaut who would be the first American to orbit Earth.
Return
Enos was returned to Holloman, where he no longer endured the terrible tests but was constantly examined. When the men finish with me, perhaps they will return me to the forest, and I will see my sister—who’s no longer an infant. For ten months he submitted to his exams peacefully, often closing his eyes and imagining the forest, a nest of mangrove leaves, his sister’s eyes.
Then he began to feel unwell. The NASA men treated his dysentery with antibiotics. He could see the concern in their strange faces. But within a year of his orbits, which meant little, nothing, to him, the Chimp succumbed: dreams of an unbroken forest, his mother, his sister, and finally, peaceful release.
Patrick Nevins lives with his family in Columbus, Indiana. He is the author of Man in a Cage, available from Malarkey Books.