Lady Gaia, as She Drunkenly Lit the Lighthouse
It was summer vacation. Edie came home to Palo Alto after her first year at college. She got home, took a quick shower, then went straight to her favorite spot on the hills behind her house, near Highway 280. It was there on those hills that she spent some of her most tumultuous high school eves. There, she learned to love herself the way she loved the relentless and primordial nature around her.
The breeze was barely blowing on those rolling hills glittering with California’s golden grass. She was surrounded, outnumbered by the dark, mysterious, oily oaks. In the distance, crowning the park, were rows and rows of eucalyptus trees. Further out, beyond Hoover Tower protruding from the campus canopy, beyond the cranes rising from the wooded suburbs, beyond the lumpy coastal ranges, was a small patch of blue that was the San Francisco Bay. The blue of the pacific met the blue of the sky overhead. The cloudless sky bore down oppressively upon her shoulders. Edie shivered.
Her cellphone rang. It was from daddy. Professor Lex was wondering whether or not Edie would be home for dinner. He informed her that her friend Anna had called wondering if they would be getting together that evening. Mother was still in Miami with auntie. He was glad that Edie was home. He missed her. He had a special surprise waiting for her at the house.
“Oh Anna,” thought Edie, with some hint of irritation. If they got together, Zoey and Jenn would certainly join in as well. They would just talk about old high school things. They would make fun of her for her past antics and catastrophes. They would bring up, they always did bring up, that time in 7th grade when she, during gym class, went up to a boy and whispered to him, “I see that you are sweating, I’d like to lick that sweat right off of you,” then proceeded to shout to the rest of the class, “Look! He’s got a boner!” That was not something she liked to be reminded of. It wasn’t as premeditated as the way they made it seem. She wasn’t some heartless bitch. It was an in-the-moment sort of thing...it was something they did together. And now they are making her shoulder all the guilt. Sure, Edie wanted to see the girls. But later.
She loosened her long skinny limbs. She advanced a few yards into the field of dried foxtails and proceeded to pirouette around in the most exaggerated manner. She hadn’t felt this free in a long while. She picked off a sprig and held it in between her teeth. She adjusted her prescription shades a little. Satisfied, she skipped on home.
At home Edie found daddy moving groceries from the car into the house. There was another human with him moving to and fro. It was John! Boner-boy John! “Hey Edie,” daddy called out lightly, “Meet John, my new research assistant. Something tells me you two have already met.” They nodded awkwardly. There was a peculiar glitter in John’s eyes. He was taller than Edie had remembered. His complexion had cleared. His hair was longer. He was wearing glasses. “It’s nice to see you again Edie,” John said. He wiped his sweaty hand on his pants and reached out to shake Edie’s hand. She evaded his handshake and wrapped her arms around his waist, turning her cheek to his shoulder. “It’s really nice to see you here,” she let out quietly. He put his arms around her. He blushed but she couldn’t see.
“John’s a sophomore at Stanford this year,” Professor Lex interrupted, “He’s gonna help me with a new project I’m doing. He was only coming to see my new buddy but has kindly decided to help me do some liftin’.” Edie turned to Professor Lex. She raised her shades so that he could see her wet eyes and blared out, “Daddy!” She ran up to him with arms outstretch, held him tightly, and kissed him on the cheeks, first the left, then the right, and finally one last one in the middle on his fatherly lips. “Oh my darling, oh my joy,” father declared in his slow and deep voice, “It’s not the same without you.”
Inside, Professor Lex got straight to business, lecturing as he led the pair down a long hallway. “John is going to help me with Felix. Actually, if you aren’t too busy, Edie, I want you to help me with Felix too. I want both of you to help me with Felix. He needs attention. He needs friends. He needs lots of other things, bananas, toys, name cards; he needs to be filmed, photographed, measured; he needs to be fed, he needs to be given his medicine, he needs to take his vitamins, he needs to...” the Professor continued for some time longer with the list before suddenly stopping. He turned around with a smile on his face. “But most importantly,” he added, “he needs to be loved.”
John and Edie chuckled a little. “Where is he? I wanna see, I wanna see!” said Edie. Professor Lex turned a door handle to left at the end of the long hall. “Come in quietly,” he warned, “Felix may be asleep.” Indeed it was. Felix was a fully grown male chimpanzee. It lived in a room with nothing but food, toys, a bed, and a red round button on the wall that it knew to press if its toilet broke. The room opened into a tiny courtyard that had high stone walls. A glass wall and a glass door stood between the room and the courtyard.
“He’s beautiful,” remarked Edie. “Was bred especially for the primate language program that I am in charge of,” explained the Professor, “We have a whole list of new ways to teach monkeys to speak. Ask John, he took my class, he’ll tell you all about it.” John smiled. “I’m in,” Edie said, “as long as John fills me in on the scientific bits. I’ll have Felix winning the next National Book Award yet!” The two men laughed at Edie’s over-enthusiasm. “Well then it’s decided. Let’s say goodbye to Felix for now.”
They walked back into the living room. Professor had a meeting to go to. He asked if John had dinner plans. John said no. Professor Lex then turned to Edie, “Why don’t you make something nice for John, a sandwich, a salad, oh and mom made you some cookies before she left. You can drink my white but don’t touch my red.” Before hearing a note of affirmation from Edie he continued, “Great, well, you kids have fun.” With that the Professor jumped into his BMW and zoomed away.
John sat quietly in the kitchen flipping through a magazine as Edie dug through the cupboards and the fridge. Their conversation didn’t amount to much. The clock ticked slowly by. “Something I learned recently,” John began to tell a story, “Well, not too recently, maybe a year or two ago, was that my dad was actually your dad’s colleague from way back when.” The story was going nowhere. Edie squinted; he was trying her patience. “And it turns out that they used to be big time hippies.” She smiled. “And you know,” John continued, “I used to be really against drugs and alcohol and everything but then I wasn’t so much anymore.” Where was this going? They had finished their sandwiches for John spoke slowly. He felt around the chest pocket of his sky blue polo and pulled out a joint. Edie’s eyes lit up. “I still don’t drink. I mean I don’t drink much. But this is a little habit I picked up. A family tradition you might say.”
Edie finally spoke, “Okay, let’s go to my room!” She opened the windows and toweled her door. He stood waiting. She rounded up all her huge fluffy pillows and made them a nest. “Here we go!” she smiled fingers tapping like Monty Burns.
They sat close to each other on the big pillow mounds. There was a makeshift ashtray, an emptied out coin jar, between them. A small fan blew their smoke out the window. Edie pressed lightly a black button on a small white controller and music, nice music, filled the room. “Good stuff,” she assured him as one would a child who had just completed a sand castle. He drifted away to ocean waves.
The sun had nearly set. Edie interjected, “I think you had better go home. I’m getting sleepy. I’m jet lagged still.” John looked at her pleadingly with big wet eyes. He smiled confidently and stood up. He stretched his arms out. He yawned. He backed into the door, somewhat stumbling. Offering her a weak salute his raspy voice gave out a barely audible, “Good night, Edie. Sweet dreams.” As he disappeared, Edie blinked. She spread her body out across all of the pillows. She was surprised at how comfortable she felt with this stranger that she had once offended. She was equally surprised at how well her first day at home went. A for effortless.
The next night Edie was with the girls. “No way! Boner-boy John’s your new boyfriend?” asked Anna in her obnoxiously vivacious manner. “He’s not my boyfriend, you dumbass,” Edie retorted gently, “He’s my dad’s new research assistant.” “My dad sucks,” added Jenn, whose interruption was ignored by Edie and Anna, “He keeps complaining about traffic and gas prices and the environmentalists who are on his back.” Zoey shifted her attention toward Jenn’s new topic. Anna continued, “Well, how about college? Do Harvard boys have tiny penises?” Jenn’s line of thought proved slightly more sophisticated, “I’m like: Dad, you’re the f’ing mayor, why don’t you just put in bus routes to where you want to go. Get rid of those big ass city buses. There aren’t enough people in all of Palo Alto to fill up the big buses. Get smaller van-sized natural gas or low emission hybrid cars. Get rid of the bus stops that are half way in between neighborhoods that people can’t get to. Put in more stops where people can actually walk to. You know, like common sense. He just looks at me like I’m some sort of an alien. He’s like, ‘Jenn, who do you think I am the wonderful Wizard of Oz?’ Bleh.” Zoey consoled her best friend, giving her a friend kiss on her temple. “Thank you, darling, you’re the best,” Jenn said, staring into Zoey’s eyes with love and passion.
Anna asked loudly, “Where is my purse?” Edie pointed toward the door. Anna dug through her purse until she found her little make up kit. She unclasped the compact and flipped open the mirror. There was a little dime bag and she quickly unloaded its contents. She pulled off a thin plastic tube from her make-up brush and used a tiny spatula-like tool to organize her blow into neat white lines. “I went to a talk by this neurologist,” she explained to the group, “who was studying the ‘neuroscience of love.’” The group listened. She continued, “And her finding, after twenty years or whatever of research, was that love is like fucking cocaine. I think she said love is like cocaine and implied that sex is also like cocaine, y’know, under an MRI and shit.” They laughed a little. Anna finished her speech, “I was like, no shit Sherlock, way to waste twenty years of your life.” They passed around the compact. Jenn’s phone buzzed. “Gotta go.” She was already packing up. “I got a date.” The group disapproved. “Shush you! Wish me luck. He’s the greatest man on planet Earth, greater than Superman,” was Jenn’s departing remark.
“Guess who I saw today?” asked Zoey, “Raymond.” Ray was Edie’s high school boyfriend. “Ugh, let’s not talk about him,” was Edie’s gut reaction. “Is he still hot?” wondered Anna. “He’s on steroids now,” answered Zoey. “How do you know? He was always buff. Did you ask him?” asked Anna. “No, but you can totally tell,” replied Zoey. “He broke your heart,” Anna said to Edie, eyebrows raised, lips pouty. “I was young and foolish,” confessed Edie in a dignified tone. “He broke all of our hearts,” added Zoey. They did another line of blow each. “He’s such an animal,” commented Anna. “That was always a part of the appeal though,” said Zoey. “It still kinda is,” giggled Edie and they all broke out into laughter. Some things never change. No matter what happened to them as they grew old and wise, they would always be silly little girls to each other. Anna took out her big box of old Disney tapes and the girls gorged themselves on the untenable romances of their teenage dreams.
Edie kept thinking about John even after he left. She was having fun with him. He taught her all about chimps. They fed Felix, played with it, and taught it new words. They were able to have simple conversations with it. Some days, after John had left, Edie would hang out with Felix alone. She liked to baby talk with animals, calling them uzzy wuzzy fuzzy and such. She held back on such behavior when John was around. At some point he had commented that he found that unattractive and that even to babies, one should speak in proper human tongue. Edie had to satisfy her uzzy wuzzy fix alone. Everything was going fine, thought Edie, except one. She was doing a little more drugs than she would like. She smoked pot when John was around. She snorted cocaine when she was with Anna. There were parties where even more toxins were added into the mixture. Overall all though, her command of her emotions felt much better. She was more stable than she had been for most of her life.
Soon enough, however, Edie began experiencing abnormal mood swings with tiny spikes of manic peaks and depressive troughs. This feeling was familiar. She felt this way all throughout high school. It was like a phantom who had returned. She blamed her corpus callosum as she often had done before. When her passion overtook her reason she blamed her brain for its ill construction. The corpus callosum, as she had learned in her neuroscience class, was the tunnel that connected her left brain hemisphere and her right brain hemisphere. The two spheres had different personalities. Without the tunnel, she would become two different people.
She once saw an experiment once where a person with a malfunctioning corpus callosum would try to do something with his or her right hand only to have his or her left hand do the opposite. One hand would pick up a book while the other batted it down. That’s about how she felt. A searing pain pierced her skull. Being struck by Thor or Zeus would not have hurt worse. She sent John a S.O.S. message. She wobbled and fell to her feet. She held onto Felix for support. Her body throbbed. “I’m mutating!” she said to herself, “I’m growing leafs and tendrils!” Felix said, “Come, daughter. Hold me.” “I’m communicating with the earth!” She squeaked, “I’m becoming one with the earth.” Her chest throbbed; her body was hot and her veins pulsated. She was a blossoming flower under a high definition time lapse. Her skin was green. Her clothes were her flower petals. She shed her petals quickly. The fuzzy feathers of giant dandelions clouded her vision. Her saliva tasted citric like a glass of orange juice. Tiny leathery hands tickled her back and her stomach. A warm thick tongue glazed over her neck. She laughed. She spread her legs wider. A piece of insight was crystalizing in her brain. Mother Earth is actually a man! She wanted to shout, “THIS IS THE TRUTH! MOTHER EARTH IS A MAN!” She looked into the eyes of Mother Earth who was actually a man and it looked like her father. She moaned deeply as her body continued to quiver and convulse. The pain wracking her brain had changed from a sensation to a color. It was completely white but also completely black. “Shouldn’t it be grey?” she wondered. But it wasn’t. It was completely white but also completely black. It was around then that John arrived on the scene.
John’s innards just about fell out of his rear end. It was his years of training as a track and field enthusiast that kept his knees from giving out. He dashed toward the ape and kicked it smack in the face. He roared like a lion and scared the beast off. It went scuttering into the garden. John lifted up Edie and took her to her bed. He wrapped her comforter over her passed out body. Sweat was trickling down from his hair to his chin, from his armpits to his fingertips, and from his groin all the way down to his toe. He was asking himself whether or not to call an ambulance. He allowed himself one glimpse of her body. There were no bruises or anything of the sort. He pushed up her eyelids, mimicking what he had seen on medical TV dramas. It looked fine. Her body had cooled off. She was no longer sweating profusely. Her hair had an oily glean. Her cheeks were full and radiant. He deemed her healthy and concluded that it would not do anyone any good for him to run around shouting monkey rape. His heart was still pumping harder than a train engine. He smoked some pot to calm himself. Sitting there, he waited quietly for Edie to wake up. The pain in his stomach began to subside but it took a long time.
There was a stirring. John hovered over Edie as she mumbled, “Givolve.” “Edie, you’re awake,” he smiled, wiping away a droplet of sweat from her forehead with the back of his hand. She seemed as if she had risen from a thousand year slumber. “I givolved” was all she had to say. “What are you trying to say silly?” John had never been so conscious as then of the words that were falling out of his lips. “Did you just say ‘I evolved’?” She nodded. He frowned, “that’s not what you said. You said ‘I givolved’.” She thought about it a little, shrugged, and put her hand on his cheek, “you came to rescue me!” “What does that mean ‘givolve’?” he was starting to sound like an interrogator. She sat up and enunciated, “‘I Di-gi-volved!’” He still didn’t understand. She rolled her eyes, “I digivolved, like in Digimon, as in I leveled up. Didn’t you ever watch Digimon?” “No,” he was entirely baffled, “Didn’t that come on when we were like sixteen?” “Yeah, so what,” she was about to make him talk to her hand but restrained herself, “I have a younger brother.” John laughed. Edie continued on, “It was amazing. I was in contact with some sort of earth spirit or something. I could understand Felix as well as any human being. There were giant dandelions. I was a flower and grew and shed petals. I experienced the life and death of a plant in an instant, John, I know what it’s like to be a plant feeding on the sun and the air and the water and the earth!” The mention of the ape’s name chilled John’s heart, his cheeks flushed and he froze in place. Edie comforted him with her touch. “It’s okay,” she assured him, “It was a religious experience.” John wasn’t sold. “Well, I’m gonna go check up on Felix to make sure you didn’t break his neck or anything,” she said sternly. Her lucidity frightened John. “Stay here,” she commanded.
She got up and put on her clothes as if John wasn’t even there. She walked out and he followed her. She had expected as much and so did not give him another look. They entered the ape’s chamber. Felix was running around frantically. As they entered, it forcefully smashed the broken toilet button. It threw bananas at the two humans until Edie called out its name. She looked at it the way a mother looks at a misbehaving child. It shrunk and curled up into a fetal ball. They walked up to it. Edie bent over to examine the ape’s forehead. It looked fine. There seemed to be nothing broken. She let out a sigh of relief and John put his hand on her shoulder. He inched a little closer and held her hand. She smiled back at him, apparently proud of his generosity or at least open mindedness. He then tugged her by her hand. The jolt threw her off balance. He put his other hand around her back, holding her up. She hesitated for a moment not knowing whether to protest. On one hand this man cared for her and came to rescue her. On the other hand, his present action was unthinkably wrong. In her moment of hesitation he pressed his lips onto hers. “I love you,” he said. “I love you too,” she replied. He smiled triumphantly even as he was kissing her.
Something Professor Lex had failed to mention to his students in his vivid exposition of the nature of the chimpanzee was that a fully grown male member of the species had the strength, and indeed has used such power in the past, to rip entire limbs from the human body. A fiery explosion of jealousy blasted forth from Felix’s eyes. It jumped up baring its feral fangs and drove those fangs deep into John’s neck. A wash of red flooded from his internal carotid. It grabbed John’s hand and with a combination of gnawing and pulling tore it cleanly off of the man’s torso. Edie was kicking and screaming. John was losing blood so quickly that he his world turned black within seconds. Edie’s foot slammed into one of Felix’s eyes. It didn’t do much for the victim was blind with rage anyhow. The destruction of its two most beloved creatures required total insanity on the part of the ape. Grief and remorse from this act would not erase itself from its mind for years to come. But it was too late to think of that now. It threw its body onto Edie and using its enormous strength tore her apart ear by ear, arm by arm, her guts lay wet on the floor, her lungs deflated from puncture damage and hissed out her reserve of oxygen.
The door was still open and Felix ran for its life. It ran from the house and ran from the town. Daddy came home to a blinking light warning him that the monkey toilet was broken. Instead of a broken toilet, however, he found two dead bodies. He sent a million armed men after the fugitive ape. Felix fed from brooks and ate dog food. It ran and ran, seemingly guided by some divine instinct carrying it south beyond San Jose, beyond Salinas, then out east past Bakersfield until it found refuge at a chimpanzee farm there. The chimpanzees at the farm, who were all busy training and learning circus tricks, welcomed the academian ape with wild hoots and hollers. The farm keeper, a tanned man named Stewart, also came to greet the ape, of whose reputation he had known from the evening news. Stewart greeted Felix with a revolver behind his back. There was a bounty out on the killer ape. “The Feds would come looking for this thing at his farming sooner or later,” thought Stewart, “There’s no point trying to save it.” But then some bug, some error, occurred among Stewart’s billions of modest synapses, call it compassion perhaps, and he stuck the revolver back into his pants. He hugged the creature and whispered, “May God have mercy upon your soul. You’re one of us now.”