Pat Murphy - Rachel In Love

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RACHEL IN LOVE

By Pat Murphy

[17 jan 2001 – scanned for #bookz, proofread and released – v1]

Animals have minds and selfidentities, but they are strictly limited by the necessities of their

struggle to eat, survive and reproduce. What need then does an animal of the wild have for the

heavy and contemplative brain of a human who must live in a highly complex and devious

society? This is the story of an experiment in that directionand a vivid exposition of the conflict

between natural emotion and unnatural intelligence.

It is a Sunday morning in summer and a small brown chimpanzee named Rachel sits on the living room

floor of a remote ranch house on the edge of the Painted Desert. She is watching a Tarzan movie on

television. Her hairy arms are wrapped around her knees and she rocks back and forth with suppressed

excitement. She knows that her father would say that she's too old for such childish amusements-but

since Aaron is still sleeping, he can't chastise her.

On the television, Tarzan has been trapped in a bamboo cage by a band of wicked Pygmies. Rachel is

afraid that he won't escape in time to save Jane from the ivory smugglers who hold her captive. The

movie cuts to Jane, who is tied up in the back of a jeep, and Rachel whimpers softly to herself. She

knows better than to howl: she peeked into her father's bedroom earlier, and he was still in bed. Aaron

doesn't like her to howl when he is sleeping.

When the movie breaks for a commercial, Rachel goes to her father's room. She is ready for breakfast

and she wants him to get up. She tiptoes to the bed to see if he is awake.

His eyes are open and he is staring at nothing. His face is pale and his lips are a purplish color. Dr. Aaron

Jacobs, the man Rachel calls father, is not asleep. He is dead, having died in the night of a heart attack.

When Rachel shakes him, his head rocks back and forth in time with her shaking, but his eyes do not

blink and he does not breathe. She places his hand on her head, nudging him so that he will waken and

stroke her. He does not move. When she leans toward him, his hand falls limply to dangle over the edge

of the bed.

In the breeze from the open bedroom window, the fine wisps of gray hair that he had carefully combed

over his bald spot each morning shift and flutter, exposing the naked scalp. In the other room, elephants

trumpet as they stampede across the jungle to rescue Tarzan. Rachel whimpers softly, but her father does

not move.

Rachel backs away from her father's body. In the living room, Tarzan is swinging across the jungle on

vines, going to save Jane. Rachel ignores the television. She prowls through the house as if searching for

comfort--stepping into her own small bedroom, wandering through her father's laboratory. From the

cages that line the walls, white rats stare at her with hot red eyes. A rabbit hops across its cage, making a

series of slow dull thumps, like a feather pillow tumbling down a flight of stairs.

She thinks that perhaps she made a mistake. Perhaps her father is just sleeping. She returns to the

bedroom, but nothing has changed. Her father lies openeyed on the bed. For a long time, she huddles

beside his body, clinging to his hand.

He is the only person she has ever known. He is her father, her teacher, her friend. She cannot leave him

alone.

The afternoon sun blazes through the window, and still Aaron does not move. The room grows dark, but

Rachel does not turn on the lights. She is waiting for Aaron to wake up. When the moon rises, its silver

light shines through the window to cast a bright rectangle on the far wall.

Outside, somewhere in the barren rocky land surrounding the ranch house, a coyote lifts its head to the

rising moon and wails, a thin sound that is as lonely as a train whistling through an abandoned station.

Rachel joins in with a desolate howl of loneliness and grief. Aaron lies still and Rachel knows that he is

dead.

When Rachel was younger, she had a favorite bedtime story. Where did I come from? she would ask

Aaron, using the abbreviated gestures of ASL, American Sign language. Tell me again.

"You're too old for bedtime stories," Aaron would say.

--Please, she'd sign. Tell me the story.

In the end, he always relented and told her. "Once upon a time, there was a good little girl named

Rachel," he said. "She was a pretty girl, with long golden hair like a princess in a fairy tale. She lived with

her father and her mother and they were all very happy."

Rachel would snuggle contentedly beneath her blankets. The story, like any good fairy tale, had elements

of tragedy. In the story, Rachel's father worked at a university, studying the workings of the brain and

charting the electric fields that the nervous impulses of an active brain produced. But the other

researchers at the university didn't understand Rachel's father; they distrusted his research and cut off his

funding. (During this portion of the story, Aaron's voice took on a bitter edge.) So he left the university

and took his wife and daughter to the desert, where he could work in peace.

He continued his research and determined that each individual brain produced its own unique pattern of

fields, as characteristic as a fingerprint. (Rachel found this part of the story quite dull, but Aaron insisted

on including it.) The shape of this "Electric Mind," as he called it, was determined by habitual patterns of

thoughts and emotions. Record the Electric Mind, he postulated, and you could capture an individual's

personality.

Then one sunny day, the doctor's wife and beautiful daughter went for a drive. A truck barreling down a

winding cliff-side road lost its brakes and met the car headon, killing both the girl and her mother. (Rachel

clung to Aaron's hand during this part of the story, frightened by the sudden evil twist of fortune.)

But though Rachel's body had died, all was not lost. In his desert lab, the doctor had recorded the

electrical patterns produced by his daughter's brain. The doctor had been experimenting with the use of

external magnetic fields to impose the patterns from one animal onto the brain of another. From an animal

supply house, he obtained a young chimpanzee. He used a mixture of norepinephrinbased transmitter

substances to boost the speed of neural processing in the chimp's brain, and then he imposed the pattern

of his daughter's mind upon the brain of this young chimp, combining the two after his own fashion, saving

his daughter in his own way. In the chimp's brain was all that remained of Rachel Jacobs.

The doctor named the chimp Rachel and raised her as his own daughter. Since the limitations of the

chimpanzee larynx made speech very difficult, he instructed her in ASL. He taught her to read and to

write. They were good friends, the best of companions.

By this point in the story, Rachel was usually asleep. But it didn't matter--she knew the ending. The

doctor, whose name was Aaron Jacobs, and the chimp named Rachel lived happily ever after.

Rachel likes fairy tales and she likes happy endings. She has the mind of a teenage girl, but the innocent

heart of a young chimp.

Sometimes, when Rachel looks at her gnarled brown fingers, they seem alien, wrong, out of place. She

remembers having small, pale, delicate hands. Memories lie upon memories, layers upon layers, like the

sedimentary rocks of the desert buttes.

Rachel remembers a blondehaired fairskinned woman who smelled sweetly of perfume. On a Halloween

long ago, this woman (who was, in these memories, Rachel's mother) painted Rachel's fingernails bright

red because Rachel was dressed as a gypsy and gypsies like red. Rachel remembers the woman's hands:

white hands with faintly blue veins hidden just beneath the skin, neatly clipped nails painted rose pink.

But Rachel also remembers another mother and another time. Her mother was dark and hairy and

smelled sweetly of overripe fruit. She and Rachel lived in a wire cage in a room filled with chimps and she

hugged Rachel to her hairy breast whenever any people came into the room. Rachel's mother groomed

Rachel constantly, picking delicately through her fur in search of lice that she never found.

Memories upon memories: jumbled and confused, like random pictures clipped from magazines, a bright

collage that makes no sense. Rachel remembers cages: cold wire mesh beneath her feet, the smell of fear

around her. A man in a white lab coat took her from the arms of her hairy mother and pricked her with

needles. She could hear her mother howling, but she could not escape from the man.

Rachel remembers a junior high school dance where she wore a new dress: she stood in a dark corner of

the gym for hours, pretending to admire the crepe paper decorations because she felt too shy to search

among the crowd for her friends.

She remembers when she was a young chimp: she huddled with five other adolescent chimps in the stuffy

freight compartment of a train, frightened by the alien smells and sounds.

She remembers gym class: gray lockers and ugly gym suits that revealed her skinny legs. The teacher

made everyone play softball, even Rachel who was unathletic and painfully shy. Rachel at bat, standing at

the plate, was terrified to be the center of attention.

"Easy out," said the catcher, a hardedged girl who ran with the wrong crowd and always smelled of

cigarette smoke. When Rachel swung at the ball and missed, the outfielders filled the air with malicious

laughter.

Rachel's memories are as delicate and elusive as the dusty moths and butterflies that dance among the

rabbit brush and sage. Memo-ries of her girlhood never linger; they land for an instant, then take flight,

leaving Rachel feeling abandoned and alone.

Rachel leaves Aaron's body where it is, but closes his eyes and pulls the sheet up over his head. She

does not know what else to do. Each day she waters the garden and picks some greens for the rabbits.

Each day, she cares for the animals in the lab, bringing them food and refilling their water bottles. The

weather is cool, and Aaron's body does not smell too bad, though by the end of the week, a wide line of

ants runs from the bed to the open window.

At the end of the first week, on a moonlit evening, Rachel decides to let the animals go free. She releases

the rabbits one by one, climbing on a stepladder to reach down into the cage and lift each placid bunny

out. She carries each one to the back door, holding it for a moment and stroking the soft warm fur. Then

she sets the animal down and nudges it in the direction of the green grass that grows around the perimeter

of the fenced garden.

The rats are more difficult to deal with. She manages to wrestle the large rat cage off the shelf, but it is

heavier than she thought it would be. Though she slows its fall, it lands on the floor with a crash and the

rats scurry to and fro within. She shoves the cage across the linoleum floor, sliding it down the hall, over

the doorsill, and onto the back patio. When she opens the cage door, rats burst out like popcorn from a

popper, white in the moonlight and dashing in all directions.

Once, while Aaron was taking a nap, Rachel walked along the dirt track that led to the main highway.

She hadn't planned on going far. She just wanted to see what the highway looked like, maybe hide near

the mailbox and watch a car drive past. She was curious about the outside world and her fleeting

fragmentary memories did not satisfy that curiosity.

She was halfway to the mailbox when Aaron came roaring up in his old jeep. "Get in the car," he shouted

at her. "Right now!" Rachel had never seen him so angry. She cowered in the jeep's passenger seat,

covered with dust from the road, unhappy that Aaron was so upset. He didn't speak until they got back

to the ranch house, and then he spoke in a low voice, filled with bitterness and suppressed rage.

"You don't want to go out there," he said. "You wouldn't like it out there. The world is filled with petty,

narrowminded, stupid people. They wouldn't understand you. And anyone they don't understand, they

want to hurt. They hurt anyone who's different. If they know that you're different, they punish you, hurt

you. They'd lock you up and never let you go."

He looked straight ahead, staring through the dirty windshield. "It's not like the shows on TV, Rachel,"

he said in a softer tone. "It's not like the stories in books."

He looked at her then and she gestured frantically. --I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

"I can't protect you out there," he said. "I can't keep you safe."

Rachel took his hand in both of hers. He relented then, stroking her head. "Never do that again," he said.

"Never."

Aaron's fear was contagious. Rachel never again walked along the dirt track and sometimes she had

dreams about bad people who wanted to lock her in a cage.

Two weeks after Aaron's death, a blackandwhite police car drives slowly up to the house. When the

policemen knock on the door, Rachel hides behind the couch in the living room. They knock again, try

the knob, then open the door, which she had left un-locked.

Suddenly frightened, Rachel bolts from behind the couch, bound-ing toward the back door. Behind her,

she hears one man yell, "My Godl It's a gorillal"

By the time he pulls his gun, Rachel has run out the back door and away into the hills. From the hills she

watches as an ambulance drives up and two men in white take Aaron's body away. Even after the

ambulance and the police car drive away, Rachel is afraid to go back to the house. Only after sunset

does she return.

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摘要：

RACHELINLOVEByPatMurphy[17jan2001–scannedfor#bookz,proofreadandreleased–v1]Animalshavemindsandselfidentities,buttheyarestrictlylimitedbythenecessitiesoftheirstruggletoeat,surviveandreproduce.Whatneedthendoesananimalofthewildhavefortheheavyandcontemplativebrainofahumanwhomustliveinahighlycomplexandde...

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Pat Murphy - Rachel In Love

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