Free Me Cheeta by Cheeta Page A

foolish little thing in ’33, and I’m sorry to have to admit, I began to feel the whole process of rehabilitation weigh a little heavy on me.
    If I squeezed my head against the mesh at one corner of our shelter I could see a section of window where the sky mooched from gray to white. This was the corner the others would vacate when I approached, where I had banked up straw for myself so I could look out and dream about America. Out there were the sidewalks with humans who knew your name, the rolling shelters and the great towers, and Tony Gentry sitting in the White Rose Tavern with a fan of cards. I had no idea whether the other animals feared or yearned for the other side of the mesh; maybe it was just me who’d been corrupted by the energy of America on my walk through Manhattan. But I thought I could read messages of sorrowin the toes of the macaques where they gripped the wire, in their sudden maniacal pacing and the listlessness of their unceasing masturbation.
    Several times a day Trefflich would enter our gallery of shelters and remove one of us for a short period. Only once or twice was it a chimp, and never a macaque. Most often it was one of the parakeets, or one of the many little ratlike things that snuffled around in transparent shelters, twitching their flamboyantly excessive ears from time to time but never doing anything else. Nearly always the parakeets and big-eared rat-things came back, but occasionally, I noticed, they didn’t, and I wondered about the fate of these non-returnees. Had they completed their rehabilitation? In which case, what had happened to them? Were they just cast back into the jungle and left to take their chances? I couldn’t really see the big-eared rat-things having that much fun back in the jungle: I’d have eaten one myself. And this thought made me nervous. There were pythons and leopards in Trefflich’s rehab center and they’d have to be eating something. And if the parakeets were python food, wasn’t it possible that the same thing applied to us? What the hell was all this rehabilitation
for?
What was the
point
of animals?
    Time passed. We slept and masturbated and nothing happened, except that I became more and more obsessed by these profound philosophical questions, as unanswerable as the mesh of our shelters was unbreachable. I was compulsively bashing my head against them as usual one morning when another occurred to me. Why was Trefflich’s helper struggling with one of the macaques in the shelter opposite us? These shelters of ours, I should explain, had an outer and an inner section. When Trefflich or his boy came to remove our excrement (what did they want with it? Why were they harvesting it?) we would be hustled into the inner section behind a second door, and I now saw that this particular macaque hadtrapped itself in the mesh. Its paw had gone right through the diamond of wire, trapping its wrist, and the boy was having to shove hard at the door to squeeze the now-screaming monkey’s pinky-gray fingers back through. But as he did so, he simultaneously swung the door back onto himself—it banged painfully against his head and a dozen macaques scampered out past him and into the space between the shelters. Hello, I thought.
    They’re not stupid, rhesus monkeys. I believe they share something like 92 percent of their DNA with chimpanzees. They may be inscrutable and standoffish, and hardly pleasant to look at, with their pale ginger fur and pleasureless frowns—I could never see Johnny’s fourth wife, Beryl, without being reminded of a macaque—but they get things done. In a group, they have an almost insect-like singleness of will. Thick as thieves, they consulted briefly in a knot, then scattered themselves across the room, working on the bolts of the outer doors of the other macaque shelters. Of course, the door of the room itself was closed, and I doubted they would have the smarts to get that open, but I applauded and pant-hooted in excitement