Enjoy our third weekly installment of “Why We Like It.” Our first and second posts explain what it’s all about, so scroll down and check those out. This week, we ran into fiction writer and PhD student Leah McCormack at the Cincinnati Zoo, wearing a hi-tech headband, talking excitedly to the simians. We asked the gorillas to transcribe what she was saying, and this is what they typed:
Leah McCormack: I recall last year an animated conversation among some graduate-student volunteers about a story submission: According to them, the piece was, in a word, fantastic. The narrator was a gorilla. I was, to say the least, intrigued. The manuscript had passed through the volunteers’ hands and was being considered by the genre editors.
That story, “Something Ancient” by Brian Beglin, appeared in the Summer 2010 issue. It is indeed fantastic—and funny and poignant and heartbreaking. Like his father and grandfather before him, Roger (the gorilla) is outfitted with an electronic headband that allows him not only to communicate with humans but to work and live alongside them. Worn since childhood, the headband (or “rim”) has undermined Roger’s animal instincts, his gorilla identity, and he must negotiate life in the margins, just outside whatever it means to be human and whatever it means to be simian. Is love human? Is aggression not? Are words more telling than acts? “Something Ancient” asks of us these things—and offers new, and unsettling, insights into what makes us who we are.
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