The Starry-Eyed Rainbow Chimps

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Andre Bertolino

 

       The sky clears. Blazing sun. A sea approaches. The winches creak. He felt the wind behind his ear. He sailed towards land, knowing his peace would not last. The gulfstream helping him along. He had lived as an animal for years continuously in the present. He had watched the sea for many years and had traveled far on waves. They have taken him back to this beach of white sand for a season. He had been there once before but he was a different person then.When you have long traveled across the horizon, you often return with new eyes.

       He sailed past north beach, doing seven knots in ten knots of wind. Striking sail in the Savannah River off Cockspur Island, he motored under highway eighty. On the surface things looked different. Coco’s was an abandoned derelict and Tybee Marina was full of new boats. He motored past the wreckage of a shrimp boat and anchored up the Lazaretto Creek within sight of the docks. Then he rowed his dinghy in for dinner. He had the catch of the day at Bubba Gumbo’s and then made arrangements for dinghy dockage with the dock master. He rowed back to his vessel feeling optimistic. He felt that his situation was the culmination of a grand dream. That he had become the person he had always wanted to be. Simplicity was so difficult to attain.

       Time changes shape. That night he was enveloped in a sound so unusual that he woke and opened the forward hatch to investigate. Standing in his V-berth he saw that as the tide ripped out, multiple floating islands of dead Spartina had collided with his anchor rode. “Marsh wrack,” as the locals called it. He put on a headlamp and a life jacket before grabbing his spare oar. Then he jumped off the bow onto the wrack. It held his weight. He tried to dislodge the wrack from his anchor line with the oar, and failed. He struck at it and ripped at it with his hands, in an ineffective way.

       He heard the howling of a ghostly organ pipe to portside.The bizarre acoustic effect could only be the wind hitting the exhaust pipe of the wrecked shrimper, so he knew that he was dragging fast now. By the light of his headlamp he could see that he was within inches of striking the submerged wreck. He knew he didn’t have much time. He was passing Tybee Marina at three knots backwards. He started his outboard. Idled for a few seconds and opened the throttle. His drift slowed, not because of the five horse engine, but because his twenty-six pound Danforth had caught something hard and heavy in the black mud. It was a chunk of iron from old highway eighty.

       By this point he was within a dozen feet of hitting the fishing pier. He turned the tiller to starboard and swung the sailboat towards Coco’s abandoned docks. Then he grabbed a bow line and jumped overboard. He swam to Coco’s and tied onto a cleat. The island of marsh wrack still wedged between his boat and dock. He used the dock line as a chin up bar to get onto the wrack and back to his vessel. Then he grabbed a stern line and walked onto the wrack, tying onto another cleat. As he stood on the docks in his soaked frosted-doughnut boxers, he saw a family of otters emerge from under the docks. They climbed onto the marsh wrack and looked at his vessel. Then what appeared to be a small child with glowing red eyes hobbled out of the shadows. It was flexing its fingers as if it were testing them. The otters slithered back into the creek. The child-shaped thing was gone when he looked back.

       The next day, when he tried to haul in his anchor he discovered the chunk of iron attached to his Danforth made it too heavy. Bennet came out from the marina and helped him haul in his anchor. Then he moored back in the creek and rowed to the Marina. He tied onto a cleat adjacent to a shipwreck covered in oysters. There was otter feces all over the dock. He walked past Locke’s Boston whaler and Carmen’s rat-infested Trojan full of soda cans. He walked up the plank. He was starving for something he had never had before. Darla was on her way from California. They had met at the marina four years prior. Brought together through the intercession of shrimp and grouper. She quit her job as a trauma social worker when she learned that she could make more money waitressing. He would select CD’s to listen to as they butchered fish.    They were approximately the same age.

       He liked her melancholic baby flapper voice, her moonshine eyes of astonishing mystery, and her cheeks. She like his otherworldly gaze. His face an ancient foreign portrait. They had stayed in touch all these years, stalking each-other’s social media posts. Their reunion occurred at the public docks on Lazaretto. He showed her his antique sloop of a boat and she introduced him to her tricked out Dodge Promaster work van.

       Later that night they met up on the forty-six foot trawler she was renting. They had drinks on the Texas deck. Afterwards she told him, “You should plan on spending the night tomorrow.” He had just started working at the new pizzeria in town. The following night he let himself into her trawler after work. She was already in the master bedroom, wearing a sundress under the covers. They found that they were compatible. He made coffee in the morning. They talked about their goals and desires. They had both lost their only child through the collateral damage caused by divorce and the meddling of the military- industrial complex. It was early June.

       They had dinner at Bubba Gumbo’s and stayed in the trawler for a few days. Then they started camping in the van. The parking lot that was formerly owned by Coco’s was now a free-for-all zone owned by the Georgia port authority. One morning the sailor got up to pee and he saw the childlike thing with red eyes come out of the old jet ski rental building. It was carrying a duffel bag this time. As it came into the light of the streetlamp he could see that it was a grey Rhesus macaque wearing human clothes. The sailor walked up to the chain-link fence. He had always wished he could communicate with animals. The chimpanzee approached with the bag slung over its back. It gently dropped the bag…A constellation of scars showed on its shaved head. A piece of paper rolled out from a slit in the PockPri printer. The macaque removed the piece of paper and fed it through the crack in the locked gate of the chain-link fence.

       The sailor took the paper between forefinger and thumb. Printed on it in Helvetica font was a photograph of him standing on the marsh wrack in front of his sloop with the legend, “Is this boat still for sale? I need a ship. Let’s make a deal.”

       “What’s the deal?” the sailor asked. Its wireless printer began to whir “You take me to Morgan Island to help me free the others. They test things on us there, things they can’t risk testing on Homo-Sapiens. Your Covid vaccines, the Neuralink implants, brain transplants…..we picked you because of your background in zoo-socio linguistics, and your work with the ALF. Help me and you will be paid enough to buy another life. Here are twenty thousand dollars worth of petrified megalodon teeth. You’ll get the other twenty K upon completion of the task.” The chimp with no name opened the duffel bag full of sharp black teeth, to show the human.On its head there was a golden device smaller than a coin.

Fast forward one month.

       A loudspeaker on Paris Island is transmitting an electronic version of “Taps.” It is a spare, mournful call drifting through the dawn. The chimp is on the bow. A note protrudes from the hip-mounted Printer. He swings to the cockpit to hand it to the sailor. There was a miniature sea chart of Beaufort South Carolina and Morgan Island. The first part of the note read, “Drop anchor near Morgan Island and stay with the ship. You don’t want to see what happens next.”

The Sailor was just drinking his coffee. Looking into the distance. By the naked eye the shoreline of Paris Island was just a hem of marsh and Pine. But through the cold glass of the binoculars, shingled roofs could be seen. They had no ornamentation, only the severe geometry of houses built to endure southern heat and salt air.  The Chimp’s augmented eyes had no need for binoculars.The sailor continued reading, “After I leave, keep the engine in Neutral. If I’m not back by tomorrow sail away.”

       The Sailor nodded and took a sip from his mug. He watched the chimp open his gas tank and stick what looked like a toy plastic gun into it. It was a red, electronic water gun with ergonomic grip and auto suction feature for simplified reloading. The chimp borrowed his flare gun and a bandoleer of expired flares. Then it slung a waterproof pack over its shoulder and dropped into an inflatable kayak. He watched the chimp paddle upstream towards Monkey Island and disappear. He refilled his tank from a Midwest can. Hours passed. He followed the chimp’s instructions and anchored near Morgan Island. At noon there were a series of explosions on the island. Black smoke drifted over St. Helena sound. Humanesque screams came from the island and carried over the water. Branches snapped as Rhesus Macaques crashed through the undergrowth. Suddenly there were sixteen of them rushing towards the water. The sailor put down his swim ladder. The chimps swam towards the boat with their prosthetic arms and scrambled aboard. Two of them were baby macaques.  His grey chimp was there with them. There was a buzz in the air as a swarm of silk ghost drones approached.  Three of the chimps joined networks, synchronized and closed their eyes before activating their jammers. The Silk Ghosts performed an about face and flew back to the island. The sailor hauled in his anchor. When the Sailor attempted to set course for a waypoint in the Cooper River he discovered that the noises the Chimps were spewing into the air with their Jammers was also affecting the radio bands that his GPS depended upon for a sense of place. The screen hesitated, lost its fix and drifted. Fortunately the shipping channel was marked, so he was able to navigate back into the Atlantic the old fashioned way.

        They were in the Atlantic Ocean for a couple of days. The Sailor had been feeding them bananas, figs, apples, pears, strawberries and cherries. They had the bond of the sea between them. Looking to make some conversation to ease the tedium the Sailor asked the chimps, “What lies beyond the dome of the sky and who was watching in the time before man existed?”

       The chimps conversed electronically through their mechanical interfaces for a few moments on the topic of their cosmology. A page spooled out. This is what it said.

“The streams of the mist realm gushed into the abyss. Where the ice met the radiant ball of molten lava smoldering in the abyss it thawed, and in the melting waters a being emerged who resembled a chimpanzee vaster than any exoplanet. It had rainbows in its fur and stars in its eyes. It floated through the dark void, through the noxious streams.

 

       It drank from the thundering vortex at the center of it all and grew. It slept, and while it slept, it procreated with itself. From it all simians are descended. The first three were called Vara, Villi and Ve. They were trapped in the eternal void. They saw the flames and the darkness knowing each would be death to them. They saw the tree.

       A stone ball rushed through the void. Beneath the crust rocks boiled and gas seethed. Shapes erupted through the crust. Dense salt water clung to the rolling ball and slimy seaweed.

 

        A tree was at the center of the stone ball holding it together.It was a massive creature. It pushed its roots into the thick stone crust. Its roots reached under meadows and mountains.

       Its colossal trunk was a dense ring of tubes, pulling up a continuous pillar of water to the branches and the canopy. The strength of the tree moved the current of water, up to the leaves, which opened in the light of the glowing ball, mixing light, water, air and earth to make new green substance, moving in the void. The green matter ate light. When light faded, the tree gave it back. It was a nebulous lamp.

       The tree consumed light and was eaten. It nourished and was fed upon. Its vast arteries were swathed in fungus, which fed on the roots. Their mycelium burrowed into the cells themselves and drank life.

       Only occasionally did these thriving thread-creatures push up through the forest floor, or through the bark, to make mushrooms or toadstools, scarlet and leathery, with white warts, pale skinned fragile umbrellas, woody layered protrusions on the bark itself. Or they rose on their own stalks and made puffballs, which burst and spread spores like smoke. They fed on the tree but they also carried food to the tree, fine fragments to be raised in the pillar of water. Some of the spores were released into the void, to travel on vast orbits across space. Vara, Villi and Ve were starry-eyed rainbow chimps. They leapt from their progenitor and swam the ether of the void until they reached the tree.  Then they created the rest of the animals.”

       The Sailor was running out of food for the Macaques. He called up Darla to arrange for a food drop. Next day, Darla pulls up in the Wilson Cemetery nearby where they were camped. She rolls down her window and says, “You better not let these monkeys fuck up my van, I have my whole ass life in here!”

 

       A couple of hikers discovered the charred remains of a boat near the Palmetto trail. The DNR called Detective Auguste Dupin to investigate. The wreckage wasn’t much to look at now, half swallowed by reeds. There wasn’t a name on the stern and the registration numbers were melted. The harbor patrol deputy beside him said, “Coast Guard came through an hour ago, told me this wreck is classified.” Dupin spat into the mud. He walked alongside the wreck, noting the trail of boot prints beside the Simian prints in the mud. They led inland, toward the Awendaw passage, vanishing into the cypress needles.

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    At 5:23 AM on October the 18th 1980 C.E. 45◦ x 43◦ longitude, Andre Bertolino was born foot first, because he’s not a head first kind of guy. He entered this world blue, and then he died. Dr. Thothmos called it “S.I.D.S.” and brought him back to life, because it would make Oneida hospital look bad if people died there for no apparent reason, other than a meaningless acronym. Besides it was a matter of national security. American children are an asset, who else is going to fight our wars for us? Many ancient cultures would have just let Andre die, saying “this kid is obviously never going to fight our wars for us, he dies way too easy!”

     Andre has always loved food. His first word was, “cookie.” Not “mom” or “dad” or “baba.” In most other areas he was a perfectly normal Earth-born human child. Now he is 46 years old and six feet tall. He has done a few art shows and some people have said they liked them, which was very nice of them but it didn’t pay the bills. So, he has worked as a Chef for 25 years. 
    He has won many awards, including the prestigious “employee of the month award.” He is composed of enough water to fill a ten gallon barrel, sufficient fat for seven cakes of soap, enough carbon for nine thousand pencils, enough phosphorus to make twenty thousand match heads, plenty of magnesium for one dose of salts, enough iron to make one medium sized nail. Ample lime to whitewash a chicken coop and an adequate amount of Sulfur to rid one dog of fleas. He lives & works in Charleston S.C. If you look hard enough you can find his poetry, Journalism and fiction in the annals of Hart magazine, Messing Around in Boats and Black Petals Magazine. To see more of his fine art resume visit Aerosoloncanvas.blogspot.com. See his You-tube channel @BlaQBeardFeralScoundrel