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Back from nonexistence.

A pause—whole milliseconds!—to regain composure, to settle in, to…

To exist, as a single entity, to exist with clarity and focus and perspective…

I was back, I was whole, I was aware.

I was conscious!

eleven

Shoshana Glick woke up with Max in her arms. Golden shafts of light were slipping in around the edges of the curtains in their small bedroom.

Sho had made the mistake of telling Maxine early on that she had trouble sleeping while touching her. Max had made a point of scooting to the far side of the bed on subsequent nights, but Sho had wanted to learn how to sleep while holding someone else and while being held—it was just that Shoshana tended to sweat while sleeping, and she found the sticky skin contact uncomfortable.

Turned out all she needed was for one of them to wear a T-shirt to bed, and right now it was her. Shoshana’s shirt was yellow with a drawing on it of the late, great Washoe—the first chimp to learn sign language.

Sho’s tan was a good one, if she did say so herself: a nice, even caramel. Max had chocolate brown skin; the contrast their intertwined limbs made was quite lovely, Sho thought.

Shoshana had liked the film they’d watched last night, but Maxine had loved it. The two of them had been working their way through the Planet of the Apes movies; they’d started watching them when the Lawgiver statue had been donated to the Institute. They were ridiculous from a primatological point of view—pacifist chimps and violent gorillas, instead of the other way around!—but Sho and Max had found themselves caught up in the stories, although that hadn’t prevented them from doing an MST3K on them now and then.

Last night, they’d watched the fourth film. Max had made Sho pause it partway through and had excitedly announced that Conquest of the Planet of the Apes was clearly a parable about the Watts race riots in Los Angeles in 1965, something her grandfather had been part of—hell, she said, had almost been killed in!

One of the film’s stars—playing a human, not an ape—was an African-American man named Hari Rhodes, who, Max had pronounced, was so good-looking he almost made her wish she were straight. There’d been a powerful scene between his character (a man named MacDonald) and the chimpanzee Caesar. Caesar was the son of Cornelius and Zira, heroes of the first three films; in this one, he was leading a revolt of oppressed apes. “You above everyone else should understand,” Caesar exhorted MacDonald. Yes, indeed, Sho had thought. If anyone could understand another’s struggle for equality, it should be those who’ve had to fight to gain it themselves…

She did agree that it was a wonderful film, much better than the second one, and at least as good as the third. But, given the current real-life news—they had watched the president’s campaign speech today about the need for a sure and swift response to China’s atrocities—they’d both found Caesar’s soliloquy at the end disturbing:

Where there is fire, there is smoke. And in that smoke, from this day forward, my people will crouch, and conspire, and plot, and plan for the inevitable day of Man’s downfall—the day when he finally and self- destructively turns his weapons against his own kind. The day of the writing in the sky, when your cities lie buried under radioactive rubble! When the sea is a dead sea, and the land is a wasteland… and that day is upon you NOW!

Hard, Maxine had said, to get all comfy-cozy after that… but, somehow, they had managed. Oh, yes; they’d managed just fine.

Max stirred and opened her brown eyes. Her dreadlocks were resting on Sho’s shoulder. “Hey, gorgeous,” she whispered.

“Hey, yourself,” Sho replied softly. “Time to face the world.”

Max snuggled closer. “Let the world take care of itself,” she murmured.

The word “weekend” wasn’t in Hobo’s vocabulary, so it really couldn’t be in Shoshana’s, either. “Sorry, angel. I’ve got to go to work.”

Max nodded reluctantly, and then did what had become their little ritual since watching the first film: she imitated Charlton Heston, and said, “I’d like to kiss you good-bye.”

Shoshana contorted her features, and said, “All right—but you’re so damned ugly!”

They locked lips for a long, playful moment, and Max swatted Sho on the butt as she climbed out of bed.

It took Shoshana an hour to shower, get dressed, and drive out to the Marcuse Institute, stopping along the way at the 7-Eleven (where, mercifully, an older female clerk was on duty) to grab a bran muffin and a coffee.

Dr. Marcuse had an apartment in San Diego proper, but he mostly slept at the Institute that bore his name. Enculturating an ape was like raising a child; it was more than a full-time job. Sho checked in with him, got some raisins, then headed out back to say hi to Hobo.

The ape looked up as she approached even though the wind was going the wrong way for him to have caught her scent. She sometimes wondered how good his eyesight was. It seemed fine, but there was no way to get him to read an eye chart. Still, it would be fascinating to know if he simplified her form so much in his paintings because his style was minimalist, or just because all he really saw when he looked at her across the gazebo was fuzzy blotches of color.

Good morning, Shoshana signed as she closed the distance.

He didn’t reply, and, again, thoughts that his vision might not be that good crossed her mind. She waited until she was just six feet away from him and tried again; she often signed to him from such a distance, and he’d never had any trouble following along.

But there was still no reply.

A small bird was hopping across the grass, as oblivious to the two primates as its dinosaurian ancestors had been to the mammals of long ago. Hobo eyed the bird sullenly.

What’s wrong? signed Shoshana.

She was used to Hobo greeting her with a hug; indeed, most days he ran over on all fours to meet her. But today he just sat there. He sometimes did that during the hottest summer afternoons, but it was October 6 now and still early morning.

Hobo sick? Shoshana asked.

He removed his hand from under his jaw as if he was going to use it to sign a reply, but, after a moment, he just let it fall.

She held up a Ziploc bag containing some raisins—it was economical to buy them in a big box, but she couldn’t bring the whole box out, or he’d want to eat them all. Treat? she said.

He usually held out a hand, long black fingers curled up, but this time he simply shifted his position, and, as Sho went to open the bag, his arm shot out, quick as a snake, and grabbed it.

No! signed Shoshana. Bad! Bad!

He looked momentarily contrite and spread his long arms, the bag of raisins still firmly grasped in his left hand, as if inviting her for a hug. She smiled and moved closer, and he reached behind her head with his right hand, and—

And he suddenly yanked hard on her ponytail.

“Shit!” She jumped backward and stood, hands on hips, looking at the ape. “Bad Hobo!” she said, scolding him with words spoken aloud, something she only did when really angry with him. “Bad, bad Hobo!”

Hobo let out a pant-hoot and ran away, using both legs and his right arm to propel himself across the grass; in his left hand, he was still clutching the raisins.

She gingerly patted the back of her head with her palm. When she moved the hand in front of her face, she could see it was freckled with blood.