GENEVIEVE, The Story of a Young, Purple Gorilla who Overcomes Loss and Achieves Self-Awareness (by Karen)

A Note from Karen: I presented this bit of short fiction at the 2014 Artist, interrupted performance at Liberty Park in Salt Lake City. I hope you find these photos of my reading as humorous as I do.

She lay asleep in a transparent sphere. Was it the hamster's wheel? Or her cage? Machine guns. Phft! Pft! Phft-ft-ft-ft-ft-ft-ft! Ksh!Ksh!Ksh! Shattered. I finally understand now what it was, or what it suddenly wasn't: a glass egg.

And where were you, Parent/Guardian, when it happened?

Genevieve stepped out, and, in a moment, grew so tall, I nearly called her Alice. She brushed off the residual glass, dust now, and entered her new world.

“We are descending into Las Vegas!”

“That's not a metaphor!”

Gen paid no attention to the asinine dialogue of the gun-wielding barbarians who had both attacked and freed her. Though shrinking now, they continued to fire, pricking her heel with dainty lead rounds. (This eventually lead to a small rash, but she took no notice of it.) Her life moved at a much slower rate now than did theirs. She did not see them knit huts and toboggans out of their own hair to protect themselves from the eternal winter caused by her shadow.

Neither did she observe their great, sliding migration from the grass between her feet to a booming new Casino village, which, by the time you finish reading this sentence, will have developed into the neonic, metropolis founded in the large geographical indentation formerly known as Gen's first footprint.

Gen's new world was warm. She lifted her face to the sun. She took her second step, and her third and so on.

The space was vast. I can't say how vast, for Gen had no instruments of measure. Neither did she care to question space. For all she knew, the potential to travel forward, one foot after the next, was infinite. Having very little interest in what lay to her right or left, her awareness was singular in dimension, as was her transportation. Gen trod faithfully toward one point of light without evaluation, without comparison, without distraction.

The Sun conveyed itself mechanically along its curved track. It cared nothing for Gen's steady conviction. Meanwhile, her mind contained a single repeated wave of thought. It was not a word, for, for Gen, the only known member of a new species, thought was neither limited nor liberated by word. However, for the sake of story-telling, I will paraphrase: “come.” And the chant was something like: I come, I come, I come.

But she couldn't keep up. The Sun was too fast. Gen's sudden cognizance of her unrequited love comprised her second thought: “go.” Now her chant was a plea, Not-go, Not-go, Not-go! And her world changed.

I would call it darkness, but Gen knew nothing of darkness. As I said before, she knew only Come and Go. But she comprehended now that Go resulted in a new something, a thought I shall call, End.

And how long stood she paused in this End?

Gen had no means for the measurement of time. Frankly, she had not had the time for it. You humans have had the advantage of thousands of years to develop time as you know it in the Twenty-First Century. At first, time was represented by only two recurring periods: light and darkness. Then mankind divided time into days and years—simple measurements defined by earth's relationship to the sun. When the rate of food production be came constant and dependable, each day was subdivided into breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Hours were later invented to make people to feel guilty for showing up late to the cathedral. Then someone came up with minutes in time to please all those people at factories who needed more holes punched in their lives. Seconds were for olympians, and nanoseconds for commanders of the U.S.S. Enterprise.

Coincidentally, Gen's next learning step was to comprehend time. She did so in thoughts I shall term, Then and Now. “Then: Sun, Come, Warm. Now: Not-Sun, Not-Come, Not-Warm.”

At this point, dancer, Angela Green, performed a structured
improvisation as a brief accompaniment to my work.

Feeling warm Then had been an abstract, spiritual experience. But this new sensation, Not-Warm, was strictly physical—it caused her to notice, for the very first time, that she had her own tangible form. Her appendages became increasingly not-warm, beginning with the digits. Then her center felt it. She studied movement next: reach, flex, twist, bend, swing, wiggle. She repeated her experiments with acceleration. Movement and touch meant understanding the ground beneath her hairy, purple feet. It was diverse: sometimes wet, sometimes hard, sometimes soft and tickley. Thus, she discovered Texture, Friction, and finally, Sweat.

Sweat inspired in Gen a new emotion that I have struggled to distill. It was something like Work, and something like Hope. She moved faster and faster—how much warmth could she produce on her own? She was determined to know. We might call her newest thought, Agility. She pushed that thought into the sky and pulled it down again, stretching it into an arc, a spiral, a diamond, and  a sequence of asymptotic fractals of Hausdorff dimension log 3 over log 2.

That's when Gen collapsed. She was down on four limbs. Another thought came to her, she named it after its sound, [inhale-exhale, inhale-exhale]. It was her first word. She used it again to ask herself something like, “How long had [inhale-exhale, inhale-exhale] been going on?” Was it only part of Now or had she done it even Then? She couldn't recall, and so she laughed at the resulting thought: her own Ignorance. Her laughter echoed so she laughed again and again. I can't say how long and loud she laughed. But think, if you were truly alone, truly unhindered by social approbation and sanction, to what depth and breadth would you laugh at the world's first joke?

Gen's joviality was finally interrupted by the return of the sun. First, she sensed a change in the atmosphere. What was it? She brought a hairy, purple hand to her face—that's when she discovered her eyes. She had never used them as yet. She pushed them open one at a time. Ah—Sight! Look, there it was. It was smaller than she expected, and her attempt to observe it directly was unpleasant. She smiled and forgot the sun, becoming immediately occupied with introducing herself to all the other purple gorillas standing evenly-spaced throughout that public park who had just opened their eyes for the very first time.