In the nightmare it was always the mother monkey he faced, not the infants. The mother, with her wild, desperate eyes. He felt what he could think of only as her passion, like a heat emanating. The mother was crazy with love, mad with a singular devotion. All she wanted was the safety of her infant. She would chew off her feet for it. She would do anything.
But she was trapped, simply trapped. He had put her in a cage, and the cage was too strong for her. When he took the baby from her arms, her panic rose so high it could rise no higher; if she knew how to beg she would beg till the end of the world, scream until her throat split. Give me my baby back.
He knew the feeling of loss that would last till she died. He knew it the way he knew a distant country. They had their own customs there.
Chomsky, Rodents
IT WAS ON CAPE COD, in the dump near our summer place, that my husband met Noam Chomsky.
We knew the Chomskys had a house in Wellfleet. The town boasted an impressive roster of leftist intellects. At a pretentious but greasy restaurant we’d seen the dapper Howard Zinn raising his wine glass amid a cluster of ethnically diverse guests. And one weekday night, a bit reluctantly, I went to hear Robert Jay Lifton talk about war atrocities at the public library.
But Chomsky was the only one either of us ever saw at the dump.
In Wellfleet the town dump is practically a local haunt. Because there’s no trash collection in town, most everyone drives to the dump once a week. You pay for a square sticker to put on your windshield, pull into the dirt lot past a guard in a tollbooth and make the rounds, distributing the various parts of your refuse load at different sites according to their nature. A few yards away from the main pit for household garbage sits a small shack full of items that occupy the nebulous space between utility and trash; always it boasts a surfeit of drinking mugs and dusty saucers. There are half-broken, bright plastic toys, chipped portable fans and sun-faded life jackets spotted with mold (my husband, K., snaps these up like they’re bullion). Chomsky was there with a little girl K. said was probably a granddaughter — she was about the right age, at least, and hovered by his side in the way that indicates some proprietary connection.
K. first noticed Chomsky standing at the open door of the junk shed, holding up a weird object composed of interlocking tubes and chambers in a smoky yellow plastic. It took him a couple of sideways glances to be sure, because the last time he’d seen the eminent scholar on video he’d been twenty years younger. Chomsky was trying to find a taker for the large yellow object, which turned out to be a deluxe gerbil condo.
A tall, affable grandfather with gray hair and glasses — he was almost eighty by then — he was presenting the gerbil condo, K. said, with a kind of desperate eagerness to the assembled company, which consisted of my husband, a couple of indifferent teenagers and a cranky old woman who scavenged the dump frequently. Chomsky did not want the gerbil condo to get lost in the dusty saucers and half-broken toys. You could tell, said K., he thought it was a truly good thing, serviceable and worthy.
The cranky old woman drew near, her shrewish face calculating. Did the object have value? She reached out a hand and tapped the bottom as Chomsky held it up. “Good for gerbils and hamsters both,” said Chomsky. “Even mice. Modular and pretty easy to clean.”
The old woman made a sour expression and turned away, muttering about rats.
But Chomsky had not been interested in her patronage anyway, said K. Indeed he had seemed to dismiss her on sight as a less-than-serious prospect. He wanted someone who would appreciate the glorious condo for what it was; he wanted to secure the good opinion of a rational person like him, a person with discrimination and high standards.
K. thought maybe the gerbil or hamster had belonged to the grandchild, and was recently deceased. Was this why Chomsky hesitated to just leave the cage there with the rest of the castoffs? Maybe it was the little girl’s feelings he was trying to protect.
K. himself had no use for the condo, possessing no rodent pets, but he stepped up and pretended to inspect a segment of tubing.
“Oh. Are you Noam Chomsky?” he asked after a minute, as though this were purely an afterthought.
“Yes, yes I am,” said Chomsky, and then returned to showcasing the condo. “Good ventilation — see? And these chambers are for bedding and eating. You put aspen shavings in there. And here’s where you hang the water bottle. The whole assemblage, of course, approximates the animal’s natural environment. Burrows, et cetera.”
“We had a gerbil,” volunteered the little girl.
“Mongolian,” elaborated Chomsky.
“First we had two, but one died,” said the little girl.
“I see,” said K.
“Hamsters — now, if you want to get a hamster, those are good-looking but purely solitary,” said Chomsky, and lowered his voice. “Strictly one to a cage. Or they’ll rip each other’s throats out. But your Mongolians are social.”
“My brother had a hamster,” said the little girl.
“Golden,” concurred Chomsky, nodding. “Your basic Syrian. Most domesticated Goldens are bred down from a single female in Aleppo. In the nineteen-thirties, I believe. ’Course, they were originally exported as research subjects.”
“That hamster choked,” said the little girl solemnly to K. “It choked right to death. On a piece of popcorn. My dad buried it.”
“Hamsters,” said K. “Are those the ones where the males have the prominent. .?”
“I recommend the gerbils,” said Chomsky. K. could tell he was trying to project his voice toward the teenagers, who were holding up a black-and-orange, flame-detailed skateboard (no wheels). He wanted to break it to Chomsky: They were way past gerbils.
“I’d like to take you up on it,” said K. “But my family travels a lot.”
“They do need care and attention,” said Chomsky, a bit punitively.
“You have to clean out the cage all the time or it stinks,” said the girl.
“Also,” said K., “an animal stuck in a box all its life, I’m not sure I’d feel great about that.”
“The Mongolians seem to do well enough,” said Chomsky.
“Herky liked to go out. One time I let him run around and he fell in the garbage can,” said the little girl.
“Herky?” asked K.
“It was short for Hercules.”
“He had no problem making it out of the garbage can then, I guess.”
“I had to pour all the garbage onto the kitchen floor.”
A harassed-looking mother with lank hair appeared in the doorway behind Chomsky, a sleepy, bobble-headed infant strapped to her chest in a padded carrier.
“Can I get through, please?” she asked tersely, in the two seconds before Chomsky noticed. He stepped back, looking past her to the outside and holding high the yellow condo.
“I’ve got a great gerbil house! Up for grabs!”
The harried mother, unimpressed, pushed by him and let the door slam behind her, heading purposefully for a pile of used baby objects. K. wanted to tell her, “Hey! This is Noam Chomsky here! The last American dissident!”