Chapter 5: Tuesday, Oct. 10

In other words, we still have in residence a number of troglodytes. To oversee them we appointed Dr. Angela Simone as the Rudy and Phyllis Stein Keeper of Great Apes, the endowed position Mr. Drex occupied. A well-respected primatologist, an attractive young woman with a sympathetic manner, Dr. Simone is devoted to her charges and punctilious when it comes to treating them humanely. She realizes that her duties are to be phased out gradually. (What we will do with the position, I'm not sure. Perhaps we could put the occupant in charge of the personnel department I plan to establish for the Museum.)

On the other hand, Dr. Simone may be with us some time. We have not found it easy to "place" the animals. Some of them have been sold or donated to other institutions. You can't give the creatures away to private citizens because, frankly, they don't make good pets. You don't see sensitive-looking people leading them around the streets the way they do with slow greyhounds.

Some of the animals have been habituated back into the wild on an island off the coast of Africa. As an aside, there are times when I think it would be handy if certain people could be habituated back into some wilderness more suitable to their feral natures. I am thinking about people like Malachy Morin, who might benefit from living in a real state of nature. Though, to give credit where credit is due, he has settled down somewhat since his marriage to Amanda Feeney, the Bugle reporter.

The fact remains Mr. Morin should be in jail for his part in the unseemly death of that young woman Elsa Pringle. The man simply does not know how to do anything except hang out with the boys and bluster and bully people around. Or try to. As it stands he has been able, through his cronies, to get himself made a University Vice President with responsibility for museums and other affiliated institutions. He remains my superior on some organizational charts, which are utter fabrications. In reality he is little more than a large nuisance.

The real mystery is why do they keep him around? I've heard unsavory rumors that he has something on someone high up in the Wainscott hierarchy, perhaps on President Twill himself. The man is as thick as thieves with Maria Cowe of the Human Resources office, another person of manifest incompetence.

The fact is, I want to more than hold the line against any University encroachment. For instance, once the chimpanzees are out of the Pavilion, I intend to remove the rest of the primates as well, the people that is. Well, not entirely. What I want to do is to convert the space in the Pavilion into curatorial areas open to the public. Here, at designated times, people would be allowed to watch as the curators tease from the matrix of time and rock and neglect some priceless ancient object, reclaiming beauty and restoring to wholeness at least some fragment of our shattered past.

None of this vision would come to pass, I know, if the University were to succeed in getting its bottom-line, budget-obsessed little bureaucrats in charge here. That's what I am struggling against. That's why these sudden dark happenings are a threat not just to our institutional survival, but to the fulfillment of a necessary dream.

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