Scene 20

While in the jaws of quiet, high-strung adoration for his sixteen month old daughter, he ruminates on the near absence of his father from her life.

He had seen her only on two vacations: in Halifax the week of her birth and for three weeks in southeastern Pennsylvania two months later.

Somehow he knew the term “genetic memory” and while he was not certain of it’s meaning, he felt it must describe the information that makes gulls fly south, salmon swim upstream to true love.

He wondered after all the unnatural evolution of humanity if there were still some secrets pass on to successive generations.

In those non-verbal, yet lucid moments of exhaustion just before sleep, he sometimes envisioned things happening. Mostly they were everyday events, but due to the sacred clarity of the scenes which, to his knowledge were foreign to him, they were gravely significant.

Could it be that we have all some vision of our ancestors, episodes, none too trivial, of human history encoded dreadfully to our brains?

Have we differentiated too specifically for any of it to became unravelled to us?

Alone, for once, he lay on the corner of the couch. It is hard and aged, but familiar enough to provide comfort. He wraps a small fleece blanket around his forearms so that they are bound together, something he does when he wants to feel cocooned.

He imagines our happy-haired chimpanzee brothers, that he is actually leaning into the soft-solid chest of one, and that he holds that chimp’s child in his arms.

They are all linked. There is nothing to unravel or communicate in speech so they do not need the mental barrier of language, but only the breath between words, the molecules between fingerpads to be humming electrically.