Death Dream of Poe’s Ape
- Sep 20, 2024
- 3 min read
by David Luntz
I had this dream once about an ape playing with a hand grenade. I even wrote a story about it [1]. In the story it’s unclear whether I live or die when the ape pulls out the pin and swallows the grenade. The story had a line that went, “Each passing moment plays its own requiem no matter what we do.” I am not sure what I was trying to say by it. Nor am I sure what the story meant. Maybe the ape represented fate or chance. Maybe the story was about the impossibility of finding the line that separates death, dreams, and sleep.
What I left out of that story was another dream I had where I’d seen a man go into a shower stall and come out an ape. The man’s back and legs were really hairy and I never saw his face, so he might have been an ape all along. But I don’t think so. His spine was too straight. His arms did not sloop toward the ground. Before the dream, I had been reading The Book of Exodus, the part where Moses begs God to let him see His face. God shoved Moses into the cleft of a rock and only revealed His back to him.
God played Moses.
God didn’t play fair.
In one of Poe’s detective stories an ape, an orangutan, kills an old woman with a razor blade and shoves her body up a chimney. The creature had been captured in Borneo and brought to Paris by a sailor who’d locked him up in a closet. I think the sailor wanted to sell him to the Paris Zoo, which is why he’d locked him up in a closet. But I might be remembering the story wrong. Then again, I don’t want to reread it. I like the memory I have of it. It keeps me company like a faithful dog and a warm fire on a cold night. If I read it again, I fear I might be betraying the story, my memory, or maybe myself.
Anyway, the part that’s stayed with me is how the orangutan watches keenly through the keyhole the exact way his captor shaves. Maybe the blade swinging across the man’s neck hypnotized the creature. Maybe he was reminded of the crescent moon gliding through the coconut leaves of the forest from which he’d been stolen. Maybe he yearned to see his real face beneath the fur.
After shaving, the man leaves the room and heads out into nineteenth-century Paris to go about his business. The creature breaks out of the closet and attempts to mimic the act of shaving he’d witnessed. But he was startled by an elderly woman who’d come to clean the room. So, he decapitated her with the razor blade and stuffed her trunk up the chimney. I wonder if the woman ever got to see the ape’s face before she died.
Memory is an eely thing: I may have the events wrong, but Poe’s story has become mine now through decayed memory. Which is to say I see it as clever, even snarky, social commentary illustrating how we try to ape those who abuse and harm us, the inability of civilization to contain its primal instincts, an anticipation of Darwin’s theory of evolution, and the opening scene in Stanley Kubrick’s movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. Those latter readings may be anachronistic. Or a massive reach — even if I have a prehensile grip. But it’s my story now, so I guess it doesn’t matter.
Which brings me to the now of now, which, as we all know, is a kind of eternal future born from an irrevocable past. Which, as I might have said, plays a constant requiem if you know how to listen. A now, too, in which I am trapped inside this dream where I’m lost in a labyrinth of Parisian alleyways where I run into that same ape, or orangutan, loping madly through them — but instead of wielding his razor blade, he’s just swallowed an unpinned hand grenade, and, in order to find out if I’ll ever wake up and get out of that labyrinth, I have no choice but to hug him.
[1] “Death Is Just A Point In Space,” Variant Literature, 2023.
David Luntz’s work is forthcoming or appeared in Post Road, Vestal Review, X-R-A-Y Lit, Bull, Rejection Letters, Maudlin House, Atticus Review, HAD and other print and online journals. More at davidluntz.com Twitter: @luntz_david
