Noah and Bubbles

4,300 years after Noah’s Ark and 8 months after Bubbles’ birth, Michael Jackson lay on straw and feces aboard a train bound for Neverland Ranch.

“There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same. He that is once admitted to the right of reason is made a freeman of the whole estate. What Plato has thought, he may think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has befallen any man, he can understand. Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done, for this is the only and sovereign agent.“

Bubbles thought Michael Jackson was insane for riding with him in the chimp cart. Still, the pop star insisted, and whatever he insisted was done, including reading Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Self-Reliance, a gift from Bernard Rollin, the man responsible for much of the additional amendments to the Animal Welfare Act of 1966 when it was renewed in the 1980s. Researchers were unsure whether animals experienced pain. Before 1989, veterinarians were simply trained to ignore animal pain. In the 17th century, René Descartes argued that animals lacked consciousness and therefore did not experience pain or suffering. This is the same person who said, “I think, therefore I am.” Bubbles thought. Bubbled thought a lot. Bubbles was Michael Jackson’s monkey.

“Sha-shamone!” said MJ, rolling around in hay and poop. “This is the funniest book, Bubbles. People don’t understand. This is the best train ride ever!“

Bernard Rollin woke up. He almost hit his head, and wondered, since the other three beds were empty, how long it would have been before someone found him. All you heard was, “Michael!” The train was hysterical, and rightfully so, the Prince of Pop, Michael Jackson, had died, but it was not this noise that woke him. It was a dream.

He saw Noah’s beard in 40 days and 40 nights of rain. The Ark survived relentless tides of apocalyptic proportions, but there was one involuntary spasm that bothered them all; every animal and man chosen by God aboard, the hiccups of a single Chimp.

Bernard looked out the window at the Rockies.

“Your Bubbles,” said Michael Jackson. “Hee-hee!”

Noah’s Ark sailed through Bernard Rollin’s mind like Moses’s basket of palm down the River Nile. It kept the old man up, and whenever he closed his eyes, he saw a chimp about to be thrown into a 40-day rain, perhaps the top of Bubble’s lineage. He tried to distract himself with memories of the 1955 World Series and his beloved Brooklyn Dodgers, but that was long ago, and how fitting it was that the King of Pop, who moved to Los Angeles and brought Bubbles with him with his help, no longer existed either. All he heard was, “Michael!” In 1983, it was all he heard, too.

“Don’t you think that was lovely, or do you think we should do that again?“ asked Michael Jackson during the recording sessions of “There Must Be More to Life Than This.”

To his right was his master, and to his left was Freddie Mercury. Michael Jackson did not ask what Freddie thought, and the mustached, leading man, left. It wouldn’t be until 2014, four years after Michael’s death, that the song was released as part of a Queen box set when Brian May and Roger Taylor realized their great-grandchildren did not have a summer home.

Bubbles was born to wear cosmetics, and if he screamed, they didn’t pass the human test. Bernard, like Michael, was horrified and arranged for both of them to head from Austin, Texas, to Encino, California via train, though Bernard, like Bubbles, thought MJ would sit in first class.

The rain ceased, and Noah’s great Ark struck soil. The clouds separated, and the Lord’s covenant, the rainbow: the Lord’s promise never again to destroy all of life on Earth by flood was fleshed out. Noah was thankful, except for the hiccuping chimp, the one thing they threw overboard and survived. It was the first to see the Lord’s promise, the rainbow.

“Let’s read the Bible, Bubbles, hee-hee! Sha-Shamone!

“Genesis 9:1-7: Noah and the generations of his posterity were required by God to procreate, and not to shed human blood (murder), because humanity was made in the image of God. Jews are forbidden to consume meat with the blood in it, but Bnei Noah Noahidism are allowed the blood of a living animal (Maimonides, Laws of Kings and Wars, Chapter IX Law 10). While the term covenant “usually implies a reciprocal bond, both parties to which come under obligations by it, each to the other. But, in this case, there are no obligations on the part of man or of the creatures. This covenant is God’s only. Sha-Shamone! Wasn’t that nice, Bubbles?”

This gave Noah enough strength after 40 days of rain and night to kill this hiccuping chimpanzee that had disturbed and disrupted his saving of all life on Earth from the flood. However, as he raised his axe, Noah was burned by the rainbow, or as it came to represent, the Seven Laws of Noah, specifically the sixth: Not to eat flesh torn from a living animal. Noah planned to eat this hiccuping chimp he called Bubbles because of the bubbles around its mouth.

“Hee-hee!“ said Michael Jackson. “Sha-shamone!“

The Lord spoke to Noah, and he spared the hiccuping chimp from his sacrifices after the flood.

“Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth,” said the Lord. “Leave Bubbles alone. He has a part to play.”

As early as ancient Greece and Rome, it was said that Noah was gifted and cursed with being the first man to taste wine and become a drunkard. Some excused his behavior because he was the first to discover the effects of wine; others, especially his son, Canaan, directed his own curse at the footsteps of his father’s nakedness. According to the gospel: Genesis 9:24–27: “And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done unto him.”

After Michael Jackson’s death, Bubbles was made to sweep the hallways and his Neverland bedroom on roller skates. There, he saw the child from Home Alone in Michael Jackson’s bed. Bubbles was pushed out of the room and heard someone say, “Sha-shamone!” though his owner was dead.

It was the weirdest dream Bernard Rollin ever had. The train stopped in Denver, and he needed to transfer to Fort Collins, but Noah’s Ark and the chimp made him think. What can snow not stop?