Points of Departure: Stories

by Pat Murphy

  He does not come to her. She looks over her shoulder and he is still sitting on the couch, watching her through half-closed eyes. He reaches over and picks up a magazine filled with pictures of naked women. His other hand drops to his crotch and he is lost in his own world.

  Rachel howls like an infant who has lost its mother, but he does not look up. He is staring at the picture of the blond woman.

  Rachel runs down dark corridors to her cage, the only home she has. When she reaches the corridor, she is breathing hard and making small lonely whimpering noises.

  In the dimly lit corridor, she hesitates for a moment, staring into Johnson’s cage. The male chimp is asleep. She remembers the touch of his hands when he groomed her.

  From the corridor, she lifts the gate that leads into Johnson’s cage and enters. He wakes at the sound of the door and sniffs the air. When he sees Rachel, he stalks toward her, sniffing eagerly. She lets him finger her genitals, sniff deeply of her scent. His penis is erect and he grunts in excitement. She turns and presents herself to him and he mounts her, thrusting deep inside. As he penetrates, she thinks, for a moment, of Jake and of the thin blond teenage girl named Rachel, but then the moment passes. Almost against her will she cries out, a shrill exclamation of welcoming and loss.

  After he withdraws his penis, Johnson grooms her gently, sniffing her genitals and softly stroking her fur. She is sleepy and content, but she knows that they cannot delay.

  Johnson is reluctant to leave his cage, but Rachel takes him by the hand and leads him to the janitor’s lounge. His presence gives her courage. She listens at the door and hears Jake’s soft breathing. Leaving Johnson in the hall, she slips into the room. Jake is lying on the couch—the magazine draped over his legs. Rachel takes the equipment that she has gathered and stands for a moment, staring at the sleeping man. His baseball cap hangs on the arm of a broken chair, and she takes that to remember him by.

  Rachel leads Johnson through the empty halls. A kangaroo rat, collecting seeds in the dried grass near the glass doors, looks up curiously as Rachel leads Johnson down the steps. Rachel carries the shopping bag slung over her shoulder. Somewhere in the distance, a coyote howls, a long yapping wail. His cry is joined by others, a chorus in the moonlight.

  Rachel takes Johnson by the hand and leads him into the desert.

  A cocktail waitress, driving from her job in Flagstaff to her home in Winslow, sees two apes dart across the road, hurrying away from the bright beams of her headlights.

  After wrestling with her conscience (she does not want to be accused of drinking on the job), she notifies the county sheriff.

  A local newspaper reporter, an eager young man fresh out of journalism school, picks up the story from the police report and interviews the waitress. Flattered by his enthusiasm for her story and delighted to find a receptive ear, she tells him details that she failed to mention to the police: one of the apes was wearing a baseball cap and carrying what appeared to be a shopping bag.

  The reporter writes up a quick humorous story for the morning edition, and begins researching a feature article to be run later in the week He knows that the newspaper, eager for news in a slow season, will play a human-interest story up big—kind of a Lassie, Come Home with chimps.

  Just before dawn, a light rain begins to fall, the first rain of spring. Rachel searches for shelter and finds a small cave formed by three tumbled boulders. It will keep off the rain and hide them from casual observers. She shares her food and water with Johnson. He has followed her closely all night, seemingly intimidated by the darkness and the howling of distant coyotes. She feels protective toward him. At the same time, having him with her gives her courage. He knows only a few gestures in ASL, but he does not need to speak. His presence is comfort enough.

  Johnson curls up in the back of the cave and falls asleep quickly. Rachel sits in the opening and watches dawn light wash the stars from the sky. The rain rattles against the sand, a comforting sound. She thinks about Jake. The baseball cap on her head still smells of his cigarettes, but she does not miss him. Not really. She fingers the cap and wonders why she thought she loved Jake.

  The rain lets up. The clouds rise like fairy castles in the distance and the rising sun tints them pink and gold and gives them flaming red banners. Rachel remembers when she was younger and Aaron read her the story of Pinocchio, the little puppet who wanted to be a real boy. At the end of his adventures, Pinocchio, who has been brave and kind, gets his wish. He becomes a real boy.

  Rachel had cried at the end of the story and when Aaron asked why, she had rubbed her eyes on the backs of her hairy hands. I want to be a real girl, she signed to him. A real girl.

  “You are a real girl,” Aaron had told her, but somehow she had never believed him.

  The sun rises higher and illuminates the broken rock turrets of the desert. There is a magic in this barren land of unassuming grandeur. Some cultures send their young people to the desert to seek visions and guidance, searching for true thinking spawned by the openness of the place, the loneliness, the beauty of emptiness.

  Rachel drowses in the warm sun and dreams a vision that has the clarity of truth. In the dream, her father comes to her. “Rachel,” he says to her, “it doesn’t matter what anyone thinks of you. You’re my daughter.”

  I want to be a real girl, she signs.

  “You are real,” her father says. “And you don’t need some two-bit drunken janitor to prove it to you.” She knows she is dreaming, but she also knows that her father speaks the truth. She is warm and happy and she doesn’t need Jake at all. The sunlight warms her and a lizard watches her from a rock, scurrying for cover when she moves. She picks up a bit of loose rock that lies on the floor of the cave. Idly, she scratches on the dark red sandstone. A lopsided heart shape. Within it, she awkwardly prints: Rachel and Johnson. Between them, a plus sign.

  She goes over the letters again and again, leaving scores of fine lines on the smooth rock surface. Then, late in the morning, soothed by the warmth of the day, she sleeps.

  Shortly after dark, an elderly rancher in a pickup truck spots two apes in a remote corner of his ranch. They run away and lose him in the rocks, but not until he has a good look at them. He calls the police, the newspaper, and the Primate Research Center.

  The reporter arrives first thing the next morning, interviews the rancher, and follows the men from the Primate Research Center as they search for evidence of the chimps.

  They find monkey shit near the cave, confirming that the runaways were indeed nearby. The reporter squirms on his belly into the cave and finds the names scratched on the cave wall. He peers at them. He might have dismissed them as the idle scratchings of kids, except that one of the names matched the name of one of the missing chimps.

  “Hey,” he calls to his photographer, “Take a look at this.”

  The next morning’s newspaper displays Rachel’s crudely scratched letters. In a brief interview, the rancher had mentioned that one of the chimps was carrying a bag.

  “Looked like supplies,” he had said. “They looked like they were in for the long haul.”

  On the third day, Rachel’s water runs out. She heads toward a small town, marked on the map. They reach it in the early morning—thirst forces them to travel by day.

  Beside an isolated ranch house, she finds a faucet. She is filling her bottle when Johnson grunts in alarm.

  A dark-haired woman watches from the porch of the house. She does not move toward the apes, and Rachel continues filling the bottle. “It’s all right, Rachel,” the woman, who has been following the story in the papers, calls out. “Drink all you want.”

  Startled, but still suspicious, Rachel caps the bottle and, keeping her eyes on the woman, drinks from the faucet.

  The woman steps back into the house. Rachel signals to Johnson, telling him to hurry and drink. She turns off the faucet when he is done.

  They are turning to go when the woman emerges from the house carrying a plate of tortilla
s and a bowl of apples.

  She sets them on the edge of the porch and says, “These are for you.”

  The woman watches through the window as Rachel packs the food in her bag. Rachel puts away the last apple and gestures her thanks to the woman. When’ the woman fails to respond to the sign language, Rachel picks up a stick and writes in the sand of the yard. “THANK YOU,” Rachel scratches, then waves good-bye and sets out across the desert. She is puzzled, but happy.

  The next morning’s newspaper includes an interview with the dark-haired woman. She describes how Rachel turned on the faucet and turned it off when she was through, how the chimp packed the apples neatly in her bag and wrote in the dirt with a stick.

  The reporter also interviews the director of the Primate Research Center. “These are animals,” the director explains angrily. “But people want to treat them like they’re small hairy people.” He describes the Center as “primarily a breeding center with some facilities for medical research.”

  The reporter asks some pointed questions about their acquisition of Rachel.

  But the biggest story is an investigative piece. The reporter reveals that he has tracked down Aaron Jacobs’s lawyer and learned that Jacobs left a will. In this will Jacobs bequeathed all his possessions—including his house and surrounding land—to “Rachel, the chimp I acknowledge as my daughter.”

  The reporter makes friends with one of the young women in the typing pool at the research center, and she tells him the office scuttlebutt: people suspect that the chimps may have been released by a deaf and drunken janitor, who was subsequently fired for negligence. The reporter, accompanied by a friend who can communicate in sign language, finds Jake in his apartment in downtown Flagstaff.

  Jake, who has been drinking steadily since he was fired, feels betrayed by Rachel, by the Primate Research Center, by the world. He complains at length about Rachel: they had been friends, and then she took his baseball cap and ran away. He just didn’t understand why she had run away like that.

  “You mean she could talk?” the reporter asks through his interpreter.

  Of course she can talk, Jake signs impatiently. She is a smart monkey.

  The headline reads: “Intelligent Chimp Inherits Fortune!”

  Of course, Aaron’s bequest isn’t really a fortune and she isn’t just a chimp, but close enough. Animal rights activists rise up in Rachel’s defense. The case is discussed on the national news. Ann Landers reports receiving a letter from a chimp named Rachel; she had thought it was a hoax perpetrated by the boys at Yale. The American Civil Liberties Union assigns a lawyer to the case.

  By day, Rachel and Johnson sleep in whatever hiding places they can find: a cave; a shelter built for range cattle; the shell of an abandoned car, rusted from long years in a desert gully. Sometimes Rachel dreams of jungle darkness, and the coyotes in the distance become a part of her dreams, their howling becomes the cries of fellow apes.

  The desert and the journey have changed her. She is wiser; having passed through the white-hot love of adolescence and emerged on the other side. She dreams, one day, of the ranch house. In the dream, she has long blond hair and pale white skin. Her eyes are red from crying and she wanders the house restlessly, searching for something that she has lost. When she hears coyotes howling, she looks through a window at the darkness outside. The face that looks in at her has jug-handle ears and shaggy hair. When she sees the face, she cries out in recognition and opens the window to let herself in.

  By night, Rachel and Johnson travel. The rocks and sands are cool beneath Rachel’s feet as she walks toward her ranch. On television, scientists and politicians discuss the ramifications of her case, describe the technology uncovered by investigation of Aaron Jacobs’s files. Their debates do not affect her steady progress toward her ranch or the stars that sprinkle the sky above her.

  It is night when Rachel and Johnson approach the ranch house. Rachel sniffs the wind and smells automobile exhaust and strange humans. From the hills, she can see a white van marked with the name of a local television station. She hesitates and considers returning to the safety of the desert. Then she takes Johnson by the hand and starts down the hill. Rachel is going home.

  Recycling Strategies for the Inner City

  I SEE THE METAL CLAW lying in the gutter among the broken bottles and litter, and I recognize it immediately: a piece of an alien spaceship. Before I pick it up, I glance in both directions to make sure no one is watching. The only person nearby is a hooker waiting for a john, and she is watching the cars drive past. A young couple is walking by, but they are looking away, determined to ignore both the hooker and me. They, like so many other people, don’t really want to see what’s around them.

  I scoop up the alien artifact. The claw has three digits, joined together at a thick stalk. The end of the stalk is rough, as if it had broken off a larger piece. Though the day is foggy, the metal is warm to the touch. When I touch the claw, I feel its digits flex in response, but when I examine it more closely, it lies still.

  I add the claw to the treasures in my pink plastic shopping bag, and I hurry to the hotel where I live.

  Harold is at the front desk when I come in. He’s wearing the same dingy white shirt, burgundy tie, and frayed blue suit jacket he always wears. I think he believes that the suit jacket gives him an air of respectability. Harold calls himself the hotel manager, but he’s really just the desk clerk. He’s a middle-aged man with delusions of grandeur.

  He looks up when I walk in. “Your social worker was looking for you today,” he grumbled. “She said you had missed your last two appointments.” Harold doesn’t look at me when he speaks. He looks past me, at a point somewhere over my head.

  “I must have forgotten,” I tell him. A month ago, I was assigned to a new social worker, a bright young woman just out of graduate school. I suspect that she is an agent of the CIA. The one time that I mentioned the aliens to her, I caught a look in her eyes, a flicker of joyous discovery. She hid her elation, but not before I noticed.

  “She left this.” He holds out a slip of industrial green paper. It is an official notification that I have an appointment with the city Department of Social Services tomorrow.

  I take the paper, drop it in my shopping bag, and head for my room. On my way through the lobby, I pass Mr. Johnson, Mrs. Danneman, and Mrs. Goldman. They sit in the grimy armchairs in the lobby, watching people walk by the hotel’s front windows. I nod to them and smile, but they do not respond. They stare past me, like zombies who are trying to remember what life was like. I may be old, but I hope I will never be that close to dead. I punch the button for the elevator.

  On the top floor of the hotel, the hallway stinks of other people’s food: tomato soup heated on illegal hot plates, greasy burgers from the take-out place on the corner, Chinese food in soggy cardboard containers. Down the center of the hall, there’s a long strip of bright red carpet that covers the path where the gray wall-to-wall carpet has worn through. The runner is wearing too: a trail of footprints and dirt marks the center and the edges are starting to fray.

  I carry my shopping bag down the hall to my room—a cozy cubicle furnished with a single bed, a battered chest of drawers, and a chair upholstered in turquoise blue vinyl. The room is small, but I’ve made it my own. Along the walls, I’ve stacked cardboard boxes filled with the things that I’ve collected. The paper bags that hold my other treasures fill most of the floor space. A narrow path leads from the door to the chair.

  I make my way to the chair and set my shopping bag on the worn gray carpet. This is the best part of the day. Now I sort the treasures I have found, putting each one where it belongs: the buttons go into the bag of buttons, the bottle caps into the box of bottle caps, the broken umbrella into the stack of broken umbrellas. The green slip from the Department of Social Services goes in the trash.

  There is no proper place for the metal claw. I set it on the arm of the chair. I will put it with the other spaceship parts, when I find more.


  The government does not want people to know about the alien spaceships. They deny all reports of UFOs and flying saucers. The government is good at hiding the things people would rather not see: the old men and women in the lobby, the hookers on the corners, the aliens who visit our world.

  But I know about the aliens. Late at night, I sit on the narrow metal balcony of the fire escape outside my window and I watch the sky. The city lights wash out the stars, but there are other lights in the sky: planes landing at the San Francisco airport, police helicopters on patrol, and, of course, the alien spaceships, small sparks that dance just above the buildings of downtown. Sometimes, I can barely see them. I have to squint my eyes and concentrate, staring into the darkness until at last they become clear.

  It was drizzling, night before last, when I tried to communicate with the aliens. I had been watching one particular alien spaceship through the rain-streaked window.

  Its faint wavering light reminded me of fireflies that I had seen as a child. The light blinked on and off, on and off: a dash, a series of dots. I knew it had to be a message, but I could not translate the sign.

  The light came lower, hovering just above the buildings a few blocks away. I left the window and stood by my door, flicking the light switch so that the bare bulb in the ceiling went on and off, on and off, repeating the pattern I had seen. I didn’t know how the aliens responded; from my post by the light switch. I could not see out the window. As I was repeating the pattern for the third time, I heard the wailing of a siren and the muffled thunder of a police helicopter. I abandoned the light switch and hurried to the window.