by Tim Sandlin
Sarah’s eyes drift open. To Bing, she looks like the doll a tourist child left on the service road behind Nairobi Village. When Bing picked it up, the doll’s arm fell off. Her hair had been almost but not quite white, like Sarah’s hair. Her ankles had been bent for the child to put on and take off plastic high heels. Sarah’s ankles aren’t bent. She is different in that respect, although she has taken off her paper slippers so she is barefoot, like the doll was when Bing found her. The slippers lie in a wad on the wood slat deck.
Rosemary says, “Do you know who I am?”
Sarah smiles. “Of course, Rosie. Isn’t the afternoon wonderful?”
Rosemary looks around, as if noticing the afternoon for the first time.
Bing says, “The afternoon is wonderful. I enjoy the sun touch on my face.”
Sarah graces him with a nod and a smile, as if they both feel exactly the same way. Although thin and vulnerable, Sarah is beautiful in Bing’s mind. She is self-contained. There’s no need in her. Her skin is the color of concrete yet soft as one of those flowers you blow on and seeds fly away. Her eyes are without qualms.
She shows no surprise or curiosity as to who Bing is or why he is with her sister. “I like the air today. I was just sitting here trying to decide what the air tastes like. Lemon, I think. Or maybe meringue on a lemon pie.”
Bing opens his mouth wide and tastes. “Water from the water fountain,” he says.
Sarah looks at Bing in what might be called gentle interest. “Isn’t it odd, that air can taste like clean water.”
Rosemary is floored by the compatibility of thought between the two. Sarah on pain medication and Bing fresh out of the zoo appear to be traveling the same wavelength.
She says, “Sarah, this is Bing. He’s the boy I told you about.”
Sarah holds her hand out to shake. “I am quite pleased to meet you, Bing.” She means it. This woman is way past small talk.
Bing stares at her hand a moment. He knows what to do this time. He grasps her extended hand with both of his, thumbs up, fingers down. “Do you have an IPhone?”
Rosemary is aghast. “Bing.”
Sarah says, “I have a Droid. Would that do?”
“I would like you to gift it to me.”
Rosemary steps to Sarah’s side, protectively. “Sarah needs her phone, Bing. I told you why. It’s rude of you to try and take it away from her.”
A slight, nearly playful smile flickers on Sarah’s lips. “There is no harm in asking.”
Bing scowls at Rosemary and says to Sarah. “Rosemary smoked a cigarette. Over there.” He motions toward her car in the parking lot.
Rosemary’s eyes flash. “Traitor. I told you not to worry her.”
Sarah says, “You shouldn’t smoke if you don’t want me to worry. I always know anyway. My nose isn’t broken.”
Bing releases her hand and bends down on one knee to examine the glider. He tries to understand what makes it go back and forth.
After choosing not to stick her foot up Bing’s ass, even though she would love to do just that, Rosemary says, “I need to talk to the day nurse. Sarah, will you entertain Bing for a few moments.”
Sarah speaks slowly, with enunciation. “Of course, Rosemary.” She turns her attention to Bing. “How would you like to be entertained?”
“Can you sing? I enjoy singing but Dr. Lori doesn’t care for voice music so I don’t hear it often. They play loud music through the speakers at the wild bird show, only it’s not singing.”
“That’s not what I mean,” Rosemary says. “I want you two to talk. I want Bing to know you better.”
Rosemary leaves the porch by a door leading into the building. Bing and Sarah look at one another, shyly. Bing thinks she doesn’t have an appearance similar to her sister. The hair and lips are different. The neck is almost the same. Sarah is much thinner. He knows from Dr. Lori that sisters often resemble each other, but then he doesn’t look a bit like his brother, Kano. Maybe it’s a female trait.
Bing says, “Do you know how the machine works?” He nods at the glider mechanism.
Sarah says, “I push with my foot and it goes back and forth. Sometimes movement hurts, but today it is nice.”
Bing leans forward and balances himself with a hand on the glider armrest, next to Sarah’s hand. He sees the chair part is connected to the base part by flat, metal pieces that hang between the two. The chair part swivels on something. He can’t say what. Machines have never been Bing’s strong point.
“Rosemary wants me to make you feel less pain.”
Sarah closes her eyes again. To Bing, she seems to be concentrating on her insides. “I know. She told me about you yesterday.” She opens her eyes and looks at Bing on his knee by her side. “Or the day before. They run together.”
Bing stares up at her a long time. Others would be self-conscious to be stared at from so close for so long with such intensity, but Sarah isn’t. She looks back at him, calmly. It isn’t one of those who-blinks-first power games people get in when trying to prove they aren’t cowed. It is two people exploring what they are seeing.
Bing touches her belly with two fingers. He is listening. He comes up on both knees and looks behind her right ear.
“What do you see?” Sarah asks.
“Pink.”
“I’ve never seen behind my own ear.”
“It’s pink and very clean. You must wash with diligence.” Bing settles back on his haunches. “I don’t think I can help you.”
Sarah’s voice is one of sadness but not surprise. “I didn’t think you could.”
“You don’t have the kind of sickness I can change.”
Sarah looks off across the lawn. Two birds are flapping at a birdbath by the drive. From somewhere far away, they can hear a siren.
“Let’s not tell Rosemary yet,” Sarah says. “She has such high hopes.”
He leans back into a squatting position. They are quiet for a while, each lost in his or her thoughts. The siren dies away. One of the birds flies off to west. The other drops to the ground and hops about, searching for food. Bing watches a fly land on Sarah’s foot. It walks up her big toe, but she doesn’t flick it off.
She says, “I don’t mind dying, you know.”
Bing flicks the fly for her. “That’s the reason I can’t help you. You don’t need help.”
She looks from the mid-distance back to Bing. “I just feel bad about Rosemary. She doesn’t understand that sometimes dying is better than not dying.”
They fall back into a comfortable silence. Someone inside turns a radio on — NPR news. Neither Bing nor Sarah cares about the news. They care about the sun on their skin, and the air that tastes like meringue.
Finally, after a long silence, Bing says, “When the time comes for you to leave, do you think I can have your phone then?”
As Rosemary appears from the building, she pushes the door open with a loud whop against the wall.
Sarah says, “I don’t see why you shouldn’t.”
Rosemary says, “Shouldn’t what?”
34
“Tell the truth, Bing. What did you think of Sarah?”
“She is content.”
“What?”
“Her heart is still.”
Rosemary is leading Bing along the sidewalk, past frame houses for families with young children. Starter homes. Her yellow Small House Movement house sits in the middle of the block, but she’d had to park at the end, on the far side of the street. It is one of those neighborhoods where you curb park on one side of the street on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and the other side on Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday. Most of the houses have driveways and single car garages or car ports. Rosemary has neither. Her house was built for minimum footprint.
“Sarah hurts,” Rosemary says. “All the time. She often doesn’t know where she is or who I am. How can you dream she is content?”
Bing stops to study a tricycle on its side. For the life of him, he can’t see its use
. “She wants nothing.”
“She wants to be out of pain.”
“Yes, but that’s not a crucial want. It’s like wanting to go to the bathroom. A person can be content and still need to pee.”
Rosemary shakes her head, fairly pulsing with indignation. It’s one thing to think like an ape, another to think like a stupid ape.
“Will you help her?”
Bing pokes the tricycle with his foot. The rubber wheel on top circles with a spoke clicking sound. “Sarah does not need help. You are the human person who needs help.”
Rosemary turns off the sidewalk onto a series of flagstone ovals that lead across her tiny lawn — no bigger than the dance floor at a corner bar — up to her house. She doesn’t much care whether Bing follows or not. He isn’t saying what she wants to hear.
At the door, she whirls on him. “Then you better help me by fixing her.”
Bing looks down at the flagstone. It is a mottled pink and white, not unlike the seashell he once blew into to make a bottom sound. He has no desire to meet Rosemary’s eyes. Bonobos don’t operate on the importance of eye contact.
“It doesn’t work like that.”
Rosemary stares hard at him. “Don’t disappoint me.”
Bing shrugs. “I will do what I can not to. Disappoint you.”
The house is tasteful, urban, cluttered yet not dirty. The nest of a young professional. The furniture is so simple it looks made in a high school shop class. The oak flooring is shined by weekly application of Mop & Glo. The walls are a pale blue with photos of Sarah and Rosemary in Sur la Table frames. There is one print of a Monet water lily painting. The bookshelves are made from stained two by fours and cinder blocks. Bing can’t read the titles.
Rosemary says, “You’ll stay here till we figure what to do with you.”
TV, sound system, microwave, laptop, lava lamp — Bing has no clue as to what does what.
He says, “Is this the part where we copulate?”
Rosemary drops her purse on the kitchenette counter with more force than is needed. “No, Bing, this is not the part where we copulate.”
Bing sniffs. Air conditioned air smells off to him, as if a snake died behind a wall.
“Do you have fruit?”
35
The front room lies shrouded in darkness, except for a nightlight plug coming from the kitchen area, and the glow of clocks on various appliances and electrical devices. The lava lamp burps. The curtains are back lit by a security light on the street.
From a pile of blankets on the couch, we hear whimpering. Bing is awake — frightened. He is not accustomed to refrigerator hum. The air conditioner clicks. Water runs through pipes when someone somewhere flushes a toilet. TV sound seeps from next door. Jay Leno. The temperature is wrong. The air is wrong. The couch is pitched at the slightest angle so he feels like he’s about to fall off.
There’s no mother smell of Betty. No Lola grunts. He thinks he had reasons for running away from home, but now, in Rosemary’s small house teeming with strangeness, Bing cannot recall what those reasons are.
He doesn’t feel invisible.
Rosemary’s bedroom door opens — a rectangle of light framing Rosemary herself wrapped in blue terrycloth. She advances across the room and sits beside him on the couch.
“What’s the matter, Bing?”
He looks through tears up at her face and the hair that means so much. Her eyes are warm.
“I have fear.”
Rosemary touches his shoulder. He’s wearing a never-worn pair of silk pajamas Sarah gave Rosemary for Christmas three years ago. The shirt has panda bears across the front and back. The bottoms are blue. Rosemary has never been a pajama kind of girl, and Sarah knew that. The pajamas were a test to see if Rosemary would wear something she hated given to her by someone she loved
“You’re safe here. The door is locked. I’m with you.”
“I have never been away from my family all night.”
“Not even in decontamination?”
“I never slept there. Dr. Lori let me out when it was time for nesting. My mother and brother and the others slept together in the compound. This is difficult.”
Rosemary is silent while she rubs his shoulder and he sniffles. She says, “This is the first night you’ve slept alone, in your life?”
Bing nods.
36
Rosemary lies on her back, in her double bed, under her flannel sheets and her Grandma Ellie’s quilt, staring at the ceiling she can’t see up there in the dark. She is as awake as she’s ever been. Sleep is but a myth told to children. On one side, the digital clock next to Sarah’s revolving photo frame measures the passing of minutes. On the other side, Bing sleeps like a toddler after a hard play day.
He also lies on his back. Only his arms are splayed crucifixion style, so his left forearm hangs dead weight across Rosemary’s neck. His legs have kicked the sheets and quilt on his side of the bed to her side. Periodically — an average of twice a minute — he spasms like popping at a hacky sack before going into what, if he were a dog, Rosemary would say was chasing rabbits.
He moans; he snores; he emits little bonobo shrieks.
Rosemary cannot help but wonder what she has gotten herself into. What is she supposed to do with the boy? The plan had been simple — spring him, take him to Sarah so he could cure her, then – then what? What is she supposed to do with the boy/ape after he heals Sarah? Or doesn’t heal Sarah, which is unthinkable. She can’t keep him like a pound cat. In fairness, she can’t return Bing to Dr. Lori. Rosemary takes pride in her fairness. She isn’t about to use him and toss him. That would go against her deepest scruples, but she sure can’t have him sleeping in her bed the rest of his life.
The thought dawns on Rosemary that she might have worked this out more thoroughly.
Beside her, Bing snorts, then blows drool and other bodily fluids. He rolls onto his side, toward her, and his other arm flops across her belly, like the snake falling out of the acacia.
37
Bing perches and Turk sits on tall bar stools in front of microphones on the end of swiveling stainless steel poles. The microphones have what looks like golf club socks on them, but, of course, Bing doesn’t know this because his experience with golf clubs is just as lacking as his experience with microphones. All sorts of high-tech geegaws are scattered about the room, seemingly left for the purpose of overwhelming Bing. Whatever the geegaws point, Bing is overwhelmed.
Rosemary and Mitchell watch from behind glass. They are in another room full of dials and switches. Rosemary looks up from her laptop to smile encouragement at Bing. Her laptop is linked to a screen Turk can see but Bing can’t, not that it would matter if he could. On a normal day, Rosemary would be feeding Turk facts and opinions so he can come across as having a world of knowledge stored in his brain. Today, Turk already knows the questions he wants to ask, so Rosemary is mostly feeding him ideas he does not need.
Mitchell gives Bing a thumbs up — the same sign he gave Bing at the California Pizza Kitchen. Bing still doesn’t know what it means, but he has been out of the zoo long enough now he knows he is supposed to thumbs up back, so he does.
They come out of a commercial for CoQ10 supplements and Turk goes into his introduction. “As I speak with my next guest, Bing the Bonobo, I want all of you who haven’t seen this to go on You Tube and check out the video entitled New Messiah at California Pizza Kitchen.”
Bing twists his headphones this way and then that. He’s had them on and off and on again three times. They aren’t as comfortable as they look.
Turk sends him a threatening scowl that anyone would know means Don’t screw with the headphones. “You must see what this kid did yesterday afternoon because there is no way you are going to believe when I tell you.”
Bing gums the microphone sock, which causes Mitchell to go into a flurry of sound adjustments. The fuzz sticks to Bing’s tongue. He sits there, lolling his tongue, watching Rosemary type on her computer. He
knows what a computer is. She explained it to him this morning over breakfast.
She had said, “It’s where information comes from.”
He had said, “Oh.”
Now, in the studio at Centered Soul, Turk says, “I was there and saw the miracle with my own eyes and I still have trouble buying it. A young punk threatened a group of –”
“T.J.,” Bing says.
“What’s that, Bing?”
“The adolescent male’s name is T.J. Not punk.”
Turk stares at Bing a few seconds until Mitch makes a roll-it hand motion. Turk says, “Your T. J. is a member of a notorious gang and in my book that makes him a punk.”
Bing shrugs, wondering where Turk’s book is.
Turk goes on, his lips almost kissing the microphone. “As this T.J. is threatening to stab Bing for having the nerve to call him sweet, another gang roars up and sprays the parking lot with gunfire, hitting T.J. three times point blank in the chest and abdomen. T.J. lies on the asphalt, dying, and now you take up the story, Bing. What happens next?”
Bing searches his memory for what happened next. He glances at Rosemary, who is staring at him, intently.
“I fixed the young man.”
Turk’s voice resonates with mock wonder. “You fixed a dying bullet-riddled boy. I saw you place your hands over the wounds and you chanted mumbo-jumbo and Poof! All better. No more blood bath. Next thing you’re a star on You Tube.”
“I do not fathom the word You Tube.”
“Bystanders filmed the miracle on smart phones and uploaded it onto the internet. You’ve had two million hits since yesterday.”
Bing ponders this, deeply. He doesn’t know bystanders either, but he knows Turk thinks whatever went on matters and he is expected to comment.
He makes a chewing motion with his jaws even though he has nothing to chew. “I would very much enjoy a smart phone. Can you please gift me one?”
Turk chuckles, glancing at Rosemary who holds her hands palm up in a Got me? gesture. Then she proceeds to type furiously on her laptop. From his side of the glass, Turk reads what she types and says, “Let us backtrack from the miracle.”