by T. C. Boyle
Guy glanced back over his shoulder and smiled. ‘That’s because the pizza’s coming. Nothing’ll distract him from pizza – isn’t that right, Sam? Pizza’s his favourite.’ And then, just as he was easing the door shut, he called out to Elise. ‘Tell them it was a bat or a squirrel or something, OK? Don’t mention Sam at all, because – well, just don’t mention him, OK?’
And then the door slammed shut and there were just the three of them left in the house – her, Barbara and Guy. Or four. If you counted Sam. And you always had to count Sam.
A week later, Elise was still waiting for her stitches. Josh had taken her to the emergency room at University Hospital, where by a stroke of luck they got someone to examine her right away, and that someone – a doctor not much older than they were – said he just couldn’t believe a bat had been the culprit, not with a bite radius like that. He’d given Josh a cold stare and said it looked as if somebody – a human being, Homo sapiens, a boyfriend, maybe – had sunk his teeth into her, and in the next moment they were both confessing and the doctor wound up bringing in two of his colleagues to look at the laceration because nobody had ever seen a chimp bite before. They kept her for three days, put her on an intravenous antibiotic and bandaged the wound rather than stitching it up, for fear of infection. Stitches would come later. And after that, plastic surgery.
Aimee was still at the house that night when the phone rang and Josh, on the other end of the line, explained the situation to Guy. She, Barbara, Guy and Sam were at the kitchen table at the time, the pizza boxes spread open in the centre of the table and Sam perched in his high chair, folding a slice of pepperoni pizza into his mouth. They each had a glass of wine set before them (she’d been too uncomfortable to refuse), including Sam, who lifted his glass delicately by the stem, sniffed it like a connoisseur and took dainty sips between bites of pizza and the limp, oily salad he seemed to relish. Which he ate with a fork, like anybody else.
‘You mean you told them?’ Guy was hunched over his plate, the phone pressed to his ear, the long yellow cord snaking across the floor behind him. ‘For shit’s sake, Josh, you know better than that. What did I tell you? I said to say it was a bat or something, right? Anything. Because the only thing that matters is that she gets her shots, and we don’t—’
There was a long pause, Josh’s voice an unintelligible buzz leaching out of the receiver, and then Guy said, ‘Oh, Christ, that’s all we need,’ and he got up, crossed the room and slammed the phone down on its hook. He circled the table twice, as if warring with himself, then sank into his chair and shifted a slice of pizza around his plate a moment before he looked up and said, ‘No worries, everything’s fine. It’s just that, well, they’ll be keeping her overnight.’
Aimee looked to Barbara, but her face showed nothing. They couldn’t have come at a worse time, that was what she was thinking, both of them thrust into the middle of this little domestic drama while its prime mover sat there in his high chair, playing with a squashed yogurt container as if it had nothing to do with him. If he’d bitten Elise, why wouldn’t he bite Barbara? Or her? The pizza went cold on her plate. She took a tentative sip of wine, though she’d never liked wine, or at least hadn’t found a variety that appealed to her – it sat like medicine on her tongue, like cough syrup without the heavy freight of sugar and menthol.
She could see that Professor Schermerhorn – Guy – was upset, though he was trying to hide it. There were regulations about keeping exotic animals, weren’t there? Dogs got put down if they were biters, but what about chimps, research animals raised as if they were human? They couldn’t be put down, could they? No, they were too valuable for that, but they could be taken away, they could be caged in some facility where they’d never bite anyone again.
‘So, listen, girls, I don’t want to give you the wrong impression,’ Guy said, as if reading her mind, ‘but it’s not always like this – Elise, I mean. There’ve been a few bites before – that’s chimp nature, they’re aggressive, they can’t help it – but never on anybody’s face. My wife – Melanie? – he bit her once, only once, on the hand, and she bit him right back.’
Barbara said, ‘Tit for tat, right? What goes around comes around?’ She smiled at Guy, then Sam, and Aimee wondered if Sam was capable of following the conversation. Her niece, Sophie, was two and a half, and though her spoken vocabulary was limited, she clearly understood the conversation going on around her – and chimps, at this age, were more advanced than children. But if Sam was listening, he showed no sign of it. At that moment, he miscalculated with a forkful of salad, which dropped to the tray with a wet plop, and he leaned forward to lap it up with his tongue, the fork clutched redundantly in one hand.
‘That’s right,’ Guy said, nodding in emphasis. ‘And that’s another thing – if he bites, and I’m not saying he will – you’ve got to discipline him right away or he’s just going to keep on doing it. With Sam’ – and here, at the mention of his name, Sam glanced up, beaming – ‘when he was one or so, he got it in his head that the best way to get attention when he wanted something or was just feeling antsy or bored was to bite somebody. Right, Sam?’
Sam didn’t respond. He leaned forward, reaching for another slice of pizza, which he neatly separated from the remainder and brought to his mouth, all without spilling his wine, though the glass shifted precariously on the tray table. He looked so innocent, so harmless, she could hardly believe what had happened, and she told herself it wasn’t going to happen to her, not after that embrace on the front steps. He liked her, he’d chosen her, he’d wrapped his arms around her, and maybe Elise didn’t understand him, maybe she’d mistreated him, maybe she was a bitch – there were two sides to every story, weren’t there?
Guy was calling her name softly. ‘Aimee,’ he said, ‘Aimee, you still with us?’
She looked up. Nodded. It was as if a spell had come over her.
‘Good. Because I wonder if you wouldn’t mind fetching the d-e-s-s-e-r-t from the k-i-t-c-h-e-n? It’s in the f-r-i-d-g-e? In a bowl? The door’s unlocked. And there’s a can of w-h-i-p-p-e-d c-r-e-a-m with it.’
‘OK, sure,’ she said, pushing herself up from the table.
‘And another thing – I’ve got a question for both of you. Since they’re keeping Elise overnight, I’m going to be short-handed here. I wonder, could either of you spend the night? In the guest room, that is – it’s all laid out, bed made and all that. Because I’m going to need help getting him to bed – and in the morning, the morning too. I’ve got an early class.’
‘Tomorrow morning?’ Barbara looked distraught – or at least she was simulating the emotion. And who was she, anyway? A junior psych major Aimee had never seen before – but then she’d been on campus two years now and hadn’t really reached out to anybody. She’d made zero friends, or close friends anyway, and she’d been on exactly three dates, two with the same guy because he was persistent, though she hadn’t really liked him. Steven Handler. At the end of the second date – bar, fast food, movie – he’d asked her if she wanted to have sex and she’d said no, and that was the end of that. ‘I’d like to,’ Barbara said, her voice dredged in fake compunction. ‘I really would, but I just can’t, I’m sorry, I’ve got like six thousand things—’ She fluttered her hands, emitted a nervous laugh. ‘If only I’d had a little warning…’
‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to lay it on you, but I’m afraid it’s something of an emergency. Aimee? What about you?’
She was standing now, arrested on her way to the kitchen and the mission Guy had entrusted her with as if she were already part of the team. She looked first to him, then Sam, who was studying her intently, as if he was fully conscious of everything going on here, as if he knew how to spell ‘dessert’ and ‘whipped cream’ as well as she did. ‘Sure,’ she said. ‘No problem.’
BLACKLY, BLEAKLY
This CAGE, this space, this prison – it was the worst place he’d ever been in his life and his life was a long, shimmering string of events
and impressions and memories that took him back to a memory he couldn’t summon and a place he didn’t know, because that was his birth, that was his awakening from a sleep into a dream, and the dream was the now. Still, though he raged against it, though he screamed till the BIG MAN came with his stinger, he knew that he was in that place now. He had no recollection of it and he had nothing but hate for it, and yet the feeling was inescapable. Was it the flickering ghost of a smell? A vestigial sound he recognised in the hoots and shrieks of these other things, these BLACK BUGS? No, he insisted to himself, signing it for emphasis, over and over: NO! NO! NO! His home was with her. His home was far from here. He could close his eyes and see it, see her. This wasn’t his home. He’d never been here before and all he wanted was to get OUT, to escape… but then blackly, bleakly, it came to him that there was a time before her and that HOME didn’t mean a thing.
He studied the cage. He sniffed the reek of his own shit and the reek of the BLACK BUGS that terrified him with their shrieking and their blind, black stupidity. He took his time. He examined every detail, every surface, every flange and jointure and crevice. There was no key. There was nothing he could use as a key, nothing, not even a fragment of plastic or a scrap of straw from a BROOM. Was he calculating? Was he logical? Was he thinking? Well, yes, because the process led him to observe the low plastered-over ceiling of the CAGE and detect the faint tracery of the pipe buried there – which presented him with an idea. He got to his feet. He reached up his arm. He began tracing the pipe with his fingers, over and over, his nails digging at the plaster that was its own kind of rock until, after a time, there were flakes of it on the floor, flakes he swept into the drain with the broom of his hand. Then he slept.
They came with food and he retreated to the back of the cage. It was no food he recognised but he was hungry, and he ate it once they went away and shut the door at the end of the hall that gave on to the world of light and movement. He rested. He slept. At some point the BLACK BUGS settled down and fell silent, and he went back to the pipe and the plaster till he found the place where the pipe was joined to another pipe by means of a hard steel nut, though he didn’t know that term because it was already occupied by the kind of NUT he liked to eat whenever she gave it to him. But here was the thing: his fingers were steadier and stronger than any wrench in the toolbox under the sink back at home, and he had patience, time on his hands, though there were no clocks here and no night or morning by which to calculate it. Minutes passed none the less, breath in, breath out. Then hours. Flakes of plaster fell to the floor. The nut loosened by slow degrees. After a while it was wet and then it began to dribble water. That was when he really applied his strength. Almost immediately the pipe gave way, bending back from its bed in the rock of the ceiling, and what had been a dribble exploded into a hard, hissing cascade of WATER – furious, unstoppable WATER.
They came running, shouting in their high, strained voices till they outdid the BLACK BUGS, who were aroused themselves now, the whole world screaming in his ears, and here they were in the cage with him, cursing him, cursing the pipe and the water and stabbing at the cascade with fluttering white rags that did no good, no good at all. Who were they? He recognised them as the same two males who’d shot the hose at him when he’d signed to them over and over to stop, and he felt something rise in him, a hate, a sudden hot, roaring urge to bury his terror and despair in the soft white flesh of their faces and limbs, but he fought down that urge. Because… because in their hurry they’d left the door ajar. DOOR! OPEN! OUT! They were distracted and he was a shadow, and the shadow slid out the door in three inches of swirling water, and it went up the hall while the BLACK BUGS threw themselves at the bars and steel mesh of their cages, screaming as if they were being flayed alive, and then the shadow was at the door that led to that compact scene of the sun and the trees that had been revealed in a flash the day when the female that wasn’t her threw it open and slammed it shut.
It was a DOOR. It had a knob. It was locked. But the lock was the kind that twists on and off under the pressure of your hand if you know how to manipulate it. And he knew. He knew.
ACCOUNTABILITY
That first night, the first night Aimee spent at the house, Guy was too wrought up to sleep. The pizza sat on his stomach like concrete. The wine puddled in his head. He kept itching himself – fleas, Sam’s fleas, and when was the last time they’d doused him with flea powder? – and twice he got up to turn on the lights and check the sheets. When he finally did get to sleep, his dreams were tense and unforgiving, compact nightmares of cancelled flights, missed deadlines, TV lights extinguished like cigarette butts in the middle of his next sentence. In the morning, as soon as he could manage it, he went to see Elise in the hospital, and far from helping out – showing a little understanding, a little sympathy – she was exclusively negative, at one point even threatening to sue, as if Sam and the project meant nothing to her. As if he meant nothing to her. As if all that mattered was the cut on her face and the plastic tube in her arm. No, the whole business was a disaster, an ongoing disaster, and though he’d hoped to hush it up, word got out within hours and ran through the department till he couldn’t walk down the hall without somebody stopping to interrogate him about it. How was Elise doing? Was it really that bad? And Sam. Sam was so sweet – it was incredible. How could he have done something like that?
His biggest fear was that they’d take Sam away, put him in a cage somewhere, the project derailed, the funding dried up. What would animal control have to say about it? The health department? The university? And there was Moncrief, never forget Moncrief, who was looming off in the distance, utterly unmoved by pleas and explanations and adhering strictly to the bottom line, which was positive publicity and the sort of solid record of publication that would advance his own agenda – and if Guy wasn’t capable of presenting him with it, then he’d get somebody who was. When he found out about this, which he invariably would, he’d make one of his late-night calls, long distance from Iowa. ‘You know what?’ he’d say, his voice a low rasp insinuating itself over the line. ‘If this keeps up, I might just have to come out there and take my animal back.’
About the only good thing to come of it was Aimee. She’d stayed the night and the next day too, and the other new girl – Barbara – had promised to return in the afternoon to help fill the gap left by Elise, which gave him at least a little breathing room while Elise was laid up in the hospital and Josh was sitting there at her bedside with a vacant look on his face. He hired them both on the spot. ‘You want hours? You can have all the hours you can handle, at least till I get things straightened out here. And I appreciate it, I really do.’
Of course, Barbara wasn’t a natural fit, and he saw that from the beginning. She was tentative around Sam, frightened of him, actually, and Sam knew it and capitalised on it, doing everything he could to make her uncomfortable, short of biting. He would hide behind the door and spring out at her with a shriek or take hold of her hand and refuse to let go no matter how many times she tried to draw it away, his humour wedded to the power he held over the household and everybody in it. Chimp humour. There was a dissertation waiting to be written: higher consciousness revealed through comedic interaction between species, the ability to conceive jokes, no matter how crude, proof positive of advanced thought processes. In Sam’s case, the humour was strictly rudimentary, ranging from the practical jokes you’d expect of a preschooler – hiding objects, refashioning a cheeseburger into a Frisbee, laying a turd in somebody’s shoe – to something darker, sadistic even. It was different with Aimee. She seemed to have an instant connection with him, an empathetic transference, as if she saw him as a child, a human child, and not simply a lab animal in a psychology experiment. And Sam responded in kind, on his best behaviour with her, as if he were trying to sell her on the arrangement, as if he knew what was at stake here – and maybe he did, maybe he saw Melanie in her, a new mother to replace the one he’d lost.
That first night, both
girls had helped clean up the kitchen, and after Barbara left, Aimee had pitched in with the nightly ritual of putting Sam to bed: drawing water for his bath, overseeing the brushing of his teeth and dressing him in his pyjama top and a clean nappy, then settling into bed with him and his favourite Dr Seuss book, reading to him in a low, languorous voice till he was out for the night. In the morning, when Guy forced himself out of bed, depressed and disoriented, he found Aimee and Sam in the living room, sitting side-by-side on the couch in front of the resurrected TV, spooning up Lucky Charms and watching cartoons.
He stood in the doorway a moment, studying them, amazed at his luck. One of the cartoon figures – Daffy Duck, wasn’t it? – kicked another in the rear and Sam laughed his breathy laugh and Aimee joined in with a soft, girlish giggle. ‘Hey, you two,’ he said, and they both looked up as if he was the last person they expected to see. ‘That’s nice, that’s good. I love it. You’re really getting along, aren’t you?’
Aimee nodded. Sam turned back to the TV.
‘You OK with everything?’
She nodded again.
‘Because I’m going to be gone most of the morning and you’ll have to handle things on your own, at least until Josh makes an appearance. And Barbara. Didn’t she say she’d be back?’
‘Yeah, I think so.’
‘OK, good. Look, if he misbehaves, and I’m not saying he will – hopefully, he got that out of his system yesterday – lock him in his room till he calms down. And don’t take any crap from him. You’ve got my number at school, so—’ He waved a hand as if to finish the thought, the thought being that she was taking on a mountain of responsibility, for which he was both apologetic and grateful and that if anything should go wrong, he’d be there for her. ‘As for Sam’ – here he raised his voice – ‘Sam’s going to get the day off, no school for him today. Is that all right with you, Sam? Would you like that? No school today?’