Talk to Me

by T. C. Boyle

  Sam didn’t respond. Daffy Duck – yes, that was Daffy, definitely Daffy – was being chased across a cartoon landscape by a hunter with a shotgun, who kept peppering him in the backside, which got Sam laughing again, and that was response enough.

  ‘What about you?’ he asked her. ‘Don’t you have classes? Work?’

  ‘I’m skipping today? And as soon as Hamburg Hamlet opens, I’m calling in to quit. I mean, if that’s all right.’ She gave him a smile, then dropped her eyes.

  She was very pretty. And her feet, her bare feet, propped up on the cushions beside Sam’s, were pretty too – and her pose, as if she were in a glossy ad for home furnishings and demonstrating how charming and comfortable a sofa with a chimp on it could be.

  ‘I like your attitude,’ he said. ‘And, you know, just play it by ear – and try not to spoil him too much. Josh’ll be here in an hour or so and I’ll be back as soon as I can. You’ve got the key to the fridge and the front door and Sam’ll let you know when he’s hungry.’

  Daffy Duck said something in an unintelligible squawk. The shotgun popped. Sam laughed.

  ‘OK,’ he said, ‘I guess I’m off then. Sam, you want to give me a hug?’

  Sam swivelled his head to peer up at him over one shoulder, but he didn’t move from the couch. He just lifted his hand and dropped it again.

  As if things weren’t bad enough, when he got to the office there was a note from the chairman of the department, asking to see him at his earliest convenience. Which meant sooner rather than later. To this point, he’d pretty much been given free rein with the project. He was Moncrief’s golden boy, after all; he’d been awarded grants from the National Institute of Health and the National Science Foundation, had lined up a number of private donors and polished his image on TV; and before he’d arrived nobody at UCSM had ever even seen a chimp before, let alone worked with one. Not to mention that the field of primate language studies was the hottest thing going, with half a dozen universities starting up competing programmes. But he was still a member of the psych department and still subject to the kind of accountability that Leonard Biggs, the chair, was doubtless about to remind him of. He didn’t want any part of it (he needed to get home, oversee things, make sure Aimee was still in one piece, though she hadn’t called and Josh had promised to be there by ten, so no news was good news, as far as it went), but none the less, after class he found himself mounting the stairs to Leonard’s office on the third floor, figuring he might as well get it over with.

  The door was open and Leonard, dressed in a suit jacket flecked with lint or maybe cat hair and a tie in a shade of yellow that concentrated all the light in the room, looked up from his bag lunch and said, ‘Thanks.’ Just that – not ‘Hello’ or ‘How you doing?’ but just ‘Thanks.’

  Guy shrugged and fell into the chair at the foot of the desk – the student chair. A wave of exhaustion washed over him. ‘What’s on your mind?’ he asked, and he wanted to light up a cigarette, but thought better of it.

  Leonard was only three years older than Guy and chairman by default – nobody else wanted the job. He wore his hair in a Beatles’ shag that had gone out of fashion a decade ago, and his teeth were too big for his mouth so that it looked as if he was grinning even when he wasn’t. Guy had no feelings about him one way or the other – he existed, he took up space, and as long as he supported the project and knew enough not to stick his nose in, he was harmless enough, Guy supposed. Leonard clutched a sandwich in one hand – bologna on white with a thin stripe of mustard the same colour as his tie – and a half-pint container of milk in the other. He chewed, swallowed, patted his lips with a rumpled paper napkin, then set down the sandwich and looked directly into Guy’s eyes. ‘I hear you had an accident out at the ranch?’

  ‘Yeah, no big deal. Sam just got a little over-animated, that’s all, and he bit Elise – Elise Ritchie? I wasn’t even there. And whether she misread him or not, it’s just not acceptable, no way. And he did say he was sorry…’

  ‘He did? Well, that’s comforting – at least there’s that, right?’ Leonard lifted his eyebrows and puckered his lips to underscore the sarcasm, took a swig from the container and set it back down on the desk. ‘And you actually believe he channels emotions and understands consequences?’

  ‘If he didn’t, I wouldn’t be working with him. Nor would people like Donald Moncrief.’

  ‘How bad is it?’

  He shrugged again, and now he did dig his cigarettes out of his shirt pocket, shake one out and light it. ‘She’s going to need stitches.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘There’s a risk of infection, so I’m told, and they’ve put her on an intravenous antibiotic. Which is fine. Just a precaution really.’

  Leonard was silent a moment. ‘What about liability?’

  ‘I don’t know. We’re covered, aren’t we? I mean, she’s got student health—’

  ‘In terms of legal liability, I mean. We can’t have dangerous animals running wild around here, or at the ranch, that is, where students and staff are going to be exposed to them – and it’s only going to get worse. What happens when he’s an adolescent? An adult? He could go totally out of control for all we know—’

  ‘Apeshit, you mean. That’s the formal ethological expression – go apeshit.’

  ‘Jesus, Guy, give me a break. But don’t they usually retire them after they’re four or five? For that very reason?’

  It wasn’t as if Guy hadn’t thought ahead. Leonard was right – after a certain stage most chimps eventually got returned to breeding facilities like Moncrief’s or sent on for use in biomedical trials because it was just too risky to work with them. A full-grown male chimp could stand over 5 feet tall and weigh 150 pounds – and a chimp of that size was at least twice as strong as any human, even an NFL lineman or the winner of the Iron Man competition. But this was different. Few researchers had ever raised a chimp entirely as a human before – without any knowledge of its own species or of a cage either – and the hope was that the experiment would go on indefinitely, well into adulthood, when Sam’s mental capacities would be that much more refined and his ability to express himself far beyond any limits previously known to science.

  ‘Sam’s different,’ he said. ‘And I can’t promise you that there won’t be problems moving forward, but I’m going to try as best I can to prevent them.’

  ‘Behaviour modification?’

  ‘More or less.’

  ‘But it’s been almost three years now, hasn’t it?’

  Guy felt the irritation rise in him. Leonard was a functionary, a desk-sitter. He couldn’t begin to conceive of the thousands of hours he and Melanie had put in, of the endless drills, the control issues, the tantrums. He said, ‘You have a teenage son, don’t you?’

  Leonard gave him a long look, then broke into a grin. ‘Yeah, Casey can be a handful – but at least he’s not biting people’s faces. Or not that I know of. Yet.’

  Guy grinned back at him. ‘Right. And not only is Sam dealing with hormonal issues, but the confusion of staff changes too.’

  ‘Melanie?’

  Guy nodded.

  ‘Is it—?’

  ‘Truthfully? I don’t know. We’re trying to work it out… but in the meanwhile I’ve just taken on two new girls on a salaried basis, and I’m hoping to attract a couple more student volunteers to cover some of the hours and help with the record keeping.’ He paused to take a deep consolatory drag of his cigarette and gather himself. ‘I won’t lie to you – it’s been tough since Melanie left, not least because she had the strongest bond with him, and as far as organising was concerned, she was a past master… But we’re getting back to it. It’s a new day, a new regime, and I for one am looking forward to really bearing down on this project, which, I don’t have to remind you, has the potential to lift the roof right off of everything we’ve ever known about animal consciousness – and our own, our own too. I mean, can you imagine actually talking with him, beyond the stage of imme
diate wants and needs? About what he’s thinking?’

  ‘What if he’s thinking what we’re thinking half the time, “Fight, kill, die”? Or better yet, “Fight, fuck, eat”?’

  ‘Yeah, sure, but what about the other half of the time, when we’re thinking about putting men on the moon and composing symphonies – and establishing apes in human households to see what we can learn from them?’

  ‘I’m not saying that – we’re all behind the project, behind you – and what Moncrief’s doing too. You’re attracting a lot of attention to the programme, no doubt about it, and the whole thing’s, well’ – he waved a hand – ‘fascinating, really fascinating. All I’m saying is be careful, that’s all.’

  It was past two by the time he got back to the ranch, and the first thing he noticed was that Josh’s car wasn’t in the driveway. Barbara’s car wasn’t there either, though he hadn’t really noticed what she’d been driving the night before or even if she’d driven there at all – for all he knew she could have hitchhiked. The point was that there was only one car in the long dirt drive, Aimee’s white Caprice, which meant that she was in there alone. And more: that she’d been alone with Sam for something like five and a half hours now.

  He cursed himself. What had he been thinking? Was this being careful? Or even responsible? His heart was pounding as he came up the front steps, picturing chaos, the house wrecked, Aimee cowering in the bathroom with her pretty face gashed and bleeding, the final stake driven through the heart of the project and everything he’d worked for evaporated in an instant. He should have cancelled class, cancelled the meeting, blown off Leonard, should have stayed home, but he hadn’t. He was tired of being on call twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, tired of having 100 per cent of the responsibility thrust on him because Melanie was back in New York and didn’t give a damn what happened – to him or Sam. So he’d dumped it all on the new girl. And Josh had let him down. Again.

  The window showed nothing, which was unusual, because as soon as he heard a car pull into the drive, Sam would go first to the window, then the door, and by the time you got the door open, he was there, always. But not now. Now everything was still, nothing moving inside or out, not even a bird or lizard. He stood there on the mat a moment, his senses on high alert, then inserted the key in the first of the locks, which was the signal for Sam to rush the door and start slapping his palms on the panels till the whole house rocked with the rhythm of it. What he was remembering in that moment was an incident from grad school. There was a new girl in the programme, Laura-Something, whose voice had a nagging nasal quality and who was always trying to get Moncrief’s attention, always at his elbow, pushing for preference and access, sucking up. One afternoon Moncrief took her out to what he called his Chimp Farm and led her into the main facility, where there were thirty-odd chimps of all ages caged in groups and separately, some so dangerous no one was allowed to handle them, ever, and led her into a cage occupied by an adolescent female named Polly. Polly didn’t move, just fastened her eyes on the girl, looking for a reaction, for weakness, in the way Sam assessed anyone he came across, whether in the house or out in public when they took him for a walk. ‘You want to know chimps?’ Moncrief asked. Laura nodded. Polly crouched there in the back of the cage, perfectly still. ‘Well, this one’s Polly,’ Moncrief said, then slipped out the door and locked it behind him.

  ‘You want to know chimps?’ Moncrief repeated.

  Laura, frozen, said, ‘Come on, please, this isn’t funny. Let me out.’

  ‘Know them from the inside, that’s the most important thing. Know what it’s like to be in a cage, dependent on somebody else – on us – for everything: food, water, comfort, stimulation. Know what resentment feels like.’

  And then he walked away.

  Inside, the house was absolutely still, the TV off, heat wafting silently from the wall registers. Everything was in order, the two easy chairs lined up parallel to the couch, the magazines stacked neatly on the end table, Sam’s toys in the straw basket in the corner, his paints and crayons in the coffee cans reserved for them. If anything had gone amiss, there was no sign of it. Puzzled, he started up the stairs to Sam’s room – depending on how he felt, Sam would sometimes take a nap around now, but if that was the case, where was Aimee?

  The door to Sam’s room was ajar. It was made of steel and the frame was steel too, because when Sam misbehaved – when he threw one of his tantrums – he had to be confined where he couldn’t do any damage. The original door, which was solid pine and not some flimsy hollow-core alternative, had been reduced to splinters one afternoon when something had set him off and Melanie sought to punish him by confining him to his room. That was over a year ago. Lesson learned. Same thing for the picture window in the living room, which Sam had twice smashed through in his eagerness over the arrival of the delivery boy from the pizza parlour before they replaced it with the safety glass. Taking a deep breath, Guy eased the door open and instantly felt the burden lift from him: Sam was there, in bed, asleep, his head on the pillow and the blanket pulled up over his shoulder. And Aimee was stretched out beside him, on her back, her long black hair trailing over the side of the bed. Her eyes blinked open. ‘Hi,’ she said, her voice fogged with sleep. ‘How was school?’

  As for Laura, the girl with the irritating voice, she’d been in that cage for three hours by the time Moncrief came to release her, and in all that time, Polly, one of the least aggressive chimps in the whole colony, the lowest-ranking female whose only desire was to submit, never emerged from the corner of the cage. Laura got it, though. The resentment part, anyway.

  By the time Josh showed up, all apologies, Sam was sitting placidly on the couch beside Aimee, leafing through the latest issue of Life while she named the objects in the pictures aloud – car, baby, airplane, dog – and Sam conjured the signs for them, almost as if he were trying to teach them to her. Guy sat across from them in the armchair, amazed all over again. He was taking notes, minute by minute, gesture by gesture, and he would have got up to dig out the video camera but for fear of breaking the spell. Like any other child, Sam resisted school. He was hyperactive, wilful, difficult to control, and yet control was what this was all about, since funding depended on his ability to build and utilise his vocabulary and show it off on demand. For anywhere from three to five hours a day, he was made to sit at a desk and go through a series of drills, exercises and tests of his vocabulary and ability to employ syntax, and some days were better than others, the whole process a towering ziggurat of advancing and sliding back and advancing again. Still, this was something new – Sam doing the teaching – and it was worth seeing where it would go.

  When Josh eased into the room, Sam glanced up at him, but didn’t sign HI or GIVE ME HUG, which was his usual reaction on encountering people he was close to. He was too absorbed. And he stayed that way for a full thirty minutes, long enough for Guy to signal Josh to get the camera and start filming. Which was good, as good as it got – until Sam, seized by a sudden urge, did a backflip over the couch and shot twice round the room in manic display before rooting through his toy box until he found his favourite stuffed toy – a chewed-over, eyeless, one-eared cocker spaniel – and presented it to Aimee, as if he were courting her.

  ‘For me?’ she said, taking it from him. ‘Well, thank you, Sam, thanks a lot.’

  Sam just stood there, bracing himself with one hand on her knee, gazing intently at her. As a general rule, he was almost pathologically protective of his things and he didn’t like anyone touching them, not even when helping him tidy up before bed.

  Guy said, ‘Sign it to him, here, like this…’ And he made the sign for thank you, open hand to the lips, then swept graciously downward, and Aimee tried it on Sam, who got it and repeated it and then signed, YOU’RE WELCOME, and all the while Josh kept the camera rolling.

  ‘That’s it?’ Aimee said.

  Guy nodded.

  ‘Wow, you mean I just talked to him?’

  ‘
It’s a start,’ he said.

  A week later, Aimee was installed in the house, spending most nights and the better part of each day working with Sam alongside Josh, Barbara and the two new student volunteers he’d managed to recruit. She was just what he’d hoped for: a calming presence, uncomplaining, non-opinionated, eager to do whatever was necessary to lighten his load. And that was more vital now than ever because the second TV appearance was scheduled for the following week, and there was interest from NBC and The Tonight Show, which was the apex as far as he was concerned – that would put him above anybody, even Moncrief – and he needed time to prepare. Sam had to be on his best behaviour and for that he had to feel secure – had to be fussed over and coddled the way Melanie had coddled him. Josh wasn’t capable of doing it, not on his own anyway, not without Elise, because like all juvenile males, Sam was more responsive to women than men. Barbara, though she was game, had her limitations. Not Aimee though. Aimee was a perfect fit.

  He learned that she lived in student housing, alone, sans roommate, but she didn’t seem to be spending much time there. As far as he could see, she wasn’t making use of the guest room either, though he’d found a backpack in the closet, which, on examination, proved to contain a change of clothes and underthings and a few school texts with her name inscribed on the inside leaves in minute block letters. In green ink. Why anybody would go out of their way to find green ink, he couldn’t imagine, and yet still, the backpack was there and now he knew at least something about her beyond her introversion and her pretty face: black lace brassieres and green ink. He wasn’t snooping, or not exactly. He was just curious, that was all, and the fact that her things were there came as a relief to him – they were markers of her commitment. Better yet, the bed was untouched. Right from the start, she’d slept with Sam, as Melanie had most nights and as he himself had been pressed into doing ever since she’d left because Sam suffered separation anxiety and needed the comfort and warmth of a living, breathing body stretched out in the bed beside him. If he didn’t get it – if the arrangement wasn’t to his satisfaction – he’d let everybody know, stripping the bed, tearing off his nappy and humping around the room with his hair erected in full chimp display, all the while screaming in a pitch that was like an ice pick to the heart. And if you weren’t up to it, if you were tired and dragged out and in no mood and you just said ‘Fuck it’ and locked him in, he would scream all night. And still be screaming, right in your face, when you unlocked the door in the morning.