Talk to Me

by T. C. Boyle

  That was no longer an issue. He hadn’t had to suggest to Aimee that she sleep in Sam’s bed; she just did it on her own initiative, because Sam wanted it and he communicated that to her, both in the rudimentary sign language she was just beginning to pick up and through subtler signals too. People outside the field couldn’t fathom the depth of communication apes were capable of, though they were willing to admit that their dogs showed moods and desires, barking at the door or fetching the leash when they wanted to go out, for instance, or that their cats’ mewing served half a dozen different purposes, but what they failed to appreciate was that apes were of a different order altogether. Dogs and cats had been bred for thousands of generations to weed out the undesirable genes, domesticated to create an all but emotionally neutered animal designed to serve human needs, but apes came straight out of the wild. They were independent. Resentful of captivity. And if you stared into their eyes, you saw yourself staring right back.

  To put Sam in the category of a dog or cat was demeaning – and beyond that, uniformed and unimaginative to the point of stupidity. Sam had presence. He had charisma. And Guy was going to show it off to Ed McMahon and Johnny Carson and all the rest of America – and he was going to be rested when he did it, rested for the first time in weeks, because Sam was back in his own bed now. With Aimee. And his fleas. And the dreams that jerked his limbs in the middle of the night till the bed rocked like a ship at sea.

  They’d just sat down to dinner one evening – he, Aimee, Sam and one of the volunteers (Sid James, nineteen, bland, suitably ape-obsessed) – when they heard the thump of footsteps on the front porch and then the rattle of keys. Sam was the first to react, jerking around in the high chair, his eyes keen with excitement. In the next instant, Sam was springing down from the chair and racing for the door on all fours, while Aimee jumped to her feet and Guy found himself slapping the edge of the table and barking ‘No!’ and ‘Bad!’ as if it would do any good. He was annoyed. Pissed off, actually. Dinner was sacrosanct, a time to relax and enjoy Sam’s company, converse with him casually without the pressure of having to perfect his signs or expand his vocabulary – this was how language was acquired, in a home environment, through observation and imitation, which was the whole point of cross-fostering in the first place. How did human children pick up language? Not in school, but in the kitchen, on the playground, in the living room. In bed at night, with a storybook spread open before them. And at dinner, dinner especially. He let out a curse, startling Sid, the new kid, who sat there immobile over his plate of spaghetti.

  It was Josh at the door. And behind him, her face blanched and her jaw set beneath a pristine gauze bandage that flashed like a distress signal in the harsh glare of the entryway, was Elise. Sam signed, GIVE ME HUG and held out his arms to Josh, who bent to embrace him, which was an invitation for Sam to scramble up on to his shoulders. Elise didn’t offer a smile. Wordlessly, she shifted round to shut the door and work the key successively through the three locks, though it was clear that Sam was going nowhere – the moment was far too interesting. Elise was back. With a bandage on her face. This was a new dynamic. And Sam, from his perch atop Josh’s shoulders, didn’t utter a sound, just stared, open-mouthed.

  ‘You caught us just as we were sitting down to eat,’ Guy said.

  ‘Don’t let us stop you,’ Josh said, flashing both palms in apology. ‘We’re fine. We just stopped by for a minute… to see how things were going?’

  ‘There’s plenty, really, if you’re hungry.’ Guy shot a glance at Aimee, who was trying not to stare at Elise’s face. ‘Right, Aimee? It’s spaghetti and meatballs, Sam’s favourite – except for p-i-z-z-a, right, Sam?’

  Sam had nothing to say, one way or the other. His head, which was already nearly as big as Josh’s, rode above Josh like a gaudy party balloon. He was staring fixedly at Elise, at her face, at her bandage. Did he know what it was? Did he understand the sequence of events that had put that bandage in place? Did he feel remorse – or was Elise’s changed appearance a curiosity that had nothing to do with him and his refractory jaws?

  Aimee – shoulders slouched, face averted – glanced up at Guy and in a whisper of a voice said, ‘Sure, there’s plenty.’

  Josh shook his head. ‘No, don’t bother – we already ate.’

  ‘A glass of wine, then?’ Guy said. ‘Elise?’

  They were all grouped there in the entryway, the moment extending itself awkwardly, until Elise, in a controlled voice, said, ‘I just came for closure, that’s all.’

  ‘Closure?’ Guy echoed. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘It means’ – she locked eyes with Sam – ‘I want some sort of accounting because maybe Josh is going to keep working with him till the next ice age, but I’m done. Finished. And I can’t believe’ – addressing Sam now, her voice sharpening – ‘that I get treated this way. What did I ever do to you, Sam? Huh? Tell me.’

  Sam let out a series of soft pant-hoots that could have meant anything, but he didn’t bring his hands into play.

  ‘So look, OK, I hear you, but why don’t we all go out to the kitchen and sit down a minute?’ Guy said, making a move to usher them in. ‘Where we can talk? I want to hear how you’re doing, what the prognosis is – Josh says they still didn’t put the stitches in, even after the intravenous?’ He didn’t wait for an answer, just slipped an arm round Elise’s waist and guided her towards the kitchen, where the new kid was waiting for an introduction and the aroma of the marinara sauce underscored the invitation.

  He pulled up two extra chairs and poured wine all around – including a glass for Sam, who’d climbed back into his high chair and addressed himself to his Tupperware bowl of pasta, sauce and meatballs as if Elise and Josh had been there all along. Elise said what she was going to say, and it was no better than what he’d heard in the hospital, and when she was done, he topped off her glass and tried to bring a little variety into the conversation. Or at least change the subject. ‘I don’t know if Josh told you, but it looks like Johnny Carson’s interested…’

  For the first time, she smiled, though it was only half a smile and it tugged at the corner of the bandage till the bandage seemed to float free in space. ‘Good for you,’ she said. ‘That’s great, it really is. And good for Sam too.’

  ‘And what about you?’ He paused. ‘We could all use you back here again, Sam especially.’

  ‘Uh-uh,’ she said. ‘I’m never going to put myself through that again. Besides,’ gesturing to Aimee, who was seated in the chair Elise used to occupy, right at Sam’s elbow, ‘I see you’ve already replaced me.’

  He was going to demur, though that was the fact (and the truth was that Aimee was better than she’d ever been or ever could be), but he didn’t have the chance. Because Sam suddenly took it into his head to spring out of the high chair and on to the table, upsetting his wine glass in the process and rocking the table so that they all had to shoot out their hands to keep their own glasses from tumbling over, and whether this was hilarious or not – Life with a Chimp – Guy hadn’t yet decided. Oblivious to the overturned glass, Sam just squatted there in the centre of the table, his eyes fixed on Elise. Then, slow as an awakening statue, he began creeping towards the far end of the table, where she sat between Josh and Sid. Everyone hushed. Guy was bracing himself to intervene, if that was what it was going to come to, but then Sam, a look of wonder on his face, snaked out a long arm and a single long finger to tentatively explore the bandage on Elise’s jaw. No one scolded him. No one said a word. Here was the experiment in real time, the chimp, the non-human, confronting his own misdeeds, feeling remorse, showing compassion – or was it something else?

  For a long moment Sam crouched there before her, the table elevating him so that their faces were on a level. He reached out to touch the bandage again, then ran his finger gently up and down the length of it, as if measuring it. He grunted softly. He signed, WHITE THING, signed, WRONG. And then, before anyone could stop him, he seized the edge of
the bandage and tore it from her face in a single motion, slapping it down hard on the surface of the table and pounding it with his fists till the silverware rattled and the glasses rocked all over again. Josh made a grab for him, but Sam shrugged him off. He looked directly at Elise, then stuffed the bandage in his mouth and began grinding it, slowly and methodically, between his teeth.

  CHAIN LINK

  There was no word for chain link in his vocabulary, but there was a word for fence and FENCE was the first thing he saw, when he slipped through the door and into the hard cold sunlight of a world transformed, no leaves on the trees, the wind like a whip in his eyes, his feet gone instantly cold and his hands too, his arms, his face, and where was he? This was no world he knew. It was dead. Frozen. Like the ICE CREAM in the freezer at home, like the ICE he demanded in his Coke and the gin-tonic she made for him when they settled into the COUCH and watched TV before dinner. He was disoriented. He was AFRAID. But he didn’t have time to worry over it because they would be after him and if he was going to get away from here, he had to scale that fence, which he did now as easily as if he were going up the trunk of a tree – more easily, actually, because the whole structure was made of hand- and footholds, simplest thing in the world, one jump, two, and he was atop the fence.

  He felt a surge of power. He was free. He was up off the ground. Safe. Safe and free. He swayed and clung with his feet and shot out his arms for balance. But there was a problem here and he recognised it even as he heard the voices shouting behind him: another fence. It stood twenty feet from this one and there were shining loops of cutting wire threaded over the top of it. He knew cutting wire from the FENCE surrounding the big buildings she used to take him to in the CAR for his tests and measurements – and he knew how to avoid it, how not to touch it and slip past it as if it wasn’t even there. He was perched high. The wind was cold. All he had to do was jump, mount the second fence and drop down the other side before they could stop him. And then? Then he would go to her, wherever she was.

  But now all of a sudden barking started up and two dark shapes came hurtling round the corner to throw themselves at the base of the fence, their bodies heavy enough to rock him where he clung ten feet above them; DOGS, DOGS snapping their jaws at him, killer DOGS, black-and-tan DOGS with thin pointed snouts full of white, white teeth, snouts he wanted to crush between his two hands, but he was AFRAID.

  ‘Hey!’ a voice shouted at him. ‘Hey, Sam, over here!’ And there were the two wet men at the base of the fence, waving their arms at him while the dogs barked and leapt and foamed on the other side. That was when he saw the BIG MAN emerge cursing from the door of the high-flown red building behind him, where the BLACK BUGS were screaming death and fury… and suddenly all his fear dissolved into anger like a pill in water, and he dropped down on the dog that was closer to him and before it could bite or even react, he sank his own white, white teeth into the top of its skull.

  The other dog – it didn’t have a tail, only the stump of a tail – let out a short, stuttering shriek and bolted away from him while the one he’d bitten cowered on the ground, and he took off running for the next fence, AFRAID all over again.

  THE DYNAMIC

  Guy talked, she listened. That was the dynamic between them. He was one of those people who needed to hear his own voice issuing from him in a constant stream of comments, counter-comments, observations, jokes, routines and whatever else came into his head. Silence was not an option for him. He was a speech giver, a lecturer, a talker, and she appreciated him all the more for it because they could talk and talk, and she didn’t have to say anything beyond ‘Uh-huh’, ‘Yeah’ and ‘Really?’ She never got tired of it. Being with him was an ongoing education in primatology, ethology, psychobiology and linguistics, like her own private tutorial. Maybe they hadn’t settled into a formal teacher/student relationship, but that was what it amounted to. From the first day he’d been guiding her towards what she had a sudden startling new hunger to know – and what statistics and psychology couldn’t even begin to give her. Which was why she’d dropped both courses by the end of the first week – and her Spanish class too. She was deep into something else now, a new field – a new life – that absorbed her totally, which was what a liberal arts education was all about, wasn’t it? She read everything he gave her – Goodall, Lorenz, Tinbergen, Hrdy, Imanishi – and she enrolled in an adult ed class in ASL, which met twice a week, after Sam had gone to bed. And she had Sam, Sam above all.

  Elise wasn’t coming back, that much was clear, nor was Guy’s wife – Melanie – and he needed all the help he could get, which only underscored how crucial to him she’d already become. Josh was still in charge – he was the expert, he was the grad student – but she was the one who had to see to all the details, the grocery shopping, the clean-up, the dishes, and she spent more time with Sam, one-on-one, than all the rest of them combined, including Josh. And Guy too. How much of it Elise had handled, she didn’t know, but the way Elise had reacted to Sam that night when she’d come for ‘closure’, as she put it, Aimee was glad she’d never have to see her again. Sam wasn’t to blame. He was only trying to say he was sorry – and when he’d peeled the bandage off her, he was attempting in his own way to make things right. Maybe he didn’t understand, or at least not fully, but he knew something was wrong with the picture he was seeing, with this wad of white tape and gauze that obscured Elise’s face so that she didn’t even look like herself, and so he got rid of it. And what did she do? She exploded.

  She tried to put herself in Elise’s place. Sam had bitten her, after all, and here was the evidence of it etched in a dark zigzagging scab slathered with some sepia antibiotic solution and the skin around it blanched like a frog’s belly – all right, OK, she got that. But Elise had let out a shriek that could have shattered the windows if they weren’t three inches thick, and then she’d started attacking him – with the breadboard, of all things. She slammed it down on his head, his neck, his shoulders, totally out of control, until Josh and Guy took hold of her, and all the while Sam didn’t attempt to defend himself, just squatted there in the centre of the table, taking it, as if he knew what he’d done and this was his penance.

  The following day, she and Guy put Sam through his drills as if nothing had happened. He wasn’t as restless as usual, which was a blessing, and he sat at his desk without complaint for a good half hour while Guy projected slides of various objects on the wall – plate, cup, chair, book, lamp – and Sam spun out the signs for them with ease and fluidity. All this was elementary to him, but the more advanced exercises had had to be suspended in the wake of first Melanie’s and then Elise’s defections, at least temporarily. That was what Guy told her, anyway. And he held out the promise that it would all begin again, soon, and that she was going to be right at the centre of it. In the meantime, he insisted on the drills to keep Sam fresh for his upcoming TV appearance, which the producers were no longer calling a feature but a mini-documentary, whatever that meant. It was all right with her. She followed along, practising the signs as Sam formed them, learning, settling in.

  After lunch, she and Guy took Sam for a walk out back of the house, where he had a high time, bristling and woofing at the cattle that roamed through the chaparral beyond the barbed-wire fence. The sense of release was electric. Clearly, he was overjoyed to be out of the classroom, playing tug of war with the lead tethering him to Guy, clowning in a scatter of leaves and dried-up grasses, signing TICKLE and CHASE over and over again. People said animals didn’t have emotions, but that was ridiculous – all you had to do was take a look at him to disprove that.

  ‘He’s having the time of his life, isn’t he?’ she said, glancing up at Guy.

  ‘Oh, absolutely. How about you – you having fun?’

  The sun was in her eyes and she had to put up a hand to shade them. Everything smelled of whatever it was in the leaves of the big oak that dominated the yard – tannin, wasn’t that it? She nodded.

  ‘You haven’t
seen him climb yet, have you? That’s what he really likes. What do you think, Sam’ – and he signed it simultaneously – ‘time for your tree?’

  Sam hooted his approval and led them across the yard till they were under the canopy of the oak, then sat on his haunches and looked up expectantly. Guy signed something to him and he signed back, something that must have had to do with permissions and admonitions, because obviously Guy was going to have to unhook the lead before Sam could get up in the tree without tying himself in knots. The lead was six feet long and connected to a metal loop on the back of the harness Sam wore whenever he left the house, and though he could wriggle around and tug on it with his hands and feet both, he was still at least nominally under control as long as he was hooked up. Guy had let her walk him so she could get used to the feel of it – of him, of his weight and power and the way you could jerk back and control him, though 90 per cent of the time, he was the one doing the jerking. It was like having a dog on a leash, but different too because dogs didn’t have hands and dogs didn’t climb trees, lamp posts, stop signs and power poles. When Guy bent forward to release the lead, she didn’t know what to expect.

  ‘Are you sure it’s all right? I mean, won’t he try to get away?’

  Guy just smiled at her. Sam was already high in the tree, making his happy sounds, rattling branches for the sheer joy of it. ‘Look around,’ Guy said. ‘You see any other trees close enough for him to swing to – brachiate, that is? That’s the official term, “brachiate”, going from branch to branch. I just love the way it sounds.’