Talk to Me

by T. C. Boyle

  ‘Oh, that’s nothing, Margaret,’ Guy said, waving his glass as if in illustration. He was drinking Chardonnay, courtesy of LaSalle Vineyards. He would have preferred champagne – so would Aimee – but grant money only took you so far. ‘Wait’ll we sit down to eat. You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to quiz him for your benefit – and yours too, Leonard. Categories and concepts. Like, “Do you like mashed potatoes better than French fries?” Or meat. “What do you like better, meat or vegetables?”’

  ‘He likes fries,’ Elise put in, claiming a piece of her turf back. ‘You should see him at McDonald’s.’

  ‘But concepts are what separate the believers from the sceptics. I can ask him what kind of animal the turkey is and he’ll say it’s a bird. And then I’ll ask him, “But isn’t it meat?” and – but wait, you just wait, you’ll see for yourself.’

  The professor – he wasn’t a stiff, not at all, and he hadn’t stopped grinning since he stepped in the door – said he’d be thrilled to see it. And his wife chimed in too. ‘Amazing, really amazing,’ she said.

  They were in the middle of the meal, all of them settled in at the big table in the dining room, Josh and Elise at one end, and she and Sam at the other, plates heaped, wine flowing, when Sam suddenly stood up in his chair and let out a single staccato bark. Everyone looked up, startled. ‘Sam,’ she warned, taking hold of his wrist to restrain him, ‘Sam, no!’ He broke her grip as easily as if she were a child, then sprang down and shot across the room on all fours even as Guy and Josh rose from their seats and Elise threw up her arms protectively (which didn’t make any sense – Sam was no danger to her, couldn’t she see that?). ‘Jesus,’ the professor said.

  In the next moment, the door pushed open as if under its own power, and a stranger was standing there, an outsized man who filled the door frame. He was in his fifties, his head shaved, his goatee gone white, and he wore a black leather eyepatch over his left eye: Moncrief. She’d forgotten all about him. And here he was, a bottle of what looked to be Scotch or rum in each hand, grinning, or trying to. ‘Sorry I’m late,’ he said, stepping into the room and brandishing the bottles even as Guy called out ‘Donald!’ and Sam shrank away from him, his hair gone limp and his eyes darting uncertainly round the room. ‘The traffic was a bitch – or no, that’s giving it too much credit. Who doesn’t love a bitch? Let’s just say it was a motherfucker and leave it at that. And, shit, finding this place? You’d have to be a bloodhound.’

  In the next moment, he and Guy were embracing and then introductions went round and Moncrief – Professor Moncrief, Donald – sat heavily in the chair reserved for him between Guy and Leonard, unscrewing the cap of one of the bottles (it was Scotch, a brand she’d never heard of ) and pouring himself half a wine glass full. The room seemed to swell and then shrink back down to size. Everyone began talking at once and Barbara got up to offer Moncrief the platter of turkey, which Guy had carved earlier, presenting the first piece ceremonially to Sam. Who’d been perfect all afternoon. Earlier, during the salad course, Guy had put him through his paces and he’d really shone, despite the pot and the fact that he’d had a glass and a half of wine (that she knew of – he often snuck sips from unattended glasses, so she could never be sure), fielding direct questions from the professor and his wife and answering fluently in sign. But all that had changed the minute Moncrief stepped into the room and she couldn’t imagine why – normally he’d be right in people’s faces, especially here, at home, where he could assert himself, but instead he’d crept under the table and pulled himself up into her lap, where she wrapped her arms around him and held him like the big baby he was.

  She was thinking about dessert – pie, coffee and Baileys, the peach ice cream that was Sam’s favourite – but couldn’t very well get up and start clearing away the dinner plates while Moncrief was still eating. He dug right in, without ceremony. He ate enormously, obliviously, talking all the while, his subjects ranging from the obvious – chimps – to deer hunting, Cessna aircraft and folk music (at one point, he’d turned to her and asked if young people had ever heard of Phil Ochs and she had to admit that she hadn’t). When finally he pushed his plate away, he pulled a half-smoked cigar from his shirt pocket, asked, ‘Anybody mind?’ and lit it without waiting for a response.

  One puff, two – he threw his head back and blew the smoke out over the room and the conversation fell off so that she became aware of the record again, a string quartet Guy had introduced her to, Debussy or Ravel, she couldn’t remember which. She was just about to ask if anyone would like dessert, when he looked directly at her – at Sam, in her lap – and said, ‘So this is him, is it? The famous talking chimp. The TV personality.’ He turned to Guy. ‘The Tonight Show – anything ever come of that?’

  ‘Not yet.’ Guy looked flushed, as if he’d had too much to drink, which, she realised in that moment, he had. ‘But we’re close – it could happen anytime. I’m just waiting for a call.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Moncrief said, ‘I’m of two minds about it. Cheapens what we’re doing, actually, as if we’re not psychologists but hucksters: let’s see the ape jump through the flaming hoop and parse sentences at the same time. But it draws attention. Nothing like the tube for drawing attention.’ He waved his hand in dismissal, took another puff of the cigar. ‘Not that it matters. Not any more.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Guy leaned heavily into the table, propped up on both elbows. His wine glass was empty. His plate shone viscidly with the remnants of the meal: butter, grease, gravy. ‘You’re not saying everybody’s not 100 per cent behind this, are you? Because we are on this end, I can assure you of that. And Sam. Sam’s making progress like you wouldn’t believe—’

  ‘I’m not saying shit. But if you want to know, this whole thing – language studies – is dead in the water, or about to be. You hear what Borstein, that fuck, is up to? He’s saying it’s all a fraud, that Chomsky was right all along – only humans are programmed for language, and the apes don’t have a thought in their heads except to suck up to us. For treats. Like trained seals. Or lapdogs. Or anything else with a brain bigger than a snake’s. And he’s going to publish in Science. It’s a fait accompli. Nail in the coffin.’

  Everybody began to talk at once. Sam fidgeted in her lap. Her heart was pounding. ‘That’s not true,’ she said, and somehow her voice was the one Moncrief picked out of the mix.

  ‘You don’t think so?’ he said, fixing a hard look on her. Rumour had it that his left eye had been gouged out by an enraged chimp when he’d got careless and drifted too close to its cage one day, but Guy insisted that wasn’t true – he’d been in an auto wreck when he was a teenager. She saw now that there were faint pink striations running across the bridge of his nose, under the patch and out the other side of it. ‘Sam,’ he said, his voice harsh and insistent, ‘are you a fraud? Do you know about death? History? DNA and heredity? Do you know why you’re the prisoner and we’re not?’

  Guy said, ‘Donald, you know that’s not fair—’

  Moncrief ignored him. He just stared at Sam, and Sam, his eyes round and unblinking, stared back. ‘Talk to me, Sam,’ he said. ‘Come on, Sam, talk to me.’

  BLACK BUG

  When he woke he was back in the CAGE and nothing had changed except the floor was damp, which made it even colder. There was heat, though, blowing through a vent in the hallway, and that was better than the ICE outside, better than what had happened to his fingers and toes that were numb all the same, and whether he’d gotten frostbite or not, he didn’t know because he didn’t know what frostbite was. PAIN, that was what he knew. Anguish, he knew anguish too, though he had no word for it. He was lying on his back, staring at the place in the ceiling where the pipe had been, and he didn’t want to move, didn’t want to push himself up, didn’t want to exist. He saw faces in his mind, hers first, then Guy’s, then Barbara’s and Josh’s, then the others, and then they all blurred and condensed as if whirling on a wheel that spun faster and faster.
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  Finally, he pushed himself up. He ached in his joints, in his back. His elbows were frayed. There was a lingering PAIN where the dart had gone in, the prick of a pin, a sore spot. The floor was hard. Everything stank. But something was different – he felt it before he saw it – and then he turned his head and his heart froze: there, not three feet from him, was one of the BLACK BUGS, not in its own cage, but in his. A silent shriek of panic jolted through him. What was this? How had it happened? What did it mean?

  It meant punishment, that was what. It meant terror, it meant payback, he saw that instantly. He wanted to scream but he didn’t scream because the thing was asleep, its ribs heaving and a low growling snore chuffing from its lips. It had black HAIR all over it and its feet were naked. He saw its ugly, outsized ears and the two bony white ridges over its shuttered eyes that were like paint, dirty smudges of creamy paint like when he was making a PICTURE and the paint stained his hands, and without realising it, he touched his face, his brow, his own nose, and she chided him and dabbed it away. But its feet. Its feet puzzled him because they weren’t at all like her feet or Guy’s feet or anybody else’s, except – he looked down now, took first one of his numbed feet in his hand, then the other – his own.

  He studied it, this BLACK BUG, this thing, for the longest time and all he felt was revulsion, all he felt was AFRAID, and then the worst thing happened, or the next to worst thing: it opened its eyes. In an instant it was on him, shrieking, tearing, pounding, biting, and all he could do was lock his hands over his head and ball up to protect himself till it was done. Its breathing was fierce, ragged. Its chest heaved, its arms trembled. It backed off two feet and then came back at him to shriek in his face with all the hot, ratcheting force of its inflamed breath. It stank, it reeked, it was filthy. And now, from all the adjoining cages and the cages he couldn’t see, came the shrieks of the others, a long, sustained catastrophic din that went on and on till suddenly the door flung open and every voice choked off. The BIG MAN stood there in the doorway, scowling till the gouges between his eye and the black hole were angry scars, and the stinger flicked in his hand and thumped like a baton against his leg. He came down the corridor, step by step, taking his time, in no hurry, this whole horrible, blistering place of suffering and confinement at his command and his alone. He glared into the cages and the BLACK BUGS shrank from him. Yes. And then he came to this CAGE where the BLACK BUG had been screaming seconds earlier. The stinger buzzed to life and the man’s arm snaked through the bars to anoint not the screamer, not the BUG, but him, him, as if he were the disrupter, the guilty one, the BUG.

  GOLDEN EAGLE

  She wouldn’t stop sobbing. When Guy tried to comfort her, she pushed him away, her face raw and twisted. She was sunk into the couch, a sodden Kleenex clamped over her nose and mouth, a metallic January sun dragging chains of light across the floor. The world was crippled, everything gone wrong, and he felt like sobbing himself, but he couldn’t – he was the one in charge here, if only nominally, as Moncrief had just demonstrated on the other end of the phone line from someplace in Nevada, where he was spending the night before flying on to Santa Maria in the morning at the controls of his Cessna 421 Golden Eagle, the one fitted out with two cages in the back for transporting animals.

  ‘I didn’t know,’ he said. ‘I swear.’ He held out his palms in extenuation. He’d known it was coming, they all did, but not today. That was Moncrief. That was how he did things. ‘Jesus, summer, that’s what I thought. Or at least the end of the semester.’

  She lifted her face, miserable, bereaved, outraged. ‘It’s you. You’re the one to blame.’

  ‘It’s Moncrief, you know that. I’ve told you all along – and the funding, without the funding we’re nothing.’

  It had taken two years, but the bomb Moncrief dropped on them that Thanksgiving had finally detonated, leaving everybody scared and angry and the programme in tatters. It was catastrophic, nothing short. Borstein had published his paper the previous year (‘Proceeding from a Faulty Premise: The Fallacy of Primate Language Acquisition Studies’) and the critics of the programme jumped on board, declaring it bankrupt, a fad, wishful thinking, reiterating Chomsky’s assertion that only Homo sapiens was hardwired to acquire language as a central inescapable fact of divergent evolution. The prefrontal cortex, which was linked to the ability to process language, was twice as big in humans as it was in apes, a fact that should have provided the answer right there and saved everybody the trouble. One Chomskyite, piling on, pronounced the whole business more suited to the circus than the university. Another called it the ‘Dr Doolittle Syndrome’.

  Moncrief was embarrassed. And because he was embarrassed, he was incensed. He’d never been all that enthusiastic about language training from the beginning – more interested in cross-fostering as a means of exploring comparative development and sexuality – but he’d gone along with it because that was where the money was. Or had been. It was astonishing how fast the grant money dried up – not only Moncrief’s, but his own too, both from the NIH and NSF, which declined to re-fund the project. And why? Because no matter how unbiased they pretended to be, people were species-centric and didn’t want to believe that apes could use language – or express emotions or exhibit self-referential consciousness. If they did, then what was the rationale for keeping them in cages – or worse, using them for biomedical research? Borstein’s article was the tipping point, but the antipathy had been there all along. Suddenly, Borstein was a hero. He was courageous. He was a truth-teller. He’d spent five years teaching Alex ASL and according to him, at the end of those five years, Alex was still incapable of expressing any thought deeper than YOU GIVE ME, YOU OPEN DOOR or, his big breakthrough, NIGHT IS DARK.

  ‘No,’ she said, glaring at him. ‘No, it’s you.’

  ‘What are you talking about? It’s the end of my career, my research, everything – kiss it all goodbye.’

  ‘You have tenure.’

  ‘Fuck tenure. You think I want to stay here teaching survey courses till I’m brain-dead like all the rest of them? This is my life we’re talking about.’

  ‘What about Sam’s life? Why can’t you stand up to your professor – he’s not God, you know.’

  ‘You’re the Catholic, you ought to know. But as far as Sam’s concerned, Moncrief is God and God’s flying in here tomorrow in his twin-engine plane and taking him straight to purgatory, and there’s nothing you or I or anybody else can do about it. God has a dart gun too, did you know that? Tipped with sernalyn?’

  She came up off the couch so fast it startled him and she was right there, right in his face, jerking her hands back and forth as if she were swatting at flies. ‘Get a lawyer. Sue him. Get a writ or what do you call it, a stay—’

  ‘Of what – execution?’

  ‘You know what I mean. A court order, whatever. He can’t just take him – not without a fight.’

  He’d been fighting all along, but the tide was against him. Or not just the tide, it was a tsunami. He’d rewritten his grant proposals half a dozen times, harangued Moncrief in letter after letter, begged him for more time, phoned him so often Moncrief had stopped answering.

  ‘But he can just take him – he owns him, or did you forget that? And sue him? Sue him for what?’

  ‘I don’t know – breach of contract? What about breach of contract?’

  ‘There is no contract, are you kidding me? Moncrief bred him, Moncrief owns him and he loaned him out to me on his own terms, end of story. “Take him,” he said. “Get your grants, do your study, but when it’s over he comes back here to me.”’

  ‘That’s crap. How can anybody own Sam? It’s like slavery – didn’t we abolish slavery?’

  ‘He’s an animal.’

  ‘He’s not. He’s just like a person, you know that – he can talk, he can think, he loves us. This is his home, here with us. He’s never known anything else. How can you even say that?’

  ‘Tell it to Moncrief, who’s interested in him
for one thing only – breeding – and the bucks he can squeeze out of the next research lab and the one after that. Tell it to Borstein, tell it to the National Science Foundation, or what, Science magazine, for Christ’s sake. You want a German shepherd, you go to the breeder and buy one, and you can do anything you want with him: feed him tender little bites of filet mignon all day or tie him to a stake and starve him to death.’

  She hadn’t moved. She was right there in his personal space, glaring up at him, accusing him, as if this was some sort of contest as to who cared the most, as if he had to prove himself to her, and it came to him then that she was no different from Melanie. Maybe she hadn’t said it in so many words – All you care about is yourself – but that was the implication. And who was she, anyway? A student, a tiny, pretty-faced, longhaired child he thought he’d been in love with, and here she was in his house, in his life, his work, making demands, attacking him.

  ‘You said you were never going to let this happen, you swore to me…’

  ‘Look, I hate it as much as you do, but he’s almost six now and that’s already beyond the age most of them get sent back. You know that. And he’s been worse than ever lately, biting everybody till it’s like we’re on permanent rabies watch, and how much longer you think they’re going to tolerate that down at the hospital before they call in animal control – you really want to see him put down?’

  ‘He’s barely breaking the skin, that’s not really biting, not like with Elise—’

  ‘And that woman on her bike, what was her name?’

  ‘Jody. But that was nothing, I talked her out of it. She’s like a friend now, she understands, she does.’

  Sam had got out a month or so back, something he was doing more frequently lately, no matter how closely they monitored him, and this time he’d gone nearly a mile and wound up sitting in the middle of the sidewalk in a residential neighbourhood at two in the afternoon when everybody thought he was upstairs in bed, asleep. A woman in her forties – Jody – who was on her way home from an art class, saw him sitting there in his overalls and T-shirt, looking lost and forlorn, and so she propped the bike up on its kickstand and came up to him chirping endearments as if he was a lost dog. She crouched down at his level, looked him in the face. ‘You look lost, little guy,’ she said, or some such, and when she reached out with the idea of checking his pocket for ID or a phone number to call, he took hold of her wrist. Just that. He didn’t threaten her, didn’t bite, just held her by the wrist. An hour later, he was still holding her, and no matter what she did he wouldn’t let go – or he would, but just for a second at a time, as if it was a game, only to snatch her arm back as soon as she tried to get away. If it weren’t for a pair of ten-year-olds on their way home from school who raised the alarm, Sam might have been sitting there with her all night long. Chimp humour. No damage done. But Leonard was furious and even the dean got involved after the story – ‘Talking Ape Keeps Local Woman Prisoner’ – appeared in the newspaper.