Talk to Me

by T. C. Boyle

  ‘You know what I’m saying – as much as you love him, as much as I love him, we can’t keep him here forever. And the cost. I can barely pay the bills as it is and believe me, we are on the last dregs of the grant money and there’s no more coming, at least not that I can see right now. Maybe things’ll change, I don’t know, but for now, maybe this is the best way.’

  ‘What way? Putting him in a cage?’

  He shrugged. He felt tired in an essential way, deeply, unconquerably tired. Nearly six years of drama, of catering to an infant who never grows up, of Leonard, the dean, Melanie, Moncrief – and now her, her too.

  ‘I hate you,’ she spat and she lurched away from him, furious, slamming her hand down on the first flat surface she came to, which happened to be the end table, piled high with Sam’s books. The table rocked, and the books, which had been stacked haphazardly – by Sam – thumped to the floor, one after another, like a cannonade.

  And then, all at once, Sam was there, as if he’d materialised out of nowhere. He let out a bark of alarm, rose to his full height and waded into the room, his hair standing erect. He looked first to Aimee and then to Guy, then back and forth again, before he went to her, and not for a hug, not for a piggyback or a kiss, but just to stand there, right in front of her, immovable, rigid, his eyes shielded in a hard glaze of light.

  It was all coming down too fast and he hadn’t really had time to sort things out yet, except to know that he’d exhausted his appeals – and that Moncrief was the alpha male in this particular configuration of things, which forced him into the subordinate role whether he liked it or not. And he didn’t like it, even if he saw the necessity of it. Do not fall in love with your subject. Or your student assistant, for that matter.

  Aimee was inconsolable. Fierce. Frantic. Unable to do anything but cling to Sam and pet him over and over till he got bored and went careering round the house as if he were trying to catch up to some phantom of himself. She kept saying she wouldn’t let Moncrief take him and he kept reminding her they had no choice in the matter, telling her he felt just as bad as she did, though she denied it. Vehemently. ‘He’s my world,’ she said. ‘My whole world.’ He’d let it go – she was wrought up and didn’t know what she was saying – but if Sam was her whole world, then that didn’t leave much room in it for himself or begin to address what was going to happen when the university got around to repurposing the ranch house and evicted them.

  That night, still in shock, he telephoned the people who’d been closest to Sam and invited everybody over for an impromptu farewell dinner. Josh was there in fifteen minutes, looking drawn and miserable. He kept calling it the Last Supper – ‘And if Sam’s Jesus, then who’s Judas? Lucas Borstein, right?’ – as if irony could make this any better. Nobody laughed. Nobody even cracked a smile. Nobody had much heart for cooking either, but Janie and Barbara took over and managed to come up with a vegetarian lasagne – and a dessert of lime Jell-O embedded with grapes and canned pineapple especially for Sam – and everybody went through the motions, trying to pretend nothing was amiss. Sam wasn’t fooled. He knew something was up, though as if by agreement they all spelled out the charged and hurtful words so he wouldn’t catch on. They spelled out ‘Moncrief’, ‘cage’, ‘airplane’, ‘winter’, ‘cold’, ‘Iowa’. Spelled out ‘sad’, ‘angry’, ‘enraged’, ‘fucked up’. Janie cried. Barbara joined her. And when Josh offered a toast to Sam and all he’d meant to them, Guy found himself choking up too. The only one who didn’t have tears in her eyes was Aimee, who’d been crying all afternoon. Now she just sat there rigidly beside Sam, her eyes gone hard and distant.

  Afterward, everybody wanted a final moment with Sam, vying to amuse him, hold him, read him one last story, but most of all just to talk to him, as if to convince themselves that all the hours they’d put in hadn’t been wasted, no matter what Borstein and the rest of them said. Barbara kept scooping him up and pressing him tightly to her till he wriggled free and bounced round the room from one person to another, revelling in the attention and stuffing himself with forbidden treats like the Snickers bars he loved to swallow, wrappers and all. Barbara chased after him till she was winded, then came straight to where Guy was slumped in one of the kitchen chairs he’d propped up in the far corner, trying to gather himself. ‘I can’t believe it,’ she said, looming over him, her hair a mess, her blouse hanging open where Sam had torn the top two buttons away. ‘It’s like when I lost my grandmother last year? Or my dog, Lolly? Did I ever tell you about that?’

  She was drunk. They all were. How could they not be?

  ‘But this is worse, way worse. It’s like if I ever had a kid and, I don’t know, the Nazis or somebody came and took him away? You know what I mean?’

  He was trying to be patient, trying to get through this for everybody’s sake, trying to be professional about it, but all he felt was the cold drop of doom. The programme was dead. His career was dead. He had a book almost completed, but where was he going to publish it? Where was he going to live even? Some shitty apartment in faculty housing? And what about Josh’s dissertation? What about Barbara? What about Aimee?

  ‘You think there’s a chance we can get him back? Or could we at least, I don’t know, go there and visit him? Where is it, again, Iowa?’

  He leaned back in the chair, reached for his glass – cognac, he was finishing the cognac somebody had left behind because what was the point in keeping it around now? – and took a long, slow sip so that he could taste the fire of it on his lips and tongue and all the way down his throat. He was a professor. Barbara was a student. He needed to be rational for her sake – and for his own too. She might not have been a natural fit at first, but she’d stuck in there and she was as devoted to Sam as any of them. He felt for her. But of course he felt for himself too because he had so much more to lose.

  ‘That’s up to Dr Moncrief,’ he said. ‘But Sam’s too old for this now, I don’t have to tell you that – who knows, maybe someday when all this dies down, we could start all over again, with a new chimp.’

  ‘I don’t want a new chimp. I want Sam.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘I hear you,’ and poured himself another drink.

  And then, when everybody had said their farewells and headed out into the grip of a stale moonless night, Aimee stood up, put on her hooded sweatshirt, slung her purse over one shoulder and took Sam’s harness down from the coat tree in the front hall. ‘What are you doing?’ he asked.

  ‘Sam,’ she called, averting her face. ‘Want to go for a walk?’

  Sam had been in the kitchen, rattling plates around in the sink with the faucet open wide, his version of helping with the dishes. Now he came scraping into the room, glutted and looking sleepy. His bedtime was eight and it was already quarter of nine.

  ‘A walk? At this hour?’

  ‘Sam,’ she said, holding out the harness to him. ‘Come on.’

  ‘With your purse? What do you need your purse for if you’re just taking him out in the yard?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, and she wouldn’t meet his eyes, bending now to help Sam into his harness, elbows jumping, hands in motion, all business.

  She was so transparent, an innocent, a true innocent. In that moment he fell in love with her all over again. ‘You can’t just take him, you know. What would you do with him? Where would you go? A motel?’

  ‘I’m not. I’m just going out to his tree, that’s all.’

  ‘You know what he’d do to a motel room? Jesus, I can’t believe you. And Moncrief. He doesn’t give a shit for your feelings or mine or anybody else’s, least of all Sam’s. He’d be on you in a heartbeat. You know what Sam is to him? Ten thousand dollars. Period.’

  She glanced up at him. Sam let out a soft grunt. There were food stains around his mouth, a dribble of red sauce on his chest. He was motionless, quiet, bent docilely to receive the harness, no different from a dog awaiting the leash. ‘I’m just taking him to his tree,’ she said.

  Moncrief
called from the airport first thing in the morning. ‘We’re here,’ he said. ‘No glitches, no weather, which is a real fucking novelty for this time of year.’ There was a pause, noise in the background, voices, a loudspeaker. ‘I’m going to need you to pick us up at the airport asap. And you can give him the drug now.’

  ‘Now?’ He was standing in the kitchen, stirring sugar into a cup of coffee, the phone pressed to one ear. It was early yet and Aimee was still upstairs with Sam, asleep. ‘You mean you’re not even going to spend the day?’

  ‘I haven’t got a day. What I’ve got is thirty-nine animals to maintain and a wife who’s a pain in the ass and a bunch of grad students who might be brilliant as all hell but don’t seem to understand a simple command delivered in plain declarative English.’

  He could feel his heart going – this was too soon, he wasn’t ready. He’d pictured it for months now, dreaded it, denied it, fought it and finally, made his peace with it, but now that it was here all he could think was to stall. ‘Won’t you be exhausted? You just flew out yesterday, right? All that way?’

  ‘I’ve got Jack with me. Jack Serfis? He’s one of the few grad students who actually knows his ass from a hole in the ground – he’s got something like fifteen hundred hours of flight time, so I can conk out on the way back if I want to. Which I don’t. You might find it hard to believe but I relish the time I get to spend in the air.’

  Guy didn’t know what to say to this. His only experience was with commercial airliners, which was stressful enough – and exhausting in a way that went beyond the purely physical. He’d had window seats once or twice, but the novelty of looking down on the clouds only took you so far.

  ‘But listen, enough already,’ Moncrief said, his tone shifting abruptly. ‘Dose him and get on down here. We’re on a tight schedule.’

  The phone went dead but he just stood there gazing out into the yard until it began beeping, and he crossed the room and put it back on the hook. There were stains on the counter, a pile of dishes in the sink where Sam had left them. The room smelled faintly of him, of his secretions that seemed to overpower any shampoo they used on him, a ghost odour, and how long would the house smell of him once he was gone? A week, a month, forever?

  Aimee would want a cup of coffee to wake her up, that’s what he was thinking, so he poured a cup and started up the stairs, his legs gone heavy on him as if he were asleep himself. When he eased open the door, though, he saw that she wasn’t asleep. She was just lying there, curled up with Sam, her eyes open and her hair splayed across the pillow. Sam, mercifully, hadn’t wakened yet.

  ‘Aimee,’ he whispered. ‘Aimee, listen, that was Moncrief on the phone – he’s here. I’ve got to go down to the airport and get him.’

  She didn’t say anything, but her eyes told him everything he needed to know. She hadn’t slept at all. Her mind had been stuck in a loop, channelling through the stages of despair, rage and surrender, the solid black squares of the windows giving way first to grey and then the hard cold transparency of dawn. Very slowly, degree by degree, she eased herself up on her elbows and shook out her hair, Sam snoring lightly beside her, hairy, slope-headed, a changeling slipped into the bed like a cuckoo in a sparrow’s nest.

  ‘I brought you coffee,’ he said, crossing the room and holding out the cup to her, but when she made no move to take it from him, he set it on the night table and eased himself down on the bed beside her. ‘Look, I know this is hard, but we’re going to have to wake him up and get him dressed now. And we’re going to need to dose him, sooner rather than later. Why don’t I go down and mix the stuff in his orange juice – or a smoothie, you think a smoothie would be better? Unless we could just inject him now while he’s asleep, which would be easier,

  really…’

  ‘Don’t you dare.’

  He reached for her hand, but she jerked it away.

  ‘Moncrief’s waiting.’

  ‘Let him wait.’

  ‘Look, I’ve got to get down there. You really want to do this yourself ?’

  She began to cry then. ‘Go,’ she said. ‘Just go.’

  ‘You going to do it?’

  ‘Go,’ she said.

  Moncrief and his newest protégé were waiting just inside the door. The minute he pulled up, they emerged and ducked into the car, Moncrief up front in the passenger seat, riding shotgun, the student – Jack Serfis – in back. Serfis was twenty-eight; he’d been in the military, and from the look of him – dressed in a T-shirt despite the fact that it was in the low fifties, overcast, and with a breeze blowing in from the sea – his hobby was squaring up barbells on a rack. His handshake was authoritative. He said, ‘Sunny California,’ and gave a laugh.

  ‘Minus five in Davenport when we left,’ Moncrief said, ‘and if we’re lucky, it’ll probably rocket all the way up to minus three by the time we get back. So enjoy it while you can, Jack.’

  As they pulled out of the lot, Moncrief turned to him and came as close to delivering an apology as he was capable of. ‘This whole thing’s a bitch, and I’m sorry about it, but fads come and go – and didn’t I tell you from the beginning this language studies business was just flavour of the month?’

  ‘Actually, no, you didn’t.’ Guy loosened his grip on the wheel – he’d been squeezing it unconsciously, his knuckles gone bloodless and white. ‘You gave us your blessing, all of us, me, Gina, even Borstein, and we never looked back.’

  ‘You defend him?’

  ‘I’m not defending him. I’m just saying he’s wrong. And you’re wrong too. Sam can talk, I’m telling you, and his comprehension is off the charts. We just needed more time—’

  ‘Time for what? For him to maim everybody in Santa Maria? Tear the house down? You know damn fucking well nobody can control a chimp when they get to be his age. He belongs in a cage. Get over it.’

  From the back seat, Jack said, ‘It’ll be OK, really – he’ll be better off with his own kind,’ as if he knew anything about it.

  When they got to the house, everything was still. The only car in the drive was Aimee’s Caprice, and there was no sound on the other side of the door when he turned the key in the locks. He called her name as they stepped into the front hall, but there was no answer. ‘She must be upstairs still,’ he said, and called her name again, feeling the faintest tick of apprehension – she hadn’t done anything crazy, had she? ‘I’ll be right down,’ he said and started up the stairs.

  He found her sitting in the chair by the window, perfectly motionless, looking down on the driveway. There were two backpacks at her feet: the one she’d kept in the guest-room closet when she first moved in and a smaller one Sam liked to stuff with his toys and treats when they went on outings. Sam was still in bed, though his eyes were open and he was dressed now in his overalls and striped T-shirt.

  ‘Hi,’ he said.

  She said nothing.

  ‘You injected him?’

  She gave him a desolate look. ‘Did I have any choice? Do you think I wanted him to do it? With his dart gun?’

  ‘All right, then,’ he said, ‘good. Thank you. But the easiest thing, I mean, at this point, is let’s just get this over with, OK? I’ll get Moncrief’s new golden boy up here and the two of us’ll carry him out to the car…’ And then he was in motion, ducking back out into the hallway and calling down the stairs. ‘Jack? Can you come up here a minute and give me a hand with him? Aimee put him out already, so…’ And he didn’t finish the thought.

  Sam made a heavy and awkward load, as big now as a black Lab, his weight unevenly distributed in the way of living things, and it was a trial getting him down the stairs, but then they were out the door and down the steps and laying him across the back seat of the car, his muscles lax but his eyes still open, and all Guy could think of was the primordial dream in which your phobias materialise to seize hold of you in every part of your anatomy and you can’t move a muscle. He felt terrible. Like an apostate, a betrayer, the Judas Josh had been looking for. He said,
‘OK, then,’ twice and looked round him at the little group gathered at the rear door of the car, Moncrief, Jack and Aimee, who stood there with her feet locked together, as if at attention.

  ‘Drops,’ she said, ‘put drops in his eyes, don’t forget,’ and she handed Moncrief a vial of Visine.

  Moncrief examined it a moment in the palm of his hand, then slipped it in his pocket, before swinging open the passenger door and settling heavily into the seat. Jack slid in beside Sam, lifting his legs from the seat and laying them across his lap to make room. Aimee said, ‘I’m going with you,’ and Moncrief, glancing over his shoulder, said, ‘Sorry, no room.’

  ‘I’m small, I can squeeze in.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Moncrief repeated.

  ‘Then take this,’ she said, handing him the smaller backpack.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked, glancing up in surprise.