Talk to Me

by T. C. Boyle

  It wasn’t until late that night, when she still hadn’t made an appearance, that he began to envision other scenarios, though none of them took him as far as Iowa. She was too – what? – self-effacing to go off on her own like that, utterly unable to look strangers in the eye or assert herself because she’d turned away from the world and found what she wanted here, locked away as if in some fairy palace, with him and Sam and the supporting cast to sustain her. She must have been at her mother’s (though he wasn’t about to call and find out) or at an aunt’s house or something. Hadn’t she mentioned an aunt in Sacramento or Stockton or someplace? She had. He was sure she had. But then he’d never been a very good listener.

  In the morning, when there was still no sign of her, he had the first intimation that she’d left him, that what she’d wanted all along was Sam – Sam and not him. It was crippling. Worse even than when Melanie had left him because when you peeled back all the layers, this truly felt like a divorce, slash and burn, one parent getting sole custody of the child and the other left with nothing, not Carson or career advancement or even a book anybody would ever want to publish. He questioned Barbara and Josh and the others – nobody had heard from her – and as far as he could glean, the aunt in Sacramento was nothing more than a phantasm, which left her mother. He’d have to call her mother.

  He kept putting it off, hoping he’d been wrong, hoping she’d come walking through the door any minute and they could start all over again. He taught his classes, ate fast food, sat stoically at his desk and wrestled with his manuscript, reading the same paragraph over and over till it lost all meaning. It was the end of the week when he finally decided to make the call because there was no other place she could be, and at this point it was no longer a matter of pride or wounded feelings but just simple necessity – he had to know. And then, just as he was steeling himself to dial the number – Hello, Mrs Villard? This is Guy, Guy Schermerhorn, the professor who – the phone rang.

  ‘Hi,’ she said, her voice so reduced it was barely there, but even if she hadn’t said a word he would have known it was her.

  ‘Where are you?’

  Just a whisper: ‘Iowa.’

  He was standing there in the deserted kitchen of the deserted house, everybody gone now – Josh, Barbara, Janie – all cut loose to scramble for work/study and internships as best they could, which was going to be tough because the semester had already begun. He felt terrible about it and he’d already made some phone calls and talked to Leonard. But he was here now and they weren’t – and Aimee was in Iowa, which he hadn’t thought possible. He said, ‘How did you get there?’

  ‘I drove.’

  ‘By yourself ?’

  ‘Well, you weren’t about to come with me, were you?’

  He ignored the question, which wasn’t so much a question as a rebuke, the same old story he was sick to death of. He said, ‘What about Moncrief ?’

  ‘He said I could stay? I told him I’d work for free.’

  ‘And Sam, how’s Sam? Is he freaking out? Is he depressed? Is he eating?’

  ‘It’s horrible. The worst thing in the world. They won’t even let me in the cage with him – and they threw away his clothes and they won’t let me give him a blanket or his, his’ – she began to cry then, a soft wheeze and rasp that sounded like static over the line – ‘his toy dog, the one we named Louie?’

  A toy dog named Louie. Jesus. In that moment, he couldn’t help asking himself what a stuffed toy had to do with science, with the project that had absorbed the last six years of his life, with language acquisition and the workings of the mind of another species – it was as if he was caught up in some dark absurdist comedy here, and who was the author, Beckett? Ionesco? The Marquis de Sade? He stood at the sink, peering out the window, envisioning that torn, filthy, spittle-soaked rag of a thing, and felt something constrict in him. Out there in the yard was the oak, Sam’s oak, which had been standing there before any of them were born and would be there when they were gone. If it didn’t burn first. And sooner or later everything out here burned, didn’t it?

  ‘When are you coming back?’ he asked.

  ‘When are you coming here? Sam misses you. I miss you.’

  ‘But I can’t – the semester just started, you know that…’

  ‘What about Presidents’ Day? When’s Presidents’ Day? Next month, right?’

  He should have said, I miss you too, should have cancelled his classes and caught the first flight out, but he didn’t: there was a line being drawn here and he was on the wrong side of it. ‘But that’s only three days – and I have a Tuesday class this semester, as I’m sure you’re aware, so it’s a day to fly there, one day trying to sort things out with who – Moncrief – and then a day to fly back? That’s crazy.’

  There was a silence on the other end of the line.

  ‘Aimee?’ he said. ‘You there?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Her voice was a scratch in his ear, an irritation, a reminder of what he’d lost, what he was losing, and yet, what if he did work up a new project? What if he went back and crawled to Moncrief and talked him into letting him set up video cameras in the chimp barn to see if the language-trained chimps – Sam, Alice, Alex – would sign to each other spontaneously, hold discussions among themselves, inaugurate a whole new chapter of ape evolution? He could take a leave from UC for a semester or even a year, apply for grants to support it, redeem himself. It only made sense, since the groundwork had already been laid – in fact, it would be criminal not to pursue it. But no. Moncrief had his chimps all to himself now, and he was going to do his masturbation studies or take their babies away for his nature-versus-nurture experiments or subject them to something a whole lot darker because they were animals and he owned them, and the first rule of the behavioural sciences—

  ‘When are you coming back?’ he asked again, and he was asking it out of frustration now, out of anger.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘When are you coming here?’

  His next call was to Moncrief, who answered on the first ring. ‘Donald,’ he said, ‘it’s me, Guy,’ and before he could say anything more, Moncrief cut him off.

  ‘Yeah, she’s here,’ he said.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Well, shit, you ought to know – you sent her, didn’t you? To what, spy on me? Make sure Sam gets his back rub each night and what, foie gras and champagne? And doilies. Doesn’t he need doilies too?’

  ‘I didn’t send her. She just took off because – and I’m sorry – it was the right thing to do, I mean, at least until he’s had a chance to settle in.’

  ‘Pretty girl, a real eye-catcher.’ In the background, faintly, there was the sound of hooting. Moncrief lived in a farmhouse just down the hill from the barn he’d converted into an apery, and even in winter, even with the windows closed and the wind raking the fields, you could always hear them, especially at mealtimes. ‘I have no problem with her working here on her own dime – I’m not fucking crazy. I can always use the extra pair of hands and she’s good with the animals, which is a plus, considering what I’ve got to work with in the department here, a whole new crop of numbnuts who wouldn’t know a chimp from a standard poodle. So yeah, sure, she can stay, if that’s what you’re worried about.’

  ‘No, that’s not it – it’s just, I don’t know, I’m kind of at a loss here.’

  ‘You’ve got tenure, haven’t you?’

  ‘That’s not the point.’

  ‘But it is. If you didn’t have tenure, you’d be out on your ass and there’d be nothing I could do to help you. Except maybe draft a letter. You want me to draft a letter?’

  ‘I want to work with primates. It’s all I know. It’s all I care about.’

  ‘Oh, shit,’ Moncrief said, ‘not this again. Look, language projects are over, get used to it. You want to know the truth, the whole business, ape studies from A to Z, even what I’m doing with sexuality and maternal displacement, is on shaky ground right now. About the o
nly thing the animals are good for at this point is biomed – they need all the chimps and monkeys they can get, what with AIDS and hepatitis and the boom in transplant surgery, but of course I’d hate to have to sell off my animals if I had any other choice…’

  The phone in his hand was an ordinary receiver moulded of yellow plastic and it weighed maybe six ounces, but it was all he could do to hang on to it – he’d known it was bad, but not this bad. Sell them off ? Put them in a lab someplace in cages so small they couldn’t even turn around? Inject them, bleed them, intubate them, open up their brains, their body cavities, transplant their hearts and lungs and livers?

  ‘But not Sam,’ he said, hearing the edge in his voice as it batted round the plastic funnel of the receiver. ‘Not Alex and Alice and the rest of the home-raised chimps, right?’

  ‘Look, Guy, I hate this as much as you do – and I’m not inhumane, don’t you think that for a minute – but everything’s fucked right now. Borstein’s just the tip of the iceberg. There’s a shitload of resentment out there, and let me tell you all the pigeon peckers and rat counters have just been waiting for something like this. So as much as I appreciate how you feel about the animal I assigned you, you’ve got to realise in the final analysis, he’s just a number – I mean, truthfully, did I ever lead you to believe anything different?’ Moncrief paused. There was a moist insuck, lips, liquid, a cup: he was drinking coffee. Or Scotch. Was it time for Scotch yet? Quarter of five there now, right on the cusp of cocktail hour.

  ‘I keep unimpeachable records, you know that,’ Moncrief went on, ‘and in my records, he’s number thirty-four, just like the tattoo says on the underside of his wrist. And I don’t have to tell you this, of all people, but any other species, the rats, the rabbits, the dogs, the monkeys – all the monkeys, the thousands of rhesus macaques they used in the Salk thing – they just get euthanised when the study’s over.’

  ‘But this is Sam we’re talking about—’

  ‘I know what we’re talking about. And so does your little protégée, or she’s going to find out soon enough. He’s not a pet. He’s not a human. He’s back here now – with me. And you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to make a chimp out of him.’

  There was still half a bottle of cognac left, enough for a good drunk, and a good drunk was what he needed after getting off the phone with Moncrief. All the glasses were dirty – nobody had been around to wash them – so he put the bottle to his lips and settled in by the window while the afternoon closed down and the ridge out back went from amber to pink to stone-cold grey. He wasn’t a sentimentalist, or at least that’s what he told himself, and yet he and Melanie had raised Sam since he was a newborn, raised him as if he were their own child, which created a bond that had more to do with human endocrinology – with love – than with science. He and Melanie had been there in the ape house like prospective parents at an adoption agency when Moncrief poked the barrel of his dart gun through the bars of the cage and darted Sam’s mother, Elizabeth Reed, who was screaming out her rage because she knew exactly what was coming. She’d been named by one of the doctoral students after an Allman Brothers’ tune (no matter how acidly Moncrief disparaged anthropomorphising them, nobody referred to any of the chimps by their numbers, not even Moncrief himself ), and she’d given birth five times, once to twins, and all five times the dart gun had been poked through the bars of the cage and the newborns taken from her while she lay there helpless, her eyes open wide. It had been disturbing, sickening, really, but he’d been so eager to get a chimp he’d deadened himself to it – everybody had birth trauma, chimp and human alike, and this was the very first moment of a revolutionary cross-fostering experiment, so the quicker Sam was acclimatised, the better.

  Melanie, her face stony and bloodless, took the infant from Moncrief’s arms and pressed him to her, Sam’s tiny hands and feet already working, grasping, clutching at the world, the scent of Melanie’s shampoo and bath soap in his nostrils, a scent no ape alive was able to give him. In the back corner of the cage, splayed out on the wet concrete where she’d pissed herself and wearing the padlocked collar that had never left her throat from the time she’d been captured in Gambia, his mother lay prostrate, her eyes burning and her breathing slower than slow, already forgotten.

  And now Moncrief was floating the idea of biomed? It was beyond imagining. But really, what had changed in the past one hundred years since Claude Bernard vivisected dogs in the operating theatre in order to demonstrate their inner workings, aside from the fact that experiments were conducted behind closed doors? Bernard had prepared a specimen one afternoon – a dog, unanaesthetised, so as not to interfere with the natural function of the organs – and then left it strapped down on the table overnight, only to resume his work on it in the morning. Lacking specimens one day, he appropriated the family dog (‘The physiologist is no ordinary man,’ he wrote. ‘He is blind to the blood that flows. He sees nothing but his idea, and organisms which conceal from him the secrets he is resolved to discover’), which so outraged his wife and daughters they moved out of the house. Permanently. The wife not only divorced him, but founded an antivivisection society to boot, and still Bernard didn’t get it. The sky was blue, the ocean was deep. Animals were animals and humans were humans. Period.

  Chimps could live to be fifty and more, but once they’d been infected with the AIDS virus or one strain or another of hepatitis or had electrodes implanted in their brains or cancerous cells injected into their organs, they were damaged goods, useless for further experiments, and could look forward to spending the rest of their years on this earth confined to cages, without stimulus, without love or even the most rudimentary kind of interaction with people or members of their own species, too valuable in terms of breeding and supply-and-demand to be euthanised. That wasn’t going to happen to Sam, no matter what Moncrief said.

  The room had gone dark. He couldn’t see what was left in the bottle, so he gave it a shake and heard the enlivening slosh of liquid, which by this point was probably 30 per cent saliva but worth finishing in any case, well worth finishing… After a while he got up and switched on the lamp, thinking he might want to dig out the phone book and jot down the number of the travel agent he’d used last time he flew anywhere, just as a point of reference. He got to his feet, feeling woozy – he’d intended to get drunk and here was the issue. He congratulated himself. ‘Job well done,’ he said, though there was no one listening.

  Just then the phone in the kitchen rang and he went to it, clumsily, slamming a shoulder into the wall and barking his shin on the door frame. He took hold of the kitchen counter to steady himself, lifted the phone to his ear and managed to utter something resembling ‘Hello?’

  ‘Professor Schermerhorn?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘This is Amanda, Renee Flowers’ secretary? Can you hold for Ms Flowers?’

  Everything in the room smelled of Sam, though Janie and Barbara had given the place a thorough scrubbing before they’d left. It wasn’t a human smell and it wasn’t easy to erase. Sam. The smell of Sam. He had tears in his eyes by the time Renee Flowers’ voice came chirping through the receiver at him. ‘Professor Schermerhorn?’ she said. ‘Guy, that is. How are you?’

  He mumbled something in response, as disoriented as if he’d just been shoved out on the sound stage in front of a live audience while Johnny sat poised behind his desk, giving him his trademark grin.

  ‘Super,’ Renee Flowers said. ‘So let me come right to the point – we’ve been following the controversy with your research and I want to say we’re on board with you 100 per cent. Johnny’s seen the tapes and he’s super-enthused. What do you say to next week?’

  ‘Next week?’

  ‘Listen, I know it’s been a long time, and that’s our fault entirely, but we’re ready to go if you are and we have a slot open next week. If Sam – it’s Sam, isn’t it? Yes. Right. If Sam is as good as he looks on tape or that time you brought him here to the studio, he’s going to
be a hit, and I could see it spinning out from there.’

  ‘You mean like J. Fred Muggs?’

  She let out a laugh. ‘Not exactly. Johnny doesn’t need a mascot’ – another laugh – ‘he’s got Ed for that. But truly, it would be ideal if we could book this, just to see how things’ll go, you understand… but my feeling? It’s going to be super.’

  If he’d been drunk when he picked up the phone, now he was on the last lap of a downhill bicycle race to sobriety, everything laid out before him, wheels churning, darkness turned to light. The only problem was Sam. Who was in Iowa. In a cage. ‘Could we put it off a bit? A week or two or maybe three? Like till Presidents’ Day?’

  ‘Presidents’ Day? What’s that got to do with it?’

  ‘Well, you see, we are on an academic schedule and the fact is Sam’s not here right now—’

  Another laugh, a trace more brittle than the last. ‘Well, I’m not exactly asking him to come to the phone…’

  ‘No, no, that’s not what I mean. It’s just – we’re going to need a bit more time on this end?’

  She didn’t have anything to say to this, but the silence over the line was the silence of disapproval, exasperation even: nobody said no to Johnny Carson.

  ‘Renee,’ he said, and he was reeling, positively reeling. ‘Don’t you worry, don’t you worry at all. Whatever happens, I’ll get him there.’

  YOU ME GO

  The BUG was gone, back in one of the other cages with the rest of them, hooting mindlessly, hooting for nothing except the compulsion to make noise because making noise was the surest sign you were alive no matter what size box they put you in. The sliding door between the cages had suddenly pulled back, and the BUG scuttled through it before it slid shut again and that was that, no WAVE GOODBYE, no his fingers in her hair, no her fingers in his. He would have gone with her, anything to get out of this place, even if it meant rushing headlong into the seething black shadows where the BUGS got progressively bigger and angrier, but for the fact that Aimee was there in front of his cage – Aimee! – and she had a HARNESS in her hand and she was calling his name. The excitement exploded in him and he rushed the bars, whimpering and pant-hooting his joy that rocketed all the higher because the previous day she’d gone back through that door and left him here in the CAGE, and the depression rocked him all over again, driving him deeper and ever deeper with the thought that she was never coming back.