by T. C. Boyle
But now, here she was! There were two men with her, one of the hose men and the one he called Arms who never wore sleeves on his shirts no matter how cold it was outside. He ignored them. He signed to her. Said, YOU ME GO.
Arms said, ‘It’s your funeral,’ and she said, ‘Just open the door,’ and the hose man said, ‘If he gets loose—’
At first he just hugged her and then he held out his arms and climbed atop her back though he was too heavy for her, he knew that, and she had to put him down almost in the same moment, but still she was AIMEE and he was SAM. Then she put a JACKET on him and he worked his arms through the HARNESS and she attached his LEAD and the door swung open, even as Arms tapped his own stinger against his thigh as if he only needed an excuse to use it and she was leading him up the corridor and out the door into the world that was as devastated and bewildering as it had been when he’d got loose and gone through it all on his own. There was the FENCE, there the DOGS. They barked and then, seeing him, they both settled down on their haunches and the one he’d bitten began to whine. That was good, that was very good, because he’d bite him again, bite both of them, tear them, pound them, kill them, if they got near her or even made a move, a single move. He bristled and barked back at them and now they both started to whine.
‘OK, Sam,’ she said, signing it and speaking at the same time, ‘want to go for a walk, get some exercise? You must need exercise after they locked you up like that.’
He did. And he was so happy to be OUT, with her, that he barely noticed the COLD and the way her breath froze and his too, and how Arms shivered and rubbed himself and tried to make as if he wasn’t bothered at all.
After a while, after they’d been around the fenced-in area over and over and walked out to the frozen lake and back, Arms said, ‘Don’t you think it’s time to bring him back?’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘yes, of course. This cold is inhuman.’ Then she laughed and added, ‘Insimian too,’ though he didn’t catch that because the word wasn’t in his vocabulary, and if it was a joke, he didn’t catch that either.
Arms was wearing a puffy vest but his arms were white and hairless and his lips were white and his cheeks too. He was as white as white got, but under that whiteness he was as red as meat – he was meat, they were all meat, even the BUGS, even the BIG MAN, even Aimee. Meat. Meat with faces. Meat. ‘OK, then,’ Arms said. ‘Good. Because I’m fucking freezing – and he must be too.’
They went back through the door in the FENCE and across the dead yellow lawn in the direction of the door in the building that reeked of shit and the BLACK BUGS, and suddenly he had an intimation of what that meant and so he tugged back on the lead so hard she almost fell.
YOU ME GO, he said.
Very slowly she began to shake her head and he knew what that meant, knew it instantly, even before she started telling the words aloud. ‘I’m sorry, Sam,’ she said, her cloud breath hanging frozen in the air. And then she was signing, just to be sure he understood, her fist rotating over her heart, VERY VERY SORRY.
THE REGIMEN
Dr Moncrief ran a tight ship. At least that was what he liked to think. The reality was different. The converted barn – the chimp barn, as everybody called it – was too cold in winter (and, as both Guy and Jack had told her, too hot in summer). It was noisy. It reeked. Sanitation was as primitive as it got – concrete floors sloping towards a central drain in each cage, a hose applied twice a day. She had no experience of anything like it, except maybe Zoo Camp when she was in sixth grade, of which she remembered little beyond the smell, which was so nauseating it made her stomach cramp, and she wound up missing two days the first week while her sister, maddeningly, seemed to have little problem with it, getting to feed the animals and bond with the other kids, including a boy named Matthew McGuire they both had a crush on. But this was worse. Much worse. The first day, when she’d managed to beg her way in before she’d even gone to Professor Moncrief to get his sanction and just approached whoever it was coming out the locked door, she almost gagged.
Outside it was so cold the air burned your lungs, but it was clean air, astringent, the kind of air she’d come to appreciate on ski trips to Squaw Valley and Mammoth, but when the guy opened the door for her and led her inside, it was all she could do to keep going. She was desperate to see Sam, to touch him, comfort him, but the stench was an ocean and she was drowning in it. Sam was there, though, in a cage with another chimp, and as soon as she saw him, he was all that mattered. Still, though she stayed nearly an hour, squatting there in front of the cage (until the guy, one of Moncrief’s techs, as he called them, told her she had to go because if anybody found out he’d let her in, it could cost him his job), she couldn’t get used to it. And that night, her first night in Iowa, when she checked into the nearest motel she could find, the room didn’t smell of Lysol or air freshener or the stale smoke of its last occupant but the reek she brought in with her.
The next day she was up at first light, took a long shower and washed her hair, then put on the only nice outfit she had, black skirt, white sweater, boots, a knit hat and her ski jacket, and drove out to Moncrief’s farmhouse to knock on the door and let him know she was there and available to do anything she could to help with the chimps – all of them, and not just Sam. What this cost her was nothing short of agony. She didn’t want to knock on anybody’s door. She didn’t want to have to make speeches or ingratiate herself or show how desperate she was. She’d met Dr Moncrief exactly twice. He might not even remember her. And he was as intimidating a presence as she could imagine, huge, big-bellied, big-headed, with a blaring whip crack of a voice and the eyepatch that distorted his face until he didn’t even look human. He was Guy’s professor. He owned Sam. And he could do anything he wanted with Sam or any of the other chimps, or for that matter, with her – she was the one put in the beggar’s position here. Probably the hardest thing she ever had to do in her life was walk up that path with its dirty crust of snow and dead brown skeletal shrubs, mount the steps to the porch and rap on the door that featured a brass knocker in the shape of a chimp and a dried-out Christmas wreath that might have been there from last month or the last century. But she did it. She had to. It was her only hope.
A woman in slippers with white hair and a red round face answered the door. She looked puzzled.
‘Um, I – I’m Aimee?’ she heard herself say, as if she were watching the scene from afar.
‘You want Donald. You’re one of his students?’
‘I guess,’ she said. ‘Or kind of.’
‘Kind of ?’
There was the sound of the chimps drifting down from the barn, screams mounting upon screams as in the old Tarzan movies on TV, and she wondered if that meant it was breakfast time and what they were giving Sam and whether he was too depressed to eat it. ‘I just got here from California? UCSM? For the chimps?’
‘Yes, the chimps, always the chimps.’ The woman – Mrs Moncrief ? – paused as if picturing them, the chimps, with their hands for feet, their multiplicity of needs and their stench, their sheer killing stench, and how did she deal with it? How did anybody? ‘Well, OK, then,’ she said, ‘come on in out of the cold and I’ll see if he’s around still or if he went up the hill already.’ The door swung open on a room panelled in knotty pine, with open beams, throw rugs, a couch, a pair of armchairs pulled up to a wood stove. The woman ushered her in and shut the door against the cold. ‘Because with him you never can tell,’ she said. ‘One minute he’s here, the next he’s gone, whether he’s at the university teaching his classes or overseeing things on the hill or mixing up one of his batches of home-made chimp chow – you know he bakes all those loaves himself ? His own recipe? The complete food, he calls it.’
She turned away then and called out, ‘Donald! Donald, you here?’, and when she didn’t get an answer, went to the stairway and shouted till his voice rose up in a kind of distant roar, ‘Yes, goddammit, what is it now?’
There was a door at the top of the
staircase. Banister, runner, paintings on the wall. Ostrich feathers in a vase. A smell of air freshener – Spring Meadow, same as her mother used. Mrs Moncrief gestured to the stairs and said, ‘Well, go ahead,’ and though each step was like climbing Everest, Aimee steeled herself and managed to make her way up the stairs and deliver the lightest of interrogatory knocks – not on the door but the frame, which seemed somehow less intrusive. A voice called out, ‘Come in,’ and she turned the knob and pushed open the door, and there he was.
If she expected him to bite her head off, that didn’t happen. He liked women, Guy had told her that, and he liked to make up to them. Girls especially. Pretty girls. And she qualified, she knew that. She knew it from the way people had treated her all her life, guys especially, but she’d never been particularly happy about it and never used her looks to get what she wanted the way other girls did. It was too embarrassing. Demeaning, really, because what did looks have to do with who you really were? The fact was, she just wanted to be left alone, and half the time she wished she’d been born looking like anybody else, like Barbara or Janie or half the other girls on campus, and yes, she did wear lipstick and eyeliner sometimes – Guy had insisted on it – but it never felt right, let alone necessary or conducive to any kind of outcome she’d ever wanted. Still, the minute she walked into Moncrief’s upstairs study – a big room with a view uphill to the chimp barn and the fields that stretched out to the horizon on either side of it – she knew what she had to do.
‘Hi,’ she said, her voice caught in her throat. ‘I hope I’m not—’
He was seated at his desk, which was pushed up against the window, so that he had to swing round in his chair to see her. ‘Not what – bothering me?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you kidding? Christ, if nobody bothered me for a single second for the rest of my life, I’d still never be able to get through even a tenth of this shit, let alone what’s piled up at school—’ He gestured at the desk, which was cyclonic with books and papers and featured a framed photograph of a younger, two-eyed version of himself, his arm around a dark-haired incarnation of the woman downstairs. ‘So you may as well bother me. In fact, I welcome it. Go ahead, bother me all you want.’ He gave her a grin that tugged at the straps of his eyepatch till everything in his face seemed to tighten under the strain. His eye bulged like an egg boiled too long – not a chicken’s egg, but a robin’s egg, sky blue and candescent. ‘But aren’t you that girl from California? Guy’s – what, assistant? What was your name again?’
‘Aimee.’
‘Right. Well, Aimee, I suppose you’ve come all this way because you want access to the chimp barn, isn’t that right?’
She was poised in the doorway still, her feet pressed tightly together, as if she were standing at attention. Her shoulders ached. She was exhausted. She took a minute before she whispered, ‘Yes.’
‘You want to see if I’m like the villain out of some Dickens novel, what’s-his-name, the beadle at the orphanage – or Simon Legree. You think I’m Simon Legree?’ His voice dropped. ‘You are so naïve, girl. You’re like a child. You are a child. No matter what you think you know, the thing I have to emphasise, if you want to go in there at all, is that everything you’ve known to this point you can throw out the window – that chimp barn is as dangerous a place as you’ve ever been in your life and those chimps are nothing like what you think.’
The light in the room, winter light, reflecting off the crust of snow in the yard, was stark and cold, sharpening the angles of the beams, the desk, the legs of the chair he was sitting in. He was giving her the look they all gave her, and all she wanted to do was turn around and walk out the door, but she didn’t.
‘What I mean is, if you want to go in there again.’
She felt herself reddening.
‘You really think anything goes on around here I don’t know about? You think I’m that blind?’ He winked his eye shut and let out a ragged laugh, then gave her a long reductive stare, as if to make sure she knew exactly what the parameters were. ‘Christian, my tech? He told me all about it.’
‘I’ll work for free,’ she said.
‘You don’t know the half of it,’ he said.
He brought her in the back door, at the other end of the building from where Sam was, and the reek, if anything, was even worse here. It took a moment for her eyes to adjust after the glare of the snow: rafters overhead, the glint of metal, squared-off shapes looming up out of the gloom to solidify into cages – two long rows of interconnected cages equipped with sliding doors to integrate or isolate the chimps as the need arose. Chimps clung to the mesh all up and down both rows like convicts in the old prison movies, the low-wattage bulbs hanging from the ceiling making them appear even bigger and denser, all of them agitated and screaming. She and Moncrief stood there a moment just inside the doorway, the din catastrophic. She was on their turf now, the chimps’ turf, and they didn’t see her as anything other than an invader and a threat, and she understood in that moment they would have torn her apart if they could. They didn’t know language. They didn’t know beds or toys or kitchen tables or even the most rudimentary gesture of kindness. They were in cages and she wasn’t, and all they wanted was to even the score.
‘Shut up!’ Moncrief shouted, startling her, and in the next moment, he had a baseball bat in his hand and he was rapping it against the bars of the nearest cage till it was the only sound in the room. ‘That’s right,’ he said, ‘and damn you all too. Now get down off those bars and behave yourselves.’
One after the other, as if they’d coordinated it, they slid away from their finger- and toeholds and retreated to the backs of their cages.
‘Discipline,’ he said. ‘Order. The regimen. They want to be told what to do just like anybody else.’
She could feel her heart pounding. This was nothing like what she’d expected, but then what had she expected? Forty Sams holding out their arms for a hug? She’d never even seen an adult chimp before, except maybe in a zoo, but here they were, up close and personal. Their rage was terrifying. If they’d been lions or leopards or hyenas, it would have been bad enough in such close quarters, but it was worse than that, far worse, because of the calculation in their eyes – they were people, just like people, furious, unhinged, calculating. How was she ever going to be able to work here? It was impossible. A nightmare.
Moncrief was watching her closely, a thin smile on his lips. ‘Well, what do you think of them now? Want to get in their cages and give them all a hug?’ He gestured to the cage behind them, in which an enormous male chimp crouched over the drainage hole, picking at the faeces gathered there and studiously compacting them into a ball. ‘How about this one? You know this one? No? You didn’t get the full tour yesterday? OK, fine. Meet Number Six, Azazel. He’s the dominant male’ – a laugh – ‘but for me, that is. He’s thirty-two years old, father of twelve and three times as wicked as the devil he’s named for. He’d eat you alive.’ And then Moncrief shouted again, again startling her. ‘Put that down, you fucker! Put it down!’
The chimp dropped the ball of faeces at his feet – on his feet, actually – shot Moncrief a sharp, sudden glare, then focused on the floor as if it gave on to a distant vista only he could see.
‘One of his tricks. He likes to fling shit at the techs. Can you imagine? How about your sweet little house chimp? How about Sam? Does he mould his shit into balls and fling it at people?’
The reek. The rustling in the cages. Moncrief. All she wanted was out. ‘I don’t know,’ she whispered.
Moncrief folded his arms over his belly, rapping the bat idly against one hip. His voice suddenly barked out again. ‘You, Azazel, get over here. Now!’
There was a moment of hesitation, a fraction of a moment, and then, resignedly, his shoulders shifting like moving pillars, the chimp shuffled to the bars, the mesh, and stood there hanging his head. His skin was scarred from innumerable confrontations – fights, takedowns, tearings and rendings – and h
e’d plucked all the hair from his head, his face, his shoulders and arms.
‘Fingers,’ Moncrief said.
The chimp extended his fingers through the mesh and when Moncrief whacked them with the baseball bat, first the right hand, then the left, he barely flinched. ‘What were you going to do with that ball of shit?’ Moncrief demanded. ‘Huh? Azazel, I’m talking to you!’
Nothing. The entire room was silent. Azazel raised his eyes in acknowledgement and dropped them again.
‘Good,’ Moncrief said. ‘Fine. Now your lips, I want your lips.’ The chimp withdrew his fingers and extended his pale puckered lips through a gap in the mesh, making a kissing noise as Moncrief held out the back of his hand to him. She saw now that Moncrief was wearing a ring, a gold signet ring with some sort of figures moulded into the face of it – snakes, a pair of intertwined snakes with tiny rubies for eyes. The chimp kissed the ring and kept kissing it till Moncrief finally withdrew his hand. ‘Now get to the back of the cage and stay there,’ he snapped. Then he turned to her and he was grinning again, as if all this – this cruelty, this savagery – was a joke. She couldn’t believe it. What did this have to do with science? Nothing. It wasn’t science any more than a circus sideshow was – it was just an excuse to impose his will on something in a cage.
‘You see what this is?’ he asked her, the grin flaring and then diminishing again. ‘The regimen, discipline – if they can learn language, they can learn not to throw shit at people, right? If you let them get away with it – get away with anything, even what you might think is the smallest little thing – then you’re going to wind up with shit on your face.’ He took a breath, squinted down at her, ‘Or worse, blood.’