Talk to Me

by T. C. Boyle

  By the time Guy got there – on the Thursday ahead of the Presidents’ Day weekend – she’d settled into a routine, five days a week working as an unpaid tech, hauling, mopping, scrubbing, shoving pans of food at screaming chimps, hosing out cages and doing anything else physical that needed to be done, the smell of the place almost unnoticeable to her at this point, testimony to the fact that you can get used to anything if you have to. And it wasn’t half as bad as what the people in the hog-processing plants must have had to endure, which wasn’t just urine and excrement but blood and viscera on top of it, the smell of death lingering in the cracks and the shrieks of the killing floor echoing off the walls. At least there was no killing done here – or not physical killing anyway, the spirit too insubstantial to count in Dr Moncrief’s reckoning, which was all about submission and control and denial. Did animals even have a spirit? He asked her about that in a casual, mocking tone when he came through the door one afternoon and found her crouching in front of Sam’s cage, signing to him, and when she said, yes, he said, ‘What about doggie heaven, you believe in that too?’ Whether she did or not, she wasn’t about to tell him, and whether or not he made fun of her, she was there on her days off too – for Sam, to spend time with him, take him for walks, talk to him, comfort him as best she could, though it devastated her every time she had to lock him in the cage and go back to her rented room without him.

  The second day, the day Moncrief had allowed her to take Sam for a walk even if it meant that Jack had to be with them to oversee things, Sam threw a tantrum when they returned to the building and then he absolutely refused to go back into the cage. She knew better than to try to force him – he was far stronger than she was and though he would never use his teeth on her, there was no telling what he might do to Jack. Who stood there, legs spread as if for action, tapping his cattle prod against one thigh. She crouched beside Sam at the open door to the cage, signing SORRY and YOU HAVE TO, but it wasn’t until she stepped through the door herself that he got up and followed her in, as Jack lunged forward to swing the door shut behind them. To calm Sam, she began grooming him, but every time she tried to get up and leave, he took hold of her wrist and wouldn’t let go, just like that time with the woman on the street, Jody, but she wasn’t Jody and he’d never done anything like this before. ‘No, Sam,’ she told him, ‘let go,’ but it was as if the words had no meaning. This went on for five or ten minutes before Jack said, ‘Look, I can appreciate he’s upset but it’s not safe for you to be in there, and I’ve got things to do, places to go, you know, people to meet? Chimps, even?’

  She tried again. Sam tightened his grip. No matter what she said, he wouldn’t listen. Finally, after another ten minutes of this, Jack flipped the switch on the cattle prod, which started up with an ominous hum. It was capable of delivering a 4,000-volt shock that could persuade any animal to do anything, from a steer in the chute to a chimp throwing a tantrum to a pair of pit bulls going at each other in a pen. Or the human animal – it was the torturer’s tool of choice because it got the message across in no uncertain terms and it didn’t leave a mark. She’d never used one, never would, no matter what, but Dr Moncrief made it a rule that anybody entering the chimp barn had to carry one at all times. Hers, shoved into her hand by Jack before he’d opened the door and allowed her to put the harness on Sam, dangled from her waist on a bright tricolour lanyard, braided, she later learned, by Mrs Moncrief – to give the thing a homey touch, she supposed.

  As if. She was complicit too – they all were.

  Jack said, ‘There’s just no way around it, and I’m sorry, I really am, but he’s got to learn…’

  He did learn. Of course he did. Anybody would learn, no different from the first time you laid your hand on a hot stove or touched a bare wire: pain is our first knowledge of this earth, pain of the birth canal, pain of the light, the clamour, the pain of recognition. The look he gave her was heartbreaking, as if she’d betrayed him, and she had, she had. He balled up on the concrete floor, whimpering, and Jack pulled her out of the cage and slammed and locked the door, and though she stayed there whispering apologies for what must have been an hour, Sam never once looked at her or even moved a muscle.

  She’d told Guy about it, about everything, calling him daily from the efficiency apartment she’d rented in a creaking old Victorian that had been divided into apartments for students, and the two old women in their fifties or maybe sixties who managed the property and had the entire downstairs of the house to themselves and their cats. He’d tried to calm her, told her he’d call Moncrief and do his best to persuade him to give Sam more stimulation and keep him isolated at least till he could get acclimated and defend himself against the bigger chimps, told her about Carson – Carson was on again, wasn’t that amazing? – told her he had an idea to start a new study involving Sam and the other home-raised chimps, which meant he could be coming back to Iowa for a semester maybe or a year, told her (right in the middle of a sentence that stretched to ten paragraphs) that he missed her. And did she miss him?

  ‘Yes,’ she murmured, and the affirmation felt sweet in her mouth, yes, the single syllable that put them back on track again.

  He could have said then that he loved her, but he didn’t. Instead he said, ‘I need you to pick me up at the airport.’

  She was half an hour early, nervous and unsure of herself, as if they hadn’t slept together, lived together, washed dishes and bought groceries, and raised Sam side by side. It was just that she’d been so focused on Sam she hadn’t had time to think much about where she was or what she’d committed herself to or even why, but as she changed out of her work clothes and got dressed that afternoon, she was as excited as if it were a first date – which, in a way, it was. He’d never asked her out. Not formally. Formally, they’d never been on a date – she’d just moved in and gone to work and then one night they had sex and that was that. Was it love? Or just getting used to another person? The magazines all said it was good to have shared interests and if that was true, they were on solid ground there. She thought about the sex, about their bed back at the ranch and the times Sam had interrupted them, which, once he’d been calmed down and put back to bed, made their lovemaking all the more intense as if he’d injected some sort of aphrodisiac into them both. She was fine. Everything was fine. She told herself she was just excited, that was all.

  What she hadn’t taken into account was the weather. She was half an hour early, yes, but this was Iowa, in February, and his flight out of Denver was delayed by snow, so that she had to sit there in the airport for hours while Sam rotted in his cage and the Denver weather, rolling eastward, manifested itself as soft brushstrokes of sleet painted on the terminal windows. When he did finally arrive, he came slouching out of the gate as if the weight of his shoulder bag was too much to bear and he was so put-upon, so exhausted, he could barely manage a smile, let alone hold her in his arms for more than the three seconds it took him to drop his bag and hug her so formulaically he might as well have given her a handshake. In the car, on their way back to her apartment, she was the one doing the talking, and that had to be a first.

  Her apartment was pinched and small, no different from the one she’d had in Santa Maria, the bed a single and a pair of cardboard boxes in the corner behind the TV, serving in place of a dresser, an example of which she hadn’t found time to acquire, even if she could have lugged a piece of furniture up the stairs by herself. There was a kitchen nook with a counter and two stools, and a bathroom featuring an old claw-footed tub and a plastic shower curtain that could have been cleaner. She was already apologising as she put the key in the lock but he cut her off. ‘I’m so wiped I don’t care if I have to sleep standing up in a horse stall,’ he muttered, heading straight for the bathroom. His bag was on the floor. The bed was turned down. She’d bought a bottle of wine. The sounds he made – the hard, hissing splash of his urine, the squeal of the taps, the thump of the towel – brought her back to the ranch and the night light in the
hall and all the times she’d crept out of Sam’s bed and slipped into his, and then he was there in the room with her and he took her in his arms and they kissed, and she felt the way she was supposed to feel.

  They didn’t make love, though she’d assumed they would, expected it, wanted to more than anything, but he was asleep on his feet and barely got his clothes off before he was face down and unconscious on the bed. The room was cold. Wind rattled the windows in their frames. The heat – steam radiators, maybe the first ones ever cast – clanked on and off like submarines dropping down into the void of the deepest ocean, while she lay there cramped against the wall, listening to his breathing until she was asleep herself.

  In the morning, he was more like himself, more focused and considerate, and they made love twice before she got up and fixed them cheese omelettes for breakfast. If he wondered what she was doing for money, he didn’t ask, though the fact was Dr Moncrief had stopped her one day when she was walking up the hill to the chimp barn and announced he was going to start paying her minimum wage, which was what the other two techs were making. ‘I like your attitude,’ he said. ‘Dedication, that’s what it takes, and that’s what I’m seeing from you. So keep it up,’ and he’d reached out and chucked her under the chin as if she were a child. Or a dog. Or worse: somebody he wanted to go to bed with. And what had she done? Nothing. She’d just stood there and smiled at him. The next day he fired the more pathetic of the two techs, a gawky local in patched overalls and a dirty feed cap who seemed to spend half his time smoking weed just outside the back door of the facility.

  She thought Guy would want to see Sam first thing, but instead he went straight to Moncrief’s office at the university, where he was teaching classes that day. She drove, he talked. Everybody in the psych building seemed to know him, from the profs to the grad students to the secretaries and even one of the janitors, which only stoked his mood all the higher, as if this were a homecoming, which it was, of sorts. He’d had two cups of coffee at breakfast and as if that wasn’t enough, they’d stopped at a diner so he could dash in for one more in a cardboard container, working himself up to spring his surprise on Dr Moncrief because Carson was on board now, definitely, and this was the chance they’d all been waiting for. Renee Flowers, did she remember Renee Flowers? Renee had even said if it worked out, she could see having Sam on on a regular basis, which could really turn things around in the public eye and get the programme back on track again. Right? Didn’t she think so?

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, absolutely – nothing could be better.’

  They were sitting in the lounge outside the main office, waiting for Moncrief’s eleven o’clock class to let out. People came and went. Machines whirred. The department secretary tapped away at her typewriter as if she were killing insects, one after another, tink, tink tink.

  ‘Because we can’t let Borstein have the final say on this.’ Guy leaned forward over the cradle of his elbows and knees so that his hair fell loose across his face, lecturing now. ‘He’s just wrong, dead wrong, and everything that’s gone down is nothing short of a crime. You know it and I know it – and Donald does too. But one thing at a time. First, I’ve got to talk him into letting me have Sam back, if even for just a couple of days, because we can be pretty sure The Tonight Show isn’t about to relocate to Iowa.’

  He flashed a smile at his own joke, pushed himself up and circled the room twice, while the secretary glanced up indulgently and a student sorted mail into a phalanx of wooden slots set into the wall, then dropped his coffee in the trash and slid back into the chair beside her. ‘And we can’t just do this blindly – we have to think of Sam, and I don’t mean just how all this is going to affect him emotionally, but on the level even of where we’re going to put him. I mean, I still have the ranch, at least till May, anyway, and we can keep Sam there a couple days till we do the show, but then it’s going to have to be back here, right, because what else are we going to do with him? If Donald lets him go at all, that is.’

  She felt herself slipping, as if the seat was giving way beneath her – he was talking about taking Sam away again? ‘They couldn’t come here?’

  ‘Are you serious? This is The Tonight Show we’re talking about. Filmed live before a studio audience. In Burbank. You think Johnny Carson’s going to fly out to Iowa to film a segment with an animal act?’

  ‘It’s not an act. And Sam’s not an animal.’

  ‘It could save us. It could set us back on course, you know that—’

  ‘What about me?’

  ‘You’d come, of course. What do you mean?’

  ‘I work here now. I live here. And it’s not like it’s ever going to be the way it was – this is the new reality. And I hate it. But at least Sam’s here with me.’

  He shifted in the chair, pushed his hair out of his eyes. He was wearing his black ski jacket, jeans, boots, the sweater she’d bought him for Christmas (black-and-white squares, alternating, very up-to-the-minute, very New Wave). ‘Look,’ he said, ‘don’t make things any harder than they already are. You know what it cost me to set this up? You think I like the fact that Donald’s got me by the balls? I need your help. He likes you, right?’

  She shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Just give him that pretty smile of yours.’ He reached over, unzipped her jacket and tugged down the front of her V-neck sweater, his fingers a hot busy fumble at her throat, like bees, like honeybees hovering over a flower. ‘And show him a little of this too – it can’t hurt.’

  WHAT ICE?

  He knew time, no different from any other alive thing, sunrise, sunset, the long wheeling drift of the seasons, and he knew time on the stove and the dashboard of Guy’s CAR, he knew BREAKFAST TIME, GIN TONIC TIME, STORY TIME, BED TIME, but he didn’t know time in here. Time in here was a vacant space abruptly rent by screams and violence, by the BIG MAN and his stinger, but in some dumbfounding, inexplicable way, suddenly it was time for her to be here too, here in this place with the BLACK BUGS whose feet were just like his – here with him and not them, never them. And then, suddenly, as if his whole life was starting over, so was Guy. He heard the faintest filament of a voice from outside the door, outside in the cold, Guy’s voice, and he came up off the floor as if he’d been launched, hooting till the others took it up, till the whole place was a pandemonium of hooting and screaming, and here came Guy’s face through the door and hers beside it, and he was signing so fast he hardly knew what he was saying, COME HUG, TIME GO, YOU ME HER OUT.

  There was the KEY, there the LOCK, and the door swung open and they both ducked into the cage, and he was so overwhelmed he prostrated himself, face on the FLOOR, arms outstretched and fingers curled in the way of his kind, the way he knew in his deepest vestigial self and had never learned or unlearned. He didn’t know why he was doing what he was doing, didn’t know the rituals of his species or how nature trumps nurture or anything beyond the wet concrete and the hormones pinning him there, but when Guy reached down to touch him, all restraint fell away and he came flying up like a bird and landed right in his arms, and Guy let out a grunt and said, ‘Jesus, Sam, you’re too big for this, you’re killing me,’ and then Guy was laughing, his lips pulled back and his teeth shining white. ‘And who’s a good boy?’ he asked. ‘Who’s my good boy?’

  He felt something then that was bigger than himself, so much bigger, and he sprang down from Guy’s arms and humped round the cage, hooting out his exultation until he couldn’t help himself and sprang back into Guy’s arms to kiss him on the lips, over and over. Guy was here! Guy was in charge! Guy was the one who would get him out of here and take him back HOME to his blanket and his bed and the refrigerator! He could see it all, because these were no mere abstractions – these were pictures he held in his mind, and he could see them as clearly as if they were right there before him.

  Aimee said, ‘You want to go for a walk?’

  He jumped back down, signed, OUT. Signed, JACKET. Signed, YOU ME GUY OUT.

&nbs
p; And then he was wearing his jacket and harness and they were in the hallway and through the door and out into the COLD, where the sun was spurious and nothing was green, but he was soaring all the same because Guy was here and she was here and the prison door had just slammed shut behind him.

  Aimee said something about the island and the ICE, ‘I’m getting him used to the island because that’s the only hope here – the minute spring arrives and that ice melts, we’re going to be out there all day every day. Dr Moncrief likes the idea – for the juveniles. To give them exercise?’

  Guy said something back, said, ‘Great. Excellent. But for now my chief concern is getting him to Burbank. All the rest can come later.’

  They were talking and he heard the words but he didn’t try to sort them out even if he could have because he was running, tumbling, tugging at the lead and gambolling across the frozen dead arena of this new world that might have been a cruel parody of all he loved and wanted and knew, but wasn’t INSIDE, wasn’t bars and steel mesh and the unblinking lights that made night into day. He surged with joy. He clowned for them, springing and leaping and laughing, but there was something else here, something darker, a dark blot on his mind.

  The CAGE, he thought, kept thinking, the CAGE, the BUILDING, the BLACK BUGS. They weren’t going to bring him back in there, were they? No. Never. Not with Guy here. With Guy here they would go to the CAR and get in it and drive home and make everything green again (though, admittedly, he didn’t see Guy’s car anywhere he looked). But he wasn’t worried. Or not yet. He was in the moment and the moment had them all out on the ICE, slipping and sliding to the place where the ice ended and the ISLAND began. When they got there and he found himself back in the yellow dried-out cane where he’d hidden the day he escaped until the dogs sniffed him out and the BIG MAN came with his dart, he settled down on his haunches just to feel the thrill of the cold on his own hairy bottom, his ASS, because that was what it was, that was what everybody called it, his ASS.