Talk to Me

by T. C. Boyle

  She went to the door and stuck her head out and the noise was louder, clearer, not a mechanical sound at all but a series of cascading screams that made her throat clench against the burn of the Scotch. It took her a moment before she thought of Sam. She’d heard him scream once before and it was like nothing she’d ever experienced in her life to that point. It was at night too, around this time or a little later (his bedtime, as it turned out), and it went on for a good ten minutes before she put on a sweater and her moccasins and started up the row for Aimee’s trailer to see what was going on – and put a stop to it, if she could, because there were rules about excessive noise, which she’d plainly posted in the office and the laundry, along with prohibitions against untended fires and letting trash accumulate for the coons and coyotes to pick over instead of getting your ass in gear to haul it to the dump. The sound was unworldly, terrifying, nails-on-a-blackboard, but the thing was, it stopped before she got halfway there – just cut off like a record when you jerk the needle away. She went up to the trailer in any case, just to stand there outside in the gravel drive and make sure everything was all right. She was there maybe ten minutes, enough to have a cigarette and listen to the little sounds of the night close back in, but she didn’t interfere because it was none of her business – unless it started up again. (And Aimee explained it the next day – came to apologise, actually. The problem was that Sam had been feeling antsy and he just didn’t want to go to bed, and yet she had to keep him on a strict schedule so he’d conk out on the nights she was working, but on this occasion he just wouldn’t have it and threw a tantrum. What made it worse was that chimps, though their vocal cords don’t allow them to form words, can scream two or three times louder than any human being on this earth.)

  Which was what was happening now. ‘That’s Sam,’ she said, lifting her sweater down from the hook by the door while Gary gave her a pained look. ‘Sounds like murder to me,’ he said, and, thinking of the professor now, because he was the odd piece in this particular puzzle, she said, ‘I’m going to go tell them to keep it down before somebody calls the police.’

  When she got closer – and people were craning their heads out of their doors up and down the row and staring numbly into the darkness – she heard the professor’s voice rise up out of the mix, and Aimee’s too. They were having some sort of argument, that was it, and it was clear that Sam was right at the forefront of it. The professor shouted, Aimee shouted back, and Sam just screamed till she thought her heart was going to stop. Just as she got there, just as she was about to go up the steps and rap on the door, there was a crash and then the thump of something hurtling against the inner wall of the trailer. In the next moment, the door flung open and there was the professor, bleeding from a cut over one eye and hustling down the steps, shouting, ‘Yeah, and fuck you too,’ while Aimee and Sam stood there backlit in the doorway and Sam’s screams went up a notch, if that was possible, and then abruptly cut off.

  The professor slammed into his rental car, turned over the engine and shot out of the lot going way too fast, while Aimee just stood there watching and Sam let out a single parting bark and settled down on his haunches. In the moment before she reached out to pull the door shut, Aimee caught sight of her standing there in her sweater and nightgown. Aimee’s face went slack, a sliver of a face, pale as moon dust and drained of emotion. She gave a little wave and tried for a smile, clearly embarrassed, but couldn’t quite manage it. ‘Sorry,’ she murmured, and then she closed the door.

  VARIETIES OF WRONG

  The TRAILER was not a CAGE and it wasn’t a TENT and the BLACK BUGS, even Alice, were just a memory now. He slept in a bed, watched TV, ate cereal out of a box whenever he wanted. Where was he? He didn’t know, and if it felt foreign – the sun, the rocks, the ground that burned his feet in the middle of the day and the plants that reached out and stabbed him if he let his vigilance slip for just an instant – it didn’t matter because he was with her, always, from the minute he opened his eyes till she read him his BEDTIME STORY, and he fell off into a dreamless sleep. He couldn’t go OUT unless she said so and that was a burden on him, and it was wrong, or one variety of wrong, but he was able to consider the alternative, which was the CAGE and the BIG MAN and his stinger. They had to hide, that was what she told him, and if he understood that, if he understood the rationale behind it, it made him obedient and eager to please, while at the same time it made him rocket with fury. Let the BIG MAN come. Just let him. Or ARMS or any of them. Let them come and see if they could have their way with him now.

  The problem was, it all ran together, like his paints when he was making a PICTURE, and it confused him. There were times when he was as content as he’d ever been, Aimee sitting there beside him on the COUCH and grooming him with her fingers that were stiff and soft at the same time, cartoons on TV, no more lessons or drills and the words draining out of his head like water in a gutter, when all at once the thought of the BIG MAN would invade him and he’d jump under her fingers, and she would say, ‘What’s wrong?’ and in the instant she posed the question, the thought vanished as suddenly as it had appeared. He wanted to say, ‘Nothing wrong,’ wanted to sign it, but in the duress of the moment, the wrongness of it, the sign was gone.

  And then one day Guy was there, on the porch, knocking at the door. The minute she opened the door, Guy stepped in out of the light and put his arms around her and pressed her to him, which was something he didn’t like at all. Guy didn’t hug him, he hugged her. And though he felt a sudden wild peal of joy at the sight of him and the promise of TREATS and RIDES and all the rest, he couldn’t help remembering that Guy had left him in the CAGE and gone away in his CAR and hadn’t come back at all. Till now. When it didn’t really matter any more.

  ‘And how’s Sam?’ Guy said, letting go of her and turning to him with his arms held out for a hug. ‘Does he want a hug?’

  He was suspicious – was this Guy, even? Guy wouldn’t leave him in a CAGE, not the Guy he knew. He brought his first two fingers together and snapped them against his thumb, three times, hard, then shook his head no, the way she did when she was angry with him.

  Guy’s face climbed up and away from him. ‘No?’ he said. ‘What’s the matter, Sam, don’t you recognise me? Do you want to make me sad? Do you want to make me hurt?’ And then he signed, I BROUGHT TREATS FOR YOU. DON’T YOU WANT TREATS?

  He did. He did want treats. CANDY especially. He held out his hand, signed, GIMME TREATS, and waited for Guy to dig a hand through the plastic bag in his pocket and come up with a palmful of dried apricots that were almost as good as candy and better for his teeth because he didn’t want his teeth to HURT, did he?

  It was a complicated transaction. He took the apricots, fed them into his mouth and held his hand out for more, and then he allowed Guy to hug him, but Guy had to bend down to him because he was too BIG now to lift and Guy knew that and so did she.

  They went OUT, they climbed the rocks, played CHASE and HIDE AND SEEK, drove in the CAR, Guy’s car, to get cheeseburgers and potato sticks and a sweet thick MILKSHAKE he sucked through a straw, and when Guy was getting ready for bed the first night and standing over the toilet peeing, he couldn’t stop himself from bursting through the door to taste the coiled yellow arc of his PISS as it streaked through the air, which was the final and definitive proof that this was Guy, really and actually Guy, and not some imposter who just happened to look and smell like him. He felt calm after that and ready to accept this new arrangement, her and Guy and him, just like before, as long as Guy slept on the couch and not in his BED, but then there was a moment in the night when he felt her slip out from under the covers and go to Guy and he wanted to do something about that because it was wrong but he was asleep and dreaming that he was paralysed and couldn’t move a muscle, even if a snake came winding purposively through his dreams, which it did, an unravelling muscle of snakeness with its licking tongue and its hooked white fangs.

  There was a whole day and then the next night
, the two of them talking and talking, and he was too consumed with his toys and puzzles and books to pay attention except when their voices rose, which he didn’t like at all. At one point, she was crying, and he tried to climb into her lap to comfort her, and Guy shoved him out of the way. ‘You can go to hell!’ Guy shouted at her. ‘I’m through, I mean it,’ and she shouted back, ‘Good, just go, because you’re nothing to me now.’

  Then Guy lurched forward and flapped his hand across her face, so quickly he couldn’t do anything about it, but that was wrong and it made him scream, made him snatch Guy off his feet and slam him into the wall so hard the wall roared back at him, and Guy’s face went bright with blood and he almost brought his teeth into play and he would have with anybody else who dared even touch her, but this was Guy, the one he used to love before her, and that saved them both. He erected his hair. He champed his teeth. He screamed. Then the door was open and Guy went through it and out into the night, gone again, gone, gone, gone.

  SHE’D CALLED HIM

  She’d called him, which came as a relief, but at the same time managed to stir his resentment all the more. It had been months. His life was a shambles. The fact was that her obstinacy had cost him everything, from Carson to the National Science Foundation to whatever thin threads of a relationship he still had with Moncrief. He was living in an apartment that wasn’t much bigger than the bedroom at the ranch and instead of nature outside the door it was a stew of traffic and fumes and noise. He was drinking too much. His diet – fast food, Chinese takeout, beer nuts – was erasing him to the point where he barely recognised himself in the mirror. And school – school was the bare, cold edge of a precipice he was just barely clinging to by his fingertips. Worse, he hadn’t got laid since he’d gone to her in Iowa and he was so desperate he’d even called Melanie, who promptly hung up on him, and then he made a fool of himself, trying to put the moves on an assistant professor of English in her thirties who specialised in Elizabethan poetry and wasn’t even his type, and who then shook her head sadly at the moment of truth and informed him that she was going home to her husband, twin boys and a dachshund named Olaf.

  The phone rang. He had half a glass of Scotch on the counter and a cigarette jammed in the corner of his mouth, and he was attempting to fold over the edge of a cheese-and-onion omelette that was already scorched on the bottom, so it took him a minute to pick up.

  ‘Hi,’ her voice breathed at him. And then, superfluously: ‘It’s me.’

  What did he feel in that moment? Surprise, anger and lust, in that order, but it was lust that won out. ‘Aimee,’ he said, just stating it, the fact of it, of her, as if to orient himself for what was to come.

  ‘I just wanted to say… well, I miss you. And Sam does too.’ A pause. ‘Do you miss me?’

  ‘Christ, where are you? It’s been months, do you realise that? And don’t tell me you’re in some campground…’

  ‘I’m in a house – a trailer, actually. With Sam.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In Arizona?’

  He wanted her. He wanted her desperately. Just the sound of her voice, a thin whisper over the phone, had given him an erection that drew all the blood to his groin instead of his brain, where it belonged. In that moment he would have done anything for her, but here was that conversation again, dodging and weaving and circling back on itself. ‘Where in Arizona?’

  There was the faintest tick of hesitation, as if she’d never meant to tell him and wasn’t going to tell him now. He listened to the susurrus of her breathing. Finally, she said, ‘Kingman? Just outside of Kingman? On Route 66?’

  ‘Kingman? How did you ever manage to wind up there?’ He conjured up some bleak outpost of strip malls and used car lots hemmed in by mesquite and creosote and what – roadrunners, coyotes, jackasses. ‘I don’t think I even know where it is—’

  ‘In the foothills of the Hualapai range, thirty-three hundred feet high, so it’s cooler than down below in the desert. It even snows here, or so they tell me.’

  ‘I would have thought you’d seen enough snow in Iowa to last you a lifetime.’ He threw it out there, small talk – he was making small talk when everything inside him was boiling over. ‘But tell me, how’s Sam – is he behaving? I can only imagine him in a trailer – what are the walls made of, titanium?’

  ‘He’s been good as gold. He knows, Guy, he really knows, and people like Borstein and Moncrief can say what they will, but all Sam wants is to be with me and if that means controlling his impulses, well, he’s doing it. And, of course, I never leave him alone. I mean never.’

  There was a pause. He was picturing that, Sam in a trailer, Sam ramping down his urges, and he wanted to ask her a thousand questions, starting with how she was paying rent, paying for groceries, paying for Sam, and more importantly what she was going to do about him and the project he was trying to float that wasn’t going to go anywhere without Sam, access to Sam, possession of him, but then it came to him that something more essential was going on here – she’d called him. He said, ‘I miss you.’

  ‘I miss you too.’

  ‘You want me to come visit?’

  It was a three-hour drive from the Phoenix airport, which gave him plenty of time to parse what he was doing. He loved her, he needed her, and he was speeding down some soulless highway in the middle of nowhere for the promise of expressing that in person, but there was a score to settle here too. She’d left him – again – and they were going to have to find some resolution to that little problem. One of his former students had got a job at the National Science Foundation and when he’d asked her to look into the status of his grant application, she’d told him everybody was impressed and while it wasn’t a sure thing, it was looking very much like he was going to get funded in spite of the Borstein revolution, which meant that his number-one priority was to placate Moncrief – and the only way he could do that was to get Sam back. And here was his argument: they could go back to Iowa, the three of them, and work out of the chimp barn with the signing chimps, a once-in-the-history-of-mankind opportunity, anybody could see that, and she didn’t really want all that training to go to waste, did she? Video cameras, that was all they needed, just set them up to run twenty-four/seven and watch Sam talk to Alice and Alice talk to Alex and Alex talk to Sam, and what if they bred Sam and Alice, and Alice used signs with the baby? What about that? What would that say to Borstein? And if Moncrief did follow through on his threat to sell off his chimps, this would at least protect Sam and Alice and some of the others too, and wasn’t that worth a try? Wasn’t that better than having to look over her shoulder every time she went to the grocery store or gassed up her car? Because Moncrief wasn’t going to give up. That wasn’t in his nature. What was in his nature was vengeance, retribution, payback.

  If anything, she was prettier than he remembered, sexier, and if she’d put on a little weight, it was just where it ought to be, and of course she knew that and she was wearing a low-cut top he’d never seen before and she’d let her hair grow even longer so that it was all the way down to her waist. And make-up. She didn’t usually wear make-up, but she’d done her eyes and put on lipstick, just for him. He stepped in the door and the connection was instantaneous, no hesitation, no recrimination, no worries – he wrapped his arms around her and she just clung to him and they kissed, and if Sam gave him a cold, hard look, he couldn’t help that, and the minute he released her he held out his arms to Sam for a hug and when that didn’t work, he produced the dried apricots he’d brought along to seal the deal. Sam was bigger, he noticed that, but Sam was still Sam, and though he might have been a genius among chimps, he was still a chimp, with the emotional and intellectual range of a four-year-old child, and Guy knew how to manipulate him. Sure enough, within minutes they were hugging and grooming and it was just like before.

  That night they went through the whole rigmarole of putting Sam to sleep when they were both on fire to have sex, to fuck, that is, and that was like old times too. They sat
around the kitchen table, drinking wine and passing a joint, making sure Sam got the lion’s share, the radio tuned to the classical station, lights turned low, everything hushed and mellow. Aimee cranked the heat till the trailer was like a sauna, and they kept their voices low in the hope that Sam, unable to follow along, would fall into the chasm of his own boredom and drift off to sleep. Sure enough, right at eight, right at his bedtime, he folded his arms on the table and put his head down and they both got up and helped him to bed.

  He’d thought that was it, that Sam was out for the night, but five minutes later, while he was brushing his teeth and relieving himself in the cramped sweatbox of a bathroom before going to her where she was waiting for him on the sofa-bed in the living room – in her negligee, her bare legs crossed and a joint glittering in her hand – Sam suddenly rocketed through the door, his mouth gaping, and sampled the stream of his piss in mid-air. Which wasn’t all that unusual – it was one of Sam’s little idiosyncrasies, life with a chimp – but Sam customarily reserved the honour for strangers, who might or might not have been rivals. And, of course, it had the desired effect of scaring the shit out of them. Chimps didn’t have a castration complex as far as anyone knew, but when they attacked one another, when they fought to the death, one of the first things they went for was the sexual organs. So there was that to consider. But beyond that, beyond its just being unnerving, was the implication that Sam saw him as a stranger now – or worse, a rival.