Talk to Me

by T. C. Boyle

  When the knock came she assumed it was Brenda or maybe Toby Andrelton stopping by to iron out the final details, and she wouldn’t even have been aware of it what with the blare of the music and the racket of the TV but for Sam, who came up and tugged at the tail of her denim shirt for probably the tenth time that morning, except that this time he pointed to the door. And there it was, a dull arrhythmic thump working in counterpoint to the music. ‘OK, OK, I’m coming!’ she shouted and she thought about turning down the volume on the stereo, but the music was part of her now, part of the transaction of the morning, and if she was going to turn it down, she’d have to fight Sam for the remote and cut the volume on the TV too, so she didn’t bother. She just went to the door, unlocked it and pulled it open.

  She didn’t blink, she didn’t breathe: Moncrief was there, right there on the top step, faintly smiling, his face a red bloat against the cincture of the eyepatch. He said, ‘Well, well, Miss Villard, how nice to see you again.’ The music was thunderous. From the TV came a stentorian voice proclaiming, ‘Out of the bowl or from the box!’ Moncrief said, ‘I believe you have something that belongs to me?’

  Expect the unexpected, that was what they’d taught her in driver’s ed back in high school, but this wasn’t unexpected, this wasn’t an accident – it was consummation, the end point of a process that had begun three and a half years ago with a flickering image on a black-and-white portable TV in her studio apartment at a university on the Central Coast of California. Well, here it was. His face. His voice. The inevitable moment. She lurched back, her first thought to slam the door shut, but Moncrief anticipated her, locking a hand round her wrist.

  She took nothing away from the scene, not the panic or the rocketing heartbeat or the grim certainty of what was to come, because Sam took it all himself. Two leaps, the first to halve the room, the second to lash into Moncrief and fling him backwards over the rail and down the steps, just as he’d done on Halloween with Moncrief’s counterfeit, as if the whole thing had been an elaborate rehearsal. Only this time he didn’t stop, and in some deep part of her, she didn’t want him to. Moncrief went spastic, landing on his back with an impact that expelled all the air from him as if his lungs were two tyres that had blown out on a racetrack, and Sam was right there on top of him, a huge black burr clinging to the man’s head and chest, working his fingers and his teeth.

  And then there was Jack. In his muscle shirt. Fumbling with the dart gun. Moncrief tried to roll over, to fight back, but Sam wouldn’t let him. What she couldn’t see yet was that Sam’s incisors – fangs, Sam’s fangs – had cut loose a wet red flap of Moncrief’s scalp that curtained his good eye (or the place where his good eye had been before Sam’s fingers got to it). There was blood all over the gravel, and now she was saying it, now she was screaming, ‘No, Sam, stop! Stop it!’ But Sam wasn’t listening. Sam would have gone on in his rage till there was no point in stopping if Jack hadn’t finally got the dart in the gun and fired it.

  There was a hiss of air and the dart appeared for the briefest instant in Sam’s shoulder before Sam reached back, snatched it out and flung it away. He gave her a look as if to say, ‘What now?’ and then he let go of Moncrief and went for Jack.

  Somebody was screaming – Brenda, Brenda was screaming – and people were running towards them – legs, knees, the caverns of their open mouths – and she was down the steps and clutching at Sam’s arm, trying to stop this, trying to save him, though she knew it was already too late. Moncrief lay writhing on a bed of gravel, cursing fluidly, one hand pressed to the place where his eye had been, and Jack, bleached of colour, tried to raise the dart gun again but Sam wasn’t having it. Sam had shaken her off and flew at him, snapping his jaws shut on the handle of the gun and the fingers that held it upright, that aimed it, and in the next moment Jack was waving a spurting hand in the air, the gun gone and the red curled remnant of his right thumb blossoming at his feet.

  Brenda was in the picture now, screaming ‘Get back!’ one arm thrust out stiffly in front of her and her face clamped shut, and that was when Aimee saw that Brenda had something in her hand too, a silver flash of light that was a gun, a little snub-nosed pistol, and it wasn’t a dart gun that would sting for just an instant and put you to sleep till you opened your eyes on the world again, but the real thing, the fatal thing. The gun went off then, suddenly, inadmissibly, and the noise was a punch to the heart. Her brain screamed, Sam!, cried it, sobbed it, but nothing came out of her mouth. She saw the gravel jump at Sam’s feet and here was Brenda, right here at her elbow, taking aim again, and that was wrong beyond any level of expectation she could even begin to harbour or imagine, so she grabbed Brenda’s hand, jerked it as if it were the cord of an engine that would roar to life and lift them all up and away from here, and in the same instant, she shouted, ‘Run, Sam, run!’

  Then there was the rest of it.

  Brenda’s face, the hand she jerked free because it belonged to her and she wanted it back, Moncrief writhing in the gravel, Jack enveloping them all with the annunciation of his pain, the severed thumb, the echoing report of the gun, the gun itself, somebody else there now with a rifle, and all their voices raised in antiphony: frantic call, frantic response. And Sam? Sam was running. For the first resounding instant, Aimee was afraid he’d try to hide in the trailer or under it or atop it, but no matter how disoriented he was, how terrified, he must have known that that was where they’d look for him, where they’d trap him, kill him, and he ducked away from the still-open door and bolted across the lot, heading for the mesa. In the next moment, he was a distant dark form, climbing.

  People’s eyes jumped at her. They didn’t know Moncrief, they didn’t know Jack, but they knew her. And they knew that whatever this was, this horror, this blood, she was the one who’d unleashed it and that but for luck of the draw, they could have been the ones bleeding into the gravel. Two women she vaguely recognised were down on their knees, tending to Moncrief. ‘Somebody call an ambulance,’ Brenda demanded in a hard metallic voice.

  When the sirens started in, she slipped away without a word to anybody, let alone Brenda, mounted the three steps to the trailer and shut the door behind her. There wasn’t much time. She knew what she had to do and she went about it quickly, her hands trembling. First the backpack, then the Coke – the sixteen-ounce size in the plastic bottle that moulded itself to your hand – then, finally, the pills.

  I AM SAM

  ‘Run, Sam!’ she said. ‘Run!’

  Her voice was high and tight and choked in her throat, which meant she was AFRAID, and that made him AFRAID too, and it jolted him out of the place he’d gone to, in which words had no more meaning than birdsong and the BIG MAN was down on the ground and ARMS was crying and screaming at the same time and their BLOOD was on his face and his hands and the taste of it in his mouth. ‘Run, Sam, run!’

  He didn’t want to run. There was a hard, hot, unbridgeable fury in him and he wanted to go back to the BIG MAN and finish what he’d started, but the GUN went off and Aimee screamed and all the faces of all the people converged on him, and before his brain could tell him what to do, his knuckles hit the gravel and his legs churned and he was gone. He could have darted back into the trailer and barred the door, climbed into his BED and pulled the covers over him, but the trailer was just another kind of CAGE, and they would get to him there the way they always had and always would and make him feel PAIN. No, he ran till the gravel became dirt and the dirt became rock, and then he was climbing to the rhythm of the blood pounding through him, climbing higher and higher till everything below him shrank away and the voices faded on the wind.

  When he got to the top, when he couldn’t see them any more and they couldn’t see him, he threw himself down in the shade of a great, smooth uplifted slab of rock and listened to the wind breathe along with him. This was his special place, the place where he came with her to lie still with his head in her lap and watch the clouds chase the sun; the place where he knew she would com
e looking for him. After a while his breathing slowed. He propped himself up on his elbows and there was a LIZARD right there, not five feet away, watching him out of a half-squinted eye as if trying to make out what he was. He could have caught it – the impulse jumped to life in him but in the same instant it died. He was feeling something he couldn’t have named, and it had to do with what had happened, of course it did; but there was this too – he was here alone, free, without supervision, without his harness or lead, without her or anybody else. The sun warmed him, the breeze cooled him. There were BIRDS, dark, small hurtling things like flung stones, and they infested the thin, dry elbows of the bushes and vanished and reappeared all over again, making their way over the hard scalp of rock and pecking, always pecking. And what was this? ANTS, a whole long, tapering stream of ANTS flowing right past his feet and each of them carrying a fragment of something green, flowing, ebbing, in unceasing motion. He could have prodded them with his finger, could have lifted them to his lips and tasted them, but he didn’t. He just sat there, watching them. And then he was asleep.

  Something woke him. A noise. And it wasn’t the wind or the birds on their silent wings or the ants on their silent legs – it was a mechanical noise, a keening that was like the wind but louder, much louder, and it rose and fell and rose and fell, over and over, until he realised what it was: a SIREN. He had to sign it to remember the name because he’d learned it a long time ago, back at the ranch when there was a FIRE in the bushes that hid the black shadows of the COWS and men came with hoses to spray it with WATER, and she let him climb into his TREE to watch. That was a good thing. That was enjoyable. That was fun. And more than that it was a distraction from his lessons that were a new kind of tedium repeated daily, repeated endlessly. He didn’t want to sit in a chair, didn’t want to be quizzed and corrected and made to conform to a model he never would have chosen for himself, but he did it. For her and for Guy and for the one before her whose name was already gone from his memory. Good boy, they told him, good boy, and that was enough. Or was it? Wasn’t there something more, something he was missing? But here it was again – still – the siren keening and whooping, and it triggered something in him, made him want to whoop back at it, and he did, he did whoop, but his spirit wasn’t in it and he gave up almost as soon as he’d begun.

  He heard something else now: DOGS. The barking of dogs. And he was AFRAID all over again, picturing the smooth, sleek heads and white, white teeth of the ones that had come after him in that place where the ICE was, where she’d deserted him, where he was alone. He felt black inside. He felt hopeless. Where was she? Where was she now?

  That was when he spotted her, the concentrated white scramble of her limbs, her face, the sheen of her hair with the sun alive in it, and she was coming up the last rise as fast as she could move on her two legs and her two hands, scrambling and clutching, up, up and up. He jumped to his feet and hooted joy to her and here she came, wearing her BACKPACK like a second set of shoulders, and the sight of it sent a thrill through him because there were sure to be TREATS inside it, crackers and oranges and something sweet to drink. He was thirsty, he realised that suddenly, all this sun, all that climbing – and what had come before. For an instant he saw the BIG MAN down on the ground, and he felt a surge of hate and pride and triumph, and then she was there, hugging him, hugging him tight.

  For the longest time, she wouldn’t let go. There was the pressure of her, the heat, the pounding of her heart and the rasp of her lungs and the tick, tick, tick of her blood that told him a multiplicity of things all at once: tragic things, frightening things, things that made him sink inside himself till he was grooming her, his fingers in her hair, on her back, on her neck, on her face. Her face was wet. She said, ‘Sam, are you thirsty?’

  He was. He was thirsty. But he was too roiled inside, too HURT, to say YES or wrap his fingers around the bottle of Coke she produced from the backpack as if she were performing a magic trick. ‘Coke,’ she said, ‘your favourite,’ holding out the bottle that still had beads of water on it from the refrigerator, but her voice wasn’t right, it wasn’t steady, it was wrong, and he didn’t take the bottle.

  The birds shot into the bushes. The lizard winked. The sirens whooped. The dogs barked.

  ‘Sam,’ she said, ‘Sam I am,’ and this was the old thing she used to say with the book spread open in her lap, and the sheets clean and cool and the covers pulled over their legs.

  And then it was easy. He took the Coke, unscrewed the top, and if it smelled different, if it was wrong too, it didn’t matter because she was Aimee and she knew who he was and this was their game. He drank.

  ‘Drink more,’ she said.

  He drank again.

  ‘Sam,’ she said, ‘Sam I am.’

  He set the bottle down carefully so what was left wouldn’t spill. Then he touched her face, rolled up his lips in the biggest smile he knew how to make and signed, I AM SAM. I AM SAM.

  THE LIGHT WAS INCONVENIENT

  The light was inconvenient, the sun stuck there against the drawn blinds in his office like something that had melted, and the overhead fluorescents so dull and flat he was afraid he’d come out looking like an animated corpse, but this was the last interview of the afternoon and he just wanted to get it over with. He’d already done the big ones – CBS, NBC, ABC, as well as KTLA out of Los Angeles, and CNN, the new one nobody ever watched. They’d posed him in front of the psych building while a mob of students armed with skateboards, backpacks and sports drinks formed a hushed semicircle just out of camera range, but now it was the local news – the same crew that had filmed him and Sam at the ranch in happier times – and they thought they’d do something original and portray him at his desk, surrounded by books. ‘The academic look, right?’ the reporter had said, and he’d said, ‘Yeah. Right. Perfect.’

  The sound girl – was it the same one? – sported a nose ring, the first nose ring he’d ever seen outside the pages of National Geographic, and maybe it was because he was tired and overstressed, but he couldn’t stop looking at it, at her. She had a body on her, that was for sure, the kind that made you drop what you were doing and just stare every time she walked across the room, the kind that made you think of anything but science, unless it was the science of reproduction. Or the practice of it.

  ‘I like your nose ring,’ he said, while they were setting up.

  She was down on her knees, bent over the black zipped bag that contained her equipment, and she glanced up and flashed a smile.

  The ring itself wasn’t much – a thin loop of gold with a tiny jewel set in it – but it made her look exotic, aboriginal almost, which meant sexy, very sexy, which was why she’d gone down to the head shop or tattoo parlour or wherever it might have been and had it put in. He said, ‘Does it hurt?’

  The reporter – Doug Fields – was studying a notecard in his hand and he lifted his eyes and gave him an indulgent look. The cameraman – same one as last time, wasn’t it? – let out with a kind of honking laugh that went on a beat too long.

  She said, ‘Only when I sneeze,’ and they all laughed.

  A moment later everybody was in position, the reporter seated in the student chair across the desk from him, the cameraman perched over the reporter’s shoulder and the sound girl (her name was Amy, he was to discover before they were through, a joyless coincidence that came hurtling out of the black heart of the universe to pin him to the chair) stationed behind him.

  The first question, a variant on the one put to him by all the others: ‘Did you see this coming? I mean, was there ever any indication that this animal you raised in your own home was capable of anything like this?’

  He tried to smile ruefully for the camera, for her, the sound girl, whose presence he could feel like a magnetic field. Though he wanted to blink, wanted to shut his eyes in a slow dissolve and seep into some other place altogether, he restrained himself. What he was seeing was Sam, Sam in a hundred poses, in his high chair, in bed with a book, hooting out hi
s joy from the top of his tree. ‘Sam was the soul of gentleness. He was as sweet and loving as anybody I’ve ever met.’

  That wasn’t the answer Doug Fields was looking for. He worked a little grit into his voice: ‘But he did maim two people, didn’t he? Permanently? You call that gentle? You call that sweet and loving? And you had him here in Santa Maria, on university property, and nobody really knew how dangerous he was, isn’t that right?’

  There was little to gain here. This was the news cycle, churning – Ape Attack! Ape Goes Berserk! Lab Chimp Maims Two! – and he was embedded in it, a thin streak of silvery consequence in a sediment of shit. He couldn’t very well turn away, couldn’t say, ‘No comment,’ not if there was anything to salvage from all this, no matter how meagre. The university expected it of him – the field, if there even was a field any more. He turned the question back on him: ‘You met him, Doug. You filmed him at the ranch. What did you think? Did he seem dangerous to you?’

  There was a moment of hesitation, but they could always edit that out. The problem was, Doug Fields was used to asking the questions, not answering them. ‘He was fine,’ he said finally.

  ‘Cute, even? Charming? Charismatic?’

  A shrug. ‘I guess so. Yes.’

  ‘Let me ask you this’ – and here he stared into the camera – ‘do you have a dog? A cat? How about a horse, any horse aficionados out there in KCOY land?’ He gave it a beat, and why was he working himself up? Really, what difference did it make now? ‘Well, you must know then that animals have moods, just like people. Your German shepherd? Sweetest thing in the world till some stranger comes to the door.’

  ‘But this is no German shepherd, this is a wild animal.’

  ‘Sam could talk, just like you and me. He wore clothes. He went to school.’

  The sun coalesced with the blinds, the fluorescents hummed, the sound girl held herself rigid. They hadn’t been able to reattach Jack Serfis’ thumb. Moncrief was blind.