by T. C. Boyle
‘But he wasn’t like you and me, was he? And isn’t it a fact that you and the university were negligent in a host of ways, and we can only be thankful this tragedy didn’t unfold right here on campus? And your student, what about your student, Aimee Villard? What about her?’
What about her? What if she’d stayed out of it? What if she’d left Sam where he belonged, where he was safe, where Moncrief was determined to make a chimp out of him and breed him with the only species he was capable of breeding with, and they could have mounted cameras and gone on to the next level of the research, the telling one, the one that would present definitive proof that language was transmissible, wired into the chimp brain just as it was wired into ours, that all it took was a single Promethean spark to kickstart the next phase of their evolution?
Finally, and this was getting to be a real pain in the ass, he said, ‘It’s pretty simple, Doug, and I’ll put it in terms you or anybody else can understand – he was only trying to protect her.’
Eventually, it all died down. People were shocked, riveted, but after a week or two, they were shocked and riveted over something else, and the TV cameras rolled on and out of his life. He taught his classes, collected his pay cheques. His colleagues might have regarded him as damaged goods (worse: damaged goods with tenure), but that was nothing to him since he’d barely connected with them to begin with. As for the students, they seemed indifferent except to the fact that he’d been on TV, no matter the association, which lent him a kind of tarnished glamour as if he were an ex-rocker or politician coming out of rehab. In the evenings, he made the rounds of the bars, exploring what lack of purpose involved at its core. Twice he called Amy to ask her to dinner – the new Amy, the sound girl with the dominant body – but both times she told him she was busy.
There was rain one afternoon, the first rain of the season, which was a kind of blessed event in the thirsty foothills of coastal California, and it elevated his mood so that he found himself whistling a fragment of Borodin as he crossed the lot to his car after class. What was he thinking? Nothing too complicated – dinner and a book at a steakhouse that had a lively bar and music he could at least tolerate – then home and maybe a movie on TV just to scrape through the patina of boredom.
It wasn’t till he turned down the row of rain-beaded compacts to his spot in the faculty lot that he saw her, Aimee, the original Aimee, waiting for him under an umbrella the colour of a ripe peach. She had on a pair of high-heeled boots in approximately the same shade, jeans, a transparent slicker over a sweater he vaguely recognised. She was wearing make-up, which suggested something he didn’t want to acknowledge – or wasn’t ready to, at least not yet. When she saw him coming, when she lifted her eyes to him as he manoeuvred through the rain, she smiled almost incidentally, as if it were beyond her control. ‘Hi,’ she said.
His own umbrella – black faded to a patchy grey, with one sagging strut – rattled with the rain, which was heavier now. He said, ‘Hi,’ in return, and then it was just the sound of the rain for a moment, till he asked, ‘Why didn’t you come up to the office?’
‘I just got here? And when I parked I saw your car and then I saw you coming…’
Another pause, rain drooling from the lip of his umbrella. There was a sharp working odour of renewal on the air, not that it mattered, not here in town, but up in the hills, out at the ranch, every shrub and tree and all the birds and rodents and the things that fed on them were taking it in to the degree their consciousness allowed and no doubt were feeling the same attitudinal shift that had got him whistling a moment earlier. He wasn’t whistling now, though. Now he was standing at the door of his car, trying to make out her face under the shadow of the umbrella.
‘So where are you living? Not still in—?’ He was going to say ‘Arizona’, but let that ride because of the long vista it opened up.
‘I’m at my mother’s? And I’m going back to school.’
He felt the smallest spark of alarm. ‘Not here?’
She shook her head, curtained by rain. ‘Uh-uh,’ she said. ‘Northridge? I can commute there from my mother’s until I – well, until I decide. What about you?’
He was going to say, ‘Let’s get out of the rain – you want a cup of coffee?’ But he didn’t say it – that would normalise things and he felt too much resentment for that. Instead, he said, ‘So what are you doing here?’
She looked as if she were about to cry. ‘I wanted to see you. I wanted to talk about what happened, about Sam,’ and then she was crying.
He wasn’t made of stone, he wasn’t a jerk, he wasn’t a user. And the fact that she’d taken his career away from him, ruined everything – Do not fall in love with your subject – was something he was just going to have to live with, and so what if it was every minute of every day for the rest of his life? ‘OK, look,’ he said, ‘let’s get a cup of coffee – you know Vesuvio’s? I’ll meet you there in five minutes, OK?’
Vesuvio’s was packed, but he got there first and wedged himself into a two-seat booth by the window where he could see her coming. He watched her shake out her umbrella under the awning, brisk and small and barely contained, and then she saw him and waved, and in the next moment, she was settling in across the table from him, the ends of her hair gone dark with the wet and clinging to her shoulders. They talked. The rain held steady. Students rushed in and out the door, all carrying their own expectations, and they brought the smell of the rain in with them. There was music playing, some pop song she used to play at the ranch all the time. The coffee grinder roared to life and died. She told him about Sam and Moncrief and what had happened on top of that mesa when the dogs came and then the men and how she’d cradled Sam till his body lost its heat and they took him away from her. How they’d handcuffed her and how her mother had come with the bail money and got her a lawyer, and the lawyer said he was going to get them to reduce the charges but now she wasn’t so sure.
‘What charges?’ he asked.
She shrugged. ‘Failure to control a dangerous animal, grand theft for taking him in the first place – as if – and, oh, I don’t know, even something about the Endangered Species Act. And Dr Moncrief is suing for damages, if you can believe it.’
She went through the details again, all of them, her voice reduced to a whisper so that he had a hard time even hearing her over the noise of the grinder and the chatter of the students. ‘Yeah,’ he said softly, every once in a while, ‘I understand,’ and, ‘It’s not your fault,’ though it was ultimately, and it was his fault too for believing in something as absurd as the power of language to construct a world out of nothing.
They were there for two hours. Then he pushed his chair back and glanced at his watch, but that was just for show. ‘Look, I’ve got to go,’ he said, then rose to his feet, picked up his umbrella and went out the door and into the rain.
As he heard it, through the grapevine because he was out of the loop now, Moncrief closed up shop not long after the event and sold off his chimps – all of them, even Alice and Alex and the others that had been raised in human households – to a biomed lab on the East Coast, where they were slated for use in AIDS research. There they were isolated and duly injected with the HIV virus, though none of them developed symptoms, which brought into question the underlying assumptions of the study itself, suggesting that chimps, though susceptible to so many human afflictions, both physical and psychological, are unaffected by the virus. As it happened, Alice had been pregnant at the time, though no one knew that until she gave birth in her cage in the lab, which would have been a boon in the days before Borstein, before Sam, but was just a footnote now. If they’d let her keep the baby, and there was no guarantee of that, she might have signed to it, might have taught it to say, HUG and DRINK and EAT and WHAT ICE? and WHY? but even so, even if the two of them had signed fluidly and talked through the day and into the night, every night, night after night, there would have been no one there to see it, to record it, to care.
A Note on
the Author
T. C. Boyle is the New York Times bestselling author of seventeen previous novels and eleven collections of short stories, including, most recently, the novel, Outside Looking In and the collection, The Relive Box. He lives in Santa Barbara, California, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
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First published in 2021 in Germany as Sprich mit mir by Carl Hanser Verlag GmbH & Co. KG
First published in Great Britain 2021
This electronic edition published in 2021 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Copyright © T. Coraghessan Boyle, 2021
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