CHAPTER 29
THE TRAFFIC IS UNUSUAL, BUT TODAY’S A CLEAR DAY; THE SUN—for now—is high, nearly warm, wavering in prismatic bands over the city; I imagine the snow prints and track evidence softening and melting all over Syracuse.
Idling at a stoplight at the corner of Harrison and South State, the car begins to feel sultry, and we roll down the windows. The cars around us seem to be doing the same thing. I can hear voices, fragments of private conversations. There are bumper stickers everywhere with the names of the presidential candidates. One metal license holder says, “My child was killed by a drunk driver.” The driver next to us switches his radio from NPR news to music, a fragment, a man’s hollow, sweet voice singing, “Oh, mercy, mercy me, oh . . .”
We turn onto South State and the song fragment trembles and evaporates into the distance: “radiation in the ground and in the sky . . .”
We pass rows of nut-colored houses; cars faded from acid rains; a red wine–colored city.
Keller turns onto a quiet road and we pass a sign for the Rosamond Gifford Zoo of Burnet Park. Keller is telling me something—a story about being seven years old—an outing with his father—the zoo—a leathery old rhinoceros. But my head’s in outer space. I glance at Keller, I even remember to nod at times. I stare at the window into a fog of hills—a cloud bank has nudged over the sun and fog rises up from the snow. I study the trees, gawking as we drive past, as if I might spot something sleeping in their canopy.
In my lap, in the white envelope, is the tooth. I finger the sharp edges of the paper. This is it, Keller said this morning, touching the envelope. This is our key.
We spent hours at work hunting for information yesterday. I called jewelry stores, party stores; I researched amulets and talismans and found mention of beetles and animal bones, and of course rabbit feet. I looked for mentions of animal parts in religious rites and rituals and read about the use of animal sacrifice in Santeria, as a technique to cure the sick, as well as articles on the use of horses, goats, bulls, and pigs in various sacrificial rituals. I even found a costume store that rented caveman outfits including big teeth on leather thongs, but no actual animal parts. After Keller searched the Internet, trying to identify the sort of animal the tooth came from (the tooth is too large to have come from a human), he learned that a primate specialist worked at the zoo.
Keller chuckles over his childhood story, then his glance bobs anxiously between me and the road. “Lena, you okay?”
I give him a narrow smile. I can’t look directly at him. I suppose, though I’d never admit it, that I’m afraid of the zoo. Pia had refused to take me. She’d said that zoos were for the “working class”—as if we’d had the money to travel to other countries and see wild animals in their native habitats. As if there was something wrong with looking at animals (and perhaps she was right). But even as a child, I suspected she was jealous of my affection for the apes.
EVEN IN WINTER, the zoo smells like mulch and sawdust and the musk of basking animals. The outdoor trails are roped off, but a young girl working in the lobby says that the enclosed exhibits are all open and that we’ll find the primatologist, Max Huntley, at the monkey house. We pass a nearly deserted reception area and start down the zoo’s meandering circuit, into a building where three children and their bored mothers stare at tanks of swirling koi, sharks, octopi, and heavy-lipped, preoccupied tarpon. Next is a building full of insects that look like twigs or puffs of cotton or black orchids. Next are the birds—scarlet macaws, emerald starlings, iridescent tanagers, and plump, mild button quails. Occasionally I spot a creature that reminds me of the rainforest: smoky-eyed lemurs, a crimson lizard with the hauteur of an Aztec god, or the morphos butterfly, its folded wings the color of a fading tapestry, its flight a flash of incandescence.
We pass informational posts under the exhibits. According to the map the girl at the front counter gave us, the fourth building houses the social animals.
“This must be it,” Keller says. He has a zippy, long-legged pace, his eyes scanning the displays the way detectives move through crime scenes.
But the cumulative effect of moving among so many creatures in captivity is depressing. I don’t much like it here—the animals’ dopey lethargy. They look hypnotized, separated from their wilderness—natural habitats decimated and their wild instincts gone.
Before we enter the building, Keller glances at me and stops. “Lena, what’s wrong?”
I stare at the door to the building. “I’m not sure I want to go in there.” The door is just a few feet away. I draw the breath down to the bottoms of my lungs. I say: “No, no. All right. I can do it.” But I still don’t move.
Keller watches me a few more moments—no longer all-detective. He holds out his hand. “Ready?”
I take it. We open the door and the air is dense and warm and close, crossed by lyrical calls and chatter. My breath comes in short bursts.
Keller’s hand is hot on mine—he squeezes tightly. “Really—you okay?” he asks.
It isn’t like I haven’t hoped for and dreamed of seeing her again, my truer mother. Oh, I’ve imagined crawling into the home of her long arms and sloping chest. I’ve wondered what it did to her when her human baby was taken away. Certainly, I’ve wondered if she could still be living and if I would ever touch her hands or inhale the warm must of her fur again.
But never had I imagined it in a place like this.
The exhibits are big enough for the animals to climb up the hunks of trees meant, apparently, to suggest the forests they—or their parents or grandparents—left behind. I check out the display cards: lemurs, mandrills, siamangs, and something called a white-handed gibbon. The tree limbs are crowded with busy monkeys, their nimble, miniature fingers clutching and rotating nuts. The monkeys are antic, their movements coming in swift jerks or long, elliptical swoops on vines. We walk silently, as if through a chapel.
I stop in front of one exhibit: a monkey with a fuzzy black crest of fur on top of his head, a petulant old man’s face, a disapproving mouth. He glares through the glass at me as if demanding some sort of explanation.
But no apes. When we get to the end of the deserted exhibit, Keller clears his throat and says, “Did you, um, was there anything here that looked familiar at all?”
I smile and shake my head at Keller.
Someone pushes in through the door—a young man, really more of a boy—wearing a button that says volunteer in red, white, and blue. Next to that a name tag: max. He stops short—as if we’d appeared in his living room. “Can I help you?”
Keller asks, “You’re Dr. Huntley? With the primatology website?”
He blushes instantly. “Well, I’m in my second year of graduate study at Cornell.”
Keller looks at me with dismay. But I like the boy’s open face, the way he stands at near-attention. “Well, Max,” I say, fishing the tooth out of the envelope. “We wondered if you’d ever seen anything like this before.”
“Is that real?”
I tap it with my fingernail. “I think it is.”
“Horrible,” he says, grimacing. “Poachers dismember the animals to amuse people. Make wastebaskets out of elephant legs and party favors out of teeth,” he says with disgust. “They should all be shot on sight.”
“Listen, Max,” Keller says evenly. “We just want to know if you can tell us what sort of ape this came from—if it came from a monkey at all.”
He smirks. “First off, monkey and ape are not interchangeable terms.”
Keller is not amused. “Great,” he says. “What about the tooth?”
The boy takes it from me reluctantly, holding it between his thumb and index finger. “Well, it’s from a gorilla, I’d say—an oversized canine—conical, dagger-shaped. . . .” He looks up at me. “Did you know that apes and humans both have the same number of incisors, canines, premolars, and
molars?”
“No,” I say. “That’s interesting.”
“But what kind of gorilla?” Keller asks with growing impatience.
Max glances at him, flustered. “Well, I’m not a dental specialist. . . .” He looks at me. “Where did you get it?”
I hesitate, unsure how to answer. “Years ago, I made a trip—to the rain forest? And while I was there, I saw these really beautiful apes. I never had a chance to go back to that place—but while I was there, someone—a stranger—gave me this tooth.”
Max is worked up. “Wow, which rain forest?”
I look at Keller. At one point I’d tried to research my remembered place, hunting down various rain forests and descriptions of the terrain, but being here, among the animals, confronting an expert, disorients me, the sights and smells of the zoo breaking into my memories. I don’t feel certain of any of it. Keller widens his eyes and says quickly, “Lena has traveled so much and it was such a long time ago—”
“African,” I say decisively.
“African rain forest?” Max says. “Okay, but, well, even so, that doesn’t narrow it down that much.” He breaks off and considers the tiny black-haired monkey who’s still scowling. “I’d assume it was one of the family of the great apes, which includes chimps, gorillas, orangutans, and humans.” He counts off on his fingers.
“Humans?” Keller says, then he too is distracted by the scowling monkey and falls silent.
“Well, I guess I don’t know exactly. She—they didn’t look like any of the monkeys here.”
“How big? How many pounds.”
“Pounds? Well—if I—is this okay?” I squat into a low crouch and rest my straightened forearms on my knees. “Yes, they were bigger than I am, definitely.”
Max squats beside me. “Is this how they sat?”
“Yes, and they walked on their knuckles.”
“And big heads?” He draws a circle in the air around his own head. “Bulging forehead and a big sort of piece on top of their head?”
“Yes, that’s it.”
“Little ears, no tails?”
“Right—well. I think so.” I look at Keller. He lifts his brows. “No, I’m sure. That’s them exactly.”
“Yeah—those are the gorillas,” he says. “We don’t have anything like that here, in this zoo,” he says wistfully. Knees cracking, I and the boy both stand.
“You sure about that?” Keller asks.
“Totally. For sure, gorillas,” Max says. “You saw a gorilla family in the rain forest. You have no idea how lucky you are.” His voice is deepened, sobered up. “There are only something like six hundred and fifty mountain gorillas left in the wild.”
“Oh, but I don’t think we were in the mountains,” I say. “I don’t think I remember mountains.”
The boy’s skin is so pale it is olive in the artificial lights. “Well, so, what do you remember about the place?”
Keller comes closer to me. He seems to be about to interrupt, but I want to answer the question. I lean against the cool wall and let my eyes shut. “It was crowded—a ton of roots, branches. Vines everywhere—” I lift my hands, “Always twisting around my arms—it was loud too, lots of hooting and chattering—just like it is here—”
“It never stops.” Max’s voice comes to me from an outside space.
“The ground was hard and—and . . . sort of . . . dry,” I say.
“Hard and dry?” His voice lifts on a skeptical note. “That part doesn’t sound right. I know the topsoil there is very thin and fragile, but it’s mulchy, you know? All leaves and bark and stuff. Spongy-like. But, okay . . . what else? Do you remember any special features, anything unusual?”
I open my eyes now, trying to pull myself out of the forest. I feel that something is out of kilter. But the sounds are still there—I can’t distinguish the cries of the primates on display from my memories—they seem to be getting louder. “I think I hear a river,” I say. I know that came out wrong, somehow. But my thoughts have turned runic, unstable. “I think there’s a river there. Is that the Amazon?”
Keller takes my hand—to comfort me or quiet me down. He says, “Okay, Lena.”
“Wrong continent,” the boy says primly, tucking in his chin. “Different rain forest.”
I want to save it, if I can, the translucent bubble of memory riding the air, the colors sliding on its surface like a drop of oil. “Maybe I’ve got it wrong.” I try again. “Sometimes I think it was very bright—I think I remember that!” I say. “It never got too terribly hot, but sometimes there was so much white light: blinding sheets of it, that was the worst thing—days and days, you know, when you couldn’t hide away.”
Max only looks more disapproving. He seems to be edging away from us toward the same door he came in through. “I—I guess I don’t know where you were,” he says. “’Cause, well, that can’t be the rain forest. The whole thing about the rain forest is it’s always dark. The trees grow up so high that their canopy blocks out most of the sunlight. It’s an eternal twilight.” He seems wrung out, as if he’s had to deliver bad news. His back is touching the door now. “So, well—maybe they weren’t apes after all,” he says, clearly let down. He hands back the tooth. And in that instant, I can picture him sitting at the dinner table, his nose in a big book with a name like The Disappearing Rain Forest.
The goblin-faced monkey presses against the glass wall of his display, avidly tracking me, hands splayed like a gecko’s. I’m entranced by him, torn between amusement and an incipient horror, the back of my neck prickling with a sense that he’s some sort of emissary. Behind him, the other monkeys are increasingly active, one pair swing wildly among the vines. “What—what year are you in?” I ask.
“Me?” His voice trips.
“Junior, right? You’re not even in grad school yet, are you?” I can’t seem to stop myself.
He turns his head and looks at me and Keller out of the corners of his eyes. Keller gives a sort of laugh disguised as a cough.
“You love animals, but I bet you want to be an actor, don’t you? When you get out of school? You’re planning to drop out soon.”
“Hey.” Keller puts a hand on my forearm. The boy’s chin is crumpled: he looks about to cry. Several monkeys are bouncing from the vines to the glass behind us.
“How do you know those things?” His eyes zing between Keller and me. “Did my mother send you?”
“No, no, Lena’s just—very—intuitive.” Keller takes my elbow. “And actually, you know what—look at the time! I think it’s time to get going.”
“So you don’t think they were gorillas?” I say, though my voice seems to come like an echo, from somewhere outside of me.
He’s still looking at Keller, his body angled away, as if I might strike him. “No.”
“Well, but what about the tooth?” I persist.
“I—I’m really not sure anymore. I’m sorry, but I’ve got to get back to work.” He’s getting testy. He has to raise his voice to be heard over the monkey racket. Several of them have started screeching and rattling the branches in the cage.
“What could I have seen, then?”
“Well, I—I don’t know for sure, ma’am, I mean, I wasn’t there, you know?” He’s nearly shouting over the noise. Max presses on the door; I hear its heavy whisk as it opens and a runner of new light appears. “I mean, it would be hard to see clearly, through all that leaf cover. Although you seem to be able to see all sorts of things.”
And with that, he slips out the door. Behind the glass, the monkeys’ howl echoes and reverberates.
I SIT BESIDE KELLER, back in his Camaro. The windshield is light-glazed, stippled with dust and bits of insects.
“Hey, Lena—that kid—he—he just—” Keller presses one elbow into the steering wheel, his whole body turned toward m
e in the seat. “Hell, he didn’t know.” The engine is still off and it’s getting cold in the car.
“There were apes—everywhere,” I say, my voice peeled away. “It was a tribe. The trees were full of them, climbing, and eating, and—I remember quite clearly—I remember . . .” The memory of the scene—the slender branches shaking, their searching figures—shimmers before me. I squint at it, trying to bring one face or detail into focus, and it starts to waver like a heat mirage on the highway. I look away from the memory and the nude white landscape of the zoo’s parking-lot is there.
“I’m not making this up.”
“I know that, Lena.”
The sky is so bright the clouds leave dazzling white afterimages; now these too pass over the surface of my eyes. “She existed. She absolutely existed.”
“He was just some high school kid—he had no idea what he was talking about.”
“She existed, Keller!” I say. My throat is hot.
“I know she did,” he says again. “Absolutely she did.” He touches my shoulders, but I pull back; if I could press my way backward, out of this car, out of my body, I would do it.
“But what if she didn’t?”
He looks at me and says, “She did.”
Neither of us mentions the tooth.
It’s only a little after noon, brilliant scrolls of clouds fill the sky, giving it detail and depth. Though the sun is filtered, it seems possible now to see everything around us in microscopic detail—bits of ice on an iron chain blocking off a lot entrance, the slope of veins through the backs of my hands, three silver hairs at Keller’s right temple. Even through the rolled-up window, I can smell the chemical twang of diesel fuel, hear the rumble of the plows, a musical chink-chink from the low-slung chain in the wind.
And the weight of all these details is so irrefutable that it seems this is the only true moment—a deserted parking lot, recently plowed, facing the side of a cinder-block building, a man turned, protectively, toward me in the seat. This is the only world there is—the microsecond of the now. Which we live together and then forget.
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