Gathering Evidence

by Martin MacInnes

  He stopped before the tall fence at the outer limit, hearing it again. It wasn’t the tarp. A high-pitched whistling sound, a turbulence. He looked up. He searched desperately for the source, but saw nothing. A bird? Tension in his chest, a shiver passing over him. Where was it? At the same time he felt sure someone was watching him, that he was no longer alone. He had to leave, now. Hurry over the fence, towards the car, quickly and safely home. But he didn’t. Time seemed to slow. A faint, gaining arrowing sound, a darkness, a high-pitched trilling, a cool breeze almost on top of him, and blind impact.

  II

  Our access was revoked mid-flight and the news awaited us on the ground; despite all earlier assurances, we were no longer permitted to see the bodies. Alice began making calls before they’d opened the doors; medics checked our papers on the runway and had us cough into a mask with an attached tube that spooled out into a black box. There was a high-pitched whirring sound as the air travelled through the tubing. The task of managing even the mildest infectious disease in an airport seemed extraordinary. We were divided at Immigration, delayed further after our postponed flight. We met again, as agreed, in Arrivals, by the café we’d specified, three, not four – Alice, Jane and me – and now we waited for the doctor.

  It was a remarkable opportunity. Almost nothing was known of the animals. Three times only in the past six years had a research team been invited in, though the offer came with certain restrictions. The team could spend a maximum of six weeks in the park. None of the findings could be published. Any and all information derived from the park remained the property of the affiliated group, and a non-disclosure agreement was essential.

  There were rumours, but that researchers were occasionally invited in was at least proof the troop still existed. With little else to go on – especially now it seemed we weren’t going to see the two bodies – we looked at our particular experience and specialities, hoping our composition might tell us something. I worked on hygiene and diet in higher primates. Alice’s research was in group formation and flux. Jane, a mycologist – the youngest of us, though, I had to keep reminding myself, only a couple of years my junior – had limited field experience, with no prior research interest in primates at all. The final member was the doctor, a haematologist; he was to coordinate and lead the animals’ blood analysis. I’d been forming tentative provisional theories from the outset. Something gone wrong in their food consumption? Specifically, relating to a fungus?

  Two hours after clearing Immigration, and having left several messages, we were still waiting, no further towards understanding what had happened to the doctor. Had something come up in his own medical checks? There would be an odd inverted logic in the doctor, sent to take samples from the animals, being detained because of something found in his own blood.

  Alice doubted he existed. Selecting and inviting an individual only to detain him at the border – it didn’t make sense. We expected setbacks – our revoked access to the bodies confirmed this. The briefing stated we were to ‘conduct an analysis of the bonobo troop’ – this could mean almost anything. The one clear instruction was that we should bring out blood, and now our haematologist had disappeared.

  Alice knew several people who had worked in service at the park headquarters. She said they wouldn’t be able to tell us anything directly – their contracts had non-disclosures too – but she’d heard rumours about recent strange activity. These may have been deliberate leaks, managed by the group – it was difficult to believe anything would get out otherwise. The stories were inconsistent, with only one or two clearer details emerging, but what was in little doubt, and confirmed in our briefing, was that two adult bodies had been discovered. The rumours here spiralled: the animals had been found strung up high in the trees, their arms outstretched; they lay prone on the ground with identical bite marks from an unknown predator piercing their necks; they’d suffered a corrosive attack, the surface of their faces burned off. None of this was likely, exaggeration thriving in the information vacuum. Certainly, had the deaths indicated human attackers, we would never have been invited in. One consistent detail was the presence of a thick, black oil-like liquid emerging from the animals’ mouths. And while this sounded a little melodramatic, and though there was no reference to it in the briefing, there remained the possibility of some truth in it.

  We continued to press the airport staff. The group’s representatives were immediately visible by their khaki attire, their shorts, boots, their clipboards. Their accents were odd, a highly enunciated, unplaceable English. They weren’t from here, but we couldn’t put them in any particular country. They were unfailingly friendly and eager to help, at least until we showed them our papers and declared the issue.

  ‘Above our grade, I’m afraid,’ the young blonde woman said, smiling. ‘I wish I could help, but you’ll need to speak to someone else. Haven’t you got a contact you should call?’

  Already she’d turned away, accosted by a group trailing suitcases loudly along the marble floor. The airport, harvesting light through its open glass and steel structures, was enormous; had the doctor simply got lost?

  Alice, calling round, finally managed to get hold of someone. The decision about the bodies was irrevocable; it was unfortunate, but there was nothing they could do. There would be further information once we arrived at the park headquarters, by the north gates. As regards the doctor, they weren’t aware of any problems. As far as they knew, he had entered the country as scheduled. We should continue trying the number – surely it was a misunderstanding. I wondered if there was a problem with his passport, his visa. Perhaps he didn’t have sufficient papers for the new equipment he was bringing.

  Jane, reading through the thick file of reports we’d passed her, held a table at the café while Alice and I tried other lines for information. Had he a criminal record that brought up an alert on the Immigration database? Had he an unusual travel history? It was possible; a doctor working in innovative blood-transfer techniques was more likely than most to have experience of war zones. In that case, the fault lay with the group, who had failed to foresee the issues or take precautions against them. I dialled another department, held indefinitely on the line. I called home – the service was gone; it wasn’t possible to leave a message.

  Although tourists could no longer enter the park, the area still received considerable income and prestige merely from the fact the animals were there. Revenue was ascribed to ‘proximate tourism’ – people who wanted to be near, if not in contact with, the last of the bonobo chimpanzees. No reason was given for the park’s public closure six years ago, and tourists were now kept to the lake resorts hundreds of miles away. For some time leading up to that, unsolicited researchers were stopped at the gates. Even as tourists we were barred on technicalities. Alice had been able to visit just once; a strange experience. The animals she saw were common chimpanzees, not bonobos, and not indigenous to the park.

  The resorts clustered around the central lakes, large hotels and apartment compounds fringed by thin trees where tour operators led groups on tracking expeditions, with small numbers of captive chimpanzees released briefly to gasps and phone camera clicks. Although these weren’t careful, discreet operations – the animals were sometimes seen being unloaded from vans – tour leaders insisted on editorial control of all video, signing off before it could be uploaded. They branded footage with inspirational quotes about conservation. Without directly saying so, they were able to present the idea the park remained open and thriving, home to a large, healthy, viable troop.

  The park was owned and administered by a group of ‘affiliates’ working under the name Westenra Ecology and Biodiversity Group. It was through this group that we received our invitation, and it was from their various offices we were trying to gather information. Although listed as independent, WEBG was funded by a large mining conglomerate. For the past eight years, formally – in reality much longer – this conglomerate had what amounted to a controlling interest in the country
and was developing extensive land interests throughout three continents. It shipped in materials for a transient infrastructure, prefab blocks assembling into railways, housing, schools, prisons, retail estates. It built new massively expanded airports, then special transit zones linking them with the lake resorts, heavily policed and only accessible to citizens with expensive and difficult-to-acquire permits. The airports were in high demand as connection hubs and were becoming prestige destinations themselves. Increasingly, travellers spent up to a week in buildings just like this, never entering the country proper.

  Heading back to the café, we passed kiosks selling merchandise and a theatre showing a loop of documentary films about the park. Interactive VR headsets were to be offered later in the year. Even virtual contact with the animals, it seemed, was more attractive if it took place nearer to them.

  But the animals themselves weren’t the attraction; it was the idea of them that brought people in. And the obvious thing to say is that if their attraction was virtual – if people were happy to meet them virtually – then their existence could be virtual too. There was little doubt tourists would continue coming after extinction was formally declared, an act the affiliates were still nervous about, reluctant to commit to and had managed to postpone, despite the definitive, irreversible point passing some time ago. In some ways, it would be much easier for the authorities to set up tours relating to the species if it was no longer present. They could at least get into the park then. There was the argument that one of the main obstacles to understanding the bonobo was the existence of the bonobo. With no more bodies to constitute the species, the whole space could be opened up, groups led in to survey the places they’d lived. National parks such as Westenra would be reset as extinction gardens, drawing in equally people who said they wanted to commemorate the loss and others who were simply curious about the place, as if the ground, and the trees, and the other animals, even the air, would appear wildly different because of the sudden loss of its apex species.

  Of the two thousand bonobos still claimed to be alive, at least 90 per cent were captive in laboratories, zoos and private residences. The remaining two hundred or so ‘wild’ bonobos were allegedly based across three national parks, with Westenra holding the largest population. It was Alice’s understanding that the real number was much lower, that, in spite of WEBG’s statements, significantly fewer than fifty existed in the park in total. This, among many other things, we hoped to clarify immediately we met the gate staff. These animals had been forced to adapt all aspects of behaviour, from diet and territorialism to sexual practice. Such unnaturally small troops would inevitably accelerate malformation through inbreeding.

  I imagined the confusion of extinction tourists watching the airport exhibitions, affected by altitude, by the slipped time zones and irregular sleep, by the scaling effect of looking down from the aircraft at the neat strips of land and river, seeing the bend of the coast, the waves as static, drawn on to the blue sea. Where had they gone? Had the animals simply starved, blending with smaller or slower species – plants, fungi, insects? Oil was interesting as a proximate extinction cause because it identified already extinct life, bringing fossilised matter out of the ground and reanimating it, fuelling aircraft through stacked small things, some of whom had had wings too. I moved past restricted areas, embassy points and tax-free zones, watching the air melt through the high glass walls, a weird contrast to the carefully conditioned atmosphere inside, listening to but unable to make out the urgent calls, the arrivals and departures, turnovers of hundreds of thousands of people, the almost religious incantation of the flight notices.

  There was a lot to think about. Alice asked how much I knew about the doctor. I didn’t know his nationality, history, where he was from. I didn’t know where he had worked, didn’t even know whether he had previous experience working with animals. This shouldn’t have mattered; we were to assume responsibility for all direct interaction – the doctor was there specifically, and exclusively, to operate the device. The device was a new piece of medical equipment still undergoing trials, still in the experimental stage. The doctor would attend to the device, which – this was the extent we were told – attached to the blood vials and gave all but instant information on a range of properties contained inside. It was being branded as exciting new analytic software, and our best available means of finding out what was afflicting the animals.

  Without the doctor, I thought, our whole project was in jeopardy. Not only would his expertise be missed – Alice noted he wasn’t there only to measure the animals, but to monitor our own condition too, to judge how we were responding to the environment and the diet and to our prophylactics, and to treat us should anything go wrong – his device, with the blood-mapping software, would be absent too. In a best case scenario, our work would be delayed. We’d take the blood the way we were accustomed to, tranquillising the animals and inserting a syringe. We would store the vials in protective containers and we would have them tested in the lab as soon as we got out. Even this saw us potentially losing several critical weeks should something be present in the blood. With the doctor, and the new software, we could relay data back to the gates directly if anything appeared. Of course another possibility, one that was becoming increasingly likely the more it seemed WEBG was orchestrating all this, our blood samples would be taken from us the minute we left the park and we would remain ignorant of anything that was found in them.

  Alice continued furiously tapping on her tablet, oblivious to the noise she was making. She looked up and warned Jane for the last time to cease using emojis in her communications: it wasn’t appropriate. Especially animal emojis. ‘There is an inverse relationship,’ I said, ‘between digital and biological populations in certain animals.’ Jane, eyeing me askance, unsure if I was being serious, made herself even smaller, curling low down, deep inside the high-backed chair. She seemed a little overwhelmed by everything, pressing her screen up close to her face, shielding herself, becoming little more than a hoodie with a fringe.

  I looked down and noticed my foot tapping independently. With an effort, I stilled it. Of course I was anxious, but I remained hopeful that nothing catastrophic had been found in the autopsies, that the authorities were simply making things difficult as a matter of course. And while it was almost expected of them that they would do this, I couldn’t help worrying about some of the rumours. Had they meant to obstruct us all along? The important thing now, I told myself, was that we got into the park and checked over the rest of the troop. This remained our objective, and in this sense nothing substantive had changed at all.

  ________________________

  I slept for a long time, waking initially unclear where I was, struggling for the light switch in a room that was completely dark and seemed to bar all sound, not only from the adjoining rooms and the corridor but also from the streets outside. I lifted my phone from the side table to check the time, but as soon as I removed the charge, the display cut. Reattaching it, it displayed again. I didn’t understand: I’d set it to charge before I went to bed; I was sure I’d connected it properly.

  I couldn’t recall exactly where the hotel was. I’d had the beginnings of a headache and a loose, groggy sensation settling in my lower stomach on the drive in. I’d looked directly at the headrest on the seat in front then tilted my head back against the cushion with my eyes closed. I remembered few details: street vendors threading through traffic, iced-water passed to hands stretching out from windows; a thin palm tree, something fluttering inside, a large bat launching into flight.

  We’d had two drivers – or, rather, one driver and a colleague whose role wasn’t clear. They greeted us at the airport doors, showing their IDs with a weary smile, offering to carry some of our luggage but not protesting when we said there wasn’t any need. We drove mostly in silence, and it was a relief to have left behind the scripted phrases and determined cheeriness of WEBG’s airport staff. They were dressed casually, the accompanying driver in jeans and a r
ed polo shirt, his colleague also in jeans and – unbelievably in this heat, though the car at least was cooler from the regulated air – a light sweater. They spoke to one another quietly and quickly, then, seeing me in the rearview mirror, reset and resumed in English. They asked us if we were comfortable and pointed to the small chilled bottles of water which we were free to drink from. They said the journey shouldn’t take long, if we had any questions we should ask, otherwise, we should just relax.

  ‘Actually,’ I’d said, ‘I can’t get this charging socket to work.’

  The co-driver found my eyes in the mirror and explained the sockets were being adapted and were temporarily inoperable. He apologised but said it wouldn’t be long until we reached the hotel, where of course there would be ample charging sockets in reception, in the bar and in our rooms.

  A knock on my door: Alice. She stood over me in apparent disappointment. Was I late? Had we agreed a time? ‘They’re sending staff to meet us here for lunch – 12.30. Okay?’

  ‘Great, sure. Any more news?’

  She’d already turned to go. ‘They’re meeting with us. That’s the news. I’ll see you in the foyer.’

  They were already gathered by the time I arrived – Alice, Jane and presumably a WEBG rep – sitting on bulky leather sofas by a low table with a pot of coffee. Alice, looming over the others, glanced up at me from the wall side but neither she nor Jane spoke. The rep stood, smiling a little uncertainly. He was slim, of average height, dressed in a neat dark-blue suit with open collar. He smiled warmly as we shook hands, introducing himself – ‘director of communications, but not at all as important as that makes me sound’ – and immediately began apologising, first for the very limited time he had to meet with us and then, of course, for all this trouble. I sat on the sofa seat next to him – the only seat available – and poured myself a mug. As he continued speaking I looked away, trying to concentrate, still disoriented. I looked ahead, at the wall, then down onto the table, distracted by the synthetic flowers held in a small stone vase.