Still Life with Monkey

by Katharine Weber

  I did not abandon every element of that option, however, and since then I have spent many hours in the afternoons when I am on my own, teaching Ottoline some skills with several different kinds of plastic bags. You have seen her sliding a large zipper bag over a cantaloupe or musk melon on the kitchen table or counter more than once, but you never questioned how and why I had been coaching this activity and rewarding her with treats for executing it quickly and completely. She’s gotten very good at it. She was motivated after I moved on from rewarding her with blueberries to grapes (too sugary, according to the Institute) to Nutella (forbidden altogether) in recent times. The faster she could get the bag down all the way over the entire melon, the bigger the glob of Nutella. (I know, I know. Please let her have some Nutella from time to time, anyway. And let her bag the occasional melon, too. Why not?)

  I encouraged you to believe that her constant bagging of objects was simply a funny artifact of some task from her previous placement. I let you think I was just enjoying testing her skills and intelligence, that it was a game. There were a couple of times when Ottoline slid a plastic bag over a melon right in front of you, and you didn’t react and reward her, which made her really frustrated, and then she started whining and begging. You just called her a brat and gave her a time-out in her cage because you didn’t know what we were up to. Everybody’s got something to hide, including me and my monkey. (I couldn’t resist that.)

  I also experimented with dry cleaning bags on several occasions, going for simple suffocation, the very thing all parents are warned about right on the bag, but they were too big and unwieldy, and also flimsy. I tore bags to shreds just trying to get them off the hangers, and there were few opportunities, once I used up the bags on our winter coats in the front hall closet, since all our clothing closets are upstairs, where I will never again set foot—ha, me talking about setting foot. I had to move on from dry cleaner bags. I had concluded, in any case, that I couldn’t really manipulate the bag on my own, with no ability to reach up over my head, and it was just too dangerous for Ottoline to be involved. The one time I tried having her handle a dry cleaning bag, she got her head wrapped up in it and I panicked until the two of us clawed her free.

  My pursuit of a workable plastic bag continued. It was soon after Christmas when I noticed that each time she worked a morning shift, Cathy brought her lunch, in an old plastic drawstring bag from the Gap. I went to a great deal of trouble to make sure she had a day shift on an afternoon when I knew you would be coming home on the late side, leaving me at least a couple of hours of solitude with Ottoline. It was nerve-wracking work, getting the bag off the kitchen table, where it was nearly out of my pathetic reach, while Cathy was down in the basement tending to the laundry. I maneuvered Ottoline into smearing peanut butter inside and out, armed with her usual tool of choice, a Bic pen. She kept trying to lick the bag clean, undoing the mess when I wanted the mess. I let her take some handfuls of Quaker Oats right out of the cylinder (you know how she loves to do that) and this distracted her from the bag. Finally, with the bag sufficiently smeared and Ottoline engrossed in picking the oatmeal flakes stuck to the peanut butter on her hands, I dropped it on the floor just before Cathy came up the stairs with a laundry basket of folded sheets.

  She saw Ottoline’s naughtiness, and together we laughed over this typical little mess she had been made in an instant while my back was turned and Cathy was downstairs with the laundry. I was able to decoy nice, frugal Cathy (so funny how her sister Darlene is the spendthrift) into washing out the bag instead of throwing it away, and then I suggested casually that she could simply leave the rinsed bag hanging on the cellar stair doorknob in the kitchen. All that effort to get the damned bag, only to discover, when I had encouraged Ottoline, with liberal bribes of unlimited access to the peanut butter jar, to pull it snugly over my head just the way she had become adept at bagging a cantaloupe, that the bag had several rips in the bottom seam and was not remotely airtight. That was the day you wondered, as we ate dinner (you were so perpetually patient and kind in your attempt to cater to my needs without comment or caption as you provided the manageable bites of everything, the special ugly rimmed plate with the high sides, the Velcro slotted utensil cuff, the glass of water placed just so with the angled straw, oh God, how could you stand it night after night?), how on earth I had somehow not noticed all the peanut butter Ottoline had smeared in my hair and on the back of my neck.

  I gave it all a rest for a while after that, most recently owing to time spent on the not unwelcome distractions of the Four-Square Cavendish House. But my body has been letting me down continually, and I am getting weaker. Each round of gut or urinary tract infection has been a potential turning point, as you know so well. A few autonomic dysreflexia events were instructive from the very beginning. Do you recall that unusually warm day in October, about a week after we got Ottoline, before Halloween, when you came home after some symposium and dinner at the Yale Art Gallery, and you found me shut in my room, which was quite hot, with the windows closed and the air conditioner turned off? I almost can’t remember it myself. I know I was half-conscious, in my chair, my blood pressure going sky-high. You grabbed the Nitro paste and smeared it on my chest and I came around pretty quickly. You were understandably upset by how this had happened, and by the inexplicable gap in the PCA schedule.

  It wasn’t a misunderstanding. It was an experiment. I planned it. But I miscalculated. I told Ida Mae that she could leave at two that day because you would be home by three. I had told Wendell that we didn’t need him at seven after all, and he could have the night off, someone else had the shift. Then I closed the door, and simply asked Ottoline, using the laser pointer, to turn up the thermostat in my room—Twist!—and she turned the dial all the way up, just the way she turns the lid of a jar when we ask her with that command. Pretty simple. And if you had not come home so promptly after that dinner I might have even died in that hot room. I wasn’t worried about Ottoline—she can take the heat.

  That was the first time I made it happen. Not every dysreflexia episode I have experienced was deliberately planned, though. It’s a ghastly feeling—that sudden pounding headache, my head pouring sweat, my nose streaming, goose bumps, black spots in my vision, the room going dim. The miserable impacted bowel episode in January was certainly not something I planned. (Wendell is a saint.) Nor was the first time dysreflexia was set off by a kink in my catheter tube that blocked my bladder a planned event. But that was such a simple yet potentially dangerous AD trigger! Noted! After that, I experimented a few times, when I had the opportunity, each occasion like another spin of the chamber in a game of Russian Roulette. It wouldn’t be a bad way to go, with no risk of harm to Ottoline. Several times, she helped me clamp one of Cathy’s hinged hair clips onto my catheter line, out of sight. After a few hours, I could feel the early signs of dysreflexia, and I would skate along the edge for a while before pulling back, having her release the clip, which she understood quickly when I asked her to Push! And Flip! It was our secret game, and my secret thrill, knowing I had that power over myself. Nothing in my life felt as good as the plan for leaving it.

  During the winter, when it was so frigid and relentlessly snowy and I didn’t leave the house for weeks, I had a recurring fantasy of rolling out our front door without the protection of a coat or hat or gloves, heading down the ugly wheelchair ramp for which we lost half our front lawn along with the trellis that supported those wonderful old climbing roses (please have the ramp taken down as soon as I am gone and it is no longer needed, and perhaps some good use can be found for that expensive Ipe), navigating the zig-zag turns and then rolling down to the end of our front walk. In my mental escape I would head down the sidewalk towards Whitney Avenue until there was a cleared driveway and then I would roll into the street, and then I would accelerate to top speed and just go with the bitter wind in my face as I would start to feel lightheaded, and a little giddy, the first welcome sign of exposure hypothermia. I imagined rolli
ng faster and faster. Sometimes I crash into a hill of plowed snow which cascades onto me and I succumb to the hypothermia, enrobed in snow, before help arrives. Sometimes I roll all the way to the end of Lawrence Street, right into the traffic on Whitney Avenue, where I die moments later in a fatal collision.

  Do you remember our conversation just last month, during the big electrical storm that knocked out our power for a couple of hours, about that hiker who was struck and killed by lightning on the top of East Rock last November? Once you reminded me about it, I became obsessed with that story. I could only think about ways to get to the top of East Rock in the next thunderstorm. I have from then to now day-dreamed about rolling myself all the way up there every time it rains. I would go out the front door, and turn left on the sidewalk and go down Lawrence Street to the corner, turn left on Orange Street, and then (this is the impossible fantasy part) travel north on Orange and cross over the Mill River and somehow get myself onto the White Trail.

  This was my morning route whenever I had the occasional burst of fitness intention and would go for early runs, which wasn’t often enough. The trail is the shortcut to the big Farnam Drive loop road to the top, and of course it is not nearly wheelchair accessible. In my mind’s eye I somehow navigate this and also manage the next impossible thing, a long uphill roll at the side of the road, still following my old running route, and then finally I reach the top. Sitting there at the summit, in my chair, in the rain, while thunder and lightning crack and roar around me, the water pours down, drenching me, runs down my face into my mouth, and I am exhilarated as I wait for the marvelous, deadly bolt of lightning that will surely come.

  All pure fantasy, of course. As you know, I cannot even open our front door.

  Several times in the last few months, I requested grapefruit juice instead of orange juice. Do you know why? Because of all the dire warnings out there about grapefruit juice interacting in deadly ways with medications! Bring it on! I tried drinking grapefruit juice at various hours of the day, with meds, before meds, after meds—but nothing happened. If it threw something off, it wasn’t enough to matter. Maybe I didn’t drink enough. How much would have been enough? With which meds? Somebody needs to figure these things out and post an instructional video on YouTube.

  I almost rolled off the Stony Creek freight dock when I went out there with Gordy to see the Steiner house a couple of weeks ago. He knew. He knew how close it was. I couldn’t go through with it with him right there. I wanted to have that perfect, effortless accident, but I couldn’t do it to him. I couldn’t do it in front of him. I knew he would always blame himself. Please do not blame Gordy for not telling you what I know he felt me thinking.

  And about the Steiners’ dock fire on Biscuit Island last week. I know the police think they’re looking for stupid kids who vandalize things in the middle of the night just for the hell of it. And God knows the Steiner House has a lot of enemies at this point, starting with those Coalition reactionaries, so there could be a lot of theories of the crime. The fire won’t have a high priority for investigation. There could be a deliberate looking the other way, in fact. Chances are, nobody will ever know who did it and why. But something tells me that Gordy knows exactly what happened to the Steiners’ dock and that gazebo. I just hope he was careful.

  I have come to realize that of course I cannot involve Ottoline in the ending of my life. Not only would I not want to risk physical harm to her, but also, I have come to believe that it would be a perversion of her life’s work. It would be a terrible betrayal of the Primate Institute, too. They get enough grief about placing “exotic” capuchin monkeys in home settings. You and I have both debated a number of well-meaning and misguided people who are horrified by the idea of a capuchin enslaved as a trained monkey helper. I can make a case for the ethical use of a service animal like Ottoline. I can defend the training, even the extraction of those canine teeth.

  I can, with all my heart, make the case for the value of monkey helpers living as singletons in captivity among humans in North America rather than in a big tribe of monkeys in their God-given habitat of the treetops of a cloud forest in Central America. But even though her presence seemed like the perfect solution to my personal pain, and I recognized how easily Ottoline’s dexterous skills could be deployed this way, in the past months I have come to see how wrong it would be for me to use Ottoline as an instrument of my death. Not only would it harm the Institute and the monkey helper program, but also, more simply, I have come to see that the only moral thing for me to do is to protect this sweet, loving, loyal monkey from having anything at all to do with my choice and my action. I want to protect you, of course. I will choose my moment carefully in order to do that. Nobody should be blamed for my actions. You didn’t know my plans. I am flying solo.

  But I am done with experiments. I have a strategy, though I am not certain when the moment will be right. I have been writing and revising this letter to you for more than three weeks now, dreading and hoping all. So here it is at last, the expected thing.

  I miss skiing terribly. I didn’t know how much I loved it. I miss standing poised at the top of a double black diamond run, the tips of my skis already out over the void, gathering my nerve, giving myself over to that liminal moment of exhilaration and terror, standing tall, feeling fully alive in my body. Then I go over the edge.

  Forgive me. Begin again, please. Keep the door open to let the future in.

  Your Duncan

  SEVENTEEN

  Thirteen blue tablets of pharmaceutical sprezzatura

  THIRTEEN BLUE TABLETS OF PHARMACEUTICAL SPREZZATURA rattled in the Altoids tin as Duncan fumbled in the open desk drawer. He pushed against the cigar box with the wrist of his splinted hand, pressing it against the side of the drawer, and once he had it lifted up, he could lever it and rock it onto its edge, and then, using his braced grasp (thank you, physical therapist), he could drag it up onto the surface of his desk.

  Duncan had four hours of privacy. He hoped it would be enough.

  With Ottoline on his shoulder, he rolled into the living room and stopped in front of the window so they could look out together at the passing scene on Lawrence Street for the last time. He had his binoculars in his lap, for Ottoline. Duncan was all out of curiosity.

  She hopped down onto the arm of his chair and snatched them, and he let her. She clambered into his lap and sat back against his chest, holding the binoculars tight in case he tried to take them away before she was ready for her turn to be over. Duncan let her look through the binoculars for a few minutes, gently stroking the back of her tufty head with the edge of his hand. It was beginning to feel like summer. Two people on bicycles came down the street, one in front of the other, their shouted conversation carrying ahead of their cicada whirr as they passed in front of the house.

  When Ottoline got bored looking through the binoculars and began to gnaw on the eyecups, holding up the end of the binoculars with her feet, he traded her for the small, nearly full jar of Nutella he had stuffed down into the seat beside his leg. This she snatched avidly, binoculars forgotten, and in an instant she had expertly unscrewed the white plastic lid and flung it away. Duncan had stuck a dull drawing pencil in his shirt pocket when he was sitting at his desk, and this she plucked out, as he knew she would, to deploy as an excavation tool for shoveling globs of Nutella from the jar. She sucked the Nutella off the pencil as fast as she could, digging for more as she chewed and swallowed, her cheeks bulging with what she had already crammed into her mouth. A thread of drool hung from her lower lip. She had never before been given unlimited Nutella privileges, and she peeped happily as she dug into the jar with the pencil. Over and over.

  After a few minutes watching her happy Nutella frenzy, Duncan took the jar from her grasp, which required only a few sharp words, and he left it on the dining room table as they rolled past it on their way back into his room. She clung to his shoulder, balancing easily, hanging onto his chest strap with one hand, like a subway commuter, wh
ile still holding the pencil with a final glob of Nutella in the other.

  Duncan rolled over to her cage and instructed her, Cage! Cage! Good girl! Cage, Ottoline! Time for a time out. Out of time. She hopped off his shoulder and entered her lair agreeably, zonked on sugar, pulling the door closed behind her. The latch engaged. Now you’ll be safe, my brown-eyed girl, thank you, my darling girl, my sweet angel, thank you, he whispered.

  Thirteen hearts in the deck, each of them worth a point you don’t want; the goal in Hearts is to have as low a score as possible. Thus the shiver of doom when the Queen of Spades turns up in all her horrifying glory, thirteen points in an instant. When she comes your way, is it always unlucky? Disappointment, the end of your plans? Or do you feel secret glee when the uninvited guest crashes your party? She sneaks into a diamond trick, or your King of Spades must bring her home. If you play your cards with care, you can hide in plain sight what it is you really want. But you have to be certain about what you really want. It’s all or nothing.

  Alone, Duncan fell down into the nothingness where this could happen. First, using the left-handed Easi-Grip scissors, he cut open three of the sealed NicoDerm patches, and then he managed to stick them on his neck and above his clavicles where he wasn’t too hairy for the patches to stick.

  “Don’t take Viagra if you are using nitrates, as this may cause a drop in blood pressure. Talk with your doctor.”

  If you shoot the moon, going high instead of low, if you collect all the points, all thirteen heart cards and the Queen of Spades, your twenty-six points vanish in an instant, leaving you with zero points, and you are the winner of the hand. Which is to say you walk away empty-handed. You have achieved your goal of having nothing.