Three Weeks in December (9781609459024)

by Schulman, Audrey

  The gun was warmer by now in her mouth, the barrel slightly wet from her lips.

  The warm fragrance of her mom’s glass of red wine as she helped Max with her homework. In the backyard, by herself and relaxed, pine needles crushed in the hand. Fresh-picked mint from near the shed. Crawling under the porch, hidden and safe, the earthy aroma of secret mushrooms. On the wind, the salt of the sea. Caramel candy. Watery paint. Her nose pressed against her arm, the sweet saltiness of her own child’s body.

  And then an image came to her and it stayed. Her mother’s chair, the green one where she sat each night to read books and articles about what was beginning to be known as Asperger’s. Worn into its velour was the outline of her mom’s buttocks, the silhouette of her spine, the imprint of her sheer determination.

  Max remembered her mom after her dad’s funeral, the way she used to stare at a wall for the longest time. Whenever Max flash-glanced at her, her mouth was slack, her face empty.

  Max weighed this memory against the hum of silence around herself in the crowded high-school halls.

  The understanding struck her that simply the fact that she was sitting here, a gun in her mouth, meant she had given up all hope of a normal life, had let go of it fully.

  For a long time she considered the space where the hope had been, turning the lack of it over in her mind.

  When she finally took the gun out of her mouth, she had changed.

  From that day on, she no longer tried to copy the ways others made friends or boyfriends, instead immersed herself in whatever really interested her. Plants. Smells. Chemistry. She read her first ethnobotany book, about a researcher among the Kiowas in the 1930s. She stared at the photos. A tall man with glasses perched neatly on his nose, his clothes crisp, he posed beside nearly naked Kiowas who stood so solidly there. A clear case of which object doesn’t belong. Still he was with them—the distance between his body and theirs the same as the distance between each of their bodies. He was part of the group because he knew about something they all considered important. Plants were the language he’d used.

  The ascent up the mountainside got steeper. The rain fell harder. Max couldn’t see much with her hood on, her head tucked down as she worked to keep her balance.

  No one was talking. Glancing over, she saw Mutara’s mouth was open with the effort of the climb.

  She leaned into her movements, huffing.

  A few months after the man had attacked her, she asked her mom to help her learn how to read human expression. She needed to be able to understand neurotypicals better, not be so surprised by their actions. She was still taking four Klonopin a day.

  Together they learned that researchers had broken down facial expressions into individual muscular actions and given each of those actions a code. Contraction of nostril wings—E7. Chin boss protruding—G3. The scientists hoped that one day, using a system like this, computers might be able to read human emotion. As though she were a computer, she had to memorize these codes and their attendant movements. Then she and her mom worked their way through every Disney movie. They freeze-framed every facial close-up in order to code the muscle movements—B3, H4, C1, and F2—then correlated the codes to name the emotion.

  As she got better at literally decoding the facial component of a conversation, she got better at predicting the words and actions that would follow. Less surprised by humans, she became less stiff in her interactions and people began to respond to that. She eased back to two Klonopin a day.

  In college she discovered email. In written communication, her strengths of logic and sheer factual knowledge came to the fore. Her flat tone of voice and averted gaze didn’t matter.

  She majored in botany, minored in chemistry. Senior year, she won the Ashe prize. Other students, and then professors, began to ask her opinion. In grad school, she found herself around researchers with obsessive interests and, occasionally, poor social skills. A world in which she could find a home.

  Then the year she started her postdoc (at a farmers’ market one Saturday) she noticed cucumbers. She already loved plants, so in a way the idea seemed only natural. Cucumbers had no confusing social rules, no expectations, no demand for conversation. Once a week she would go to the market, sorting through the different options, considering texture and size, until the farmer behind the table began to stare.

  If she couldn’t find an organic one, then back at home she rolled a condom over the cucumber to avoid possible pesticides.

  Sometimes she talked to the vegetable. Told it about her day and her work and what she was learning. She relayed the information the way she needed to, going into the details, no matter how minute, not explaining any vocab or research, not stopping herself every few minutes to inquire about the other’s life, simply following her thought process with enthusiasm. Letting the words tumble out. The way she’d always wanted to.

  So much less lonely than those times she’d tried this act with humans.

  Maybe from above, the crackle and thud of the humans had sounded like a few more gorillas approaching. Or it could be the apes were all crunching through too much celery to hear the people, the rain thundering down on the leaves all around.

  Breathing hard, the rain on her hood, Max certainly heard nothing of the gorillas.

  And so, she and the others simply stepped into the midst of the group. No time to give warning by clucking, no time to knucklewalk gradually in, no time for the apes to get used to the idea of the humans or for the humans to get used to the apes.

  Max ducked under the branch of a bush, straightened up and saw beside her a large furry bureau. Her head swiveled.

  She stood as close as in a cocktail party, as though she might be about to pass this silverback—Titus—the salmon croquettes.

  Even as she jerked her gaze away, his eyes were widening. Time telescoped out.

  Staring down at the ground now, she could feel him begin to straighten up, rising on his hind legs, all this width and heat and smell and sculpted black leather skin, all of his wet hair ruffling up like the fur on a dog when it’s angry, making him bigger and bigger.

  And seared into her memory was his face. Such a sense of presence, that he was there, staring back. Two dark shining eyes, thin chapped lips, a complex combination of emotion and soul. An immense face furrowing into fury.

  He screamed with anger and, grabbing hold of a three-inch-wide branch, ripped it off a tree as easily as Max could tear paper.

  From somewhere in the distance, Yoko’s voice hissed, “Get down.”

  But Max stood frozen, breathing through her mouth.

  He slashed the branch through the air a foot from her head.

  The breeze rushed past her face, startling her. She threw herself to the ground, as though before an emperor or God.

  The speed angered him. The branch swished by twice more, just above, his screams cutting the air, more furious by the second.

  He roared, galloped away and then back, a bristling blur of hair and mass. She clenched every muscle in her body. Yoko had said she could not run, not run. He slid to a halt a few feet away, as he threw his arms up and up, the branch in his hands. Then it began to come down. His massive shoulders behind its weight, his back, his legs. The wood whistling through the air. She knew she’d never even make it to her feet. Don’t move, don’t move. Closing her eyes, forcing herself motionless, concentrating with all her strength.

  The wood punched the earth a yard from her head. Through the ground, she heard the dull whhmp, like some far-off explosion. The branch shattered into a thousand pieces. Shreds of bark pattered down on her cheek.

  Her breath sighed out her nose. She lay on the ground, slack as a wet towel.

  As had happened after the buff had charged her, her jittery nerves realigned.

  Complete silence. All the humans and gorillas motionless. After thirty seconds, maybe longer, he sidled a half step closer. One of his hands cautiously touched the ground a foot from her face. His fingers up close were leathery cigars, t
he dry skin so scuffed it was a light gray. Filled with a feeling of calm like cool water, she eyed his knuckles and fingernails.

  An animal with cuticles, she thought.

  She heard him sniff. His bristly chin lowered further.

  And strangely enough, she glanced up.

  Looked him in the eye. Not a flash-glance, a real look.

  His brown eyes widened.

  She didn’t see his arm move, it was too fast, didn’t feel his hand hit, her body simply became airborne, flying backward, the wind in her ears, then a loud thwack as she hit a tree—somehow the sound outside her body. She slid down the trunk to the ground. Lay there on her side, breathing.

  Her eyes pointed ever so obediently now away from him. The shock focusing her mind.

  Having shown his mastery of her, he coughed twice and moved off.

  The idea of movement wasn’t even a possibility in her head. Her heart ba-bumped rhythmically in her chest. Everything she saw appeared crisply luminous, as though lit from within. Three feet from her nose, along the underside of a fern’s frond, she could pick out its granular dots of sporangia. The patterned precision mesmerized her.

  She pictured herself gently nipping the sporangia off the frond like candy buttons from a strip of paper. She inhaled the scent of the grass near her cheek. Only gradually did the numbness of her body begin to shift to a throbbing along her ribs where she’d hit the tree.

  Looking cautiously around, she found the gorillas were sixty feet uphill from her, throwing her occasional spooked looks. Yoko was sitting fifteen feet to her left and Mutara crouched a little past that. Both of them eating wild celery, putting on busy displays of being harmless primates while they stared at her. Her ribs now pulsing solidly with pain. She pushed herself up in stages into a sitting position, trying to look small. Something that shouldn’t move grated together in her chest. Sparkling lights appeared in the periphery of her vision. At least one rib was fractured. She focused on the lights.

  She ran one hand slowly over her side, testing for other injuries. She waited for the pasty taste of pain to retreat. Titus had only cuffed her with the back of one hand, the way one might discipline a dog.

  The gorillas were clustered together, trying not to look nervous. They crunched and rustled through the underbrush, shooting glances at her from the corners of their eyes. Titus sat with his back turned to her, loudly uninterested, chomping on a bamboo shoot.

  Yoko knucklewalked over on her hands and knees, imitating as best she could the way the gorillas moved, munching on celery, stopping occasionally to check if any of them were bothered by her movement.

  Three feet from Max she stopped and whispered, “You ok?”

  Max didn’t nod because that might make her rib grate again. She kept her head very still and whispered, “Yes.” She tried to breathe moving only her belly, not her ribs.

  “Don’t ever look them in the eyes again, especially not Titus.”

  “OK.”

  “Gorillas consider staring aggressive. They tend to hit.”

  “Yep.” As a child, hitting was how she’d instinctively reacted to staring also, until her mom made her stop.

  “Also, don’t get too close to them,” said Yoko. “They don’t like it. Never touch them.”

  “Alrightie.”

  “Jesus, that was scary. You sure you’re OK?”

  And for a second time Max said, “Yes.” She did not like doctors with all their prodding and poking. She didn’t want to go to the hospital at the base of these mountains, the one Yoko had said was bad. She would tightly wrap the rib tonight. That was probably all any doctor would do anyway.

  “Well, stay fairly still today. Just let them get used to your presence. Be quiet and keep at least fifty feet away.” Yoko snuck a clipboard out of her knapsack. “Tell me if you need anything. OK?” She crawled over to a pile of poop and began to make notes.

  Max’s rib had changed from a throbbing to something close to a high-pitched humming, a white heat. She kept her body as still as she could. In an effort to distract herself, she watched the gorillas, willed herself into studying them. If at any point they looked at her, she darted her eyes away to make sure they didn’t get angry.

  They sat on their heels, hairy Buddhists monks, jutting vegetarian bellies. Combing their way through the foliage, they focused on plants, absorbed in their task. From sixty feet away, she tried to figure out what they were eating. Bamboo shoots, wild celery. One gorilla was plucking some type of berries off a bush. She couldn’t identify the species of bush from here. Sometimes they tugged a plant or two out of the ground and chewed on roots, or reached up and yanked down moss or vines hanging from branches. The crunching and rustling sounds like a herd of moose rummaging. Occasionally there was a loud crack when a branch was broken.

  A young gorilla the size of a five-year-old child glanced at her from around its mother’s hip. Its face was as wrinkled as an old person’s face, but with these shiny eyes. It glanced fast, then ducked back behind its mom.

  When the other gorillas looked at Max, Yoko, or Mutara, it was with the same type of shy glance, and then they’d look away. At first she assumed this was from fear of the humans, but after a while, she noticed that this was how they looked at each other too, a short flick of a glance. Also when two or more of them ate off the same bush, they didn’t seem to interact much. They gave each other room and waited their turn, eyes averted. They acted a bit like strangers in a cafeteria collecting their lunch, striving not to invade anyone else’s personal space. This confused her because, from what Yoko had said, this was basically a family: Titus the father, the females the mothers. Yoko had told her this group of seventeen had been together for years, most of them born into it.

  Puzzling this over, she noticed that, although they treated each other like strangers, they never wandered more than twenty feet from the group. As they moved through the jungle, they stayed clustered together, wanting this closeness.

  The young gorilla she’d spotted before had wandered about seven feet away from its mom. It looked back at its mom, glancing fast, as though they’d never been introduced. Then it began a seemingly casual knucklewalk closer, strolling circuitously, until it was near enough to sit down with its back to the mother. A precise gap of twelve inches between their bodies.

  Instantly recognizable to Max. Her mom and her on the couch.

  Quickly she looked around, searching for other clues and spotted a female sitting in a beam of sunlight, eyes closed, no movement at all except for breathing.

  Motionless and concentrated. Max’s dad.

  Surprised, she whispered, “Asparagus.”

  THIRTEEN

  December 27, 1899

  Ungan Singh found a N’derobbo to lead Jeremy to Otombe’s village. Without Patsy, Jeremy was forced to walk everywhere, feeling the labor of travel, time dribbling by. Moving slower, he could notice more, found himself studying the river, the jungle, the grace of the N’derobbo’s body and walk. The man had outlined ribs, while the joint of his knees bulged wider than his thighs. Not a fleshy people, Jeremy thought. They must run so much, chasing food and escaping danger.

  At first he did not recognize the village as a village. The open gate, woven from nyika, merged seamlessly with the forest. The walls of the round huts were fashioned from cattle feces and mud, the roofs of woven grass—from a distance they had the appearance of small hillocks. Abruptly they snapped into focus as human habitation. He walked in through the gate, staring.

  His guide led him to one hut, pounded the butt of his spear three times onto the ground, and called out a greeting. Otombe gracefully stooped out of a doorway that was no taller than Jeremy’s hip. Inexplicably, Jeremy felt mortified, as though he had come upon Otombe snarling over a piece of meat. Through the door, the floor was visible, simple beaten earth. Looking around, almost everything he could see was made of grass, manure, animal skins, or mud.

  “Otombe,” he said, inclining his head. “I hope your family is w
ell.” Etiquette had always been his first recourse.

  Otombe nodded, replied he hoped the same was true for him, no surprise visible in his face at Jeremy being here. He added nothing more to the conversation. A group of villagers began to form, staring at Jeremy.

  He smiled uncomfortably. He was the only one he could see wearing anything he would refer to as trousers.

  “I have come to request your help,” Jeremy said. “A lion has killed two men in camp. No one there is brave enough to help me hunt it.”

  “It is not one lion,” said Otombe, “but two who work together.”

  He was startled, not used to being contradicted. “How would you know?”

  “They have been killing the N’derobbo, WaKikuyu, and Masai for months. The people track them, chase them. The lions always get away, always kill again. Never have there been such creatures.” After a short pause, he added, “They took my younger brother, not yet ten summers old.”

  “Was he . . . Did he . . . survive?”

  Otombe stared at him.

  Jeremy blushed at his own North American innocence. “Why didn’t you tell me what was happening?” By this time the crowd around them was large. He thought possibly every man, woman, and child in the village was standing within fifteen feet of him.

  “Would you have done anything?” His eyes glittered. The interview was not going well.

  Then a small child stepped forward, latched her fingers onto Jeremy’s belt and started scrambling upwards.

  “What does she want?” Jeremy asked, his hands held out, not sure if he were allowed to touch her, if her parents might react badly. Her tiny feet kicked for purchase on his calf, her arms straining, trying to scale him. She wore no clothes, only a necklace made of shells and a leather thong around her waist.

  “To touch your hair,” Otombe spoke without emotion. “She has never seen anything like it.”

  Jeremy looked down at her big eyes, bony legs and arms. She weighed no more than twenty pounds, yet—from the shape of her face and her facility of movement—seemed to be at least four years old.