A Beautiful Truth

by Colin McAdam

  Lonee wasn’t sleeping and his hand had started to float. Jennifer thought they were connecting some nights, those intelligent eyes of his reaching out, but he would suddenly look away or attack his hand. He was pulling off his nails.

  When he seemed lucid he sometimes came to her at the front of the cage and lay on his back. He pulled his feet back and looked at her through his legs while he felt his diminished scrotum. It had been more than a year since his testicle was removed.

  They were all now chronically infected with HIV. The progress of the virus in chimpanzees was not yet fully understood. Biopsies showed that they were clearly infected, and clearly fighting infection, but the outcome of the infection was a mystery.

  It had been decided that Dusty would be superinfected with several strains at once.

  Jennifer got a special dispensation from the entertainment coordinator to bring a television and VCR into the wing. She wheeled both on a trolley to the far end, and at moments when there were no scheduled procedures they all craned their necks and watched.

  Lonee wanted to show everyone that he knew how to use the remote control. Jennifer couldn’t understand why he was jumping and displaying so loudly and said you really are a moody boy. They watched Three Men and a Baby.

  Dr. Meijer felt like he no longer could tell anyone about his work. He could barely talk to colleagues.

  Rosie was eating her own shit, to savour and savour again the food that was each day’s only diversion. She was growing obese and Dr. Meijer knew neither how nor why to stop it. Staff were instructed to keep a careful eye on her whenever she returned from a knockdown. They stood near her cage with broomsticks to prod her in case she slumped and choked.

  At night when Jennifer visited, Lonee played a song for her, rattling the door of his cage rhythmically, repeatedly, a metal song of train tracks shivering under maniac commuters. Jennifer took her hair out of her hood and danced like an idiot.

  She told Dr. Meijer she couldn’t do it anymore. I’m either going to quit or I’m rescuing every one of them.

  Protests outside the main site became fervent, and some of the labs were broken into. Macaques were freed to the Florida suburbs and a labworker beaten by activists till he trusted no one ever again.

  When Dr. Meijer performed the autopsy on Rosie, he determined heart failure to be the cause of death, but her liver was in pieces and dispersed around her body. He stared at a print of a seashell in his office and couldn’t remember where or why he got it or why anyone would make it and his lungs felt full of snow.

  Research had slowed and the wing was like a hospice for eighteen months.

  But Dusty’s death prompted a renewed interest in HIV studies. As the years had passed there were very few publishable results. Some vaccines seemed to work on some of the chimpanzees, but none could cover every strain. And some that were safe for chimpanzees ended up being pernicious in human trials. There was accumulating doubt about whether the experience of the disease was the same for chimps and humans.

  As a consequence, funding for many studies dried up and there was talk of closing CID. But Dusty’s superinfection eventually developed into symptoms like those of full-blown AIDS.

  After five years of infection, his diarrhea became fulminant and relentless. He was treated with five different antibiotics and showed little response. Cryptosporidium was rampant in his intestines, and it was this which the researchers called “AIDS-defining” in their paper. He wasn’t treated with any antiretroviral drugs, as some of the others were, because the researchers wanted to see how the virus progressed.

  Jennifer watched his weight go up and down. After a year she no longer wished he would rally. She spent a night on the floor by his cage thinking it would be his last, but he made it through hundreds more. In their night sweats and fevers Lonee and Dusty called mournfully to each other like neuters across a chapel.

  Dr. Meijer began insisting to the PI that they euthanize Dusty. The PI, after consulting with his peers, told Dr. Meijer to wait and perform a blood transfusion. They had found that the virus they had isolated from Dusty’s blood was different from what he had been inoculated with—it had undergone a genetic mutation. A new quasipecies of HIV had developed in Dusty’s body and they wanted to see now how other chimpanzees reacted to it.

  Lonee was knocked down and 40 mL of Dusty’s blood were transfused into him intravenously.

  Dusty was killed when his weight dropped to thirty-five pounds. He weighed less than Jennifer’s six-year-old son, who was ten years Dusty’s junior.

  Altogether, Lonee spent fourteen years in those cages.

  Jennifer resigned.

  Lonee saw and smelled her in the dark sometimes with the tall men Walt and Larry, with rainstorms and meatsmells and friendship and lipstick: all of them bugs in the woodwork, distractions from the sleeping that had to be done.

  thirty

  Mr. Ghoul is led into a room with a plekter wall and the room is dark in the corners. On the other side, a yek appears. He walks oddly.

  Mr. Ghoul sits. He doesn’t challenge the yek. He watches.

  The yek is sitting in a corner. He looks around the room.

  Mr. Ghoul moves closer to the plekter. He looks for something in the room to play with. He sees something on the floor, moves to it and holds it up, as much for the yek’s analysis as his own.

  It’s a tooth.

  They both stare at it.

  Mr. Ghoul shows his teeth briefly to the yek to remark on the fact that it’s a tooth. The yek does not move.

  At midnight through a high window, a star shines so dimly. Sometimes it doesn’t seem like it is there, but Mr. Ghoul knows it is.

  The yek doesn’t move or make a sound. He is black in the corner. Mr. Ghoul keeps holding the tooth. Something about it pricks the darkness of the yek.

  There is no fear in that room.

  Mr. Ghoul stares at him.

  Quiet star. Silver coin in a dirty pond.

  All of them meet the yek. Some are brought in separately, some in groups. Fifi, Mama and the new one are brought in together. The yek watches from the corner. The women and the girl are eager to meet him.

  Fifi turns in a submissive posture, but the yek doesn’t move from the corner.

  They clap, as Podo used to clap, to initiate a skrupulus. They groom, and the new one gestures towards the yek, inviting him to come closer to the plekter.

  He stays.

  Lonee sleeps.

  Dusty’s malignant blood fizzed and mixed with his own.

  He sleeps for two years while his muscles melt, and once the pain has climaxed he enjoys the deliquescence. He will flood the floor and suffer no longer.

  Bill the labtech is transferred from Congo to CID and recognizes Lonee as Looee, though he can’t believe that it’s the same animal. He corrects the name on Looee’s chart and asks: remember me, old soldier.

  No papers are published. Nothing can be gathered from his body’s data except that a massive infection has come and gone.

  There is no final submission. For months he feels more than ever as if he is floating. Two feet above the ground for fourteen years, this aluminum air has become the new earth.

  He rallies and sits and can adjust his posture now when the bars dig into his ribs. The knockdowns have stopped. He misses the ketamine.

  There is something about having shared this space with the others—all the dogpeople screaming, succumbing and surviving. Dusty and Rosie are now long gone, their cages never filled, but the others have hung on. Looee survives by watching the others surviving. They have always called in support and screamed at the men with guns. Each of them is isolated, but looking around for all these years they feel that no one is alone. Looee screamed with the rest of them, felt jealousy and sympathetic joy when the others had their cages cleaned. He has yearned for touch, and died like everyone else.

  New caregivers tie colourful streamers to the corners of the wing and bring balloons. They give everyone a piece of cake. Looee
eats his and Mac makes noises of delight so excessive and pure that the caregivers remember that moment for years.

  HIV research on chimpanzees has grown too costly and inconclusive. The CID Wing is to be closed. The chimps will be sent to other laboratories.

  Dr. Meijer does what he can. The placements are dictated by the arbitrary needs of strangers, but most of the chimps will escape these cages. Pepper, Spud and Nathan are sent to sanctuaries in Quebec and Louisiana, others are sent to Spain and Uganda. Mac endures ten more years of biomedical testing in New Mexico. Looee remains at Girdish.

  He is knocked down and transported in a van for half a mile to the field station.

  He is kept in a concrete room with bars on one side and is brought vegetables and fruit.

  David Kennedy says let’s get you healthy.

  He puts a television in front of the bars and Looee watches footage of a group of dogpeople in an outdoor enclosure. Looee wonders where their cages are.

  Another man comes to the bars and offers Looee grape juice. As Looee sucks on the straw, the man masturbates him with a long-handled device. Despite his missing testicle his sperm is adequate and motile.

  He is given blankets and toys and he sleeps.

  He dreams of a garden with a tall blue wall.

  He dreams of bananas, watermelon and strawberries.

  He doesn’t trust this space but he is dreaming.

  No one knows if he is aware of what a dream is.

  A woman points to the TV screen and says that’s Magda … that’s Jonathan … that’s Bootie.

  Looee wants her to talk to him all day.

  He attacks his hand sometimes.

  He is led into the room they have always used for introductions. It is divided in two by a wall of iron mesh so the chimps being introduced are unable to hurt each other.

  He sits in the corner so his back is protected and he can see anyone coming with a gun. A low door opens from the outside and two dogpeople come into the room on the other side of the mesh.

  Bootie sees Looee and barks in alarm. His hair stands on end and he goes to Magda for support.

  Bootie reminds him of Dusty.

  Magda comes up to the mesh. She looks deep into the corner while Bootie makes a racket behind her.

  Magda looks hard at Looee and barks. She’s what Larry would have called an asshole.

  Stencilled memories of a past long gone take colour for a moment and Looee is overcome with fear and sadness. He pushes hard into the corner wall.

  They feed him parsnips, lettuce and red peppers. They fill a rubber hose with peanut butter and he occupies himself with sucking it out.

  David Kennedy sits on a chair. He watches Looee eat. He senses vulnerability and defiance, some otherworldly wisdom. He feels irrationally drawn to this injured chimp like students are to certain teachers. Charisma is one of those forces that unite us with other apes. Alphas, male or female, are those who attract others to them, sometimes regardless of what is said or done.

  He thinks about sending Looee out into the colony, an emissary of sorts. David hasn’t had any physical interaction with them for over fifteen years.

  Looee will be killed if he joins the colony now. Some of the males will have to be sequestered. There will have to be introductions.

  David feels a strength in his hands as he watches Looee, an unconscious force that he reflects on later. A shared determination.

  He wants Looee to be strong. He wants to see if others feel his charm.

  Looee gains weight and gathers strength. His hips and legs are permanently damaged from being in the cage for so long.

  Burke comes into the introduction room looking massive and invincible. He paces his half of the room, several times with purpose around the perimeter. He pounds on the low iron door with room-shaking strength. It slides up and he walks outside.

  Jonathan is in the room when Looee is next brought in. He fills the room with sounds that make Looee shudder, but they continue for so long that Looee eventually relaxes.

  Looee sits in the corner and watches the rangy dogperson leap around the room. Jonathan hangs from the mesh and pisses and his penis surges and flags.

  He holds a low pipe that protrudes from the wall, too low for him to swing around it. He moves to and fro and tries to break the pipe and he jumps again onto the mesh and screams.

  Where Burke walked, Jonathan runs, pounding randomly on the walls, and there seems to be no end to his mania.

  He runs unseeing into the pipe mouth-first and knocks himself backwards and flat.

  Looee meets Mr. Ghoul the same day, who finds Jonathan’s tooth on the floor.

  He watches Mr. Ghoul walk out to a sunny garden. Looee has been naked for years but not outside.

  When food is brought to him later he tries to tell the man that he wants clothes.

  The new one waits outside the door some days. She wants to see the yek again.

  Jonathan watches her with suspicion. She has grown and is beginning to ripen. Jonathan sits with Burke and they groom each other.

  Mr. Ghoul is trying to rest. Burke had hit him so hard yesterday that he cannot see properly and he has trouble standing.

  Jonathan and Burke allow him to pay them obeisance but there is no benefit to him.

  After all this time Jonathan occasionally thinks that Podo will emerge from the shady grove and he tries to keep them all from going in. The new one looks in and tries to understand. Bootie goes to Burke when the others go into the grove. He wants Burke to like him so he acts as an informant.

  When Jonathan and Burke are having naps, the others feel more free. Fifi and Mr. Ghoul have snuck into the grove together. There is a single cure for most fear and worry, one answer to most questions. Their sounds blow birds into the sky.

  Jonathan awakes, and when he sees them coming out of the grove and knows they have been together he screams as if a thick stick is being forced up his ass. He pounds the ground and cries like a child.

  Jonathan has been throwing these tantrums more and more. He knows he can’t hit Fifi because she and Mama will turn on him, and if he attacks Mr. Ghoul right now it will be the same as beating Fifi.

  Burke will not console him through his tantrum. The new one goes to Jonathan and hugs him from behind. Closer to childhood, she understands his behaviour better than the others. The spectacle of Jonathan being hugged from behind by the girl makes Burke feel powerful.

  Burke later beats Mr. Ghoul and runs at Fifi as she tries to sit with Mama. He and Jonathan sit apart, the older man looking over his shoulder and trying to look big.

  The same cast of animals enters the room over the coming weeks and Looee watches them on TV. There are long periods of stillness interrupted by noisy fights, and he doesn’t understand what happens.

  He gets stronger but David remarks his many tics. Looee’s stare grows absent and he has pulled off some of his fingernails.

  David thinks it’s a good idea to let him out into the enclosure on his own so he gets a real sense of it. If the others are around he will be attacked.

  They keep the night cages locked in the morning so the others can’t go outside. Looee is brought to the outdoor side of the introduction room. The low iron door is raised and the sun shines in horizontally.

  Looee walks tentatively to the doorway. He sits down beside it, looking back into the room, and he won’t go outside. He stares at the rectangle of sun on the floor and feels the room warm up.

  He wants to go back to his cell.

  He hears local birds and cicadas making sounds he has never heard. He peers out and sees the beautiful garden he has seen on TV. He can’t see any of the dogpeople.

  He stands on the concrete ledge and leans forward, touching the dirt with his knuckles. He doesn’t understand whether this is television or not.

  Fresh air blows softly into his face and something awakens. He sits back and breathes and stares out at the sunny garden. He cautiously sighs, a pensive ape in a concrete frame. A camera capt
ures him looking out from the doorway, a postcard from one of evolution’s abandoned neighbourhoods.

  David has had the courage to touch his hands through the bars. He sensed that Looee is comfortable with people and surmises that he spent time in a human environment. His records have long been lost.

  We trust each other. I tell him that. I trust you Looee.

  I bet you could tell me stories.

  Looee’s eyes follow him, and look away before David turns to leave.

  He willingly enters transfer boxes and presents his limbs for injection.

  He has been broken.

  David believed that there was value in trying to communicate with other apes, but that more could be gained by trying not to fit them into human culture. Seeing how they communicated among themselves seemed a less narcissistic sort of inquiry than trying to make them communicate with us.

  He and his staff have thousands of hours of video footage and volumes of meticulously noted interactions, upon which hundreds of papers have been generated—papers on customs, politics, empathy, conflict, child-rearing, personality, topics so far-reaching that he is often invited to speak at conferences that ostensibly have nothing to do with chimpanzees.

  Occasionally they test social behaviour in various ways—dropping melons or nutritious foliage into the enclosure, for example, to see whether they share and what sort of conflict arises. For the most part they try to let life unfold without interference.

  Outdoors there are five acres of land including several species of trees. The climate is so like their natural habitat that there is seldom need for prolonged indoor housing, but their sleeping quarters are easily modified in the winter.

  A concrete wall surrounds part of the enclosure, with two observation posts. Its base is moated because chimpanzees cannot swim and are generally afraid of water. At the end is an electrified fence. One of the old sweetgum trees, which could provide escape over the wall, has also been electrified.

  The population has largely been static—most of the babies were delivered in clinic and taken away for other studies in Girdish. This is one of the institute’s longest-running projects.