The Woman and the Ape

by Peter Høeg

  “I had to hear your voice,” she said.

  Adam growled seductively, flattered. Madelene tried to think. She had to get into the Institute. But without any risk of running into him. She had to make sure that he stayed in his office until she was back outside again.

  “If only I could touch you,” she said.

  “Mm.”

  She knew Adam’s sounds. She knew he now had an erection.

  She glanced around her. A group of old people came past her carrying peanuts for the monkeys.

  “I’ve got this urge to talk dirty to you,” she rasped. “Can I call you back in fifteen minutes?”

  She could hear his breathing growing heavier. Lust outweighs logic every time. It never occurred to Adam to ask why their conversation had to be cut short just then.

  “I’ll be glued to the phone,” he said.

  Madelene hung up.

  * * *

  Heading at a jog for the main entrance, she pinned up her hair, put on her sunglasses and unbelted her coat to let it hang loosely around her. Parked at the curb was a truck with a picture of a dog on the door. It was empty. She walked into the Institute foyer to find the driver of this vehicle standing at the reception desk, being treated to a snarling rebuff from the terrier. Madelene took the elevator up and hurried past the door behind which the secretary and Adam sat waiting for her call.

  The vet’s office was empty. Madelene sat down to wait. She had ten minutes.

  He walked in after five. With a cup of tea and a muffin.

  “Sorry about this,” said Madelene.

  The doctor sat down.

  “Why don’t you just move in,” he said. “I can have a bed set up for you.”

  “I don’t know who else to ask but you,” said Madelene.

  In her own voice, under the huskiness, she caught the sound of that new and somewhat honest side of herself, with which she was not yet quite at home.

  The doctor waggled his head.

  “I like a bit of company over my morning tea. And no one here talks to me anymore.”

  “Why not?”

  He pondered this question.

  “Maybe because I’m growing senile. Maybe because we’re on the threshold of a new age. And I belong to the old one. Or maybe for some other reason. What can I offer you?”

  Madelene removed her sunglasses.

  “You wouldn’t happen to have a beer?”

  The doctor reached into a small refrigerator at his back, then set a bottle and a glass in front of her.

  Madelene poured the beer and drank. She opened the cardboard tube, put her flask on the desk and shook out a small bundle of white papers—sketches of the equipment she had seen outside the ape’s cage the day before. Drawn from memory, but not with eyeliner. With black ink, very early that morning while she was still sober.

  She handed the vet the first sketch, of the twin-size coffin on wheels and the electric chair.

  “Brain scanning,” said the doctor. “Equipment for brain scanning.”

  “How does it work?”

  He shook his head.

  “That falls under the heading of this new age,” he said.

  Madelene handed him the next sketch.

  “A sleep monitor. They have one like this right below where we’re sitting. In the Institute for Sleep Research. This one is designed for larger animals. You hook the beast up to it and switch it on. When it falls asleep, the force of gravity will cause some part of the body, an arm, a trunk, the neck, to droop. At which point it will receive a shock and wake up. They measure the length of time they can keep the animals awake. It’s a method that’s been well used. They’ve proved that animals can do without sleep. They haven’t managed to convince the animals of this, though.”

  Madelene held out two more drawings.

  “Those collapsible boxes are part of an obstacle course. Those, as far as I can see, are checkerboards.”

  He took yet another sheet from her.

  “A stimulation simulator. Straight out of the Institute for Neuroetiology, two floors below us. They’ve cast some doubt on the extent to which animals can feel pain. And suggested that until animals can tell us in proper English that they are in pain there is no reason to suppose that cruelty to animals is being practiced.”

  He looked at Madelene.

  “This machine is designed to carry out an extensive test on a fair-sized animal. Have they started doing behavioral research at the slaughterhouses?”

  “Testing for what? What type of behavior?”

  “Intelligence tests, I would say. Problem solving. But we’re looking at some pretty hardhanded methods here. That sleep monitor, for example. It’s become extremely difficult to obtain permission from the Animal Procedure Committee for its use. But perhaps this research can’t wait?”

  Madelene gathered up her papers.

  “Can I borrow your phone?” she asked.

  The vet flung out a hand.

  “It’s all yours. Keep it if you want. I’ll be retiring next year. And no one calls now anyway.”

  Madelene dialed Adam’s number. It took the secretary a moment to compose herself sufficiently to put her through.

  “Are you alone?” Adam asked.

  “Completely.”

  “Are you wearing anything?”

  Madelene eyed the vet.

  “No,” she said. “Not a thing.”

  Adam whistled under his breath.

  “It’s stiff as a poker,” he said.

  Madelene cast an eye around the room, looking for inspiration. This was a tricky situation. She considered a row of dental charts hanging on the wall behind the vet.

  “Can it be felt with the tongue?” she asked softly.

  A moan issued from the receiver.

  “I’ll be … coming soon,” said Madelene. “So I’m going to have to hang up.”

  She hung up and picked up her sketches.

  “How’s that allergy of yours?” the doctor asked.

  “Better, thanks.”

  “I rang the Meat Marketing Board Research Center. They’d never heard of you.”

  Madelene took a deep breath.

  “They’ve forgotten all about me. No sooner am I out the door than people have forgotten me.”

  “I’ve gone through the newsletters. For six months back. No theft of any large ape or apelike creature has been reported.”

  “You’re an angel,” said Madelene.

  “Of course, there are always rumors. Once or twice over the past ten years there’s been the odd whisper of an unidentified species of ape, some sort of primate, being offered for sale. We, of course, do not deal on the black market. And such a thing is, of course, impossible. With the Vu Quang ox, the last of the big mammals was discovered and documented. It has to have been a cross between some known species of ape.”

  * * *

  Madelene stepped into the corridor, pushed off and made an unsteady attempt at a run, wanting to get past Adam’s office.

  The office door swung open and out came the secretary. It was evident, even to Madelene, that while this woman would usually have the most precise and rational grounds for her actions, on this occasion she was driven solely by an overwhelming desire to get away and to give vent to her indignation. On being confronted with Priscilla in the corridor she flattened herself against the wall.

  Madelene flashed her a big smile. A smile of relief at the fact that it was not Adam she was faced with and a smile that said: Just because we’ve had our occasional differences that doesn’t mean we can’t all get along. Then she went on her way.

  The first button she pushed in the elevator took her to the basement but on her next attempt she made it to the foyer. Her senses told her she had enough in reserve for tying up one more loose end. She walked over to the reception desk.

  “I’m expecting a car,” she said. “That man who was here earlier, might he have been my driver?”

  The terrier clenched her teeth.

  Madelene placed
her cardboard tube on the desktop. The woman regarded it coldly.

  “These,” said Madelene, “are urgent brain-scan results. Anxiously awaited by government ministers and princes. We’re talking life or death. If you’ve let that car drive away without me, tomorrow you’ll be so far out of a job you won’t even be allowed to shovel the shit from under sea cows.”

  The woman considered the advantages and disadvantages of continued insolence.

  “It was the street sweeper,” she said at last. “He wanted the director’s car moved. Wanted to know whom it belonged to. Wanted to sweep beneath it. Was naturally sent packing.”

  Madelene pulled herself up, swayed and winked.

  “That’s the way to treat them,” she said.

  * * *

  She emerged into the sunshine and into the final, euphoric phase of her drunkenness. Singing a little song to herself, with no clear direction, she set out on her magical mystery tour through a benign and joyful world. Her mind seethed with thoughts of the zoological building site, Andrea Burden, potential and abandoned dreams, strange and unforeseen women friends, Adam’s erection, a sketch of a sleep monitor and a drive that could not be explained away in purely chemical terms.

  She passed the truck with the dog on the door. Up in the cab the ejected street sweeper sat staring into space, like the young man in the fairy tale just at the point when his strength and his spirits are at their lowest ebb, the point at which the witch comes to his aid.

  Madelene reached up, opened the cab door and climbed aloft. She made herself comfortable next to Johnny, opened the cardboard tube, took out the flask containing her last few ounces of propellant and removed the cork.

  Johnny did not move a muscle.

  “Well?” he said.

  “I have a street I want swept,” said Madelene.

  She drank from the flask and held it out to Johnny. He took a sniff and sipped cautiously. His eyes filled first with tears and then with respect.

  “That’s some booze.”

  Madelene took off her sunglasses. Only then did she notice the plaster-encased Samson in the bunk behind the driver’s seat.

  “You’re his wife,” said Johnny.

  Madelene smiled. Halfway through the smile the downturn kicked in.

  The effect was instantaneous. All reserves were exhausted; the rocket decelerated, stalled and jettisoned its empty tanks. After which it plummeted earthward like a stone.

  Madelene opened the door through which she had entered and hung out. Passersby on the pavement saw the look on her face and got out of the way. All except one. Adam’s secretary, possibly on her way to lunch, still pale and shaken, stayed where she was. Madelene threw up. The secretary backed away.

  Madelene would have fallen out if an arm that had in its time supported gnus and hippos had not wrapped itself around her and hauled her back into the cab. Johnny handed her a large, blue, freshly pressed and folded handkerchief and a thermos.

  “Drink,” he said. “It’s water.”

  Madelene gulped greedily. In her coat pocket she found her vitamin B tablets, popped a handful in her mouth and took another gulp.

  Johnny started the truck and pulled away from the curb.

  Inside, Madelene was plunging downward at an ever-increasing rate. Off down the slope self-loathing lay in wait and, farther down, the corpse-filled catacombs referred to by the outside world, with inexcusable understatement, as a hangover. She had no energy left now for being enigmatic. At the same time she saw everything with the hysterical clarity that precedes utter collapse.

  “That dog,” she said. “It’s the one Bowen was talking about. You had the ape in the van.”

  “It ran off,” said Johnny. “First time it’s ever happened. I didn’t know it was there.”

  “How did you track it down again?”

  Johnny tapped the radio.

  “The police transmit on 148 MHz,” he said. “The veterinary police on 146.”

  Madelene had never communicated with workers—skilled or unskilled—on anything other than a clearly defined set of prior conditions. They had furnished her with the material side of her existence and then they had carted off the garbage. She had engaged them, received them, let them in and out and treated them with an exaggerated friendliness born of the fact that she feared them without having any idea of what made them tick, and that—deep down—she was completely at their mercy, she herself being incapable of changing a fuse, digging a septic tank or baking a gâteau. In a taxi she always sat in the back. Now she was sitting up beside Johnny. On a drive that she herself had instigated. And for which no advance bid had been given.

  When faced with a dilemma all living creatures will resort to the patterns of behavior they know best.

  “You’ll be looking for compensation,” she said.

  Johnny shook his head.

  “How much?”

  Johnny shook his head again.

  Madelene looked at him with fresh eyes, the way one looks at some rare animal—a hornbill or a pygmy tapir. Or a person who is not on the make.

  “What do you want, then?” she asked.

  Through Johnny’s limbs and across his face there swept a cavalcade of emotions, none of which found verbal expression. Madelene saw that beside her sat someone who, like her, did not know where he was headed but who, again like her, was positive that he was on the right track.

  “I’d just like to see it again,” he said.

  They drove for a while in silence. Both of them were conscious of the fact that the ape had been there, in the cab in which they now sat.

  “I’ve promised to help it,” said Madelene.

  Johnny nodded.

  “I see.”

  “But I don’t know how.”

  “I’ve driven the lot,” said Johnny. “Rutting bull giraffes. Impalas. Which die if they so much as suspect they’re no longer in Africa.”

  He stopped the truck. Only then did Madelene recognize the area. They were only a stone’s throw from Mombasa Manor. Gingerly she climbed out.

  “I could help you,” said Johnny.

  Madelene looked him in the eye. For her to trust a strange man from a different social stratum was an impossibility. But she was not alone. In her pain-wracked state of clarity she sensed that the hazy women behind her had taken a liking to Johnny.

  “I’ll park here from now on,” he said. “I live in the van.”

  He passed the cardboard tube down to her.

  “Tell it … say that me and Samson, we’ve forgiven it for what it did to him. It didn’t have no choice.”

  Madelene shut the cab door, turned on her heel and started to fight her way homeward, with never a backward glance.

  ten

  She was woken by a light, the throb of an engine and a feeling of owing something to someone.

  It was two in the morning but the noise was nothing new to her. Over the past few months, a six-lane highway had been run through her skull—a road on which traffic was especially heavy at night, at which time it was also lit by searchlights that played and flickered across the inside of her corneas. She had had time to get used to that particular inferno of light and sound. What bothered her this time was that these sensations were being picked up from the outside.

  She positioned herself by the window. In the courtyard, by the light of dimmed floodlights, about a dozen men were hard at work securing and sealing off the garden room. During the two hours for which she stood there, they hung grilles over the windows, replaced the doors and built a little run that extended from the side wing into the yard out of fifteen-foot-high wire fencing topped off by three rows of electric cable stretched over insulators. That done, they drove away.

  Madelene went back to bed but when sleep eluded her she got up once more. In the dawn light she saw Adam welcoming three men. Having pulled on lab coats, they all went through the door into the garden room. Not long afterward they were joined by Clapham.

  As the day gradually grew lighter, Madelen
e fought the effects of the previous day’s alcoholic poisoning with yet more alcohol. At first this looked like it was going to succeed.

  * * *

  Over the next three days Adam and his four assistants only came out to eat, to go to the lavatory or to catch an hour or two’s sleep on a sofa or in an armchair. And through those three days Madelene drank steadily and without a break. Initially in order to take the edge off her confusion; later—when this failed—to put herself, if possible, to sleep. And when that too failed she drank to keep the hangover at bay and to save herself from sobering up.

  In the course of those three days, the people living in that house acquired something of an animal air. The five men as well as Madelene. The first time they emerged they had bathed and changed their clothes. But by their second sortie, twelve hours later, they had already taken to sitting around the kitchen table in their gray overalls, eating in silence. After that mealtimes were canceled. The men forgot all about them or sent out for a sandwich or trooped into the kitchen in twos and threes, grabbed a slice of meat, flopped into a chair and fell asleep, slept for a couple of hours, then went back to work. The first twenty-four hours saw the eradication of all social differences between them. When they hissed at one another or sat slumped over the furniture, it would no longer have been possible for a stranger to figure out who was the workman, who the butler and who the future director of the most prestigious establishment the zoological world had ever seen.

  They had set to work glowing with scientific optimism. And over those three days, through her own deepening alcoholic haze, Madelene had watched this optimism turn first to expectancy, then dogged determination, then depression and finally panic.

  When Adam staggered upstairs to his bedroom at twenty-hour intervals, Madelene went with him and coupled with him and sometimes even nodded off for a few hours. It was here that she awoke, on the night of the third day, during the gap between one nightmare and the next to the certainty of her system’s organic collapse.

  The alcohol had drained her fluid reserves. It had drawn off serum from her cells to effect its breakdown, paralyzed the autoregulation function of her kidneys and contaminated the remaining ducts through its production of ammonium compounds. She was acutely aware of her fluttering heart, her overburdened liver, the deathly ineffectuality of her intestine. And above this internal catastrophe hovered the reptiles of her dreams, the great white venereal amphibians of alcoholic nightmare.