Isabel wanted to laugh. Celia was so transparent she didn’t seem capable of hiding murderous intent, or anything else.
As the contents of Celia’s bags continued to spread across the floor, Isabel realized she was taking over the living room. Isabel assumed Celia had an apartment or dorm room somewhere, but Celia was vague on the details and Isabel didn’t want to press the issue because, as the days passed, she decided she wanted Celia to stay. In fact, she was so grateful for the company she didn’t mind all the things Celia did that would normally drive her crazy, like leaving wet towels on the floor, or squeezing toothpaste from the center of the tube. Isabel even caught Celia using her deodorant. Isabel was about to say something, but then she noticed that a second toothbrush had appeared in the mug by the sink and decided that as long as her toothbrush was safe, she could live with sharing her deodorant.
The day after Celia moved in, Isabel called Thomas Bradshaw and begged him to tell her where the apes were.
He insisted that he did not know. Moreover, he did not want to know. He had a family to protect, a life to rebuild. He and his family had been away the weekend the ELL had broken the windows to their house and fed hoses into their living room and kitchen. Did Isabel know that he, his wife, and three children had returned to almost six inches of water, and they’d had to rip out not just the floors but also all the drywall up to ceiling level? That there were hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of damage? He knew nothing about the bonobos or their private benefactor. He suggested that if Isabel knew what was good for her, she didn’t want to know either.
Isabel spent the next few days contacting the big zoos and primate sanctuaries, but none of them had taken in any bonobos. She called the places that hawked “animal actors” and pretended to be a customer. She was offered the services of macaque monkeys, mandrills, and a two-year-old chimp, but she insisted she needed several mature great apes for her advertising campaign. One agent said she might be able to scrape up a few more chimps, although they would all be juveniles, and bemoaned the tragic loss of the entertainment industry’s last two orangutans a little more than two years before. (Isabel knew that the orangutans had gone to the Great Ape Trust in Des Moines to live in a state-of-the-art complex with other orangutans, but the agent spoke as though some dreadful fate had befallen them.)
She lurked on Internet sites filled with messages posted by people willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars for a baby chimpanzee. There were even more posts by people with chimps on offer, all of them at the age of puberty, which meant they were starting to assert themselves and their owners were trying to dump them before anyone got killed. “Please take my baby,” begged the typical ad, citing the owner’s health problems as the reason the “baby” had to go. More likely, the chimp had started to topple the refrigerator, dismantle built-in bookshelves, and bite. But there was no sign of anyone seeking multiple great apes, and certainly not mature ones.
She called all biomedical facilities that used primates, and every one of them refused to provide any information at all. She then called a lawyer, who dedicated 7.3 hours of billable time before concluding that Isabel had no legal basis upon which to learn the whereabouts of the bonobos because they were private property. Isabel scraped together a retainer for a private investigator, who cashed her check and never called back.
She called the FBI, and an increasingly exasperated agent explained anonymous proxies and why it was possible to post something untraceable on the Internet. She didn’t believe him. If they could trace the ink or imprint of a letter to a specific typewriter, how was it they could not follow an electronic trail?
Celia hovered in the background, listening to this last phone call with interest. When Isabel hung up, she said, “I’ve got some friends who might be able to help.”
Isabel threw her an irritated glance.
“What?” said Celia.
“If the FBI is stumped, what makes you think your friends can do anything?”
“They break into business networks all the time. Once they even got into a bank.”
“Oh my God! What kind of people are you hanging around with?”
“It’s not like they’re creating viruses,” Celia said, somewhat indignantly.
Isabel and Celia locked eyes. Eventually, Isabel threw her hands in the air and turned away. “Okay. Fine. Ask them for … help.”
Joel was a lanky kid with a long nose and pasty skin that seemed like it should be blemished but wasn’t. Jawad was compact, with tightly curled dark hair and eyes the color of roasted almonds. They were students in the computer science department and self-described “weekend hackers.”
They parked themselves on Isabel’s sofa with their laptops and began tippy-tapping away. They were apparently also instant-messaging each other, as they would occasionally snort and jab each other in the ribs for no apparent reason. Celia got fed up, hung her head out the window, and lit a cigarette. “Don’t,” she said sharply, sensing the look Isabel was aiming at her back. “I already have a mother.”
Isabel sighed and turned away. If anyone on earth understood that one mother was enough, it was Isabel. Instead, she wandered and fidgeted. She picked up each photograph of the bonobos. She stared at their faces, their hands, the shapes of their ears, recalling specific details to keep them fresh in her memory. She picked up a picture of Bonzi and stared into her eyes.
I will find you. I will.
Where she would take them she had no idea, but she would worry about that later.
She set the picture down and aligned all of them so that their frames were at the exact same angle relative to the table’s edge. She paced the living room, swinging her hands back and forth and letting them slap in front of her until Joel looked up in irritation. She disappeared into the kitchen and scrubbed the vegetable crisper. She made herbal tea, and when she set the cups down on the coffee table tried to peer around the edges of Joel’s and Jawad’s laptops to see what they were doing. They hunched forward protectively, angling the monitors down.
“These guys are badass,” said Joel a half hour after all previous conversation had ceased.
“I think we know that,” said Celia. She and Isabel were lying on their backs on the living room floor with a bowl of blue corn chips between them. “They bombed the lab.”
“No, I mean really badass—there’s this family that raised guinea pigs. Lots of guinea pigs. Anyway, the ELL started targeting them because they thought some of the guinea pigs were going for biomedical research.”
“Were they?” said Celia. She popped a chip into her mouth, crunched it, then sucked the salt from each finger.
“I don’t know. Maybe. That’s not the point. The point is that they terrorized the family for years. When the grandmother died, the ELL actually dug up her corpse and held it hostage for three months until the family agreed to stop raising guinea pigs.”
“They stole a dead body?” Isabel said around a mouthful of corn chips.
“And hung on to it for three months,” reiterated Joel. “The family gave up the guinea pigs, and Grandma got dumped in a forest and retrieved. Can you imagine the shape she was in?”
Celia and Isabel looked at each other and simultaneously stopped chewing.
“Listen to this,” said Jawad. “Five months ago some of their operatives broke into an animal shelter, stole all the animals, killed them, and dumped them in a bin behind a supermarket. Seventeen dogs and thirty-two cats.”
“And these people call themselves pro-animal?” said Isabel.
“Why are you surprised? They bombed the bonobos,” Celia said. “And you.” She had apparently recovered from the image of the dead body, because she licked her finger and ran it around the bottom of the empty bowl.
“Their so-called rep said it was more humane for the animals to be dead than in a shelter,” said Jawad.
“Why ‘so-called’?”
“These guys operate in cells, so no one group ever really knows what any of the others is
up to. It’s a way of protecting themselves. Because of that they’ve been accused of claiming responsibility for things they didn’t do. Hamas-style.”
“What about the Webcast?” Isabel said wearily. “Can you find anything?”
“No,” said Jawad, “and I don’t think I’m going to. I’ve been tracing the IP addresses of each mirrored copy, but I don’t think the original is even up anymore, and the copies have bounced between proxies from Uzbekistan, Serbia, Ireland, and Venezuela, all via Nigeria. Good luck getting subscriber info from them.”
Isabel thought of the final sentence spoken by the frustrated FBI agent: “If it were that easy, we’d have bin Laden.”
“Excuse me,” she said, climbing to her feet. From the corner of her eye, she watched Celia wipe her fingers on the carpet.
Isabel made her way to the bedroom, leaving the students alone in the living room. She flopped face-first onto the bed.
Six great apes could not simply disappear. They could pick locks with straws, dismantle heating ducts, pull bolts from door frames, break through drywall, and remove window casings—all of which meant that wherever they had gone had been prepared to receive them. Since it wasn’t a zoo or a sanctuary, it had to be a biomedical lab.
She felt a sudden stab as she realized that Peter hadn’t been back since she threw him out. It was true she’d turned off her cell phone and yanked the other phone’s cord from the wall, but if he loved her, shouldn’t he just come?
When she eventually went back into the living room, the students were sitting cross-legged around the coffee table with a bottle of tequila, slices of lime, and a salt shaker. Jawad glanced up. He’d already put salt on the webbing between his index finger and thumb, and had a lime slice at the ready. He offered her the filled shot glass.
“I can’t,” she said, staring at it. Her fingers twitched, wanting to reach for it. “I can’t,” she repeated, with more conviction.
Jawad’s eyebrows rose into a question mark. Then he shrugged, licked the salt from his hand, tossed the tequila down his throat, and jammed the slice of lime between his teeth.
Isabel went back to her bedroom and found a sitcom on TV.
——
A week later, Celia drove Isabel to her final surgery, which was the most unpleasant of all: getting dental implants to replace her five missing teeth.
This time she was grateful when the nurse wheeled her to the curb, because she had been heavily sedated during the procedure and hadn’t quite come around. Her limbs and head felt like bags of concrete.
“You good?” said Celia, straddling Isabel’s legs in order to do up her seat belt.
Isabel nodded with her eyes closed. She was obediently biting down on rolls of gauze.
Within a few hours, when the sedation and anesthetic had worn off, Isabel was lying in abject misery in bed. She tossed sleeplessly, sandwiching her head between two pillows and propping bags of frozen vegetables—replaced by Celia as soon as they began to thaw—against her jaw.
Celia had a strange but charming bedside manner. She flung herself onto the duvet beside Isabel, appropriated half the pillows, and flipped through the channels until she found comedies to distract Isabel from her pain. She brought Jell-O and Gatorade, and although her culinary knowledge did not extend much further than that (even the Jell-O was pre-made), Isabel was almost pathetically grateful. She remembered her childhood ear infections, when her mother was extraordinarily solicitous during the early part of the day—allowing Isabel to watch television in bed, and bringing her paper dolls and juice—and then increasingly absent as the wine kicked in. By midafternoon, Isabel was left to fend for herself.
The next day, when Isabel ventured from her bedroom and found that Celia had removed the dead plants and bought African violets from the supermarket, she burst into tears. The white stickers with their bar codes were still stuck slapdash across the terra-cotta-colored plastic.
“What?” said Celia, looking a bit alarmed at the sight of Isabel with a hand over her mouth, crying. “It’s no big deal. It was the loss leader.”
“It is a big deal,” said Isabel. “Thank you.” She immediately peeled the stickers off the pots and rolled them into cylinders.
Celia laughed. “You’re a complete neat freak.”
“And you’re completely … not,” said Isabel, also laughing.
That afternoon, Celia persuaded Isabel to plug her phone back in. It rang within minutes. Celia jumped from the bed to answer it, and Isabel muted the TV so she could listen.
“Oh, hey!” she said brightly. After a pause she said, “It’s Celia.” After another pause she said, “C-E-L-I-A.” Her voice had taken on a different tone. “What do you mean? … I’m helping Isabel out for a while.… Helping her out, like looking after her.… What? … What are you talking about? … No, I haven’t said anything. Why would I?” Celia’s voice rose dramatically. “Oh my God. You stinking rat. I get it. I get it entirely.…” From here on out she was yelling. “What makes you think you get to tell me what to do? I’ll do what I like.… Are you trying to threaten me? Really? What are you going to do, fire me from the lab? … No, I think maybe I’ll talk to her first.”
Click.
Celia returned to the bedroom and threw herself down on the bed. She and Isabel lay side by side, staring at the muted television set.
“So,” Celia eventually said. “It seems I slept with your boyfriend on New Year’s Eve.”
“Fiancé,” said Isabel. It was the only word she could choke past the aching lump that had risen in the back of her throat.
On the television, a bumbling actor swung his arms wildly before falling backward over a sofa.
“I’m sorry,” Celia said. “I had no idea you were together.”
Isabel covered her eyes with her hands.
“Do you hate me?” asked Celia.
Isabel shook her head, unable to speak.
“Want to be alone?” asked Celia.
Isabel nodded, still covering her eyes. When she heard the bedroom door click shut, she rolled over, pressed her face into a pillow, pulled her knees to her chest, and wept silently, heaving sobs until long after the last rays of sun had disappeared.
——
The next day, a large box of cut tulips appeared in the hallway. The phone rang shortly thereafter.
“Yup, still here,” Celia said casually, holding the phone with one hand and using the other to cup her elbow. “No, I put them down the garbage chute.… Yes, I’m sure they were expensive, and yet somehow I don’t think she wants armfuls of decaying plant genitals from you.… No, I don’t see that happening anytime soon.” And then she hung up.
“I’m right, right?” she said, turning to Isabel. “You don’t want to see him?”
Isabel thought for a moment, biting her lower lip, perilously close to tears. She glanced around the room at the multiple containers of tulips that, despite Celia’s claims, had never been anywhere near a garbage chute. “Not yet. I really don’t think I can.”
Two days later he finally showed up in person. Isabel was padding into the kitchen when an ungodly pounding started at the door. Celia glanced quickly at Isabel, who ducked into the corner behind it. Celia opened the door, but left the chain on.
“I want to see Isabel,” he demanded.
“She’s not available,” said Celia.
“I know she’s here. Her car’s in the lot. I want to see her.”
“I don’t think she wants to see you.”
His voice turned vicious. “What did you tell her, you little slut?”
Celia let out a short bark of a laugh. “Little slut? That’s inventive. I expected better from someone involved in language studies. Anyway, I told her we fucked.”
“I was drunk. You were available. It meant nothing.”
“You got that right.”
“Isabel!” he roared.
Isabel, squatting against the wall behind the door, cringed.
“Isabel! I need to talk to
you! Isabel!”
“I’m going to close the door now,” Celia said calmly. Then she sighed and shook her head. “You know, it’s funny, but sticking your foot in the door doesn’t seem to have any effect on the chain.”
Isabel looked down at the brown shoe tip, the only part of Peter that was visible from her vantage point. She half expected him to reach through the crack and grab Celia. After a couple of seconds, the shoe disappeared and Celia shut the door.
“He is such an ass,” she said, sliding the bolt. “Want a drink?”
“No,” said Isabel.
“Well, I do.” Celia disappeared into the kitchen.
Isabel felt used and betrayed and foolish. It had all happened too fast—she could see that now. The animal attraction, the heady mix of endorphins and pheromones that left all logic turned to mush—all of it had led to the sense that she was protected, would never have to face anything alone again. She had given herself to him too quickly, too completely, and in return he had dashed her world to pieces. Although she hadn’t disclosed everything about her background, he knew enough to be aware that betraying her on a personal level was much larger than that. He was betraying her trust in the world in general, undermining her faith in everyone. She knew he thought he could talk his way back into her heart and her bed—he had great faith in his abilities in all things, and that confidence was part of his allure—but this time he was wrong.
——
The day Isabel was fitted with flippers—false teeth that were attached to a retainer because the titanium pegs would need to heal for several months before her new teeth could be screwed in—she came home and discovered that her refrigerator was virtually empty. So was her apartment, as Celia had moved back out.
Over the course of her stay, the vagaries of Celia’s living arrangements had become somewhat clearer. Celia, along with Joel, Jawad, and three other students, rented a large ramshackle house near the university. When it came to light that Celia was sleeping with three of them (Joel, Jawad, and an unnamed girl), a brief power struggle had ensued, during which Celia announced that if they couldn’t live with it, she wanted none of them and was going to couch-surf for a while. Isabel’s predicament had created a perfect symbiosis. Since then, the roommates had made peace, and Celia had moved back in. Isabel didn’t ask for details. It was just another of the mysteries that was Celia, who sometimes seemed more bonobo than human. Isabel missed her, so she took the absence of any food other than lime chutney, canned peaches, and ramen noodles as an excuse to treat Celia, Joel, and Jawad to dinner.
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