Sara Gruen

by Ape House (v5)

  At the far end of the room, she found a doorway that led into another all-beige room. When she entered, her eyes lit on a computer. She let out a piercing shriek and loped over on all fours. She swung onto the stainless-steel stool, her eyes glinting. Her large-knuckled fingers slid beneath the Plexiglass shield and poked at the touch-sensitive screen, finding and selecting, finding and selecting.

  ——

  Isabel leaned even closer to the TV screen, trying to make out the symbols Bonzi was pressing. It was a bastardization of the software they used in the lab. How in the hell had Faulks gotten hold of that? But while the lexigrams in the lab allowed for complex utterances, this one merely displayed categories of abstract nouns with the ability to drill down to specific items. Bonzi chose among symbols that stood for food, electronics, toys, tools, and clothing, navigating subcategory after subcategory without pause. Isabel was transfixed. In spite of herself, the scientist in her registered with relief that all of this was being recorded.

  While Bonzi got to work, the other bonobos left the cage and tentatively began exploring the house ape-style. Isabel did a head count. They were all there, all seemingly okay. She could see they were vocalizing but couldn’t hear them—what was being broadcast was the type of canned music, sound effects, and laugh track associated with shows like America’s Funniest Home Videos. The television screen separated dynamically to reflect areas of activity in the house. Bonzi remained in the center slice, parallel to a growing shopping list that was rendered as puffy handwriting, white crayon on red. Mbongo, in a square on the bottom left, went into each of the three bathrooms and turned the faucets on full blast. He relieved himself in the toilet and then stood flushing it over and over. Sam, in the square above Mbongo, explored the refrigerator and freezer, which were empty but for an automatic icemaker. He popped ice cubes into his mouth, one after another, until his cheeks bulged, at which point he shot them individually at various targets. On the right side of the screen, Jelani took running jumps at the wall, flipping backward when he reached the ceiling, while Makena looked on with an expression of adoration. Occasionally one of the other bonobos would drift into the room where Bonzi was and peep excitedly (Isabel could tell by their respirations and the way they shaped their lips) or even sign a request, which Bonzi dutifully entered. All the while Lola sat on Bonzi’s head, peering at the screen and reaching out with tiny hands to press symbols of her own. The “handwritten” list grew until it began to scroll:

  Eggs

  Pears

  Juice

  M&M’s

  Onions

  Milk

  Blankets

  Wrench

  Doll

  Screwdriver

  Magazine

  Bucket

  Bonzi stared thoughtfully at the screen, carefully making her selections.

  ——

  In the control room, Ken Faulks pumped his fist at the bank of monitors and jumped into the air. “Yes!” he screamed.

  The room erupted into cheers. Champagne corks popped against a backdrop of joyous whooping.

  A squat man with a black headset thrust a bottle toward the ceiling. “We did it! Congratulations, everyone! Ape House is live!”

  “Long live Ape House!” a woman bellowed from the back.

  “Long live Ape House!” yelled a chorus of voices.

  Faulks’s face was flushed. He was uncharacteristically passive when accepting handshakes and back pats. His hands even shook as he held out his glass so someone could fill it with champagne. With cheeks marked by lipstick and fingers curled around a flute of mostly bubbles, he turned away from his jubilant crew and back to the wall of monitors. They showed the house’s interior from every conceivable angle: here the bathroom and its gleaming white porcelain; here the kitchen, with its maple cabinets; here the female ape, squatting on the stool in front of the wall-mounted computer, knees folded up beside her earnest face, baby perched on her head. The soundtrack being broadcast to the world, along with the actual noises coming from the house, were piped into the studio simultaneously.

  Faulks leaned in close. A blinking green light indicated that this was one of the views streaming live—anyone tuned in was face-to-face with Bonzi (and according to Nielsen, anyone was potentially a great many people). The ape’s bright eyes darted back and forth as she tracked the cursor on the screen in front of her. She paused to emit a series of emphatic peeps over her shoulder.

  Faulks raised a hand and traced the outline of her jaw on the glass with the back of his finger.

  “That’s my girl,” he whispered.

  “Hey—hands off my screen,” muttered the only engineer who hadn’t left his post. He was hunched over his controls. After a moment of nonresponse he did a double-take, registering Faulks’s steely look. “I mean, please,” he said. “Sir.”

  17

  John yanked his tie loose while waiting for the garage door, which jerked arthritically upward. His left hand dangled out the window, grasping the black plastic garage door opener and tapping it against the side panel of the car. When the garage door finally reached the top of its track, John aimed the clicker and pressed again. Then he slapped the whole thing against the padded steering wheel so the button would unstick. Left to its own devices the door would go up and down forever.

  He was convinced the commute was killing him: an hour and twenty minutes each direction in bumper-to-bumper traffic, stewing in filthy emissions so he could spend the day writing shampoo copy for Procter & Gamble in a cubicle that shook each time the elevator went past. They had just offered to extend his contract by three weeks, despite being obviously underwhelmed by his first efforts, which included such gems as “Head & Shoulders, Won’t Be Snowing Boulders” (although he had meant that as a joke, and was beyond mortified when a colleague presented it at a meeting).

  He knew he should be grateful. He was not flipping burgers. He was not measuring garbage, or potholes, or counting stripped car frames on the side of the highway. But he was also not in Lizard, New Mexico, covering Ape House.

  The day after John arrived in L.A., he had looked through the windshield and done a double-take. A quarter of a mile ahead, on thirty-foot posts, was a digital billboard cycling photographs of the bonobos. A hairy hand here, a whiskered chin there. Unchanging red text across the bottom gave the address of a Web site and a date, nothing more. It didn’t take long for him (and Cat, and various other of the reporters from major papers still assigned to the story) to figure out that Ken Faulks, John’s old boss from the New York Gazette, was behind it. John was now obsessively following the reports.

  Apparently Faulks had acquired the apes and built them an ape-proof house with a courtyard in a remote area of New Mexico best known for its third-rate casinos and “gentlemen’s clubs.” The house contained cameras designed to catch every angle of every room, but was otherwise entirely empty except for a single computer and a stool so the apes could reach it. Faulks installed the apes, switched on the cameras, and had been broadcasting the results live ever since.

  A handful of animal rights activists had been present at the house from the very beginning, but no one really believed the endeavor would last more than a couple of days. Surely even the notorious Ken Faulks—who had made his fortune on porn series such as Busty Lusty Ladies, Jiggly Gigglies, and Crazy Cougars—wouldn’t let endangered great apes starve to death in an empty house on live television.

  But it turned out that Ken Faulks was the only person who did not underestimate the bonobos. They used the computer to order food. Then they ordered blankets and kiddie pools and play structures and beanbag chairs. They even ordered televisions. They didn’t technically order the installation man, but they let him do his thing before showing him the door. John had seen the news footage of his exit: ashen and shaken, the man had staggered from the front door and fallen into the arms of the nearest protester in a dead faint. Apparently some sort of intimate kissing had been involved, although the actual kiss had not been broa
dcast on Ape House because of “technical difficulties.”

  In the five days since, the show gave every indication of becoming the biggest phenomenon in the history of modern media, and not simply because of the astonishing language and computer skills of the bonobos. It was the sex. Having witnessed it firsthand, John was not surprised, but apparently the rest of the world was. The bonobos incorporated sex into every aspect of their lives, and as a result, human audiences were hooked. The bonobos had sex to say hello. They had sex before eating. They had sex to alleviate tension. They had sex in so many combinations, so frequently, and in so many positions that after three days the FCC forced the show off the air. But Ken Faulks was no stranger to the FCC: he had a secondary system set up and ready to go, and without a second’s interruption in broadcasting, Ape House was made available by satellite and the Internet, beyond the FCC’s reach, and—not coincidentally—only to paying subscribers.

  At last count, more than 25 million people had called in their credit card numbers. John was one of them.

  ——

  When John entered the living room, he found Amanda sitting in the middle of the carpet with one leg chicken-winged beneath her and the other sticking out straight. Her laptop was in front of her, causing her to hunch over as she typed. Crumpled paper dotted the floor around her. The TV was blaring in front of her.

  The screen was a collage of small squares, each displaying a different view from inside Ape House. One ape admired himself in a mirror and picked his teeth. Others swung from doorjambs and scooted across floors. Another lolled in a kiddie pool, repeatedly filling his mouth from a hose and spitting jets of water. In the top right frame, two wildly grinning females joined in a passionate embrace and began rubbing together their swollen genitals, which looked like large wads of chewed bubble gum. A Klaxon horn blew three times as this frame enlarged and slid to the center of the screen. It grew an outline and digital shadow. HOKA-HOKA!!! said a garish and flashing bright-red subtitle. The whole thing was accompanied by frenetic clown music and canned sound effects—whistles, pings, and boings.

  “What’s up?” said John.

  Amanda looked up. Her hair, newly blond and perfectly straight, swung back to reveal a thick white paste smeared across her upper lip. It had a crystalline appearance, sugary and alchemic.

  “I’m bleaching my mustache,” she said. “Not sure I can do it after my appointment tomorrow, and apparently it’s another of my many flaws.”

  A few days ago one of Amanda’s new bosses—the one who had called her “refreshingly different”—had given her the name of a dermatologist and suggested in a tone Amanda interpreted as an order that she get injections of Restylane, a popular face plumper, along with Botox and some sort of laser treatment to get rid of her freckles. John couldn’t fathom why a writer needed to look like a movie star, but it seemed to be true: recently there had been a scandal involving a nineteen-year-old scriptwriting ingenue who was feted and celebrated until she was discovered to be thirty-five, at which point she could no longer find work. Although Amanda’s latest round of transformations were clearly traceable to this one specific idiot’s mutterings about the Hollywood “type,” in his heart, John blamed Uncle Ab. If only the scotch-addled old man had kept his yap shut at the wedding—

  “I mean what’s up in general,” said John.

  “Oh,” said Amanda, rising to her feet. “You should probably look at the fridge.”

  “Why?” said John, staring at the television. The genital-rubbing apes had gone their separate ways and were relegated back to the bottom left corner. One was now wearing a bucket on her head. In another square, an ape lay on a beanbag chair with his legs crossed, casually flipping through a magazine.

  Arroogah! Arroogah! The Klaxon horn sounded as a different square enlarged and slid to the center of the screen. A male walking upright presented his long, pointy erection to another ape.

  “I just think you should,” Amanda said, disappearing into the bathroom. John sighed, dragged a hand down his face, and went to the kitchen. The last thing he needed to deal with was a broken refrigerator.

  As he opened its door to investigate, a neon pink Post-it note came unstuck and fluttered to the ground. He stooped to pick it up. He stared at it for a moment and then called into the hallway. “Amanda?”

  The bathroom door opened and Amanda sailed out. She had changed out of her drawstring pants and was wrapped in a fuzzy white robe, her upper lip scrubbed pink. She passed between John and the refrigerator and reached inside for a beer.

  “Yes?” she said, handing him the bottle.

  He twisted the cap off and handed it back to her. “What did the Times want?”

  “A job interview, I assume,” she said, and broke into a wide grin.

  John stared at her for a moment, then whooped in joy.

  ——

  “Pendleton Group. How may I direct your call?”

  John’s brow furrowed. He glanced down at the Post-it note, which was stuck along the length of his forefinger. The Los Angeles Times was owned by the Tribune Company. Everybody knew that.

  “Topher McFadden, please,” he said, reading the name from the Post-it. John had not heard of him; he must be an editorial assistant, or a new addition.

  “Which division?”

  “The Times. Editorial,” John said.

  “One moment, please.” There was a click, followed by waterfall noises and birdsong. It cut off abruptly after several seconds.

  “Yes?” said a languorous male voice.

  John propped the phone between his ear and shoulder and set about detangling the coils of the cord. “Hello. This is John Thigpen. You left a message for me earlier today?”

  “Oh, yes. So I did. I have your résumé here.” The sound of paper rustling. “Pretty impressive. Internship, and then eight years at the New York Gazette. A year plus at The Philadelphia Inquirer. Some freelance work for The New York Times.”

  “Thank you.”

  “So what brings you to the City of Angels?”

  “My wife is co-writing a series for NBC.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “Single women navigating the jungle of urban relationships.”

  “Like Sex and the City.”

  “It’s similar. I guess.”

  “So she’s ripping it off. Like Cashmere Mafia, or Lipstick Jungle.”

  John swallowed loudly. “Not at all. It’s got its own … twists.”

  “Sure it does,” said Topher McFadden. “So, do you want to come in tomorrow? Maybe at ten?”

  “That would be great,” said John.

  “Good. Bring a double-shot grande skinny latte. Two sugars.”

  “Would you like a dusting of Madagascar cinnamon with that?” said John, smiling at his own little joke.

  This was followed by a devastating, cricket-filled silence. John’s smile reversed itself. Either the man had never watched Frasier or he had no sense of humor. John’s instincts leaned toward the latter.

  “Do you know where we are?” McFadden finally said.

  “Yes. Of course. You’re on West First.”

  “Huh? We’re what?” A pause, and then, “Wait—are you shitting me? With Simon Bell at the helm? You think they’re hiring? You’re shitting me, aren’t you?”

  “No,” said John. “No, I’m afraid I wasn’t.”

  ——

  John descended the stairs slowly. Amanda had a selection of pots and pans out on the counter and was crushing garlic cloves with the flat side of a knife. A copper pan was on the stove behind her, a generous lump of butter melting within.

  She glanced up at John. “Was that the Times?”

  “Yes.”

  She turned to swirl the saucepan with both hands, making sure the bottom was evenly coated. “How did it go?”

  “They want an interview.” He paused, watching as she tipped the pan from side to side.

  “Oh! That’s great!”

  “The only thing is, it’s not
the L.A. Times.”

  Amanda reached for a wooden spoon from a canister on the counter. “What do you mean?”

  “It was the Weekly Times,” John continued. After a moment he added, “I didn’t apply to the Weekly Times. It’s a tabloid.”

  She stopped stirring for a second, and then resumed.

  “Amanda?”

  “Yes?” she said cautiously. The distribution of butter had suddenly become utterly absorbing.

  “Is there something you want to tell me?”

  She tapped the spoon against the edge of the pan and set it on the counter.

  “How did they get my résumé?” John continued.

  She closed her eyes for a moment and leaned against the counter. “I might have sent it.”

  “You might have sent it?”

  “Okay. Yes,” she said, turning to face him. “One of the producers said he knows an editor at the Times and he said he’d put in a word for you, so I emailed your résumé.”

  John stared with an open mouth.

  “What?” she said. “I don’t understand why you’re angry.”

  “It’s a tabloid! I can’t write about stars in rehab and stupid skinny blond girls and who’s boinking them.”

  “I didn’t know,” she said. Her voice had taken on an edge. “I also thought it was the L.A. Times.”

  John opened his mouth and then snapped it shut again. He swiped the car keys from the counter.

  “John! Wait!” She was suddenly behind him, holding his wrist. “What’s going on here? If you don’t want the job, don’t go to the interview. Nobody’s forcing you. I was just trying to help.”

  “You think I can’t get a job by myself? Is that what you think?”

  “What is wrong with you?” she said.

  Finally, she let go of his wrist. He went back to the garage, coaxed the Jetta’s engine to turn over, and screeched down the street, bypassing third gear altogether and leaving the garage door in the mostly-up position.

  ——