Sara Gruen

by Ape House (v5)

  Faulks gestured angrily until they took their seats. He remained standing. He picked up a clicker and pointed at a monitor on the wall, jabbing its buttons. When the image of Ape House came up, he fast-forwarded to the delivery of a large crate.

  Ding dong! went the sound effect. The apes, who were lounging in front of their television, were obviously surprised. They hadn’t ordered anything. As they turned to look at the door, their television station switched to an early episode of Faulks’s wildly successful Busty Lusty Ladies series.

  “Sir,” said the director of marketing. The area around his eyes was grayish purple. He knew what was coming, as did everyone else in the room—they had all watched it live an hour before.

  Faulks held a hand up to silence him. Then he turned the volume up as Bonzi and Jelani dragged the crate inside to investigate. Sam stayed at the television, trying to get the channel to change back to Planet of the Apes while the others emptied the crate. Lola pulled out a vibrator, turned it on, and began spinning it on the floor. Bonzi dragged out the blow-up sex doll, regarded it with some alarm, prodded it, loped away, returned to prod it again, and then took it into the corner and threw a blanket over it.

  Faulks fast-forwarded through an excruciating amount of basically nothing before pressing Pause.

  “What the hell was that?” said Faulks.

  His executives all stared at the table or wall. Some of them shook their heads.

  “I said, what the hell was that?”

  “Maybe they’re not into breasts,” ventured one brave soul. When he looked up, he shriveled under Faulks’s glare.

  “Anyone want to tell me how many long-term subscriptions this gained us?”

  Apparently nobody did. Faulks began pacing.

  “How about votes for what to do next?”

  Again, silence.

  The VP of marketing said, “I’ve been doing a little research …”

  “And?”

  “And apparently chimpanzees are terrible drunks. A group of chimps has been raiding illegal breweries in Uganda and, well, attacking people. Killing children, in fact. So I was thinking that for the segment with the war footage, we could send in beer along with cap guns.”

  A blond woman with her hair in a tight knot cleared her throat and sat reluctantly forward. “But wouldn’t that give them more ammunition for the lawsuit?”

  Faulks walked around to the head of the table and sat. He leaned back and made a steeple of his fingers.

  “Ah, yes,” he said calmly. “The lawsuit. Anyone want to address that?”

  “It’s from a group called PAEGA. They—”

  Faulks leaned forward and pounded the tabletop. “I know who it’s from! What I want to know is what we’re going to do about it! Somebody! Anybody!”

  The chief financial officer straightened in his chair. “Sir. If I may suggest. Unless we can think of a way of getting subscriptions up drastically I think maybe we ought to start considering exit strategies. We could just let them take the apes …”

  “And lose a lawsuit? Never. Next?”

  Nobody moved. The blonde looked at several of her cohorts for support, cowered preemptively, and said, “Sir, as long as we’re talking about legal issues, there’s something else we need to discuss. Something that’s becoming a problem …”

  “Is it that shithead from Kansas?”

  “Yes.”

  Faulks thought long enough that his executives began to exchange nervous glances. Then he sat forward. “All right. First step, put out a press release. Inflate the numbers—make it sound like we’ve got hundreds of thousands of votes for the next Prime Time segment. Stir up hype. Make it clear that we’re raising the stakes, but don’t say how. Wait a couple of days, work up anticipation. Then send in the beer and cap guns, and make sure the hammers are cocked. In the meantime, get rid of the petition.”

  “How?” said the blonde.

  Faulks leaned forward, resting his arms on the table and looking from person to person, eyes burning. “Call the shithead. Tell him if he wants more money, he can earn it. Bring him out here. And in the press release mention that we now have a bona fide ape expert on staff, because our greatest concern is the health and welfare and blah blah blah …” He sat back and stirred the air beside his head. “You know the drill.”

  24

  The noise in the room above John finally ceased at 6:48 A.M. When the thrumming music went silent and the bed creaked under the weight of prone bodies, he fought an urge to turn his television on full blast.

  Although Amanda wasn’t an early riser, John called at the crack of seven.

  “Hello?” she said testily, and he realized that it was actually only six her time.

  “Baby?”

  There was a brief pause before she said, “What?” He heard clattering in the background, like she’d decided to rearrange the bathroom cabinet.

  “Baby, I’m sorry about last night. I had a few beers on an empty stomach and you caught me a little off-guard. I know we’ve been talking about having kids but I hadn’t realized that we were at the point of ovulation kits. I mean, I guess I thought we just weren’t avoiding, and then I panicked, and I tried to make a joke, and it went downhill from there. I’m sorry.”

  “If you don’t want kids, you need to tell me now, before it happens,” she said, her voice brittle.

  The thought was only slightly less frightening in the morning light. “I’m fine either way,” he said, trying to sound calm. From the icy silence that followed, he intuited that she had taken this the wrong way. “Look, if it will make you happy, it will make me happy. We’ll have lots and lots of babies and make all our parents ecstatic. Okay?”

  “Okay,” she said, but there was still something off about her voice.

  John frowned. “Are you okay? Did something else happen?”

  “Oh, nothing important,” she said wearily.

  “Nothing important like what?”

  She was silent.

  “Amanda? What happened?”

  “Sean made a little pass at me. That’s all.”

  “He what? I thought he was gay!”

  “So did I. I’ve even met his boyfriend. I guess he’s an equal-opportunity lech.”

  “What did the bastard do to you?” John said in a stony monotone.

  “Seriously. Nothing. Please don’t do anything stupid like come back and kill him.”

  John, who could make no such promises, said through clenched teeth, “What did he do?”

  “We were at a party. He had his hand around my waist, which, you know, if he’s gay it’s no big deal, but then he started nibbling my ear. I told him to knock it off and when he finally realized I was serious about it, he knocked it off. Like I said, no big deal. He’d had a bit to drink. It’s just now I feel a little weird working with him. And I suppose if he wanted to, he could have me replaced.”

  ——

  When they hung up, John felt physically ill. He knew from personal experience what pigs men could be, because he, himself, had been one.

  It was Frosh Week and he was frosh. That was his only excuse. He’d been dropped off at the dorm by his parents just eight days before, and he was testing his newly minted fake ID in a yeasty bar with sticky floors called Nasty Hammer’s Taproom, where people shook salt into their two-dollar watered-down drafts. He was doing his damnedest to pretend he knew how to hold his liquor. He most categorically did not.

  Ginette Pinegar was waiting tables. She was close to forty, which at the time had seemed ancient, but she had good legs and the dim lighting of the tavern was kind to her. He felt an immediate affinity toward her on account of her name alone: how could a Thigpen not be sympathetic to a Pinegar? (“‘Piss ’n’ Pinegar,’” she’d sighed. “All my life. And every fucker who comes up with it seems to think he’s the first.”) At one point when he went a bit green about the face, she brought him a pink pickled egg from the enormous jar on the counter, presumably because she thought it would settle his stomach.
He thanked her profusely and palmed it, because the mere smell launched contractions within his diaphragm that would have measured seven on the Richter scale.

  He shuddered. To this day, he had no idea if he’d even managed to have sex with her. He remembered only snippets—things like standing on his head while people held a funnel to his mouth and hollered support while he choked and gagged on the unstoppable flow of beer, and other people dropping shots of whiskey, glass and all, into mugs of beer and then chanting, “Hoo! Hoo! Hoo!” while he chugged it. And then suddenly there she was, and oops—there he was, throwing up on the bus, and then again, on his knees and clutching a toilet’s edge—and then nothing until several hours later, when he awoke to find himself being regaled with stories of all things Pinegar while he earnestly but silently begged the ceiling to stop spinning.

  As he inched backward across the bedroom floor collecting his clothes, he told her he would call. He shouldn’t have, because he knew he wasn’t going to, but he figured you couldn’t just say nothing to a woman while leaving her bedroom, and you certainly couldn’t say that you had no idea what the hell had gotten into you (other than a dozen boilermakers) and that your most fervent desire was to never lay eyes on her again.

  Back on campus, his male friends laughed as though he’d done something admirable. They laughed even harder when he begged them not to tell Amanda, whom he met a few days later. John was leaving class, looked up, and there she was, a silhouette at the end of the hallway glowing in her halo of copper hair. She wore jeans, cowboy boots, and a soft cotton T-shirt in faded plum. She walked slowly, with calm purpose, moving her legs from the hips like a runway model. Her hair bounced with each stride. John was a goner before he even knew her name.

  Two weeks later, as they headed out to dinner, John caught sight of Ginette on the opposite side of the street. She caught sight of him at the very same moment and barreled at him straight through traffic. When she reached him, she rolled forward onto the toes of her dirty canvas shoes and unleashed a searing, finger-pointing stream of abuse. Her eyes were wild and spittle flew. After she finished with John, she turned to Amanda and told her that John was a lying scumbag of a worthless snake and that if she knew what was good for her she’d walk away now.

  As Ginette stormed off, shouldering people out of her way and leaving Amanda staring aghast, John was forced to admit what had happened. It was the last thing he wanted to discuss on their third date, but Ginette had left him no choice. Why Amanda didn’t walk away, John would never know.

  The killing of Sean would have to wait because John had work to do. First, he needed to find coffee. A large one. Then, he would head out to Ape House to get a feel for the types of protesters who were there, and why, exactly, they were there, since his impression was that the connection was none too clear in a number of cases. His main goals were to ferret out whether the ELL had established a presence (having “liberated” the apes, surely they must be observing this development with interest, and—quite possibly—intent), and to get an interview with Ken Faulks. He was hoping he’d make a couple of contacts at the site, but if he didn’t, that was okay. He’d go back to the Mohegan Moon and work the bar. If there were no Faulks flunkies there, he’d simply phone Faulks Enterprises and ask for an interview. Nobody else had gotten one yet, although Faulks had been appearing randomly in front of camera crews, thrusting the anchor aside, shamelessly flogging his show, and then disappearing without answering a single question. Faulks seemed to be thumbing his nose at all media, but since technically John—like Faulks—had abandoned so-called legitimate media, maybe he had a chance. Maybe if he appealed to Faulks as a fellow maverick, or promised to do a puff piece …

  John drove to a gas station to get coffee and breakfast. After some contemplation, he bought a desiccated hot dog from the grill under the heat lamp, doused it with ketchup, and drove toward Ape House.

  John had seen from newscasts that people were congregating around Ape House, but he was not prepared for anything like this—he was still at least half a mile from the site when the thin line of people trudging along the road began to thicken. Before long, they were solid and unperturbed by the car’s presence. He ended up driving among them at walking speed, and finally decided it was time to park when he nearly ran over a bony man with a scraggly ponytail and earth sandals. The only reason he didn’t was that the man turned and banged his fist on the hood of John’s car.

  “Dude! What are you doing?” the man yelled, putting his angry, bearded face up against John’s windshield. John raised his hand in a meek apology.

  Makeshift vendors had set up shop at the side of the road, selling bottles of water and soda from tubs of ice. Tailgate grills served up burgers, bratwursts, and Polish sausages, chicken kebabs, unidentified kitchen leftovers, and, for the vegetably-inclined, grilled portobello mushrooms. Beer was purveyed from secret locations toward the front ends of vehicles and decanted into blue plastic cups so it might pass for something else. By means of persistent honking, John managed to turn off the road and squeeze his car between a couple of these impromptu shopkeepers. They viewed him with suspicion until they realized he was not also setting up shop. He bought a can of Coke to further establish goodwill and set out on foot.

  John estimated the crowd at around four thousand. Simple arithmetic dictated that many of them must be commuting daily for the purpose, since the Buccaneer and the handful of other hotels around the casinos couldn’t possibly house so many. Also, there were buses parked everywhere, ranging from sleek and air-conditioned luxury vessels to the type of revamped school buses used by garage bands and church groups.

  It was a mob, and had the dangerous feeling of being nearly out of control. As John suspected, most of the groups jostling for camera time seemed to have only the most tangential connection with the apes. The eco-feminists and the green-haired boy had co-opted an NBC news crew and were expounding on how the apes represented oppressed women everywhere. A member of the Eastborough Baptist Church, a woman with an angular face and mousy hair, was earnestly explaining to Fox News why the dead soldiers coming home from the war was God’s way of punishing America for enabling “fags” and would stop only when America enacted a death penalty against them and their soul-damning, nation-destroying filth. When the anchor asked why they were picketing Ape House, the woman explained that bonobos had bisexual and homosexual sex, and therefore were fags. She smiled broadly; from her tone she might have been offering a glass of lemonade. Behind her, children with twig-thin arms thrust signs into the air that read YOU’RE GOING TO HELL and GOD HATES YOU.

  With the atmosphere so charged, it was the quiet people who caught John’s attention. Three people were scoping out the building and taking notes. John’s first thought was that they might be connected to the ELL, but when they turned so he could see their faces he recognized two of them instantly: Francesca De Rossi and Eleanor Mansfield were famous primatologists, right up there with Jane Goodall. They had been featured in a number of documentaries, many of which he had viewed while researching his ape series at the Inky.

  He approached them. “Dr. De Rossi? Dr. Mansfield? My name is John Thigpen. I’m a reporter. I was wondering if I could talk with you for a few minutes?”

  “Certainly,” said Francesca De Rossi. “I’m sorry—who did you say you’re with?”

  “I’m out of Los Angeles. With the Times,” he said.

  Liar! Liar! screamed a voice inside his head.

  “Oh, the Times. Of course,” said Dr. De Rossi. She introduced the third person, a lawyer who was preparing a legal petition to get the apes removed from Faulks.

  “Thank you,” said John. “Can you tell me a little about the petition? By the way, is it okay if I record this?”

  “Yes, by all means,” said Dr. De Rossi.

  John aimed his voice recorder and made encouraging noises. He got the sense that Francesca De Rossi was not a person who raised her voice; in fact, she was leaning quite close in order to be heard above t
he crowd. The bridge of her nose was smattered with freckles the way Amanda’s had been before the Fraxel. He had liked Amanda’s freckles. They were evenly spaced and sweet, not at all as Amanda had described them (“like someone tossed dirty dishwater in my face”).

  “ … their behavior is virtually identical to that of humans in this respect. They order all the wrong types of food and in vast amounts immediately after viewing commercials that …”

  He realized with a jolt that he had not absorbed a single word Francesca De Rossi had said until she began talking about food, and even then it was because the only thing he’d eaten all day was a leathery hot dog. Thank God for his voice recorder.

  “Think Super Size Me, but with a species even worse equipped to process junk than we are,” she continued.

  Of equal concern were the unsanitary conditions within Ape House. The timed and forceful sprayings of the concrete floors were incapable of handling the leftover food and accumulating trash. And, because the bonobos had ordered upholstered furniture, these automated hosedowns left the base of the furniture wet, which invited mold and left the bonobos in danger of all kinds of respiratory and immune-system disorders. These issues were at the crux of PAEGA’s legal petition to have the bonobos removed. The hearing was seven days away, having been filed on an emergency basis.

  “Obviously we’re extremely concerned about these particular great apes and the current situation,” continued Dr. De Rossi, “but in a more general sense, we need to educate the public about the exploitation of all great apes.”

  John nodded and smiled. He gratefully accepted business cards and scribbled his own name and number on the back of a gas station receipt. Since the good doctors were laboring under the belief that he was with the L.A. Times, perhaps it was for the best that he didn’t have business cards. He wondered if there would ever be a good moment to inform them of his real affiliation, and decided that no, there probably wasn’t.