Ape House

by Sara Gruen

  "Christ, baby--are you okay? Your heart is racing like a gerbil's."

  "I'm fine. I just had a bad dream."

  She switched on the lamp.

  "Gah!" he said, shielding his eyes.

  She felt his forehead and studied him intensely.

  "I'm not having a heart attack. Really."

  She turned the light off and lay back down. "What was it?"

  "What?"

  "The dream."

  He shook his head. "Too weird to explain."

  John lay awake, eyes open with worry. Had he shouted Isabel's name? Probably not, since Amanda curled up behind him and stroked his shoulder until he went back to sleep. But by morning he was less sure.

  John realized he was staring at the radiator. He shook the cobwebs from his brain and dialed Cat again. This time, he didn't bother leaving a message because if he had, it wouldn't have been a nice one. If she didn't respond in ten minutes, he was going to strike out on his own. If they duplicated their efforts, it would not be his fault.

  He sipped the coffee Amanda had gotten from the lobby (she was right--it was truly terrible) and booted up his computer. He typed the search string "Earth Liberation League University of Kansas lab" into his browser, hit Enter, and watched with amazement as the results loaded.

  There were thirty-two pages of Google hits. The video message had gone viral, showing up on sites as diverse as YouTube, personal blogs, and animal-activism message boards. John had seen it several times before, but it still filled him with fascinated horror.

  A man in a black balaclava sat at a metal desk in a room without windows or adornment. The walls were white-painted concrete bricks. His hands were gloved and rested on the desk's surface. The grainy footage was overcast with olive and yellow, like a home video from the 1970s.

  He referred to a piece of paper that lay flat beneath his hands, appearing to read it all the way through. Then he addressed the camera. He started by naming the "agents of horror": Peter Benton, Isabel Duncan, a few other people associated with the language lab, and Thomas Bradshaw, who was the president of the university. The man recited their home addresses, complete with telephone numbers and ZIP codes.

  "You are all equally despicable and equally guilty, those of you who administered the torture, and those of you who made it possible, sitting so comfortably in your offices miles away from that depraved lab, where your mad scientists performed perverted research on innocent and unconsenting primates. We will no longer allow it. You will be held accountable, as was Isabel Duncan. Your addresses are now public. Who knows what someone will decide to do? Thomas Bradshaw, this time we flooded your home, but what's next? A firebomb, perhaps? Maybe your family will be inside, as trapped and innocent as those apes you tortured in the name of science. Or maybe something will happen to your car. You won't know until you're driving it, and then it will be too late. What will you say to your children then, Thomas Bradshaw? You'll finally be as helpless as the apes you've imprisoned in that sick and evil lab for all these years."

  The man consulted the paper again. When he raised his face to the camera, there were traces of a hard smile through the mouth hole in his ski mask.

  "For now, the research has stopped. We made it stop, but it's up to you to keep it stopped. Because now you know what will happen if you don't. We will liberate the apes again, and again, and again, and we will come after you--personally, each and every one of you--again, and again, and again. We don't back down. We are the ELL. We are everywhere, and we don't give up. Expect us."

  The picture froze. John stared at the final image for several seconds before realizing he was gaping.

  Torture? Mad scientists? Unconsenting apes? Even from John's short visit it was clear that everyone associated with the lab went to great lengths to ensure that the bonobos had as much control over their surroundings as possible. The entire premise of the project was that the apes were communicating because they wanted to. Was it possible that these people--these terrorists--had bombed the building simply because the project contained the word "lab"? Would all of this have been avoided had it been called the Great Ape Language Project instead?

  How badly hurt was Isabel? He wondered if he closed his eyes and concentrated hard enough whether he'd get some kind of telepathic feeling. He tried. It didn't work. And then he felt guilty.

  John drained his coffee, and grimaced when he sucked in a mouthful of grinds. He held his head sideways under the tap in the kitchenette, swishing his mouth with water. Then he set out for the university. The hell with Cat.

  7

  Isabel spent the day waiting: for orderlies to wheel her from place to place, for tests and procedures, for doctors and consultations. Most of all she waited for Peter and news of the apes.

  Were they hurt? Dehydrated? Where were they being housed? The televisions in various waiting rooms showed repeats of the other night's footage along with a terrifying clip of the video that had been released on the Internet. The clip was very short, and always shown over the shoulder of an anchorperson. The lips behind the balaclava moved, but Isabel could not hear what they said.

  She was devastated at the thought that Celia was involved. Although wary of her own reaction to human beings, Isabel trusted the bonobos implicitly, and they adored Celia. After her first day at the lab, Bonzi had signed, CELIA LOVE! BUILD NEST. HURRY CELIA COME BONZI LOVE.

  As the day wore on, another, more primal longing crept up beside Isabel's desperate loneliness. It was an irrational, wrenching desire, since Peter had all but said her mother wasn't coming. Isabel had been meting out her family history in digestible bites, although, since they intended to marry, she knew she eventually had to disclose exactly what lurked in her gene pool. So far, he knew about her father's exit and her mother's decline into alcoholism, and also that the two events might not have happened in that order. He knew about the welfare fraud. He knew that her brother had been expelled from school by fifteen, and had also been carried off on the current of addiction; Isabel didn't know if he was alive or dead. He knew something of Isabel's tortured school years, and that none of her nascent friendships had survived the first bloom because when the parents of the other children saw the state of her house, no further visits were allowed. He knew generally about the schoolyard taunts because of thrift store clothes and bizarre lunches, but he didn't know specifically about the canned corn sandwich and how it had prompted Mrs. Butson to start sending an extra lunch each day with Michele, or how that misguided act of kindness had cemented Isabel's status as a pariah. He did not know about the day Marilyn Cho leapt around behind Isabel in the playground, mocking her silently and with cruel precision, unaware that Isabel could see every movement in the shadow on the pavement in front of her. And he certainly did not know about the "uncles," or how her mother would race for the powder room to apply a pucker of pink lipstick and shoo the children into the basement as though each rendezvous were some kind of fun secret. He didn't know that Isabel watched The Muppet Show and after-school specials with her brother while trying to ignore what was happening upstairs, or that after the man left, her mother would disappear into the bathroom for prolonged periods to weep.

  And yet Isabel could not help imagining that her mother was on her way right now, that she had somehow found the strength to pull herself together and was going to walk through the door at any moment. She would fold Isabel in her arms as though she were a little girl and tell her that she was sorry, so sorry. She'd gotten help and things would be different from now on, and everything was going to be okay. And Isabel would believe her, because what was the alternative? To believe that she was lying alone in a hospital bed without a single family member or friend to sit with her?

  In the afternoon, Beulah poked her head through the door, beaming. "You have a visitor," she said.

  Tears sprang to Isabel's eyes. She had come.

  "It's your sister," Beulah continued.

  Isabel's eyes snapped open.

  Cat Douglas strode through t
he door. "Dr. Duncan, nice to see you again. How are ..." She stopped. Her eyes widened. "Wow." She pulled a digital camera out of her pocket, snapped a shot, and palmed it again.

  Isabel let out a cry and lurched forward, hands seeking the pad and pen she'd been using to communicate with the nurses. She accidentally knocked the pen to the tiled floor, then threw the pad overhand at Cat. Its pages flapped and separated and it dropped to the ground like a crumpled fledgling.

  Realization, and then horror, crossed Beulah's face. She spun to Cat. "You said you were her sister," she hissed. "How dare you? Get out of here!"

  Cat leaned forward at the waist, scanning Isabel's face. "That's some serious hardware. Can you even speak with all that?"

  Peter's voice boomed from behind them. "Who the hell are you?"

  Isabel signed frantically with both hands: GET HER OUT OF HERE, GET HER OUT, GET HER OUT. Tears streamed down her face.

  Peter grabbed Cat's upper arm and swung her toward him.

  "Get your hands off me!" Cat shrieked. "That's assault!"

  Peter pulled her close and put his mouth against her ear. "So sue me," he said. His eyes were glinting, his smile hard. She raised her chin and stared right back. He shoved her, hard enough that she stumbled, but because of his grip on her arm she remained upright. "Call the police," he said to Beulah.

  "Fine. Fine, I'll go," said Cat. She took a moment to compose herself and lowered her gaze to look at the fingers encircling her arm. Her eyelids flickered as she registered the missing joints of his first finger.

  "Damned right you will," said Peter. "Come on." He yanked her toward the door.

  8

  Half a dozen news crews were waiting outside the university's administrative offices, along with a handful of reporters. John knew several of them. One was a classmate from Columbia who had married a homely girl with old money and a summer home in the Hamptons. He had subsequently landed a job at The New York Times. Philip Underwood. He'd been present the night of the Ginette Pinegar incident, had held John's legs toward the ceiling while someone else held the funnel to his mouth. It was all so fuzzy, and it was never going to get any clearer. After all these years, John was still so embarrassed he didn't want to face anyone who had witnessed it. Another familiar face was an old-timer John had worked with at the New York Gazette, a man known for writing warning messages on masking tape and affixing them to his lunches in the communal refrigerator in case anyone was thinking of stealing them, as well as for peppering his speech with outdated terms such as "burying the lede" and "nut grafs." He was gaunt yet paunchy, and gray in all respects--hair, clothes, complexion. A few years ago he'd gone through a divorce that had sucked the life, color, and possibly a decade right out of him. He was wearing a battered trench coat, his shoulders rounded against the wind.

  John came up beside him. "Hey, Cecil."

  Cecil glanced over at John, took one last drag from a cigarette, and flicked it to the ground. It rolled away from him, the end still glowing. He rubbed his reddened hands together and blew on them. "Hey, John."

  "Hope you have a sweater on under that," said John.

  "Nope." Cecil shrugged and stared straight ahead. "So, still with the Inky?"

  "Yup. Still with the Gazette?"

  "Yup."

  The banter that followed was as ritualized as a mating dance--each of them trying to figure out what the other knew without giving anything away himself.

  Eventually Cecil dug his hands in his pockets and rocked back on his heels. "You've got nothing, do you?"

  John shook his head. "Nope. You?"

  "Not a thing."

  They nodded slowly, in commiseration. John saw no reason for Cecil to know that he'd met Isabel and the apes on the day of the explosion, and he wondered what Cecil was keeping from him.

  There was a buzz of excitement, and the building's double glass doors were pushed open by two large men. A petite woman in business attire and towering heels made her way down the stairs to the standing microphone. The men came down and flanked her.

  She pushed her glasses up her nose and smoothed her hair. Her manicured hands shivered in the cold. "Thank you for coming," she said, looking around.

  News crews jostled to get their overhead microphones into place, and reporters began shouting questions:

  "Was the Bradshaw family home at the time of the attack?"

  "How is Isabel Duncan?"

  "Were the apes injured?"

  "Has anyone been arrested?"

  The woman scanned the faces in front of her. Flashes from the cameras reflected off her glasses in bursts. Fuzzy black microphone cozies surrounded her face like monster caterpillars suspended from the sky. She closed her eyes for a moment and drew a breath.

  "The police are holding several persons of interest, although they are not being described as suspects at this time. We are also told that as of this morning Isabel Duncan's condition has been upgraded to stable, and her doctors are hopeful that she will make a full recovery. The home of the university president was vandalized in connection with this incident, and although he and his family are safe, the Earth Liberation League is designated by the FBI as one of the foremost domestic terrorist groups, and therefore any and all threats are being taken extremely seriously. The apes are uninjured, but, for their own safety, have been transferred to another location."

  She was interrupted by another volley.

  "Who are the persons of interest?"

  "What type of facility are the apes in?"

  "Are they still on campus?"

  She lifted a hand to silence them. "I'm sorry, but I cannot provide specific answers to those questions. We have every confidence that the perpetrators will be found and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, and we encourage anyone with any knowledge of the incident to speak to the authorities. In the meantime, we have done--and are continuing to do--everything in our power to ensure the safety of our students and faculty. Thank you."

  She squared up the edges of her note cards and kept her gaze turned downward. Clearly, she was preparing to leave. The shouts grew louder.

  "The Bradshaw flooding happened almost twenty-four hours after the bombing--what actions has the university taken to prevent further attacks?"

  After a moment, she put her hand on the standing microphone and said, "We have taken definitive measures to ensure that nothing like this will ever happen again. Please direct any further inquiries to the press office. Thank you." She turned and wobbled her way back up the stone steps.

  "Isn't she the freaking press office?" muttered Cecil.

  From there, John went to the lab. A couple of bored-looking policemen walked the perimeter, keeping an eye on photographers and making sure they didn't duck under the reams of yellow tape (where was Osgood, anyway? John guessed Elizabeth had decided to run Associated Press photographs to avoid paying his airfare).

  John had thought he was prepared for the sight of the lab, but actually seeing it was like taking a cannonball to the gut. Three days ago he had climbed those steps and held that handrail. It had been painted bluish gray; it was now blistered and dark. He had followed Isabel Duncan through that doorway and been allowed into the rooms that housed the apes. The door was gone, its absence a gaping hole in an epicenter of black, the exterior wall scorched with angry spikes. He could see only a few feet into the hallway, but insulation and wiring hung from sooty ceiling panels, and the sickly scent of burned plastic lingered.

  John cast his eyes over the parking lot: here, where John, Cat, and Osgood had climbed into the cab, the pebbles were littered with shards of glass. It was almost certainly here, too, that an ambulance had received Isabel Duncan. And here, beneath the tree where the apes had sought refuge, broken branches lay like an enormous and messy bird's nest, evidence of the bonobos' failed struggle to stay at the top. John turned away in a fruitless attempt to stop the mental image of their unconscious bodies dropping into the night.

  Next he drove to Lawrence City Animal Control, a
one-story building with rows of chain-link dog runs extending from the back end. The cinder-block walls of the reception area were painted green, and, from the smell of it, the linoleum floors had been recently bleached. An operatic canine howl came from behind the swinging door leading to the back.

  "Sounds like a Wookiee," said John.

  "He just came in," said the woman behind the desk. "He's not very happy. Better off here than where he was, though."

  "My name is John Thigpen, and I'm with The Philadelphia Inquirer. I was wondering if--"

  She held a hand up to stop him. "The apes aren't here."

  "Were they?"

  She eyed him, sizing him up, then spoke. "Briefly. A truck rolled up in the dead of night, the guys tranq'ed them, and off they went."

  "They shot them again?"

  "They said it was the only way. It's not like we have crush cages here. Mostly we get dogs and cats. The craziest thing we've ever had before this was an alligator. Some guy bought a hatchling in Florida and next thing he knew it was seven feet long and he was throwing turkey legs down the basement stairs and aiming a hose at various kiddie pools he'd tossed down there. That worked fine until his furnace broke and he needed a repairman."

  John stared at her, wide-eyed. Then he shook his head. "The apes--were you here when they were taken away?"

  "Yup. We're short-staffed. A bunch of our volunteers got picked up in that sweep yesterday. One of them is an intern at the lab."

  John perked up. "Really? Can I have his number?"

  "Her number. Since it's all over the Internet anyway, I can't see why not. I think she's still in custody, though." She pulled a book from a drawer and flipped through its pages before copying a name and number onto a scrap of paper. She slid it across the counter at John.

  Celia Honeycutt. She had been named in the ELL video, which John found odd, given that she was apparently under suspicion. Had the ELL included her in an attempt to cover their tracks? He folded the paper and put it in his pocket. "Do you know why they picked her up?"