Ape House

by Sara Gruen

"Hello, Isabel," said a female voice.

  The connection, the tone, everything was all wrong. Isabel sat forward, on alert. "Who is this?"

  "I'm a friend," said the woman.

  A chill flashed outward from the pit of Isabel's stomach. She glanced at the curtains, which, since Celia's departure, were once again held together with chip clips and safety pins, and then at the door, which was chained. "I have caller ID. I'm recording this call," she said, although her caller ID was registering a solid line of ones. Isabel's mind raced back through all she'd learned about IP addresses and Internet anonymity--did it work the same way for telephones?

  "Don't be scared," said the woman.

  "What more do you want from me? You've already taken everything." Her voice, raised in false bravado, betrayed her panic.

  "I'm a friend of a friend," said the woman, "and I think I know where the bonobos are."

  Isabel grasped the phone with both hands, her breath coming in short bursts. Her heart was racing so fast she thought she might faint. She closed her eyes for a moment, and rocked back and forth.

  "I'm listening," she said.

  14

  John checked his watch. It was nearly two o'clock. According to his research, the credits to Sesame Street should be rolling right now and Candy's tyke would be in bed shortly thereafter.

  Given the alarming proximity to his parents' house, John was parked almost a mile away but he wasn't kidding himself--he was still in grave danger of being recognized. To this end he was wearing a knit hat pulled low and a peacoat with the collar turned up. He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel and checked his watch again. He thought about the child, maybe in footsies pajamas, maybe sucking his thumb, being tucked under a quilt while a mobile dangled stuffed animals above him and plinked out a lullaby.

  John could not believe he had been reduced to this.

  Exactly what he had been reduced to had been driven home yet again that morning, when the first section of the Inky featured another report from Cat in which she pretended that she was the one who had visited the lab the day of the explosion, that she was the one who had brought presents and backpacks to the bonobos. It was extremely carefully worded--technically nothing was an outright lie, but she had made great use of the Royal "We" and the passive voice. The photographs Osgood had taken ran with the piece--images of Sam playing the xylophone, of Mbongo holding the gorilla mask and looking desolate, of Bonzi opening her backpack, and then another of her leaping up to kiss the glass. John had been carefully cropped out of this final one. Frankly, he was surprised that Cat hadn't been Photoshopped in. Meanwhile, John was sitting in his car dressed like a hoodlum waiting for a part-time hooker to put her child to bed so they could begin their "party."

  He waited an extra ten minutes, since he had no idea how long it took for a kid to fall asleep, and then slunk through the alley to the back of Candy's townhouse. There was only one window on the main floor, which he assumed was the kitchen. He took a deep breath, looked around at the surrounding houses, and slid behind the holly bush to hoist himself up and check if the high chair was empty.

  He was clinging to the window ledge with strips of paint lodged beneath his nails and his nose pressed to the glass when the sound of rapid footsteps shuffled through the gravel behind him.

  "Get down from there, you ... you ... reprobate!" said a voice both wavery and sharp. "I have pepper spray!"

  John's fingers slid from the sill and he toppled into the holly. He thrashed his way out and landed facedown in the gravel.

  "We all know what's going on in that house," the woman cried, "and we won't have it. This is a respectable neighborhood!"

  John turned his head and found himself facing orthopedic shoes, opaque stockings, and a tweed skirt that fell well below the knee. He was also facing a can of mace.

  "Don't you move!" The tiny canister trembled violently in the clutches of arthritic fingers, one of which hovered over the red trigger button.

  "Please," John said, trying to recover his breath. "Please don't."

  "Give me one reason why I shouldn't!"

  "Because it's backward. You're pointing it at yourself."

  The mace disappeared and John rolled over. He sat up and wiped off the gravel that was embedded in his cheek. Both his hands were bleeding from the holly. He tested his left wrist, which had been overextended and was quite possibly sprained.

  "John Thigpen? Is that you?"

  He looked up. After a moment of sickening confusion, he realized he was looking into the face of Mrs. Moriarty, his childhood Sunday-school teacher.

  "Oh, Jesus," he said, dropping his head into his injured hands.

  "Oh, for shame, John Thigpen, for shame!" she scolded. "What will your parents think?"

  ----

  "What the hell happened to you?" said Elizabeth, giving him a dismissive once-over as he entered her office. She had risen to answer the door, become visibly irritated at the sight of him, and sailed back behind her desk. "You look like something the cat dragged in."

  "Don't ask." Although not invited, he took a seat.

  Elizabeth surveyed him dubiously. "If you say so." She flung herself onto her spring-loaded chair. "So what's up?"

  John pulled off his ski hat and held it on his lap, flicking off random bits of yard debris. "I've decided to take the buyout."

  She froze. "You what?" she said, leaning forward.

  "The buyout. I'm taking the buyout."

  Her eyes narrowed, drilling into him. "You're taking early retirement? Are you insane?"

  "The buyout," John said firmly. The terminology was important to him. He was thirty-six. He was not retiring.

  Elizabeth cocked her head. "Really. And when, exactly, did you decide this?"

  "Just now."

  "And may I ask why?" said Elizabeth.

  "Does it matter?"

  "Yes."

  John stared straight at her, feeling the storm cloud of his combined humiliations swelling within him. He had intended to come in, calmly announce his decision, and leave. Suddenly he found himself shouting. "Because in the last few weeks I've been sprayed with skunk oil, I have personally taken samples of random dog poo in parks for goddamned DNA testing, I have measured the depth of rotting trash in gutters and estimated what percentage of it was used condoms. I have hidden in doorways recording the license plates of the people who pick up tranny hookers, and today I was nearly maced by my Sunday-school teacher!" He thumped his fist on her desk to punctuate this last indignity.

  Elizabeth's eyes were wide. He did not blame her; he had shocked himself. He knew he should try to collect himself, but at this point he had nothing to lose.

  "The ape story was mine," he continued, pounding his chest. "I know you didn't want to hire me in the first place, but I've done damned good work, and my reward for that is ... this." He flashed his hands, which were crisscrossed with lacerations. "You took my story--my series--and gave it to Cat Douglas the second it started to look like Pulitzer material."

  Elizabeth's eyes narrowed to pinpricks. She began tapping her pencil on her desk.

  "Cat Douglas, for Christ's sake!" he reiterated. "Did you even read what she wrote this morning? She was never in the room with the apes. They wouldn't let her in because she was sick. She was briefly in the building with them, but she never laid eyes on them. And that picture she posted of Isabel Duncan? Unconscionable. I hope she gets sued!"

  Elizabeth didn't respond. Tap, tap, tap, went the pencil.

  John sighed and sank back in his chair. When he continued, his voice was lowered. "Amanda has an opportunity in L.A. I'm going to join her there. Hell, you should be relieved. Now you have one less person to get rid of, right? Make the executives happy?"

  Elizabeth sat forward suddenly and grabbed her phone. She punched four digits and waited.

  "Yeah, it's Elizabeth Greer. I need an HR rep up here now. And a packing box. And someone from security."

  "I can carry my own box," John said.


  "Yes, right away," Elizabeth said into the phone.

  ----

  When John told Amanda what he had done, there was a pause long enough that he wondered whether the line had gone dead. Then she said, "Oh. My. God. You did what?" Only then did he truly comprehend the enormity of it. He had just done away with their only source of income. Regret was useless--being escorted from the Inky by security guards almost certainly precluded any possibility of slinking back and begging for reinstatement.

  He began to babble, trying to convince Amanda--and himself--that they would be okay. He would put the house on the market immediately and come to L.A. His buyout was only one month's salary, but if they were thrifty they could survive until he found work, which he would do immediately, even if it meant flipping burgers. They would have to dip into their nest egg, but not by much, and no matter what, they would be okay. They always had been, even in the lean student years.

  When they hung up, John hugged his knees and rocked.

  Over the next few days they rallied, or at least John thought they did. Amanda seemed more cheerful on the phone, although it finally dawned on him that it was an act. She relayed funny stories from the studio (ha! ha! ha!) that he later realized weren't funny at all. Apparently the actors were now required to walk around carrying Vitaminwater bottles at all times, label out, because studies had shown that the new trend was for audiences to record shows to watch later, allowing them to skip past commercials, and so the studios had to find new ways of integrating commercial endorsements into the shows themselves. When John finally picked up on Amanda's level of horror over this, he wanted to shrink into the earth. They had been apart only a few weeks and already he was having trouble reading her.

  While packing boxes, John found the edited manuscript of Recipe for Disaster in the guest room closet. Fran had collated it, stacked all the rejections on top, and secured the lot with two rubber bands going in opposite directions. The rejection with the enormous red NO scrawled across it was uppermost; this was what she had chosen her daughter to see the next time she opened the guest room closet.

  John sat cross-legged on the floor, peeled off the rubber bands, and began reading.

  An hour later he had not moved, and it was more than two hours before he turned the final page. It was good, really good--and by good he meant that she'd blown things up, or at least set them on fire. She had incorporated a number of aspects of her real life--such as her passion for cooking and poor old Magnificat. Somehow she hadn't felt the need to exact revenge on certain family members by way of cameo performances. John was not at all sure he himself could have risen above temptation, given the richness and abundance of available material, but he was grateful nonetheless. Perhaps she had been tempted, as she'd gone to some effort to kill off the mother before the story began, and then killed the father within a couple of pages.

  John picked up the stack of rejections and flipped through them, marveling at the many ways people found to say no. No, they couldn't be bothered to have a look, not even at the first few pages. No, they weren't interested. No, they weren't accepting new clients except by referral.

  No, no, no, no, no.

  John set the rejections on the floor. He didn't count them, but he had no reason to disbelieve Amanda's claim that there were 129. The stack was nearly half as thick as the manuscript itself. No wonder she had taken to her bed.

  15

  Isabel stood on a residential street in Alamogordo, New Mexico, behind a panel van with a woman who called herself Rose. Rose had a job as a technician inside the Corston Foundation, a primate research facility, but she was actually working undercover for an animal advocacy group. They were just beyond its dimly lit parking lot.

  The Corston Foundation had acquired six new chimpanzees. Many people, including research scientists, had trouble distinguishing bonobos from chimpanzees. This gave Isabel hope and despair in equal parts, since the Corston Foundation was notorious for flouting USDA and NIH requirements for primate care. They had been cited eight times in the past year alone for violations in cage size and basic care, and two years before that had been fined for leaving three elderly chimpanzees outside in unventilated crates in the summer sun with the predictable result that they died of heatstroke. Because these were cast-off Air Force chimps, their deaths had caused a small blip of media interest and public outrage. Buddy, Ivan, and Donald had been celebrities in their day, media darlings whose enormous grins--as they were plucked free from their space capsules after crashing into the sea--were splashed across magazine covers nationwide. What the American public didn't know was that the grins were actually grimaces of fear. They also didn't know that Buddy, Ivan, and Donald had been acquired in the way of all "wild-caught" chimps, which is to say yanked from the bodies of their murdered mothers, or that they had spent their first five years in captivity in enormous centrifuges and decompression chambers designed to test the rigors of space travel on the human body. Nor did they know that the chimps were used as crash-test dummies and slammed repeatedly into walls at high speeds to develop seat belts that would effectively restrain human astronauts during reentry into the atmosphere. Indeed, until they were left to expire in the sun, the public didn't know that while the human astronauts were greeted with ticker tape, confetti, and hero parades, the Air Force decided that Buddy, Ivan, and Donald were no longer useful and leased them to the Corston Foundation, where they were renamed 17489, 17490, and 17491 respectively, infected with hepatitis, caged individually, and subjected to regular liver biopsies. Ferdinand Corston surely breathed a sigh of relief when the surge of gossip about a major celebrity's marital infidelities swept his own bilge out of the media's eye. The Corston Foundation was the very last place Isabel would want the bonobos to end up. On the other hand, knowing where they were was the first step in rescuing them.

  Isabel stood beside Rose at the van's tailgate. The looming concrete building was surrounded by gravel, chain link, and razor wire. Isabel tried to imagine the more than four hundred chimpanzees imprisoned inside.

  "I don't know how you stand it," she said.

  "I have to," said Rose, tossing a pair of rubber boots at Isabel's feet and then laying a jumpsuit, rubber gloves, and surgeon's mask with full face shield on the tailgate. "If we don't have someone on the inside, we'll never know what's going on. They're not exactly forthcoming about what they do in there."

  "I know," said Isabel, recalling her recent attempts at gathering information. She glanced at the hazmat outfit. "Is this really necessary?"

  "Yes. They spit and throw shit. Many of them have been infected with diseases that are transmissible to humans. Malaria, hepatitis, HIV. So put these on."

  Isabel stared at the squat building with a renewed sense of horror. The behavior Rose was describing was typical of apes who had suffered severe psychological trauma.

  Rose watched her, as though assessing. Finally she spoke. "Last week they infected three baby chimps with leukemia by poisoning the formula in their bottles. Others are subjected to lawn treatments, cleaning chemicals, cosmetics--you name it. Some are addicted to drugs, some are locked in unventilated rooms filled with secondhand smoke. One chimp had his teeth smashed out so someone could practice dental implant techniques on him."

  Isabel's hand flew to her still-tender jaw.

  If Rose noticed, she didn't say anything. She was busy pulling on her hazmat gear. Isabel did the same, in shame-filled silence.

  Isabel and Rose both held flashlights as they entered. A long concrete corridor stretched before them, a windowless expanse of cages that hung from the ceiling. The cages were the size of small elevators, and each held a single chimpanzee, who crouched or slept on the chain-link floor. There were no blankets, no toys--nothing except stainless-steel water bowls that refilled automatically. The cages were suspended a couple of feet from the floor, which sloped toward a trough against the wall. Isabel supposed this was for cleaning purposes--a high-powered hose would do it, although now, several hours after the last hu
man had left, feces and urine lay in lumps beneath the cages. The stench was nearly unbearable.

  The chimpanzees were mostly quiet, huddled in the corners of their barren cages. A few rushed to the front and displayed, shaking the chain link with hands and feet and splattering Isabel and Rose with water, urine, spit, and worse. Their angry screeches echoed down the hall, amplifying the silence of the others. Most of the quiet ones had their heads turned to the wall, but the ones who faced forward looked through Isabel and Rose with deadened eyes. Their bodies were present, but their spirits gone. A couple had metal bolts coming from the tops of their skulls. Several were missing fingers and toes.

  Rose followed Isabel's gaze. "They chew them off from stress."

  When they finally turned a corner, Isabel leaned up against the wall to catch her breath.

  She would not cry. She would not. Crying would help no one.

  Rose waited, but offered no comfort. Did she think Isabel condoned this? Surely not. If she did, she wouldn't have tried to help find the bonobos, would she?

  When Isabel finally composed herself, they began walking again. As irrational as it seemed, Isabel thought they were going through the laundry facility, but after passing a few extra-large front-load dryers, she realized that behind the thick round portholes were baby chimpanzees.

  "Oh no, oh no," she cried. She sank to her knees in front of one and rested her forehead against the glass, grasping the edges of the porthole with her gloved hands. The infant inside, who should have been with his mother for at least four more years, did not respond. He already had the glassy-eyed stare of the lost. Isabel sobbed openly. She turned to Rose. "Why?" she demanded. "Why?"

  Rose responded with a look that spared nothing and said, "They're not much further."

  Isabel followed. Because of her surgeon's mask she could not even wipe her nose or eyes, although her gloves were so filthy with feces and spit she couldn't have anyway. She walked past one isolette after another, each containing a lone, infected baby.

  At the end of the hall, Rose punched a combination into a keypad beside the door. She went through first and held it open for Isabel.

  "This is where they quarantine the new ones. These six are the recent additions."