Ape House

by Sara Gruen

  Marty picked up his briefcase and shook Isabel's hand. As he and Eleanor made their way to the door, Francesca De Rossi gathered her things. She paused and momentarily laid her hand on Isabel's arm. "It's going to be okay," she said.

  Isabel composed her face into something resembling a smile and nodded. She was embarrassed to find herself wiping away tears.

  "I'll call soon," said Francesca.

  ----

  Within moments of their departure, a woman's hand appeared on the back of the stool next to Isabel's.

  "Is anyone sitting here?"

  "No. Go ahead," Isabel said glumly.

  "Thanks," the woman said, sliding onto the stool. "Campari and soda," she called to the bartender, who had his back to her. "And onion rings. Do you have onion rings?"

  The bartender responded by tossing her a menu.

  After scanning it, the woman said, "I'll have the basket of fries." She slapped the menu on the counter.

  Within seconds Isabel was keenly aware of being watched. The feeling was unmistakable. She glanced over to find Cat Douglas regarding her closely.

  "Oh my God. It's you," said Cat.

  Isabel nearly choked. She waved desperately at the bartender, signaling for her tab.

  Cat continued to stare. "It is. It's you!"

  Isabel's cheeks got hot and she turned away. "I don't know who you think I am, but you're wrong."

  An outstretched hand appeared in front of her.

  "Cat Douglas--remember? From The Philadelphia Inquirer?"

  Isabel kept her face turned to the wall.

  The hand was retracted and replaced a moment later by a BlackBerry displaying the picture of Isabel, oozing and battered in her hospital bed. "You can't tell me this isn't you. The nose looks good, by the way. Very nice work."

  "Oh dear God," Isabel said. "Will you please leave me alone?"

  Cat Douglas laid her phone on the counter, sighed, and pulled her lips into a smile that crinkled the corners of her eyes. Her posture softened and she tipped her head slightly in an attempt to make herself look approachable. "Okay. I'm sorry. Let's start over. What happened to you and the apes was horrifying, and obviously you have a totally unique perspective on it. I would really love to hear what you think of what's going on here. Just a few quick ques--"

  "I don't give interviews." Isabel spun her barstool so she was facing Cat and added, loudly, "And particularly not to people who would do something like this!"

  She flicked the backs of her fingers against Cat's BlackBerry, grabbed her purse, and left, registering with a sickening feeling that as a result of her outburst she was no longer invisible to the other bar patrons.

  21

  Ken Faulks sat in the boardroom, slumped deep in his Aeron chair and dragging a finger in greasy circles on the table's gleaming surface.

  It was approximately an hour before dawn. His executives, six men and two women, were sleepy and disheveled. Their shirts were crisp and clean, but from the collar up they were bleary and puffy.

  Faulks lifted his finger from the table and observed the pattern he'd left on it. He leaned forward and breathed fog on it before using the underside of his silk tie to restore its perfect shine. He considered the end of his finger, and then ran it across his lips in a distracted fashion as his chief financial officer clicked through a series of PowerPoint slides. The red line on a chart zigzagged up and then sharply down.

  "Bottom line," said the beleaguered CFO, "is that even though we're offering discounts on long-term subscriptions, viewers aren't biting."

  "And short-term subscriptions?"

  "Fine. Great. Brilliant, even. But with only a day's commitment the whole thing could go tits up in a ditch pretty much instantly."

  "Make them buy a week, minimum. Make the subscription renew automatically unless they opt out."

  "We can't. Virtually all our sales are now in twenty-four-hour increments--businessmen at conferences, etcetera. They're changing hotels daily."

  "What about computer subscriptions and home viewers?"

  "They don't want to commit."

  "Why?" Faulks demanded.

  All eyes landed on one of the producers, who took note, sighed, and propped himself up. "The apes are having a lot of sex and spending up a storm, but basically that's it. So far there hasn't been a single altercation. There's no drama. We have to kick it up a notch."

  "How?" asked Faulks, his gray eyes trained on the chart.

  "Drama, fun, the unexpected. Fights, coalitions, betrayals. The kind of thing audiences expect from reality TV," said one of the producers. "We need tension." He stood abruptly and walked from the table. He propped his hands on his hips, inadvertently displaying sweaty armpits. "Jesus God. People always turn on each other. So do meerkats, for Christ's sake--Animal Planet kept Meerkat Manor going for years. What's wrong with these creatures?"

  "How about audience participation?" someone suggested.

  "And how the hell are we going to manage that?" said Faulks. "Throw a washed-up celebrity in with them for a week?"

  There was an immediate, excited response:

  "Ron Jeremy!"

  "Carmen Electra!"

  "Verne Troyer!"

  "All three!"

  The possibilities were glorious. They paused to consider. Even Faulks seemed lost in reverie.

  "No," he said finally. "We'd never get liability insurance. But clearly we have to do something. Mess with them. Goad them into doing something."

  "The whole premise of the show is that the apes are in charge," protested a woman whose chignon was falling down.

  "Things change," Faulks said sharply.

  The director of marketing began drumming the table with his pen. All eyes in the room turned to him. He stopped suddenly and leaned forward. "How about ...," he began and then trailed off. He brought a hand to his chin and gazed at the ceiling. His eyes had a dreamy glow about them.

  Faulks leaned forward. "What? How about what?"

  "How about," he said again, slower this time, spreading his hands in an expansive gesture: "Ape House Prime Time." He gave them all a moment to let their imaginations take flight. "The apes are in charge twenty-three hours a day. Then, once a day, we do something to affect their environment. Something," he said, sitting forward, "voted on by the audience. The paying audience. People who have bought the monthly package. Twenty-three hours of doing whatever they want, and then one hour a day of doing something chosen by monthly subscribers."

  "Twenty-three for one."

  "Ostensibly, yes."

  "Ostensibly?"

  "Presumably the repercussions would continue until the next ... intervention. We throw in a wrench, then make the show available for free for the hour that immediately follows. We hook the audience, then they have to subscribe to see what happens next. A twenty-four-hour package brings them to the next Prime Time segment. But if they want to vote on what happens in the next Prime Time segment, they need to subscribe to the monthly package."

  "We need something to start with," said the CFO, snapping his fingers. "Porn, cap guns, something."

  "War footage and cap guns. Porn and sex toys."

  One corner of Faulks's mouth lifted almost imperceptibly and then stuck there, twitching. "Go on," he said.

  22

  John's heart sank when he saw the lizard statue in the parking lot of the Buccaneer Motor Inn: it was sixteen feet tall, wearing overalls and a straw hat, and had disturbingly human bare feet with bulbous, green toes. Its hands held a marquee sign that read:

  QUEEN BEDS AVIL

  COLUR TV RADIO

  AIR CNDIT

  HBO APE HSE

  LOW RATE

  Beneath it, the "no" part of the "no vacancy" light flickered.

  The building itself was cinder block, two stories, with trim the color of Pepto-Bismol. The window air-conditioning units were held in place with plywood and foil, and hummed and excreted water onto the concrete beneath. The gravel parking lot was dotted with beer cans a
nd fast-food wrappers. The vending machine was against the wall, next to a dumpster. Across the street was a small, flat building that housed two businesses: one was clearly defunct, as evidenced by an unlit neon sign reading CHIROPRACTIC CLINIC that hung almost vertically in the window; the other one, a restaurant called Jimmy's, advertised a bento box/pizza combination. John saw a few pairs of shoes thrown over wires. He knew drug gangs did this to mark their turf in urban areas, but here? In Lizard? As his eyes ran the length of the wire, he noticed a pair of stilettos, which had been carefully tied together before being tossed.

  There was also a pool, which was suspiciously blue. Four attractive bikini-clad women were spread out on white plastic loungers. Their hair was long, their skin the color of honey. There wasn't a dimple in sight, except on the arms of the woman waddling toward her door on the second floor in a brightly flowered muumuu. She apparently took the presence of the sunbathers personally, as she tossed them withering glances every few feet. She took her ancient husband's interest even more personally, and shoved him into their room with the flat of her hand once he got the door unlocked.

  John parked the car, got out, and went into the office. A bell strung above the glass door announced his arrival.

  The office was paneled in dark wood, like a basement den. There was a false Christmas tree in the corner, draped with limp garland and cardboard air fresheners shaped like pine trees. Behind the laminate desk, a black-and-white portable TV was tuned to Ape House. In the bottom left corner, an ape was roasting a marshmallow over the gas range. In the square above, an ape was happily jamming on a keyboard while another watched admiringly. The right half of the screen was taken up by an ape giving another a haircut. The recipient of the haircut was clipping her own toenails.

  "Can I help you?" said a fat man sitting in a swivel chair. His fingers were laced together, resting on the swell of his belly. He didn't bother to rise. An oscillating fan with a few pieces of tinsel tied to it was aimed at his bald, sweaty head. Wiry gray curls sprung from the neckline of his sweat-dappled T-shirt, which had probably started out white.

  "I'm checking in."

  "Name?"

  "John Thigpen."

  John waited--if ever someone was going to make a Pigpen joke, this was the guy--but it didn't come. He lifted his considerable bulk from his chair and pulled the only set of keys from the board behind him. He tossed them onto the desk.

  "You're late."

  "My plane was delayed."

  "Shoulda called."

  "Sorry." John glanced at his watch and frowned. He had taken a short detour to the Staples near the airport to print and mail half a dozen packages to New York, but it was still only midafternoon.

  "Credit card," said the fat man.

  "My company didn't call one in?"

  "Nope."

  "Can you check?"

  "Nobody called in nothing. You're lucky I didn't give your room away." The man glared at John from under Brezhnev brows.

  John dug out a credit card and sent it skidding across the desk. He'd meant to toss it in an insouciant fashion so that it dropped directly in front of the man. Instead, it traveled like a frisbee. The man plucked it off the edge of the counter, fitted it and a slip into the manual processing machine, and ran the slider arm over it. Kachunk! He pushed the carboned slip toward John and dropped a pen from a height of ten inches.

  "Sign here. Thirty-nine dollars a night, extra if housekeeping finds anything out of the ordinary. Capiche?"

  "I, uh--"

  "The deposit on your credit card is four hundred bucks. No exceptions. You leave in the night, we keep it. Put this"--he chucked a numbered plastic chip that bounced off John's chest and fell to the floor--"on your dashboard where it can be seen or you'll get towed. We count towels and sheets. You're in Room 142. Follow the wall around the outside."

  John put his credit card back in his wallet, bent over to pick up his parking chip from the stained carpet, put the keys in his pocket, and set out to find his room.

  As he unlocked his door, one of the women by the pool, a redhead with a wasp waist and something sparkly dangling from her belly button, smiled at him before dropping her head back, allowing her thick pelt of hair to fan out. Red and orange highlights winked in the sun.

  John, alarmed by what he thought might be an invitation, turned away, but not before processing that her hair was the color Amanda's had been such a short time ago.

  ----

  John stripped the bedspread off and piled it in the corner beneath the air conditioner, which rattled and vibrated and spat through broken teeth. The carpet was slightly damp from a recent cleaning, and the room was suffused with the scents of rug shampoo and something vaguely sour. John cranked the air conditioner up to speed the drying process.

  He looked at the bed and called Topher. "Do you mind if I change hotels?"

  "I wouldn't mind at all," Topher said, "but the other hotels are booked solid."

  "Seriously? It's Lizard," said John, pacing between the bed and the door. "What's in Lizard?"

  "Casinos. And Ape House. My assistant had trouble finding you a room at all."

  Of course. Cat and all the reporters from the real papers had swarmed in and spread out like locusts a week earlier, filling the good hotel rooms. John sank to the edge of the bed and stared at the bent slats of the window blinds. He suddenly brightened. He would find a Wal-Mart. He would buy his own pillows and a bottle of Febreze.

  "Been to the site yet?" Topher asked.

  "I'm about to head out."

  "Good. Send your first report by midnight tomorrow. We go to press at three A.M."

  "Got it."

  John shut his cell phone and set it on the bedside table. He leaned down to sniff the bed and was pleasantly surprised to discover that it smelled of laundry soap. In desperate need of a shower, he stripped off his clothes and walked into the bathroom. It was outfitted in white, which was unfortunate because it emphasized that the grout was orange in places, grayish green in others. A half-dozen dead flies lay belly-up on the windowsill above the tub, looking for all the world like Amanda's crispy pan-fried capers, an association he tried to put out of his head at once. And, of course, the showerhead didn't work. It was encrusted with mineral deposits and shot alternately freezing and scalding water at angles so extreme that the shower curtain was unable to contain them.

  He was going to have to add a bottle of Lime-a-way and one of those tentacled rubber bath mats to his shopping list, he thought as he crouched near the faucet and splashed water into his armpits. And a bar of soap. This one had been previously enjoyed, as evidenced by the embedded pubic hair.

  ----

  Since John had eaten nothing but a tiny bag of airplane peanuts all day, he returned to the lobby to inquire about restaurants. The fat man said the restaurant at the Mohegan Moon--the hotel next to the largest casino--was decent. Also, one of the gentlemen's clubs had excellent wings. John asked about the place across the street advertising the pizza/bento box combination. The fat man shook his head sternly and slowly.

  The casino was impossible to miss, being the shape of the Taj Mahal and bedecked from top to bottom with twinkling lights. The lobby of the Mohegan Moon was cool and airy, with marble floors, plush oriental carpets, and red-suited hotel employees pushing brass luggage carts. An enormous claw-footed mahogany table in front of the checkin desk held a flower arrangement that was easily as tall as John. Birds-of-paradise and fronds of palm intermingled with artistically bent sticks and other assorted blossoms, about which John knew nothing except that they smelled good. An older woman with platinum-blond hair walked past, talking to a large pink purse. As John was pondering this, a tiny and fluffy white dog head popped out. Its collar was the same pattern as the purse, and studded with rhinestones. The dog's eyes were glossy and black, its ears triangular. The tip of its pink tongue stuck out endearingly.

  Although Topher had already said that no other hotels had vacancies, this whiff of luxury, of cleanliness
, found John groveling desperately to the manager, asking if they didn't have some rooms set aside, for emergency purposes, because, really, this qualified as an emergency. The manager regretted that he couldn't be of service. They were entirely full.

  John turned from the counter just in time to see Cat Douglas leave the bar and head toward a bank of glass elevators.

  The bar was standing room only--servers ran back and forth, turning sideways and raising trays above their heads to move between the bodies, and the harried bartender slung drinks as quickly as he could, more often than not leaving a trail of foam sliding down the sides of pint glasses. John made his way to the very end of the counter, beside the station where servers dumped dirty glasses and plates, and ordered a beer while he waited for a seat.

  When a patron pointed out that the bonobos' television was showing human porn, the bartender flipped the channel. When the room filled with angry protests, he turned it back.

  One of the bonobos was trying to change the channel, but the remote control didn't seem to work. The other apes wandered in and out of the courtyard and flipped through magazines. There was a blow-up sex doll in the corner that one of the females had covered with a blanket. She periodically pulled back a corner to check for signs of life, then gave up and went to play video games. John realized with a start that it was Bonzi, the one who had tried to kiss him.

  Although the bartender left the television on, he muted it, which allowed John to listen to the conversations going on around him. Two reporters drank bourbon and compared notes. Neither had anything earth-shattering, but John filed away the details just in case. Observers from animal protection agencies discussed their lack of options with clear frustration. At a table nearby, three women made a point of identifying themselves to the waitress as eco-feminists. Two were long-haired and lanky, wearing skirts that looked as if they needed a good wash. The third was soft and doughy and stuffed into dark khaki pants. They sat with a skinny and bespotted green-haired boy who John thought would be wise to flee. They were vegan--militantly so--and made sure everyone knew it. Was this ever on the same surface as any animal product? they asked. Are you absolutely sure this was made with vegetable oil? Yes, it matters very much, they said to the server, who had begun throwing desperate glances since she was being summoned by other customers. The oppression of women and animals has been historically interconnected. Didn't she realize that waitressing--or for that matter any job that involved minimum wage and working for tips--was a form of female oppression?