32.
On Friday morning, while driving to work, Varya pulls to the side of the road, wrenches the car into park, and drops her head between her knees. She is thinking of Luke. For the past two days, he has met her at the lab at seven thirty and followed her into the vivarium. There he’s been useful—helping her weigh pellets for feedings, transferring heavy cages to the storage room for cleaning—and the animals have taken to him. On Wednesday he developed a game with one of their older males, Gus, a beautiful rhesus with a full orange coat and an ego to match. Gus came to the front of his cage and presented his belly to ask for a scratch. Then he either jumped back in an attempt to startle Luke, who laughed and played along, or sat there for as long as Luke scratched his exposed, salmon-colored stomach, smacking his lips in affection.
When Varya expressed surprise at his skill with the monkeys and his desire to help, Luke explained that he grew up on a farm, that physical labor and working with animals are familiar to him, and that this is what his editor at the Chronicle wanted, anyway: to get a sense of daily life at the Drake, so that the researchers come alive as real people, and the monkeys as individuals, too. On Thursday, while eating lunch in the office—Varya with her Tupperware of broccoli and black beans, Luke with a chicken wrap from the atrium—he asked her about this, whether she thought of the monkeys as individuals, and whether it troubled her to see them in cages. If he had done so on Monday, she would have been wary, but the days since have passed so easily, without crisis or judgment, that by Thursday she was relaxed enough to answer honestly.
Before she came to the Drake, she had never been around organisms of such size and flesh. The monkeys’ bodies were meaty and impossible to ignore: they smelled and screeched, they were covered in hair, they suffered from diabetes and endometriosis. Their nipples were pink as bubblegum and distended, their faces startlingly emotive. It was impossible to look into their eyes and not see—or think you saw—just what they were thinking. They were not passive subjects to be acted upon but opinionated participants. She was conscious of not anthropomorphizing them, and yet, in those early years, she was struck by the familiarity of their faces and especially by their eyes. When they gathered together and stared at her with those bottomless eyes they looked to her like humans in monkey suits, peering through cutouts in masks.
“Which was obviously unsustainable,” she tells Luke, “that kind of thinking.”
She sat at her desk, Luke at Annie’s. He had propped his right ankle up on his left knee, his long legs bent with the spider awkwardness of tall young men. Put at ease by the gentleness of his attention, Varya continued.
“One Thanksgiving—this would have been my second or third year at the Drake—I visited my brother, who worked as a military doctor, and I shared all of this. He told me about a patient he’d seen that day, a twenty-three-year-old soldier with an infected amputation who cursed the Afghans every time Daniel touched his skin. Daniel remembered him from a medical screening a couple of years earlier, when the soldier expressed so much anxiety about the state of Afghanistan—so much concern for its people—that Daniel almost ordered a psychiatric evaluation. He was worried the boy was too soft.”
Daniel had sat much like Luke did on Thursday—one leg cast over the other, his large eyes intent—but the skin beneath his eyes was dark and his formerly thick hair sparse. In that moment Varya remembered him as a boy, her younger brother, whose idealism had been replaced by something more realistic but just as simple, something she recognized in herself.
“His point,” Varya said, “was that it’s impossible to survive without dehumanizing the enemy, without creating an enemy in the first place. He said that compassion was the purview of civilians, not those whose job was to act. Acting requires you to choose one thing over another. And it’s better to help one side than neither.”
She fit the lid of the Tupperware on the bowl and thought of Frida, who was part of the restricted-calorie group. In the beginning, she called and called for more food. At home, Varya was haunted by those calls. There was something in the monkey’s shameless hunger that made her feel both guilty and repulsed. So clear was Frida’s desire for life, so visible the accusation in her eyes, that Varya nearly expected her to trade her rough, staccato shrieks for English.
“I do grow attached to the monkeys,” she added. “I shouldn’t say that—not very scientific. But I’ve known them for ten years. And I remind myself that the study benefits them, too. I’m protecting them, the restricted ones especially. They’ll live longer this way.” Luke was quiet; he’d put his tape recorder away, and though his notebook sat on Annie’s desk, he didn’t touch it. “Still, you have to draw a line in the sand that says: ‘This research is worth it. This animal’s life is simply not as valuable as whatever medical advances that life can serve.’ You have to.”
That night, Varya lay awake for hours. She wondered why she had shared all of this with Luke, and how it might reflect on her if Luke were to include it in his article. She could ask him to omit the conversation, but that would indicate a degree of doubt about her work, and the thinking required to accomplish it, that she did not want to project. Now she sits in her car, nauseated. She has the overwhelming feeling that she has not only put herself at risk but that she has also betrayed Daniel. When she thinks of meeting Luke at the lab, she sees her brother. It makes no sense. Their only similarity is their height, and yet the visual remains, Daniel waiting for her in Luke’s windbreaker and backpack, Daniel’s face transposed on Luke’s younger, expectant one. The image morphs, then: she sees Daniel in the trailer, a bullet in his leg and the floor a red pool, and she knows that if she had not been so withdrawn, he would have come to her about Bruna, and she could have saved him.
By the time the nausea is gone and her hands have stopped trembling enough to hold the steering wheel, an hour has passed. She’s never been late to work before, and Annie, to her relief, has brought Luke to the kitchen, where he is helping her weigh what food the monkeys have not eaten and separate next week’s pellets into puzzle feeders. Varya avoids him, working on a grant in the office with the door closed. At one point, someone knocks, and because Annie would not bother her, Varya knows it can only be Luke.
“I thought I’d see if you’d like to go to dinner,” he says when she opens the door. He has his hands in his pockets and, seeing her confusion, he smiles. “It’s already six o’clock.”
“Not hungry, I’m afraid.” She walks back to her desk to shut down the computer.
“A drink? There’s resveratrol in red wine. You can’t say I haven’t done my research.”
Varya exhales. “Would this be on the record or off?”
“Your choice. I thought off.”
“If it’s off the record,” she says, swiveling, “what would be the point?”
“Networking? Human connection?” Luke stares at her peculiarly, as if he can’t tell whether she’s joking. “I don’t bite. Or at least, I bite less than your monkeys.”
She turns off the light in the office, and Luke’s face drops into half shadow, lit only by the hallway fluorescents. She’s hurt him.
“My treat,” he adds. “To thank you.”
Later, she will wonder what made her agree to go when nothing in her wanted to, and what would have happened if she hadn’t. Was it guilt, or fatigue? She was so tired of guilt, which shrank only when she was working, and when she washed her hands, letting the tap run until it was so hot that the sensation was no longer one of water but fire or ice. It shrank, too, when she was hungry, which she so often was—there were times when she felt light enough to drift toward the sky, light enough to drift toward her siblings. And she was hungry now, but still, something made her go; something made her say yes.
• • •
They sit in a wine bar on Grant Avenue and share a bottle of red, a Cabernet that was grown and bottled seven miles south and which works in Varya immediately. She reali
zes how long it’s been since she’s eaten, but she does not eat at restaurants, so she drinks and listens as Luke tells her about his upbringing: how his family owns a cherry farm in Door County, Wisconsin, a combination of islands and shoreline that extends into Lake Michigan. He says that it reminds him of Marin, the land having belonged to Native Americans—in Door County, the Potawatomi; in Marin, the Coast Miwoks—before the arrival of Europeans, who took that land and used it for farming and lumber. He describes the limestone and the dunes and the hemlock trees, with their long fingers of green, and the yellow birch trees, which in late fall lay astonishing gold blankets on the ground.
During the off-season the population is less than thirty thousand, he says, but in the summer and early fall it grows by almost ten times that much. In July, the farm becomes frenzied, the rush to pick and dry and can and freeze the cherries a kind of madness. They have four kinds of cherries, and when Luke was young, each family member was assigned to collect one with a mechanical harvester. Luke’s father took the large, juicy Balatons. Because Luke was the youngest, he and his mother paired up to pick the Montmorency cherries, with their translucent yellow flesh. Luke’s older brother harvested the sweet cherries, firm and black and most precious of all.
Varya finds herself drifting as he speaks. She sees the cherries, their yellow and black and red, with the soft focus of a dream. He uses his phone to show her a photo of his family. It’s early fall, the trees a fuzz of mustard and sage. Luke’s parents have his thick blond hair, though theirs is lighter than Luke’s. His brother—“Asher,” he says—is a young teen, his face pimpled but grinning openly, his hands on Luke’s shoulders. Luke can’t be more than six. His shoulders rise into Asher’s hands, and his smile is so wide it’s nearly a grimace.
“What about you?” he asks, putting the phone back in his pocket. “What’s your family like?”
“My older brother was a doctor, as I mentioned. My younger brother was a dancer. And my sister was a magician.”
“No shit. With a black hat and a rabbit?”
“Neither.” Around them, the lighting is dim, so Varya can’t pick out things to worry her. “She was fantastic with cards, and she was a mentalist—her partner would pick an item from the audience, a hat or a wallet, and she would guess it without verbal cues, blindfolded and facing the wall.”
“What are they doing now?” asks Luke, and she startles. He watches her. “I’m sorry. It’s just that you used the past tense. I thought they must have—”
“Retired?” asks Varya, and shakes her head. “No. They’re gone.” She doesn’t know what makes her say what she does next; perhaps it’s that Luke is leaving, and there is something that feels so unusual, so relieving, about sharing with another person these things she’s only told a therapist. “My youngest brother died of AIDS; he was twenty. My sister—took her life. Looking back, I’ve wondered if she was bipolar or schizophrenic, not that there’s anything I can do about it now.” She finishes her glass and pours another; she rarely drinks, and the wine makes her feel lazy, dulled, open. “Daniel got caught up in something he shouldn’t have. He was shot.”
Luke is quiet, gazing at her, and for a ridiculous moment she fears he will reach out and squeeze her hand. But he doesn’t—why would he?—and she exhales.
“I’m so sorry,” he says. “Is that why you do the work you do?” She does not answer, and he pushes on, hesitantly at first and then with deliberateness. “The medications we have now—well, they would have saved your brother’s life, if they’d been available back then. And genetic testing could make it possible to detect an individual’s risk of mental illness, even to diagnose them. That might have saved Klara, right?”
“What is your article about?” Varya asks. “My work, or me?”
She tries to keep her voice light. Inside her is a vein of fear, though she isn’t sure why.
“It’s difficult to separate the two, isn’t it?” When Luke leans forward, his eyes loom, and something deep in Varya lurches. She realizes it now, what frightened her: she never told him Klara’s name.
“I should leave,” she mumbles, pressing her hands to the table to stand. Immediately the floor seesaws upward, the walls sway, and she sits—she falls—down again.
“Don’t,” says Luke, and now he does place his hand on hers.
A bubble of panic climbs her throat and bursts. “Please don’t touch me,” she says, and Luke lets go. His face is sorrowful; he finds her pathetic, and this is more than she can tolerate. She stands again and this time is successful.
“You shouldn’t drive,” Luke says, standing, too. She sees panic in his face, the same panic she feels, and this alarms her even more. “Please—I’m sorry.”
She fumbles with her wallet, drawing out a thin stack of twenties, which she deposits on the table. “I’m fine.”
“Let me drive you,” he presses as she makes her way to the door. “Where do you live?”
“Where do I live?” she hisses, and Luke drops back; even in the dark of the bar she can see him redden. “What’s wrong with you?” and she is now at the door, she is outside of it. After checking behind to make sure Luke is not following her, she sees her car and runs.
33.
She wakes on Saturday to a crunch of pain in the center of her back and a hammer in her skull. Her clothes are wet with sweat and stink. She kicked off her shoes in the night, and her sweater as well, but her blouse sticks to her stomach and her socks are so damp that when she peels them off they drop heavily to the floor of the car. She sits up in the backseat. Outside, it is morning, and Grant Street is thick with rain.
She brings the heels of her hands to her eyes. She remembers the wine bar, Luke’s face coming toward her, his voice low but insistent—It’s difficult to separate the two, isn’t it?—and his hand on hers, which was hot. She remembers running to the car, and curling in the backseat like a child.
She is starving. She crawls from the backseat to the front and scrabbles around in the passenger seat for yesterday’s leftovers. The apples have turned spongy and brown, but she eats them anyway, as well as the warm, puckered grapes. She avoids the car mirror but catches sight of herself, accidentally, in the passenger side window—her hair like Einstein’s, her mouth drooping open—before she looks away and finds her keys.
At her condo, she strips off her clothes, depositing everything directly in the washing machine, and showers for so long the water turns cool. She pulls on her bathrobe—pink and ridiculously fluffy, a gift from Gertie, something Varya never would have bought for herself—and takes as much Advil as she thinks her body can stand. Then she climbs into bed and sleeps again.
• • •
It’s mid-afternoon when she wakes up. Now that she is no longer purely exhausted, she feels a bolt of panic and knows she cannot spend the rest of the day at home. She dresses quickly. Her face is pale and birdlike and her silver hair sticks up in tufts. She wets her hands and smooths it down, then wonders why: the only people at the lab on Saturdays are the animal techs, and anyway, Varya will put a hair cover on as soon as she arrives. She doesn’t usually eat lunch, but today she grabs another baggie from the refrigerator and eats the hardboiled eggs as she drives.
As soon as she enters the lab, she feels calmer. She pulls on her scrubs and walks into the vivarium.
She wants to check on the monkeys. It still makes her nervous to be close to them, but she is sometimes beset by the fear that something will happen to them while she is gone. Nothing has, of course. Josie uses her mirror to look at the doorway and, when she sees Varya, lets the mirror drop. The infants skitter anxiously in their communal enclosure. Gus sits in the back of his cage. But the last cage—Frida’s cage—is empty.
“Frida?” Varya asks, absurdly; there is no proof that the monkeys understand their names, and yet she says it again. She leaves the vivarium and walks down the hallway, calling, until an animal technic
ian named Johanna steps out of the kitchen.
“She’s in isolation,” Johanna says.
“Why?”
“She was plucking,” says Johanna, rapidly. “I thought, in isolation, she might—”
But she does not finish, because Varya has already turned around.
• • •
The second floor of the lab is a square. Varya and Annie’s office is on the western side, the vivarium north. The kitchen is south, along with the procedure rooms, and the isolation chamber—as well as the janitor’s closet and the laundry room—is east. At six feet wide by eight tall, the isolation chamber is actually bigger than the monkeys’ normal cages. But it is devoid of enrichment, a place where disobedient animals are sent to be punished. Of course, there is nothing threatening about it, nothing overtly frightening. There is merely nothing interesting about it, either: it is a stainless steel cage with a small, square door for entry, which locks from the outside. It’s equipped with a food box and a water bottle. There are four inches between the floor and the bottom of the chamber, which has been drilled with holes to allow urine and waste to drop into a retractable pan.
“Frida,” says Varya. She looks into the chamber, the same place she brought Frida on the night of her arrival, when the monkey was only days old.
Now Frida faces the rear of the cage and rocks in place, hunching. Her back is bald in fist-sized areas where she pulled the hair out. Six months ago, she stopped grooming what fur she has, and the other animals keep away, sensing her weakness, repelled by it. She sits in a thin layer of rust-colored urine that has not yet drained into the pan.
The Immortalists Page 28
