A Beautiful Truth

by Colin McAdam

  They heard a hoot from Looee’s house, who’d seen Larry’s headlights coming along the drive.

  I bet he’ll want to see you she said.

  They opened the door in the dining room which led to Looee’s corridor. Judy had even hung wreaths in the passage and there was cedar in the air.

  Larry smiled to himself as he always did, hearing Looee’s impassioned calls. By now, like Walt and Judy, he had relinquished all pretense in himself of being much more than a talking animal. He was open to error and confusion and had called his elderly brother and said I forgive you, having spoken of it with no one for more than thirty years.

  When Judy said we’re coming and pushed the bolted door, Looee jumped back and hopped a small hop, two hundred pounds and barefoot on concrete. Larry and Looee clasped hands and men’s thick thumbs, and Looee smelled the fresh whiskey on their breath.

  Judy said it stinks in here and she wedged the door wide open.

  We’re having some people over for a Christmas party Looee, remember I told you yesterday. You’ve got to stay in your house and we’ll have our real Christmas in a week.

  Looee looked over their shoulders and saw the unusual light in the dining room.

  I lit candles said Judy. It’s nothing to be afraid of.

  There was the warmth of alcohol on their breaths, the warmth of the distant light—and Looee felt immediately removed from both. Concrete at his feet and at his back. Larry and Judy had gathered affection as they had walked to Looee’s door, and Looee mistakenly sensed it as affection for each other rather than for him. Judy didn’t notice when he made his quizzical noise.

  I shouldn’t leave the candles burning she said. She touched Larry’s arm and said will you come and help me for a second.

  Looee watched them leave and pull the steel door behind them. He didn’t trust their movements tonight and didn’t understand why Larry wasn’t staying longer. He stared at the door and listened. He couldn’t hear them walking away or talking and thought they were just outside his door. Hiding and whispering secrets. He banged on the door but they wouldn’t open it. He banged again and got angry.

  Larry helped Judy open a jar of pickled onions in the kitchen. I think I’m getting arthritis she said.

  Larry poured himself a drink and Judy said Walt should be here soon. I’ll keep an eye on things here. You go bring a beer to Looee if you want and I’ll send Walt out. Everyone’s coming at seven.

  As Larry approached Looee’s door he heard screams and felt Looee hit the door.

  I’m coming in buddy. It’s me. I’m coming in.

  Looee was still screaming and Larry tentatively opened the door. He looked in and Looee was in full display. His hair was all on end. He looked gigantic. From side to side he swayed and he pushed his TV on its casters around the room and into the wall beside Larry.

  Calm down buddy. Did I scare you. I brought you a beer. Look. Everything’s all right.

  Looee screamed and walked away and sat with his back to the wall without looking at him.

  Larry figured he had probably felt neglected. I was just helping her open a jar he said. Here.

  He wedged the door wide open as he had seen Judy do.

  Looee saw the hallway and dining room again. His anger seemed to be subsiding and Larry gave him his beer. They sat with their backs to the wall and looked down the hall at the candlelight and gold and silver stars, a spangled and flickering drama beyond his reach or ken.

  It’s a time of peace said Larry. No sense screaming and breaking your TV.

  Larry explained that guests were coming over and they were going to have drinks and dinner. Looee heard Susan’s name among them.

  He found everything strange tonight.

  They drank. Looee wasn’t looking at Larry, and Larry wasn’t comfortable sitting close to him. There was a prickliness to Looee, and it felt like they were staring forward like rivals at a bar.

  Looee was trying to understand why the door was still open. He thought Susan might come in.

  They heard kitchen cupboards closing and they both listened for cars.

  Looee finished his beer and made a noise. He crushed the can and got up and looked down the hallway and back over his shoulder at Larry to see if he was watching. Looee sat and would only glance at him.

  You’re not in a great mood tonight are you.

  Larry seemed equally confrontational to Looee. He looked at the open door and was all the more confused.

  Larry felt he had spent enough time visiting the kid’s room. He got up to leave and Looee got up with him. He wanted to wait for Susan in the living room.

  All right buddy, I guess I’ll say goodnight.

  Larry tried to leave but Looee jumped at him and pulled him by the arm.

  Walt saw Larry’s car when he pulled up.

  He knocked the snow off his boots and missed the greeting of Murphy who had died in his sleep in the summer.

  The house was quiet and he called for Larry and Judy. Candles were blowing in a draft in the dining room and he could see that the door to Looee’s house was open.

  He walked down the corridor and called for the three of them. Larry was face down in the middle of Looee’s house. His right arm was resting impossibly across the back of his head. One of his buttocks was missing and was lying nearby under a scalp of bloodied trouser.

  Walt found Judy behind the couch in the living room. She was missing a hand and her face was split open from temple to jaw. She was moaning sounds so lonely.

  Walt heard those moans for weeks. They came from the spans of iron bridges and contractions of the city. The hospital in Burlington was built on a bruise and if you put your ear to the cracks in the pavement or the fold of any curb, you could hear those hopeless sounds.

  They say that some of it will heal.

  In Burlington the streets were salted and plowed and Walt bought doughnuts, the only food he could eat for a month. He bought them from the same place and always looked across the street at a jewellery store before he got into his car.

  Looee had been sitting in a corner of the living room, his eyes slow-blinking and brown. As the ambulance raced towards them through a horizontal snowstorm, Walt chased Looee the two of them screaming into a corner of Looee’s house where Looee cowered and hugged himself. Walt had his rifle and aimed it at Looee while the paramedics took Larry out of the room. Larry remembered nothing. Walt couldn’t imagine the creature that was taken away. Tranquilizers and game wardens. Was he screaming or muttering his own weird story, that animal they found.

  Walt looked at the jewellery store and back through the window of the doughnut shop and saw people eating.

  These are the hard questions.

  Why can’t a man turn his back on his son, and what does it mean to be animated meat on these streets of boutiques and spilled oil.

  twenty-six

  Mike got a call from the chief warden at Fish and Game. There had been an attack, two people were maimed, and the chimpanzee was in a cage.

  He’s pretty wild and we’ll probably put him down.

  Mike called Dr. Heinz at the Girdish Institute, who was more forthcoming than the first time they spoke. Ninety-seven percent of our apes are involved in biomedical procedures. Senator, if you allow us to come and get him you will be helping our research immensely. People will benefit.

  For those who walk this earth, Mike thought, liberation and punishment are inseparable.

  You will not be setting him free. I will be honest with you. A chimpanzee like that has no place now—not in the wild. But I can assure you that our work has led to countless medical breakthroughs.

  Mike thought of Judy being disfigured. The frigid swollen back of Cindy and crouching over the face of beauty. Will illness ever be cured.

  He made arrangements with Fish and Game.

  Girdish sent a horse trailer which returned to Florida in four days.

  Looee felt sharp and regular fists of tranquilizers and PCP.

  A long road
burned beneath him.

  There was a smell of vomit when they opened the trailer.

  twenty-seven

  Looee’s right hand is heavy but weightless. The big black boat could float among the bubbles. He can’t lift his hand but it rises like a balloon.

  Mummy sang a song.

  Looee doesn’t trust his hand. He wakes up and it is pulling off the nails of his other hand and won’t let him scream.

  There’s a paint we invented, the colour of sperm: we put it on concrete walls and it’s lit by its own smeared fluorescence. There’s mould from the Florida heat and the sophisticated nose thinks of Roquefort or something dustier—black ash on chèvre—and a storyteller could conjure from that smell a world of corrupt gentility, a tale of the South of hot gothic moons and florid mildew that puffs up from sheets beneath the bodies of doomed lovers.

  CH 488, known as Dusty, is on all fours spraying the wall behind his cage with diarrhea.

  Looee is ignoring his hand. He wants to move away from it.

  Dusty feels dizzy and collapses.

  Looee’s hand helps him make a circle. Four sticks of monkey chow. He thinks about eating the circle. He forgets again whose hand that is.

  The CID Wing is otherwise clean.

  Looee’s name is Lonee now.

  Some of Lonee’s fingernails are growing back. He needs his right hand to scratch himself. He wants it to scratch his chest and it does.

  The scratch feels good. He remembers the swollen itch of summer evenings and someone scratching his mosquito bites. He listens to the sound of scratching and looks down at his chest to see the skin flaking off beneath his fingers. Blood is sticky and he thinks of maple syrup.

  Lonee stares at his hand.

  Some of the old anger is returning.

  He looks away from his hand to make it think he isn’t there. He will attack it before it attacks him. He bangs his knuckles against the bars and they swell.

  You stick a fork into sausages before you put them on the barbecue, Looee.

  Lonee feels pain now in his hand and is confused. He is sitting in a back corner of his cage.

  There is a tire suspended horizontally by ropes above his forehead.

  Rosie, in the cage next to Lonee’s, is sleeping in her tire as though it were a hammock.

  Rosie likes the look of Lonee and can’t touch him, and while she sleeps her teeth are eating themselves.

  Yesterday, Rosie, a thirty-year-old chimpanzee, was knocked down and wheeled to the anteroom where 1 mL of HIV virus stock was applied directly to her vaginal mucosa with a cotton-tipped swab.

  Lonee has begun to keen and is craving spaghetti with meatsauce.

  The Florida heat enlivens all the other smells of the wing and the smells become tastes and the tastes swell to sounds, the sharp brassband of monkey chow licked, neglected or egested by ten bewildered chimpanzees, blow Dixie, there’s the underarm tang of terror to taste before you blast your trumpet in the face of those who innocently crave salvation: there is such a thing as angels, there is.

  Caregiver Martha says the smell is like hazelnuts that went sour or something, but boom does it ever hit you in the face some days.

  Lonee is keening and staring at his right hand, which is resting on the floor of his cage. He begins to sway as his anger grows. He is sitting and his body is rocking and the hoots are building in his chest but they stop. He won’t attack his hand.

  The vet gave him clomipramine.

  Steady, big Lonee.

  The CID Wing is fifty feet long and bright as a gas station’s bathroom.

  It has emerged that bodies are the products of four Roman letters, G-A-T-C, and the alphabet and numbers also dictate death. ARV-2. LAV-1. SF2. HIV.

  Lonee’s body is currently leased by a pharmaceutical company in France named Pastora, determined to find a vaccine to prevent AIDS.

  The lights go off on a timer.

  Lonee floats like his hand.

  He will steal a key and break out.

  The ten chimpanzees all have their own cage, five by five by seven feet tall, fixed to a wall and suspended two feet above the ground. Five are on one side and five on the other and their cages are two feet apart. Lonee’s feet haven’t touched the ground in five years.

  A new caregiver named Martin arrived at Girdish last week and today he was asked to do a simple walkthrough and tag. He stands at the anteroom door and looks through the window. When CH 563 (Spud) sees Martin’s face he raises the alarm and the wing fills with the hoots that say a stranger is coming. Spud doesn’t remember Martin’s face.

  Martin pulls the hood of his Tyvek suit over his head and the mask over his mouth. He puts the face shield on and a third layer of latex gloves and remembers the look on Lisa’s face when he told her the chimps might have AIDS. Seven months is the longest he’s had a girlfriend.

  Martin waits for the labtech, Frank, to dress out, and they open the door and walk. Frank told Martin not to let them know you’re afraid.

  Martin walks tall behind Frank.

  Spud spits on Martin’s head and so do Pepper and Nathan. The closest sounds to Martin are of liquid slapping Tyvek but the sound that puts his hair on end is of the ten in unified hostility, reminding the concrete that it wasn’t always there and may not always stand.

  Accurate Mac fills his hand and flings a mouth-sized piece of shit directly at Martin’s face shield. Martin gags and sees that Frank is getting hit by none of it.

  Saliva seeps under his hood and he starts to panic and puts his hand on Frank’s lower back to hurry him along. Another piece of shit hits the side of his hood near his ear and he thinks he can feel it on his face.

  When they are back in the anteroom Martin removes his face shield and a string of saliva hangs from it like egg white and swings towards his nose.

  Frank notes in the log that Dusty is looking promisingly ill and that the superinfection is working, and Martin quits that evening.

  Lonee and the others take a while to settle down like a crowd watching a detested fighter leave the ring. They want more blood but never want to see him again and don’t know what to do with themselves.

  Pepper is spinning in circles and screaming and Nathan, in the cage next door, is screaming to calm her down.

  Lonee has his hands on the bars at the front of his cage and is looking up and down the room. His cage is the third on his side. He can see the five across the room. He has never had a good look at Spud or Jeannie on his side of the wing, except when they are wheeled in front of him unconscious on the table.

  To his right is a droop-lipped old lady named Rosie who has been in a cage for thirteen years. Lonee misses the long bald grace of the women in magazines and their eyes like living candy. Some of the caregivers pull their Tyvek suits back over their arms and let him touch their skin through the bars.

  In the midst of his fear and revulsion, Martin forgot to tag the cage of Mac. This means Mac is fed his meal of chow and he will inhale his vomit when under anaesthetic.

  Lonee would still prefer to eat with a knife and fork.

  There is a storm of brown and white and black when Mac is darted and Lonee and Pepper keen through it. Everyone screams when Mac is wheeled past, and when the procedure fails and Mac is resuscitated he is wheeled back through and placed on his side so vomit can hang safely from his mouth. Dr. Meijer keeps an eye on him and when he is there most of them stay calm. Some of them suck their lips with the expectation of treats.

  The vet watches Mac sit up, fall over, and move himself on shaking arms till he falls face forward and sleeps. Saliva pours from his mouth and he rolls on his back. Mac’s big lips are relaxed across his ridiculous mouth and his body is spread-eagle, gigantic, submissive, come sun, come women, come bring me your best and worst. The ketamine makes Mac hallucinate and Dr. Meijer wants the bite of vodka to clean the work of blood and breath and will go to his drawer as soon as Mac seems safe.

  Lonee is asleep and awakens in the dark. He stares at the handl
e of the anteroom door, reflecting a light in the room that Lonee can’t find. He thinks of Judy’s bracelet.

  Time is no more contained in a clock than a body is in a cage.

  Seven years earlier Lonee was Looee and he woke up with a shaved and tattooed chest, CH 447. He jumped and banged his head on the roof of a cage and was shuttled in transfer boxes from one cage to another with his history preceding him as the one who attacked the people in Vermont.

  A labtech who loved drugs gave him diazepam when he arrived and he was lifted an inch above life. For a week he was given enough diazepam to maintain a joyless suburb, his memories and awareness suspended.

  Judy had put a thin bracelet on him the year before and it was overlooked when he was admitted and tattooed. He stared at its silver and memories almost came to his eyes but his eyes were too relaxed and all they took in was the silver.

  He was anaesthetized repeatedly, kept in a metcage that squeezed him forward till he was trapped and easily injected. His first long-term cage was made from the same grating used on sidewalks to vent the New York subway—its gaps were narrow and the metal was deep so his view from within was limited to whatever was directly in front of him.

  He had never seen chimpanzees before. He was put in the darkest wing in Girdish which was nicknamed Congo. It was a long, yellow-lit corridor with fifteen chimpanzees and, at the end, a group of small stacked cages for macaques.

  The apes and monkeys in Congo were transitionally used. Many of the chimpanzees were juveniles who had been born and raised in the nursery at Girdish. They were destined to be part of longer-term studies but were kept in Congo until their futures were determined.

  Looee spent more than a year in Congo and was used intermittently for rhinovirus studies, mostly for drugs that were meant to cure the common cold. He was now owned by Girdish but was leased that year by divisions of Monroe Pharmaceuticals.

  The protocols for these studies required clean chimpanzees, so the vet of Congo made sure they were drug-free. When the diazepam stopped, Looee became more aware of his surroundings and expected Walt and Judy to get him soon. Each time a labtech approached his cage he was friendly and held out a hand or hugged himself to say sorry.