NO.
Her eyes flashed to the camera. She was clearly working hard to suppress a grin.
“Yes,” she said emphatically. “Sam. Please make the window open.”
YOU—
Isabel cut him off. “Sam, please open the window.”
YES.
Isabel sighed with visible relief, but Sam did nothing. He sat sullenly, scanning the people around him, worrying his toes with his fingers, and finally averting his gaze.
“Sam, please open the window,” she said again.
SAM WANT JUICE.
“No. Isabel wants Sam to open the window.”
NO. SAM WANT ISABEL MAKE WINDOW OPEN.
At this, Isabel burst out laughing, and Sam got his juice and egg. The camera crew was thrilled by this exchange, but after they left, Peter turned to Isabel in a rage.
“Every other day he opens the damned window. This time, with a national television crew here, he can’t open the window? And you rewarded him?”
Isabel had never seen this side of Peter and was startled. “Of course I rewarded him. He disagreed and argued his own point. If anything, that is an even more valid demonstration of using and understanding language than following orders. Not to mention that it proves definitively that he’s not simply trained.”
Peter’s eyes were hard, his jaw set. “I told them he would perform specific tasks.”
“He chose not to. He did nothing wrong. In fact, I think he was brilliant and I think we’re extremely lucky this was captured on film.”
Peter put his hands on his hips and exhaled so hard his cheeks puffed out. Then he ran a hand through his hair. His face softened. “You’re right. I’m sorry. You’re right. Look, I’m going to take a little walk, okay? Sort myself out. Back in a bit.”
Isabel’s memory lingered on this flash of temper. It was the only time she’d seen it, but now, combined with the curious comments from Gary and Rose, it made her wonder exactly what Peter had done during his time in Rockwell. The Primate Studies Institute had a terrible reputation—the owner was an imposing man with a salt-and-pepper beard known to subdue chimps with cattle prods and even a shotgun. But several leading primatologists had put in time at PSI as grad students, largely because there were very few programs in the country that provided access to primates. Most came out vowing that PSI had taught them how not to do things. This had always been Peter’s line.
Isabel booted up her laptop and searched the Internet. His dissertation came up immediately: “Why Apes Don’t Ape: How Motor Patterns and Working Memory Constrain Chimpanzee Social Learning,” as did another article that had gotten him national recognition: “Cooperation or Joint Action: What Is Behind Chimpanzee Hunting and Coalitionary Behavior?” There were no surprises here—Peter’s cognitive studies had been the primary reason Richard Hughes had hired him. There was certainly nothing to warrant Rose’s comment.
Isabel called Celia.
“Glad to hear you’re alive,” said Celia. “Have you eaten?”
“I need a favor.”
“You didn’t answer.”
“Celia, please.”
“Okay. What?”
“You said at one point that Joel and Jawad can access private networks.”
“Yes. And you were pretty horrified, if I remember correctly.”
“Yes, well.” Isabel cleared her throat. “Can you see what they can dig up about Peter, and what he was doing when he first went to PSI?”
“That’s quite a turnaround.”
“Please, Celia?”
“Okay.” Celia sounded nonplussed. “I’ll call you back.”
Forty minutes later, she did. “Check your email,” she said without salutation.
“Why? What did they find?”
“Please. Just check your email.” Celia’s voice was shaking.
Isabel’s inbox was full: Joel had forwarded dozens of articles, abstracts, and briefs from Peter’s days as a research assistant. He had participated in studies on the effects of maternal deprivation in chimpanzees, and, later, stress caused by immobilization. He had removed infants from their mothers at birth and placed them in cages with either a wire or a terry-cloth “mother” and clocked the differences in how long it took each group to die. He had placed chimpanzees in wooden chairs with their heads, hands, feet, and chest restrained, and had kept them there for weeks at a time, all to come to the stunning conclusion that this resulted in increased stress.
Isabel stared at images of chimpanzees strapped upright with a sickening sense of déjà vu. She knew these pictures. They were the same ones Gary and company had waved on sticks. The arrival of the protesters the year before suddenly made sense—it coincided with when Peter was hired.
Peter had always glossed over his time in Rockwell, dismissing his studies as noninvasive. She supposed that technically they were noninvasive—as long as all you meant by that was not drilling bolts into apes’ brains or removing pieces of their internal organs. He had been sterner with the bonobos than the other researchers at the language lab, but she had always thought it was an alpha-male thing. And then she was hit by a wall of guilt, because it was this very quality she had found attractive.
She had fallen in love with a kidnapper, torturer, and murderer. She had opened herself up to him, made love with him, had been preparing to share her life with him, even to bear his children. He had told her what he wanted her to believe about his work, and naïvely, she’d believed it.
No wonder some chimp had taken off most of his finger. Isabel wished it had taken off his testicles instead.
——
That night she had vivid dreams: of Bonzi clipping her nails while Lola climbed all over her head. Of Makena wearing an inside-out blouse and gazing at herself in a mirror, alternately applying and nibbling lipstick. Of Jelani picking up branches and displaying in fearsome style, waving them over his head and staggering bipedally, then suddenly growing introspective. He came to Isabel on all fours, picked up her foot, and quietly unlaced her shoe. He removed it, and then her sock. His big hands, with their callused knuckles and hairy fingers, held her foot as he worked deftly, and oh-so-gently, searching between her toes for invisible nits.
In a flash she was in the other building. Men in hazmat suits marched down the concrete hall under glaring fluorescent lights, leaving a trail of screaming primates behind them. One pushed a gurney; another held a gun. When they slowed their pace the screams became even more deafening. They came to a stop in front of a cage, and the female inside realized they had come for her. She flew from side to side, trying to climb the walls, to find some way of escaping, but she had no chance. The man with the gun leveled it at her and shot her in the thigh. The men waited, chatting, while she staggered and fought the loss of consciousness. They continued chatting as they loaded the ape onto the gurney and secured her hands and feet with thick rubber straps. Several of her fingers and toes were chewed to nubs.
Isabel woke screaming. Her sheets were slick and cold with sweat, her heart pounding.
The next morning, she rose and solemnly turned all the framed pictures of the bonobos facedown. From a distance the downturned frames looked like a row of shark fins. She began sleeping on the couch under an afghan her grandmother had made.
She worked her way through the last of the food, eating peaches from the can, lime chutney from the jar. She ripped packages of ramen noodles open, set aside the seasonings, and broke off strips of long, uncooked noodles, which she crunched between her temporary teeth. When she ran out of all other options, she microwaved mugs of water and made broth from the seasoning packets.
She was pondering the tiny bottle of colorful flakes that had been the defunct Stuart’s staple when there was a great pounding next door. Isabel jumped—red, yellow, and orange flakes flew everywhere, drifting on the air currents like snow.
“Jerry? Jerry! Open the damned door!” shouted her neighbor’s lover. “I know you’re in there! Jerry!”
Isabel dropped her head back and let her j
aw drop. She then melted against the wall until she reached the floor. Stuart’s food was scattered like confetti on the carpet.
Had she really been considering it as soup base?
——
Isabel finally accepted that she had to go buy food. She showered first, because she hadn’t been dressed since her excursion to Alamogordo. Just before she stepped into the running water, she caught sight of herself in the mirror and stood back to survey herself.
She was gaunt, her face hollow and shadowed, her hip bones sticking out like the blades of a plow. The lines between her nose and mouth had deepened, and, of course, she still had virtually no hair. She raised a hand tentatively, tenderly, to her new nose and her delicately bristled scalp, and then stepped into the steaming water.
On a whim, Isabel took a right instead of a left on her way back from the supermarket. Her food was in the back, most of it frozen and actively melting, but she suddenly, desperately, needed a new Stuart. She needed something alive in her apartment, something she could feed, something that would look back at her.
She was nearly at the mall when something flashed in her peripheral vision. It was a digital billboard, its picture changing every few seconds.
A portion of a familiar black face (Was that Makena?) blended into a profile (Dear God, was that Bonzi? BONZI! Yes! She was sure!), and then two dark hairy hands clasped together.
The car beside her honked in panic as Isabel swerved into its lane. She yanked the wheel back and rammed the guardrail. Her side panels crunched rhythmically for the length of a few rails before the rear spun out. When she came to a stop, the chassis still bouncing and the engine ticking, she was facing a long line of cars with startled drivers. Several of them were already reaching for their cell phones.
I’m fine, she gestured with her hands. Everything’s okay.
She held up her cell phone and pointed to it to indicate that she was calling for help herself.
——
As she waited for the tow truck, she studied the billboard. It was cycling pictures of the bonobos, but otherwise displayed only a date, time, and what appeared to be the address of a Web site: www.apehouse.tv.
Isabel had heard of dot coms, dot orgs, and dot nets, but dot tv?
When she arrived home she immediately turned on her computer and entered the address: the Web site turned out to be identical to the billboards, except that it had a clock ticking down toward the date and time, which was just a week away. Isabel studied the pictures of the bonobos carefully—they seemed to be in decent physical condition, but the stark white background offered no clues as to where they were or how they were being housed. Mbongo was displaying a stress grin, but at least Bonzi was holding Lola.
She called Celia, who consulted with Joel and Jawad, who traced ownership of the URL back to the corporate headquarters of Faulks Enterprises. From there, she didn’t know what to expect. Faulks was apparently a pornographer. Isabel knew the sexual habits of the bonobos better than anyone, and wondered with increasing alarm how Faulks might intend to incorporate their behavior into his oeuvre. Information regarding the project appeared to be carefully guarded, but the “mystery meat” campaign was pervasive—viral, even—not only on billboards, but on television commercials and automatically generated Internet ads that clicked through to the same mysterious site. Animal activist boards were overrun with speculation about where the bonobos were and what Faulks was up to. No one had proof of anything, and since the information posted on such sites was dubious at best and the date on the official billboards, advertisements, and Web site was only a week away, Isabel decided to wait. Although the radicals had already mobilized, Isabel saw no point in wasting valuable resources on a false alarm.
The moment she had seen the billboard, her entire core hardened with resolve. Where she had been weak, now she was strong. Somehow, some way, she and the bonobos would be reunited.
16
James Hamish Watson just wanted the screaming to stop.
He’d been driving a forklift for thirty-some years and had never felt so desperate before. All he wanted to do was park and climb off.
The way his brother-in-law had described it, it was supposed to be a simple and fast job, damned close to a free lunch. All he had to do was lift a steel cage off a truck, drive it into a house, leave it there, and collect a day’s wages. But when he’d done the required dry run (which he’d thought stupid at the time, but Ray had advised him not to argue with the boss man), there were no protesters to push past, no apes in the cage.
It was the apes that were giving him grief, not the protesters. He discovered that if you were willing to run over a few feet, protesters would get out of the way. But the apes shrieked and screamed, hurling themselves from one side of the cage to the other, clinging to the bars until the whole cage teetered dangerously on his pallet forks. He tried to right it with the side-to-side, but he grabbed the tilt lever by mistake. In thirty-two years, that was a first.
After nearly tipping the cage off the forks, he simply lowered the teeming, screeching mess to the floor. It was nowhere near flush with the wall and he knew he’d catch hell for that, but his head didn’t feel right and he wanted to go home. He’d pshawed his wife’s concerns about the job, but now he thought she was right—they might only be animals, but this was the Devil’s work and he was sorry he’d gotten involved.
He studied the cage and its occupants with something akin to panic and inhaled sharply. Thin purple veins snaked around the base of his nose, anchoring it to his ruddy face like the knotty roots of a banyan. Sweat seeped between his frown lines, stinging his eyes.
Enough. He was finished.
He pivoted to face the door, cranked into gear, and jolted tank-like across the empty room. He paused in front of the open door and the swath of moving color that was the outside world, gritted his teeth, maneuvered through it, and was immediately sucked into the vortex of angry shouts, jabbing placards, bobbing television cameras, and blinding flashbulbs.
As the forklift exited, someone waiting in the anteroom pushed the door shut behind it.
The slam resonated through the house before warbling off into silence. A second slam marked the closure of the outside door.
Within the house, dozens of cameras affixed to junctures of ceiling and wall sprang to life, blinking red and swiveling silently.
——
Isabel sat rapt, watching the clock on the Web site as it ran down through the final seconds. When the counter reached zero, a message flashed, instructing people to turn their televisions to a specific station.
Isabel knocked her chair over in her rush to get to the TV. She fumbled with the controller, hitting the wrong combination of numbers twice before finally landing on the right channel.
She found herself looking at a vivid splash screen of a house that was meant to look like it was drawn by a child—squiggly primary-colored crayon marks that formed a square structure with peaked roof, four windows, door, and chimney. A minivan bounced and chugged up to the house, and six smiling apes hopped out. They jumped up and down, scratching their heads and armpits, while an obviously human voice hooted, “Hoo hoo hoo haa haa haaaa!!” The cartoon apes went inside and closed the door with such vigor the whole house shook. Moments later, smoke billowed from the chimney and apes waved at the windows before yanking the gingham curtains shut.
“Welcome to Ape House,” boomed an exaggerated baritone voice, “where the apes are in charge and you never know what’s coming up next! Fifty-nine cameras! Six apes! One computer, and unlimited credit! And unlimited … Well, you know what they say about bonobos”—the voice paused long enough for the double-squonk of an old-time bicycle horn—“or do you? Find out what our ‘Kissin’ Cousins’ get up to next, right here, on Ape House!”
The cartoon house disappeared in a poof of cartoon smoke, and suddenly there they were, the real apes, huddled together in the corner of a steel cage, a hairy black mass of long arms, long fingers, and even longer toes.
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Isabel was breathless, kneeling on the floor with fingers pressed against the edges of the screen. Her stomach turned somersaults, contracting around a nugget of ice. She tried to count, to make sure they were all there, but it was impossible to tell where one ended and the next began.
The “Morning Mood” theme from Peer Gynt began, implying that the bonobos were about to wake from a peaceful slumber.
——
The bonobos clung together in silence. A lone peep rang out, followed by a series of high-pitched squeaks, which bounced off the empty walls. Bonzi extracted her callused and dark-knuckled hand from the mound to pat reassurance. She raised her head and met Sam’s worried eyes, which darted from blinking camera to blinking camera, taking it all in.
A rasping buzzer preceded a definitive metal thunk. The apes shrieked and once again receded into themselves. The door of the cage began to rise, powered by hydraulic pistons, and came to rest in a groove at the top.
Once again, silence filled the building’s interior.
For a long time, the only signs of life from the ape heap were the rise and fall of rib cages and occasional outbursts of primate distress. Finally, Sam and Bonzi extracted themselves. The others screamed and reached for them, trying to pull them back, but they patiently peeled fingers and toes from their hairy limbs. Bonzi handed Lola to Makena, paused to examine the pistons beside the cage door, and—after a moment’s consideration—slowly, slowly ambled forth on her knuckles. Sam stood guard by a piston and watched, his face the picture of attentive concentration.
Bonzi made her way to the center of the room and pivoted, taking everything in. Lola and Makena hovered near the exit of the cage, wanting to be near her, but not enough to trust the pistons. They yipped high-pitched warnings.
Bonzi went to the front door and sniffed it, touched it, ran her fingers along the seal at the bottom. She looked through the peephole (which happened to be at ape height), and scrunched up her face. She tasted the doorknob. She turned the deadbolt this way and that with both hands, and then lay on her back and tried it with her feet. She toured the perimeter of the room, which was empty but for the cage.
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