Sara Gruen

by Ape House (v5)

John had no idea where he was going. He headed toward the Santa Monica Freeway with the vague notion of streaming down it until his fury dissipated, but traffic was jammed from the moment he got on the entrance ramp. By then, he was already committed. He had no choice now but to bake in the smog and creep along toward the next exit.

  The Weekly Times was the rag that people surreptitiously thumbed through while their groceries crawled along the belt in the checkout lane. John tried to remember if he’d ever seen anyone openly reading it—occasionally in an airport or a hotel, cloaked by anonymity. Maybe at the dentist’s, but even then it was only because the alternatives were Forbes or Golf Illustrated.

  If he worked for them, that would be the end of his credibility as a reporter. That, or he’d have to fake a hole in his résumé when and if they left L.A., which would be almost as bad as admitting he’d been with the Weekly Times.

  John blinked rapidly, bringing himself back into the moment. The cars began moving again, requiring him to shift from first gear to second to first again, keeping one foot poised over the clutch. He rolled up the window and turned on the air-conditioning.

  His cell phone buzzed against his thigh. He dug it out and flipped it open. Amanda had sent a text:

  U THR?

  John held his phone up above the steering wheel so he could see the traffic beyond and thumb-typed: NO.

  He snapped the phone shut and tossed it onto the passenger seat. He turned his gaze back to the highway, although the traffic wasn’t moving. He focused on the thin wisp of blue exhaust coming from the tailpipe of the convertible in front of him.

  The phone buzzed again.

  Y R U MAD? PLS TALK 2 ME.

  He didn’t answer, because he didn’t have an answer to give.

  A horn blared from behind, and John looked up to see a three-car gap in front of him. In the rearview mirror the driver behind him gesticulated wildly. John raised a hand in apology and pulled up.

  John glanced at the phone, hoping she would text again and then realized that no, of course she wouldn’t, because he was being a complete jerk. It also became entirely clear to him that he was not angry with her. He was terrified. He had been methodical and relentless in his job-hunting, spending two hours a night at it, keeping spreadsheets and notes in three-ring binders. So far, he hadn’t gotten so much as a nibble from anywhere he actually wanted to work. And, of course, the very first place he had applied to was the L.A. Times.

  Was writing for the Weekly Times really worse than writing shampoo copy? It would certainly be more secure than a temporary job, assuming they even wanted him. If Amanda was serious about having children—which she appeared to be—they needed an income they could count on.

  Another horn sounded. John eased up on the clutch and the Jetta was actually in motion before he looked up and realized that the car in front of him hadn’t moved. He slammed on the brakes so violently his engine stalled and his phone dropped to the floor. Against the blaring of horns, he laid his head against the steering wheel, and then reached down to retrieve the phone from the floor pads that were still stained with salt from the streets of Philadelphia.

  ——

  It was past midnight before he cut the engine and coasted into the garage, Garp-style. All the lights were off.

  Amanda was asleep in the center of the bed with her arms thrown over her head. The television was on, and an electric guitar ground out a primal soundtrack while bald security guards held two fantastically obese women apart as dry ice wafted around them. Their fists flew, their legs spun like egg beaters. Both were down to their bras and black-wired microphones, although one of them still had the tattered remains of her shirt tucked into the waist of her Tweedle Dee stretch pants. She brandished a wig torn off the head of her rival and shrieked a string of obscenities that were rendered as solid bleeps. The apparent object of dispute was a lanky man slouched in a chair behind them. He sat with knees spread and eyebrows raised in a combination of annoyance and boredom. Look at what I put up with, his expression seemed to say. Jerry Springer arranged his features into a look of unspeakable sadness, shaking his head as the camera panned past.

  John switched the television off and undressed in the dark. He sat on the edge of the bed and stared down at Amanda, who was milky-blue in the pale glow of the streetlight. She stirred and opened her eyes.

  “Hey,” she said, rolling over to make room for him.

  “Hey,” he replied.

  He slipped between the sheets and tucked his knees into the space behind hers. When he draped an arm over her rib cage she took his hand in both of hers and squeezed it beneath her chin.

  “I’m sorry,” she mumbled. “I shouldn’t have sent your résumé. I was just trying to help.”

  “I know,” he said. “And I’m sorry I was such an ass. I’m going to go to the interview.”

  After just a moment, John pressed his nose into her hair. It was smooth and slick, unlike her old hair, but it still smelled like her. He took a deep breath and held it in, taking an olfactory snapshot. He kissed the back of her head and closed his eyes.

  18

  Five days before, Isabel had spent the night of Ape House’s debut glued to the television. It didn’t take long for her to figure out the premise. In fact, it took Isabel about as long as it took Bonzi.

  After Bonzi had poked lexigrams representing various objects and clearly decided her actions were having no effect, she left the computer. Shortly thereafter, a doorbell rang. Although what Isabel could hear through the TV was a sound effect (like the rest of the soundtrack), something actual had happened within the house because the bonobos gathered in the main room, their heads swiveling suspiciously.

  Ding dong!

  Sam and Mbongo rushed the front door several times, pounding it with hands and feet before leaping back. Then they kept guard from a dozen feet back. Their hair bristled, making them look larger.

  Ding dong!

  Sam approached the door and lined an eye up at the peephole. After a moment’s scrutiny, he flung the door open and jumped back. Immediately beyond it sat several crates, brimming with the goodies Bonzi had ordered.

  A celebratory orgy ensued, set against a canned laugh track. The sex was followed by feasting and mutual grooming.

  Isabel watched from her place on the floor until the bonobos formed nests out of their new blankets, surrounded by discarded fruit boxes, milk and juice jugs, candy wrappers, and other detritus. An unbearable ache seized her heart when she realized that Bonzi had gathered exactly six blankets and was folding their edges as she always had. Then she called to Lola, who was investigating the hinges of a kitchen cabinet with a wrench. When Lola looked, Bonzi signed, BABY COME! and Lola bounded over and into the nest to let Bonzi groom her into slumber. Isabel wondered if any of the viewing audience had any idea what they had just witnessed: one of the most exciting discoveries to come from the language lab was that once bonobos acquired human language they passed it on to their babies, communicating with a combination of ASL and their own vocalizations.

  Isabel didn’t move until all the bonobos were asleep. The frenzied soundtrack had been replaced by a synthesized version of the Brahms lullaby with an occasional human snore or whistle tossed in. The cameras zoomed in on the rise and fall of chests, the pucker of a whiskered chin caught on the exhale. Only then did Isabel go to bed herself, leaving the television on. Several times during the night she awoke and sat bolt upright, checking the screen to make sure she hadn’t made the whole thing up. But there they were, snoozing in their nests.

  The next day, after a CNN broadcast confirmed that the show was airing from Lizard, New Mexico, Isabel was on a plane to El Paso. She rented a car, drove to Lizard, and settled into the Mohegan Moon, a hotel next to the largest casino. With Ape House playing on the flat-screen TV, she gave her sheets a couple of spritzes of Spirit of Ylang Ylang—the hotel had provided a variety of essential oils designed to promote relaxation—and collapsed on the bed, fully dressed.

&n
bsp; The feather duvet was soft, and she slipped her arms beneath the pillows. She didn’t intend to fall asleep, but at some point she realized that not only was it morning, but also that six hours had passed since she’d last checked the apes.

  In the center square of the television, Makena and Bonzi performed a quick genito-genital rub before splitting a banana. Makena was wearing an inside-out fleece shirt and carried a doll in the crook of her arm. She would give birth soon, and Isabel felt a stab of panic: she had no reason to believe that the producers even knew Makena was pregnant. It wasn’t the same as looking at a woman in her eighth month; to the untrained eye, a bonobo pregnancy could easily go undetected.

  Isabel rose immediately, and, without bothering to change her clothes, covered her baldness with a pale blue mohair beret. She then asked the concierge for directions to where Ape House was filming.

  The place was teeming with protesters, many of whose issues had only tenuous connections with the apes. Certainly animal rights and activist groups were represented, but so were Christian Right protesters, anti-war protesters, Intelligent Design protesters, gay pride groups, Support Our Troops protesters, people on both sides of the abortion fence, and one particularly large and odious family calling themselves the Eastborough Baptist Church, who demanded the deaths of all homosexuals, human or otherwise. Camera crews surfed the perimeter, sampling the groups as though they were dim sum. Isabel caught snippets of the carefully rehearsed sound bites:

  “Make love, not war! Be one with your inner bonobo! Harness pleasure for peace, and peace for—”

  “—proving yet again that homosexuality is a naturally occurring phenomenon in the animal kingdom, and discrediting the basis of any and all politically and religiously motivated—”

  “—maybe you’re related to monkeys, but I’m certainly not. The Bible clearly states that man was created in God’s image and that we have dominion over all of God’s creation, including apes. He put them here on earth for our use and entertainment, whatever form that may—”

  “—nothing more than prime-time pornography. This is typical of the kind of so-called ‘entertainment’ that corrupts the minds and morals of our youth. We pray, O God, for the souls of the sinners and pornographers who willfully expose our nation’s children and young people to wanton fornication and senseless acts of—”

  “—intelligent, curious, and highly social animals that deserve to be treated with the same dignity and respect we demand for our—”

  Isabel made her way through the crowd. When a body shifted, she slipped into the gap, moving forward until she was finally within sight of the building. She stopped and drew her breath, aware that she was within a hundred yards of the bonobos. She felt a sensation like a fist tightening around her heart.

  The real Ape House looked nothing like the cartoon drawing. It was a single-story, flat-roofed building with no windows, like a smaller version of the Corston Foundation. Its walls were concrete and uninterrupted except for the front door, which was wide enough for a small vehicle to drive through, an occurrence Isabel observed three times in close succession: everything the bonobos ordered was delivered in crates on the front end of a forklift. The crowd always turned as one, standing on tiptoe and trying to catch sight of the apes, but they never did. The forklift dropped the goods off in an anteroom, which was closed before the apes accessed them through an inside door. Speculation about what the crates contained usually subdued the crowd temporarily, and there was nearly universal laughter when a kiddie pool arrived. But when the front door closed and the forklift retreated, the fight for attention and airtime resumed.

  ——

  Isabel was about to go back to the hotel when the buzzing began. At first she thought it was in her head—she was overwhelmed by the crowd and felt nauseated, as if she’d had too much sun. But when other people’s heads started turning and the yapping mouths lost track of where they were mid-rant, she realized the noise was external. The buzz soon became a thwackity-thwackity with a vibration so deep Isabel felt it through her entire body. Black-suited security guards wearing noise-reduction headsets herded the crowd backward and erected sawhorse barriers along a portion of the wall. A helicopter appeared, dangling a large and ungainly object that twirled at the end of its cables. Isabel glanced up at it, squinting into the blindingly bright New Mexico sky—there was wood, rope webbing, and yellow plastic tubing, all of it spinning and swaying. The helicopter hovered directly over Ape House and slowly lowered the play structure behind the walls of the courtyard. The cables were detached and retracted, and the helicopter swooped away.

  The people around the house, most of whom had crouched and covered their ears, were momentarily silent. They rose one by one, shielding their eyes with their hands. After the helicopter disappeared from sight, anchors once again began earnestly addressing cameramen, and protesters, as though roused from sleep, resumed poking their boards and flags into the air. A few people gathered around laptops and BlackBerries, trying to figure out via the Internet what they had just witnessed.

  Isabel decided they had the right idea. She would learn far more from watching what was being broadcast from within Ape House than by standing outside it.

  ——

  The hotel bar was crowded and the restaurant empty, which Isabel attributed to the fact that the former was playing Ape House on the overhead televisions and the latter was not.

  She spotted the last available stool between two burly men, and slid onto it. Both men nursed beers while keeping their eyes on the television, where the apes cavorted on their new play structure in the courtyard. Mbongo walked out with an erection and two oranges. Bonzi approached, rubbed her hips up against him, and left with both pieces of fruit.

  “I dropped them off in there,” said the man on Isabel’s right.

  She couldn’t tell who he was talking to, as he continued to face forward. His cheeks were ruddy to the point of discoloration, the base of his nose surrounded by plum-colored veins.

  When no one else responded, Isabel said, “Who? The apes?”

  “Yep,” he said. He looked down at his kielbasa-like fingers. “Drove ’em right in on my forklift. Put up a real fuss, they did. Could’ve had the delivery job too, but my wife—that’s Ray’s sister—she don’t like the whole idea. Says she won’t have it on our TV at home, so I have to come here to watch.”

  “Oh, really?” said Isabel. “She doesn’t approve?”

  “It’s because of all the other stuff Ray helps out with.” He glanced over quickly, his potatoey face looking unexpectedly boyish and bashful. He lowered his voice to a whisper. “Porn. He works on movies with Ken Faulks. He doesn’t do, you know, that, but he helps out on the sets. Does special effects—dry ice, pyrotechnics, that kind of stuff.”

  Isabel leaned in closer, feeling immensely grateful that she had put on a pretty hat that morning. She smiled with demurely closed lips, because although she had her teeth in, that was only by virtue of having accidentally fallen asleep with them in place.

  19

  The day of the job interview, John was shaved, showered, and drinking coffee at the counter with his tie thrown over his shoulder before Amanda appeared.

  She was in her robe with a towel turban on her head. She padded over and got herself a cup of coffee, her very aura subdued.

  John set his coffee down and went over to her. “Hey,” he said, rubbing her lower back. “You okay?”

  She nodded. “Yeah.” Then she put her mug on the counter and shuddered. “Actually, no. I’m terrified. I can’t stand the thought of getting needles in my face. What if I move and make him slip?”

  “So don’t get it done. You don’t need to. That guy is a complete idiot.”

  “Even if he is, he’s also the executive producer.” She took a deep breath. “No. I’ll be okay. Everyone says it’s not that bad.” She kissed John quickly, distractedly, and picked up her coffee. “Good luck with the interview.”

  “Thanks,” he said, and watched h
elplessly as she disappeared into the hall.

  ——

  John pushed the door to the building open with his hip, clutching the corrugated cardboard sleeve of the double-shot grande skinny latte. He stepped into the lobby and stopped to absorb it, his preconceived notions shattered. Apparently somebody bought the Weekly Times. Lots of somebodies.

  The reception area was high-ceilinged and airy, graced with red leather sectionals arranged in semicircles. Glass-topped cherrywood tables displayed perfect fans of the most recent issues of the Weekly Times. Square candles in sugared glass glowed on either end of a glass-topped reception desk, and a large slate waterfall burbled peacefully against the end wall. Above it was a super-size magazine logo.

  John breathed the scented air deeply, trying to shift his attitude. He’d suffered humiliation at the hands of a barista only minutes before, having mangled the wording of his order. His mind had been on Amanda and her face full of needles, and he’d stuttered something that, while inelegant, had apparently been functional, since he’d ended up with the correct beverage. When the barista gave John his change, she also gave him a pitying smile and reminded him that it was actually called a double-shot grande skinny latte.

  John approached the reception desk. The polished young woman behind it looked up. “May I help you?” she said, smiling without showing teeth. Her skin was flawless and entirely smooth. John wondered if he was looking at evidence of Restylane. A little apple-plump about the cheeks, a pillowy je ne sais quoi about the upper lip.

  “Uh, yes. I have an appointment with Topher McFadden at ten.” John set the latte on the counter. The woman’s eyes followed it. A dribble of coffee pooled at its base. He snatched it up again, leaving a ring.

  “Your name?”

  “John Thigpen.”

  “Thigpen?”

  “Yes. Thigpen.”

  “I’ll let him know,” the woman said in the reverent hush of a librarian. “Please have a seat.”