A Beautiful Truth (25 page)

Cities waited for better times.

Dr. Meijer made them wait for grape juice, one cage at a time. Jennifer did the same. Martha brought other treats.

When the women did their rounds, Spud climbed all over the front of the bars, stabbing his hard pink penis towards their faces like their husbands did on their birthdays. Spud was proud and playful and aching, and screamed for just one touch.

Each of them did his or her own thing, depending on who was visiting the front of the cage. Mac would always do a slow and deliberate display for Dr. Meijer, one which showed his belief that he and Dr. Meijer were both leaders, Dr. Meijer out there, Mac in here, and uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.

Rosie loved to groom and would get down as low as possible, though two feet off the ground. Dr. Meijer leaned forward and rested his white Tyvek arm for Rosie’s busy fingers to clean it. Her grooming noises were frantic and she picked and rubbed at the Tyvek with a business and passion that made Dr. Meijer smile at first. He marvelled at how she could imagine all those faults and nits and concerns on that flawless piece of Tyvek. They really have imaginations. And after a while he realized that it was nothing but worry and fear. She would do him endless favours, anything he wanted, if he would only stop turning the lights on.

Right now Lonee’s hand is floating, an endless salute to Dusty.

When people came to the front of Lonee’s cage he either lunged at them or sat in the back corner, looking either through them or away.

Martha didn’t bother lingering in front of Lonee’s cage. Here’s your chow you old bully.

But Jennifer always tried.

She thought of a guy in her local family restaurant. He was there most Sundays, sitting on his own. He had a way of seeing everything that was going on in the room without making eye contact with anyone. It looked like arrogance, but Jennifer figured it was insecurity and loneliness. He didn’t want to be seen, but wanted to be noticed by one perfect person.

Looee watched Jennifer remove her face mask. She took off her hood and hairnet and put her arm against the cage saying I see you handsome boy, I see you. She was pretty and Looee sighed. He moved a little closer.

Jennifer pulled back the arm of her Tyvek and showed her skin to Lonee.

Pretty.

He put the back of his fingers outside his cage and she rested her skin against them. Nobody believed her when she said he was the sweetest.

He has memories. You can see them.

Sometimes when Dr. Meijer left the room, his mind stopped at the anteroom door. The wing was quiet behind him for a moment of contemplation—he was a father putting his children to bed. He thought how none of them knew when they slept that he was the one who opened their bodies and shared the diseases we were ashamed of.

Lonee was infected with a different strain of HIV. He was knocked down and it was administered intravenously at a hundred times the infectious dose.

He liked it when Jennifer visited. When she didn’t come regularly he blamed her. He was harder to cajole from the corner of his cage and she had to show more skin or stay longer.

He began to display for her to impress instead of frighten, like the others did, jumping from one wall of bars to another in a rhythmic pattern, up and around like a hairy rollercoaster, and Jennifer was impressed.

He swung on the tire in the middle of his cage, thinking it might make her laugh because he was so big.

She always spent a little more time with Dusty. Looee and Dusty developed the further bond of rivals. Dusty had always admired Looee, but now Looee admired more deeply some of the things the dogperson did because Jennifer was impressed.

Dusty was good at making Jennifer feel guilty. If an irregular amount of time passed between her visits he would sulk in the corner of his cage and not look at her. She would have to stay longer and bring him sweeter treats. He got her to take off her shoes once and leave them in his cage, and he slept with them.

Lonee gestured for her to take off her mask and hood and he saw her pretty hair.

They had good dreams some nights.

Their health went up and down. Dusty was so listless sometimes that he didn’t bother moving when the pistols were pointed at his cage. Looee screamed for him to get up but he only flinched when the darts hit, and slumped when the ketamine took effect.

Lonee was too angry to be listless.

Needles went blunt on his bones.

Frank and Simon watched through the window of the anteroom door sometimes. Lonee spinning, Lonee holding the bars and shaking his cage getting all the rest of them agitated.

Simon had been raised by an uncle who drank too much and backhanded him, and Simon had gone to school some days with ears swollen and lips inflamed. Lonee made Simon nervous.

And when Lonee wasn’t angry he was sad and bored because
when there were no knockdowns, no visits, no deaths, there was absolutely nothing to do but sit and think and remember.

Dreams of a house and Larry. A horrible night. He was closest to death when memories were strongest. They flashed and changed. What was Larry’s name. These days of torture are the same as mummy’s screams. He remembered Jennifer, and saw her, and didn’t know whether he was remembering her or not, and there were things he didn’t want to remember. He screamed and spun not only to get out of his cage but to get the memories out as well. His habits became an unconscious discipline, a way to find oblivion.

Sometimes Jennifer put her hand in his cage, which she was not supposed to do. Once a chimp has a hold of you, he won’t let go until he doesn’t want a hold of you, till he’s hurt you or used you for whatever it was he wanted.

Don’t wear shoelaces. Tie your hair in a bun and keep it under the hood. No necklaces. Wear nothing they can get a hold of.

The cardinal rule at any institution containing chimpanzees is to lock the doors.

Posted at every exit in Girdish was HAVE YOU CHECKED THE LOCKS. Padlocks were ubiquitous—on cage doors, transfer boxes, fridges, cabinets—and the protocol was to make sure each was secure and hanging straight downwards. A glance back over a room you left would be satisfied if every padlock was hanging straight downwards.

And every time the lights came on in the morning on CID, a glance would find every lock askew. In fact, every worker at Girdish in every corner of the buildings over its long history would tell you that last night the chimps had tested the locks.

They tested them throughout the day, whenever a back was turned, and every night when the lights went out. Those dark
eyes in cages saw everything. Over the years there had been many escapes, but rarely on the smaller wings like CID.

Cages were cleaned every thirty days, each of the ten cages on a fixed schedule. The outside doors at the opposite end of the wing were opened and some mouthfuls of fresh air came in along with the fumes of a forklift. The occupant of the cage to be cleaned was knocked down and manoeuvred into a transfer box. The forklift removed the cage from its mooring on the wall and took it outside, and the chimp in the transfer box was wheeled out with it. The cage was hosed on the driveway and a caregiver would wash the back wall where the cage had hung, mopping away the artless finger-painting that each of them did with their shit. Each chimp had a monthly moment outside and they were usually anaesthetized lightly because the process rarely took more than twenty minutes.

The outside doors opened and the forklift appeared. Jerome came out of the anteroom and shot Lonee. Jerome recorded the time and he, Simon, Frank and Martha lifted Lonee out of the cage, struggled to get him in the transfer box which they righted on its wheels. Simon pushed the box outside and the forklift came in and removed the cage. Martha mopped the wall.

Ten minutes later Lonee was loose and the general alarm sounded, and every door and window across the hundred acres of the Girdish Institute was locked.

Simon had closed the padlock on the box, but the lock was rusty and what felt like a catch was the shifting of grit. The ketamine did little more than make Looee think of bubble gum when he was wheeled outside. Cherries in the air and metal pink and chewy. He looked through the gap and watched his cage getting hosed like Murphy after the skunk.

His fingers reached around through the gap and felt the lock. They pulled and the lock came loose.

He stood upright on the driveway and fell over. He wanted to get to a telephone or at least as far as the Wileys’ house.

Simon was looking at the forklift driver and finding him kind of sexy. He thought of Richard, his ex, and how good he was at fixing the car and the coffee-maker—anything mechanical.

Looee smelled the tarmac. He got up on all fours and ran, and dreamt that he was running, and nothing looked familiar but he felt like he was home.

Simon was hosing the cage. He looked idly towards the transfer box and saw its door ajar. He cried for help and held the spraying hose like a bayonet.

Girdish had had a long and fragile understanding with the municipality and county that they would keep the strictest control of their premises, and that they would call the police if any of the animals escaped. Not only were the animals dangerous on their own but many of them carried infectious and fatal diseases.

Once Simon radioed in to CID, the central call went out to all corridors of Girdish. Labworkers locked their doors. At the field station they looked outside and counted, and all of them were there.

Internal policy was to call the police only after thirty minutes of not finding an animal. The police had killed a gorilla several years earlier and the institution got too much of the wrong attention in the press. Animals were to be darted, or ideally coaxed back into a cage by someone familiar to them like a caregiver.

Few of those who escaped ever went far beyond the walls because most of them knew this as home. They sought out cafeterias or comfortable hideaways within the grounds or buildings. When a baby crawls away she always looks back for her mother.

Looee was at the bottom of the hill, looking for a telephone. He moved in spurts and collapsed, and sprang up again like a push
puppet. The footage later showed that he was stumbling in circles on the driveway before he made his final run.

Simon had been certain that Lonee was hiding and that he would leap at someone like he did in his cage. He went inside. Jerome was out with a rifle. Jennifer had been called as someone who might encourage Lonee back inside.

Forty minutes passed and the police were cautiously notified. The minimum physical value of a chimpanzee to Girdish was fifty thousand dollars—that was what they could sell them for if other labs were interested; but the information a study animal like Lonee contained was invaluable. Girdish wanted its trained employees to capture him, but the institute was obligated to inform the police of all likely dangers associated with the animals.

Once word was out that the escaped chimpanzee was HIV-positive, the police had orders to shoot to kill.

Florida Animal Control was notified as a matter of course. Their preferred trapper in that county was Wade Henderson, who knew how to catch everything from alligators to bobcats.

Jennifer looked around from outside CID with her hand shading her eyes.

Looee walked into the diner and climbed onto the counter. He took a glass and ran cold water into it and wanted to meet the other customers. He liked the waitress and wanted to lie back while she rubbed her ass on his balls. He smelled bacon and burning onions and he drooled.

Simon watched from the side windows of the anteroom as the security staff moved down the driveway. They were met by others coming up.

Staff had fanned out in all directions. The guard at the gatehouse had seen nothing pass, but the perimeter fence was no obstacle for a chimpanzee.

Wade Henderson assembled his collars and guns and drove towards Girdish with no idea of how to capture an ape.

Police patrol cars were scoping a one-mile radius and focusing on the businesses along Jackson Avenue, which was busy with a lunchtime crowd. The chimpanzee would likely not travel far and would probably search for food sources.

Looee tugged on the trouser leg of one of the customers at the diner. He wanted help. The man stood stiff as a tree. Looee stood upright and came to the man’s shoulders. Everyone in the diner was still. Looee looked around and saw nobody familiar. He had never been here before. He felt frightened, and when he called and showed his teeth everyone flinched and the man said okay, sweet boy, it’s okay.

Looee looked around for a telephone and went back to the sink for more water. He was dying for a strawberry milkshake and made loud calls which upset the customers all the more. Dust blew into his eyes.

The public relations staff at Girdish were beginning to be concerned and the director was briefed. For the most part, people drove by the gates of Girdish with no idea of what went on inside. There were occasional flare-ups with animal rights activists but most of those people did not live locally. Girdish had managed to exist quietly, a business like any other, rarely troubling the local community—the escaped gorilla had been quickly absorbed into the lore of alligators in swimming pools and other Floridian oddities. But Lonee’s escape could easily shut them down. They urged the police to be as discreet as possible.

The police walked into restaurants carrying rifles and asked proprietors if they had seen a big monkey.

Jennifer could do little more than pace. Jerome was wandering the grounds. He knew how much ketamine he had given Looee.

And Looee’s mouth was dry. The light through the windows was so bright. Genuine, painful sunlight that he hadn’t felt in years. He couldn’t see anyone for a moment and wanted to find a corner to be sick in. The countertop felt like heated dirt and he smelled women and licked metal and wanted milkshakes, strawberries, that’s a spoon. He hadn’t moved like this in years.

He slept while Wade Henderson spoke to the sheriff. Wade had a prosthetic arm.

The sheriff’s radio was full of chatter. An officer had shot a black bag of garbage in the alley behind Annie’s diner.