Talk to Me Read online

  The thing was, the key didn’t seem to want to turn in the bottom lock. It jammed halfway in, another irritation, and he had to set the groceries down at his feet so as to have both hands free to manipulate it, thinking Sam must have forced something inside the keyhole when nobody was looking. Which was one of his tricks, like trying to poke things into the electrical sockets or unscrew the hinges on the cabinet doors. His hoots were louder now, more urgent, and he was slapping his palms rhythmically on the inside of the door. The instant the key finally did turn in the lock, the door jerked open and there he was, his nappy full and strawberry jam smeared across the front of his shirt, holding out his arms for a hug. In the next moment he was in Guy’s arms and in the moment after that clinging to his shoulders in the way of chimps in the wild, who rode their mothers’ backs off and on for the first four years of life. But Guy wasn’t Sam’s mother – Melanie was, or had been, till she said, ‘Fuck you, Guy, really, fuck you,’ and walked out on them – and this wasn’t the wild, this was captivity. And no matter how passionately he wanted to believe in the ideal of cross-fostering, of chimps taking the place of human children, that was the fact.

  The problem – one of the problems, and the problems were infinite – was simply keeping Sam contained. And occupied. He was watchful, alert, deceptive, always probing the weaknesses in the facility and any lapses among the staff, looking to escape, to get out, to break free and lead them all on a merry chase because this was high humour, this was fun, this was what he’d been born to do. Though they’d taken pains to chimp-proof the house, installing a whole hardware store’s worth of padlocks on every drawer and cabinet and even the refrigerator, and replacing all the wooden doors with steel, as well as panelling over the drywall and redoing the windows in three-and-a-half-inch-thick laminated glass, he still managed to get out often enough to put the whole project at risk. There were cars on the highway (speeding cars), neighbours on either side and across the street who might or might not have been inclined to reach for their deer rifles on any pretext, and an assortment of rattlesnakes, bobcats, bears, coyotes and even mountain lions roaming the slopes. The price of a chimp was $10,000. And this one had been invested with nearly three years of exhaustive language training, his every gesture and reaction catalogued, his psyche probed and development monitored step by step. He’d mastered more than a hundred signs to date. He’d been on TV. He was famous. And, more importantly, he was Guy’s ticket to bigger things, like a full professorship, a book contract and TV, more TV.

  ‘Elise? Josh?’

  No answer. Which pissed him off, as did the general wreckage of the living room: chairs upended, sofa on its back, food stains on the walls, not to mention the usual accumulation of toys, blankets, puzzles and magazines scattered across the floor like so much refuse. Worse, the TV cabinet was standing on one end in the far corner, the sound garbled and the picture rotating till it swallowed itself, over and over. He let out a curse and slammed the door behind him. ‘Elise!’ he roared. ‘Josh!’

  Innocent of everything but the present moment, Sam clung to his back, hooting softly – he wanted his dinner, but his dinner was not forthcoming because the groceries were on the front porch, unattended and unrefrigerated, and Guy wasn’t about to take the chance of propping open the door to retrieve them, even for ten seconds, not without help. Jesus, and where were they?

  That was when Josh appeared in the kitchen doorway, looking sheepish. ‘Sorry, Guy, but he’s been throwing tantrums all afternoon – he just went apeshit, OK, and now I know where that term comes from. In spades. It was like there was nothing we could do. Elise locked herself in the bathroom, it was that bad.’

  He didn’t want to open up on Josh. That wasn’t his nature. He was a persuader, a team player – unlike Moncrief, who he swore to himself he would never be like, no matter what it came to. Josh was one of his best grad students and he liked him, genuinely liked him, and he liked Josh’s girlfriend, Elise, too – they were all in this together – but he was feeling just a bit overwhelmed at the moment, not to mention worn thin as wire. Which put him in a black mood. He pushed his way past Josh and into the kitchen, which was also – no surprise – a mess. ‘You’re telling me I can’t leave the house any more?’

  Josh was wearing a T-shirt smeared with the same strawberry jam as Sam’s, which Guy could feel now as an adhesive give-and-release at the back of his neck as Sam shifted position, still hooting softly. For food. ‘No, I’m not saying that, I’m just saying today was one of his difficult days – you know, since Melanie left? One of the worst, actually. He misses her. Badly. Really badly.’

  ‘Don’t we all.’

  ‘And he’s acting out.’

  ‘Like any other kid, right?’

  ‘Yeah, right, that’s what I’m saying. And sometimes you just have to—’

  ‘Let him wreck the fucking house? And shit in his diapers and don’t bother to change him?’

  ‘Change him? I could barely catch up with him – I mean, he was on a tear like I’ve never seen. And he bit Elise, hard – drew blood – and no joke, right on her face? Like her cheek? Her left cheek? She’s in there now putting alcohol and hydrogen peroxide on it and whatever… I mean, I don’t know if after today she’s even going to want to come back any more.’

  ‘How bad is it? She’s not going to need stitches, is she?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe.’

  ‘Maybe? Well, that’s just fucking great. Because I wouldn’t want her to have to go to the emergency room or anything and have people start sticking their noses in—’

  ‘Don’t blame me.’ Josh pointed at the chimp riding his shoulders. ‘Blame him. He’s the one that created this situation. No matter what we did, he just wouldn’t stop.’

  It came to him, in a flood of bitterness, that Josh was too small for this job. Literally and figuratively. He was five-seven or -eight, with an apricot fluff of hair that was already receding and an academic’s anaemic build, and he couldn’t handle a chimp of thirty-five pounds? What was going to happen when Sam put on another fifteen pounds? Another fifty? Another hundred? If you had any hope of controlling him you had to use psychology – operant conditioning, stimulus/response/reinforcement – and Josh knew that as well as he did because Sam was already as strong or stronger than he was. Of course, Sam knew it too, and for the moment, at least, he was having none of it. He was hungry, that was all that mattered, that was the full extent of his awareness, and he swung himself fluidly down to the floor, went to the refrigerator and started tugging at the twin door handles. Which were chained shut, for obvious reasons.

  ‘OK, OK, it’s not the end of the world. Go get the groceries – they’re out on the porch – and then feed him a couple apples and his peach yogurt, one container only. Maybe we send out for pizza tonight, that’s what I’m thinking.’ He bent to Sam and signed, WHAT YOU WANT? and Sam, pointing first to the clock set in the stove with his elongated index finger that was like the stretched-out finger of a leather glove, signed, TIME EAT.

  That was when the doorbell rang. Or buzzed, actually – an insistent buzz that froze the three of them in place. Guy slapped his forehead (and where had that gesture evolved from?). ‘Oh, shit, I forgot all about it – that’ll be the girls…’

  ‘What girls?’ Josh had his head down, fingering the keys he wore trucker-style on a chain clipped to his belt, sorting through them for the one to the refrigerator. He located it, which caught Sam’s attention, then glanced up, looking puzzled.

  Ignoring him, Guy went straight for the front door, muttering to himself – Jesus Christ, one fucking thing after another – but before he could get there, it swung open on Barbara, the ROTC girl. Or non-ROTC girl. The eager one. The one who’d said, ‘You were great.’ She was framed in the doorway, backlit, a bag of groceries propped on each hip. He saw that she’d combed out her hair and changed her clothes, wearing shorts now and a low-cut print blouse that showed off her breasts as if she were answering an ad for a wet nurse
(which, in fact, Sam had needed for the first six months of his life, but that time was past). ‘Hi,’ she said, stepping into the room without preliminaries. ‘I’m sorry, but I think somebody forgot these?’ She shifted her hips, indicating the groceries, and tried for a smile.

  Behind him, Guy heard Josh call out a warning, but before he could react, here came Sam, hurtling through the room on all fours, intent on the open door – which was a crisis in the making, because if he got loose it could take hours to get him back. The last time he escaped, after he’d appropriated a key that someone – Elise – had been careless with, it was a nightmare, but then since Melanie walked out, everything connected with the project had begun to seem like a nightmare. Guy had been in the kitchen that time too, chopping vegetables for a salad while the burgers he’d just moulded hissed in the pan and the buns browned in the oven, Sam right there beside him overseeing the preparations while alternately springing up and down off the counter, feeding slices of zucchini and cucumber into his mouth, chewing on the rim of the big Tupperware bowl to admire the impression of his own teeth and drooling milk down his chin and into the dense matted hair of his chest. A moment later, he was gone, and Guy didn’t think anything of it – Sam was easily distracted and the house was his to roam – until Sam appeared on the other side of the kitchen window, grinning at him. Sam signed, PLAY ME, signed, HIDE SEEK.

  As it turned out, as best they could reconstruct it, he’d slipped the key off the top of the washing machine where Elise had set it down for just an instant while she took out the trash. She discovered it missing as soon as she came back through the door, and after patting down her pockets and making a quick search of the laundry room and kitchen, went directly to Sam, where he was sunk into the couch in the living room, thumbing through a magazine, all innocence. She searched him – both pockets, inside his shirt, front and back – and then overturned the couch cushions before going down on hands and knees to search beneath the furniture. She even took the magazine from him and shook out the pages, but the key was nowhere to be found.

  The Cartesian view of animals had it that they were merely biological machines, driven by instinct and incapable of thought, of planning, of foreseeing future actions and consequences, but that kind of thinking was antiquated. And demonstrably wrong. In fact, Sam had not only planned the whole episode, he’d used deception as well. As they ultimately discovered, he’d stolen the key, hidden it under his tongue and managed to hold it there all the while Elise was searching him and throughout the preparations in the kitchen, waiting till the time was right, till everybody was distracted and the key could reappear again, albeit coated in a slime of saliva and masticated zucchini and whatever else he’d been chewing. Which, as long as it performed its function, was of little consequence to him. Did it stick in the lock? Was it difficult to turn? No matter: he managed it. And, as if to rub it in, as if to underscore the joke, there he was, right in the kitchen window, laughing at them all.

  Now the situation was different – no key required; the door stood open – but the intent was the same. Sam could move at speed, far more physically advanced than a human child of his age and beyond, and he could easily outmanoeuvre anybody in the house. There was the open door. There was the grinning girl with the groceries balanced on her hips. And there was Sam, closing fast.

  This was a disaster, pure and simple. Another recrudescence of shit, and Guy was in no mood for it. He was angry, outraged, but still he didn’t cry out ‘Stop!’ because it wouldn’t have had the slightest effect. Instead, he pitched his voice high and crooned, ‘Oh, Barbara, you brought the ice cream!’

  Chimps run as if on pistons, up and down, shoulders, arms, knuckles, legs, feet, and now, suddenly, the motion was arrested, and he could see the effect of those two seductive words in combination – ice and cream – as they became concept and then calculation in the neural pathways of the chimp’s brain. Sam pulled up short, skidding across the floorboards and right on past Barbara, bracing himself only long enough to snatch one of the bags out of her hands. The hesitation was enough, or almost enough, to let Guy get to the door first. But just as he got there, just as he was lurching for the upper panel to slam it shut, Sam, the bag clutched in one hand, worked his shoulders between the door and the frame and wriggled through the gap, trailing groceries behind him.

  Josh shouted something unintelligible, the girl – Barbara – looked paralysed, as if she’d expected a cuddle toy and not this Id on wheels that Sam had become, that Sam was, and then the door slammed shut and Sam was on the other side of it. Furious, Guy jerked the door open again, expecting to see him scrambling up the side of the house or hurtling down the drive for the road and the traffic and the death that awaited him beneath the wheels of the next speeding car, but that didn’t happen. Sam was right there, on the porch, crouched over the tattered remains of the grocery bag and staring up into the eyes of the other girl, the shy one, the pretty-face, Aimee. He wasn’t running, wasn’t even moving. He shot a glance over his shoulder at Guy, who was already reaching out to snatch at him, then signed, SORRY, SORRY, and made a leap right into her arms.

  NOT HER

  She was not there. She was not there in any way he could perceive, not even in the faintest trace of a scent, not even in the sweet, lingering odour of the shampoo she used on her HAIR and his too. He was alone, but for the shapes in the other cages that showed their teeth and screeched at him like BUGS, big, black chittering BUGS, things beneath his notice, things meant to be squashed against a wall or clapped between two hands. Except that they were BIG and ugly and had teeth, which puzzled him and hurt him too because what were they and what were they doing here? The real question, though, the persistent question that was lodged in his brain in a pinched tight compartment squeezed between AFRAID and HURT, was what was he doing here, wherever this was, which wasn’t with her, wasn’t home, wasn’t safe. Or warm. Or habitable in any way he’d ever known. He’d known the COUCH, the TV, the BED, his TOYS. And her. She was there, always, and now she wasn’t.

  Another night must have gone by, though the lights wouldn’t admit it, and he must have slept because here they came with food for him again and water for his cup, and he signed to them with the words that were so urgent his gut constricted and the diarrhoea squirted out of him all over again – KEY LOCK OUT – but they couldn’t fathom those words. They were ignorant, illiterate, and the faces they showed him, the two of them, males both, were without expression of any kind except indifference. One of them had a hose. The water shot from it to sweep his shit down the drain that made its own hole in the middle of the cement floor and then it shot at him too so that he had to turn his back to keep it out of his eyes, and he wanted to tell them to stop – he was COLD, he was WET – and then he did tell them, rushing at the bars till the hose was right there in his face and he didn’t flinch, he didn’t care, and they were laughing at him now, laughing, and he stood there and took it because it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. Not any more.

  Later – he was shivering, wrapping himself in the sad blanket of his own wet arms – he heard the quick sharp sigh of the hinges on the door at the end of the hall and it brought him instantly to life. Footsteps were coming, female footsteps, the sway, the tap, the rhythm of the hips pumping the legs and manoeuvring the shoes that hid her feet and toes, and he knew it was her. And more: he smelled her! Her shampoo! Her hair! But then the footsteps turned the corner and all at once she was not her but someone else altogether, with the wrong face and the wrong hair – and beneath the shampoo, the wrong smell. It was a woman wearing the same sort of clothes she would wear, not dress-up, but work clothes, and she was smiling at him. Leaning towards the cage and holding something out to him – ORANGE – and saying, ‘Come on now, little fella, cheer up. It’s not so bad, is it? Look, look what I have for you – isn’t that nice? It’s nice, isn’t it?’

  The orange was in his hand. A surge of lust came over him – he wanted it – but just as quickly he remembered where
he was and who she wasn’t and how she’d tricked him, and he pushed his hand back through the bars and dropped it at her feet. Then he signed, YOU ME GO, but she just kept on grinning till finally she picked up the orange, slipped it back through the bars and tap-tapped her way down the hall and out the door that gave the briefest glimpse of – could it be? – light, real light, sunlight, and a cold sweet funk of cut weeds and tall trees and a thousand other things too.

  That was when he began to look around him. Really look. He was in a cage and the cage was impregnable, but there was a lock on the door and if he didn’t have a KEY, he could find something else, some other small and shiny thing that could work the lock that would have had tumblers in it like any other lock, though he didn’t know how tumblers were called, only the fact of them – or the sound of them, the sound that made the invisible visible. He could see them in his mind, hear them click into place. The animals in the other cages, the BLACK BUGS, woofed and chittered at him, but he ignored them. He was looking for something, anything, a strand of wire, a sliver of metal or even wood, because he had a plan now, a purpose, and he was hungry suddenly, starving. He plucked up the orange, squatted on the floor in the corner of the cage and fed it into his mouth, morsel by morsel, pausing only to sign to himself, to sign KEY LOCK OUT.

  LIKE PLUGGING A WIRE INTO A SOCKET

  So he’d selected her. He’d gone right by the other girl and out the door, Professor Schermerhorn chasing frantically after him, and he could have raced down the drive, hoisted himself to the roof or scrambled up the trunk of a tree, but when he saw her there on the porch, he just froze, as if she were a screen or a wall or a moat brimming with water. He froze, his eyes locked on hers, and then he made his leap and she didn’t flinch because she didn’t have time to think about it or wonder what was happening to her – he leapt and she caught him, and it was the most natural thing in the world to wrap her arms around him and press him to her and feel the mad, pounding cyclone of his heart beating against hers. It was intense. The most intense moment of her life, electric, like plugging a wire into a socket. Here was this animal she didn’t know at all, a wild animal one generation removed from the jungles of West Africa, and suddenly it – he – was hers. Or she was his.