A Beautiful Truth (24 page)

He was involved in every surgical procedure. He was at hand for all emergencies. He knew their idiosyncrasies, their flesh, what it was like to push the needle in.

The remoteness of the researchers allowed them to think of the chimpanzees as a crop of data, numbered bodies to be harvested for information. Dr. Meijer had to know them by name as well as number.

Girdish was a perverse abattoir where the animals were efficiently denied their death. Altogether Dr. Meijer worked there for sixteen years. When enough conversations with researchers accumulated, when he got to know each chimpanzee by character, he began to feel like a failed colonist—sent to a dark continent to exploit and find information, he fell in love with the natives and became a man without a country. In his tenth year at Girdish he stared at his hands, which were busy in the body of Rosie. She died of heart failure. He was removing tissue from her liver, brain, lymph nodes and spleen, which he would mince and send for analysis. Something about seeing his hands at their task that day made him lose all sense of whose hands they were.

Apes have hands that betray them. Last night Looee’s hand tried to float away from him.

The cages on CID didn’t squeeze their occupants forward to be anaesthetized. They were bigger, with bars far enough apart that you could extend your hand between them or fire a gun from outside.

When Looee awoke in the morning after being moved from Congo he hung from the bars of his cage and screamed. He screamed at all these new dogpeople, at their noises and smells and hunched despicability. He screamed at Judy and the hunger he felt, and
screamed at the screams he made, and his screams became a relentless fugue of insanity, of muscle, teeth and diarrhea responding: and surely this was madness, this was what we are all afraid of, the rest of us, cowering on the sidewalk while the schizophrenic with his bags of garbage screams murder and makes all commerce and congress quiet; he was the man on the bus who stabs at passengers’ heads with a pocketknife.

Everyone was terrified and shivering or screaming and a man in a Tyvek suit and face shield walked in and fired a pistol at Lonee.

He was lifted onto the wheeled transfer table which was used for most operations and was given Fluothane and atropine in the anteroom.

Dr. Meijer had never seen teeth as good as Lonee’s. And even though his muscles had atrophied over the previous eighteen months, he was in better physical condition than any chimpanzee the vet had ever known. He rested a latex hand on Lonee’s chest. He’s a healthy boy he said to the labtech at his side.

Dr. Meijer filed Lonee’s nails, remarked on the swelling of his hands. He took blood and told the labtech to fetch a stool sample from the sheet beneath Looee’s cage. Dr. Meijer gave him mebend-azole for worms. He admired the texture of Lonee’s hair and shaved it off his chest to reveal his tattooed number.

The labtech marked the time in the log when Lonee came to in his cage.

Over the coming days Looee witnessed the procedure of knockdowns. Men in Tyvek suits, sometimes one, sometimes two or three, would come into the room and the populace would scream. The men would walk to a cage and fire at least one pistol. The dogperson would fall down and the men would lift it onto the table and wheel it away while everyone screamed.

Looee felt a bit of a thrill when he saw it happen the first few
times, seeing a dogperson get shot—similar to the thrill he felt when Walt shot a deer, the wonder of what will happen next. Then he felt sad and scared when the body was wheeled by him.

And once he felt it happen to himself a few times he never felt that thrill again. He moved to the back of his cage when the men walked towards him and screamed for them to go away. It was just one man at first, but Looee learned how to dodge the dart sometimes.

He had built up a tolerance for ketamine and required more than one dose to be anaesthetized. By the end of his second week two men approached his cage and there was nowhere to hide. One dart hit his lip and chipped a tooth, the other did its job.

He was weighed and got his nails cut and Dr. Meijer drew some blood.

Dusty arrived at CID soon after Looee. His body was wheeled in and lifted into the cage directly across. When Dusty awoke he was happy to see Looee, the friend he was in awe of. Looee recognized him and when Dusty reached out his hand from his cage Looee reached out his own twelve feet away.

Besides Dr. Meijer, the people who were a daily part of life on CID were the labtechs and caregivers. The caregivers were lowest on the hierarchy, divorced from the research except that they sometimes did the rounds with administering trial drugs and medicine. Their role was to keep the premises clean, to provide food and water as directed, to tag the cages before knockdowns, and to provide some sort of care to the animals in terms of enrichment or warmth or diversion. There was an enrichment coordinator, a former office manager named Pam, who determined what sort of toys were allowed, what sort of contact and for how long.

The range of personalities who worked at Girdish was as broad and varied as in any other collection of great apes. Some of the
caregivers and labtechs were studying to be primatologists or clinicians. Some were there because, as they said, they loved animals. Some were simply locals, like Jerome who had grown up half a mile away from the white main building and had worked there for twenty-one years. Jerome had held a variety of jobs and had watched the institution grow, and at the peak of his abilities he reached the role of lab technician and disliked most aspects of his life except his fishing trips to the Everglades.

Some of the workers despised the animals, some thought of their jobs as nothing more than jobs, and some had their hearts broken daily.

A few of the often changing employees were young and came from all over the world, specifically to work with chimpanzees and the other apes and monkeys. They had read of some of the fascinating social research that was going on in other parts of Girdish and hoped to play a part somehow in the discovery of what it means to be an ape. Few of them ended up doing what they wanted. Most went away with ideas of only the most negative aspects of what it means to be an ape.

The caregivers and labtechs also worked in other biomedical units of Girdish, including the nursery—only a few were permanently dedicated to duties on CID. The reality of their days was often of long shifts and tedious work, of gossip and politics like most other jobs. The caregivers resented doing the dirty work and were sensitive to the arrogance of those who were there for science. The labtechs resented the occasional imperiousness of Dr. Meijer, who resented the same in the PIs. Martha, the caregiver, knew that the reason Pepper screamed at Jerome, just now as he passed by Pepper’s cage, was that Pepper was about to get her period and it was really nothing personal. Jerome, who often fantasized about fucking Martha’s big ass, was tired of the way she treated these
animals as human. Another labtech, Simon, was sick of Jerome’s negativity, and Dr. Meijer was sick of Simon’s incompetence when assisting him during surgery.

The greater reality was that the work was dangerous and always ugly; a walk along CID or any other wing usually meant being spat upon, shat upon and screamed at. At best it was like working in a hospital where the patients never got better. It was a place that offered no praise.

And while there were some who truly saw it as nothing more than a job and some who never questioned the nature of apes and life, almost everyone felt a need at some point to justify this work and almost everyone had the same justification. It was for the benefit of humankind.

When it comes to disease and death, hunger and survival, there is no right or wrong. Rachel, who came from San Francisco to work at Girdish for a year while studying primatology, was aware that a bright and talented generation of men was being decimated by AIDS. Her brother was among them. She knew of the spread of the plague. She left Girdish because she couldn’t stand what she saw, but signed their confidentiality agreement and told herself it was for the greater good. Those corridors and rooms of ugly industry might offer hope.

Hepatitis C. Parkinson’s. Cancer. Alzheimer’s.

Girdish is funded by a species trying to survive, and a country that can’t get used to sadness.

The long shifts and turnover in staff meant that those few caregivers who were there for several years had little time or energy to spend more than half an hour each day trying to entertain or comfort the chimpanzees.

Jennifer was a caregiver who worked in the nursery. She had raised Dusty from birth, until he had been moved to Congo at age
five; she had bottle-fed him and played with him and had grown particularly attached to him. She was sad when he moved to Congo because caregivers played a small role there. She was even more sad to hear he’d been moved to CID because she knew he would be infected with HIV.

She made an effort to come over to CID in the evenings. She had kids and a husband and a job volunteering at the hospital on the weekends, but she tried to spend half an hour with Dusty when she could. She dressed out in all the gear they had to wear on CID but took off her face shield and mask once she was inside.

Dusty liked anything rubber and was especially fond of shoes with rubber soles. After getting over their mutual excitement at seeing each other, Jennifer held her shoes up to the cage whenever she visited and Dusty smelled, groomed and chewed them.

Looee always watched from the other side. There was a nice smell when Jennifer was near. He didn’t know why she always went to the dogperson and he sometimes shouted at her. He wanted her to come over but he didn’t trust her either. He sat at the back of his cage and turned sideways to her, looking at her only when she had her back turned.

The chimps always hooted when someone familiar came in, and once that noise died down it was replaced by individual pleas, complaints or Bronx cheers. Looee had been taught not to spit, but it was an effective way of getting someone’s attention when bars prevented movement. Jennifer expected to be spat upon or somehow harassed by the others whenever she went, and in the half-hour she could spare she tried to give everyone a little attention. But when she came to Looee’s cage he sat back and ignored her.

They all figured out that when a cage was tagged it meant its occupant would soon be knocked down. Dusty’s cage was tagged, as was Lonee’s.

They spent a night of anxiety, and in the morning Looee watched Dusty get shot and saw his body on the table. Dusty was taken to the anteroom where Dr. Meijer used a two-pronged needle to scarify his upper back and inject him with an HIV-1 isolate as directed by the PI.

Looee watched Dusty’s body getting lifted back into his cage and shouted for him to wake up. Soon he saw two pistols pointed at him through the bars of his cage. His bowels went liquid and he heard a scream and he stared at the fluorescent ceiling and thought of icing and a white couch he sat on, who loves cream, cream Christmas. He felt loving hands, warm light on his face, wanted a hand on his ass but where is it. He was turned on his side and felt a pain behind his hips that made him scream, and ketamine screams aren’t heard. Dr. Meijer removed a four-inch needle from the back of Lonee’s hip bone and had a clean sample of bone marrow for baseline analysis.

Lonee was a control in that study. His antibodies were measured at the same intervals as Dusty’s and Nathan’s, who was now HIV-positive like Dusty. Their counts were regularly measured through lymph node and bone marrow biopsy. After four months they showed positive signs of infection. Dusty and Nathan were fighting the disease.

Lonee screamed at everyone. He was unconscious regularly and felt the same disbelief each time he woke up.

Pam, the entertainment coordinator, had arranged for Lonee to be given a bucket as a toy. She had meant a plastic bucket, but he was given a metal one.

When Looee wore it on his head, the fluorescent lights turned off. He liked the sound of his breath.

Jerome and another labtech came in to knock down Dusty, and Dusty, while cowering, turned and blasted diarrhea through the
front of his cage. Jerome backed up in case Dusty had more to offer and, unthinkingly, held on to a bar on Lonee’s cage.

Lonee took his bucket and smashed Jerome’s knuckles, rendering his fingers unusable for two weeks. When Jerome realized the pain he screamed and wheeled. He tried to use his gun with his left hand but he missed.

Lonee rang the bucket off the bars. His hair was on end and he wailed and thrashed the bucket and Jerome ducked and made a noise. Lonee awakened a fear that Jerome had always had of these animals and their fangs, and he felt humiliated for ducking.

When studies were in full swing they were all knocked down at least once a week.

Lonee now leapt at anyone who came near his cage.

Dusty and Nathan were showing few obvious outward signs of disease. They had lymph and bone marrow biopsies every two weeks at first, and every eight weeks by the end of the year.

A vaccine for that strain of HIV had been developed through earlier studies—a combination of HIV antigens and canarypox. Lonee and Spud were given the vaccine over a period of eighteen months and challenged with the same strain of HIV.

Jerome was asked by Dr. Meijer to gather a stool sample from under Lonee’s cage. Lonee pissed on or screamed at Jerome whenever he could, and even though Jerome found more straightforward revenge in various ways he cleverly gathered some of Dusty’s oily stool and presented it as Lonee’s.

Dr. Meijer grew worried about Lonee’s health as a consequence. He gave Lonee doxycycline for an apparent bacterial infection. Lonee broke out in a rash from the unnecessary antibiotics, and there was now concern that the rash and diarrhea were signs of an unknown disease.

So for a time they insisted on stricter protocols and more
cautious behaviour on CID. This meant that when Jennifer visited she no longer took off her mask. This bewildered Dusty. He was feeling ill.

Researchers waited for results.

Mothers waited for babies.