A Beautiful Truth (26 page)

Looee remembered about menus. He found one on the floor that felt like dry leaves and pointed at a tiny picture of something that looked like a milkshake. He looked over his shoulder to the waitress. She was pretty in white but scary. He looked at the menu but it had blown away and he looked again over his shoulder at the waitress who looked exactly like Jerome.

While the search first concentrated on the driveway and then spread out, Jerome had a hunch that Looee wouldn’t be far. He helped with checking the kitchens and cafeteria, then wandered to the south of CID. There was a grove of poplar trees on the grounds near the storehouse that seemed a likely place to look. He watched Lonee falling over and babbling, using the trees to pull himself up.

Jerome had waited awhile, had watched Lonee sleep, and he thought about options. He stood not far behind Lonee and aimed the rifle, and the dart pierced a testicle with no satisfying pop.

Lonee was slung into the back of a short-bed pickup and driven to CID.

Jennifer transferred from the nursery to CID. She wanted to be close to Dusty. She arrived at seven most mornings and manually turned on the light.

She looked at the protocol book to see who should eat and what procedures were planned for the day, and she went from cage to cage to note how much each had eaten through the night.

She fetched the food bucket—a yellow plastic garbage can on wheels—and for those who weren’t scheduled for knockdowns she opened each feeder and poured out two scoops of chow. The room was filled with food grunts and hoots, even from the sickly. At lunch she came around with fruit and water and noticed their barks, uniquely reserved for the prospect of fruit.

The next and last meal was at 3
PM
, and most of the staff went home. Dr. Meijer arrived and left late.

Jennifer was allowed to visit during the evening. The lights went off automatically at eight. If she was late she sometimes turned on the anteroom light, which suffused through the main wing like the light around bedtime stories.

Lonee wasn’t sleeping and his hand had started to float. Jennifer thought they were connecting some nights, those intelligent eyes of his reaching out, but he would suddenly look away or attack his hand. He was pulling off his nails.

When he seemed lucid he sometimes came to her at the front of the cage and lay on his back. He pulled his feet back and looked at her through his legs while he felt his diminished scrotum. It had been more than a year since his testicle was removed.

They were all now chronically infected with HIV. The progress of the virus in chimpanzees was not yet fully understood. Biopsies showed that they were clearly infected, and clearly fighting infection, but the outcome of the infection was a mystery.

It had been decided that Dusty would be superinfected with several strains at once.

Jennifer got a special dispensation from the entertainment coordinator to bring a television and VCR into the wing. She
wheeled both on a trolley to the far end, and at moments when there were no scheduled procedures they all craned their necks and watched.

Lonee wanted to show everyone that he knew how to use the remote control. Jennifer couldn’t understand why he was jumping and displaying so loudly and said you really are a moody boy. They watched Three Men and a Baby.

Dr. Meijer felt like he no longer could tell anyone about his work. He could barely talk to colleagues.

Rosie was eating her own shit, to savour and savour again the food that was each day’s only diversion. She was growing obese and Dr. Meijer knew neither how nor why to stop it. Staff were instructed to keep a careful eye on her whenever she returned from a knockdown. They stood near her cage with broomsticks to prod her in case she slumped and choked.

At night when Jennifer visited, Lonee played a song for her, rattling the door of his cage rhythmically, repeatedly, a metal song of train tracks shivering under maniac commuters. Jennifer took her hair out of her hood and danced like an idiot.

She told Dr. Meijer she couldn’t do it anymore. I’m either going to quit or I’m rescuing every one of them.

Protests outside the main site became fervent, and some of the labs were broken into. Macaques were freed to the Florida suburbs and a labworker beaten by activists till he trusted no one ever again.

When Dr. Meijer performed the autopsy on Rosie, he determined heart failure to be the cause of death, but her liver was in pieces and dispersed around her body. He stared at a print of a seashell in his office and couldn’t remember where or why he got it or why anyone would make it and his lungs felt full of snow.

Research had slowed and the wing was like a hospice for eighteen months.

But Dusty’s death prompted a renewed interest in HIV studies. As the years had passed there were very few publishable results. Some vaccines seemed to work on some of the chimpanzees, but none could cover every strain. And some that were safe for chimpanzees ended up being pernicious in human trials. There was accumulating doubt about whether the experience of the disease was the same for chimps and humans.

As a consequence, funding for many studies dried up and there was talk of closing CID. But Dusty’s superinfection eventually developed into symptoms like those of full-blown AIDS.

After five years of infection, his diarrhea became fulminant and relentless. He was treated with five different antibiotics and showed little response. Cryptosporidium was rampant in his intestines, and it was this which the researchers called “AIDS-defining” in their paper. He wasn’t treated with any antiretroviral drugs, as some of the others were, because the researchers wanted to see how the virus progressed.

Jennifer watched his weight go up and down. After a year she no longer wished he would rally. She spent a night on the floor by his cage thinking it would be his last, but he made it through hundreds more. In their night sweats and fevers Lonee and Dusty called mournfully to each other like neuters across a chapel.

Dr. Meijer began insisting to the PI that they euthanize Dusty. The PI, after consulting with his peers, told Dr. Meijer to wait and perform a blood transfusion. They had found that the virus they had isolated from Dusty’s blood was different from what he had been inoculated with—it had undergone a genetic mutation. A new quasipecies of HIV had developed in Dusty’s body and they wanted to see now how other chimpanzees reacted to it.

Lonee was knocked down and 40 mL of Dusty’s blood were transfused into him intravenously.

Dusty was killed when his weight dropped to thirty-five pounds. He weighed less than Jennifer’s six-year-old son, who was ten years Dusty’s junior.

Altogether, Lonee spent fourteen years in those cages.

Jennifer resigned.

Lonee saw and smelled her in the dark sometimes with the tall men Walt and Larry, with rainstorms and meatsmells and friendship and lipstick: all of them bugs in the woodwork, distractions from the sleeping that had to be done.

Mr. Ghoul is led into a room with a plekter wall and the room is dark in the corners. On the other side, a yek appears. He walks oddly.

Mr. Ghoul sits. He doesn’t challenge the yek. He watches.

The yek is sitting in a corner. He looks around the room.

Mr. Ghoul moves closer to the plekter. He looks for something in the room to play with. He sees something on the floor, moves to it and holds it up, as much for the yek’s analysis as his own.

It’s a tooth.

They both stare at it.

Mr. Ghoul shows his teeth briefly to the yek to remark on the fact that it’s a tooth. The yek does not move.

At midnight through a high window, a star shines so dimly. Sometimes it doesn’t seem like it is there, but Mr. Ghoul knows it is.

The yek doesn’t move or make a sound. He is black in the corner. Mr. Ghoul keeps holding the tooth. Something about it pricks the darkness of the yek.

There is no fear in that room.

Mr. Ghoul stares at him.

Quiet star. Silver coin in a dirty pond.

All of them meet the yek. Some are brought in separately, some in groups. Fifi, Mama and the new one are brought in together. The yek watches from the corner. The women and the girl are eager to meet him.

Fifi turns in a submissive posture, but the yek doesn’t move from the corner.

They clap, as Podo used to clap, to initiate a skrupulus. They groom, and the new one gestures towards the yek, inviting him to come closer to the plekter.

He stays.

Lonee sleeps.

Dusty’s malignant blood fizzed and mixed with his own.

He sleeps for two years while his muscles melt, and once the pain has climaxed he enjoys the deliquescence. He will flood the floor and suffer no longer.

Bill the labtech is transferred from Congo to CID and recognizes Lonee as Looee, though he can’t believe that it’s the same animal. He corrects the name on Looee’s chart and asks: remember me, old soldier.

No papers are published. Nothing can be gathered from his body’s data except that a massive infection has come and gone.

There is no final submission. For months he feels more than ever as if he is floating. Two feet above the ground for fourteen years, this aluminum air has become the new earth.

He rallies and sits and can adjust his posture now when the
bars dig into his ribs. The knockdowns have stopped. He misses the ketamine.

There is something about having shared this space with the others—all the dogpeople screaming, succumbing and surviving. Dusty and Rosie are now long gone, their cages never filled, but the others have hung on. Looee survives by watching the others surviving. They have always called in support and screamed at the men with guns. Each of them is isolated, but looking around for all these years they feel that no one is alone. Looee screamed with the rest of them, felt jealousy and sympathetic joy when the others had their cages cleaned. He has yearned for touch, and died like everyone else.

New caregivers tie colourful streamers to the corners of the wing and bring balloons. They give everyone a piece of cake. Looee eats his and Mac makes noises of delight so excessive and pure that the caregivers remember that moment for years.

HIV research on chimpanzees has grown too costly and inconclusive. The CID Wing is to be closed. The chimps will be sent to other laboratories.

Dr. Meijer does what he can. The placements are dictated by the arbitrary needs of strangers, but most of the chimps will escape these cages. Pepper, Spud and Nathan are sent to sanctuaries in Quebec and Louisiana, others are sent to Spain and Uganda. Mac endures ten more years of biomedical testing in New Mexico. Looee remains at Girdish.

He is knocked down and transported in a van for half a mile to the field station.

He is kept in a concrete room with bars on one side and is brought vegetables and fruit.

David Kennedy says let’s get you healthy.

He puts a television in front of the bars and Looee watches footage of a group of dogpeople in an outdoor enclosure. Looee wonders where their cages are.

Another man comes to the bars and offers Looee grape juice. As Looee sucks on the straw, the man masturbates him with a long-handled device. Despite his missing testicle his sperm is adequate and motile.

He is given blankets and toys and he sleeps.

He dreams of a garden with a tall blue wall.

He dreams of bananas, watermelon and strawberries.

He doesn’t trust this space but he is dreaming.

No one knows if he is aware of what a dream is.

A woman points to the TV screen and says that’s Magda … that’s Jonathan … that’s Bootie.

Looee wants her to talk to him all day.

He attacks his hand sometimes.

He is led into the room they have always used for introductions. It is divided in two by a wall of iron mesh so the chimps being introduced are unable to hurt each other.

He sits in the corner so his back is protected and he can see anyone coming with a gun. A low door opens from the outside and two dogpeople come into the room on the other side of the mesh.

Bootie sees Looee and barks in alarm. His hair stands on end and he goes to Magda for support.

Bootie reminds him of Dusty.

Magda comes up to the mesh. She looks deep into the corner while Bootie makes a racket behind her.

Magda looks hard at Looee and barks. She’s what Larry would have called an asshole.

Stencilled memories of a past long gone take colour for a
moment and Looee is overcome with fear and sadness. He pushes hard into the corner wall.

They feed him parsnips, lettuce and red peppers. They fill a rubber hose with peanut butter and he occupies himself with sucking it out.

David Kennedy sits on a chair. He watches Looee eat. He senses vulnerability and defiance, some otherworldly wisdom. He feels irrationally drawn to this injured chimp like students are to certain teachers. Charisma is one of those forces that unite us with other apes. Alphas, male or female, are those who attract others to them, sometimes regardless of what is said or done.

He thinks about sending Looee out into the colony, an emissary of sorts. David hasn’t had any physical interaction with them for over fifteen years.

Looee will be killed if he joins the colony now. Some of the males will have to be sequestered. There will have to be introductions.

David feels a strength in his hands as he watches Looee, an unconscious force that he reflects on later. A shared determination.

He wants Looee to be strong. He wants to see if others feel his charm.

Looee gains weight and gathers strength. His hips and legs are permanently damaged from being in the cage for so long.

Burke comes into the introduction room looking massive and invincible. He paces his half of the room, several times with purpose around the perimeter. He pounds on the low iron door with room-shaking strength. It slides up and he walks outside.

Jonathan is in the room when Looee is next brought in. He fills the room with sounds that make Looee shudder, but they continue for so long that Looee eventually relaxes.

Looee sits in the corner and watches the rangy dogperson leap around the room. Jonathan hangs from the mesh and pisses and his penis surges and flags.