All about Skin (12 page)

Puppies, she thought.
Puppies
. Numbers in plates on cage doors: 432, 433, 434. Sabina felt the breath knot and pull tight inside her. Daddy, she breathed.
Da-dd-eee!
She was shouting, running.

What was it; what had she seen? She was in a shifting hole, a black hole; it was a tidal wave, it pulled at her, dragged her into those cages of living breathing creatures with eyes shrinking, shadowed; it swirled and spiraled her, memories crashing, into the tense, inexorable thrust of metal drilling down the tender cave of her four-year-old ear canal when the ENT specialist had had to drill down to remove that recalcitrant ear wax that had grown, encrusted, deep inside her skull, three nurses holding her down.

She heard them now, heard her own eight-year-old self screaming.

They held her down; she felt them, hands like iron bands on her, biting skin, thudding on bones, the packed, inescapable horror of it; she had only to look into one beagle's eyes to know, in painful immediacy, what it could feel like. The wave swallowed, drowned her. Her breath extruded in squeezed, unwieldy gasps.

By the time she reached the wide-open steel door, the pound of footsteps, keys, women and men in white lab coats, somewhere her father behind them, she was hyperventilating, in shock, asthmatic, wheezing; she stumbled over her own feet and fell; they caught her.

These things you could not forget.

She was eight; it was the day she saw her father fall, into that abyss she would never comprehend.

What he said later that night in the house remaining forever incomprehensible. For mankind, he had said, the good of mankind, when she shouted,
Why, daddy, why!
Not even, she pondered, years later,
womankind
. Who were, after all, the subjects of his enquiry, his practice.

She was crying, and the tears fell between them. She gazed at him as if he were a stranger, parts of his face suddenly winking into disappearance, the trimmed yet uneven moustache, sprout of black on cheeks, hair curling out of one nostril, the restless, seeking eyes.

In a way, this is how he remained to her, all through the rest of her childhood. A little disappeared, a little remote, those parts of him she had once believed essential elided, forgotten, removed from reality. She could believe him monstrous. Perhaps she did. She would not question too closely what any of it meant. For a long time the hole was a vacuum of silence in her. She would not speak of it.

She would look at him instead, in stray moments, at dinner sometimes, or later at night, watching television, or on Sundays on the Mall, visiting museums, walking through gardens in spring—at Dumbarton Oaks, the Arboretum—gazing at varieties of his favorite blooming shrub, azalea. He would walk past scintillant bursts of coral, mauve, magenta, touching, marveling, murmuring. She would see her father, loved, beloved. The same father who swung her up in the air when she was a child, who helped her fly kites in the park, held her hand on hikes in camping spots in the dark. And she would see, walking in his shirt, his pants, his shoes, too, that disappearance in him, that excision from meaning that he walked around with for her, a body incomplete, whole cells of him stamped mysteriously into oblivion.

Such a father could not be relied on, nor, in an essential, visceral way, be turned to. Such a father belonged, in part, to a void.

I will never be a doctor, she screamed into his face that night,
Never like you—never!

And later, years later, her grandmother smiling calmly at her, advising. A PhD is a doctor who is not a doctor. Get a PhD in whatever you want.
You don't have to study medicine
.

Now, sitting across from him at dinner—balding, his thin, gray hair combed loosely across the dome of his scalp, concentrating on his rice and sambar—she darts the question at him almost unwillingly. Dad, would a circus steal a macaque?

A rhesus macaque? Her father's eyes gleam, as if he has uncovered a treasure.

From someone's house, I mean? A pet macaque.

Ah. Her father leans back, sips from his glass of ice water. I would not know about circuses. I do know that rhesus macaques are still in demand in labs.

Oddly, Sabina has not thought of a lab. As yet.

It was very easy, once, he says, to import them from India. You know they are plentiful in India. But after the Indian government put a ban on importing them in the late '70s—you see they were almost becoming extinct then in India, thousands were exported, over the years—one had to look for other means.

What do you mean?

After the ban, primate supply switched to breeding. Rhesus macaques today are bred here in the United States in large colonies, in captivity—they are bred purely for research. Sabina knows already she wants to stop this conversation. She shifts in her chair; her face stiffens into a mask. The image of the kind of monkeys Lucy talked about, loving, affectionate, clinging, brought up in families yet caged from birth, bred for the laboratory, for experimentation, is almost too much to bear. Such monkeys are more malleable. From the beginning they get used to the technicians. But the most malleable subject of all that I ever knew—he pauses and sips his water, smiling reflectively, oddly enough—was not captive-bred.

Sabina feels faint, as if she needs to sit down, although she is indeed sitting down. This lady I know, she says, faintly, her pet was stolen and taken to a circus.

Her father resumes eating. They are alone at the dinner table tonight as often enough, her father and herself. Her mother, an interventional cardiologist on call many nights, has been called away again and is in surgery. Possible, he says. Pets are stolen for labs also. Dogs, cats, rabbits, hamsters. Monkeys too, he offers, reaching for an
aplum
. In that interim period, after the ban, there was a dearth of monkeys—we were lucky to get them any way we could.

Through stealing?
Sabina's voice is hitting an octave.
Stolen pets?
You
knew
they were stolen?

Her father does not answer immediately. He is eating with his fingers, meditatively. Jim, that is, James Netherton, he says finally. He was our best Class B supplier. Of course they got animals from everywhere. Flea markets, dog pounds, newspaper ads, country auctions—unwanted animals, you see. The Class As are the breeders, the class Bs are the random sources. Of course you knew there were bunchers involved.

Inside of her, Sabina is feeling a familiar feeling, gritty as sandpaper, raw as crude oil, tear upward and through her.
Bunchers?
What were
bunchers
? She doesn't know, but it doesn't sound good.
What is the “of course” about it
, she wants to shout.

But she has lived too long in this house, with her parents, all through high school and college—she was a day student at GWU, she just took the Orange Line in to Foggy Bottom—too long with removal sitting beside her, peeling an orange, wiping a face, straightening a collar, that she has forgotten what to say to it. In some ways she has forgotten she
can
say something to it. In this oblivion of acceptance, day after month after year, not intending to, she has lost that part of herself that could speak, that could shout, that spoke once, that shouted once, that has shriveled into a fetal ball and rolled deep away inside her.

Her cousins, her Indian friends, the ones she knows here in northern Virginia—they too live at home. Well, not all of them. Sonya is at Princeton, Tarik is at MIT. But the rest are at George Mason, George Washington, Georgetown—all close to home. It's not expected, to leave home, like the Americans do.

Sabina had thought about it for a while, dreamed of it—Berkeley, she had dreamed, or UC–Davis or Harvard or U of Michigan at Ann Arbor—then surrendered to her parents' wishes to study close by. They would be all alone if she left. She was an only child. She owed it to them. She had grown up with this knowing, that there was no one else to take care of them when they became old. It was an expectation she'd heard voiced often enough by relatives growing up that it began to grow inside her. Besides, she wanted to. Didn't she? Now, looking at her father crumpling
aplums
in his fingers and talking casually of
bunchers
, she is not so sure.

Bunchers were often employed by Class Bs, says her father. I know Jim had some.

They stole
pets
? Sabina has stopped eating. She can hardly speak.

They got them from pounds, auction sales. I told you. Too many unwanted animals on the streets, in the shelters. In this country, most shelters kill the animals. But this way they are saved from being euthanized. It is a good thing to rescue them for science. I just told you, those animals who were once pets make good subjects.

Sabina feels frozen to her chair. Her father is speaking calmly, ruminatively, as if he were pronouncing facts and not opinions, as if she weren't sitting there at all. The best subject I had, no, the perfect subject came to me from Jim. Let me think, what was its name? Jim insisted I use the name always, he says, it answered only to the name.

A
stolen pet
?

Her father shrugs. May have been. Who knows? It may have been from a pound, a private owner. Sometimes people give animals away, you know. When they get posted overseas or have children, sometimes—these animals are too much in a house full of children. He adjusted his glasses. Sometimes you see how dogs are left alone in a yard all day. Bunchers rescue them.

You mean, steal them!

These animals are docile, says her father firmly. Trusting, easy to handle. Not wild or fearful, they come to you willingly. Well, he pauses, at least at first. And for a long time. He looks at Sabina searchingly, as if seeing her for the first time. Did your mother tell you if she made anything for dessert?

Sabina jumps up. Her napkin falls to the floor. Her plate is still full with rice, dhal, vegetables. She has barely eaten. It is only habit that keeps her here, taking care of her father. There's
gulab jamun
. She pulls the box out of the fridge, puts some in a bright yellow dessert bowl. From Sarla Sweets.

Ah, says her father, good! He slides his spoon into the sweet rose syrup and conveys it to his tongue. He tests the
jamuns
slowly. Too hard, he says after a minute. Not cooked enough.

You want ice cream instead?

Her father is eating the hard
gulab jamuns
. He shakes his head. This is enough sugar. He pushes the bowl away. You finish it!

Sabina does not answer. She is half inside the fridge. She is staring, not at bowls of food, bottles of condiments, sweet relish, mango pickle, apricot jam, but at sunlit acres of yards with dogs and cats being invaded by men called the peculiar name of
bunchers
, at cages of animals being transported in vans to secret supply centers, moved from hand to hand at universities and research labs where her father has worked.

I kept the name tag Jim gave me with that animal, her father is saying. I cannot recall the name now. He frowns, gets up. I will show it to you.

Sabina closes the fridge and returns slowly to her plate. Once before in her life, when she had contracted a terrible stomach flu virus, the world went black before her; she actually fainted. Now she feels something as black and wave-like, tubular, steal across her vision.

She sits but feels the table is tilting. Ahead of her the long, forever dismal corridor snakes in a mist of remembered misery, insistent whining fills the air, and in cage upon cage she sees the desperate, golden eyes of beagles.

Her father holds out a round, metal object to her. It is flat, an aluminum name tag, the kind you might put on a dog or cat's collar. A name, an address, a phone number. These details are slight, worn thin. Hints of dirt fill the crevices. Her fingers rub automatically over the dented, engraved letters. She rubs, to glimpse the almost-faded name.

Funny name, her father muses, for a macaque.

Sabina's head jerks up. I did not know it was a macaque.

Oh yes, her father says absently, wiping his glasses with his napkin. One of the most-used animals in the lab. All of us used that one. It was ideal, almost human. A willing subject. Yes, for a long time it came to us without reserve. Like a child it was—excitable, it would rush at us.

Lucy Kendall's voice, frail and remembering:
She always came flying at me when I came home
. Sabina hears this.
Not everyone could live with a monkey
. Through the willowy mist clouding her eyes, the horrid metal sinking cold inside her, Sabina sees the cascading white lace of the dress, the ruffled skirt, the billowy collar, not in Lucy's papery hands, empty and longing. But in a cage in a lab, luminous and shimmering in a hidden-away basement, a monkey in it, the beautiful, hungry-for-love macaque that Lucy had loved like a child.

Yes, her father is reminiscing aloud, some macaques are better than others. Rubbing earnestly through the dirt, the fading, the almost-erasure, the cold blade of premonition knifing through her, she views the name she has already heard this morning, the name she wants desperately not to but wills herself to see, a fate stamped in tilted lurching capitals: D-E-L-I-L-A-H.

Later, she thinks: of the worst things in the world, the thing you cannot believe when you hear about it, and then the thing you want with all the force of your being never to have happened,
these things too happen
.

Later she sits in the living room, a wash of sound and light engulfing, consuming, as her father watches television and she sits, in a fugue, unable, herself, to engage in the slightest act of conscious, external perception.

It is a day and a week from that moment when she enters Lucy Kendall's room in the nursing home again. Lucy is sewing something, her needle glinting as she raises the thread and loops and pierces the pale peach batiste of the dress in her hands. A pattern of stars and moons on it, so delicate as to seem watermarked into the fabric.

This belonged to my mother, she says, so long ago. Do you see the years on it?