Points of Departure (35 page)

“Looked like supplies,” he had said. “They looked like they were in for the long haul.”

On the third day, Rachel’s
water runs out. She heads toward a small town, marked on the map. They reach it in the early morning—thirst forces them to travel by day.

Beside an isolated ranch house, she finds a faucet. She is filling her bottle when Johnson grunts in alarm.

A dark-haired woman watches from the porch of the house. She does not move toward the apes, and Rachel continues filling the bottle. “It’s all right,
Rachel,” the woman, who has been following the story in the papers, calls out. “Drink all you want.”

Startled, but still suspicious, Rachel caps the bottle and, keeping her eyes on the woman, drinks from the faucet.

The woman steps back into the house. Rachel signals to Johnson, telling him to hurry and drink. She turns off the faucet when he is done.

They are turning to go when the woman emerges
from the house carrying a plate of tortillas and a bowl of apples.

She sets them on the edge of the porch and says, “These are for you.”

The woman watches through the window as Rachel packs the food in her bag. Rachel puts away the last apple and gestures her thanks to the woman. When’ the woman fails to respond to the sign language, Rachel picks up a stick and writes in the sand of the yard.
“THANK YOU,” Rachel scratches, then waves good-bye and sets out across the desert. She is puzzled, but happy.

The next morning’s newspaper includes an interview with the dark-haired woman. She describes how Rachel turned on the faucet and turned it off when she was through, how the chimp packed the apples neatly in her bag and wrote in the dirt with a stick.

The reporter also interviews the
director of the Primate Research Center. “These are animals,” the director explains angrily. “But people want to treat them like they’re small hairy people.” He describes the Center as “primarily a breeding center with some facilities for medical research.”

The reporter asks some pointed questions about their acquisition of Rachel.

But the biggest story is an investigative piece. The reporter
reveals that he has tracked down Aaron Jacobs’s lawyer and learned that Jacobs left a will. In this will Jacobs bequeathed all his possessions—including his house and surrounding land—to “Rachel, the chimp I acknowledge as my daughter.”

The reporter makes friends with one of the young women in the typing pool at the research center, and she tells him the office scuttlebutt: people suspect that
the chimps may have been released by a deaf and drunken janitor, who was subsequently fired for negligence. The reporter, accompanied by a friend who can communicate in sign language, finds Jake in his apartment in downtown Flagstaff.

Jake, who has been drinking steadily since he was fired, feels betrayed by Rachel, by the Primate Research Center, by the world. He complains at length about Rachel:
they had been friends, and then she took his baseball cap and ran away. He just didn’t understand why she had run away like that.

“You mean she could talk?” the reporter asks through his interpreter.

Of course she can talk, Jake signs impatiently. She is a smart monkey.

The headline reads: “Intelligent Chimp Inherits Fortune!”

Of course, Aaron’s bequest isn’t really a fortune and she isn’t
just a chimp, but close enough. Animal rights activists rise up in Rachel’s defense. The case is discussed on the national news. Ann Landers reports receiving a letter from a chimp named Rachel; she had thought it was a hoax perpetrated by the boys at Yale. The American Civil Liberties Union assigns a lawyer to the case.

By day, Rachel and Johnson sleep in whatever hiding places they can find:
a cave; a shelter built for range cattle; the shell of an abandoned car, rusted from long years in a desert gully. Sometimes Rachel dreams of jungle darkness, and the coyotes in the distance become a part of her dreams, their howling becomes the cries of fellow apes.

The desert and the journey have changed her. She is wiser; having passed through the white-hot love of adolescence and emerged
on the other side. She dreams, one day, of the ranch house. In the dream, she has long blond hair and pale white skin. Her eyes are red from crying and she wanders the house restlessly, searching for something that she has lost. When she hears coyotes howling, she looks through a window at the darkness outside. The face that looks in at her has jug-handle ears and shaggy hair. When she sees the face,
she cries out in recognition and opens the window to let herself in.

By night, Rachel and Johnson travel. The rocks and sands are cool beneath Rachel’s feet as she walks toward her ranch. On television, scientists and politicians discuss the ramifications of her case, describe the technology uncovered by investigation of Aaron Jacobs’s files. Their debates do not affect her steady progress toward
her ranch or the stars that sprinkle the sky above her.

It is night when Rachel and Johnson approach the ranch house. Rachel sniffs the wind and smells automobile exhaust and strange humans. From the hills, she can see a white van marked with the name of a local television station. She hesitates and considers returning to the safety of the desert. Then she takes Johnson by the hand and starts
down the hill. Rachel is going home.

I
SEE THE METAL CLAW
lying in the gutter among the broken bottles and litter, and I recognize it immediately: a piece of an alien spaceship. Before I pick it up, I glance in both directions to make sure no one is watching. The only person nearby is a hooker waiting for a john, and she is watching the cars drive past. A young couple is walking by, but they
are looking away, determined to ignore both the hooker and me. They, like so many other people, don’t really want to see what’s around them.

I scoop up the alien artifact. The claw has three digits, joined together at a thick stalk. The end of the stalk is rough, as if it had broken off a larger piece. Though the day is foggy, the metal is warm to the touch. When I touch the claw, I feel its
digits flex in response, but when I examine it more closely, it lies still.

I add the claw to the treasures in my pink plastic shopping bag, and I hurry to the hotel where I live.

Harold is at the front desk when I come in. He’s wearing the same dingy white shirt, burgundy tie, and frayed blue suit jacket he always wears. I think he believes that the suit jacket gives him an air of respectability.
Harold calls himself the hotel manager, but he’s really just the desk clerk. He’s a middle-aged man with delusions of grandeur.

He looks up when I walk in. “Your social worker was looking for you today,” he grumbled. “She said you had missed your last two appointments.” Harold doesn’t look at me when he speaks. He looks past me, at a point somewhere over my head.

“I must have forgotten,” I tell
him. A month ago, I was assigned to a new social worker, a bright young woman just out of graduate school. I suspect that she is an agent of the CIA. The one time that I mentioned the aliens to her, I caught a look in her eyes, a flicker of joyous discovery. She hid her elation, but not before I noticed.

“She left this.” He holds out a slip of industrial green paper. It is an official notification
that I have an appointment with the city Department of Social Services tomorrow.

I take the paper, drop it in my shopping bag, and head for my room. On my way through the lobby, I pass Mr. Johnson, Mrs. Danneman, and Mrs. Goldman. They sit in the grimy armchairs in the lobby, watching people walk by the hotel’s front windows. I nod to them and smile, but they do not respond. They stare past me,
like zombies who are trying to remember what life was like. I may be old, but I hope I will never be that close to dead. I punch the button for the elevator.

On the top floor of the hotel, the hallway stinks of other people’s food: tomato soup heated on illegal hot plates, greasy burgers from the take-out place on the corner, Chinese food in soggy cardboard containers. Down the center of the
hall, there’s a long strip of bright red carpet that covers the path where the gray wall-to-wall carpet has worn through. The runner is wearing too: a trail of footprints and dirt marks the center and the edges are starting to fray.

I carry my shopping bag down the hall to my room—a cozy cubicle furnished with a single bed, a battered chest of drawers, and a chair upholstered in turquoise blue
vinyl. The room is small, but I’ve made it my own. Along the walls, I’ve stacked cardboard boxes filled with the things that I’ve collected. The paper bags that hold my other treasures fill most of the floor space. A narrow path leads from the door to the chair.

I make my way to the chair and set my shopping bag on the worn gray carpet. This is the best part of the day. Now I sort the treasures
I have found, putting each one where it belongs: the buttons go into the bag of buttons, the bottle caps into the box of bottle caps, the broken umbrella into the stack of broken umbrellas. The green slip from the Department of Social Services goes in the trash.

There is no proper place for the metal claw. I set it on the arm of the chair. I will put it with the other spaceship parts, when I
find more.

The government does not want people to know about the alien spaceships. They deny all reports of UFOs and flying saucers. The government is good at hiding the things people would rather not see: the old men and women in the lobby, the hookers on the corners, the aliens who visit our world.

But I know about the aliens. Late at night, I sit on the narrow metal balcony of the fire escape
outside my window and I watch the sky. The city lights wash out the stars, but there are other lights in the sky: planes landing at the San Francisco airport, police helicopters on patrol, and, of course, the alien spaceships, small sparks that dance just above the buildings of downtown. Sometimes, I can barely see them. I have to squint my eyes and concentrate, staring into the darkness until
at last they become clear.

It was drizzling, night before last, when I tried to communicate with the aliens. I had been watching one particular alien spaceship through the rain-streaked window.

Its faint wavering light reminded me of fireflies that I had seen as a child. The light blinked on and off, on and off: a dash, a series of dots. I knew it had to be a message, but I could not translate
the sign.

The light came lower, hovering just above the buildings a few blocks away. I left the window and stood by my door, flicking the light switch so that the bare bulb in the ceiling went on and off, on and off, repeating the pattern I had seen. I didn’t know how the aliens responded; from my post by the light switch. I could not see out the window. As I was repeating the pattern for the
third time, I heard the wailing of a siren and the muffled thunder of a police helicopter. I abandoned the light switch and hurried to the window.

The helicopter was circling nearby. The roving beams of its spotlights reflected from the raindrops, forming bright shafts of light that seemed to connect the copter to the ground. The spotlights moved in a frantic, erratic pattern, rippling over the
cars, the alleys, the walls of buildings.

Sirens in the street, bright lights flashing blue and red and blue and red, the rattle of gunfire, a distant explosion—I backed away from the window, suddenly frightened. I turned off my light and crawled into bed, pulling the covers up under my chin. I hadn’t meant to lure the spaceship in too close. I hadn’t meant to cause trouble.

For a long time,
I lay awake, listening to the sirens.

The next day, Harold said that there had been a drug bust down the street. “Thank God they’re doing something to clean up the neighborhood,” he said to Mrs. Goldman, who wasn’t listening.

Harold believes what he reads in the newspapers. He doesn’t know about the aliens. He doesn’t see the world as it really is.

With the alien claw on the arm of my chair,
I lie in my bed, trying to sleep. My room is not a quiet place. The bathroom faucet drips, a delicate tap, tap, tapping, in the darkness. The wheezing of buses and the rattling of Muni trains drift up to my window from the street below. My next-door-neighbor’s TV rumbles through the walls—he’s a little deaf, and he keeps the sound turned up loud.

On this particular night I notice a new noise:
a furtive scrabbling that stops each time I move. I sit up in the bed and look around, thinking it might be a rat. I’ve seen rats on the stairs, nasty gray shadows that flee at the sound of footsteps.

The metal claw is no longer on the arm of the chair. I wait, remaining very still. Finally, by the pale moonlight that filters through my window, I see the claw crouching among the bags and boxes.
As I watch, it begins to move again, pulling itself along with its three digits and dragging its broken stalk across the carpet. I shift my weight, the bed creaks, and the claw stops, freezing in position.

It seems so frightened and helpless, crouching on the floor in the darkness. “It’s all right,” I say to it softly. “Don’t worry. I won’t hurt you. I’m your friend.” I remain very still.

Eventually,
the claw moves again. I hear a soft rustling as it pushes between the paper bags. I hear it rattling among the broken umbrellas. I fall asleep to the gentle clicking as its digits flex and straighten, flex and straighten again.

In the morning, I see the claw sunning itself in the pale morning light that comes in the window. When I was a girl on my grandfather’s farm, the morning light was yellow
like the corn that grew in the fields, like the sunflowers on the edge of the garden. But the city light is gray. I remember reading somewhere that different stars cast light of different colors. I wonder what color light the claw is used to.

During the night, the claw has improved itself. It has six legs now—the original three and three more that look like they were constructed from the ribs
of a broken umbrella.

When I sit up in bed, the claw scurries away, seeking refuge among the boxes and bags. I watch it go.

It’s comforting to have something alive here in my room. I had a kitten once, a scrawny black alley cat that I found hiding under a dumpster in an alley. But Harold found out about it and told me cats weren’t allowed. When I was out, he got into my room and took the kitten
away. I don’t think he could catch the claw and take it away. I’ll bet that the claw would hide so well that he wouldn’t even see it.