Sara Gruen

Ape House

For great apes everywhere

but especially Panbanisha

Give orange give me eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you.

– NIM CHIMPSKY, 1970s

Gimme gimme more, gimme more, gimme gimme more.

– BRITNEY SPEARS, 2007

1

The plane had yet to take off, but Osgood, the photographer, was already snoring softly. He was in the center seat, wedged between John Thigpen and a woman in coffee-colored stockings and sensible shoes. He listed heavily toward the latter, who, having already made a great point of lowering the armrest, was progressively becoming one with the wall. Osgood was blissfully unaware. John glanced at him with a pang of envy; their editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer was loath to spring for hotels and had insisted that they complete their visit to the Great Ape Language Lab in a single day. And so, despite seeing in the New Year the night before, John, Cat, and Osgood had all been on the 6 A.M. flight to Kansas City that same morning. John would have loved to close his eyes for a few minutes, even at the risk of accidentally cozying up to Osgood, but he needed to expand his notes while the details were fresh.

John’s knees did not fit within his allotted space, so he turned them outward into the aisle. Because Cat was behind him, reclining his seat was not an option. He was well aware of her mood. She had an entire row to herself-an unbelievable stroke of luck-but she had just asked the flight attendant for two gins and a tonic. Apparently having three seats to herself was not enough to offset the trauma of having spent her day poring over linguistics texts when she had been expecting to meet six great apes. Although she’d tried to disguise the symptoms of her cold ahead of time and explain away the residual as allergies, Isabel Duncan, the scientist who had greeted them, sussed her out immediately and banished her to the Linguistics Department. Cat had turned on her legendary charm, which she reserved for only the most dire of circumstances, but Isabel had been like Teflon. Bonobos and humans share 98.7 percent of their DNA, she’d said, which makes them susceptible to the same viruses. She couldn’t risk exposing them, particularly as one was pregnant. Besides, the Linguistics Department had fascinating new data on the bonobos’ vocalizations. And so a disappointed, sick, and frustrated Cat spent the afternoon at Blake Hall hearing about the dynamic shape and movement of tongues while John and Osgood visited the apes.

“You were behind glass anyway, right?” Cat complained in the taxi afterward. She was crammed between John and Osgood, both of whom kept their heads turned toward their respective windows in a futile attempt to avoid germs. “I don’t see how I could have given them anything from behind glass. I would have stood at the back of the room if she’d asked me. Hell, I’d have worn a gas mask.” She paused to snort Afrin up both nostrils and then honked mightily into a tissue. “Do you have any idea what I went through today?” she continued. “Their lingo is completely incomprehensible. I was already in trouble at ‘discourse.’ Next thing I knew it was ‘declarative illocutionary point’ this, ‘deontic modality’ that, blah blah blah.” She emphasized the “blahs” with her hands, waving the Afrin bottle in one and the crumpled tissue in the other. “I almost lost it on ‘rank lexical relation.’ Sounds like a smelly, overly chatty uncle, doesn’t it? How on earth do they think I’m going to be able to work that into a newspaper piece?”

John and Osgood exchanged a silent, relieved glance when they got their seat assignments for the trip home. John didn’t know Osgood’s take on today’s experience-they hadn’t had a moment alone-but for John, something massive had shifted.

He’d had a two-way conversation with great apes. He’d spoken to them in English, and they’d responded using American Sign Language, all the more remarkable because it meant they were competent in two human languages. One of the apes, Bonzi, arguably knew three: she was able to communicate by computer using a specially designed set of lexigrams. John also hadn’t realized the complexity of their native tongue-during the visit, the bonobos had clearly demonstrated their ability to vocalize specific information, such as flavors of yogurt and locations of hidden objects, even when unable to see each other. He’d looked into their eyes and recognized without a shadow of a doubt that sentient, intelligent beings were looking back. It was entirely different from peering into a zoo enclosure, and it changed his comprehension of the world in such a profound way he could not yet articulate it.

Being cleared by Isabel Duncan was only the first step in getting inside the apes’ living quarters. After Cat’s banishment to Blake Hall, Osgood and John were taken into an administrative office to wait while the apes were consulted. John had been told ahead of time that the bonobos had final say over who came into their home, and also that they’d been known to be fickle: over the past two years, they’d allowed in only about half of their would-be visitors. Knowing this, John had stacked his odds as much as possible. He researched the bonobos’ tastes online and bought a backpack for each, which he stuffed with favorite foods and toys-bouncy balls, fleece blankets, xylophones, Mr. Potato Heads, snacks, and anything else he thought they might find amusing. Then he emailed Isabel Duncan and asked her to tell the bonobos he was bringing surprises. Despite his efforts, John found that his forehead was beaded with sweat by the time Isabel returned from the consultation and informed him that not only were the apes allowing Osgood and him to come in, they were insisting.

She led them into the observation area, which was separated from the apes by a glass partition. She took the backpacks, disappeared into a hallway, reappeared on the other side of the glass, and handed them to the apes. John and Osgood stood watching as the bonobos unpacked their gifts. John was so close to the partition his nose and forehead were touching it. He’d almost forgotten it was there, so when the M &M’s surfaced and Bonzi leapt up to kiss him through the glass, he nearly fell backward.

Although John already knew that the bonobos’ preferences varied (for example, he knew Mbongo’s favorite food was green onions and that Sam loved pears), he was surprised by how distinct, how differentiated, how almost human, they were: Bonzi, the matriarch and undisputed leader, was calm, assured, and thoughtful, if unnervingly fond of M &M’s. Sam, the oldest male, was outgoing and charismatic, and entirely certain of his own magnetism. Jelani, an adolescent male, was an unabashed show-off with boundless energy and a particular love of leaping up walls and then flipping over backward. Makena, the pregnant one, was Jelani’s biggest fan, but was also exceedingly fond of Bonzi and spent long periods grooming her, sitting quietly and picking through her hair, with the result that Bonzi was balder than the others. The infant, Lola, was indescribably cute and also a stitch-John witnessed her yank a blanket out from under Sam’s head while he was resting and then come barreling over to Bonzi for protection, signing, BAD SURPRISE! BAD SURPRISE! (According to Isabel, messing with another bonobo’s nest was a major transgression, but there was another rule that trumped it: in their mothers’ eyes, bonobo babies could do no wrong.) Mbongo, the other adult male, was smaller than Sam and of a more sensitive nature: he opted out of further conversations with John after John unwittingly misinterpreted a game called Monster Chase. Mbongo put on a gorilla mask, which was John’s cue to act terrified and let Mbongo chase him. Unfortunately, nobody had told John, who didn’t even realize Mbongo was wearing a mask until the ape gave up and pulled it off, at which point John laughed. This was so devastating that Mbongo turned his back and flatly refused to acknowledge John from that point forward. Isabel eventually cheered him up by playing the game properly, but he declined to interact with John for the rest of the visit, which left John feeling as if he’d slapped a baby.

“Excuse me.”

John looked up to find a man standing in the aisle, unable to move past John’s legs. John shifted sideways and wrangled them into Osgood’s space, which elicited a grunt. When the man passed, John returned his legs to the aisle and as he did so caught sight of a woman three rows up holding a book whose familiar cover shot a jolt of adrenaline through him. It was his wife’s debut novel, although she had recently forbidden him from using that particular phrase since it was beginning to look as though her debut novel was also going to be her last. Back when The River Wars first came out and John and Amanda were still feeling hopeful, they had coined the phrase “a sighting in the wild” to describe finding some random person in the act of reading it. Until this moment it had been theoretical. John wished Amanda had been the one to experience it. She was in desperate need of cheering up, and he’d very nearly concluded that he was helpless in that department. John checked for the location of the flight attendant. She was in the galley, so he whipped out his cell phone, rose slightly out of his seat, and snapped a picture.

The drinks cart returned; Cat bought more gin, John ordered coffee, and Osgood continued to rumble subterraneously while his human cushion glowered.

John got out his laptop and started a new file:

Similar to chimpanzees in appearance but with slimmer build, longer limbs, flatter brow ridge. Black or dusky gray faces, pink lips. Black hair parted down the center. Expressive eyes and faces. High-pitched and frequent vocalizations. Matriarchal, egalitarian, peaceful. Extremely amorous. Intense female bonding.

Although John had known something of the bonobos’ demonstrative nature, he had been initially caught off-guard at the frequency of their sexual contact, particularly between females. A quick genital rub seemed as casual as a handshake. There were predictable occurrences, such as immediately before sharing food, but mostly there was no rhyme or reason that John could ascertain.

John sipped his coffee and considered. What he really needed to do was transcribe the interview with Isabel while he could still recall and annotate the non-aural details: her expressions and gestures, and the moment-unexpected and lovely-when she’d broken into ASL. He plugged his earphones into his voice recorder, and began:

ID: So this is the part where we talk about me?

JT: Yes.

ID: [nervous laugh] Great. Can we talk about someone else instead?

JT: Nope. Sorry.

ID: I was afraid of that.

JT: So what made you get into this type of work?

ID: I was taking a class with Richard Hughes-he’s the one who founded the lab-and he talked a little about the work he was doing. I was utterly fascinated.

JT: He passed away recently, didn’t he?

ID: Yes. [pause] Pancreatic cancer.

JT: I’m sorry.

ID: Thank you.

JT: So anyway, this class. Was it linguistics? Zoology?

ID: Psychology. Behavioral psychology.

JT: Is that what your degree is in?

ID: My first one. I think originally I thought it might help me understand my family-wait, can you please scratch that?

JT: Scratch what?

ID: That bit about my family. Can you take it out?

JT: Sure. No problem.

ID: [makes gesture of relief] Whew. Thanks. Okay, so basically I was this aimless first-year kid taking a psychology class, and I heard about the ape project and I went, and after I met the apes I couldn’t imagine doing anything else with my life. I can’t really describe it adequately. I begged and pleaded with Dr. Hughes to be allowed to do something, anything. I would mop floors, clean toilets, do laundry, just to be near them. They just… long pause, faraway look]… don’t know if I can say what it is. It just… s. I felt very strongly that this was where I belonged.

JT: So he let you.

ID: Not quite. [laughs] He told me that if I took a comprehensive linguistics course over the summer, read all his work, and came back to him fluent in ASL he’d think about it.

JT: And did you?

ID: [seems surprised] Yeah. I did. It was the hardest summer of my life. That’s like telling someone to go off and become fluent in Japanese over four months. ASL is not simply signed English-it’s a unique language, with a unique syntax. It’s usually time-topic-comment-oriented, although like English, there’s variability. For instance, you could say [starts signing], “Day-past me eat cherries,” or you could say, “Day-past eat cherries me.” But that is not to say that ASL doesn’t also use the subject-verb-object structure; it simply doesn’t use “state-of-being” verbs.

JT: You’re losing me.

ID: [laughs] Sorry.

JT: So you came back, you blew him out of the water, and you got the job.

ID: I don’t know about blowing him out of the water…

JT: Tell me about the apes.

ID: What about them?

JT: Seeing you with them today, and then speaking with them myself, and then managing to actually insult one of them-that was an eye-opener.

ID: He got over it.

JT: No. He didn’t. But do you understand how strange that whole thing would seem to your average, everyday person? The concept that you can insult an animal in a social situation and have to make it up to him? And possibly fail? That you can have a two-way conversation with apes, in human language no less, and they’re doing it simply because they want to?

ID: By Jove, I think he’s got it!

JT: I suppose I had that coming.

ID: I’m sorry. But yes, that’s the entire point of our work. Apes acquire language through exposure and a desire to communicate, just like human infants, and age-wise there is approximately the same window of opportunity. Although I’d like to branch out a little going forward.

JT: How so?

ID: Bonobos have their own language. You saw that today-Sam told Bonzi exactly where he’d hidden the key, even though they were in separate rooms and couldn’t see each other. She went straight for it and never looked anywhere else. We may never be able to use their vocalizations to communicate with them for the same reasons they can’t use spoken English-our vocal tracts are shaped too differently, which we think is related to the HAR1 gene sequence, but I think it’s high time someone made an attempt to decode it.

JT: About the sex.

ID: What about it?

JT: There’s just so much of it. And they’re so… irtuosic. It’s clearly not just about procreation.

ID: Absolutely right. Bonobos-along with dolphins and humans-are the only animals known to have recreational sex.

JT: Why do they do that?

ID: Why do you do it?

JT: Uh… kay. Moving right along.

ID: I’m sorry. That’s a fair question. We believe it’s a mechanism to relieve tension, resolve conflict, and reaffirm friendship, although it also has to do with the size of the females’ clitorises and that they are sexually receptive regardless of estrus. Whether this shapes or reflects bonobo culture is a matter of scientific debate, but there are several related factors: food is abundant in their natural habitat, which means the females aren’t in competition to feed their babies. They form strong friendships and band together to “correct” aggressive males, thus keeping those genes from entering the pool, and so, unlike chimpanzees, male bonobos do not practice infanticide. Maybe it’s because no male has any idea which babies are his, or maybe it’s because the males who are allowed to breed don’t care and that trait is passed along. Or maybe it’s because the females would rip him to shreds. Like I said, it’s a matter of some debate.

JT: Do you think the apes know they’re apes, or do they think they’re human?

ID: They know they’re apes, but I don’t think it means what you think it does.

JT: Explain.

ID: They know they’re bonobos and they know we’re human, but it doesn’t imply mastery, or superiority, or anything of the sort. We are, all of us, collaborators. We are, in fact, family.

John clicked off his voice recorder and closed the lid of his laptop. He’d have loved to follow up on the family thing, but since she’d backtracked immediately he left it alone. It was also interesting that she’d later called the bonobos her family. Maybe he could coax her into opening up in a follow-up interview. They’d definitely made a connection-a connection that he worried might have crossed over into flirtation at one point, although with each passing mile he felt better about that. She was unquestionably attractive, slim-hipped and athletic with straight blond hair that fell almost to her waist, but her charm was frank and earnest: she wore no makeup or jewelry of any kind, and John doubted she recognized her own appeal. Friendly is what they’d been; maybe she’d eventually trust him with her messy family history. It was the sort of detail readers loved, although this piece already promised to have plenty of those. She’d made another interesting comment when she put on the gorilla mask and gave a proper demonstration of Monster Chase. After she “caught” Mbongo, they’d rolled around on the floor tickling each other and laughing (hers was full and high-pitched, his a nearly silent wheezing, but the expression on his face left no question that it was laughter). John was shocked at the level of roughhousing going on, having been given to believe that working with great apes was extremely dangerous. Even though he’d read that bonobos were different, he hadn’t expected her to be so physical with them. His surprise must have been evident, because when she stopped she said, “Over the years, they’ve become more human, and I’ve become more bonobo,” and in that moment he’d felt a flash of understanding, like he’d been allowed to peek briefly through the crack.

2

Isabel leaned through the doorway, her eyes scanning the dinner carts. Only two-year-old Lola reacted to her presence, glancing briefly in her direction. She was tiny, as bonobo babies are, and clung to Bonzi’s chest and neck, alternately mouthing her mother’s nipple and letting it slide from her lips.

The bonobos lolled on the floor in nests of carefully arranged blankets, watching Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes.

Bonzi was more precise about her nest than the others-she always used exactly six blankets, swirling them over each other and folding the edges under so there was a soft rim all the way around. Isabel, who was prone to a certain precision herself, loved watching Bonzi poke and fiddle with her nest, which had to be just so before she’d invite Lola in, slapping her hands to her chest and signing, BABY COME.

Jelani and Makena lay head to head on their blankets, reaching up with lazy and long-fingered hands to examine each other’s faces and chests and rid each other of imaginary bugs. When John Clayton, Seventh Earl of Greystoke, slid Miss Jane Porter’s filmy nightdress off her shoulders, they tipped up their chins and exchanged a languorous kiss.

Sam sprawled on his back with an arm behind his head and one leg crossed over the other. His foot bobbed, and he worked a watermelon rind, scraping the last of the sweet flesh off with his teeth. Mbongo had set up his nest across the room and wrapped a blanket firmly around his new backpack to keep Sam from noticing its suspicious girth. Mbongo had punctured his own bouncy ball almost immediately, and so had “borrowed” Sam’s. Mbongo flashed impressive canines, his gaze flitting nervously between Sam and his precious blanketed lump. He lifted a corner of the fleece and peered beneath, then hurriedly tucked the blanket back around it. He was enjoying his secret too visibly. It wouldn’t be long before Sam noticed.

Not wishing to disturb movie time, Isabel said nothing as she retrieved the empty carts. She rolled them out one by one and passed them off to Celia, a nineteen-year-old magenta-haired intern. When all the carts were in the kitchen, the two of them began to clear the remains of dinner. Celia stacked the plastic soup bowls while Isabel scooped up peels and stems, dumping the fruit and vegetable detritus into the disposal and running water over her hands.

Celia finally broke the silence. “So how did the big visit go today?”

“It was good,” said Isabel. “Lots of conversations. Lots of great pictures-the photographer’s camera was digital so I’ve already seen a bunch.”

“Anyone we know?”

“They’re from The Philadelphia Inquirer. Cat Douglas and John Thigpen. They’re finishing a series on great apes.”

Celia snorted. “Catwoman and Pigpen! Love it. So what did the apes think?”

“I only let John in. She had a virus, so I sent her over to Linguistics instead.”

“David and Eric were here? On New Year’s Day?”

“They have a fancy new spectrum analyzer. There’s no keeping them away from it.”

“And how did that go?”

Isabel smiled at the plate she was holding. “Let’s just say I owe them one. That woman is a real piece of work.”

“Ha! Did Pigpen know ASL?”

“His name is John. And no. I translated their responses.” After a moment’s pause, she added, “Mostly.”

One of Celia’s pierced eyebrows rose.

“Mbongo called him a ‘dirty bad toilet’ at one point,” Isabel explained. “I may have paraphrased that one a little.”

Celia laughed. “And what did he do to deserve that?”

“A game of Monster Chase gone hideously wrong.”

Celia picked up a plastic dish and held it at various angles, trying to determine whether it had been washed or licked clean. “In Pigpen’s defense, Monster Chase is hard to do through glass.”

“It was much worse than that. But we showed him how it’s done,” said Isabel. “Monster Chase, Monster Tickle, Apple Chase, we did it all. Much to the delight of the photographer.”

“Did Peter come in today?”

Well, that was a hard left turn, thought Isabel, stealing a quick look at Celia. The girl stared into the sink, the corner of her lip lifted into a smirk. Apparently Dr. Benton had become “Peter” to the intern at some point over the last twenty-four hours.

“No. I haven’t seen him,” Isabel said carefully.

At the previous night’s New Year’s Eve party, Isabel had been uncharacteristically thrown for a loop by a sorry excuse for dinner (four tiny cubes of cheese) and three strong cocktails (“It’s a Glenda Bendah!” the host, and husband of Glenda, had exclaimed as he thrust a glass of the iced blue concoction into her hands). Isabel didn’t normally drink-had in fact just purchased her first bottle of vodka so she’d have something on hand to offer guests-but this was the first social gathering of the people involved with the Great Ape Language Lab since Richard Hughes’s death, and everyone was working hard at the appearance of being merry. It was exhausting. Isabel tried to keep up, but when she staggered into the powder room and encountered her own flushed, intoxicated face in the mirror, she saw something even more frightening than the gorilla mask in Monster Chase was supposed to be: she saw an earlier version of her mother, weaving and pale. Isabel was unused to wearing makeup and had somehow managed to smear lipstick up one cheek. Sections of hair stuck like twigs from her updo. She ditched the remains of her third Glenda Bendah in the sink, dissolved the blue-tinged ice cubes in running water, and tried to creep out before she could embarrass herself further. Peter, who was not only Dr. Hughes’s successor but also Isabel’s fiancé, found her in the lobby in stockinged feet, slumped against the wall with her high-heeled shoes dangling from a thumb. When she looked up and saw him, she burst into tears.

He crouched next to her. He held a hand to her forehead. His eyes filled with concern. He went back upstairs and returned with a moist, cool cloth, which he pressed to her cheeks.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” he said moments later, helping her into a taxi. “Let me come with you.”

“I’m fine,” she said, and promptly leaned out of the car to be sick. The cabdriver observed this with alarm through the rearview mirror. Peter lifted the hems of his pants to inspect his shoes and leaned forward to examine Isabel more thoroughly. His eyebrows formed a lopsided V beneath a series of wavy lines. He paused, and then decided.

“I’m coming with you,” he declared. “Wait while I get my coat.”

“No, really, I’m fine.” She groped through her purse for a tissue, beyond mortified. She couldn’t stand for him to see her like this. “Stay,” she insisted, waving a hand in the general direction of the party. “Really. I’ll be fine. Stay and ring in the New Year.”

“Are you sure?”

“Completely.” She sniffed, nodded, and straightened her shoulders.

He watched a moment longer and said, “Drink lots of water. And take Tylenol.”

She nodded. Even in her inebriated state, she could tell that he was considering whether to kiss her. She took mercy on him, pulled the door shut on her taffeta dress, and waved the driver onward.

Isabel had no idea what happened after she left. The party hadn’t quite reached the lampshade stage, but that was certainly the trajectory-veiled grief, an endless supply of alcohol, and resentment on the part of a select few over Peter’s appointment made for a strange and unpredictable atmosphere. Peter had been at the lab for only a year, and there were some who felt the position should have gone to a person with a longer investment in the project.

Nearly twenty hours later, Isabel still felt wretched. She leaned her belly against the edge of the counter and snuck another fleeting glance at Celia, whose shoulder-to-wrist tattoos were displayed in full glory because she was wearing an orange “Peace” tank over a bright purple bra-in January. It wouldn’t surprise Isabel at all if Celia had attempted a bit of political maneuvering at the party. A little dancing, a little flirting, maybe even sidling up to Peter when the ball dropped, angling for a midnight kiss.

Isabel sighed. It wasn’t as if she could take it personally: her relationship with Peter was not yet public. He had proposed only a few days earlier, after an accelerated and passionate courtship-Isabel had never fallen so fast and so hard-but for various reasons, including an ongoing and rancorous custody battle with his ex-wife and concern over how it would be perceived by the department, he felt it best to keep things quiet until they moved in together. Besides which, although Celia apparently had no idea, Peter disliked her.

“What?” Celia stopped digging vegetable peelings out of the bottom of the sink and glanced down the length of her arm.

Isabel realized she’d been staring at the tattoos. She turned her eyes back to the dishes. “Nothing. I just have a headache.”

Bonzi rounded the corner and ambled up to them. Lola rode on her back, jockey-style, tiny fingers laced over her mother’s shoulders.

Celia looked over her shoulder and called out, “Bonzi, did you try to kiss the visitor?”

Bonzi grinned gleefully and spun on her behind, propelling herself with her feet. She touched her fingers to her lips and then her cheek, twice, before crossing both hands over her chest, signing, KISS KISS BONZI LOVE.

Celia laughed. “And what about Mbongo? Did he also love the visitor?”

Bonzi considered for a moment and then wiggled her fingers beneath her chin and swept her hand downward, signing, DIRTY BAD! DIRTY BAD!

“Did Mbongo think the visitor was a dumbass?” continued Celia, stacking clean plates.

“Celia!” Isabel barked. “Language!”

This was precisely why Peter had been unhappy when Richard Hughes had bestowed the coveted internship on Celia over a half-dozen other deserving candidates. He was worried about her colorful language. If one of the bonobos picked up an offensive phrase and used it the requisite number of times in proper context, it would have to be included in the official lexicon. It was one thing when a bonobo came up with an insult like “dirty bad toilet” on his own, and quite another to acquire “dumbass” from a human.

Although Bonzi had been conversing with Celia, she was now looking intently at Isabel. Her expression shifted to worry. SMILE HUG, she signed. BONZI LOVE VISITOR, KISS KISS.

“Don’t worry, Bonzi. I’m not mad at you,” Isabel said, speaking and signing simultaneously. She threw an accusatory glare in Celia’s direction to drive her point home. “Don’t you want to watch the rest of the movie?”

WANT COFFEE.

“Sure, I can make coffee.”

WANT CANDY COFFEE. ISABEL GO. HURRY GIMME.

Isabel laughed and assumed a posture of mock offense. “You don’t like my coffee?”

Bonzi sat on her haunches, looking sheepish. Lola climbed over her shoulder and blinked at Isabel.

“Touché. Neither do I,” Isabel conceded. “You want a caramel macchiato?”

Bonzi yipped excitedly. GOOD DRINK. GO HURRY, said her hands.

“Okay. You want marshmallow on that?” said Isabel, using Bonzi’s term for the sweet froth on the top.

SMILE SMILE, HUG HUG.

Isabel threw the damp dish towel over her shoulder and wiped her still-clammy hands on her thighs.

“You want me to go?” Celia said.

“Sure. Thanks.” Isabel was surprised by the offer, and also grateful, on account of her lingering headache. Celia’s shift had technically ended almost a quarter of an hour earlier. “I’ll finish up here.”

Celia waited as Isabel lined the carts up against the wall. “Ahem,” she said finally.

Isabel looked up. “What?”

“Can I take your car? Mine’s in the shop.”

Mystery solved. Isabel nearly laughed out loud. Celia wanted a ride home at the end of the night.

Isabel patted her pockets until a lump jingled.

GRAB PICTURE, said Bonzi.

“Take the video camera,” Isabel said, tossing the keys in a perfect arc. “And make sure you ask for decaf. And skim milk.”

Celia nodded and snatched the keys from the air.

All the bonobos-but especially Bonzi-loved watching videos of humans carrying out their requests. The bonobos used to ride along on limited errands, but all that stopped two years ago on the day Bonzi decided to steer the car and nearly wrapped it around a telephone pole. She’d simply reached across and grabbed the steering wheel. Isabel managed to brake before impact, but not before running off the road. This happened less than a week after Dr. Hughes’s car was swarmed at a McDonald’s drive-through when the driver of a passenger van in front of them glanced in his rearview mirror and spied Mbongo-who had successfully talked his way into a rare and cherished cheeseburger-riding shotgun. Moments later adults and children alike mobbed the car screaming, “Monkey! Monkey!” while trying to thrust their arms through the windows. Mbongo’s response was to dive beneath the backseat as Dr. Hughes closed the windows, but that, followed by the Bonzi-steering episode, sounded the death knell for public outings.

The bonobos missed their contact with the outside world (although, when asked, they were absolutely firm in their belief that the double electric fence and moat around their outside play yard was there to keep people and cats out rather than bonobos in), so now Isabel and the others brought the outside world to them by video. At this point, the local shopkeepers thought nothing of being filmed for the viewing pleasure of the neighborhood apes.

“Try to run over some protesters while you’re at it,” said Isabel.

“There’s nobody out there,” said Celia.

“Really?” said Isabel. There had been a gaggle of protesters outside the gates every day for almost a year, silently holding placards that showed great apes undergoing terrible procedures. Since the protesters obviously had no clue as to the nature of the work being done at the language lab, Isabel always ignored them.

Celia opened the viewfinder of the video camera and then flicked the switch to check its battery. “Larry-Harry-Gary and Green-Haired Freaky Dude were there before dinner but they were gone when I went out for a smoke.”

“‘Green-Haired Freaky Dude’? This from the girl with hot pink hair?”

“It is not hot pink,” Celia said, fingering a pixie curl in front of her ear. “It’s fuchsia. And I have nothing against his hair color. I just think he, himself, is an asshat.”

“Celia! Language!” Isabel whipped her head around and noted with relief that Bonzi had wandered back into the TV room, thereby missing this opportunity to enrich her vocabulary. “You have got to be more careful. I’m serious.”

Celia shrugged. “What? They didn’t hear me.”

Isabel felt her eyes wander over to Celia again. The intern’s body art fascinated and repulsed Isabel almost equally. A labyrinthine swirl of nudes and mermaids tumbled down her shoulders and frolicked along her forearms, their hair and breasts entwined with the scaly limbs and tails of creatures borne from hell. A smattering of horseshoes and daisy-eyed skulls rained down on the whole, which was sharply rendered in reddish pinks, yellows, purples, and ghostly bluish greens. Isabel was only eight years older than Celia, but her own brand of rebellion had been to bury her nose in books and ride the scholarship train away from home as far and fast as possible.

“Okay. I’m off,” Celia declared, tucking the video camera under her arm. Isabel went back to the dishes, listening as Celia’s footsteps receded down the hallway.

A moment later, the door creaked open. Isabel spun on her heels. “Wait! You do have a valid driver’s-”

The door slammed shut. Isabel stared at it for a moment, then tucked a bottle of Lubriderm under her arm and went in to watch the end of the movie.

Sam had reasserted ownership of the ball, and Mbongo was sulking in his nest, the picture of desolation. He wore his new backpack, whose concave shape betrayed the ball’s absence. His shoulders slumped forward, and he hugged his arms across his chest. Isabel knelt beside him and put a hand on his shoulder.

“Did Sam take his ball back?” she asked, signing and speaking at the same time.

Mbongo stared forlornly ahead.

“Do you need a hug?” asked Isabel.

At first he didn’t respond. Then he signed with a flurry: KISS HUG, KISS HUG.

Isabel leaned in and took his head in both hands. She kissed his creased forehead and straightened his long black hair. “Poor Mbongo,” she said, wrapping her arms around his shoulders. “I’ll tell you what. Tomorrow I’ll get you another ball. But don’t carry this one in your teeth. Okay?”

The bonobo pulled his lips back in a smile and nodded quickly.

“Do you need some oil? Let me check your hands,” said Isabel, reaching for his arm.

Mbongo obligingly stretched it toward her. Isabel took his hand and ran her fingers over it. Although the lab had humidifiers going all the time in the winter, the air still couldn’t compete with that of the bonobos’ native Congo Basin.

“That’s what I thought,” she said. She squeezed a glob of Lubriderm onto her palm and massaged it into his long, heavily knuckled hand.

As one, the bonobos turned to face the hallway.

“What is it?” Isabel looked from face to face, puzzled.

VISITOR, signed Bonzi. The rest of the apes remained motionless, their eyes trained on the door.

“No, not a visitor. The visitors left. The visitors are gone,” said Isabel.

The apes continued to stare down the hallway. Sam’s hair rose until it stood on end, and a pricking like tiny spiders crept over Isabel’s neck and scalp. She rose and muted the TV.

Finally she heard it-a muffled rustling.

Sam pulled his lips back and screamed, “Whah! Whah! Whah!” Bonzi scooped baby Lola under her arm, grabbed a hanging fire hose with the other, and swung onto the lowest of the platforms that jutted from the walls at various heights. Makena joined them, grinning nervously, clinging to the other females.

The rustling stopped, but all eyes-human and ape-remained on the hallway. After a moment, the rustling was replaced by a muted jiggling.

Sam’s nostrils flared. He turned to Isabel and signed urgently, VISITOR, SMOKE.

“No, not a visitor. It’s probably just Celia,” Isabel said, although she couldn’t hide the apprehension in her voice. Celia hadn’t had time to get the coffee and return. Besides, Celia would just come in.

Sam stood up and swaggered a few bipedal steps.

The females swung to an even higher perch and backed against the wall. Mbongo and Jelani darted around the corners of the room on all fours.

Isabel let herself out through the partition that defined the bonobos’ inner sanctum and stopped to check that it was locked behind her. In eight years of daily contact, she’d never seen the bonobos act like this. Their adrenaline was contagious.

She flicked on the light. The hallway looked as it always did. The noise, whatever it was, had stopped.

“Celia?” Isabel asked tentatively. There was no answer.

She walked toward the door that led to the parking lot. When she glanced behind her, Sam galloped silently past the doorway of the group room, a dark and muscled mass.

Isabel reached for the doorknob and then retracted her hand. She leaned in close to the door, her forehead nearly touching it.

“Celia? Is that-”

The explosion blasted the door entirely out of its frame. As it carried her backward, she processed that she and the door were being propelled down the hall by a billowing, rolling wall of fire. She felt lucid and detached, parsing the events as though examining consecutive frames of a video. Since there was no time to react, she recorded.

When she slammed into the wall, she noted that her skull stopped moving before her brain did. When the door came to a stop against her, trapping her upright, she observed that the left side of her face-the side she’d had pressed against the door-took the brunt of the impact. When her eyes filled with stars and her mouth with blood, she filed these facts away for future reference. She watched helplessly as the fireball whooshed past the door and rolled onward toward the apes. When the door finally tipped forward and released her, she crumpled to the ground. She couldn’t breathe, but she did not appear to be on fire. Her eyes shifted to the empty doorway.

Shadowy figures in black clothes and balaclavas swarmed in and spread out, strangely, frighteningly silent.

Crowbars swung and glass flew, but the people didn’t speak. It wasn’t until one of them knelt briefly by her head, with oversized rubber-band lips mouthing the word “Shit!” that she realized she couldn’t hear. And still she couldn’t breathe. She fought to keep her eyes open, fought the crushing weight in her chest.

Black-and-white static, the roar of a million bees interrupted by the fluttering of her own eyelids. A vision of boots running past her. She lay on her back with her head tilted to the right. She moved her tongue, fat as a sea slug, and pushed one, two, and then three teeth from the corner of her mouth. More static, longer this time. Then blinding light and crushing pain. She was suffocating. Her eyes drifted shut.

Time passed-how much, she didn’t know-but suddenly she was being yanked around. An acrid latexed finger swept through her mouth, and a bright pinpoint of light illuminated the veined landscape of her inner lids. Her eyes sprung open.

Faces hovered over her, speaking urgently to each other. She heard them as though through surf. Gloved hands scissored roughly through her T-shirt and bra. Someone suctioned out her nose and mouth and covered them both with a mask.

“-respiratory distress. No breath sounds on the left.”

“She has a tracheal shift. Get a line in.”

“I’m in. Any crepitus?”

Fingers massaged her chest. Something inside cracked and popped like bubble wrap.

“Crepitus present.”

Isabel tried to gasp, but succeeded only in producing a rasping wheeze.

“You’re going to be okay,” said the voice attached to the hand attached to the oxygen mask. “Do you know where you are?”

Isabel tried to inhale, and the pain was like a thousand knives. She mewed into the mask.

A male face appeared above hers: “You’re going to feel something cold on your skin. We have to insert a needle to help you breathe.”

A freezing swipe of antiseptic, a long needle flashing above her and then down and into her chest. The pain was excruciating, but accompanied by instant relief. Air hissed through the needle and her lung reinflated. She could breathe again. She gasped and sucked so hard the mask inverted against her face. She clawed at it, but the hand holding it stayed firm, and Isabel discovered that even though it flattened against her face, it still delivered oxygen. It stank of PVC, like cheap shower curtains and the type of bath toys she avoided buying for the bonobos because she’d read that they exuded fake estrogens when the material began to break down.

“Get her on a backboard.”

Hands maneuvered her sideways, holding her head, then eased her onto her back. A radio sputtered in the background.

“We have a female, mid- to late twenties, victim of an explosion. Tension pneumothorax-needle decompression performed in the field. Breath sounds present. Facial and oral trauma. Head injury. Altered level of consciousness. Ready to evacuate-ETA seventeen minutes.”

She let her eyes drift shut and the bees swarmed again. The world was spinning, she was nauseated. When the crisp night air hit her face, her lids snapped open. Each movement of the gurney was amplified as its wheels crunched through the gravel.

The parking lot was full of flashing lights and sirens. Velcro straps prevented Isabel from turning her head, so instead she turned her gaze. Celia was off to the side, screaming and crying and pleading with firemen to let her past. She was still clutching a cardboard tray of grande caramel macchiatos. When she caught sight of the gurney, the tray and drinks splattered to the ground. The video camera swung from a strap on her wrist.

“Isabel!” she wailed. “Oh my God! Isabel!” and only then did Isabel have a concept of what had happened to her.

When the front wheels of the gurney met the back of the vehicle and folded beneath her, Isabel caught a glimpse of a dark shadow at the top of a tree, and then another, and then another, and she bleated into the mask. At least half the bonobos had made it out.

The ceiling of the ambulance replaced the starry night and her eyes flickered shut. Someone yanked them open, first one, and then the other, and shone a light into them. Against the ambulance interior she saw faces and uniforms and gloved hands, bags of intravenous fluid and crisscrossing tubes. Voices boomed and radios hissed and someone was calling her name but she was helpless against the riptide. She tried to stay with them-it seemed the polite thing to do, given that they now knew her name-but she couldn’t. Their voices echoed and swirled as she sank into a chasm that was beyond the bees and darker than black. It was the complete absence of everything.

3

John opened his front door and came to an abrupt halt. It was the scent of Pine-Sol that startled him.

Nine weeks earlier, the death of their cat had pushed his already-teetering wife into an abyss from which she seemed unable to emerge. It was the end of a long progression that had begun more than a year earlier, before they moved from New York City to Philadelphia for John’s job at the Inquirer.

John had known moving wouldn’t be easy for Amanda. She was still reeling from the near-simultaneous loss of both her book contract and her agent-what was euphemistically termed “an economic downturn” turned into a mudslide that swept away her entire publisher. Her agent was so disenchanted she left the business to start a natural-fiber yarn boutique, leaving Amanda a literary orphan.

John did his best to infuse Amanda with enthusiasm for Philly-who wouldn’t love its food, its neighborhoods, its architecture?-but she wasn’t swayed. She missed her friends. She missed the city. She even spoke wistfully about their tiny six-story walkup, seeming to forget that it had been infested with mice. John had hoped their new house in Queen Village with a private garden and alley would cheer her up, and it did give her new energy: she was so determined to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat that she immediately holed up with her laptop to finish her second novel. She worked in complete isolation, prompting John to suggest that she volunteer at the animal shelter. He had hoped she would meet some people and make new friends, but the inevitable and alarmingly swift result was that she fell in love with a cat.

Although named Magnificat, the creature in question was an ancient twenty-three-pound one-eared Maine coon with a permanently crooked tail. He also had a flaking skin rash that left him scaly and bald in places, which might have been bearable except that he also insisted on sleeping between their heads, spreading his considerable heft between their pillows and batting at their heads if they didn’t pet him enough. Amanda didn’t understand why John got so upset about a bit of dander on his pillow, and John didn’t know how to explain that he had fully expected she would adopt something, but that he had assumed it would be a sweet little baby something, not a monstrous beast with a weepy eye whose tongue stuck out perpetually because he had no teeth left to hold it in place. And yet, eight months later, when Magnificat’s kidneys failed and they had to have him put down, John was as shattered as Amanda. They wept over the empty cat crate in the car, clutching each other for a full twenty minutes before John felt composed enough to drive. Back home, Amanda drew the blinds, crawled into bed, and stayed there for three days. It killed John to see her like that: she had no friends within a hundred miles, her writing career was in tatters, her cat was dead, and there was nothing he could do about any of it. His suggestion that they get another cat was met with a look of horrified betrayal. His suggestion that she see a therapist went over even worse, although even John could see that she was clinically depressed.

She ate barely anything. She couldn’t sleep, although it took her longer and longer to get out of bed in the morning, and when she finally did, she rarely got dressed. She moved from bed to couch, lying under a quilt with her laptop on her knees and the curtains firmly drawn. The only light in the room was the ghostly blue glow of her monitor.

John hadn’t realized just how much of the housekeeping Amanda had been doing until she stopped. Clean underwear and socks no longer appeared in his drawer. The pile of shirts remained in the corner of the closet until he gathered them and took them to the cleaners. Greasy cobwebs sprouted along the undersides of furniture and reached with filmy fingers to ensnare the baseboards. The hall table all but disappeared under towering piles of bills, catalogs, and credit card offers. John had taken over the kitchen to some degree, but there were always stacks of dirty dishes in the sink, and usually on the counter too. At this point, Amanda’s efforts were limited to spraying lemon Pledge in the center of the powder room and turning the towels around if someone threatened to come over.

Alas, “someone” was always his parents. Their proximity was something he had failed to factor in when considering their move, an oversight for which he and Amanda were paying dearly.

For almost a year after they moved, Patricia and Paul Thigpen tried to persuade John and Amanda to join their church. If it had been anybody else, John might have considered it simply because it would force them to meet people, but the idea of his parents being even on the periphery of whatever social circle he and Amanda eventually assembled was unthinkable. The elder Thigpens had apparently given up, but now they inexplicably showed up at noon each Sunday to recount the sermon and wax on about how darling, how adorable, the children in the nursery were. The mournful sighs and static-filled silences made John want to curl into a ball and weep. Amanda tolerated them with an aloof grace (whether resigned or icy, John knew and cared not-he was just grateful, since her own family’s brand of conflict resolution tended toward the throwing of crockery).

Patricia’s thin-lipped and accusatory glares grew more overt in perfect correlation with the decline of the house. Sunday after Sunday John watched as Patricia shot smoldering blame rays in Amanda’s direction. John knew he should do something to shield his broken wife, but his family dynamic was not such that he could address his mother’s assumption about who was responsible for either the slide toward squalor or the lack of babies without risking an epic maternal sulk, and if the Thigpen males were united on any one front, it was the absolute necessity of Not Upsetting Mother. (John’s brothers, Luke and Matthew, didn’t realize how fortunate they were to live on other continents. Or perhaps they did.)

Now, with ice in his veins and a hand on the door frame, John sniffed again. In addition to Pine-Sol, he identified scented candles, seared beef, and the lingering odor of pomegranate bath bubbles. He steeled himself, entered the house, and pulled the door shut behind him.

Amanda was leaning over the coffee table in the living room, arranging shucked oysters on a bed of crushed ice. Two bottles of Perrier-Jouët and crystal flutes sat off to the side, along with a tiny, perfect mound of Osetra caviar in the center of a small piece of their wedding china. Amanda stood barefoot on fresh vacuum tracks, wearing the silk nightgown John had given her for Christmas. It was a hopeful, desperate gift, a clumsy attempt to address her increasing reluctance to get out of bed. As far as John knew, this was the first time she’d worn it. He felt suddenly light-headed. The last time he’d come home to such a scene, she’d just sold The River Wars. Had she found another agent? Had someone bought her second book, Recipe for Disaster?

“Wow,” he said.

She swung around, beaming. “I didn’t hear you come in.” She grabbed a bottle and came to him. Her hair, a mass of unruly spirals in a shade he referred to as Botticelli gold and she as Ronald McDonald orange, was arranged in a disheveled knot at the nape of her neck. She was wearing lip gloss. Her toenails were painted an opalescent shade that matched the pink silk. Something glittered on her eyelids.

“You look amazing,” he said.

“There’s a beef Wellington in the oven,” she replied, kissing him and handing him the bottle of champagne.

As John fumbled with the foil, tiny silver flecks drifted down to the carpet. He balled the rest up in his palm and loosened the wire cage. “What’s up?”

She smiled coyly. “You first. How was the trip?”

A bolt of joy displaced his apprehension. He tucked the cold bottle under his arm and dug his cell phone from his pocket. “Actually,” he said, fumbling with the touch screen, “it was kind of exciting…” He held the photograph triumphantly forth. “Ta-dah!”

Amanda squinted. She leaned closer and cocked her head. “What is that?”

“Hang on,” he said, taking the phone back. He zoomed in on the image of a real live stranger reading The River Wars. “Here.”

When Amanda realized what she was looking at, she snatched the phone.

“A sighting in the wild!” John popped the champagne. He watched Amanda with an expectant smile.

She held the phone with both hands and stared at the screen without a hint of jubilance. John’s smile faded. “Are you okay?”

She sniffed, wiped the corner of one eye, and nodded. “Yes. Yes, I am,” she said in a tight voice. “Actually, I have something to tell you. Come sit.”

John followed her to the couch, where she sat with a straight back and clasped hands. His eyes moved nervously from her profile to the spread. There was no mistaking this for anything other than a celebration dinner, yet she appeared to be on the verge of tears. Was she pregnant? Probably not, as there were two glasses set out for the champagne. He tried to ignore the metallic tang of fear that blossomed in the back of his throat, and leaned forward to pour the champagne. He left the glasses on the table and reached for her hand, interlacing their fingers. Her fingertips were cold, her palm moist. She stared at the table’s edge.

“Honey?” he said. “What’s going on?”

“I found a job,” she said quietly.

John winced. He couldn’t help it. He forced his features to relax and breathed deeply, steeling himself. He did not know whether to pretend to be happy about the job or to try to talk her out of it. All she’d ever wanted to do was write novels, and he knew she’d recently completed Recipe for Disaster. Surely this was the worst time to give up. Then again, perhaps a reason to get up in the morning would be a good thing. Contact with the outside world, an opportunity to make new friends, to not be pummeled relentlessly with rejection letters-

Amanda blinked at him, awaiting his response.

“Where? Doing what?” he finally said.

“Well, that’s the complicated part.” She looked back into her lap. “It’s in L.A.”

“It’s what?” John said, unsure if he’d heard correctly.

She shifted to face him and clutched his hands in a death grip. “I know this is going to sound crazy. I know that. And I know you’re going to want to say no at first, so please don’t answer right away. Maybe even sleep on it. Okay?”

John paused for the space of several beats. “Okay.”

Her eyes lifted and stared earnestly into his. She took a deep breath. “Sean and I wrote a treatment for a show, and he had a pitch meeting with NBC last week. Today we got the green light. They’re producing four episodes. And then, we’ll see.”

The room came unmoored. The ceiling swirled like toilet water. John dug his heels into the carpet to remind himself that he was anchored. Sean the who-what? And what was a treatment?

Amanda explained: she had connected with someone in an online chat room for writers, she said. His name was Sean, and they’d been corresponding for weeks. John didn’t need to worry-she knew all about the dangers of online chat rooms and had set up a Hotmail account with a fake name. They had exchanged real information only after she was sure he was legitimate. Sean had worked with the major networks for years, matching scriptwriters with various television projects. This time, the project was his, and he wanted Amanda onboard-he’d read The River Wars and was a huge fan, thought it criminal that it hadn’t gotten the review attention it deserved, because if it had, she would have been picked up by another publisher the second she was cut loose. She had the perfect voice for this project, which involved forty-something single women and a good deal of bed-hopping and was sure to hit the pulse of an enormous audience (apparently the boomer generation preferred to think of itself as in its forties rather than in its sixties). They’d collaborated on the treatment-a five-page description of the project-and Amanda stood to earn fifteen thousand an episode if NBC decided to keep it going after the initial four episodes. She hadn’t mentioned anything to John before this because she didn’t want to get his hopes up.

John realized she’d stopped talking. Her eyes bored into his, seeking a reaction.

“You don’t want me to do it,” she finally said.

He struggled to form an answer, trying to give his mind enough lead time to race through the implications. “I didn’t say that. It’s a surprise, that’s all.”

She waited for him to continue.

“What about Recipe for Disaster?”

“I’ve been rejected by a hundred and twenty-nine agents.”

“But that was to letters asking for permission to send the book, right? Nobody’s actually read the thing.”

“It doesn’t matter. No one’s going to. Apparently.”

“Tell me why you want to be involved in this series.”

“I want to write. It’s a way of writing.”

“Books. You want to write books.”

“And I’ve been rejected by every legitimate agent in the business. It’s over.”

He stood abruptly and began pacing. What if she was right? He hated the idea of her giving up, but there was some point at which persistence became masochism.

“Let’s think this through. What would I do in L.A.?” he said. “No newspapers are hiring. I’d never find another job. I’m lucky I still have this one.”

“Well, that’s the thing.” She paused long enough that he knew he wasn’t going to like whatever came next. “You wouldn’t have to right away. You can keep working here. You know, until we know for sure they’re going to continue the series.”

John’s lips moved for a full three seconds before he managed to form words. “You want to move to L.A. without me?”

“No, no,” she said vehemently. “Of course not. We’ll commute on weekends.”

“All the way across the country?”

“We can alternate weekends.”

“How would we afford all that flying? And what about your rent? You’d have to get an apartment. And a car.” John’s voice rose along with the tally.

“We could dip into our savings-”

He shook his head. “No. Absolutely not. And what happens if NBC decides to keep the series going? We continue to live apart?”

“Then you join me out there. If they pick it up, I’ll be making enough that we could get by while you looked.”

“What’s the advance?”

Amanda dropped her gaze.

“There’s no advance?”

“Scripted shows cost so much to produce they just don’t have the funding…”

“Are you kidding me?”

“It’s because of reality TV. It costs almost nothing to produce, compared to almost three million per episode for scripted shows. Networks used to produce a dozen dramas or comedies, hoping one might take. Now they produce a couple and fill up the rest of the time slots with stupid shows about stupid people apparently trying to find true love by having sex in a hot tub with a different person every night while the cameras roll. I know they should pay me. But if I say no to this there are thousands of other writers just dying for a shot at it.”

John threw his hands in the air. They landed with a smack on his thighs. He hoped this was some kind of hallucination, that his wife was not suggesting they live on opposite sides of the country so she could follow a Hollywood chimera that, for all he knew, came attached to a piece of spam-these writers’ boards were filled with desperate people, some of them malicious, and Amanda was particularly vulnerable. He wondered whether she had paid anything to this Sean person. There was nothing, absolutely nothing, about this that smelled right.

John’s cell phone rang, piercing a silence that had long since grown uncomfortable.

Amanda picked it up. “Hello?” After a moment she held it out to John. “It’s your editor.”

John raked a hand down his face and reached for the phone.

“Hey, Elizabeth. No, it’s fine. Yeah, really.” His eyes widened. “What? Are you kidding me? Jesus God. And what about…? Is she going to be okay?… h-huh. Of course. Okay.” He hung up and closed his eyes. Then he turned back to Amanda. “I have to go back to Kansas.”

“What happened?”

“The language lab got bombed.”

She brought a hand to her mouth. “The place from today? With the bonobos?”

“Yes.”

“Oh my God. Who would do such a thing?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are the apes okay?”

“I don’t know,” said John. “But the scientist I interviewed was badly hurt.”

Amanda laid a hand on his arm. “I’m so sorry.”

John nodded, hearing her as though from a distance. His brain flashed through images of today’s visit-following Isabel to the observation area, noticing how her hair swung as she walked. Watching, rapt, as the bonobos plucked “surprises” from their backpacks, as eager as children emptying Christmas stockings. Sitting in Isabel’s office, watching her eyes flit nervously between him and the voice recorder, and registering his own physical yearning with a dreadful, guilty pang. Mbongo and his gorilla mask. Bonzi smooching the glass. That sweet infant with the naughty streak and irresistible eyes. Isabel was now in critical condition, and although Elizabeth had no details on the apes, every terrible possibility flashed through John’s head-

“We can’t do this,” he said abruptly. “It’s impossible. Please tell me you realize this is not going to happen.”

Amanda stared at John until he had to look down. Then she walked past him and up the stairs. A few seconds later, their bedroom door clicked shut.

I am a fucking cad, John thought as he sank to the floor by the coffee table. He poked an oyster and watched it quiver in its shell. He stared glumly at the Osetra, which he knew he should put in the refrigerator because he had a general idea of what it had cost. He imagined Amanda, upstairs, climbing into bed and pulling the covers up to her ears, and knew he should go to her. Instead, he took the open bottle by the neck and alternately took swigs and rested it on his thigh, which was soon dotted with wet circles.

The series seemed like too much of a fluke to be real, but what if it were? His own career was a fluke-he had intended to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a lawyer until he got the internship at the New York Gazette. He was twenty-one and found the atmosphere intoxicating-everyone around him was so smart, so sophisticated, and so wholly and unabashedly bizarre that he wanted to remain a part of it. He got to talk to important people and ask any question he wanted and then got paid to write. Paid to write? Growing up that had never even occurred to him. And every day the job changed and he met someone new, heard another story, and got another chance to either entertain people or expose something that needed to be seen. “The business of a newspaper is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable” was one of the aphorisms his boss liked to quote. Of course, newspapers themselves were now among the afflicted. But who was he to deny someone else’s unexpected opportunity?

It should be easy enough to confirm if the series were real-there would be a letter of offer or a contract-but then what? Everyone knew that long-distance relationships eventually fell apart. John had spent almost half his life with Amanda, and in many ways she defined it. The thought of being without her terrified him. The thought of her being surrounded by predatory males terrified him even more. She was beautiful, and so vulnerable right now, like a nerve scraped raw.

John picked up the little spoon from the plate of caviar and examined it. It was mother-of-pearl. Amanda must have bought it for the occasion. He dug it into the glistening mound of caviar and put some in his mouth. It didn’t seem right to just swallow something so expensive and of which there was so little, so he held it in his mouth for a moment and then popped the eggs between his tongue and palate. The result was so exquisite he realized he must be doing it right. He took another little scoop. And then another.

It couldn’t take too long to produce four episodes. She could be safely home in six months. Not that he wanted her to fail; she deserved success more than anyone else he knew.

After graduating summa cum laude with an insightful thesis on the sociological consequences of the industrial revolution as reflected in the works of Elizabeth Gaskell, Amanda had spent almost the entire time between graduation and their move to Philadelphia writing catalog copy for an online outdoor-sports outfitter. She worked eight-hour days laboring to find new and inventive ways of describing mukluks and all-weather parkas (“top notes of Ugg with a soupçon of Piperlime, and guaranteed 100 percent cat-fur free!”). She joked that her situation could have been worse-her best friend, Gisele, who had graduated first in their class, had taken a job painting house exteriors and had recently married a man who taught sound healing to a group of raw-foodists-but John knew she was simply putting on a brave face. In her spare time, she worked on her first novel, although she was too shy to show it to John until it was complete.

When she finally gave it to him, John flipped through the pages with a growing sense of unease. He hoped earnestly and with his soul that he was wrong-after all, his own guilty pleasures included Dan Brown and Michael Crichton-and yet he couldn’t shake the feeling that the novel was missing that crucial something. Her prose was beautiful and polished and swept him along, but by the time he reached the end she had not blown up a single thing. There was no car wreck, no murder, no secret brotherhood or international plague. It was psychological and literary and while John understood that there were people who enjoyed such books, he wasn’t one of them, which was exceedingly unfortunate given that his wife had just written one and wanted his opinion. When his silence finally grew conspicuous, he lied copiously and through his teeth.

As the manuscript made its way around New York publishing houses, Amanda-his steady, strong, unsinkable Amanda-began to crack. She developed insomnia. She gnawed her cuticles until they bled. She cooked ever more complicated meals and ate virtually nothing. She developed headaches and, for the first time ever, complained about her job. (“What’s wrong with ‘tufts of skunk’? They wanted edgy, I gave them edgy. How was I supposed to know it really was skunk? And if it was, why all the secrecy?”)

Four and a half months passed. A handful of rejections trickled in, followed by radio silence. And then, on Amanda’s thirty-fourth birthday, her agent called. A publisher had made an offer for The River Wars and Amanda’s as-yet-unwritten second book.

Amanda’s was a modest advance, but it allowed her to give up copywriting. Chinese cat fur be damned! With the exception of being required to publish under a pseudonym, John had never seen Amanda so happy. (“Nobody is going to buy a novel by Amanda Thigpen,” her editor had explained. “Now Amanda LaRue, on the other hand…”) The night of the book sale was the first appearance of Osetra in their household, and for that one night everything felt possible-bestseller lists, foreign editions, movie deals. John had never been so happy to be wrong.

If the lead-up to the release of The River Wars was a frenzy of excitement and anxiety, the weeks that followed were devastating.

There was no launch party. In retrospect, John realized that he was probably supposed to have arranged one. There were no reviews, because it had been published in paperback rather than as a hardcover, a prejudice John and Amanda didn’t understand but felt someone should have explained. Her “tour” consisted of three local signings.

John drove Amanda to the first because she was too terrified to be counted on to steer, and when he reached across the gearbox for her hand she clung so tightly that his palm was pitted with nail marks. She practiced deep breathing in the parking lot before going in, and her hands trembled so violently that she expressed doubts about her ability to sign her name.

The bookstore had a small table set up with a semicircle of folding chairs in front of it. Amanda’s books were piled beside two Sharpies, a plate of chocolate-chip cookies, and a bottle of water. Amanda took her seat behind the table and waited.

Halfway through her allotted hour, a man wandered to the middle of the semicircle and settled into a chair. John hovered nearby, watching as Amanda first went pallid and then apple-red, and then smiled and steeled herself to say something. Just as she gathered breath, the man stuck his legs out, crossed his arms, and closed his eyes. Within seconds he was snoring. The color drained from Amanda’s cheeks and John nearly couldn’t contain his urge to walk over and dump his hot coffee on the man’s lap.

The bookstore’s Events Coordinator spent the rest of the hour gamely collaring customers and dragging them to Amanda’s table. Trapped, they’d pick up the book and pretend to read the back cover, muttering and looking uncomfortable until they managed to break eye contact and wander off. At the end of the hour, the cookies were gone and the books remained. Amanda was the color of chalk.

She insisted on driving herself to both her other signings. “Oh, fine,” she said cheerily when John asked how the second one went. Her smile lasted a couple of seconds before she dissolved into shoulder-wracking sobs. After the third signing, she was more pragmatic. “I’m screwed,” she proclaimed calmly, while filling a tumbler with equal parts vodka and orange juice.

As the months went by a couple of foreign editions sold (her book was briefly the number-two bestseller in Taiwan, which would have been amusing if it had hit even a single list in the States). And then, out of the blue, both publisher and agent were gone. Although clearly it was through no fault of her own, she obsessed about what she might have done differently. If she’d published under Thigpen instead of LaRue, her real estate in the bookstore would have fallen somewhere between Paul Theroux and Dylan Thomas (it was widely speculated on Internet writers’ communities that Joshua Ferris’s sales were strong because of his proximity to Jonathan Safran Foer). She could have sent herself on a real tour, armed with a GPS, and signed every copy of her book on the Eastern Seaboard. She could have created an interactive Web site, run contests, started a blog. John watched helplessly as she worked herself into a frenzy. Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the self-flagellation ended. She called her old boss, was reinstated in her cubicle, and went back to work extolling the virtues of Gore-Tex, which turned out to have been their financial salvation, because shortly thereafter, John lost his job.

While devastating, John’s layoff was not unexpected: every major paper had suffered massive layoffs, and the situation was particularly dire at the New York Gazette. Management announced its plans to cut a quarter of the newsroom months after everyone took what was euphemistically called a “wage concession” to avoid exactly that. A cheery memo followed, assuring them that if they all pulled together they’d be able to “do more with less!” The next memo implored them to “transform the business,” “generate content” (John wondered what, exactly, management thought the reporters had been doing), and concentrate on “packaging.” Charts! Visuals! Design! These were the way of the future. One buffoon of an executive actually declared that a perfectly designed page should cause readers to spill their coffee. It made John yearn for the days when Ken Faulks was at the helm, but Faulks, a media mogul with sandy hair and a crooked smile, had long since moved on to the greener pastures of porn. John had no particular fondness for the man-as John recalled, he had the people skills of Genghis Khan-but at least he’d kept the company solvent.

After several months of searching, John took a staff job at The Philadelphia Inquirer, or “the Inky,” as insiders called it. It was a fine job, a great job, but it nearly killed John to accept it because it was a direct result of his father calling in a favor from a fellow Moose Lodge member. And so John was taken on, reporting to Elizabeth, who resented his very presence, even as other Inky employees were being encouraged to walk the plank with early retirement packages.

Under any other circumstances, his work would have redeemed him: John’s investigation into a fire at the zoo’s ape house in 2008-on Christmas Eve, no less-had uncovered gross incompetence. Fire alarms had gone off and been ignored. People smelled smoke and never investigated. There were no sprinkler systems. All told, twenty-three animals died, including an entire family of bonobos. A week ago, on the one-year anniversary of the fire, a toddler scaled a wall and fell twenty-four feet into the new gorilla enclosure. The only gorilla who had survived the fire, whose own baby had died of smoke inhalation, swooped in through the gaggle of other curious gorillas, cradled the child in her arms, and carried him to the door of her enclosure, where she handed him to zookeepers. This astonishing act of empathy, caught on video and aired across the country, was dismissed by several right-leaning outlets and pundits as simple training. Simple training for what, John wondered? Were they suggesting the zoo had been dropping dolls into the gorilla pit to practice for just such an occasion? John found this reactionary denial almost as fascinating as the gorilla’s response-was it because empathy was supposed to be a purely human response? Was the discussion really about Evolution?-and this led to his proposing a piece on the cognitive studies being performed at the Great Ape Language Lab. At this point Elizabeth suddenly decided he needed to share the byline with Cat Douglas. She offered no explanations, but John had two theories: either she was still so angry about having to hire him that she was shackling him with the most abrasive woman alive, or else she wanted to associate her star reporter with a series that was beginning to smell like potential Pulitzer material. (Early in her career, Cat had become something of a celebrity in the newspaper world when she caught a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter in a lie about a made-up eight-year-old crackhead, and then scored a Pulitzer herself for breaking the story. She had also stirred up controversy by allegedly faking a romantic interest in her rival reporter and going through his files when she was alone in his apartment.)

John realized with a start that he had eaten every last dot of the Osetra. There was a tiny bit of champagne left in the bottle, but he didn’t want to change the flavor of his mouth. What he wanted was more caviar. He ran his finger across the plate and licked it.

Then he hauled himself off the floor and locked the front door. As he passed the hall table he noticed the message light blinking on the house phone. Fran, his mother-in-law, had left multiple messages, each more forceful than the last. Apparently Amanda had been screening her calls. John could not have been more sympathetic. Their mothers were polar opposites, but equally challenging. Where Patricia would retreat into a glacial silence, Fran would be upstairs sorting your socks. She disguised Schadenfreudic glee as helpfulness, malice as concern, all while harvesting information to share with the rest of the clan. With Fran, nothing was off-limits.

John deleted her messages.

***

It was two in the morning before John remembered the beef Wellington, and he remembered it then only because he thought the house was on fire. His eyes sprang open at the first hint of smoke. Amanda remained in a dead sleep.

John bounded down the stairs and into the kitchen. Smoke poured from the edges of the oven. John shut it off and opened the window and back door. He picked up a dish towel and snapped it like a matador’s cape in an effort to direct the smoke outside.

The beef Wellington was a charred rectangle solidly attached to the bottom of the roasting tin. The winding pastry vine Amanda had carved and applied to the top was the least burned, so John plucked off a leaf and ate it. He examined her artistry-each leaf was scored exactly six times, and the stem wound in and around itself, a perfect pastry kudzu.

At the beginning of their cohabitation, Amanda had given them both campylobacter poisoning from her improvisations with canned soup. Her remorse was grand and her declarations grander: she wanted to become a gourmet chef. John hadn’t thought much of it at the time, but in retrospect he felt that this was the first time he’d truly seen the sheer force of her will. She bought all of Julia Child’s books, pored over them, and obeyed every command. (“If Julia says peel the broccoli, you peel the broccoli,” she’d said bashfully the first time John caught her doing it. He’d roared with laughter, but after tasting the result never again questioned any bizarre kitchen ritual.)

Tonight, she’d left a fistful of raw puff pastry and all the leaves that hadn’t passed muster wadded up beside the cutting board. Bits of egg and shell were dried onto the counter along with smashed garlic skins and strips of waxed butter wrapper. Flour coated the floor. Every utensil she’d used was abandoned at the precise spot where she’d ceased to use it.

John turned on the water, and waited until it got hot. Although he was tired, he wanted Amanda to encounter a clean kitchen when she rose the next morning.

4

Isabel drifted in and out of a swirling rush. It wasn’t sleep, because she was aware of things happening-people speaking, but not understandably, swooshing noises as she zoomed from tunnel to tunnel-this one orange, this one blue, this one green. Hands manipulated her body and her face, and she suffered the occasional discomfort of being punctured. But reacting or moving didn’t occur to her, and it was just as well, because it wasn’t a possibility. Finally the colors and noise submerged into a merciful, vacuous black.

A high-pitched beeping and intermittent wheezing disturbed her rest, stirring and prodding from the depths. She tried to ignore it like she would a fly, but like a fly, it was insistent. Finally, she surfaced.

She blinked several times and found herself looking at pressed ceiling tiles. Her peripheral vision was obscured by her own swollen flesh.

“Look who’s awake.”

Peter’s face appeared above her, smiling. His eyes had dark crescents beneath them and his chin was flecked in stubble.

“The nurses said you were coming around.” He pulled a chair up and sat next to her, reaching through the bars in the bed rail. His hand was warm and familiar to her: he was missing the first two sections of his left index finger, bitten off by a chimpanzee while he was doing graduate work at a primate center in Rockwell, Oklahoma. She tried to tighten her fingers around his, but was too weak. He reached through with his other hand and stilled hers.

Isabel mumbled, but her mouth wouldn’t cooperate. Her tongue moved, but her teeth wouldn’t budge.

“Your jaw is wired. Don’t try to talk.”

She lifted a hand and found it encumbered by a finger clamp and loops of IV tubing. She freed the other from Peter’s grasp and gingerly investigated her face. Her fingers met a maze of plaster, gauze, and tape, the tender lumps of swollen lip and lines of wire crisscrossing the brackets that had been glued onto her remaining teeth. Her eyes swung to Peter. She signed, TELL ME.

“Your jaw is broken and you have a concussion. They had to reinflate your lung, so you have a chest tube, and your nose-”

NOT ME. THE APES.

Her efforts were truncated and awkward. She fumbled through the spelling of words that usually took two hands to sign, and improvised others.

“Ah,” he said.

PETER?

“They’re… kay.” The corners of his lips twitched upward in an attempt to smile, but his eyes gave him away.

A cry escaped Isabel’s wired mouth.

INJURED?

“No. I don’t think so. But we’re not sure. They’re still in the trees. In the parking lot. They won’t come down.”

ALL OF THEM?

“Yes.” He stroked her hand and spoke calmly. “Everyone is working on it. The fire department is there. The Humane Society and Animal Control are there. I’ve been going back and forth.”

Isabel let her gaze drift to the ceiling, and then to the window. Sleet drummed the pane, fat droplets of near-hail that coated the black glass. Her eyes welled with tears.

“It will be okay. I promise you,” he said. He took a jagged breath and let his forehead rest on the bed rail. “Thank God you’re awake. I was terrified…”

TAKE ME THERE. PLEASE. IT’S TOO COLD. THEY’LL DIE.

The beeping of her heart monitor sped up.

“Isabel, I can’t.”

MAKENA IS PREGNANT.

“I know, and I promise I’ll make sure she’s okay.”

WHO DID THIS? WHY?

“Extremists. The bastards claim they ‘liberated’ the apes. Wait till you see the video statement. Very Al Qaeda. It’s all over the Internet.” He clenched and unclenched his jaw, his eyes fixed on some point beyond the wall. He suddenly seemed to realize she was watching and softened. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m just…” He looked down and was silent. A moment later, she realized his shoulders were heaving. He was crying.

After a while he collected himself, wiping his eyes with the backs of his hands. “When you’re up to it, the police want to talk to you.”

She blinked deliberately to indicate assent.

“There’s something else you should know. Celia has been taken in for questioning.”

Isabel’s eyes snapped open. OUR CELIA? ARRESTED?

“No. Not exactly. But she’s being held as a ‘person of interest.’ Apparently she has a background in animal activism. I wish I could say I’m surprised.”

Isabel’s mind raced back over Celia’s time at the lab. Although Isabel had shared several of Peter’s concerns over language, she had never doubted Celia’s devotion to the bonobos.

NO. THEY’RE WRONG. I DON’T BELIEVE IT.

Peter looked on sadly. Isabel closed her eyes, sending tears down her cheeks.

A silence stretched between them, broken by the patter of hail and all it implied for the tree-bound apes. When she opened her eyes again, Peter was staring at her. He exhaled, and raked a hand through his hair.

SHOW ME.

He nodded reluctantly. “Are you sure?”

YES.

He looked around the room, in the bathroom, and then went into the hall. After a few minutes, he came back with a hand mirror. He stood by the bed, pressing the reflective side against his sweater.

“This is all very fresh-you know that, right? You have the best plastic surgeons in the city. You’re going to look fine. You’re going to be fine.”

Isabel stared, waiting.

Peter cleared his throat and positioned the mirror above her. He tilted its flashing surface until a face came into view.

Isabel found herself looking at a complete stranger. The scalp and cheeks were swathed in gauze. The nose was broad and smashed, with an absurd nose diaper taped loosely beneath the oxygen piping to catch the bloody runoff. Its flesh was swollen and blue, with specks of reddish purple. The eyes were slits between swollen pads of flesh and the white of one was scarlet. Trembling fingers appeared beside the face, and these were indisputably hers. The mirror disappeared.

Isabel took a moment to absorb what she’d seen. She looked to Peter for comfort but he was still clenching and unclenching his jaw.

MY HAIR? GONE?

“For now. You have fifty-some stitches in your scalp.”

TEETH?

“You lost five, I think. You can get implants. And the stitches, all under the hairline. When it grows back no one will know. Really, it could have been so much worse. You could have been burned.”

The clock ticked, the sleet pelted.

DID YOU CALL MY MOTHER?

“I did.”

AND?

Peter paused and reached for her hand. He brought her fingertips to his lips. “Oh, sweetheart. I’m so sorry. I really am.”

***

The police came by that afternoon, two plainclothes detectives in dripping shell jackets. They stood some distance from the bed as they waited for the ASL interpreter, and were clearly uncomfortable. Isabel remembered the vision in the mirror and understood their reticence.

When the interpreter finally arrived, Isabel shook off her oxy-pulse finger clip and let loose with a flurry of double-handed signs.

The interpreter watched her hands and then spoke. “Are the apes still up in the trees? Have they had any water or food? It’s too cold for them. They’re delicate. Prone to pneumonia. Flu. One of them is pregnant. Who is with them?”

The detectives exchanged glances. The older of the two asked the interpreter, “Can you please tell her we need her to answer some questions?”

“Speak to her,” he replied, cocking his head toward Isabel.

“All right,” said the detective. He shifted his reluctant gaze to Isabel, who blinked expectantly. He cleared his throat and practically shouted, leaving a space between words and phrases. “How many… eople… ntered… he lab… fter… he explosion?”

I AM NOT DEAF, she replied. As an afterthought she added, FOUR, MAYBE FIVE.

“Did you recognize any of them?” The cop’s brow glistened and his eyes swung between Isabel and the interpreter, clearly unsure about whether to look at the hands that created the words or the mouth that uttered them.

NO. THEY WERE WEARING FACE MASKS.

The other cop spoke: “Is it true that Celia Honeycutt exited the lab immediately before the explosion?”

YES.

“Was she acting strange in any way?”

NO.

“Nervous? On edge?”

NO. NOTHING.

“The people who entered after the explosion-did any of them say anything?”

COULD NOT HEAR. EXPLOSION.

“You didn’t hear or see anything-”

COULD NOT BREATHE. COULD NOT HEAR.

“Dr. Benton said an animal rights group usually has a presence right outside the lab. Were any of them in the lab that night?”

DON’T KNOW. FACE MASKS. I ALREADY SAID.

“What do you know about them?”

ALMOST NOTHING. THERE’S A GUY NAMED HARRY, LARRY, OR GARY. MIDDLE-AGED. TALL. WELL-DRESSED. AND A GREEN-HAIRED KID. THERE’S ONE TATTOOED KID AND A FEW WITH DREADLOCKS AND SMELLY PONCHOS. A COUPLE OF PREPPY TYPES. MOSTLY THEY JUST LOOK LIKE STUDENTS.

“Have they ever threatened you?”

NO. THEY WAVE SIGNS WHEN WE DRIVE PAST.

“Have they identified themselves as part of an organization?”

I DON’T KNOW. HAVEN’T SPOKEN TO THEM.

“You’ve never heard them say anything about the Earth Liberation League?”

NO.

“Did you notice anything strange last night?”

YOU MEAN OTHER THAN BEING BLOWN UP?

The detective scratched his forehead with stubby fingers. “Before that. Did you see or hear anything out of the ordinary?”

NO. BUT THE BONOBOS DID. THEY KNEW SOMEONE WAS OUT THERE. THEY SMELLED SMOKE. ASK THEM WHEN THEY COME DOWN.

“What?” The detective froze with his pen pressed to his pad. “No, never mind,” he said. He sighed, put his pad and pen in his shirt pocket, and massaged his temples. “Okay, well, thank you for your time,” he said, addressing a portion of wall between Isabel and the balding interpreter. “I hope you feel better soon.”

GET THE APES DOWN, said Isabel. AND TALK TO THEM.

She stared resentfully as the police thanked the interpreter and left. She knew they had no intention of speaking with the apes, even though it was clear the apes knew more than anyone. She knew the police thought she was nuts. She had encountered this reaction more times than she could recall, but never, never, had she felt so desperate about it.

***

A nurse brought Isabel’s dinner, which consisted of clear liquids. Juice of some sort, and a brown plastic thermos of clear broth with stiff green flakes sprinkled on the surface. The nurse, Beulah, turned to Isabel.

“You’re looking much better. Ready for some dinner? I know, it doesn’t look like much, but your doctors want us to take it slowly. How about some TV?”

Beulah raised the head of Isabel’s bed and flicked on the television. She took a seat by Isabel, dropped the bed rail, and reached for the juice.

“Don’t try to lean forward. I’ll come to you,” she said, guiding the straw to Isabel’s lips.

Isabel sucked some apple juice through the straw. It was almost painfully sweet. Her tongue was huge and clumsy, and she was suddenly aware of stitches along its side, poking out like the stiff spines of a caterpillar. It took a couple of tries to coax the liquid down her throat.

“You all right?” asked Beulah, looking momentarily back at Isabel.

Isabel nodded weakly.

“I can’t stand the news anymore,” said Beulah, reaching for the remote control. “Everything’s so depressing. The economy, that oil spill, the war…”

Isabel touched Beulah’s hand to still it. The scene had just cut to the parking lot of the language lab, with a newscaster standing out in the drizzle. She wore a yellow hooded raincoat, her shoulders hunched against the cold. People crowded around the edges of the parking lot beyond brightly painted barricades.

“… ontinuing drama playing out at the Great Ape Language Lab at the University of Kansas. The public is urged to remember that while these apes have a peaceful reputation, they are still wild animals, many times stronger than adult male humans, and capable of inflicting grievous injury, even ripping off limbs…”

Isabel’s eyes shot open.

The camera panned past the tops of the trees, where the bonobos sat miserable and wet, huddled against the trunk, seeking protection from the wind.

“Many groups have converged in an effort to save the endangered animals, which have been stranded in the treetops since an explosion last night destroyed the building that housed them and critically injured one of the scientists. Today the home of the university president was vandalized. The animal rights extremist group Earth Liberation League has claimed responsibility for the attacks in a video released on the Internet, but the authorities have yet to… h! My goodness!”

A crack resounded, and the camera swung to a man with a gun on his shoulder and then to the top of a tree. At first, there was nothing. Then one of the bonobos began to sway. Amid screeching and yipping, the others plucked the tranquilizer dart out of his thigh and tossed it to the ground, but it was too late. The stricken bonobo-was it Sam or Mbongo? It was too dark and too distant for Isabel to tell-collapsed and dropped from the ring of hairy black arms that tried to keep him upright. Another crack, another bonobo. This one seemed to split in two midfall, the parts spinning and tumbling through the tree branches. One landed in the center of a piece of round canvas held at its edges by firemen. The other part-Lola, Isabel now realized-hit the frame and bounced back into the air. There was a collective gasp from the crowd and news crew alike as the firemen lunged forward with outstretched arms.

Isabel let out a muffled cry and struggled to get upright. She knocked the juice from the nurse’s hand, spilling it across both of them. The insulated brown thermos slid across a puddle of condensation, as if pushed by an invisible hand, the broth sloshing from side to side.

“Stop. You’ll hurt yourself! Stop!” said Beulah, and when Isabel did not, she pressed the red call button and held Isabel’s wrists and shouted for help, which came pattering down the hall in the form of other uniformed figures and a syringe that was emptied into the valve on Isabel’s intravenous line.

Well, thought Isabel, when she realized what had just happened, at least they didn’t shoot me out of a tree. The television and its falling bonobos was clicked off, and shortly thereafter Isabel sank back against the lowered bed, her panicked desperation neutered by the blissful numbing of drugs.

5

John had finally booked his flight for the next morning (inexplicably, all the flights that day were full) and was watching footage of the apes falling from trees when someone started banging on the door. The banging continued with such vehemence that it occurred to him it might be the police. Of course they would wish to speak with him; he had been at the language lab only hours before the explosion. But the vigor and relentlessness of the banging worried him. Surely they didn’t consider him a suspect?

When he swung the door open, it all made sense, even though she was supposed to be safely six states away-

“Fran?”

“Where is she?” demanded his mother-in-law, inserting herself between John and the doorway and entering the front hall. Bulging supermarket bags swung from her hands and wrists. John was sure he saw the outline of a box of Velveeta.

“I think she’s in the…” John’s voice trailed off, because Fran was already marching toward the kitchen.

John turned back to the doorway. His father-in-law was climbing the stairs with two suitcases, old-fashioned hard-sided ones without wheels or retractable handles. They had purple ribbons tied around the handles, presumably to tell them apart from all the other pieces of thirty-year-old luggage coming around the carousel.

“Hello, John,” said Tim, pausing at the doorway.

“Hello, Tim.” John swung his head around toward the raised voices coming from the kitchen. “Did Amanda know you were coming?”

“I don’t think so. When Amanda didn’t even call to say ‘Happy New Year’ Fran got it in her head that something was wrong.”

John sighed and took the suitcases from the old man. He carried them into the guest room, which was really Amanda’s office. It had been in a state of suspended animation since Magnificat’s untimely demise, at which point she had been polishing Recipe for Disaster and sending query letters to agents. The room looked like a paper mill had exploded. Chunks of her manuscript, marked up in her own hand, littered the bed and were scattered around it. They were mixed in with dozens of rejections: “Hard to market literary fiction…”; “Not for me…”; “Not taking on new clients at the moment…” John picked up a piece of paper that was lying facedown. It was one of Amanda’s own query letters, which had been returned to her with the word NO scrawled diagonally across it in enormous red letters. He imagined her standing with trembling fingers, ripping open the envelope that she herself had addressed and stamped, hoping that this time, this time, someone had written to say, “Yes, please send the manuscript, I’d love to read it,” and instead finding… this. He let the page fall to the floor. The surge of anger he felt was overwhelming. He’d never felt so impotent.

His mother-in-law’s voice sailed in from some other part of the house and John pulled himself together. He couldn’t do much-even if the room were neat, it would not be clean enough to please Fran-but he shuffled stacks of paper together and moved them into the closet along with the printer and stepped into the wastepaper basket to squash its contents. As a final touch, he smoothed the bedspread, which still had a fine coating of cat dander.

***

There was no rescuing Amanda from Fran, and adding his own presence to the mix could only make things worse, so John parked himself in the living room with Tim and the television and a bottle of Bushmills. After a while Fran came through on hands and knees, scrubbing the wall and baseboard, complaining in equal parts about her creaking knees and Amanda’s housekeeping. Amanda followed, swabbing halfheartedly with a wad of moistened paper towel. Her deficiencies were grievous: what kind of a woman didn’t keep her guest room made up? And why didn’t she have shelf paper in the kitchen? Fran promised to furnish some, since it was clear Amanda didn’t care, and Lord only knew where that came from, since she, herself, was a meticulous housekeeper. Once, when John was absolutely sure Fran’s back was turned, he made a yapping motion with his hand. Amanda responded by holding a finger gun to her own forehead and pulling the trigger.

Through a whiskeyed haze, John endured Velveeta-laced scalloped potatoes, a pile of tasteless green beans, and pork chops dressed in Shake ’n Bake. The Caesar salad, drowning in Kraft dressing, had been carefully denuded of all the crisp white pieces of the romaine, which were John’s favorite. Fran herself consumed three quarters of a basket of heat-and-serve dinner rolls, all while continuing to berate Amanda: she needed to take a good, hard look at her life. She wasn’t getting any younger, you know. Forty was closer than thirty now, and she still didn’t have a career or family to speak of, and while it was fine to have one or the other, Amanda had neither, in case she hadn’t noticed. She’d given the book thing a go but now it was time to think of the future. How could she even think of leaving her husband and moving to L.A.? She’d end up being a waitress, that was what, and she was too old to spend that much time on her feet. She did realize that varicose veins ran in the family, didn’t she?

John watched with amazement as Amanda blandly “Yes, Mothered” her way through the onslaught.

When Fran got up to clear the table, Amanda stood and calmly gathered plates. Tim Matthews patted his stomach, rose, and toddled off toward the room with the television. God bless him, thought John, following in such a hurry he nearly knocked his chair over.

***

In the privacy of their room, Amanda’s inscrutable veneer dropped like a carton of eggs.

“This is unbelievable,” she said, flopping onto the bed. “They ‘dropped in’ from Fort Myers. Who ‘drops in’ from Fort Myers?”

“Did she say how long they’re staying?”

“No.” Her voice had an edge of panic.

“My flight leaves first thing in the morning. Will you be okay?”

“I don’t know.”

“You were brilliant tonight,” he said. “How did you do that? Not that she didn’t manage to have a fight with you all by herself anyway.”

“I tuned her out. Or at least I tried to. It’s hard to do. I don’t know how long I can keep it up. She-” The strain of whispering was too much. Amanda sat forward with a sudden cough.

John hauled himself up on an elbow and rubbed her back. “You okay?”

“Mm-hmm,” she managed. “Just swallowed the wrong way. I’ll be fine.” She cleared her throat and nestled back against him.

Down the hall, the guest room door creaked open. There were footsteps, moving past the bathroom, and down the stairs, followed by a rattling in the kitchen. It sounded like the cutlery drawer, but that made no sense, unless someone was having a midnight hankering for scalloped potatoes. But no, that could not have been the case, because now, too soon for a plate to have been made, came the unmistakable sound of someone ascending the stairs.

And down the hall.

To their room.

The door crashed open, hitting the wall behind it. John yanked the blankets up to his chin. Amanda let out an “eep” as she struggled to do the same.

Fran stopped at the end of the bed, squinting to make out the figure of her daughter among the shadows. “There you are,” she said, coming around to Amanda’s side of the bed.

In the near-colorless glare of the moonlight, John saw the flash of a spoon. Amanda sat forward obediently, clutching the covers against her naked body with both hands. Her mother poured cough syrup onto the spoon and Amanda opened her mouth like a baby bird.

“That’ll sort you out,” Fran said with a nod. She turned on her heel and left the room, closing the door behind her.

John and Amanda lay in stunned silence.

“Did that just happen?” John said.

“I think it did.”

John stared at the ceiling. A car drove by; the headlights flashed across the length of their bedroom wall and disappeared.

“Come with me tomorrow,” John said. “We’ll get you on standby.”

Amanda flopped back onto him and adjusted the covers so that only their necks and heads were exposed. “Thank you,” she said, clinging to him like a spider monkey and breathing warm eucalyptus across his face. “Because if you leave me here with her, I think I might have to kill her.”

***

The next morning, John lay perfectly still until he heard the sounds of the television downstairs. It was a reliable indicator of when his in-laws began their day.

Amanda was asleep with her arms thrown over her head. Her hair, corkscrew curly, tumbled over her pillow and beyond her pale wrists. It was what had struck him the first time he laid eyes on her, in a hallway at Columbia, standing between him and the sunlight within a glowing halo of curls. It was always out of control, even when secured in its customary knot. She never used elastics; she used chopsticks, pencils, plastic cutlery, and anything else she could poke through it. Very early in their relationship, John had learned to check just what was in there before letting her lay her head on his shoulder so he wouldn’t lose an eye. But no matter how tight the knot or how recently done, bits of hair always sprang free.

He leaned over and buried his nose in her hair. He breathed deeply, and then nibbled her collarbone, which gave way to soft curves and heartbreaking dips. God, how he loved her. It had always been Amanda. For eighteen years, it had been Amanda. He’d never even been with another woman-unless you counted the unfortunate incident with Ginette Pinegar, which he did not.

“Mmm,” Amanda said, swatting him away.

“It’s time to go,” he whispered.

Her eyes opened wide. She smiled as he pressed a finger to her lips.

With a rerun of The Price Is Right as their soundtrack, Amanda piled folded clothes on the bed while John snuck to the hall closet for a suitcase. Not a word passed between them, but when their eyes met, they stifled giggles. They crept down the stairs and stood by the front door.

“Good-bye! We’re leaving!” John called loudly.

Sounds of muffled confusion floated down the hall, followed by fast footsteps.

Amanda pressed a fist against her mouth to suppress a laugh and zipped her feet into shiny high-heeled black boots that were very much the opposite of mukluks. John gazed admiringly, but not for long-Fran’s solid feet slid into view, encased in Isotoner slippers.

“What do you mean, you’re leaving?” she said. She stood with arms akimbo, eyes flashing. “Where are you going?”

“Kansas,” said Amanda.

“L.A.,” said John at the exact same moment. “House-hunting,” he added. Amanda paused momentarily, then resumed struggling into her pink belted coat. Large sunglasses already hid her eyes.

Tim ambled down the hall toward them.

“Bye, Tim! Thanks for coming,” John called cheerily.

“You’re welcome,” the old man replied in a baffled tone.

John pulled the door open.

“Wait!” Fran’s voice sent chills through John’s body. It was a reflex-her tone demanded obedience. He girded himself and turned to meet her steely glare. “Yes?”

“Nobody said anything about this last night.”

“It was very last minute. No choice. The Realtor was very busy-”

“Very busy,” added Amanda. She tied the sash of her coat while trying to remain hidden behind John.

“You only said you were thinking about moving, not that you had decided. When are you coming back?”

“No idea,” said John, ushering Amanda through the door. She headed for the car at a near-run. John followed with the suitcase.

“And what are we supposed to do?” Fran cried from the porch.

“Stay as long as you like,” said John. “Good-bye, Fran. Good-bye, Tim!”

“See you at the wedding!” Amanda called over her shoulder. She climbed into the car and slammed the door.

John glanced behind him. Fran was marching down the walkway, a one-woman armada, her bosom an impregnable force resting on a shelf of gut.

By the time John hit the driver’s seat, Amanda had pulled down her sunshade and was pretending to search through her purse. “Gun it, baby,” she said, without looking up.

John did, screeching backward into the road and then forward and out. Somewhere down the road, as he finally did up his seat belt, he asked Amanda, “What wedding? What are you talking about?”

“My cousin Ariel is getting married in three weeks.”

“That’s awfully fast.”

“It’s of the shotgun variety, although officially we don’t know that. Are we really going to L.A.?”

“No. We’re going to Kansas.”

“Oh.”

“But after that, you can go to L.A. If that’s what you really want.”

“Oh God.” Amanda dropped her head back and stared out the windshield. They pulled up at a stoplight, and she was silent for the entire red. “Are you sure?” she said when the light finally changed.

“As long as you’re really sure this is what you want.”

John glanced at her a couple of times, the second time in alarm, because tears were streaming down her face. But when she reached over and laid a hand on the back of his neck, her expression became almost beatific.

“I do. I really, really do. But are you sure you’re okay with this?”

“Yes.”

They were both reflective for a moment. Then John reached over and patted her thigh. “Yes. I am.”

Sara Gruen

***

Content

Sara Gruen
Ape House

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Sara Gruen