Дуглас Престон - Jennie

Here was the deal. This’ll make you sick. Prentiss insisted that we transfer ownership of Jennie to the Tahachee center. Like a fucking slave. Like chattel. Oh but no, it was just a legal formality, see? Something about insurance or liability, oh yes of course , thank you, just a formality. Right. And my parents went along; they signed the fucking slave papers, giving these bastards ownership of Jennie. A clean break, a new life, they called it. How oh-so- wonderful .

My parents flew down to Florida with Jennie and came back a few days later. I wasn’t around. I was so pissed off at that point that I’d gone to live with Sammie. I stayed there for a week and then I came home.

I have to say, I found my parents pretty broken up about losing Jennie. The only one who was happy was Sarah, who went humming and skipping around the house with her fucking dolls, having make-believe tea parties and things like that. Oh well, I can’t blame her really. My mother cried just about every day. That surprised me, how upset she was. We talked a lot about it and I think that was the first time I’d really connected with my mother in years. We talked a lot about the early days when Jennie was young, about Jennie and her tricycle, about Jennie’s first words. My mother really needed to talk about it. She tried to explain to me why they’d sent Jennie away. It was hard for her to defend the decision when I could see she was having second thoughts herself. I think she realized she’d made a terrible mistake. My father, he just withdrew. He was always pretty remote, but he looked... ashen after that. He was at the museum all the time. I really resented that.

The reports coming back from Florida were all bullshit. Everything was “normal.” Normal what? Jennie was still in a fucking cage. It may be normal for them to sit in a cage but it wasn’t normal for Jennie. What a crock.

After a few weeks my mom started getting suspicious. They had said Jennie would be released on the island in two weeks, but a month later she was still in the cage. They were evasive. They didn’t want anyone to come down. Dr. Prentiss came back to Boston, but three weeks later she was back down there. No one would say why.

My father was a fool. In his mind, these people were scientists and scientists never make mistakes. He had this faith in those people, Epstein, Prentiss, Gabriel.

So here we were, everyone was sitting around the house talking about it but nobody was doing anything. Not a thing.

So I finally said to myself, the hell with this, this is a crock of shit, I’m going down there myself to see what’s going on. I’m her brother. Nobody, I mean nobody, is going to keep me out.

So about a month after Jennie left, I wrapped my stuff in a blanket and I went out there to Route 128 South and stuck out my thumb.

That trip was a nightmare. It took me five days to get to Florida, and it rained almost every day. The first man that picked me up was an old guy driving a gold Cadillac, and he was so drunk, weaving all over the road, that I had to get him to stop and get out in the pouring rain. Then this busful of hippies picked me up; you know, peace and love and all that, and all they did was bitch about who was hogging the drugs, who had ripped off the pot. I spent a night with them at this KOA campground outside of Baltimore, and they split in the morning without paying and I had to pick up the tab.

It rained that morning, and an old black guy in a pickup stopped. He was only going a hundred miles, but he invited me to spend the night at his place near Richmond. His name was Dad Patterson. Dad and Muriel Patterson. I’ll never forget them. Their kids had grown up and moved away, and I think they were lonely. They lived on one floor of this old crooked three-story house, looked like the porches were about to fall off. His wife cooked me a fantastic meal and I told them about Jennie. They were fascinated. They asked me all kinds of questions about Jennie and what it was like growing up with a chimpanzee, and I showed them my finger and they ooohed and aaaahed about it. We drank bottles of Colt 45.

It rained the next day and the next, and when I finally got to Florida it was still raining. It took me a day and a half just to get halfway down the length of Florida. Tahachee was on the Gulf Coast near Sarasota.

The last afternoon it cleared and I slept in a nature preserve along the coast. Snuck in and curled up in this deep sandy grove of palmettos. The night was full of stars. When I got up in the morning the sun was just hitting the tops of the trees and the birds were making an incredible racket. They were flapping and squawking through the branches. The sky was an incredible blue color, and as I lay on my back I saw a snake silently gliding along a branch above my head, so smooth and graceful and alive. It seemed like such a perfect thing. Just going about its business and living its life in a pure way. There was no bullshit or phoniness in this snake’s life. No complexity, no moral agony. Just this beautiful simplicity. I wanted to be the snake, at that moment. I wanted to shed this life and just be up there, gliding over a branch in the warm sun. And then I thought, Why not? What’s preventing it? I can be like that.

I wish I could describe to you how I felt at that moment. I suddenly felt alive, for the first time in months. It was a great moment, an epiphany. I felt free.

I was only a few miles from Tahachee. I felt that, whatever happened, everything would be okay. I don’t know why I felt that, but I did. It helped me get through the next few days.

I got to Tahachee about noon. I walked into George Gabriel’s office. I wasn’t looking very presentable, and he looked at me and demanded to know what I wanted.

I told him who I was, and I said I wanted to see Jennie.

He just looked at me steadily. He was dressed like a great white hunter, all khaki with pockets everywhere. He had a big beard and a sunburned face, but his eyes were that Nazi pale-blue color. He was a phony through and through.

Then he stood up and shook my hand. He said, “Sit down, sit down. Let’s rap.”

Can you believe it? Let’s rap . He thought he was so cool, so with-it, he wanted to rap. Not talk. Rap. What an asshole.

Then he went through this thing of crossing his legs and sighing and saying that he didn’t know how to say this to me, but it wouldn’t be in Jennie’s interests for her to see me, and so forth. Looking all thoughtful and fatherly and paternal, and pretending to take me seriously when all he wanted was for me to get the hell out. Talking to me like I was some kind of idiot.

So I said, “Why not?”

So he started this longwinded explanation. They wanted to release Jennie on this island with other chimpanzees, but in order to do that they had to accustom her to being with her own kind. And that was a hard process for her. On and on. Jennie was very upset, she was having trouble adjusting. But she was making progress. My visiting her would undo all the progress they’d made. It would upset Jennie terribly. It was a very bad idea. It would set her back.

I listened patiently. I thought, Let the asshole talk himself out. I mean, nothing was going to keep me out of that cage.

So I asked him, very nicely, why she was in a cage in the first place.

He had another long bullshit explanation for that. She was too powerful to control on a lead. She was extremely hostile to other chimpanzees and had attacked one. Why, Jennie had even attacked him. When he said that I couldn’t keep myself from grinning. Too bad Jennie didn’t kill the bastard. The only way, he said, to safely allow her to be in proximity with other chimps was by keeping her in a cage. On and on. It was only temporary and then she would have a long and happy life on the island.