Дуглас Престон - Jennie

It kind of freaked me out. But I wasn’t going in there. No way. So I went over to the house and woke up Gabriel. That lady scientist had an apartment there too. So anyway she calls the vet while Gabriel comes running down.

He goes, “Who did this? Did you do this?” Like I would go and kill this chimp. “Hey,” I said, “take it easy. I found it like that.”

He was all over me. “You let someone in. You let that kid in, didn’t you? That son of a bitch, look what he did. I’ll get that son of a bitch.” Saying stuff like that. I was really getting pissed off. I don’t have to take that kind of shit. I told him so. Nobody had been around, or I would have seen him. I hadn’t seen nobody, but he didn’t believe me.

He was really ripped. And this chimp is like snoring , and then it starts crawling across the cage. To the door. And it gets to the door and reaches up, like, grabs the handle. And then it falls back and starts flopping again and twitches. So Gabriel tells me to stay there, and he goes back and calls the cops. And while I’m waiting, the chimp coughs or something and goes still. Like, it died.

And then, it was really weird. That lady scientist comes down, and she goes in the cage and she’s holding the dead chimp and screaming her head off. Getting blood all over her. And kissing it. No shit. I mean, she was still in her nightgown . And then she’s looking at her hands, with the blood on them, and slapping her own face and hitting herself. Jesus. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I swear to God you never seen anything like it. I swear to God.

Then everyone comes, and they take it away. So the cops want to talk to me, and they’re asking me all these questions like Who did this? Who was around? Did I go to sleep? Had I been drinking? I mean, it really pissed me off and I told them so. Even with a shitty job like that, I’m a responsible guy. I don’t have to take shit like that.

Then the next day it was all cleaned up. It was like nothing happened. A week later they asked me a bunch of questions, but it was different. They were a lot more friendly. See, they were afraid I was gonna quit. I mean, who were they gonna get to work nights at three fifty an hour? That’s what they paid, three fifty. They wanted to know what I’d seen. Hey, I said, I keep telling you I didn’t see nothing or nobody. Just what I said. Like, why would I lie? And that was it. So later they told me it was an accident, the chimp fell and hit its head.

Yeah. So I worked there another year and then they laid me off because of some cutback somewhere. That’s when I got the job at Marine Magic.

There isn’t much to tell after that. The story’s over. You can finally shut off that tape recorder. Jennie was dead. It was done. And legally they owned her, she was their property, so who could we sue? Who could we complain to? They had killed our daughter and there was nothing we could do. Nothing. Anyway she was dead.

So there was Jennie’s body laid out there in the veterinary hospital, on a stainless steel table, dissected. Her whole face and skull had been opened up. I was the only one to see that. No, Sandy saw her later, I believe. I kept Hugo and Sarah out. You know, it wasn’t that shocking, really — because it just wasn’t her. For the first time, she looked like an animal to me. All the life was gone and she looked like somebody’s big black dog run over by a car. If there is such a thing as a soul, it was long gone.

Sandy was released from the hospital that day. The psychiatrist said he was upset but in good mental health. George Gabriel, fearing a scandal, no doubt, declined to press any charges. We had Jennie’s body cremated, and we took the ashes back to Boston.

Sandy had already made his peace. Learning of Jennie’s death didn’t throw him for a loop the way we thought it would. He accepted it with a fatalism that, well, kind of scared us at first. It was almost as if he’d already said good-bye to her. I guess he had.

Now where was I? You know the story. They found Jennie on the floor of her cage. Unconscious. While Dr. Gabriel administered emergency first aid to Jennie, Dr. Prentiss called Roger Kuntz, who was the D.V.M. used by the center. Although Dr. Gabriel was a veterinarian himself, Dr. Kuntz had more experience with trauma. He arrived ten minutes later and tried cardiopulmonary resuscitation, but by that time it was clear that Jennie was not merely unconscious. She was dead.

Now I know that Esquire reported that Jennie might have been murdered. Let me address that. This utterly ridiculous falsehood stemmed from the fact that, in her very distraught state, Dr. Prentiss made some thoughtless allegations against Sandy. Jennie had been found lying in her cage with a fractured skull. And Pam didn’t see, at first, how that could have happened. She asked Dr. Kuntz to photograph and remove the body and perform an autopsy. Once made, the allegation was out, and it took on a life of its own. It was sensational. A macho red-blooded journalist like that fellow from Esquire , well, he just couldn’t resist.

Dr. Kuntz quickly dispelled the idea that the death was anything but accidental. Mind you, they seriously examined the possibility of foul play. Dr. Prentiss insisted on it. What they found was crystal clear. The door to the building was locked. The cage was locked. There were no signs of a break-in or tampering. The night watchman had not fallen asleep or been derelict in his duty. All his clocks had been punched and this was, apparently, an unusually reliable fellow.

Sandy had quite definitely been in the hospital all night. When everyone finally calmed down we realized that it had been an accident, a freakish accident.

Apparently what happened was this. During the night she had had a fall, undoubtedly while the sedative was still clouding her mind. Normally chimps can fall twenty or thirty feet out of a tree and be unhurt. I might add, however, that Goodall did observe chimpanzees falling to their deaths from trees. Jennie fell from above and just happened to land on her head on some hard blunt object — we believe it might have been the edge of her cement water bowl. A severe cranial fracture followed by cerebral edema ended her life very quickly and mercifully, without suffering.

When Dr. Prentiss returned to Boston a week later, she came into my office. She was a changed woman. Her love for that chimpanzee was as powerful as any mother’s love for her daughter. That tragedy changed her life. And you know what? She’s never been the same since. Don’t print this, but she’s been treated for depression. That’s why it burns me up to hear accusations leveled against her merely because she isn’t, on the surface, the warmest and most socially graceful person in the world. I hope you will not be another one of those people casting stones. I’m asking you to have a little compassion. I also hope you’ll be gentle with Sandy. He was a lovely, kind boy and he was just crushed by this whole thing. He is suffering terribly out there in Arizona. I think he blames himself. And Hugo’s death, I think, had something to do with this whole thing. It ruined him as a scientist. He lost all perspective. He just seemed to give up on life. Of course, I’m not implying suicide of any kind, but one doesn’t normally die from a simple gallstone operation. It was a routine operation; he just never woke up from the anesthetic.

Look, we’re all good people here: myself, Dr. Prentiss, Lea, Sandy, and of course Hugo. Hugo was a wonderful man. We are kind people. To be sure, we’re human beings, but we’re not evil scientists. So, where did we go wrong? I really don’t know the answer. I really don’t.