Russell Banks - The Darling

“Them was small-small Firestone houses built for the native foremen. We got ’em moved an’ set ’em up special for the Americans who run the blood lab,” Satterthwaite explained.

Inside, the units were identical — a single room cleanly swept and minimally furnished with a narrow, stripped bed, a table and two chairs, a kitchen counter with a hot plate, a few plastic buckets, enough dishes and utensils for two people, and a closet-sized bathroom. All three buildings were empty and evidently unclaimed. I chose the cottage farthest from the chimps.

“Can’t promise water or ’lectric full time,” Satterthwaite said, smiling. “But mostly it comes. I’ll check on that caretaker fellow,” he added, then dashed back to the air-conditioned comfort of the Mercedes and drove from the compound slowly, almost delicately, as if hoping to be seen by passersby.

I dropped my duffel in a corner. My worldly possessions, entire. Then lay down on the cot, exhausted from travel and the relentless heat and the several shocks of the day, and tried to sleep. But it was impossible. The screeches and banging of metal from the Quonset hut were like an ongoing accident, a slow-motion highway pileup. The racket frightened and confused me. I couldn’t stop hearing it, and couldn’t get used to it either. I wanted only to replay my meeting with Woodrow Sundiata and savor the details, ruminate on their implications. What was wrong with the chimps? Why were they so agitated? Weren’t there people to take care of them, to feed and quiet them down? I’d never seen chimpanzees in the flesh, only on television and in circuses wearing cute costumes — grinning, mischievous little creatures that made us laugh and shake our heads, amazed by their uncanny resemblance to humans and relieved by the difference. But these creatures sounded like huge and powerful beasts. They sounded violent and insane.

I tried covering my head with the thin pillow, but it did no good. Finally, I got up and went into the musty, windowless bathroom, closed the door, and stood in darkness inside the shower stall with the plastic curtain drawn shut on me — and at last could no longer hear them. After a few moments, not so oddly, my thoughts drifted back for the first time in a long time to a rainy night in 1967, standing in line for a movie in Durham, North Carolina, at a small art-house theater. The theater was located across the street from the county jail, a high, dark-brick building with bars in the third-storey windows facing the street and the line of moviegoers below. I’d been sent to North Carolina to help organize SDS chapters at Duke and Chapel Hill, and I remembered the movie — it was Easy Rider , of all things — because it was the only movie I saw that entire fall and I came away loathing it. While I waited in line for the theater to open, a few of the prisoners, men barely visible to the moviegoers on the sidewalk below, started shouting down at us, perhaps at first as a joke or to harass us, hollering obscenities and curses. Hey, you assholes! Motherfuckers! Hey, you cocksuckers, suck on this! And so on. Then other prisoners joined in. I imagined that all of them were black, although surely some were not. In seconds there were dozens of them calling down to us, and their hollers had turned into wild, uncontrolled, enraged screams, and they were banging metal objects against the bars, their tin cups, I supposed, or maybe just their fists — a clamorous, outpouring of anger that so shocked and frightened me that I wanted to break out of line and flee down the rain-soaked street and into the night.

When at last the door to the theater opened and we were able to get inside, the sudden silence of the lobby was even more terrible than the noise outside. It was as if we had become prisoners ourselves. We looked around the lobby at the posters, inhaled the familiar, friendly smell of fresh popcorn and candy, caught one another’s scared gazes, recognized them as our own, and quickly looked elsewhere.

Lost in the memory of that night, I slowly sank to the cool, dry floor of the shower stall — when suddenly something with claws darted across my ankle and calf. I half leapt, half fell from the stall onto the bathroom floor, pushed open the door to the outer room to let in light, and looked carefully back. A brown rat the size of a man’s shoe stared at me from a dark corner of the shower stall. I reached around for something to club it with, something to protect myself from it. Nothing. The bathroom was bare — just a toilet without a seat, an empty plastic pail for a sink. And then I saw the cockroaches. I hadn’t noticed them earlier, though surely they’d been there all along, watching me. Despite the sweltering heat, my body went cold, as shiny, dark-brown packs of brooch-sized cockroaches moved in undulating waves across the walls and over the crackled, lime-green linoleum floor. Scrambling to my feet, I heard again the undiminished screams of the chimps and the clang and bang of large, hard bodies being hurled relentlessly over and over against the steel bars of cages. It was the noise of bedlam, the cries from a madhouse or a torture chamber.

I ran from the bathroom, slammed the door shut behind me, and leaned against it, breathing hard. Though the room in the fading, evening light was half in darkness, I could now see cockroaches there, too — whole legions of them marching across the cot and pillow where minutes earlier I had lain my head. Why hadn’t I seen them before? Had I been that disoriented, that distracted by fatigue and the noise of the chimpanzees? The insects swarmed over my duffel, scattered from clusters on the kitchen counter, and regrouped on the hot plate. They raced across the dusty surface of the small dresser in the corner. They were everywhere, spreading over the formica-topped table as if spilled from a pail and shuddering over the floor and across the threadbare braided rug — hundreds of cockroaches, thousands, fleeing from my sight into pockets of darkness between walls, behind and beneath furniture, plates, and utensils, as if I had unexpectedly caught them doing a forbidden thing, a black mass or an obscene sexual act.

I held my breath and didn’t move. The cockroaches seemed to do the same, as if watching, waiting for me to attack them or run. I began to tremble, from my hands up my arms to my body and onto my face. I felt my lips purse involuntarily, and my right cheek started to twitch, as if with neuralgia. What is wrong with me? I wondered. Even though alone, I felt embarrassed. But this is the way things are in Africa , I reminded myself. It’s the tropics, for heaven’s sake! What did I expect in a house that’s been empty for weeks or months? I’d had to displace cockroaches and rats before, in my apartment in Accra and before that in dozens of rented rooms and filthy apartments and so-called safe houses in the States, and had disinfected my living quarters, set traps, put out poisons, washed floors with lye and scrubbed counters down with ammonia water. And though the chimps were louder and more raucous than I might have expected, I’d heard laboratory animals before — monkeys and bonobos yelling to be fed at this time of day — and had not been frightened by them, only worried that someone might not be there to feed them on time and clean their cages and change their water.

Slowly, carefully, as if walking on loose sheets of paper, I crossed the room and stepped onto the small open porch. The dirt yard needs sweeping , I noticed. I’ll buy some candles and mosquito coils at the little corner shop we passed coming in, and tonight when I sleep I’ll burn them near the bed . With relief, I saw a bundle of mosquito netting tied to a ceiling hook above the bed. Tomorrow I’ll scrub down the cottage and put out traps and poison. Tomorrow I’ll dispossess these tenants and take over the place, make it my own. I’ll meet the people who are supposed to care for the chimps, and I’ll learn their schedules and tasks, so that I can fill in for them when they’re late or for some reason can’t come in to work. And, in fact, right now I’ll see if I can figure out how to calm the chimps myself somehow. Perhaps all they need is fresh water, and maybe what and how to feed them will be obvious to me. As soon as I can, possibly this very evening, I’ll present myself to the woman who Mr. Sundiata said runs the lab and the man who feeds the chimps and cleans their cages, and they’ll tell me what sort of work I am to do here. I’ll work hard, very hard, and they will quickly find me irreplaceable. I’ll find good friends here, men and women. Liberians speak English, after all, and they’re said to like and admire Americans. It will be easy and enjoyable. I may call myself Dawn Carrington, or I may say I am Hannah Musgrave, and I’ll make a useful, satisfying, aboveground life for myself here in Liberia. And someday I’ll return to the United States, and at last I’ll see my mother and father again .