Russell Banks - The Darling

It was the first recognizable sign of his precocity, of his love of numbers and preternatural skill at using them, and it was how he quickly became his father’s favorite. “The boy is a genius at math,” Woodrow proudly declared to anyone who asked after his sons. “Like me.” The twins, however, Woodrow regarded with a strangely anxious wariness, as if the two boys knew things that mere mortals didn’t and perhaps shouldn’t know. Which in a sense was true, because each twin knew another person better and deeper than any of us ever could. It’s dangerous, that much knowledge. They understood each other’s breathing and cries in the night and were able quickly, silently, to comfort each other and developed their own language long before expressing any willingness to use ours. It separated them from the rest of us, and it bound them together. The twins were like the chimps. Dillon, too — inasmuch as he had an ability that we did not, an ability that might be dangerous.

At first, my daily routine was surprisingly liberating to me. Then oppressive. Never before had I been so free, yet never so confined and controlled by others. Controlled by Woodrow, of course, and to some small degree by Satterthwaite, whose responsibility was to be on call for any driving I might require. At Woodrow’s direction, Satterthwaite was to leave the office whenever I wanted or needed to go out, whether to the doctor, the market, or to the stores downtown, where there was very little on the shelves that I wanted or needed anyhow. As for our past indiscretion, Satterthwaite’s cynicism matched mine. An exciting risk, that’s all it had been. The same for him as for me. We’d chanced it, and we’d gotten away with it, and that moment, that exact degree of risk, would never appear again. The danger would always be greater and therefore not worth it, or less, and therefore not exciting enough. He remained a boy who was employed by my husband, and I was his boss’s wife and practically middle aged. Without once having to say it, we both knew the same thing.

I was controlled, too, by the people who worked for Woodrow at home — the yardman, Kuyo, until he left that job to work full time at the sanctuary; the many village girls and boys who came and went, working for a season or two and sometimes longer as housekeepers, laundresses, cooks, and drivers; and Jeannine, who was at first by herself the cook and maid and then became the nanny — all of whom actually answered to Woodrow, not to me, and knew their jobs better than I anyhow and didn’t need any supervision. So I made lists, menus, schedules; tried, ineptly, to help with the flower gardens; and shopped; and arranged entertainments — dinners, teas, lunches — for Woodrow’s colleagues and friends among the Americo-Liberian elite. I’d ended up with my mother’s life.

In those first years in Liberia, it was of course mostly my own doing, falling into my mother’s life. It was a thing difficult to avoid. As soon as we were married, Woodrow had insisted that I quit my job at the lab. Not “seemly” for the wife of a minister of government, he pronounced. And I complied. For a long while I had been eager to quit the lab anyhow and hadn’t already done it only because until now in the entire country of Liberia there was nothing else available to me, nothing for which I was not over- or underqualified. And, of course, there was the matter of the chimps, my dreamers.

Until I married and moved into Woodrow’s house, I had nowhere else to live than in my cabin at the lab. Before long, however, the job had changed for me, and to my surprise I had actually become attached to it. Attached to the chimps. In the beginning, the work had been suffused with tedium. Every day it was the same — a simple, mind-numbing set of tasks associated with recording and tracking plasma samples taken from the chimps and shipping the samples back to the U.S. for testing. The chimps had been deliberately infected, and the progress of the disease had to be recorded month by month, until the subject, the infected chimp, died, date and cause of death carefully recorded. They’d been infected at different ages, depending on when they’d been brought to the lab, and I noted that; and gender, duly noted; and background (subject’s general health before infection; conditions of birth, i.e., born and raised in the wild or captivity; birth order, if known; location of early habitat; place and means of capture…) — all duly noted.

At the same time, my days were edged with the slow approach of despair, despair that later became intolerable, because of the condition and fate of the chimps. Those same tedious details, the data, however impersonal and repetitive, gradually provided the individual chimps with individual biographies and identities. They were nameless and were differentiated one from the other by a file number, each file containing the chimp’s entire life history. Number 241: male, age approx. 14 years; captured in Maryland County, mother killed by poachers; purchased at market in Gbong by Swedish businessman, seized from him by customs officials at point of departure from Liberia; age at capture, approx. 6 months; age when turned over to U.S. lab in Monrovia, approx. 2 years; infected with hepatitis C at age approx. 4 years; total time in confinement 12 years, 3 months, 4 days at time of most recent extraction of plasma sample….

Gradually, over time, each number came to contain within it a single chimp’s story. But it was a kind of obituary written in advance, for once a chimp was placed inside one of our cages, its life was effectively over. I worked in the office, a cinder-block bunker that hummed with the sound of the air-conditioner, but still it couldn’t blot out the noise of the chimps when they were hungry or angry or frightened. It was always one of those three — hunger, anger, and fear — and the chimps reacted to them like people who were mad, with wild screams, shouts, calls, and cries beyond weeping. It was like working in an insane asylum. Sometimes silence fell, and, as in an asylum, that was bad, for it usually meant that the patients were hurting themselves.

I did not handle the chimps myself and in the early days rarely saw them. I was the clerk of the works, as I called myself, the only one trusted with the numbers. The woman and man who actually took care of the chimps and drew the blood plasma from them and infected them with the diseases shipped in dry ice from the U.S. were local Liberians who had been recruited and trained by American physicians long before I arrived on the scene. Elizabeth Kolbert, a practical nurse, was in her late forties, a large, slovenly woman, very black, with six or seven kids — it was never clear exactly how many. Sometimes she said six, sometimes seven, sometimes simply “many.” Underpaid, with no husband to help provide for the kids, she got by as well as possible, but always came late to work and left early and sometimes didn’t show at all.

The other employee at the lab was Benji Haddad, also in his late forties, a light-skinned con man with a nasal voice, a toothpick in his mouth, and pomaded hair shaped like a helmet. He worked nights dealing blackjack at the hotel casino and part time at the lab, drifting into the compound around noon for a few hours to feed the chimps and clean up their cages, and because he hated doing these tasks, for they were beneath his dignity and understanding of his own status in town, he made things as difficult and uncomfortable for the chimps as possible, banging the bars with his shovel, spraying them with the hose as if in fun. It was he who knocked the chimps out with darts so Elizabeth could extract the blood samples and inject the viruses. Knockdowns, they were called. It was he who extracted their large incisors. And both Benji and Elizabeth talked about the knockdowns, extractions, and biopsies as if they were car mechanics discussing oil changes and tune-ups.