Russell Banks - The Darling

As clerk of the works, I was also the paymaster, which went a long way towards shaping my relationship with Elizabeth and Benji. They desperately needed their regular paychecks, a rare and luxurious thing in this country. Their monthly pay, drawn on the lab account at the Chase Bank in Monrovia, exceeded the average annual income for most Liberians and let Elizabeth and Benji and their families live modestly. It let them send their kids to school, rent a little house close to town, and even provided Benji with a car, a beat, old hand-me-down Ford.

Because of the way he treated the chimps, I was not fond of Benji, and he knew it. I could not keep a disapproving scowl off my face when in his presence. He was not especially fond of me, either, and we were barely civil to each other, except on payday, when I was officious and he as smooth as wet glass. But I liked Elizabeth. She was jolly, and although she viewed the chimps the way most people regard house cats or squirrels or caged birds — as if the creatures were without feelings, memories, or emotions and with no needs other than physical — she seemed to find them amusing and interesting. And she seemed to like me and enjoyed hanging out at the office telling stories about her kids and neighbors and now and then local politics.

It was Elizabeth who told me of the atrocities, told me in a way that let me for the first time believe the stories and rumors that I’d heard earlier, stories of how the soldiers, especially the president’s personal security force, took drugs and roamed the city at night looking for women and girls to rape; how they wantonly butchered people from the tribes not currently in favor, that is, killed people who were not members of the president’s own tribe, the Americo-Liberians, or the most populous and best educated of the native people, the Kpelle, though they had no qualms about torturing and killing Americos and Kpelles if it was on the president’s orders. Elizabeth told me also of rumors of cannibalism, of rituals among the stoned soldiers that consisted of disemboweling people and eating raw their hearts and livers and drinking their blood. These rumors I discounted, however. African urban legends , I thought. Stories told to scare the white lady. These guys might be murderers and thugs and rapists, and maybe they relish eating chimpanzee flesh, but they’re not cannibals. Not in this day and age.

THE DREAMER THAT my records called Number 34, when finally I was able to put a face on the number, was the first one I named. After a few months at the lab I had taken to visiting the chimp house when no one was around, mid-afternoon, when the chimps, having been recently fed by Benji, were usually relatively quiet and settled. I went there for company, strangely enough. My days were lonely, and somehow visiting the chimp house after the humans had left it diluted my loneliness. The animals were kept one to a cage, the babies housed by themselves in smaller, half-size cages. The cages were padlocked, constructed of thick steel bars that might have come from a maximum-security prison, and stacked on metal racks. For ease of cleaning, the floor of each cage was grated to allow feces and urine and uneaten food to fall through, the way chickens are kept in poultry farms. I’d gotten used to the rotting, vegetal smell of the place, the claustrophobic heat, and the sorrow that the creatures exuded with every breath. But something about that sorrow drew me forward and out of my habitual, brittle self-absorption. Paradoxically and without a scrap of shame, I felt comforted by their sorrow, soothed and reassured by it. Theirs was a reality greater than mine.

I walked alongside the cages and peered in, and the chimps came cautiously forward, and for a second, with knuckled hands grasping the inch-thick bars, their round, puckered faces peered back at me. Some of them rolled up their lips and bared their huge mouths to warn me off; others, lips pursed, on the edge of speech, it seemed, ready to exchange a small word or two, saw me approach and shyly withdrew and became sullen or sour faced; and there were a few who were clearly psychotic, screaming, wild eyed, terrorized.

Number 34 was a large adult male, and I kept coming back to his cage and lingering in front of it, perhaps because after my first few visits, he, more than the rest, was able to return my gaze with the same mixture and degree of apparent curiosity and fear that I was feeling towards him, and he seemed neither enraged by my presence nor intimidated by it. The others, when I looked directly at them, if they came towards me at all, if they did not cower in the corner of their cages or, like autistic children, bang their heads against the bars, leapt at me or bared their teeth in rage or spat. They tried to throw things at me, uneaten food, feces, water bowls, and sent me on my way, frightened and disturbed and embarrassed.

This was before I learned how to approach the chimps — eyes lowered, teeth covered, face slightly canted, as if in deference. It was Number 34 who taught me. From the first, he’d been neither angered by my presence before his cage nor frightened of it. With him, I had a chance to experiment, mimicking his approach to me and afterwards applying it to the others, who gradually began to accept my approach, then, over time, seemed to welcome it. Hello, brother ape. Greetings, sister ape. How are you today? What are your thoughts, brother ape? Is everyone in the chimp house okay? No one sick? No one injured?

I looked steadily at Number 34, and he looked steadily back. He was the boss, I decided, the chief. That’s why he’s given me the time of day and hasn’t been frightened or angered by my dumb lack of ceremony. He’s seen that I’m just an ignorant human, and because I’m not Benji or Elizabeth and haven’t been involved in the capture and transport and imprisonment of him or any of the others, I’m relatively harmless. He was long faced, with a grizzled muzzle and a huge paunch and a habit of pouting with his lips as if about to whistle. His facial expression reminded me somehow of a surgeon, scalpel poised, ready to cut — thoughtful, concentrated, deliberate. I named him Doc.

I suspected that Elizabeth and even Benji had favorites among the chimps and might even have given some of them names. But I told no one about Doc, and gradually over the following weeks I named them all, one by one, even the babies. There was Ginko, a scrawny adolescent male who had a pale, greenish cast to his skin; and Mano, a stubby, tough-looking male whose full name I realized later must be Mano-a-Mano; and Wassail, round bellied and freckled and reminding me of Christmas somehow, one of Santa’s elves; and Edna, a slope-shouldered female with dark, stringy hair who made me remember for the first time in years a crafts counselor I’d had at Camp Saranac the summer I was nine, a kindly woman mocked by all her charges, including me, for her slow speech and low, mannish voice. Their names bubbled into my head as if sent by thought-transference from the chimps themselves, and it was only later that I’d realize I was naming them after people whom the chimps reminded me of, people I’d long forgotten. The names were sounds that for mysterious reasons I liked saying to myself, sounds that were keys capable of unlocking blocked memories, lost sensations, ignored associations.

Words replaced the old file numbers, absorbing the data that made up each chimp’s biography, and just as with a family member or a close friend, the name became the same as the bearer. I knew that I was making a mistake and soon would no longer be able to see the chimps as numbers, as data, and that in time I would want to free them from their cages. But I couldn’t help myself. For my job had lost its tedium, and the edge of despair had begun slowly turning into a cause. An old pattern. It’s how since childhood I have made my daily life worth living, by turning tedium and despair into a cause.