Russell Banks - The Darling

WOODROW DECLARED that he could not do without the car, promising that I would have a car of my own in a few days. I couldn’t wait, however, and the morning after my arrival home, as soon as Satterthwaite had driven the boys to school, I pedaled my bicycle out to the old lab, knowing fairly well what I’d find there. In my backpack I carried as many fruits and vegetables as I could stuff into it, along with my lunch and the video camera that I had shipped back from the States. Woodrow had assured me that in my absence the dreamers had been fed and their cages kept clean by Elizabeth and Benji, but I knew how casually and carelessly they would have done their work. I feared the worst.

The lab was a wreck. The office had been looted of nearly everything that remained — every stick of furniture, the filing cabinets and most of their contents, the remnants of medical equipment, all of it either gone or smashed to pieces. Plumbing fixtures and electric lights had been ripped out. The doors to the three cabins swung open, and the window frames had been pulled out and were probably way across town by now, installed in a permanently unfinished cinder-block hut. In those days half of Monrovia had been vandalized to build the other half, and work on the other half had unaccountably ceased. A strange sort of stasis had settled over the city.

I smelled the dreamers before I saw them. From halfway across the yard, the stench enveloped me — rotted fruit and urine. The old, rusted Quonset hut was silent as I approached. The padlock was gone, and the door hung half-open on one hinge, as if someone had tried to rip it off and had given up. Thus the stench, I thought, but I would have smelled it even if the door had been shut and locked. It was overpowering, putrid, like nothing I had smelled before, and though in subsequent years I became almost familiar with that odor, I knew at once that it was the smell of dead bodies, if not human bodies then enough like human to smell the same, to repel and frighten me in the same primal way and fill my throat and mouth with the soured contents of my stomach.

I untied my head scarf and covered my nose and mouth and swung the door back, reached blindly into the darkness and found the switch. Miraculously, the fixtures and fluorescent tubes were still in place and working, protected against theft no doubt by the awful smell of death. The pale, flickering light drove the thick darkness from the building. I could almost hear the darkness flee. But the stink remained. There was no movement in the cages. Brown and black lumps of hair were all that remained of my dreamers. I staggered along the row of cages and one by one said their names, as if taking a macabre roll, and as I passed, first one of the lumps of hair, then another, came slowly to life, rolled its head into view, showed me its flattened, expressionless gaze. They were shrunk to half the size they had been when I’d last made this walk from cage to cage and called their names and they’d leapt to the front of the cages to greet me with glad hoots and hollers. Now they barely stirred at my passing. They lay in their feces and urine and the rotted remains of their last feeding, which from the looks of it had taken place weeks ago. Some of them did not move at all. Others turned their faces to me, but did not open their eyes.

Of the twelve dreamers I’d left behind six months ago, only eight survived. Four cages had a dead body locked inside: Ginko’s, Mano’s, Wassail’s, and Edna’s. I flipped the switch of the video camera and slowly, back and forth in front of the cages, from one foul end of the Quonset hut to the other, I shot close-ups of the dreamers’ flaccid faces, their emaciated, scab-covered bodies, their sores and self-inflicted abrasions and wounds, and I took lingering footage of the dead. Then I stepped to the center of the hut and panned the length of it, filming a slow, sweeping medium shot of the rack of cages. Doc lifted his huge head, and when he looked at me, I switched to zoom and closed on his blank gaze and held it for a full minute.

I brought water to those that still lived and distributed the food I had carried in my backpack, and afterwards hurried to the nearest market and brought back a large sack of fufu leaves and cabbages. I stayed with the dreamers for hours, coaxing them to eat and drink. It was mid-afternoon before I had managed to remove the bodies of Ginko, Mano, Wassail, and Edna from their cages and drag them outside to the yard, and by dusk I had buried them together, side by side, in a small plot of bare ground at the rear of the Quonset hut. The last thing I did was make a circle of rocks around the grave. Then I returned home to my family of humans.

A DAY LATER I had my own car, and after dropping the boys off at school, drove myself straight to the Executive Mansion and once again marched up the long, wide staircase as if on a mission from the American ambassador himself and presented myself at the office of the president. Samuel Doe welcomed me with a warm smile and a familial hug. I shrugged out of it and stood away from him.

“It is a wonderful t’ing that you have returned to us,” he began and sat slowly behind his vast desk.

“Yes, well, I have something for you.” I pulled the video cassette from my purse and set it on his desk before him.

He pursed his lips in surprise and curiosity, then gave me a lecherous grin. “Aha! An American movie! You know my taste in movies?”

“This is a Liberian movie, Mister President,” I said. “Let’s watch it together, you and I.” I looked around the room for the television set and VCR that I knew would be close at hand, for, indeed, I did know of his taste in movies. His addiction to pornography was a nationwide joke. In the corner was a cart with a TV and VCR ready to go. I walked over and snapped them on and inserted the cassette, then came and stood next to the president.

Together, in silence, we watched the film. A ghastly study of pain and cruelty, it ran for about fifteen minutes. Neither of us spoke for the entire time. Yes, it was only a video of some apes in their cages, dead and dying of hunger and thirst and neglect, but flattened out on the screen like that in unedited documentary mode with no soundtrack, it was as shocking and indicting as footage of the hold of a slave ship.

The film ended, and I rewound and retrieved it. The president said, “These them chimps from out at the old American blood-testing place?”

“Yes.”

“Why you showin’ them to me?” he asked, genuinely puzzled. “I was expectin’ some other kind of movie,” he said. “You know the kind.”

“I have a proposal to make to you, Mister President,” I said. I began to lay out my plan in very simple, straightforward language. I told him that, with his help and protection, I would establish a permanent sanctuary for the chimpanzees someplace not far from Monrovia. I would need a building and a secure open space for them and enough funding to care for and feed them and to pay a small staff. I would need money to purchase, whenever possible, chimps that were being sold illegally for pets. I explained that I intended to develop a national program designed to protect this internationally protected species. It would provide him and his administration with good public relations worldwide, especially among the Americans, and people would come from all over the world to visit the sanctuary. The Americans would make films of the project to show on American television, and Liberia would finally become known as something other than a place to register foreign oil tankers.

He lighted a cigarette and waved me to the chair nearest his own. “Sit down. Would you like a drink with me? Not too early, is it?”

“That depends on your answer to my proposal.”

“My answer.” He smiled and smacked his lips with his red tongue. “I like them chimps, y ’ know.”