T. Boyle - Riven Rock

And then they were down the stairs, through the kitchen and out the back door, heading toward the hominoid laboratory, the doctor so worked up it was all he could do to keep from breaking into a trot. O‘Kane could hear the screeching and caterwauling of the monkeys long before they hit the path that wound in under the oaks, and he could smell them too — a ripe festering flyblown reek of hominoid sweat and vomit and the killing stench of monkey fur clotted with excrement. And he could call them monkeys now, outside Hamilton’s hearing anyway, because that’s what they were: nine rhesus monkeys and a pair of olive baboons. Apes, as it turned out, weren’t so easy to come by. The doctor had made application to every exotic animal dealer, circus and zoo up and down the coast, hoping for chimps, but there were none to be had.

He found monkeys, though, and there were more coming. After the first two ratlike little things died with blood leaching out their ears and anuses, the doctor got lucky and was able to purchase nine more at a single stroke from one of the local millionaires, an eccentric who had a whole menagerie running wild on his property, ostriches, kangaroos, boa constrictors, impala and dik-dik, and he’d tracked down the baboons in a decrepit zoo in Muchas Vacas, Mexico, where a few pesos went a long way. O‘Kane was just happy he didn’t have to look after the things — and they hadn’t been there two weeks when Hamilton began hinting around, but in the end he wound up hiring two scrawny little brown men, one wop and one Mexican, to construct the cages and hose the reeking piles of crap out of them every morning.

Monkeys didn’t have a whole lot of appeal for O‘Kane — they reminded him too much of the droolers and shit-flingers he’d been wedded to for the past seven years, and that was an era he wanted to put behind him, permanently. He was head nurse to Stanley McCormick now, and before long he’d be an orange rancher or an oil man, strutting around the lobby of the Potter Hotel in a Panama hat while his own motorcar stood out front at the curb. Of course, as long as he was under the thumb of Hamilton he’d at least have to feign interest in hominoids, but he really didn’t see the point — a whole wagonload of monkeys wouldn’t cure what ailed Mr. McCormick. And as far as he could tell, Katherine wasn’t much for hominoids either, though she was willing to go along in the hope that Hamilton’s experiments would lead to a cure for her husband, and she spent a good part of each visit out there under the trees listening to Hamilton go on about hominoid micturition, auto-eroticism and frequency of copulation. The doctor had given the monkeys names like Maud, Gertie and Jocko, and the way he talked about them you’d have thought he’d personally fathered them all. (“Jocko achieved coitus with Bridget six times yesterday, and twice with Gertie,” he would say, or, “The minute I let Jimmy into Maud’s cage she assumed the sexually submissive posture and exposed her genitalia.”) To O’Kane’s way of thinking, the whole business was a bit, well, excessive. Not to mention dirty-minded.

But there was Hamilton, standing between the grinning wop and the grinning spic, ready to flick a filthy checkered tablecloth off what looked to be a cage behind him. He was beaming like a magician. The monkeys screeched and stank. Sunlight filtered softly through the trees. “Ready, Edward? Voilà!”

The tablecloth fluttered to the ground and the cage stood revealed. Inside was a pale orange aggregation of limbs and hair that looked like nothing so much as a heap of palm husks until it began to stir. O‘Kane saw two liquid eyes, nostrils like gouges in a rubber tire, the naked simian face. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” he said, “what is it?”

“Orang-utan,” the doctor pronounced. “Literally, ‘man of the forest.’ His name is Julius, and he comes to us all the way from Borneo, courtesy of one of Captain Piroscz’s colleagues, Benjamin Butler, of the Siam.” The doctor’s grin ate up his face. “Our first ape.”

O‘Kane took a step back when Hamilton reached down to unlatch the mesh door of the cage. He was thinking of the one-eyed chimp in Donnelly’s and the way it had taken hold of Frank Leary’s hand — and wasn’t that a fine thing for an ape to do?

“It’s all right,” the doctor reassured him, “he’s quite tame. A former pet. Come on, Julius,” he cooed, his voice sweetened to the hypnotic whisper he used on his ravers and lunatics, “come on out now.” A pair of oranges, held seductively aloft, was the inducement.

“Are you sure—?” O‘Kane began.

“Oh, yes, there’s nothing to worry about,” Hamilton said over his shoulder. “They’ve had him on shipboard since he was a baby and they all loved him, the whole crew, and they hated to give him up, but of course now that he’s full-grown it became too dangerous, what with the rigging and pots of hot tar and whatnot…. Come on, that’s a boy.”

Soundlessly, the shabby orange creature unfolded itself from the cage, crouching over its bristling arms like a giant spider. O‘Kane took another step back and the two keepers exchanged a nervous glance — the thing was nearly as big as they were, and it certainly outweighed them. And, of course, like all the rest of the hominoids, it stank like a boatload of drowned men.

Julius didn’t seem much interested in the oranges, but he folded them into the slot in the middle of his plastic face as if they were horse pills and shambled through the dust to where the monkeys and baboons were affixed to the doors of the cages and shrieking themselves breathless. He exchanged various fluids with them, his face drooping and impassive even as they clawed at the mesh and bared their teeth, then sat in the dirt sniffing luxuriously at his fingers and toes before lazily hoisting himself into the nearest tree like a big dangling bug, where he promptly fell asleep. Or died. It was hard to tell which — he was so utterly inanimate and featureless, it was as if someone had tossed a wad of wet carpeting up into the crotch of the tree.

O‘Kane could feel Hamilton’s eyes on him. “Well?” the doctor demanded. “What do you think? Magnificent, isn’t he?”

The two keepers had moved off into the big central enclosure Hamilton had designed as a communal area where his hominoids could “interact,” as he called it, busying themselves with setting up the apparatus for one or another of the doctor’s arcane experiments. The monkeys, locked up in their individual cages, watched them with shining eyes. They knew what the doctor’s experiments meant: eating, fighting and fucking, and not necessarily in that order. O‘Kane was at a loss for words.

“You don’t look terribly enthusiastic, Edward,” Hamilton observed, the beardless jaw paler than the rest of his face, like the etiolated flesh beneath a bandage. His eyes did a quick flip.

“No, it’s not that — I was wondering if you can get more, uh, hominoids like this orange one. It must be pretty rare. I have to admit I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Oh, it is, it is. But apes are what we want, Edward. The Macacus rhesus is a splendid experimental subject, and we’re fortunate to have them, the baboons too, but the apes are our nearest cousins and the more of them we can get, the more thorough — and relevant — my studies will be. Don’t you see that?”

O‘Kane was working the toe of his shoe in the friable yellow dirt, creating a pattern of concentric circles, each one swallowing up the next. He wanted a drink. He wanted a woman. He wanted to be downtown, with Mart and Roscoe LaSource, his elbows propped up on a polished mahogany bar and a dish of salt peanuts within easy reach. “Listen, Dr. Hamilton,” head down, still working his shoe in the dirt, “there’s something I’ve been wondering about, and I don’t mean to sound disrespectful or to question your methods in any way, but I can’t really see how all this is supposed to help Mr. McCormick. What I mean is, the monkeys are out here going through their paces and he’s in there twisted up like a strand of wire, and I may be wrong, but I don’t see him getting any better.”