Tania James - Aerogrammes - and Other Stories

At that moment, Henry looked up. Neneh sat perfectly still. She imagined his world and her world, two distinct, delicate bubbles floating toward each other, hovering as he fixed her with his faraway gaze. Did he see the red headband? Did he recognize her voice?

He dropped his eyes and went back to poking the ground.

For that week, Neneh rented a room at the Motor Inn, which came equipped with a hot plate, a coffeepot, an iron, and a mirror that took up the entire wall opposite the bed. With the blue-green wallpaper and drawn shades, the room had a contained, nautical feel.

Here, she ruminated over Britta’s words, the note of accusation when she’d said “impose our world.” It was the same accusation Pearl had inflicted upon herself ever since leaving Henry at the zoo. By rescuing him, they had ruined him.

Sometimes Neneh wondered if Pearl had felt similarly about rescuing her. Pearl had never tried to contact Neneh’s relatives in Bo, and gradually Sierra Leone had come to seem to Neneh like yet another photograph in National Geographic , the natives serene and strange, the land lush and yet unyielding of its mysteries. With or without Pearl, Neneh would never visit Sierra Leone. Her birth mother was dead, and her grandmother had died soon after she’d left. Strangely, the only face that remained in her mind’s eye, like an icon, belonged to the boy who’d sold them baby Henry. She remembered the high, delicate bones of his cheeks, the sweatless sheen of his skin, but he would certainly never remember her. Maybe he was dead as well, or disfigured, or handless, another casualty in a war that was mentioned only marginally in their local paper. Neneh had sought out other newspapers, had read articles that displayed pictures of bandaged limbs and hard-eyed children holding guns. She had been spared.

In college, she had dated a boy, Carl, whose mother was black and whose father was white, both of them from Atlanta. He was proud of his parents’ union, forged at a time when some states still declared such intermixing illegal. He kept their picture in his desk drawer, his mother in a sleeveless white dress, bright against her smooth shoulders, smearing cake across her new husband’s mouth.

As for Neneh and Carl, the relationship ended in a matter of months. Neneh rarely spent a night away from Pearl, and evetually Carl started dating an Iranian girl who lived down the hall. “She’s chill about things,” Carl told Neneh. “She gets me.”

“Really? Even though she’s not your tribe?” Our tribe was a phrase that Carl had coined, referring to the racial kinship he shared with Neneh, their twinned experience. Whatever that meant. She would’ve given anything to have a single picture like the one in his desk, a captured second of ordinary love from the people who made her. Or maybe just her mother. What she had was her own reflection, which told her nothing.

So Neneh had come to the zoo without a plan, with only the belief that, at the very least, she had Henry. As a child, she had felt unrestrained around him, able to breathe freely, at ease with her place in the world. And despite the intervening years, she had come to believe that she shared more with him than with anyone else. They were two ruined souls doomed to wander their minds, if not the earth, trying to remember from whence they came.

Some of the keepers expressed concern over the fact that Neneh would have direct contact with an adult male chimpanzee. Neneh argued that she wanted only to interact with Henry, away from the other chimps; it was a demand that had to be met according to the contract Pearl had signed long ago.

The first reunion was arranged for the afternoon. A keeper named Ben called Henry into the cages while the other chimps remained outside. When Henry entered the cage, his eyes went to the Dole fruit cup, still sealed, sitting close to the bars of the opposite wall. Neneh was kneeling on the other side. Henry no longer moved with a limp, but it seemed to her that his spirit had atrophied, sucked from his frame. She wondered if he thought he was being punished. She raised her hand and waved, a gesture he used to mirror, but now did not.

“Looks like he’s in one of his moods,” Ben said. He tugged at the bill of his baseball cap and gazed at Henry with disinterest. “No one can talk him out of a funk.”

Neneh kept insisting on her privacy, so Ben moved away to sweep an empty cage within shouting distance. “Just don’t get too comfy with him. He’s still a wild animal. He might not remember old friends.”

She turned back to Henry, worried that he had detected the irritation in her voice, but he was avoiding her eyes in favor of the fruit cup. He seemed not to recognize her, despite the red headband, and for a time, there was only the scrape of Ben’s broom.

Henry took up the fruit cup. His fingers, long and slim and thick-knuckled, moved with all the care and precision of an old man’s, as if the object might jump from his hands if he didn’t handle it deliberately. He found the peel-back flap on the lid and opened it as Pearl had taught him to do, an act so perfect, so familiar, that Neneh had trouble containing her smile behind her hand. He drank the syrup first, and she almost laughed when he scooped out a yellow wedge of pineapple with a single finger; Henry always mined the pineapples first. Without hesitation, she reached an open palm through the bars, just as she used to do when asking him to share. Henry put down the fruit cup and watched her hand coming toward him.

With a lunge, he took hold of her wrist so quickly she almost cried out. His grip was frightening in its power and assurance; her bones and tendons were no more than flower stems in his fist.

“Henry, stop,” she said quietly, “it’s me …” But his lips remained sealed, his gaze cold and impassive. Was this the same face that had winced when the trunk door fell on her head? And didn’t he rub his crown just as she rubbed her own? She had collected those memories like precious stones, kept them all these years. Hadn’t he?

But his grip did not tighten or loosen, and she began to wonder if he was holding her there for a reason. Perhaps he was testing her, to see whether he could trust her as before, or whether she feared him and would squirm free of his clasp. She made herself as still as possible. She flexed her forearm and closed her fist as if to transmit her steadiness, her strength, the solid resolve of a promise, until a distant yell came bearing down on them both: “Henry, let go! … NO, HENRY, NO! ”

Ben rapped his broomstick against the bars. Henry flinched but didn’t let go until Ben whacked the bars again, harder this time. Shrieking, Henry scrabbled across the cage to the farthest wall. “Wait,” Neneh said, almost to herself, and before she realized what she was doing, she had sprung up and wrenched the broomstick from Ben’s hands.

“What the hell,” he began to say, but stopped short, silenced by her wild, rage-reddened face.

“Leave him alone,” she said hoarsely, in a low, raw voice, as if she’d been shouting for days, years. Ben stood there, staring. “Just leave us the fuck alone!”

Ben backed away, palms raised. “Okay. I’m leaving.”

Dropping the broom, she fell to her knees by the cage and reached her arm through the bars, calling to Henry, coaxing, begging even. No matter how she beckoned, Henry would not come. He had turned away from her, a watery blur of black, and all she could do was trace the air with her finger, the question mark curve of his spine.

Somewhere, behind her, Ben was muttering into his walkie-talkie. She knew they wouldn’t let her return. She wrapped her hands around the bars and held fast to the only thing that could keep her intact, the remembrance of last night’s dream, wherein Henry was being chased by the hunter. Neneh had thrown herself between Henry and the barrel of the hunter’s gun, but she felt no pain as the bullet entered her, only an electric tide that swept through her body. This was death — a last, luminous surge. The hunter was gone, but her death was prolonged, painless, as Henry crouched beside her. And though he could not talk, they were communicating in a wordless language all their own, and he was thanking her, he was telling her that he loved her, he was promising her that she was not alone.