Sara Gruen - Ape House

GET THE APES DOWN, said Isabel. AND TALK TO THEM.

She stared resentfully as the police thanked the interpreter and left. She knew they had no intention of speaking with the apes, even though it was clear the apes knew more than anyone. She knew the police thought she was nuts. She had encountered this reaction more times than she could recall, but never, never, had she felt so desperate about it.

A nurse brought Isabel’s dinner, which consisted of clear liquids. Juice of some sort, and a brown plastic thermos of clear broth with stiff green flakes sprinkled on the surface. The nurse, Beulah, turned to Isabel.

“You’re looking much better. Ready for some dinner? I know, it doesn’t look like much, but your doctors want us to take it slowly. How about some TV?”

Beulah raised the head of Isabel’s bed and flicked on the television. She took a seat by Isabel, dropped the bed rail, and reached for the juice.

“Don’t try to lean forward. I’ll come to you,” she said, guiding the straw to Isabel’s lips.

Isabel sucked some apple juice through the straw. It was almost painfully sweet. Her tongue was huge and clumsy, and she was suddenly aware of stitches along its side, poking out like the stiff spines of a caterpillar. It took a couple of tries to coax the liquid down her throat.

“You all right?” asked Beulah, looking momentarily back at Isabel.

Isabel nodded weakly.

“I can’t stand the news anymore,” said Beulah, reaching for the remote control. “Everything’s so depressing. The economy, that oil spill, the war…”

Isabel touched Beulah’s hand to still it. The scene had just cut to the parking lot of the language lab, with a newscaster standing out in the drizzle. She wore a yellow hooded raincoat, her shoulders hunched against the cold. People crowded around the edges of the parking lot beyond brightly painted barricades.

“… ontinuing drama playing out at the Great Ape Language Lab at the University of Kansas. The public is urged to remember that while these apes have a peaceful reputation, they are still wild animals, many times stronger than adult male humans, and capable of inflicting grievous injury, even ripping off limbs…”

Isabel’s eyes shot open.

The camera panned past the tops of the trees, where the bonobos sat miserable and wet, huddled against the trunk, seeking protection from the wind.

“Many groups have converged in an effort to save the endangered animals, which have been stranded in the treetops since an explosion last night destroyed the building that housed them and critically injured one of the scientists. Today the home of the university president was vandalized. The animal rights extremist group Earth Liberation League has claimed responsibility for the attacks in a video released on the Internet, but the authorities have yet to… h! My goodness!”

A crack resounded, and the camera swung to a man with a gun on his shoulder and then to the top of a tree. At first, there was nothing. Then one of the bonobos began to sway. Amid screeching and yipping, the others plucked the tranquilizer dart out of his thigh and tossed it to the ground, but it was too late. The stricken bonobo-was it Sam or Mbongo? It was too dark and too distant for Isabel to tell-collapsed and dropped from the ring of hairy black arms that tried to keep him upright. Another crack, another bonobo. This one seemed to split in two midfall, the parts spinning and tumbling through the tree branches. One landed in the center of a piece of round canvas held at its edges by firemen. The other part-Lola, Isabel now realized-hit the frame and bounced back into the air. There was a collective gasp from the crowd and news crew alike as the firemen lunged forward with outstretched arms.

Isabel let out a muffled cry and struggled to get upright. She knocked the juice from the nurse’s hand, spilling it across both of them. The insulated brown thermos slid across a puddle of condensation, as if pushed by an invisible hand, the broth sloshing from side to side.

“Stop. You’ll hurt yourself! Stop!” said Beulah, and when Isabel did not, she pressed the red call button and held Isabel’s wrists and shouted for help, which came pattering down the hall in the form of other uniformed figures and a syringe that was emptied into the valve on Isabel’s intravenous line.

Well , thought Isabel, when she realized what had just happened, at least they didn’t shoot me out of a tree . The television and its falling bonobos was clicked off, and shortly thereafter Isabel sank back against the lowered bed, her panicked desperation neutered by the blissful numbing of drugs.

John had finally booked his flight for the next morning (inexplicably, all the flights that day were full) and was watching footage of the apes falling from trees when someone started banging on the door. The banging continued with such vehemence that it occurred to him it might be the police. Of course they would wish to speak with him; he had been at the language lab only hours before the explosion. But the vigor and relentlessness of the banging worried him. Surely they didn’t consider him a suspect?

When he swung the door open, it all made sense, even though she was supposed to be safely six states away-

“Fran?”

“Where is she?” demanded his mother-in-law, inserting herself between John and the doorway and entering the front hall. Bulging supermarket bags swung from her hands and wrists. John was sure he saw the outline of a box of Velveeta.

“I think she’s in the…” John’s voice trailed off, because Fran was already marching toward the kitchen.

John turned back to the doorway. His father-in-law was climbing the stairs with two suitcases, old-fashioned hard-sided ones without wheels or retractable handles. They had purple ribbons tied around the handles, presumably to tell them apart from all the other pieces of thirty-year-old luggage coming around the carousel.

“Hello, John,” said Tim, pausing at the doorway.

“Hello, Tim.” John swung his head around toward the raised voices coming from the kitchen. “Did Amanda know you were coming?”

“I don’t think so. When Amanda didn’t even call to say ‘Happy New Year’ Fran got it in her head that something was wrong.”

John sighed and took the suitcases from the old man. He carried them into the guest room, which was really Amanda’s office. It had been in a state of suspended animation since Magnificat’s untimely demise, at which point she had been polishing Recipe for Disaster and sending query letters to agents. The room looked like a paper mill had exploded. Chunks of her manuscript, marked up in her own hand, littered the bed and were scattered around it. They were mixed in with dozens of rejections: “Hard to market literary fiction…”; “Not for me…”; “Not taking on new clients at the moment…” John picked up a piece of paper that was lying facedown. It was one of Amanda’s own query letters, which had been returned to her with the word NO scrawled diagonally across it in enormous red letters. He imagined her standing with trembling fingers, ripping open the envelope that she herself had addressed and stamped, hoping that this time, this time, someone had written to say, “Yes, please send the manuscript, I’d love to read it,” and instead finding… this . He let the page fall to the floor. The surge of anger he felt was overwhelming. He’d never felt so impotent.

His mother-in-law’s voice sailed in from some other part of the house and John pulled himself together. He couldn’t do much-even if the room were neat, it would not be clean enough to please Fran-but he shuffled stacks of paper together and moved them into the closet along with the printer and stepped into the wastepaper basket to squash its contents. As a final touch, he smoothed the bedspread, which still had a fine coating of cat dander.