Хлоя Бенджамин - The Immortalists

‘Frida,’ repeats Varya, louder now, but soothingly. ‘Stop, Frida – please.’

When the monkey hears Varya’s voice, she turns her face to one side. In profile, her eyelid is glossy and lavender, her mouth an open half-moon. Then she grimaces. Slowly, she turns, but when she comes to face Varya, she does not stop: she continues to rotate, favoring her right limb, dragging the left. Two weeks ago, she bit her left thigh so badly it required stitches.

How did it happen? When Frida was young, she had more zest than any of the other monkeys. She could be Machiavellian in her social behavior, forging strategic alliances and stealing the more submissive animals’ food, but she was also charming and impossibly curious. She loved to be held: she reached through the bars for Varya’s waist, and Varya would occasionally let Frida out and carry her around the vivarium on one hip. The experience of being so close to her made Varya feel both frightened and ecstatic – frightened because of the fact of Frida’s contamination, and ecstatic because Varya could briefly, through layers of protective clothing, feel what it was like to be close to another animal, to be an animal herself.

A knock on the door. Johanna, Varya thinks, or Annie, though Annie rarely comes to the lab on weekends. Like Varya, she is both childless and unmarried. At thirty-seven, it’s hardly too late, but Annie does not want these things. ‘I lack for nothing,’ she said once, and Varya believed her. Annie’s populous Korean American family lives just over the bridge. She seems always to have a lover – sometimes male, sometimes female – and she executes these liaisons with the same confidence she does her research. Varya feels a motherly appreciation for Annie, as well as a motherly envy. Annie is the kind of woman Varya hoped to be: the kind who makes unconventional choices, and who is satisfied by them.

The knock comes again. ‘Johanna?’ calls Varya, rising to open the door.

But the person who faces her is Luke. His hair is tangled, dark with grease. His lips are chapped, and his face has a strange yellow cast. He wears the same clothes he did the day before. He must have slept in them, too. The sheet of calm Varya assembled this afternoon cracks down the center and falls.

‘What,’ she says, ‘are you doing here?’

‘Clyde let me in.’ Luke blinks. One of his hands is still on the doorknob, and the other, she sees, is trembling. ‘I need to talk to you.’

Frida has turned to face the wall and resumed her rocking. Varya hates her rocking, and she hates that Luke is here to see it. She turns away from him to lock the door of the isolation chamber. The process takes no more than two seconds, but before she is finished she hears a dull click and seizes. By the time she whips back to face him, he is stuffing his camera back in his bag.

‘Give that to me,’ she says, savagely.

‘No,’ says Luke, but his voice is small, like a young boy with a treasured belonging.

‘No? You weren’t authorized to take that photo. I’ll sue you.’

Luke’s face is filled not with the professional glee she expected but with fear. He clutches the backpack.

‘You’re not a journalist,’ Varya says. Her dread is acute, it is ringing. She thinks of the marmosets’ alarm calls. ‘Who are you?’

But he does not answer. He is fixed in the doorway, his body so still it would be statuesque if not for the still-quaking left hand.

‘I’ll call the police,’ she says.

‘Don’t,’ says Luke. ‘I –’

But he does not finish, and in that pause a thought rises in Varya unbidden. Let it be benign , she thinks, let it be benign , as if she is staring at the X-ray of a tumor and not into the face of an utter stranger.

‘You named me Solomon,’ he says.

And the pitch into darkness. At first she feels confusion: How? It isn’t possible. I would have known. Then the full impact, the flattening. Her vision smears.

For she stopped outside the Bleecker Street Planned Parenthood, those twenty-six years ago, and stood rooted to the ground as if by lightning. It was early February, dark and freezing at three thirty, but Varya’s body seared. Inside her was an unfamiliar flutter. She looked at the flatiron building in which the clinic was housed and wondered what would happen if she did not quash that flutter. She could make the choice she had planned to make; her life could continue on as it had been before the aberration and so remain symmetrical. Instead, she unbuttoned her coat to a flush of cold air. And then she turned around.

She stumbles out of the vivarium and takes the stairs to the first floor. Through the lobby she runs, past Clyde, who stands to ask if she’s all right, and out onto the mountain. She does not care that Luke is inside unsupervised; she wants only to get away from him. The rain has cleared to reveal sun so bright her eyes burn. She walks toward the parking lot as fast as she can without attracting attention, not wanting to waste the time it would take to grab her sunglasses, because she can hear that Luke is following her.

‘Varya,’ he calls, but she does not stop. ‘Varya!’

Because he has shouted, she turns. ‘Keep your voice down. This is my workplace.’

‘I’m sorry,’ says Luke, panting.

‘How dare you. How dare you trick me. How dare you do it in the lab, my lab.’

‘You would never have talked with me otherwise.’ Luke’s voice is strangely high in pitch, and Varya sees that he is trying not to cry.

She laughs, a bark. ‘I won’t talk with you now.’

‘You will.’ A cloud passes across the sun, and in the new, steely light, he steadies. ‘Or I’ll sell the photos.’

‘To whom?’

‘To PETA.’

Varya stares. She thinks of the notion of having the wind knocked out of you, but that isn’t right: it has not been knocked but suctioned.

‘But Annie,’ she says. ‘Annie checked your references.’

‘I had my roommate pose as a Chronicle editor. She knew how badly I wanted to meet you.’

‘We adhere to the strictest ethical standards,’ says Varya. Her voice is brittle with useless rage.

‘Maybe so. But Frida wasn’t doing very well.’

They stand halfway down the mountain. Behind them, two postdocs walk toward the main facility, eating forkfuls of takeout.

‘You’re blackmailing me,’ says Varya, when she is able to speak again.

‘I didn’t want to. But it took years to figure out who you were. The agency was no help at all, they knew you didn’t want to be found, and all my records were sealed. I spent everything I had on a trip to New York and I pored over the birth certificates at the county courthouse for – for weeks. I knew my birthday but not which hospital you’d gone to, and when I found you, when I finally found you, I couldn’t –’

It comes out in a rush and now he inhales deeply. Then he sees her face. He swings his backpack around to reach inside and emerges with a folded piece of white cloth.

‘Hanky,’ he says. ‘You’re crying.’

She had not noticed. ‘You carry a handkerchief?’

‘It was my brother’s, and our dad’s before that. Their initials are the same.’ He shows her the tiny embroidered lettering, and then he sees her pause. ‘It’s clean. I haven’t used it since the last time I washed it, and I always wash it in hot water.’

His voice is confidential. She knows then that he has seen her as she is, in the way she does not want to be seen, and she swells with shame.

‘The thing is I have it, too,’ Luke says. ‘I noticed it in you right away. Mine doesn’t have to do with contamination, though. I’m afraid I’ll hurt someone – that I’ll kill them accidentally.’