Хлоя Бенджамин: The Immortalists

Frida drops her head to Varya’s shoulder and rests her arm on Varya’s breast. Varya gasps. She wears no protective gear, and the wound, which releases a foul odor of decay, sticks to her sweater. She begins to jog, Frida’s forehead bouncing into her clavicle, and enters the kitchen. The puzzle feeders are stacked against the wall, but Varya wants the loose pellets, the huge bins of open food, and the treats that are given to the unrestricted monkeys: apples and bananas and oranges, grapes, raisins, peanuts, broccoli, shaved coconut, each in their own bucket. She pulls out the buckets and bins and sets them on the floor with Frida on her waist. Then she puts Frida down before the troughs.

‘Go,’ she snaps. ‘Eat!’ but Frida stares blankly at the feast. Varya urges more loudly, pointing, and Frida unfurls her left hand. Her legs are splayed on the floor like a toddler’s, her knees bent; the soles of her feet are soft and gray. Varya watches greedily as Frida reaches for the raisins, but before her hand enters the bin, she changes course and brings her forearm to her face. She opens her mouth, finds the wound, and chews.

Varya reaches down to pull Frida’s hand away and sobs. The wound is matted with hair but very deep. Frida may have cracked the bone.

‘Eat,’ cries Varya. She crouches to reach into the bin of raisins and brings her hand to Frida’s lips. Frida snuffles. Slowly, slowly, she takes the first raisin in her mouth. Varya uses both hands to scoop again. Soon her fingers are covered in flecks of food and flesh, but she continues, reaching now into the bin of coconut, the peanuts, the grapes. ‘Oh, good,’ says Varya; ‘Oh, my baby,’ words she has not used in decades, words she used only once – Luke crowning, her body splitting to accommodate his sudden life.

When Frida turns away from Varya’s hand, Varya tempts her with another kind of fruit or a differently shaped pellet. Frida eats these, too, and then she vomits: clear mucus, bile, a river of raisins. Varya keens. She wipes Frida’s mouth, her patchy scalp, and her salmon-colored, translucent ears, for the animal is sweating. Vomit flows hotly over Varya’s pants. She must call the veterinarian. But at the thought of calling the veterinarian – what Dr. Mitchell will ask Varya, what Varya will have to explain – she cries harder.

So she will hold Frida, until Dr. Mitchell comes; she will comfort her, she will make Frida feel better. She drags the animal onto her lap. Frida’s eyes are glassy and unfocused, but she wriggles, she wants to be left alone. Varya squeezes more tightly. ‘Shh-shh,’ she whispers. ‘Shh-shh.’ Still Frida struggles to get away, and still Varya clings. She is over, she is done for. What does it matter? She wants to hold something, she wants to be held. She does not let go until Frida brings her face to Varya’s, her lips soft against Varya’s chin, and bites down.

Varya did not call the vet. The next morning, Annie found her and Frida asleep in the kitchen – Varya with her back against a stack of boxes, Frida on a top shelf – and screamed.

In the hospital, Varya thought she would die: first from something contracted during the bite, and then, when the doctor told her that Frida had neither hepatitis B nor tuberculosis, from something she would contract in the isolation unit. She was astounded when she lived. It had seemed, in her panic, that the only outcome was the one she most feared. As soon as this fear was proven invalid, it was replaced by distress far more concrete: the knowledge that what she had done was so destructive as to be irreparable.

With each day she ate the hospital food, she grew more alert. She had not inhabited her body so wholly since childhood. Now the world rushed toward her in all its texture and sensation. She felt the acid misery of each wound-cleaning and the papery brush of the hospital sheets, which she was too depleted to inspect. When the nurse drew close, Varya smelled a shampoo she’s sure Klara once used. Occasionally she saw Annie sleeping on a chair pulled up to her bed, and once, in a moment of coherence, she asked Annie not to tell Gertie what had happened. Annie looked grim and disapproving, but she nodded. Varya would tell Gertie someday, but telling her about the bite meant telling her about everything else, and she could not do that yet.

Frida had been flown to an animal hospital in Davis. Her bone had cracked, as Varya feared. A surgeon amputated her arm at the shoulder. But the only way to know whether Frida had rabies was to cut off her head and test the brain. Varya pleaded for leniency: she herself had no symptoms, and if Frida did have rabies, the monkey would die within days.

Two weeks later, Varya meets Annie at a café on Redwood Boulevard. Upon entering, Annie smiles – she wears street clothes, slim black pants with a striped tee and clogs, her hair loose – but her discomfort is obvious. Varya orders a vegetarian wrap. Ordinarily, she would not eat, but her experiment was undone in the hospital, and she hasn’t found the conviction to start over.

‘I talked to Bob,’ Annie says when the waiter leaves. ‘He’ll let you resign voluntarily.’

Bob is Drake’s CEO. Varya does not want to know how he reacted when told that she put a twenty-year experiment in jeopardy. Frida was in the restricted group. In feeding her, Varya nullified Frida’s data and compromised the analysis as a whole: with Frida’s results omitted, the number of restricted monkeys to controls will be skewed. All this is not to mention the publicity disaster that will arise should word get out that a high-ranking Drake researcher suffered a breakdown, endangering staff and animals in the process. When Varya thinks of how hard Annie must have pushed for Bob to allow a voluntary resignation, she fills with shame.

‘It’ll be easier that way,’ says Annie, haltingly. ‘To continue your career.’

‘Are you kidding?’ Varya uses a napkin to blow her nose. ‘There’s no way to keep this quiet.’

Annie is silent, conceding this. ‘Still,’ she says. ‘It’s a better way to go.’

Annie has kept the bulk of her anger from Varya, if only because, unlike Bob, she knows Varya’s story: in the hospital, Varya confessed the truth about Luke as Annie’s expression moved from fury to disbelief to pity.

‘Goddammit,’ she said. ‘I wanted to hate you.’

‘You still can.’

‘Yes,’ said Annie. ‘But it’s harder now.’

Now Varya swallows a bite of her wrap. She is not used to restaurant portions, which seem comically huge. ‘What will happen to Frida?’

‘You know as well as I do.’

Varya nods. If Frida is very lucky, she’ll be moved to a primate sanctuary, where former research animals live with minimal human intervention. Varya has campaigned for this, making daily calls to the hospital and to a sanctuary in Kentucky where primates roam thirty acres of outdoor enclosures. But the sanctuary’s capacity is limited. More likely, Frida will be shipped to another research center and used for a different experiment.

That evening, Varya falls asleep at seven and wakes just after midnight. She crawls out of bed in her nightgown and stands at the window, opening the blinds for the first time in months. The moon is bright enough for Varya to see the rest of the condominium complex; across the way, somebody’s kitchen light is on. She has a curious feeling of purgatory, or perhaps it is afterlife. She has lost her work, which was meant to be her contribution to the world – her repayment. The worst has happened, and amidst the hollowing loss is the thought that now there is much less to fear.

She retrieves her cell phone from the bedside table and sits on top of the covers. The other line rings and rings. Just when she is resigned that it will go to voice mail, someone answers.