Stephan Clark - Sweetness #9

“We can try again,” I said.

And that’s when she told me. “I need an intellectual life.”

Nothing could have confused me more. She’d majored in Family-Consumer Sciences and navigated our brief courtship with all the skill of someone completing the thesis for her MRS degree. But now she was saying she was thinking of going back to school in the fall, this time as a business major. She’d already placed a call, and because she was a former student, it was just a matter of completing some paperwork.

I looked to Dan Rather for consolation. He stood reporting the news from Vietnam, a village burning behind him.

“All I have is silence,” she said. “It’d be enough if I could just hear a baby scream.” She looked at me. “You have your work. I need something, too, David.”

I looked back to the television and the jungle atrocities that would trouble my sleep that night. “An intellectual life,” I said.

We watched the village burn.

The next morning I drove in to work with my Yankees cap on the passenger seat, thinking I’d stop into the lab for only an hour or two before heading up to the fifth floor and offering to drive Billy’s replacement to the park. As it so happens, I wasn’t there even that long.

When I entered Animal Testing, I heard the sounds of The Carpenters (“We’ve only just begun”) coming from a radio inside the primate room. As the door was ajar, I poked my head inside and found Hickey dancing with one of the monkeys as a grandfather might dance with his granddaughter. The monkey was standing on his shoes and holding his hands, the two of them seemingly having a grand old time. I stepped inside, smiling, and then I noticed the monkey’s profile: thin, not fat. What’s more, when he turned to face me, I saw he had bright, lively eyes and cheeks that were far from bloated. They were so drawn, in fact, that I could see the outline of the monkey’s skull.

“Is he the one from yesterday?”

Hickey’s expression hardened into a mask of B-movie sincerity. “What do you mean?”

“Don’t play dumb with me.” As he returned the thing to its cage, I looked at all the others — and they all had changed. Standing, walking in circles, shaking at their screens — they were lively, loud, and above all else thin.

“Repeatable results.” I turned to face him. “If that’s what we’re after, who are we testing? Hmm? The monkeys or me?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Don’t play with me.”

“What makes you think I’m playing?”

“That playful remark. What did you do? Make a phone call after I visited you on Sunday? Say I was out of control?”

“I really don’t know what you mean.”

I turned from him and marched into the other room. The rats were no different. One drank freely from a vertical bottle; another ran on an exercise wheel. And Louie! Oh, Louie! There was a yellow clip attached to the rat’s left ear identifying him as E3CL9, but when I had him out and was holding him up before my nose, it was as if I was looking into the eyes of one of those pod people in the movies. “What have you done with Louie?” I said.

Hickey stood at the door, struggling to speak. I set the rat down in the communal tank and bumped out past him.

“Where are you going?” he said. “Let’s talk. What are you gonna do?”

“You’d like to know, wouldn’t you?”

I stopped at my desk for a framed photo of Betty, then pulled open the pencil drawer and grabbed a roll of quarters I kept there for the vending machine.

“You just need to calm down.”

“Calm down?” I turned to face him, but there was nothing to say. I added only one word as I moved around him. “Lunch,” I said. And then I was slamming the door behind me — or trying to; I had forgotten about the hydraulic hinge.

I crossed the parking lot as erect as a soldier on parade, knowing full well the part that I was to play — that of the brave whistle-blower, the man who goes without sleep and forgets to shave, sacrificing everything in the name of a grand ideal. A cover-up! A cancer in the industry! People needed to know the truth! Then I stopped, remembering the marbled notebook in which I’d entered all of my observations and readings. There was nothing more galling than an anti-climactic flight, but I was sure I’d need it for evidence, so I turned round and went in again to Animal Testing.

As I pushed through the door, Hickey and the man I’d spoken with the day before were talking at Hickey’s desk.

“What’s your name?” I said.

Billy’s replacement gave me a smile I’m sure he thought was pacifying. “I hear you’re in quite the state, Leveraux.”

“I’m not in a state. I’m reacting as any sane man would.” I pointed to the door of the primate room. “Those monkeys are thin, and they were obese only two days ago. It can mean only one thing.”

Hickey spoke to the man as if I weren’t there. “He showed up at my house on Sunday drunk.”

I stepped toward them. “What?”

“Is this true, David?”

“I had one for every three that he had!”

“He’s been having family problems,” Hickey continued. “He and his wife can’t conceive.”

“Now wait a second, that doesn’t have anything to do with this.”

“It’s been affecting his work,” Hickey said. “He told me so himself.”

“Will you stop!” I turned to face the man whose name I didn’t know. “I only told him about my wife because he was going on and on about his own sad and pathetic life.”

“There’s no need for name-calling, David.”

Hickey mopped his brow with a handkerchief, while the nameless man held up his hands as if I had approached them with a knife and not the truth. “What do you say you just take a few days off?” he said. “A little vacation.”

“I don’t need a little vacation.”

“Just long enough to get your mind back in order.”

“My mind is perfectly ordered. It’s Hickey’s that’s out of whack.”

“If you won’t let us help you, Leveraux, you can’t help us.”

I looked at him as if he’d grown a third arm and a second nose. “What on earth does that mean?”

At this moment, a security guard entered the room with an empty banker’s box balanced on his belly. He was a young, plodding fellow whose brain seemed to trail him by a good four or five steps. The man whose name I didn’t know pointed him to my desk, saying he should collect my things.

I followed him over and reached for my marbled notebook before he could grab it from the desk’s drawer.

“That’s company property,” Billy’s replacement told the guard, who snatched it out of my hand and set it down in his box.

“This is absurd,” I said.

“You’re out of control, Leveraux. You’re refusing help. What would you have us do?”

“Are you firing me? Did you just fire me? Because if you fired me, I want it known that I quit. Do you hear?” I sent my hand into the banker’s box as the guard reached for the doorknob to leave, but as soon as I grabbed my marbled notebook, the executive whose name I didn’t know stepped forward to yank it out of my hands — just a second before Hickey tackled me to the floor.

I landed with a thud, and spoke through a wheeze. “What are you doing?”

The security guard was standing over us, fumbling to unbutton his gun.

“Get off of me!” I said. “This is an outrage! You think you can silence me?”

“Take him to his car,” the executive told the guard. “And make sure you watch him drive off the lot.”

“I know what happened here!” I said. I spoke back over my shoulder to Hickey, who lay on top of me, struggling to hold my arms behind my back. “Dean may not be a human tape recorder, he may get a few of the details wrong, but if he’s anything like me, he remembers the big things. The sky is blue. Water’s water. Nixon is or is not a crook.” The executive helped Hickey pull me up by the armpits and throw me into the arms of the guard. “Those monkeys were fat,” I said. “They were fat, I know it — and now they’re thin.”