Stephan Clark - Sweetness #9

Rats, as Hickey was kind enough to inform me after the fact, are less prone to biting if you handle them in silence; as a consequence, my days became muted by design. Even those few hours I spent at my desk, writing up my daily observation reports or eating the sandwich I’d brought from home, passed without much more noise than the thrumming of the building’s HVAC system. Hickey rarely spoke, perhaps owing to my initial reaction to his prosthetic limb. On several occasions I tried to draw him out on the subject of Vietnam, wanting to learn how he’d lost his leg. But it only seemed to push him farther away. Thinking I should meet him halfway, I spoke freely of my undergraduate adventures as a reporter for The Daily Targum, when I’d been assigned to what my editor had called “the draft-card-and-bra-burning beat.” I was on his side, I wanted him to know, but still he responded to me as if I had challenged him to a breath-holding contest.

It began to affect my judgment. When it was time to run my rats through the wooden maze (a task I’d perform once a week with a stop-watch in hand), I often couldn’t help but say a few encouraging words to one of my test subjects as it moved off toward the piece of cheese I’d set down at the finish line. (Coach Dix had done the same for me the summer before my junior year of high school, after I’d defied my mother’s wishes and baffled my closest friends by signing up for the football team. I suffered through a few rather unfortunate acts of hazing before emerging out beneath the lights of Friday night, but the ends, as they say, always justify the means.)

I grew so desperate for conversation that I finally brought a transistor radio from home and tuned it in to the Watergate hearings.

“Are you a Nixon man?” I asked Hickey.

“Mmm.”

“Horrible, this thing they’re dragging him through, don’t you think?” It was the day that former White House counsel John Dean testified, implicating Nixon in the cover-up. He’d prepared a 246-page opening statement, in which his powers of memory were so great that some newspaper columnists had taken to calling him The Human Tape Recorder. “Enemies lists and hush money — what nonsense! Do you believe a word this man says?”

Hickey turned round in his seat, running a handkerchief across the back of his neck. At first I’d thought he perspired so profusely because the primate room was kept at a more tropical temperature than the one housing my rats. But after seeing him wipe his face dry after returning from the cafeteria or attending to himself in the men’s room, I had come to the conclusion that he simply had overactive sweat glands.

“It’s one man’s word against another’s,” I said, “and the word of a disgruntled former employee at that. Who but a madman writes a two-hundred-and-forty-six-page opening statement? Can you tell me?”

Hickey turned back to his paperwork, his voice almost lost in the drone of the air conditioner. “Turn the radio down, will you?”

In a way, it was a triumph. Usually he gave me no more than a word or two. “Lunch,” he might say at midday, or “Checking out” near five o’clock. But here? Six! A triumph indeed.

Conversations with my wife were barely better anymore. One evening in late June, I came home to find her sitting in the dark in the living room, wearing a pair of my grey sweat pants and an oversize T-shirt. Streaks of mascara ran from her eyes; a field of used Kleenexes, like so much scattered dandelion fluff, lay all about her on the sofa.

“That bastard!” she said, as I moved in from the door. “How could he be such a bastard?”

It was her father. He had left her mother for a younger woman and fled to a pied-à-terre in Philadelphia.

“Can you believe it?” she said. “She’s only three years older than me!”

The four of us had planned to celebrate the Fourth of July together with a cruise of New York Harbor; when we’d first spoken of it over glazed ham at Christmas, I’d imagined lifting a glass of champagne to what I’d assumed would be the inevitable news — we’re having a baby! But instead, as we rode the Spirit of New Jersey on the evening of Independence Day, it was just three of us, regardless of your views on the beginning of life.*

That evening, Betty and I might as well have been sailing away from our life as newlyweds, because as the fireworks erupted over the Statue of Liberty, her mother stood wilted at the ship’s railing, staring down into the flashes of light that spread out in blurry bursts across the water.

“I think I’m going to vomit,” she’d say, as Betty rubbed her back. “I think I’m going to vomit.”

Had I known that grief and sorrow can be contagious, I would never have allowed my wife to spend so many countless hours that summer in the hot zone of her childhood home. I thought I was being supportive each time I told her yes, of course, go away for a day or two. But then back she’d come to punish me for another man’s crimes.

July was as passionless as it was unbearably hot. When Betty was home, long stretches of silence passed between us, interrupted only by the hum of the refrigerator or the whirring of the window A/C unit.

I began to live in my head more than anywhere else. At work, after Alexander Butterfield testified that Nixon had recorded all the conversations in the Oval Office, I even stopped turning on my transistor radio. Maybe if Hickey had been a better conversationalist, I would have been fine. That wasn’t the case, though. And so I descended deeper and deeper into my muted world, a place where every sound became all the louder as a consequence of the deafening silence that surrounded it. Most unnerving were those cries I heard coming from the primate room, especially those that sounded after Hickey had slipped away to perform his morning’s toilet or grab a bite to eat.

One day, sure the screeching of the chimpanzees had never before reached such heights, I called for Hickey moments after he’d stepped out into the hall.

“But I’ve got to go!” he said.

“It’ll just be a moment.”

A great huffing sigh propelled him back into the lab, then he stood at my side, looking at me with restrained violence. I held up one finger to ask for his patience, and stood there with my head cocked toward the door of the primate room. “There!” A screech — not quite as hideous as it had been moments earlier, but plaintive and terrible all the same. “Did you hear that?”

“They’re monkeys,” Hickey said, wiping the sweat from his brow. “What do you want?”

“But they’ve been getting worse, haven’t they? Louder, I mean.”

He just looked at me. Sometimes I thought he had a glass eye, though maybe it’s only in retrospect that I’ve begun to think this.

“You should hear them when you leave the room,” I said.

“When I leave the room?”

“As soon as you’re gone”—I pointed—“it sounds like someone’s protesting ritual slaughter in there.”

He exhaled and turned back for the door. “I have to go.”

“But don’t they sound angry?”

“I’m no expert.”

“You work with monkeys!”

He threw a hand up over his shoulder, saying maybe they just needed a snack. This was his answer to everything. If I said they were making a horrible noise, or he emerged from the primate room and conceded they were a little restless, he’d head off to the cafeteria for another box of milk and a crate of bananas. I never dared watch him feed them; they took their milk from a baby’s bottle and this seemed somehow grotesque, considering what Betty and I were trying for at home. But one afternoon, after the monkeys had started cackling and Hickey had gone in there to placate them, I did dare step up to the door and peek through its window — right as a monkey’s face filled the glass, its eyes wild, its chin doubled, its cheeks as fat as a baby’s.