A Beautiful Truth (21 page)

Looee was bigger and older than many of the chimps in Congo but was more confused than most because they had grown up in cages. He could see pale young faces like he used to have, staring through the grids, but he wasn’t able to associate them with himself or consider himself one of them. They were desperate creatures from some dark dream, the products of dogs and strangers. They made familiar sounds but used them in different ways and were deafeningly loud in unison.

He was naked and never given clothes. He was never let out to go to the bathroom, no matter how loudly he screamed, so he made dirty in his cage and thought he would help Judy clean it up when she came.

All permanent cages in Girdish were fixed to a wall and suspended above the ground. The director advocated what he called the Dry Method. He didn’t want cages to be cleaned with hoses because he believed a wet environment would encourage respiratory infections. A long clear plastic sheet was laid on the ground beneath the cages and changed once a day by caregivers or labtechs, who preferred the shift of laying it down to the one of picking it up.

Looee sat in the dark and started shaking. There was a window at the end of Congo but Looee couldn’t see it. He needed to say sorry. The light in that long room was like permanent dusk, and darker in the cages because of the thick grates. Looee sat at the back of his cage and waited for Walt and Judy.

People came near to fill the water or the feeder, and Looee waited to be let out.

The cages in Congo were attached to each other and had sliding doors between them. A chimpanzee named Dusty was in the cage adjoining Looee’s. Dusty was young and small and wanted to get to know his new neighbour but was simultaneously afraid. Looee wouldn’t look at him.

Looee was tired of the snacks. The only food they brought him was monkey chow, a biscuit-like concoction. He wanted chicken. He didn’t know how to drink the water. He saw the dogpeople across from him drink it and he didn’t want to be like them.

He watched labtechs in white coats and surgical masks wheel transfer boxes to the cages across from his own. He called at them so they wouldn’t forget to take him home.

He stared at Judy’s bracelet.

A scream made his hair stand on end.

His sleep was a dream of not being able to sleep.

Labtechs finally came with a transfer box and pressed it up against the gate of his cage. Looee shook with excitement. He went in with the relief of a man who has reached the first-class carriage, having jostled through a train full of paupers.

He couldn’t see out of the transfer box but was aware of being wheeled, and heard the noises of Congo diminish. The transfer box was pushed up to a metcage which he quickly moved into, and found himself being squeezed once he was in it. He shouted so they knew he had no space and felt a sharp pain in his leg.

The PCP took effect and they took the animal out of the metcage. They put it on a table and drew blood for a virus-serum neutralization test. They took throat cultures by rubbing the back of its throat with a dry sterile swab.

Looee awoke back in Congo but was dreaming.

Another transfer box came to take him to see Judy and he again heard the chimps and macaques of Congo fade away.

The chimpanzee was anaesthetized and strapped to a table. A suspended solution of rhinovirus strain 30 was placed in a number 40 DeVilbiss glass nebulizer which was put in the animal’s mouth. Its nose was pinched shut, a plastic surgical mask was placed over the nebulizer, and the virus was sprayed as an aerosol into its mouth. More of the virus was then introduced into each nostril.

Looee awoke back in Congo.

He was very sorry and reached out a hand to a woman in a white coat.

He lay on his side and slept with open eyes.

He awoke with a sore throat. He was hungry and found a piece of monkey chow which he had earlier rejected. He sniffed at it but couldn’t smell it. He ate it and his throat hurt.

Rhinovirus 30 was similar to the cold Looee had caught when he and Walt fixed the pickup and they were both laid out for a week. Looee had partial immunity and a minimal response. He was anaesthetized on day 2 of the study for a throat swab and a bleed, and infected with more of the virus.

He slept.

His cage was hot and cold.

A labtech noted diarrhea dripping from the animal’s anus.

His neighbours Dusty, Lucas and Tom were treated with the drug bis-bentadazole. Looee was untreated as one of three controls.

The animals were anaesthetized and bled on days 2, 4, 6, 9, 21 and 35 and serum neutralization titres were measured. They were also anaesthetized and swabbed every day for the first nine days.

Table 7 shows results of the study. Note that control chimpanzee 447 had no detectable titre at 21 days and no detectable virus in throat swabs. Note also the universal rise in titres at 35 days among the treated animals, 7 days after cessation of the drug. A cross-infection seems to have taken place.

While bis-bentadazole seems to inhibit virus reproduction, it offers no immunological conversion.

Dusty developed diarrhea from receiving a higher dose of the drug.

The primary investigator and vet could not determine the cause of Looee’s diarrhea.

When Looee wasn’t sleeping he saw the dogpeople across the room being moved in transfer boxes. He screamed at the labtechs and dreamt that Larry and Judy were being attacked and eaten by Murphy. They were brought back asleep and the other beasts screamed when this happened. His neighbour was taken away and Looee felt he had more room. He screamed at the labtechs and hit the cage and his knuckles were too sore to put his weight on.

During his first procedure at Congo his bracelet was noticed and removed. A caregiver named Consuela took it back to her doily-filled home and put it in a box among poems and detritus from the lab which she labelled The Tears of Tiny Children.

Looee looked for something on his wrist but couldn’t remember what. Then he saw light and Judy’s face and remembered the bracelet for ten more years like an embittered woman remembers a ring decades after divorce. One of his tics is to rub his hairless wrist.

On the CID Wing it sometimes seems likely that all are having the same dream and they are dreaming what all of us dream, children in adult bodies. The labtechs and caregivers watch them sleep and dream their own dreams at home. Things never done and everything done wrong. There’s a skinny woman who used to sell perfume at Macy’s who wishes cancer upon all girlfriends, and a man who dreams of ejaculating in a rusty tin can which a moment ago was his wife. They all dream of killers behind their back, of damning those who damn them awake, of joy and revenge not quite attained from the end of floppy guns. They eat what their bodies don’t want, dream of the taste of shit, awake to the light with the eyes of a migraineur. The chimps float and fly and are not who they are, and the one thing they do not dream, as Martha thinks when she hears them cough and snore, is of a peaceful jungle that simply never existed, neither in the jungle nor here. This plastic Africa is all there ever was and all there ever will be.

Each study had a primary investigator, or PI, sometimes a clinician employed by a pharmaceutical company, usually a researcher funded by grants. The PI devised and orchestrated tests appropriate to whatever drug or disease was being examined. The PI then worked in concert with a veterinarian and sometimes lab technicians at Girdish to choose appropriate animals and find the right protocol for study.

A product called Narase was being developed by Monroe Pharmaceuticals, and a PI based in Detroit established a correspondence with the vet at Congo to begin tests of Narase on clean research subjects.

Narase was a blocking agent. It was essentially a collection of proteins applied to the nasal cavity, ideally as a spray, with the purpose of preventing the rhinovirus from taking root and causing a cold. It was being tested in various forms, the first in a consistency like petroleum jelly for maximum coverage.

The protocol requested by the PI had various components, most involving direct intranasal challenges. CH 447 was involved in these, but also in one which tested indirect infection.

CH 556 and CH 447 were anaesthetized, bled and swabbed, and found to be both susceptible to rhinovirus 5.

Dusty was infected, and Looee, while under anaesthetic, was treated with Narase by having it liberally smeared within his nose. Although under anaesthetic, the chimps still made gagging noises, groans and farts, and the labtech Bill was saddened by the sounds Looee made when he pushed the applicator to the back of the chimpanzee’s airway.

Looee’s sense of smell was gone when he awoke. The labtechs had raised the partition between his and Dusty’s cage so the two could roam freely between their cages. The purpose was to see whether the Narase would protect Looee from catching Dusty’s cold.

Looee hadn’t touched any dogpeople yet. He was hiding in the corner of his cage and banging the back of his head against it. He was growing less aware of what was real and had chronic diarrhea which the vet and researchers had come to take as an underlying condition unrelated to their tests.

Dusty had had no body contact since he was brought here from
the nursery a year earlier. He was a young adolescent and keen on impressing an older chimpanzee. He was aching to groom Looee.

The vet and labtechs knew that it could be dangerous to house two males together, but transmission of the virus was probable whether they fought each other or groomed.

Looee awoke to the smell of nothing and a dogperson sitting in a close dark corner of his cage. He sprang and screamed and banged his hands and feet on the cage to scare the creature away. Dusty shat and ran through the door to his own cage, and his screams of fear started a wave through Congo till all of them were screaming. Those who were housed in twos and threes could hug while they screamed and those on their own shook their cages.

Dusty made circles in his cage and looked over his shoulder at Looee, and felt like everyone was watching and judging his next move. He found himself going back to Looee’s cage without thinking, and he was walking with his hand upturned. The filthy supplicant terrified Looee and he screamed and ran at Dusty. He pounded his eye and mouth and bit his calf as Dusty ran away.

The others were still screaming and Dusty was whimpering in a corner of his cage. Looee was running hard against the cage, ignoring the pain, telling the dogpeople to be quiet.

Dusty was taken away in a transfer box and a missing tooth was noted while he was bled and swabbed and the progress of the virus was assessed. It was at its most contagious and they wanted to ensure maximum contact between animals.

Looee was wheeled away and awoke in his cage with the dogperson cowering in arm’s reach. The trapdoor had been closed between the cages and the two were now housed as one.

Both were shivering like orphans in an alley. They wouldn’t look each other in the eye.

Looee hit the cage with the back of his arms and Dusty had
nowhere to go. He wouldn’t look at Looee but was grinning in fear. Looee saw the grin, saw it as fear instead of a caricature of an ugly man’s smile. He understood Dusty for a moment, and then reverted to understanding nothing.

Looee bit into Dusty’s head and opened his scalp. The labtechs were alerted in time and tried to hold Looee back with prods while the trapdoor was lifted for Dusty.

Exhaustion overcame Looee and he slept facing the trapdoor so there could be no more surprises. The bottom grid of the cage was dripping with Dusty’s spit and diarrhea. Looee’s nose rested there but the Narase prevented a cold.

The PI in Detroit was encouraged and wished to test an aerosolized version of the solution. They repeated the protocol with different animals and the thinner solution, but results were inconclusive and never published.

Looee developed a reputation as violent. Each chimpanzee had a chart detailing not only their medical history but also character if anything was noteworthy. One of the labtechs noted “aggressive” on his chart.

Bill would talk about Looee with his colleagues saying he’s the one to watch out for. They all had the recurring fear that a cage would be left open, and Bill was afraid it would be Looee’s. He heard a story about a lab in Atlanta where one of the chimps got out and it took nine men and a shotgun to restrain him. He knew a hundred stories about chimps biting off labworkers’ fingers, and the story where the finger couldn’t be repaired because the tendon came off with it and was draped on the cage like a piece of bleeding spaghetti.

Lonee is the king of pus. Lonee is the thrashing heart of an aluminum giant.

Bill loved his granddad’s memory and could bench-press 315. And if one sick kid could get better from this research then all this
misery was worth it, these days of screams and filth. He respected these animals and gave them extra food and knew it was the little things that could make a day better. From eight to three this place could get to you, could do to joy what a junkyard does to cars, but if one sick kid got better.

Peace, big Looee, peace.

Looee banged his back against the cage at noon and was doing it still when Bill returned at 2:45.

Dusty was now completely in awe of Looee.

Lonee is the king.

On the CID Wing Dusty is across from Lonee and is dying of what some are calling AIDS. Dusty will be mentioned in Time magazine.

In Congo, years ago, Dusty collected things to pass through his cage to Looee.

There was no enrichment coordinator in Congo, as there would be on the CID Wing. No one was instructed to provide the chimps with toys. But Bill gave them whatever he could because it calmed them. He gave Looee a piece of dark blue cardboard from the lid of a box of bottles.

Looee stared at it as it sat on the floor of the cage and it looked like a hole, like the elusive centre of midnight. Looee saw it, then couldn’t see it, and realized it was a hole. He looked around to see if anyone was watching and felt the erotic nausea that everyone feels on the brink of a great departure. The woman starting the car after twenty-five years of abuse. He reached for the hole and it moved.