Points of Departure (31 page)

Outside, somewhere in the barren land surrounding the ranch house, a coyote lifts its head to the
rising moon and wails, a thin sound that is as lonely as a train whistling through an abandoned station. Rachel joins in with a desolate howl of loneliness and grief. Aaron lies still and Rachel knows that he is dead.

When Rachel was younger, she had a favorite bedtime story.
Where did I come from?
She would ask Aaron, using the abbreviated gestures of ASL, American Sign Language.
Tell me again.

“You’re too old for bedtime stories,” Aaron would say.

Please
, she would sign.
Tell me the story
.

In the end, he always relented and told her. “Once upon a time, there was a little girl named Rachel,” he would say, “She was a pretty girl, with long golden hair like a princess in a fairy tale. She lived with her father and her mother and they were all very happy.”

Rachel would snuggle contentedly
beneath her blankets. The story, like any good fairy tale, had elements of tragedy. In the story, Rachel’s father worked at a university, studying the workings of the brain and charting the electric fields that the nervous impulses of an active brain produced. But the other researchers at the university didn’t understand Rachel’s father; they distrusted his research and cut off his funding.
(During this portion of the story, Aaron’s voice took on a bitter edge.) So he left the university and took his wife and daughter to the desert, where he could work in peace.

He continued his research and determined that each individual brain produced its own unique pattern of fields, as characteristic as a fingerprint. (Rachel found this part of the story quite dull, but Aaron insisted on including
it.) The shape of this Electric Mind, as he called it, was determined by habitual patterns of thoughts and emotions. Record the Electric Mind, he postulated, and you could capture an individual’s personality.

Then one sunny day, the doctor’s wife and beautiful daughter went for a drive. A truck barreling down a winding cliffside road lost its brakes and met the car head-on, killing both the girl
and her mother. (Rachel clung to Aaron’s hand during this part of the story, frightened by the sudden evil twist of fortune.)

But though Rachel’s body had died, all was not lost. In his desert lab, the doctor had recorded the electrical patterns produced by his daughter’s brain. The doctor had been experimenting with the use of external magnetic fields to impose the patterns from one animal onto
the brain of another. From an animal supply house, he obtained a young chimpanzee. He used a mixture of norepinephrin-based transmitter substances to boost the speed of neural processing in the chimp’s brain, and then he imposed the pattern of his daughter’s mind on the brain of this young chimp, combining the two after his own fashion, saving his daughter in his own way. In the chimp’s brain
was all that remained of Rachel Jacobs.

The doctor named the chimp Rachel and raised her as his own daughter. Because the limitations of the chimpanzee larynx made speech very difficult, he instructed her in ASL. He taught her to read and to write. They were good friends, the best of companions.

By this point in the story, Rachel was usually asleep. But it didn’t matter—she knew the ending.
The doctor, whose name was Aaron Jacobs, and the chimp named Rachel lived happily ever after.

Rachel likes fairy tales and she likes happy endings. She has the mind of a teenage girl, but the innocent heart of a young chimp.

Sometimes, when Rachel looks at her gnarled brown fingers, they seem alien, wrong, out of place. She remembers having small, pale, delicate hands. Memories lie upon memories,
layers upon layers, like the sedimentary rocks of the desert buttes.

Rachel remembers a blond woman who smelled sweetly of perfume. On a Halloween long ago, this woman (who was, in these memories, Rachel’s mother) painted Rachel’s fingernails bright red because Rachel was dressed as a gypsy and gypsies liked red. Rachel remembers the woman’s hands: white hands with faintly blue veins hidden just
beneath the skin, neatly clipped nails painted rose pink.

But Rachel also remembers another mother and another time. Her mother was dark and hairy and smelled sweetly of overripe fruit. She and Rachel lived in a wire cage in a room filled with chimps and she hugged Rachel to her hairy breast whenever any people came into the room.

Rachel’s mother groomed Rachel constantly, picking delicately
through her fur in search of lice that she never found.

Memories upon memories: jumbled and confused, like random pictures clipped from magazines, a bright collage that makes no sense. Rachel remembers cages: cold wire mesh beneath her feet, the smell of fear around her. A man in a white lab coat took her from the arms of her hairy mother and pricked her with needles. She could hear her mother
howling, but she could not escape from the man.

Rachel remembers a junior high school dance where she wore a new dress: she stood in a dark corner of the gym for hours, pretending to admire the crepe paper decorations because she felt too shy to search among the crowd for her friends.

She remembers when she was a young chimp: she huddled with five other adolescent chimps in the stuffy freight
compartment of a train, frightened by the alien smells and sounds.

She remembers gym class: gray lockers and ugly gym suits that revealed her skinny legs. The teacher made everyone play softball, even Rachel who was unathletic and painfully shy. Rachel at bat, standing at the plate, was terrified to be the center of attention. “Easy out,” said the catcher, a hard-edged girl who ran with the wrong
crowd and always smelled of cigarette smoke. When Rachel swung at the ball and missed, the outfielders filled the air with malicious laughter.

Rachel’s memories are as delicate and elusive as the dusty moths that dance among the rabbit brush and sage. Memories of her girlhood never linger; they land for an instant, then take flight, leaving Rachel feeling abandoned and alone.

Rachel leaves Aaron’s
body where it is, but closes his eyes and pulls the sheet up over his head. She does not know what else to do. Each day she waters the garden and picks some greens for the rabbits. Each day, she cares for the rats, bringing them food and refilling their water bottles. The weather is cool, and Aaron’s body does not smell too bad, though by the end of the week, a wide line of ants runs from the
bed to the open window.

At the end of the first week, on a moonlit evening, Rachel decides to let the animals go free. She releases the rabbits one by one, climbing on a stepladder to reach down into the cage and lift each placid bunny out. She carries each one to the back door, holding it for a moment and stroking the soft warm fur. Then she sets the animal down and nudges it in the direction
of the green grass that grows around the perimeter of the fenced garden.

The rats are more difficult to deal with. She manages to wrestle the large rat cage off the shelf, but it is heavier than she thought it would be. Though she slows its fall, it lands on the floor with a crash and the rats scurry to and fro within. She shoves the cage across the linoleum floor, sliding it down the hall, over
the doorsill, and onto the back patio. When she opens the cage door, rats burst out like popcorn from a popper, white in the moonlight and dashing in all directions.

Once, while Aaron was taking a nap, Rachel walked along the dirt track that led to the main highway. She hadn’t planned on going far. She just wanted to see what the highway looked like, maybe hide near the mailbox and watch a car
drive past. She was curious about the outside world and her fleeting fragmentary memories did not satisfy that curiosity.

She was halfway to the mailbox when Aaron came roaring up in his old jeep. “Get in the car,” he shouted at her. “Right now!” Rachel had never seen him so angry. She cowered in the jeep’s passenger seat, covered with dust from the road, unhappy that Aaron was so upset. He didn’t
speak until they got back to the ranch house, and then he spoke in a low voice, filled with bitterness and suppressed rage.

“You don’t want to go out there,” he said. “You wouldn’t like it out there. The world is filled with petty, narrowminded, stupid people. They wouldn’t understand you. And anyone they don’t understand, they want to hurt. They hate anyone who’s different. If they know that
you’re different, they punish you, hurt you. They’d lock you up and never let you go.”

He looked straight ahead, staring through the dirty windshield. “It’s not like the shows on TV, Rachel,” he said in a softer tone. “It’s not like the stories in books.”

He looked at her then and she gestured frantically.
I’m sorry. I’m sorry
.

“I can’t protect you out there,” he said. “I can’t keep you safe.”

Rachel took his hand in both of hers. He relented then, stroking her head. “Never do that again,” he said. “Never.”

Aaron’s fear was contagious. Rachel never again walked along the dirt track and sometimes she had dreams about bad people who wanted to lock her in a cage.

Two weeks after Aaron’s death, a black-and-white police car drives slowly up to the house. When the policemen knock on the
door, Rachel hides behind the couch in the living room. They knock again, try the knob, then open the door; which she had left unlocked.

Suddenly frightened, Rachel bolts from behind the couch, bounding toward the back door. Behind her, she hears one man yell, “My God! It’s a gorilla!”

By the time he pulls his gun, Rachel has run out the back door and away into the hills. From the hills she
watches as an ambulance drives up and two men in white take Aaron’s body away. Even after the ambulance and the police car drive away, Rachel is afraid to go back to the house. Only after sunset does she return.

Just before dawn the next morning, she wakens to the sound of a truck jouncing down the dirt road. She peers out the window to see a pale green pickup. Sloppily stenciled in white on
the door are the words: PRIMATE RESEARCH CENTER.

Rachel hesitates as the truck pulls up in front of the house.

By the time she decides to flee, two men are getting out of the truck. One of them carries a rifle.

She runs out the back door and heads for the hills, but she is only halfway to hiding when she hears a sound like a sharp intake of breath and feels a painful jolt in her shoulder. Suddenly,
her legs give way and she is tumbling backward down the sandy slope, dust coating her red-brown fur, her howl becoming a whimper, then fading to nothing at all. She falls into the blackness of sleep.

The sun is up. Rachel lies in a cage in the back of the pickup truck. She is partially conscious and she feels a tingling in her hands and feet. Nausea grips her stomach and bowels. Her body aches.

Rachel can blink, but otherwise she can’t move. From where she lies, she can see only the wire mesh of the cage and the side of the truck. When she tries to turn her head, the burning in her skin intensifies. She lies still, wanting to cry out, but unable to make a sound. She can only blink slowly, trying to close out the pain. But the burning and nausea stay.

The truck jounces down a dirt road,
then stops. It rocks as the men get out. The doors slam. Rachel hears the tailgate open.

A woman’s voice: “Is that the animal the county sheriff wanted us to pick up?” A woman peers into the cage. She wears a white lab coat and her brown hair is tied back in a single braid. Around her eyes, Rachel can see small wrinkles, etched by years of living in the desert. The woman doesn’t look evil. Rachel
hopes that the woman will save her from the men in the truck.

“Yeah. It should be knocked out for at least another half hour. Where do you want it?”

“Bring it into the lab where we had the rhesus monkeys. I’ll keep it there until I have an empty cage in the breeding area.”

Rachel’s cage scrapes across the bed of the pickup. She feels each bump and jar as a new pain. The man swings the cage
onto a cart and the woman pushes the cart down a concrete corridor. Rachel watches the walls pass just a few inches from her nose.

The lab contains rows of cages in which small animals move sleepily. In a sudden stark light of the overhead fluorescent bulbs, the eyes of white rats gleam red.

With the help of one of the men from the truck, the woman manhandles Rachel onto a lab table. The metal
surface is cold and hard, painful against Rachel’s skin.

Rachel’s body is not under her control; her limbs will not respond. She is still frozen by the tranquilizer, able to watch, but that is all. She cannot protest or plead for mercy.

Rachel watches with growing terror as the woman pulls on rubber gloves and fills a hypodermic needle with a clear solution. “Mark down that I’m giving her the
standard test for tuberculosis; this eyelid should be checked before she’s moved in with the others. I’ll add thiabendazole to her feed for the next few days to clean out any intestinal worms. And I suppose we might as well deflea her as well,” the woman says. The man grunts in response.

Expertly, the woman closes one of Rachel’s eyes. With her open eye, Rachel watches the hypodermic needle approach.
She feels a sharp pain in her eyelid. In her mind, she is howling, but the only sound she can manage is a breathy sigh.

The woman sets the hypodermic aside and begins methodically spraying Rachel’s fur with a cold, foul-smelling liquid. A drop strikes Rachel’s eye and burns. Rachel blinks, but she cannot lift a hand to rub her eye. The woman treats Rachel with casual indifference, chatting with
the man as she spreads Rachel’s legs and sprays her genitals. “Looks healthy enough. Good breeding stock.”

Rachel moans, but neither person notices. At last, they finish their torture, put her in a cage, and leave the room.

She closes her eyes, and the darkness returns.

Rachel dreams. She is back at home in the ranch house.

It is night and she is alone. Outside, coyotes yip and howl.

The
coyote is the voice of the desert, wailing as the wind wails when it stretches itself thin to squeeze through a crack between two boulders. The people native to this land tell tales of Coyote, a god who was a trickster, unreliable, changeable, mercurial.