Points of Departure (33 page)

Jake nods.
I won’t tell them anything
.

They treat me like I’m not real
, Rachel signs sadly. Then she hugs her knees, frightened at the thought of being held captive by crazy people. She considers planning her escape: she is out of the cage and she is sure she could outrun Jake. As she wonders about it, she
finishes her cup of whiskey. The alcohol takes the edge off her fear. She sits close beside Jake on the couch, and the smell of his cigarette smoke reminds her of Aaron. For the first time since Aaron’s death she feels warm and happy.

She shares Jake’s cookies and potato chips and looks at the
Love Confessions
magazine that she took from the trash. The first story that she reads is about a woman
named Alice. The headline reads: “I became a go-go dancer to payoff my husband’s gambling debts, and now he wants me to sell my body.”

Rachel sympathizes with Alice’s loneliness and suffering.

Alice, like Rachel, is alone and misunderstood. As Rachel slowly reads, she sips her second cup of whiskey.

The story reminds her of a fairy tale: the nice man who rescues Alice from her terrible husband
replaces the handsome prince who rescued the princess. Rachel glances at Jake and wonders if he will rescue her from the wicked people who locked her in the cage.

She has finished the second cup of whiskey and eaten half Jake’s cookies when Jake says that she must go back to her cage. She goes reluctantly, taking the magazine with her. He promises that he will come back for her the next night,
and with that she must be content. She puts the magazine in one corner of the cage and curls up to sleep.

She wakes early in the afternoon. A man in a white coat is wheeling a low cart into the lab.

Rachel’s head aches with hangover and she feels sick. As she crouches in one corner of her cage, the man stops the cart beside her and locks the wheels. “Hold on there,” he mutters to her, then slides
her cage onto the cart.

The man wheels her through long corridors, where the walls are cement blocks, painted institutional green. Rachel huddles unhappily in the cage, wondering where she is going and whether Jake will ever be able to find her.

At the end of a long corridor, the man opens a thick metal door. A wave of warm air comes from the doorway.

It stinks of chimpanzees, excrement, and
rotting food. On either side of the corridor are metal bars and wire mesh.

Behind the mesh, Rachel can see dark hairy shadows. In one cage, five adolescent chimps swing and play. In another, two females huddle together, grooming each other.

The man slows as he passes a cage in which a big male is banging on the wire with his fist, making the mesh rattle and ring.

“Now, Johnson,” says the man.
“Cool it. Be nice. I’m bringing you a new little girlfriend.”

With a series of hooks, the man links Rachel’s cage with the cage next to Johnson’s and opens the doors. “Go on, girl,” he says. “See the nice fruit.” In the new cage is a bowl of sliced apples with an attendant swarm of fruit flies.

At first, Rachel will not move into the new cage. She crouches in the cage on the cart, hoping that
the man will decide to take her back to the lab. She watches him get a hose and attach it to a water faucet. But she does not understand his intention until he turns the stream of water on her. A cold blast strikes her on the back and she howls, fleeing into the new cage to avoid the cold water. Then the man closes the doors, unhooks the cage, and hurries away.

The floor is bare cement. Her cage
is at one end of the corridor and two of its walls are cement block. A doorway in one of the cement block walls leads to an outside run. The other two walls are wire mesh: one facing the corridor; the other, Johnson’s cage.

Johnson, quiet now that the man has left, is sniffing around the door in the wire mesh wall that joins their cages. Rachel watches him anxiously. Her memories of other chimps
are distant, softened by time. She remembers her mother; she vaguely remembers playing with other chimps her age. But she does not know how to react to Johnson when he stares at her with great intensity and makes a loud huffing sound. She gestures to him in ASL, but he only stares harder and huffs again. Beyond Johnson, she can see other cages and other chimps, so many that the wire mesh blurs
her vision and she cannot see the other end of the corridor.

To escape Johnson’s scrutiny, she ducks through the door, into the outside run, a wire mesh cage on a white concrete foundation. Outside there is barren ground and rabbit brush. All the other runs are deserted until Johnson appears in the run beside hers. His attention disturbs her and she goes back inside.

She retreats to the side
of the cage furthest from Johnson. A crudely built wooden platform provides her with a place to sit. Wrapping her arms around her knees, she tries to relax and ignore Johnson. She dozes off for a while, but wakes to a commotion across the corridor.

In the cage across the way a female Chimp is in heat.

Rachel recognizes the smell from her own times in heat.

Two keepers are opening the door that
separates the female’s cage from the adjoining cage, where a male stands, watching with great interest. Johnson is shaking the wire mesh and howling as he watches.

“Mike here is a virgin, but Susie knows what she’s doing,” one keeper was saying to the other, “So it should go smoothly. But keep the hose ready.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Sometimes they fight. We only use the hose to break it up if it gets
real bad. Generally, they do okay.”

Mike stalks into Susie’s cage. The keepers lower the cage door, trapping both chimps in the same enclosure.

Susie seems unalarmed. She continues eating a slice of orange while Mike sniffs at her genitals with every indication of great interest. She bends over to let Mike finger her pink bottom, the sign of estrus.

Rachel finds herself standing at the wire
mesh, making low moaning noises. She can see Mike’s erection, hear his grunting cries. He squats on the floor of Susie’s cage, gesturing to the female. Rachel’s feelings are mixed: she is fascinated, fearful, confused. She keeps thinking of the description of sex in the
Love Confessions
story. When Alice feels Danny’s lips on hers, she is swept away by the passion of the moment. He takes her in
his arms and her skin tingles as if she were consumed by an inner fire.

Susie bends down and Mike penetrates her with a loud grunt, thrusting violently with his hips. Susie cries out shrilly and suddenly leaps up, knocking Mike away. Rachel watches, overcome with fascination. Mike, his penis now limp, follows Susie slowly to the corner of the cage, where he begins grooming her carefully. Rachel
finds that the wire mesh has cut her hands where she gripped it too tightly.

It is night, and the door at the end of the corridor creaks open. Rachel is immediately alert, peering through the wire mesh and trying to see down to the end of the corridor. She bangs on the mesh. As Jake comes closer, she waves a greeting.

When Jake reaches for the lever that will raise the door to Rachel’s cage,
Johnson charges toward him, howling and waving his arms above his head. He hammers on the mesh with his fists, howling and grimacing at Jake. Rachel ignores Johnson and hurries after Jake.

Again Rachel helps Jake clean. In the laboratory, she greets the old chimp, but the animal is more interested in the banana that Jake has brought than in conversation.

The chimp will not reply to her questions,
and after several tries, she gives up.

While Jake vacuums the carpeted corridors, Rachel empties the trash, finding a magazine called
Modern Romance
in the same wastebasket that had provided
Love Confessions
.

Later, in the janitor’s lounge, Jake smokes a cigarette, sips whiskey, and flips through one of his own magazines.

Rachel reads love stories in
Modern Romance
.

Every once in a while,
she looks over Jake’s shoulder at grainy pictures of naked women with their legs spread wide apart. Jake looks for a long time at a picture of a blond woman with big breasts, red fingernails, and purplepainted eyelids. The woman lies on her back and smiles as she strokes the pinkness between her legs. The picture on the next page shows her caressing her own breasts, pinching the dark nipples. The
final picture shows her looking back over her shoulder. She is in the position that Susie took when she was ready to be mounted.

Rachel looks over Jake’s shoulder at the magazine, but she does not ask questions. Jake’s smell began to change as soon as he opened the magazine; the scent of nervous sweat mingles with the aromas of tobacco and whiskey.

Rachel suspects that questions would not be
welcome just now.

At Jake’s insistence, she goes back to her cage before dawn.

Over the next week, she listens to the conversations of the men who come and go, bringing food and hosing out the cages. From the conversations, she learns that the Primate Research Center is primarily a breeding facility that supplies researchers with domestically bred apes and monkeys of several species. It also
maintains its own research staff. In indifferent tones, the men talk of horrible things. The adolescent chimps at the end of the corridor are being fed a diet high in cholesterol to determine cholesterol’s effects on the circulatory system. A group of pregnant females is being injected with male hormones to determine how that will affect the offspring.

A group of infants is being fed a low-protein
diet to determine adverse effects on their brain development.

The men look through her as if she were not real, as if she were a part of the wall, as if she were no one at all.

She cannot speak to them; she cannot trust them.

Each night, Jake lets her out of her cage and she helps him clean. He brings treats: barbecued potato chips, fresh fruit, chocolate bars, and cookies. He treats her fondly,
as one would treat a precocious child. And he talks to her.

At night, when she is with Jake, Rachel can almost forget the terror of the cage, the anxiety of watching Johnson pace to and fro, the sense of unreality that accompanies the simplest act. She would be content to stay with Jake forever, eating snack food and reading confessions magazines. He seems to like her company. But each morning,
Jake insists that she must go back to the cage and the terror. By the end of the first week, she has begun plotting her escape.

Whenever Jake falls asleep over his whiskey, something that happens three nights out of five, Rachel prowls the center alone, surreptitiously gathering things that she will need to survive in the desert: a plastic jug filled with water, a bag of food pellets, a large
beach towel that will serve as a blanket on the cool desert nights, a discarded shopping bag in which she can carry the other things. Her best find is a road map on which the Primate Research Center is marked in red. She knows the address of Aaron’s ranch and finds it on the map. She studies the roads and plots a route home. Cross-country, assuming that she does not get lost, she will have to travel
about fifty miles to reach the ranch. She hides these things behind one of the shelves in the janitor’s storeroom.

Her plans to run away and go home are disrupted by the idea that she is in love with Jake, a notion that comes to her slowly, fed by the stories in the confessions magazines.

When Jake absentmindedly strokes her, she is filled with a strange excitement. She longs for his company
and misses him on the weekends when he is away. She is happy only when she is with him, following him through the halls of the center, sniffing the aroma of tobacco and whiskey that is his own perfume. She steals a cigarette from his pack and hides it in her cage, where she can savor the smell of it at her leisure.

She loves him, but she does not know how to make him love her back. Rachel knows
little about love. She remembers a high-school crush where she mooned after a boy with a locker near hers, but that came to nothing. She reads the confessions magazines and Ann Landers’s column in the newspaper that Jake brings with him each night. From these sources, she learns about romance. One night, after Jake falls asleep, she types a badly punctuated, ungrammatical letter to Ann. In the
letter, she explains her situation and asks for advice on how to make Jake love her. She slips the letter into a sack labeled “Outgoing Mail,” and for the next week she reads Ann’s column with increased interest. But her letter never appears.

Rachel searches for answers in the magazine pictures that seem to fascinate Jake. She studies the naked women, especially the big-breasted woman with the
purple smudges around her eyes.

One night, she finds a plastic case of eyeshadow in a secretary’s desk. She steals it and takes it back to her cage.

The next evening, as soon as the center is quiet, she upturns her metal food dish and regards her reflection in the shiny bottom. Squatting, she balances the eye shadow case on one knee and examines its contents: a tiny makeup brush and three shades
of eye shadow—Indian Blue, Forest Green, and Wildly Violet. Rachel chooses the shade labeled Wildly Violet.

Using one finger to hold her right eye closed, she dabs her eyelid carefully with the makeup brush, leaving a gaudy orchid-colored smudge on her brown skin. She studies the smudge critically, then adds to it, smearing the color beyond the corner of her eyelid until it disappears in her
brown fur. The color gives her eye a carnival brightness, a lunatic gaiety. Working with great care, she matches the effect on the other side, then smiles at her reflection, blinking coquettishly.

In the other cage, Johnson bares his teeth and shakes the mesh. She ignores him.

When Jake comes to let her out, he frowns at her eyes.
Did you hurt yourself?
he asks.

No
, she says. Then, after a
pause,
Don’t you like it?

Jake squats beside her and stares at her eyes. Rachel puts a hand on his knee and her heart pounds at her own boldness.
You are a very strange monkey
, he signs.

Rachel is afraid to move. Her hand on his knee closes into a fist; her face folds in on itself, puckering around the eyes.