Author: Russell Banks
Category: Literature
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It was the first recognizable sign of his precocity, of his love of numbers and preternatural skill at using them, and it was how he quickly became his father’s favorite. “The boy is a genius at math,” Woodrow proudly declared to anyone who asked after his sons. “Like me.” The twins, however, Woodrow regarded with a strangely anxious wariness, as if the two boys knew things that mere mortals didn’t and perhaps shouldn’t know. Which in a sense was true, because each twin knew another person better and deeper than any of us ever could. It’s dangerous, that much knowledge. They understood each other’s breathing and cries in the night and were able quickly, silently, to comfort each other and developed their own language long before expressing any willingness to use ours. It separated them from the rest of us, and it bound them together. The twins were like the chimps. Dillon, too—inasmuch as he had an ability that we did not, an ability that might be dangerous.
At first, my daily routine was surprisingly liberating to me. Then oppressive. Never before had I been so free, yet never so confined and controlled by others. Controlled by Woodrow, of course, and to some small degree by Satterthwaite, whose responsibility was to be on call for any driving I might require. At Woodrow’s direction, Satterthwaite was to leave the office whenever I wanted or needed to go out, whether to the doctor, the market, or to the stores downtown, where there was very little on the shelves that I wanted or needed anyhow. As for our past indiscretion, Satterthwaite’s cynicism matched mine. An exciting risk, that’s all it had been. The same for him as for me. We’d chanced it, and we’d gotten away with it, and that moment, that exact degree of risk, would never appear again. The danger would always be greater and therefore not worth it, or less, and therefore not exciting enough. He remained a boy who was employed by my husband, and I was his boss’s wife and practically middle aged. Without once having to say it, we both knew the same thing.
I was controlled, too, by the people who worked for Woodrow at home—the yardman, Kuyo, until he left that job to work full time at the sanctuary; the many village girls and boys who came and went, working for a season or two and sometimes longer as housekeepers, laundresses, cooks, and drivers; and Jeannine, who was at first by herself the cook and maid and then became the nanny—all of whom actually answered to Woodrow, not to me, and knew their jobs better than I anyhow and didn’t need any supervision. So I made lists, menus, schedules; tried, ineptly, to help with the flower gardens; and shopped; and arranged entertainments—dinners, teas, lunches—for Woodrow’s colleagues and friends among the Americo-Liberian elite. I’d ended up with my mother’s life.
In those first years in Liberia, it was of course mostly my own doing, falling into my mother’s life. It was a thing difficult to avoid. As soon as we were married, Woodrow had insisted that I quit my job at the lab. Not “seemly” for the wife of a minister of government, he pronounced. And I complied. For a long while I had been eager to quit the lab anyhow and hadn’t already done it only because until now in the entire country of Liberia there was nothing else available to me, nothing for which I was not over- or underqualified. And, of course, there was the matter of the chimps, my dreamers.
Until I married and moved into Woodrow’s house, I had nowhere else to live than in my cabin at the lab. Before long, however, the job had changed for me, and to my surprise I had actually become attached to it. Attached to the chimps. In the beginning, the work had been suffused with tedium. Every day it was the same—a simple, mind-numbing set of tasks associated with recording and tracking plasma samples taken from the chimps and shipping the samples back to the U.S. for testing. The chimps had been deliberately infected, and the progress of the disease had to be recorded month by month, until the subject, the infected chimp, died, date and cause of death carefully recorded. They’d been infected at different ages, depending on when they’d been brought to the lab, and I noted that; and gender, duly noted; and background (subject’s general health before infection; conditions of birth, i.e., born and raised in the wild or captivity; birth order, if known; location of early habitat; place and means of capture…)—all duly noted.
At the same time, my days were edged with the slow approach of despair, despair that later became intolerable, because of the condition and fate of the chimps. Those same tedious details, the data, however impersonal and repetitive, gradually provided the individual chimps with individual biographies and identities. They were nameless and were differentiated one from the other by a file number, each file containing the chimp’s entire life history. Number 241: male, age approx. 14 years; captured in Maryland County, mother killed by poachers; purchased at market in Gbong by Swedish businessman, seized from him by customs officials at point of departure from Liberia; age at capture, approx. 6 months; age when turned over to U.S. lab in Monrovia, approx. 2 years; infected with hepatitis C at age approx. 4 years; total time in confinement 12 years, 3 months, 4 days at time of most recent extraction of plasma sample… .
Gradually, over time, each number came to contain within it a single chimp’s story. But it was a kind of obituary written in advance, for once a chimp was placed inside one of our cages, its life was effectively over. I worked in the office, a cinder-block bunker that hummed with the sound of the air-conditioner, but still it couldn’t blot out the noise of the chimps when they were hungry or angry or frightened. It was always one of those three—hunger, anger, and fear—and the chimps reacted to them like people who were mad, with wild screams, shouts, calls, and cries beyond weeping. It was like working in an insane asylum. Sometimes silence fell, and, as in an asylum, that was bad, for it usually meant that the patients were hurting themselves.
I did not handle the chimps myself and in the early days rarely saw them. I was the clerk of the works, as I called myself, the only one trusted with the numbers. The woman and man who actually took care of the chimps and drew the blood plasma from them and infected them with the diseases shipped in dry ice from the U.S. were local Liberians who had been recruited and trained by American physicians long before I arrived on the scene. Elizabeth Kolbert, a practical nurse, was in her late forties, a large, slovenly woman, very black, with six or seven kids—it was never clear exactly how many. Sometimes she said six, sometimes seven, sometimes simply “many.” Underpaid, with no husband to help provide for the kids, she got by as well as possible, but always came late to work and left early and sometimes didn’t show at all.
The other employee at the lab was Benji Haddad, also in his late forties, a light-skinned con man with a nasal voice, a toothpick in his mouth, and pomaded hair shaped like a helmet. He worked nights dealing blackjack at the hotel casino and part time at the lab, drifting into the compound around noon for a few hours to feed the chimps and clean up their cages, and because he hated doing these tasks, for they were beneath his dignity and understanding of his own status in town, he made things as difficult and uncomfortable for the chimps as possible, banging the bars with his shovel, spraying them with the hose as if in fun. It was he who knocked the chimps out with darts so Elizabeth could extract the blood samples and inject the viruses. Knockdowns, they were called. It was he who extracted their large incisors. And both Benji and Elizabeth talked about the knockdowns, extractions, and biopsies as if they were car mechanics discussing oil changes and tune-ups.
As clerk of the works, I was also the paymaster, which went a long way towards shaping my relationship with Elizabeth and Benji. They desperately needed their regular paychecks, a rare and luxurious thing in this country. Their monthly pay, drawn on the lab account at the Chase Bank in Monrovia, exceeded the average annual income for most Liberians and let Elizabeth and Benji and their families live modestly. It let them send their kids to school, rent a little house close to town, and even provided Benji with a car, a beat, old hand-me-down Ford.
Because of the way he treated the chimps, I was not fond of Benji, and he knew it. I could not keep a disapproving scowl off my face when in his presence. He was not especially fond of me, either, and w
e were barely civil to each other, except on payday, when I was officious and he as smooth as wet glass. But I liked Elizabeth. She was jolly, and although she viewed the chimps the way most people regard house cats or squirrels or caged birds—as if the creatures were without feelings, memories, or emotions and with no needs other than physical—she seemed to find them amusing and interesting. And she seemed to like me and enjoyed hanging out at the office telling stories about her kids and neighbors and now and then local politics.
It was Elizabeth who told me of the atrocities, told me in a way that let me for the first time believe the stories and rumors that I’d heard earlier, stories of how the soldiers, especially the president’s personal security force, took drugs and roamed the city at night looking for women and girls to rape; how they wantonly butchered people from the tribes not currently in favor, that is, killed people who were not members of the president’s own tribe, the Americo-Liberians, or the most populous and best educated of the native people, the Kpelle, though they had no qualms about torturing and killing Americos and Kpelles if it was on the president’s orders. Elizabeth told me also of rumors of cannibalism, of rituals among the stoned soldiers that consisted of disemboweling people and eating raw their hearts and livers and drinking their blood. These rumors I discounted, however. African urban legends, I thought. Stories told to scare the white lady. These guys might be murderers and thugs and rapists, and maybe they relish eating chimpanzee flesh, but they’re not cannibals. Not in this day and age.
THE DREAMER THAT my records called Number 34, when finally I was able to put a face on the number, was the first one I named. After a few months at the lab I had taken to visiting the chimp house when no one was around, mid-afternoon, when the chimps, having been recently fed by Benji, were usually relatively quiet and settled. I went there for company, strangely enough. My days were lonely, and somehow visiting the chimp house after the humans had left it diluted my loneliness. The animals were kept one to a cage, the babies housed by themselves in smaller, half-size cages. The cages were padlocked, constructed of thick steel bars that might have come from a maximum-security prison, and stacked on metal racks. For ease of cleaning, the floor of each cage was grated to allow feces and urine and uneaten food to fall through, the way chickens are kept in poultry farms. I’d gotten used to the rotting, vegetal smell of the place, the claustrophobic heat, and the sorrow that the creatures exuded with every breath. But something about that sorrow drew me forward and out of my habitual, brittle self-absorption. Paradoxically and without a scrap of shame, I felt comforted by their sorrow, soothed and reassured by it. Theirs was a reality greater than mine.
I walked alongside the cages and peered in, and the chimps came cautiously forward, and for a second, with knuckled hands grasping the inch-thick bars, their round, puckered faces peered back at me. Some of them rolled up their lips and bared their huge mouths to warn me off; others, lips pursed, on the edge of speech, it seemed, ready to exchange a small word or two, saw me approach and shyly withdrew and became sullen or sour faced; and there were a few who were clearly psychotic, screaming, wild eyed, terrorized.
Number 34 was a large adult male, and I kept coming back to his cage and lingering in front of it, perhaps because after my first few visits, he, more than the rest, was able to return my gaze with the same mixture and degree of apparent curiosity and fear that I was feeling towards him, and he seemed neither enraged by my presence nor intimidated by it. The others, when I looked directly at them, if they came towards me at all, if they did not cower in the corner of their cages or, like autistic children, bang their heads against the bars, leapt at me or bared their teeth in rage or spat. They tried to throw things at me, uneaten food, feces, water bowls, and sent me on my way, frightened and disturbed and embarrassed.
This was before I learned how to approach the chimps—eyes lowered, teeth covered, face slightly canted, as if in deference. It was Number 34 who taught me. From the first, he’d been neither angered by my presence before his cage nor frightened of it. With him, I had a chance to experiment, mimicking his approach to me and afterwards applying it to the others, who gradually began to accept my approach, then, over time, seemed to welcome it. Hello, brother ape. Greetings, sister ape. How are you today? What are your thoughts, brother ape? Is everyone in the chimp house okay? No one sick? No one injured?
I looked steadily at Number 34, and he looked steadily back. He was the boss, I decided, the chief. That’s why he’s given me the time of day and hasn’t been frightened or angered by my dumb lack of ceremony. He’s seen that I’m just an ignorant human, and because I’m not Benji or Elizabeth and haven’t been involved in the capture and transport and imprisonment of him or any of the others, I’m relatively harmless. He was long faced, with a grizzled muzzle and a huge paunch and a habit of pouting with his lips as if about to whistle. His facial expression reminded me somehow of a surgeon, scalpel poised, ready to cut—thoughtful, concentrated, deliberate. I named him Doc.
I suspected that Elizabeth and even Benji had favorites among the chimps and might even have given some of them names. But I told no one about Doc, and gradually over the following weeks I named them all, one by one, even the babies. There was Ginko, a scrawny adolescent male who had a pale, greenish cast to his skin; and Mano, a stubby, tough-looking male whose full name I realized later must be Mano-a-Mano; and Wassail, round bellied and freckled and reminding me of Christmas somehow, one of Santa’s elves; and Edna, a slope-shouldered female with dark, stringy hair who made me remember for the first time in years a crafts counselor I’d had at Camp Saranac the summer I was nine, a kindly woman mocked by all her charges, including me, for her slow speech and low, mannish voice. Their names bubbled into my head as if sent by thought-transference from the chimps themselves, and it was only later that I’d realize I was naming them after people whom the chimps reminded me of, people I’d long forgotten. The names were sounds that for mysterious reasons I liked saying to myself, sounds that were keys capable of unlocking blocked memories, lost sensations, ignored associations.
Words replaced the old file numbers, absorbing the data that made up each chimp’s biography, and just as with a family member or a close friend, the name became the same as the bearer. I knew that I was making a mistake and soon would no longer be able to see the chimps as numbers, as data, and that in time I would want to free them from their cages. But I couldn’t help myself. For my job had lost its tedium, and the edge of despair had begun slowly turning into a cause. An old pattern. It’s how since childhood I have made my daily life worth living, by turning tedium and despair into a cause.
In any case, by the time Woodrow and I were married, I had come to love my job.
“BUT WHO’S GOING to replace me?” I asked him. It was the very first morning after we’d returned from our two-day honeymoon. We were finishing breakfast on the terrace adjacent to our bedroom, and Woodrow had informed me that I might prefer to stay home today, since I no longer had to work. I would not have to give notice that I was quitting; he’d already done that for me. Jeannine refilled my coffee cup and padded barefoot back through our bedroom to the kitchen.
“Not your problem who’ll replace you, Hannah. The woman, Elizabeth, she can fill in for you until the Americans send someone over. They know about the need, I’ve already informed them that you will have to be replaced. They tell me they have some big, rich foundation ready to expand funding for the position, so they can afford to send an American graduate student over soon, which is nice and what they prefer anyhow. One of their own. The new person should be along shortly. A matter of weeks. Maybe days. So you needn’t concern yourself. Nothing will be lost in your absence, my dear.”
“Terrific. Great. Elizabeth is barely literate,” I said. “She’ll screw everything up. Do you have any idea how long it took me to get those records straight and reliable when I first took over, after she’d been ‘filling in’ for the previous clerk of the works? It took months!”
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p; “Hannah darling, they’re chimpanzees. Animals. Animals and numbers, that’s all. Anyhow, what does it matter?” He touched the corners of his mouth with his napkin and stood up to leave. “It’s just a way to keep money flowing from one hand to the other.”
“No, it’s science! Medical science.”
Woodrow looked down at me as if I were a child, and laughed, genuinely amused. “I’ll see you this evening, my dear little bride,” he said, and strolled to his waiting car.
Woodrow was right—the lab was a shabby, inept operation, and it was ridiculous to call it a “lab” and think of the work done there as science, much less medical science. It was the broken-down tail end of an elaborate scam, a way for a pharmaceutical company to gather data that would back up its claims for a product; a way for a university to get funding for professors’ and graduate students’ salaries and brand-new lab equipment, possibly a whole new university department; a way for Woodrow’s underfunded ministry to get a few American health workers and some decent medical equipment into Liberia and paid for by someone else. And it had been a way for me to finance my stay in Africa, avoiding arrest in the U.S., and most important, a way for me to come up from underground.