After dinner, Mom came over with Zan and asked me to hold him for a while.
“Do I have to?” I whispered. I felt myself starting to blush. Things were going well with these other guys and I didn’t want them to think I was a freak, or a sissy. Mom just gave me a look and put Zan into my arms.
And then all the guys were looking at him and asking questions.
“So he’s going to talk?” said David.
“Well, not talk exactly,” I said. “Chimps can’t talk. But he can learn ASL. American Sign Language.”
“That’s pretty wild,” said Hugh. “Talking with a chimp.”
“What’ll they talk about?” Evan asked.
David snorted into his pop. “‘Give me another friggin’ banana. And make it quick.’ Stuff like that.”
“Are you going to help teach him?” Hugh asked.
“Yeah. Sure. He’s part of the family now.”
Suddenly I felt proud to be holding him, and to know so much about chimps.
“Can I hold him?”
Startled, I looked over and saw Jennifer beside me. “Oh, hey, sure, yeah, hi,” I said idiotically. “Yeah, sure.” Carefully I transferred Zan into her slender, waiting arms. “Oh my God, he is so adorable,” she said. “How old is he?” “Just under six weeks.”
She was wearing some kind of perfume. It smelled like the incense Mom burned in the house sometimes. Sandalwood. I wanted to breathe it forever.
“So, is he like your pet?” she asked.
“More like my baby brother,” I said, surprising myself. “That is so cool.” “He’s pretty cool, yeah.”
Zan seemed to like her too. He nuzzled right up against her breasts. She caught me looking and gave a little embarrassed laugh.
“So are you going to Windermere next year?” she asked me. I shook my head. “Do you go there?” “We both do,” she said, nodding at her brother. I decided that Windermere was the school I’d wanted to go to my entire life.
“Don’t you have to be really smart to go there?” I asked. David shook his head. “Nah. Jennifer got in.” “Goof,” she said.
Then she handed Zan back to me and returned to her friends.
The rest of the barbecue I kept hoping she’d come back and talk to us, but she didn’t. I sneaked looks at her whenever I could. I didn’t want to be too obvious. Still, I must have spent about twenty minutes total just staring, and I never caught her glancing in my direction.
On the way home, I sat in the back seat with Zan asleep in my arms. Mom was talking about Mrs. Godwin.
“She certainly has firm opinions about the right schools. She kept telling me Ben should go to Windermere University School.”
She looked over at Dad, like she was expecting him to snort and shake his head and say how ridiculous that was.
“It’s not such a bad idea,” Dad said. “We probably should have put a little more thought into schools before we moved.”
“The local public school is perfectly fine,” said Mom.
Dad said, “I think Ben might benefit from a more rigorous environment.”
“The specimen is in the back seat,” I reminded them.
Mom turned around to look at me. “You’d have to wear a uniform, Ben.”
I shrugged. “Wouldn’t be so bad.”
“I’m against the whole idea of private schools,” she said.
“You went to private schools,” I pointed out.
“So I should know what a breeding ground for privilege they are.”
“You got an excellent education,” Dad said.
“You’d put him in private school just because the Godwin kids go?” Mom asked, chin lifted.
“I’m thinking of putting him in, if it’s good for him.”
“Hey, I’m open to the idea,” I said. “David and his friends were cool.”
“We’ll see,” said Dad.
Mom shook her head and stared out the window.
I looked down at Zan. “Dad, what you said at the party, about how Zan might be a moron and the whole thing wouldn’t work. You didn’t really mean that, did you?”
Dad didn’t reply for a second. “You’re not supposed to go into an experiment with any particular bias, or it can affect how you structure your experiment—and how you see the results.”
“But it’s impossible to be completely unbiased,” Mom added. “You wouldn’t have embarked on it if you didn’t think there was a good chance something interesting would happen.”
“I’ve got to be very careful with this project, though,” Dad said. “Some of the people in the department have their doubts.”
“Who?” I asked. All those men around him at the party, hanging on his every word, laughing. “Theo Schaffter for one,” Dad said. “The guy with the pipe?”
“He thinks I’m crazy. He’s probably not the only one.”
“But they just hired you!” I said. “Why would they do that if they thought you were crazy?”
“The university wants a big splashy project that’ll get funding and a lot of attention,” Dad explained. “Godwin likes me, but just because he’s head of the department doesn’t mean everyone else has to like me. We’ll win them over soon enough, though, once they see what Zan can do.”
“You think he can learn to talk, right?” I said.
“Absolutely,” Dad said. “Zan’s going to go all the way, right into the history books.”
FOUR
DOMINANT MALE
“Zan, stay still!”
I hated changing Zan’s diaper. It was fine the first few weeks, when he’d just lie there on the changing mat. But at four weeks he’d started grabbing at the diaper with his fingers—and his toes, which were just as nimble. It was like he had four hands. At five weeks, he’d discovered he could roll over. Now, at over six weeks, he could crawl. It was almost impossible to keep him still.
It was a few days after the barbecue at the Godwins, and I was babysitting. Mom had had to go out and she’d asked me to watch Zan for a couple of hours. Dad was home, but upstairs in his study, working. He was too busy with graphs and charts and making phone calls to other important people to actually take care of his own chimp—which was pretty typical. Dad was a big fan of the hands-off approach when it came to parenting.
I managed to get Zan’s poopy diaper off and was crazily wiping his bottom clean as fast as I could. He looked at me solemnly and, with a hoot, flipped over onto his stomach.
“Come on, Zan!” I pleaded. I grabbed him firmly around his furry hips and turned him back over.
“Hey, Dad,” I muttered to myself, “how about you change him now and then. How’s that grab you?”
I wanted to get the new diaper on Zan before he peed all over me. I’d seen it happen to Mom, a big golden arc splashing everywhere.
I unfolded the new diaper, but before I could slide it under his bum, he snatched it with his toes and was waving it wildly all around, panting softly, the way he did whenever he was excited and wanted to play. I grabbed the diaper, but just as quickly it was back in his toes again.
“Okay, fine, you play with that one,” I told him, taking another diaper from the pile. I could feel myself getting angry. I didn’t want to be babysitting Zan right now. I didn’t want to change his diapers. This was Dad’s project.
I slid the new diaper under Zan but he rolled towards me, and grabbed hold of my shirt. Before I could get him off, he’d climbed around to my back and was lowering himself down my right leg.
One of his favourite blankets was there on the floor and he grabbed it in his hands and slid across the floor, pushing with his legs.
“No way, Zan!” I said, catching him up in my arms. He peed all over me. All down my chest and pants. He had lots of pee.
I swore and put him back down on the floor.
“That’s bad, Zan!” I shouted. “Bad boy!”
I grabbed a towel and dried myself off. Zan made a little playful pant-hoot up at me.
“Oh, you think it’s funny???
? I said. “How about if I pee on you? Would you like that?”
I was undoing my zipper when Dad came into the room.
“What’s going on?” he asked, looking at me sternly.
“Zan peed all over me!”
Dad looked at my open zipper. “Were you going to pee on him, Ben?”
“Maybe,” I muttered, pulling up my pants.
“Ben, he’s just a baby. Of course he’s going to pee on you sometimes.”
“I don’t see him peeing on you! Why don’t you change your freaky little son once in a while?”
“Ben, you’re shouting,” Dad said calmly.
Zan was watching all this, looking solemnly from me to Dad, like he was trying to figure out what was going on.
“Mom asked you to babysit for just a couple hours,” Dad went on. “Does that seem so unreasonable? Two hours?”
“Two hours more than you,” I shot back.
“You need to work on controlling your temper, young man.”
Control. Another one of Dad’s favourite words.
I looked back at Zan and felt my anger wash away. His eyes were huge. Above his backside he had this little white tuft of hair, which all babies had for the first few years. It was very cute. He rolled over and I dropped down beside him and started tickling him. His eyebrows shot up and he grinned, and his arms and legs pulled in with excitement. He never got tired of this, and the harder you tickled, the more he seemed to like it. He shrieked with glee. Pretty soon I was laughing too. Whenever I stopped and held my hands over him, he’d freeze, silent, and look at me with his eyes wide and expectant. Then, when my hands dived back down, he’d start panting and kicking again.
“Get him in a diaper, pronto,” Dad told me.
“It’s not so easy,” I said.
“Don’t let him get away with it, Ben. You’ve got to be firm.” “I was firm.”
“He’s only going to get more stubborn. The way we treat him now is going to affect his behaviour the rest of his life. Show him you mean business.”
And with that, Dad bent down, grabbed Zan from behind, and picked him up.
I think Zan must have been startled, because he gave a little shriek, turned, and bit Dad on the wrist.
It wasn’t a real bite—because Zan’s baby teeth hadn’t even come in yet. But Dad’s expression darkened. He held Zan up so they were face to face.
“No, Zan!” he said, with a stern shake of his head. “No!”
Zan’s eyes got so big his body seemed to shrink.
“You’re scaring him, Dad!” I said.
“Good,” said Dad. “He needs to know that’s unacceptable. We can’t have him biting. Just wait till his teeth come. Now get him in a diaper, please.” He passed Zan to me and left the room.
Zan lay very, very still on the diaper mat and just watched me while I changed him. Dad was right: being strict seemed to do the trick, but I couldn’t help feeling sorry for Zan. We could put him in diapers and pretend he was a baby, but he was still a chimp, and chimps bit sometimes. I’d read in one of Mom’s books that they bit each other in play. Their skin was so much thicker than ours, they didn’t feel it as much.
I’d even let Zan nip me a few times when he was overexcited, but I guess I should have been harsher with him when he did it.
He wasn’t allowed to be a chimp. He had to be a human.
That night after dinner, Tim Borden dropped by and we went out on our bikes.
I’d been spending a fair amount of time with him over the summer, which surprised me, because we didn’t really have a ton in common. Maybe we were both just bored. It didn’t matter. It got me out of the house, away from poopy diapers.
We’d mostly ride around, or hang out in his basement, playing pinball and Monopoly and Risk and taking peeks at his father’s magazines. We spent time at my place too. I was a bit nervous the first time I showed him Zan. I guess I was worried he would laugh or think Zan was some kind of goofy pet.
But instead he’d asked if he could hold him. He was very careful when I put Zan in his arms, and Zan seemed to like him—which made me like Tim all the more. Mom liked Tim, but I’m not sure Dad did. I got the feeling he thought Tim wasn’t the kind of kid I should be hanging out with.
It was another one of those perfect summer nights as we cycled in the direction of the construction site. At the entrance were two other guys, waiting astride their bikes. Tim called out to them, and we pulled off onto the gravel.
“Hey,” Tim said, “this is Ben.”
It was the first time I’d met Tim’s friends. Jamie was on his soccer team. He had red hair and a chipped front tooth, and seemed like a good-natured guy. Mike, I wasn’t so sure about. He had scary eyes. They were intelligent, but they stared really hard, and I couldn’t tell what was going on behind them. It didn’t look like there was a lot of sunlight and chirping birds back there. He didn’t talk much.
“You want to go in?” Tim asked me. Obviously he’d planned this with the other two, and I didn’t want to look like a wimp.
“Sure,” I said.
There was a chain across the entrance, but we just hopped off our bikes, ducked under, and wheeled our bikes in a ways, out of sight of the main road.
The site was how I imagined a battlefield from World War I. All rubble and mud and pools of oily water and lots of metal debris and oil drums and wire. There weren’t any houses going up yet. It looked like they were still working on the underground stuff, because there were big trenches and beside them huge cement cylinders on their sides. They were so big we could walk right through them, barely stooping.
“These are the storm drains,” Tim explained.
The massive digging machinery sat crooked on the uneven earth, casting long shadows. In a sci-fi movie it would’ve all come to life and made a grab for us. Mike and Jamie climbed up into one of the excavators and sat in the cabin, pushing at the controls for a bit. After they came down, Mike lit a cigarette and passed it around. I took a puff and held the smoke in my mouth for a second before blowing it out.
“So you’re the guy with the monkey,” Jamie said.
“Chimpanzee,” I corrected.
“What’s the difference?” asked Mike, turning his dark eyes on me.
“Different animals. Different species.” I might’ve told him that the chimp was the closest ancestor to humans, but I wasn’t sure he’d be interested.
“You should bring him here,” said Mike, looking around. “He’d go nuts playing out here.”
“Hmm,” I said. I couldn’t think of a worse idea. All I saw were the sharp things Zan could cut himself on. All the holes and puddles he might fall into.
Near the big trench and storm drain segments, Mike found an old spray-paint can on the ground. He picked it up, gave it a shake.
“Check it out,” he said.
Around the inside of one of the cement cylinders, he sprayed a big circle, then quickly took his lighter and lit it. The flame took right away, licking hungrily all around.
“Wicked!” said Tim.
“Mike, you freaking pyro!” said Jamie.
“Watch this,” Mike said. He stepped back, then took a run and jumped right through the ring of fire, landing in a crouch inside the cement tube. I let out my breath. I’d half expected him to catch fire.
Inside the tube, he stepped closer to the circle of flame, shook the can, and sprayed some more onto the fire. The aerosol ignited in a long cone.
Even Tim looked a bit nervous now. “The can’s gonna blow up in your hand!” he said.
But Mike just laughed and fed the fire some more. I imagined an explosion. I imagined him aflame, screaming. He took a few steps back, then jumped on out.
“Easy,” he said, then looked at me. “You go.”
I was about to say no, but for some reason I didn’t. Back in Toronto I would’ve said no. But maybe here I could be the crazy kid for a change. I’d never been that kid before.
I took a run and hunched over as I leaped thr
ough. I hardly even felt the heat of the fire. It was just like passing your finger fast through a candle flame. I was inside the tube now, and I felt good. I’d done it. The flames smelled greasy. The other three were watching me, and behind them I could see the road and the entrance to the construction site—
And a pickup that hadn’t been there before.
“Hey, get out of there!” someone shouted, and my eyes spotted a man, hurrying towards us.
“Crap!” I said, and the other guys all turned at the same time, then started running. I ran out the back end of the tube and kept going, cutting across the construction site towards the road, veering around machinery and piles of steel and crates, skirting sludgy pools. It was pretty dark by now. I could still hear the man shouting, but I couldn’t see Tim and the others anywhere.
I staggered on through some tall grass, vaulted over a low wooden fence, and was back on West Saanich Road. I didn’t know what had happened to the other guys. I wanted my bike, but there was no way I was going back right now. What could I do? Miserably, I started home on foot. I’d come back later for my bike. I walked way off to the side of the road, near the trees, so I could hide in case the guy in the truck came past.
When I got back home it was really dark, and Mom opened the front door as I came down the driveway.
“Where’ve you been?” she demanded, not looking at all happy. Then: “Where’s your bike?”
“I just left it,” I said vaguely.
“What happened?”
There was no way out. In the kitchen I told her and Dad what we’d been doing at the construction site.
“That was very foolish behaviour, Ben,” Dad said.
Mom shook her head in horror. “Jumping through fire?”
“Well, let’s see if we get a call from the police,” said Dad.
“The police?” I said, feeling wobbly. “I don’t think he was a policeman.”
“No, he was probably a security guard. But he might call the police. Trespassing. Destruction of property. Setting a fire … this is serious stuff.”
“It won’t come to that,” Mom said, frowning at Dad.
“He didn’t see any of us,” I said. “We all ran.”
But what if he’d caught Tim or one of the others? Would they tell on me?