"Wait," said the man behind the counter.
John froze.
"Close the door."
John stepped forward and let the door close.
"You came here for dinner?"
"Yes. I'll go somewhere else. No problem."
"No," said the man, cocking his head. "You came here. What do you want?"
"I, uh ... well, a pizza. Or a bento box. Or a combo," John said, although he had no idea why they were even having this conversation. Were they stalling while they figured out where to ditch his headless, handless torso? Would he end up in the dumpster beside the vending machine at the Buccaneer?
"Pizza. You like pepperoni?"
John swallowed heavily, noisily.
The man, who John had decided was Jimmy (or at least operating in a Jimmy-type capacity) snapped his fingers toward the table. "Frankie, a pepperoni pizza. You heard our customer."
Frankie's eyebrows rose in surprise. He pointed at his own chest.
"Yeah, you," said Jimmy.
Frankie glanced around at the others, and, finding no solidarity, skulked off behind the counter and disappeared between the sheets. John heard a clattering in the back, followed by the opening and closing of a door.
"Have a seat," said Jimmy. He tipped his head toward the table, and the men who were still standing around it.
"No, I'm okay," said John.
"I said have a seat."
"Okay." John's eyes flitted over to the dog, which was no longer growling, but continued to stare with malicious intent.
"Don't mind Booger. He wouldn't hurt a fly."
John moved reluctantly toward the table. One of the men righted an overturned chair and pulled it out in invitation. John sat on its edge, mentally calculating the length of the thick leather leash and the distance between him and the dog. The others remained standing wordlessly, their expressions carefully blank.
"So," said Jimmy, who remained behind the counter. He bent down and set something hard (ker-clunk!) on a shelf. Then he leaned over the counter, resting on his hairy forearms. His arms, hands, even the backs of his fingers were covered in black hair. "You from out of town?"
"Yes," said John.
"Yeah? Where you from?"
"Iowa," said John. He had no idea why.
"Really?"
"Really."
"I hear they got good potatoes there."
"I think that's Idaho."
"You sure?"
"Pretty sure."
"Because I thought it was Iowa."
And so it went, for the longest half hour of John's life. Twice, a cell phone rang and was taken behind the sheets to be answered in muffled tones. Twice, men came in and stopped cold at the sight of John. They turned their eyes to Jimmy, who tilted his head in a way that said all was well and led them behind the curtain. Eventually, John heard the back door open and close again. Someone flung keys onto a surface, and Frankie appeared with a small box. He came around the counter and dropped it on the table in front of John. It was from Domino's Pizza.
John stared at it.
Jimmy shrugged. "We recycle boxes. Cuz of the environment and whatnot."
Booger raised his snout, sniffing hopefully.
John, for his own part, smelled the sweet scent of freedom. They were going to let him go. No death! No dumpster! He leapt to his feet. "So, what do I owe you?" he said, patting his pockets.
"Frankie?" asked Jimmy.
"Fifty bucks," said Frankie.
"Fifty bucks, all righty, then," said John. He was giddy, dizzy with relief. He dug his wallet out and tore through it with trembling hands. "I only have twenties," he said, tossing three bills onto the table. "But that's okay. Keep the change."
"Thanks. We'll do that," said Jimmy. "Enjoy your ... dinner."
John snatched the pizza box and backed toward the door. "I will. Thank you. I--" When he felt the cool metal of the door beneath his fingers he turned, launched himself through it, and ran. He ducked across the highway without looking, causing one driver to swerve and lean heavily on his horn. In the lengthening shadow of the Buccaneer's sign-clutching lizard, John leaned over and rested one hand on his thigh, trying to catch his breath. He'd run only about thirty yards, but he was light-headed, his heart pounding.
When John turned to go back to his room he noticed the women at the pool, who were packing up their things as the last of the sunlight dwindled. They stared in horrified amazement. John forced a smile, indicating that everything was okay, and held the pizza box aloft by way of an explanation.
----
There was no desk, so he stripped down to his boxers and sat cross-legged on the bed. He opened his computer, and then the file. He stared at its blank whiteness and the strip of menus and tools above it.
At this moment, the story in his head was perfect. He also knew from experience that it would degenerate the second he started typing, because such was the nature of writing.
A portrait of Isabel Duncan, when he first met her at the lab, her long blond hair streaming over her shoulders, her laugh clear and unrestrained in a way that, as the interview progressed, charmed him into an attraction that eventually alarmed him. Her statement that "over the years, they've become more human, and I've become more bonobo," as she rolled around on the floor being tickled by Mbongo, and he'd gotten it--he'd really gotten it. An accessible summary of the language research, set forth not in the impenetrable vocabulary of linguistics but rather in the language of the experience itself, of making eye contact with members of another species and the startling and discomfiting realization that there was something damned close to human in there. Of knowing not only that they understood every word you said but if moved to answer would do so--and in your own language. Of trying to capture the wonderment, near-watershed, of it. It had not escaped John that the bonobos had managed to acquire human language, but that humans had not crossed over in the other direction. It had also not escaped him that Isabel Duncan also recognized this.
And then the seismic shift in fortune: the horrors of the bombing, the terrorist tactics, the complete lack of resolution. The swooping away and unexplained absence, the media circus and parasitic publicity junkies. In his imagination he could picture the story whole--if only he could plug a thumbnail chip into a slot behind his ear and download straight from his brain to his computer. But he could not. He had only the imperfect medium of words.
He typed a sentence, and then another. A few more came out, his fingers banging the keys like scattershot. He read what he'd written, and deleted it.
He examined the pizza for razor blades, sniffed it, blotted the orange grease with a wad of toilet tissue, and ate it. It was cold and tough, but no worse than his breakfast hot dog.
He pulled up Nexis and discovered that there were more stories on Biden's abysmal table-tennis scores than on a newly discovered Justice Department memo from Bush's last year in office that blatantly authorized torture.
He called up the pieces other reporters had written about the apes, and then, in the hope of discovering some fresh angle, also searched the Internet for that ubiquitous and free online content that had buried his chances of working at a real paper. He watched the ELL Webcast again, and called up the press release Faulks had sent out the day after Ape House began airing. He opened the notes he'd taken on the plane coming back from Kansas, before he knew about the bombing. He investigated the cost of digital billboards. He typed a little, read it back, and deleted it.
After an hour, he had nothing. Zippo. Zilch.
How could this be so hard? The story had been percolating in his head since New Year's Day. Why couldn't he just open the tap and catch it in a bucket?
It was true he was working on no sleep and the physical aftereffects of sheer terror. An image of Booger's gaping maw flashed through his head in slow motion. Strings of slobber flew from undulating jowls. Of course that amount of adrenaline would be followed by a physical crash. Not an hour before, he had thought he might become dog meat.
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He also could not help thinking that Amanda was probably out with The Hated Sean at that very moment, fending off his advances. John tried calling her, but went straight to voice mail.
It was 8:30, and he had nothing written.
He took out his voice recorder and clicked Play. He hoped he hadn't been smiling and nodding the whole time he was tuned out, since Francesca De Rossi turned out to have been explaining that the term wild-caught ape virtually always translated into "shot the mother, took the baby," and that all great apes used in entertainment were juveniles, which meant that even if they weren't wild-caught they had been kidnapped, since great-ape mothers are as likely as human mothers to hand over their babies.
John began typing, but his brain hurt and he was pulling words out of all the wrong slots. He needed 800 words by midnight. By 9:07, he had 205 words written. By 10:31, he was back down to 187. He glanced through his notes, made bullet points, and began to flesh them out. The transitions could come later.
He downloaded Boston's "Amanda," and put it on repeat. He picked at his file, wrote a sentence here, moved it there, broke it into pieces, and put it back together. As he replaced a comma for the third time, he thought of Oscar Wilde's remark that he'd spent the morning removing a comma and the afternoon putting it back.
His phone rang and he dove for it. It was Topher, and it was 12:07.
"Where's your piece?" Topher demanded.
"I'm just finishing up. It's coming."
"It better be," said Topher.
The line went dead.
John sat hyperventilating in front of his 422 words. He had never missed a deadline in his life, and this was his very first assignment for the Weekly Times.
He discovered he'd said the same thing twice, a paragraph apart. He liked the way he'd said it both times, but knew the drill and deleted one anyway. He wanted to pull his brain out of his nose with a crochet hook--surely that would be easier than finding more words. He borrowed some phrases from Francesca De Rossi, and threw in some advertising statistics. He spoke about the bonobos' sexual habits and their apparent total lack of interest in human pornography as compared to humans' sexual habits and their absolute obsession with the bonobos'. He outlined the differences between chimpanzees and bonobos, discussed the apes' decorating choices, and added a snippet about the upcoming hearing and the pregnancy. And then, quite suddenly, he was finished.
He stared in astonishment and checked the word count--797. He rubbed his eyes, went for an overdue piss, reread the piece, and discovered that it was good. Not just passable, but something he would be proud to turn in anywhere. He ran a spell check, read it once again to make sure he wasn't deluding himself, wished Amanda were there so he could run it past her, and emailed it. It was 12:37. The read receipt came back instantly.
----
He crawled into bed and wrapped his arms around the pillow. He gathered the blanket into a ball and squished it between his legs to cushion his knees. He took a deep breath and slid into a dream that involved Amanda.
Just as things were getting good, the thumper car pulled up in front of his door. Noisy women spilled out of it again, just like the night before. Once again they tippy-tapped up the concrete stairs and made their way unsteadily to their room. At one point John heard a heavy thud, followed by howls of laughter, and then cajoling and scraping, as they dragged the fallen one to her feet. And then, just like the night before, they slammed their door, turned on their music and the TV, ran the shower, and generally continued the party.
John tried burying his head under a pillow. He tried wrapping his head in a T-shirt. After twenty minutes, he pulled on his jeans and went upstairs.
The redhead opened the door. She was heavily made up, and wearing a latex dress the color of maraschino cherries. A cigarette hung from the corner of her vermilion lips. She looked older close up, a fact that was accentuated by the layers of makeup, which highlighted the fine lines at the corners of her eyes and above her lips.
She ran suspicious eyes up and down the length of his body.
"What you want?" she demanded in a thick accent.
Behind her, a brunette lay on the bed, curled like a fetus around a large bottle of vodka. Her nails were long and curved, each bearing a silver comet on a background of midnight blue.
"Can you keep it down? I'm trying to sleep," said John.
The bathroom door opened and another woman came out. Her hair was wrapped in a towel. Other than that she was completely naked. Although she could not have missed the fact that John was standing in the open doorway, she was completely unself-conscious as she walked to the bed, plucked the bottle of vodka from the brunette, and took a long drink.
"We just got off work," said the redhead at the door. She inhaled deeply and blew a stream of smoke straight at John's face.
"It's past three and I have to get up in a few hours."
"This is not my problem," said the woman, shrugging.
"It'll be your problem when I complain to the manager."
"Ha!" She snorted. "I don't think so."
And then she closed the door. She did not slam it; she just set it in motion and turned away. John's last glimpse was of her at the bed reaching for the vodka.
John lay in bed, thrashing and trying to ignore the party raging upstairs. Eventually he gave up and turned on the TV. He flipped through the channels, stopping briefly on Ape House. The bonobos were sleeping peacefully in their blanket nests, although the engineers were doing their best to keep things interesting. Cameras zoomed in on faces and tremulous lips, and the soundtrack superimposed snores and cricket noises.
Watching the bonobos sleep was infuriating since John himself could not, so he kept clicking. A desiccated ninety-four-year-old man in a muscle shirt demonstrated a kitchen machine shaped like a steam engine that, as far as John could tell, extracted juice from vegetables and spat all the fiber out the back. The man's eighty-seven-year-old wife gamely swallowed the juice of raw onions and beets, smiling broadly to indicate how much she enjoyed it. On the next channel, a lingerie-clad woman rolled around on her bed while purring and smiling into her phone. Local singles who like to party are just a phone call away, said the announcer. Tiffany is waiting ... The phone numbers were displayed at the bottom of the screen.
The ruckus upstairs stopped at 5:41 A.M. There were a few moments of mattress coils squeaking as bodies adjusted themselves, and then beautiful, beautiful silence.
When John's alarm went off at 7:30, he wanted to cry. Amanda had just vaporized for a second time, and this time at a crucial moment. He hit the snooze button, jacked off with great effort and misery, hit the snooze button again, ripped the covers back, and went to the bathroom to clean up. He was devastated by lack of sleep, so tired he nicked himself four times while shaving. When he emerged to find his clothes, he still had little pieces of toilet paper stuck to his face.
John's hand was on the doorknob before he turned back. He stood at the foot of the bed, looking first at it, and then at the ceiling. He positioned his laptop in the center of the bed, signed on to iTunes, downloaded Jefferson Starship's "We Built This City," put it on repeat, turned the volume to full, gathered his things, and left, slamming the door behind him.
28
The phone beside Isabel's bed rang, waking her. She had her blackout curtains drawn and was momentarily confused; she reached for her cell phone and said, "Hello?" before realizing it was the hotel phone that was ringing. She propped herself onto an elbow and fumbled for the light switch. "Hello?" she said again, this time into the correct mouthpiece.
"Good morning, Miss Duncan. This is Mario from the front desk. There's a young ... 'lady' here to see you."
"Pink hair?"
"Indeed."
"Please send her up."
"Yes, miss."
Isabel went into the washroom and splashed cold water on her face. She picked up each of the miniature bottles to see what the housekeeping genie had brought her the day before, noting with keen a
ppreciation the symmetry with which they'd been arranged. She put them back exactly as they had been and was contemplating whether she had time to change out of her flannel pajamas when someone started rapping "Shave and a Haircut" on her door.
Isabel swung it open before the Two Bits. "Celia!"
Celia bounded through and hugged her. "Let me look at you," she said. "Love the pajamas, by the way. Turn around."
Isabel sighed and turned her back to let Celia examine her head. Celia ran her finger across the raised scar tissue.
"It's better. You know what I'd do? I'd get a zipper tattooed over it, or maybe Frankenstein stitches."
"Yeah-huh. I don't think so."
"It would be so cool. You could, like, own that scar."
"I do own it. And I'm going to grow hair over it. How was your flight? It must have been the red-eye," Isabel said, glancing at the clock by the bed.
"I hitchhiked."
"Celia! You're going to get yourself killed."
"Not likely. I caught a ride with a church bus. We sang camp songs all the way here."
"No, you did not. You did not catch a ride that took you all the way from Lawrence to here."
"Okay, so maybe there were a few truckers along the way."
"Celia!"
"They were fine."
Celia squeezed past and disappeared into the bathroom.
"So when did you get in?" Isabel called over the sound of running water.
"Yesterday afternoon."
"Where did you stay? Where's your stuff?"
Celia appeared in the doorway, scrubbed her toe in the carpet, and looked coyly at the floor. "Yeah. About that. I kind of met this guy ..."
"Oh, Celia, tell me you did not stay with a complete stranger," said Isabel.
"Calm down, Mama Bear. You know I'm careful. And I didn't really meet him, meet him. More like met up with again. You'll recognize him."
"So who is he and where are you staying?"
Celia came forward and took Isabel's hands. She led her to the bed, sat, and patted the space beside her. "Sit."
Isabel obeyed, albeit reluctantly.
"We're staying at the campground, but he's downstairs in the restaurant. I want you to come meet him."
"I thought you said I knew him?"
"No," Celia said carefully. "I said you'd recognize him."