I thought of the quiet lamplit street out front, the charming architecture of this house, the pair of matched magnolia trees, the arbor hung with star jasmine. No one passing the place that night would have guessed at the strange drama playing out within these ordinary stucco walls.
“The monkey seems like he’s expecting them,” Angela said, “isn’t concerned, doesn’t try to get away. One of them shoots him with a dart. He bares his teeth and hisses but doesn’t even try to pluck the needle out. He drops what’s left of the second tangerine, struggles hard to swallow the bite he has in his mouth, then just curls up on the table, sighs, goes to sleep. They leave with the monkey, and Rod goes with them, and I never see the monkey again. Rod doesn’t come back until three o’clock in the morning, until Christmas Eve is over, and we never do exchange gifts until late Christmas Day, and by then we’re in Hell and nothing’s ever going to be the same. No way out, and I know it.”
Finally she tossed back her remaining brandy and put the glass down on the table so hard that it sounded like a gunshot.
Until this moment she had exhibited only fear and melancholy, both as deep as cancer in the bone. Now came anger from a still deeper source.
“I had to let them take their goddamn blood samples the day after Christmas.”
“Who?”
“The project at Wyvern.”
“Project?”
“And once a month ever since—their sample. Like my body isn’t mine, like I’ve got to pay a rent in blood just to be allowed to go on living in it.”
“Wyvern has been closed a year and a half.”
“Not all of it. Some things don’t die. Can’t die. No matter how much we wish them dead.”
Although she was thin almost to the point of gauntness, Angela had always been pretty in her way. Porcelain skin, a graceful brow, high cheekbones, sculpted nose, a generous mouth that balanced the otherwise vertical lines of her face and paid out a wealth of smiles—these qualities, combined with her selfless heart, made her lovely in spite of the fact that her skull was too near the skin, her skeleton too ill-concealed beneath the illusion of immortality that the flesh provides. Now, however, her face was hard and cold and ugly, fiercely sharpened at every edge by the grinding wheel of anger.
“If I ever refuse to give them the monthly sample, they’ll kill me. I’m sure of that. Or lock me away in some secret hospital out there where they can keep a closer watch on me.”
“What’s the sample for? What’re they afraid of?”
She seemed about to tell me, but then she pressed her lips together.
“Angela?”
I gave a sample every month myself, for Dr. Cleveland, and often Angela drew it. In my case it was for an experimental procedure that might detect early indications of skin and eye cancers from subtle changes in blood chemistry. Although giving the samples was painless and for my own good, I resented the invasion, and I could imagine how deeply I would resent it if it were compulsory rather than voluntary.
She said, “Maybe I shouldn’t tell you. Even though you need to know to…to defend yourself. Telling you all of it is like lighting a fuse. Sooner or later, your whole world blows up.”
“Was the monkey carrying a disease?”
“I wish it were a disease. Wouldn’t that be nice? Maybe I’d be cured by now. Or dead. Dead would be better than what’s coming.”
She snatched up her empty cordial glass, made a fist around it, and for a moment I thought she would hurl it across the room.
“The monkey never bit me,” she insisted, “never clawed me, never even touched me, for God’s sake. But they won’t believe me. I’m not sure even Rod believed me. They won’t take any chances. They made me…Rod made me submit to sterilization.”
Tears stood in her eyes, unshed but shimmering like the votive light in the red glass candleholders.
“I was forty-five years old then,” she said, “and I’d never had a child, because I was already sterile. We’d tried so hard to have a baby—fertility doctors, hormone therapy, everything, everything—and nothing worked.”
Oppressed by the suffering in Angela’s voice, I was barely able to remain in my chair, looking passively up at her. I had the urge to stand, to put my arms around her. To be the nurse this time.
With a tremor of rage in her voice, she said, “And still the bastards made me have the surgery, permanent surgery, didn’t just tie my tubes but removed my ovaries, cut me, cut out all hope.” Her voice almost broke, but she was strong. “I was forty-five, and I’d given up hope anyway, or pretended to give it up. But to have it cut out of me…The humiliation of it, the hopelessness. They wouldn’t even tell me why. Rod took me out to the base the day after Christmas, supposedly for an interview about the monkey, about its behavior. He wouldn’t elaborate. Very mysterious. He took me into this place…this place out there that even most people on the base didn’t know existed. They sedated me against my will, performed the surgery without my permission. And when it was all over, the sons of bitches wouldn’t even tell me why!”
I pushed my chair away from the table and got to my feet. My shoulders ached, and my legs felt weak. I hadn’t been expecting to hear a story of this weight.
Although I wanted to comfort her, I didn’t attempt to approach Angela. The cordial glass was still sealed in the hard shell of her fist. Grinding anger had sharpened her once-pretty face into a collection of knives. I didn’t think she would want me to touch her just then.
Instead, after standing awkwardly at the table for seconds that were interminable, not sure what to do, I went at last to the back door and double-checked the dead bolt to confirm that it was engaged.
“I know Rod loved me,” she said, although the anger in her voice didn’t soften. “It broke his heart, just broke him entirely, to do what he had to do. Broke his heart to cooperate with them, tricking me into surgery. He was never the same after that.”
I turned and saw that her fist was cocked. The blades of her face were polished by candlelight.
“And if his superiors had understood how close Rod and I had always been, they would have known he couldn’t go on keeping secrets from me, not when I’d suffered so much for them.”
“Eventually he told you all of it,” I guessed.
“Yes. And I forgave him, truly forgave him for what had been done to me, but he was still in despair. There was nothing I could do to nurse him out of it. So deep in despair…and so scared.” Now her anger was veined with pity and with sorrow. “So scared he had no joy in anything anymore. Finally he killed himself…and when he was dead, there was nothing left to cut out of me.”
She lowered her fist. She opened it. She stared at the cordial glass—and then carefully set it on the table.
“Angela, what was wrong with the monkey?” I asked.
She didn’t reply.
Images of candle flames danced in her eyes. Her solemn face was like a stone shrine to a dead goddess.
I repeated the question: “What was wrong with the monkey?”
When at last Angela spoke, her voice was hardly louder than a whisper: “It wasn’t a monkey.”
I knew that I had heard her correctly, yet her words made no sense. “Not a monkey? But you said—”
“It appeared to be a monkey.”
“Appeared?”
“And it was a monkey, of course.”
Lost, I said nothing.
“Was and wasn’t,” she whispered. “And that’s what was wrong with it.”
She did not seem entirely rational. I began to wonder if her fantastic story had been more fantasy than truth—and if she knew the difference.
Turning away from the votive candles, she met my eyes. She was not ugly anymore, but she wasn’t pretty again, either. Hers was a face of ashes and shadows. “Maybe I shouldn’t have called you. I was emotional about your dad dying. I wasn’t thinking clearly.”
“You said I need to know…to defend myself.”
She nodded. “You do. That’s right. You need to know. You’re hanging by such a thin thread. You need to know who hates you.”
I held out my hand to her, but she didn’t take it.
“Angela,” I pleaded, “I want to know what really happened to my parents.”
“They’re dead. They’re gone. I loved them, Chris, loved them as friends, but they’re gone.”
“I still need to know.”
“If you’re thinking that somebody has to pay for their deaths…then you have to realize that nobody ever will. Not in your lifetime. Not in anyone’s. No matter how much of the truth you learn, no one will be made to pay. No matter what you try to do.”
I found that I had drawn my hand back and had curled it into a fist on the table. After a silence, I said, “We’ll see.”
“I’ve quit my job at Mercy this evening.” Revealing this sad news, she appeared to shrink, until she resembled a child in adult clothing, once more the girl who had brought iced tea, medicine, and pillows to her disabled mother. “I’m not a nurse anymore.”
“What will you do?”
She didn’t answer.
“It was all you ever wanted to be,” I reminded her.
“Doesn’t seem any point to it now. Bandaging wounds in a war is vital work. Bandaging wounds in the middle of Armageddon is foolish. Besides, I’m becoming. I’m becoming. Don’t you see?”
In fact, I didn’t see.
“I’m becoming. Another me. Another Angela. Someone I don’t want to be. Something I don’t dare think about.”
I still didn’t know what to make of her apocalyptic talk. Was it a rational response to the secrets of Wyvern or the result of the personal despair arising from the loss of her husband?
She said, “If you insist on knowing about this, then once you know, there’s nothing to do but sit back, drink what pleases you most, and watch it all end.”
“I insist anyway.”
“Then I guess it’s time for show-and-tell,” Angela said with evident ambivalence. “But…oh, Chris, it’s going to break your heart.” Sadness elongated her features. “I think you need to know…but it’s going to break your heart.”
When she turned from me and crossed the kitchen, I began to follow her.
She stopped me. “I’ll have to turn some lights on to get what I need. You better wait here, and I’ll bring everything back.”
I watched her navigate the dark dining room. In the living room, she switched on a single lamp, and from there she moved out of sight.
Restlessly, I circled this room to which I had been confined, my mind spinning as I prowled. The monkey was and was not a monkey, and its wrongness lay in this simultaneous wasness and notness. This would seem to make sense only in a Lewis Carroll world, with Alice at the bottom of a magical rabbit hole.
At the back door, I tried the dead bolt again. Locked.
I drew the curtain aside and surveyed the night. I could not see Orson.
Trees were stirring. The wind had returned.
Moonlight was on the move. Apparently, new weather was coming in from the Pacific. As the wind flung tattered clouds across the face of the moon, a silvery radiance appeared to ripple across the nightscape. In fact, what traveled were the dappling shadows of the clouds, and the movement of the light was but an illusion. Nevertheless, the backyard was transformed into a winter stream, and the light purled like water moving under ice.
From elsewhere in the house came a brief wordless cry. It was as thin and forlorn as Angela herself.
13
The cry was so short-lived and so hollow that it might have been no more real than the movement of the moonlight across the backyard, merely a ghost of sound haunting a room in my mind. Like the monkey, it possessed both a quality of wasness and notness.
As the door curtain slipped through my fingers and fell silently across the glass, however, a muffled thump sounded elsewhere in the house and shuddered through the walls.
The second cry was briefer and thinner than the first—but it was unmistakably a bleat of pain and terror.
Maybe she had merely fallen off a step stool and sprained her ankle. Maybe I’d heard only wind and birds in the eaves. Maybe the moon is made of cheese and the sky is a chocolate nonpareil with sugar stars.
I called loudly to Angela.
She didn’t answer.
The house was not so large that she could have failed to hear me. Her silence was ominous.
Cursing under my breath, I drew the Glock from my jacket pocket. I held it in the candlelight, searching desperately for safeties.
I found only one switch that might be what I wanted. When I pressed it down, an intense beam of red light shot out of a smaller hole below the muzzle and painted a bright dot on the refrigerator door.
My dad, wanting a weapon that was user-friendly even to gentle professors of literature, had paid extra for laser sighting. Good man.
I didn’t know much about handguns, but I knew some models of pistols featured “safe action” systems with only internal safety devices that disengaged as the trigger was pulled and, after firing, engaged again. Maybe this was one of those weapons. If not, then I would either find myself unable to get off a shot when confronted by an assailant—or, fumbling in panic, would shoot myself in the foot.
Although I wasn’t trained for this work, there was no one but me to do the job. Admittedly, I thought about getting out of there, climbing on my bike, riding to safety, and placing an anonymous emergency call to the police. Thereafter, however, I would never be able to look at myself in a mirror—or even meet Orson’s eyes.
I didn’t like the way my hands were shaking, but I sure as hell couldn’t pause for deep-breathing exercises or meditation.
As I crossed the kitchen to the open door at the dining room, I considered returning the pistol to my pocket and taking a knife from the cutlery drawer. Telling the story of the monkey, Angela had shown me where the blades were kept.
Reason prevailed. I was no more practiced with knives than I was expert with firearms.
Besides, using a knife, slashing and gouging at another human being, seemed to require a ruthlessness greater than that needed to pull a trigger. I figured I could do whatever was necessary if my life—or Angela’s—was on the line, but I couldn’t rule out the possibility that I was better suited to the comparatively dry business of shooting than to the up-close-and-personal wet work of evisceration. In a desperate confrontation, a flinch might be fatal.