Beside me on my desk there’s a raw chicken liver in a red velvet jewelry box. The box is just large enough to fit the meat, but a pinch of flesh is caught in one of the metal hinges, and the little gilt clasp that closes the box strains against the hump of liver.
The whole thing—box and liver—softly stinks. This morning, before I sat down at the computer, I took the box out of the refrigerator where it has nestled for the last few days between a quart of raspberry kefir and a plastic pint of alfalfa sprouts. When my wife, Darla, saw me put it on my desk so early, long before I was supposed to take off, she wrinkled her nose.
“Jesus, Charlotte,” Darla said, “is that really necessary?”
“I don’t want to forget it,” I told her, but she knew, of course, I would never forget.
“You could have just kept it in the fridge. I would make sure you took it.”
The velvet box is from the Christmas present Darla gave me last year. The present was a necklace made of a flat gold chain. I wear the necklace now, but when I got that present, I was most excited about that box and wished I’d gotten it a few weeks earlier. When we were cleaning up last year, I slipped that box into the plastic shopping bags we keep in the hall closet, stuffed with throwaway bows and scraps of wrapping paper and dead rolls of scotch tape, and I thought about that red velvet box all year long.
But still, I put off getting into the car until the last possible moment, until I will most certainly be late.
Instead, I sit at my desk with my present of chicken liver and answer e-mail.
Before that, I was Googling Charlie and the Toneybee. I only allow myself to do this once a year, this time of year, and every year I find a little bit more. In the years since we left the Toneybee and I have grown and graduated from college and made my small life in the world, the story has moved out of my reach. It’s all because of the Internet. Online, there are those who remember the experiment, and those who discover it, and usually those are the people I’ve learned to avoid: racial militants, animal militants, trivia buffs, fans of great apes, the relentlessly quirky. Once a year, I search and I find our family in posts with titles like “Top Ten Wackiest Sacrifices for Science” and “Fifty-Three Weirdest Childhood Pets.” I read the lists and then I will myself not to read the comments.
Sometimes someone finds my e-mail address and sends me a question. They’ve tracked down the Toneybee’s report of the experiment, or they’ve read Man or Beast? for some college seminar. They write to ask if all of it is true. I don’t write back to the cranks or the ones with a mission, but I respond to the softball questions.
“What was it like having a chimp for a brother?”
I’ve learned you can’t really answer much more than that. You have to stop the questions there, before things get weird. Things always get weird. Usually people are just ramping up, waiting to steer the conversation toward what they really want to talk about: some form of race baiting or speculation about hygiene or, inevitably, questions about sex. To stop any of that from happening, I make a crack about the smell. I write, “Having a chimp for a brother stinks.” I like imagining the groans that greet that awful pun.
“What was it like having a chimp for a brother?” they write, and I write back, “It was a wonderful experience. I would not trade it for the world. It was really something special. My sister and I are grateful.”
Twenty minutes before I should leave, I get up from my desk and take great interest in fishing a broken tea bag out of the garbage disposal. When I pass through the living room, Darla says, from the couch, “Just go already. You’re making it worse by stalling.”
Darla isn’t coming, even though it was she who bought the cut of meat, not me, and it was she who made sure it was a good one. She’s never once asked to come with me on these trips. She’s said instead, “I’ll go if you want me to,” and I love her, I love her, I love her for caring so much and doing me the kindness of pretending not to.
In the car, at the first stoplight, I take out my phone and peck out an apology that spills over into four texts, explaining why I am running late.
The reply buzzes back immediately.
A single, stoic K.
Fifteen minutes later, I’m parked at the base of the stairs to Callie’s apartment. I text her again, press send, but she does not reply. I just hear her front door slam, a few flights above me, and then I see her slowly make her way down the stone staircase.
Callie lives on the other side of the city from me, just outside of Boston, in one of those Somerville apartments built into the side of a hill. Her building is at the very top of a steep rise, with a narrow concrete staircase set deep into the earth, clambering up to the front door. Callie lives at the very top of the building, up in the clouds, far removed. She’s never invited me and Darla to her house. She’s never invited our parents, either. She doesn’t talk to any of us of friends or lovers, but it is a safe bet that she does not have any of either. As far as any of us know, in all the years she’s lived there, Callie has never had a houseguest.
She walks down the stairs sideways, rolling each hip forward and carefully making sure each foot falls fully on the step below it. As we’ve grown up, she’s only added to the weight she put on at the Toneybee, and so she is extra careful on the steep stairs. She has two shopping bags slung in the crooks of her arms. She keeps a third plastic bag close to her chest. She is wearing a purple felt overcoat and black baggy pants and a shiftless black wool sweater. Callie only wears black now. Her hair is threaded into a million microbraids that wisp around her full, pretty face and end abruptly in a severe bob, down around her chin.
When she’s finished her slow progress down the stairs, she unceremoniously dumps all of these bags into the backseat of my car before throwing herself in the front.
While she settles in beside me, I scan her for evidence of her secret life. There is a flurry of animal hairs, fine and white and bright on the black of her sweater. I see that she has on one black sock and one pink.
Your socks don’t match. I make a point of signing to her when we are together. I am hoping that if I say it with my hands, it will seem more like a gentle ribbing, not an accusation.
But it doesn’t work that way. Callie waits, allows herself a bristle. Then she says very distinctly, making her voice full and round, “I didn’t get to laundry this week.”
She has never gotten to laundry in all the weeks she’s lived alone. She hasn’t signed to me since we left the Toneybee over twenty years ago.
I start the car, make it out of the city, and pull on to the turnpike. Callie turns on the radio, loud, as soon as she can. She picks the most obnoxious channel possible: a news station, with periodic updates of traffic, the advertisements too loud. “W-I-N-S, the Winds of New England,” says the announcer with a heavy Boston accent.
I take my hand off the steering wheel. Do we have to listen to this?
“Yes,” Callie says, simply, but she’s smiling. This is rare. I always offend her. But she has decided not to be right now, which is a blessing, so I take it.
“Dad’s good,” I say, giving up on signing. Callie only nods.
Unlike Callie, I see our father every Sunday. When we left the Toneybee, we moved in with him and Uncle Lyle and Aunt Ginny in their house on Chalk Street. A humiliating time for Callie, a terrible, sad time for me, one we both prefer to forget about. When my sister and I left for college, he could finally afford to move out of Lyle’s house. Now, so many years later, he lives with his new wife, Gloria, a woman who looks eerily like our mother. She even sports a version of our mother’s old Jheri curl. But Gloria is nothing like our mother when you speak to her. She is adamantly passionless. She has no strong likes or dislikes, she does not abhor. If she has views on anything, she is very careful not to mention them in front of me or Callie or Darla. The rare times when all of us eat out together, and she catches me signing to Callie in passing, Gloria lowers her eyes and blushes.
I don’t talk about the Toneybee with our father. Any mention of it still makes him cry: it doesn’t matter when or where. I can say something about the trees around Courtland County High and his eyes cloud over.
Callie would like to believe she is the only one who still lives at the Toneybee in her heart, who goes through the experiment every day in her mind, but she is not. Still, she won’t give our father the satisfaction of sharing this grief.
He does not try to work past her reserve. He believes it is a just punishment, one that it is right he should endure. He accepts it meekly, but that does not mean he doesn’t rage in his heart about it. Or rather, in his heart and to me.
“How’s work?” I say, and watch Callie’s shoulders rise up, realizing instantly, that I have made a grave mistake.
“Work,” she says distinctly, “does not exist.”
I was not expecting this answer. As far as I knew, up until this moment, Callie was a massage therapist and actually quite good at it. She goes to the houses of the rich and touches the smalls of their backs with the palms of her hands. She has done this since she dropped out of college. Callie did not much care for college: she fell in with a Bible study group for a while, then a vegan collective, and finally a bunch of unaffiliated house shares on the outskirts of the city’s Blue line.
I should ask her why work does not exist, but she’s trained all of us not to ask any questions about her personal life. Even the names and numbers of her cats are off limits. And she has told me, long ago, that she does not like it when I “brag about my life,” as she puts it, so any conversation about myself is off limits as well.
I have nothing to brag about. My life is as odd and small and secretive as Callie’s. I, too, live in a very small room at the top of a very tall house, all of it outside of my price range. I am a lab technician at an eye doctor’s in downtown Boston. The difference between Callie and me is that I have Darla. Darla, who is not black but Indian; not from New England, but California; cannot sign and has never expressed the desire to learn. We met in college, and her complete otherness from me, what made me fall in love with her, has dulled, turned warm, and now I love her for what we share. She is not an animal lover, thank God. Still, it took her a while to realize I was not joking when I told her I do not want to have children because they only end up doing awful things.
When I first meant Darla, when we were young, I thought nobody would ever remember the Toneybee. Darla had never heard of it, and when I told her about it, all of it, she was more sickened by the story than fascinated. Besides her, I only told it to a few of our friends and, then, in strictest confidence.
And then came the Internet and we are known again, or believed to be known.
Last year, 2010 was the twenty-year anniversary of the start of our experiment. The fan notes came then, sent to my work address; Boston magazine did a brief write-up, a few other places published that picture. A few months after the write-ups, I received an e-mail with two attachments, scans of documents on Toneybee letterhead. The e-mail itself read, “I have often thought of you.” It read, “Inside these files, a kind of amends.” It was signed “Max.”
The first scan was of a very old and yellow document in a cramped script that hurt my eyes to read and was signed by Nymphadora. The second scan was of an old laser printout, a long, rambling letter from Julia Toneybee-Leroy.
I read both documents again and again, but I didn’t show them to my family. Callie would have raged, I told myself, and my parents would have wept. And I don’t think that’s what Max wanted when he sent them.
On the turnpike, I take the correct exit, but we drive past the gates of the Toneybee. We head downtown instead. Even though it’s February, Main Street is still decorated with pine garlands and oversized red velvet ribbons and between two lampposts, across a fine mesh of muddy netting, a string of glittering electric bulbs spell out COURTLAND COUNTY CELEBRATES DIVERSITY.
I pull over on to a side street and park in front of one of the overly restored Victorians. Callie says, “I’ll get Mom.” She leaves me in the car, in the cold, and I turn off the static of the radio and sit quiet.
Each year that we make this trip back to Courtland County, I have the terrible premonition that I will see Adia. I feel it with a certainty that glows from the middle of my chest and warms my skin in prickling fear and anticipation. Even now, as I sit in the car, I catch a glimpse of the back of a brown bald head and I gasp, and fight the urge to dive down in my seat and hide below the window line.
But it is obvious, after I blink, that it is merely the profile of a very skinny fifteen-year-old boy. And I remind myself that I am being silly, that it would be impossible for Adia to look the same now as she did twenty years ago, and impossible for her to walk down this street, precisely as I sit in a parked car, waiting for my mother. As much as I would like to believe I would be able to recognize Adia anywhere, that some small muscle in the back of my knee, or down around my elbow, say, would flip over in dull ache and recognition in her presence, I know, in reality, this would not be true. She could have passed me on the street or in an airport a dozen times in the last two decades, she probably in all likelihood has, and I have not known her.
Besides, it is impossible that she would be here, today, now, because she is a graphic designer in San Diego, married to a Polish man and mother of three sons. An entirely disappointing and pedestrian end for my Adia. It feels like an outrage. For all the torment she caused me, I willed her to grow up and become some sort of artistic terrorist: burning down monuments or etching scratchitti on the glass doors of expensive galleries or tearing oil portraits of our nation’s forefathers to ribbons. Then, at least, our painful time together would have been worth it.
I prefer, in my heart of hearts, to imagine that for Adia, domesticity is only a bivouac of sorts, that she is amassing her powers and will burst back into the world, soon enough, beautiful and merciless and ready again to devour hearts and history. But this is unlikely. We are both past thirty and should have done all our bursting by now.
Callie comes down the wooden steps of the old Victorian. She is carrying a large pile of presents for my mother, who walks behind her, slim and sober in a Michelin man coat. My mother has the same hairstyle now as Adia once did: shaved close to her skull, the better to show off her long and only slightly wrinkly neck.
Callie gets into the back with all the presents and my mother gets into the front beside me.
“You look good,” she says. “Both my girls look good.”
Callie beams at her for the lie.
She teaches sign language to every new hire at the Toneybee, and she teaches it to the new chimps, the ones just born, though they don’t allow her to ever be alone with them. The job was the Toneybee’s final bribe. It wasn’t needed, my mother would never have told what happened between Callie and Charlie, but they gave it to her anyway, a kind of insurance. When the Toneybee published their groundbreaking full study of Charlie a few months later, they said the experiment ended successfully and that the Freeman children showed all signs of happiness and no one has ever contested it.
I make a U-turn in her street. We turn back on to the highway and we drive back to the gates of the Toneybee. In the gatehouse is a new guard. She tells us Dr. Paulsen is expecting us. She waves us through with a smile. Lester Potter retired ten years ago, and in his place is a whole staff of security guards, mostly women and very young men, in nicer versions of Lester’s uniform. The Toneybee Institute has recovered enough in its fortunes for that.
The trees along the drive are bare. Past them, I could see a little bit deeper into the forest, where a few newer outbuildings have gone up. When we get to the end of the drive, we pull into the main parking lot. My mother would prefer it if we entered through the employee entrance, but Dr. Paulsen is waiting for us on the steps, eager to usher us through the lobby.
She looks exactly the same. She hugs my mother very tightly. Callie, too.
Dr. Paulsen does not waste time on small talk. It makes her uneasy to have us there. When she ushers us through the halls, her tongue darts across her lips and her eyes are downcast. This, despite the fact that we are the cause of her unprecedented success. The new buildings and the plural security guards and the better uniforms are all because of Charlie and our family, the fame and interest we brought her.
Charlie gave up his life in science a few years ago. It was after his retirement that we began to make these yearly visits to him.
We pass the cafeteria, the downstairs labs. We go upstairs and pass our old apartment without comment. It’s been converted into office space: a regular glass door where our front wooden one used to be. We are in the right wing of the building. Here, there are larger pens with two or three chimps in each: their hair is graying, their teeth are yellow, and a few are hunched over in arthritic discomfort. It’s where the older chimps retire.
Charlie’s pen is at the very back and he has it all to himself. He doesn’t share because he still cannot stand to be around other apes. He infinitely prefers people. Dr. Paulsen tried to mate him about a decade ago, but all attempts were unsuccessful. He ignored the pretty girl apes she put before him. He has spent a furiously celibate life. Abstinence is not natural for an ape, but he has refused all other options. Eventually, in his frustration, he began to make passes at the female lab workers, then the male ones, too, and this was part of the reason he left his life in science early.
His pen is larger than the others, with a television suspended from the ceiling in a battered cage. It’s always on, nearly always turned to a classic movie channel, in the hopes of catching a Western.
Callie is carrying most of the gifts. My mother has Callie’s plastic bag. The velvet box is still secreted in my purse.
When we reach him, Charlie has his back to us. He is gazing up at the television, laughing hoarsely. My mother calls, “Charlie,” but he doesn’t turn. He very rarely turns for her voice. He’s frozen her out: he’s miffed, even twenty years later, that they no longer live together, that she no longer wakes him in the morning and soothes him to sleep at night.
When Callie calls, “Charlie, Charlie,” he turns and happily pads over. She’s gotten that, at least, his admiration.
A lab technician unlocks his pen and we file in, placing the pile of gifts on the floor. Charlie paces back and forth anxiously as we arrange the boxes. He remembers the routine and he is rocking now, keen with anticipation for all his surprises. As soon as we’ve set the last box on the ground, he surges forward and starts tearing at wrapping paper with his yellowed, curling nails, his softened old teeth. He tears and tears until he’s forced the first box open and then he dips his head inside and ruts. When he comes back up for air, the ends of his beard are a bright, fluorescent pink, frosted with sugar dust. Those boxes came from Callie. She’s packed them to the brim with kids’ cereal.
Callie gets him the same thing every year, because it is Charlie’s favorite. She’s brought six large boxes worth of Frosted Flakes and Lucky Charms and Trix, and he devours the cereal in every one while Callie laughs, while our mother takes pictures, while I try not to cry.
He plays inside Callie’s large boxes until I get up the courage to take out my velvet box and set it on the floor. When he notices it, he’s up in a flash, snatching it into his hands.
It’s only when I see Charlie struggling with the clasp—first bashing the box on the ground, then grasping the clasp between his teeth, then, most frustrating and sadly of all, pinching his fingers, trying to get them small and agile enough to manipulate the catch—that I realize how perverse that box is, what a cruel present it makes. I realize why I was so eager to have it, why I saved it for twelve long months and made my wife pack it tight, why I took it out to stare at it for two hours this morning. Some part of me must have known he couldn’t open it, must have anticipated his frustration, must have thrilled to play this trick. My own pettiness sears through me, a surprise.
Callie watches Charlie struggle and huff and eventually start banging again until the box falls open and he can scrape out the meat. She turns to me but doesn’t say anything, only narrows her eyes. My pettiness doesn’t surprise her at all. It’s been proven again, my eagerness and capacity to hurt, and it is not shocking, only tells her what she already knows. She hasn’t been fooled by me for a long time. Right now, she knows me best.
My mother is beside herself. She can’t sit still, she wants to stop Charlie’s frustration and open his box for him, and gently pull the meat apart and feed him slips of liver one by one. But he is in such a frenzy, she can’t get ahold of him. She folds her hands and only allows herself to lilt forward, as if she can’t help it, as if she is being called. When he finally bashes my gift open and laps at the contents, she leans forward even farther. She wants to hear Charlie gnashing his triumph.
He traces his finger along the surface of the liver, marbled with broken brown veins, and he licks the grease.
When he’s done eating, he stalks away and turns his back to us. We are dismissed. We go back to the car. I usually treat Callie and my mother to dinner at a diner near town, but now, as I restart the car, Callie clears her throat shyly and proudly calls out from the backseat that the meal is on her.
My mother beams, “That’s wonderful.”
I am a little irked that such a simple, adult act draws such praise, but I nod and just sign Thanks. I also force myself not to ask how she will pay for it.
At the diner, after we’ve ordered and the waitress has left us, Callie clears her throat again.
“So,” she says. “I have something to tell you.”
She says she can afford this dinner because she’s been saving. She’s been saving for the past three years and she finally has enough money and this spring she is moving to Kinshasa, to the Congo. She is going to volunteer with an ape sanctuary there.
“Oh, Callie, it’s too dangerous. You can’t go. There are sanctuaries in nicer places,” my mother protests. “Go to Louisiana, go to Florida.” But her cries are weak. She knows she doesn’t really have a say.
“It’s only for a year,” Callie says, but something in her voice catches, her eyes skip. Callie is a terrible liar.
I watch her from across the table. I know, a few months from now, she will stand at the side of some unknown heat-broken highway. She will stand at the brink of a great wide forest. It will be night. She will hear through the brush that familiar, piercing cry, but it won’t be frightening. She’ll recognize it as the sound of home. Callie will not hesitate. She will step off the broken road into the brush and she will walk straight into the cool of the trees and she won’t ever come back.
I see all this, sitting across from her in the diner, my forearms sticking to the stray maple syrup tacked across the tabletop. I lift my right hand.
Good-bye.
Callie smiles back.
Good-bye.