The Immortalists(80)

He still holds Bruna’s delicate wrist. He raises the gun to her temple, and she cringes.

‘Daniel,’ roars Eddie. ‘I’ll shoot.’

But Daniel barely hears him. The freedom, the expansiveness, of thinking he is innocent: it fills and lifts him like helium. He looks down at Bruna Costello. Once he believed that responsibility flowed between them like air. Now he can’t remember what he thought they had in common.

‘Akana mukav tut le Devlesa.’ Bruna speaks under her breath, a strained mutter. ‘Akana mukav tut le Devlesa. I now leave you to God.’

‘Listen to me, Daniel,’ Eddie says. ‘After this, I can’t help you.’

Daniel’s hands are damp. He cocks the gun.

‘Akana mukav tut le Devlesa,’ says Bruna. ‘I now leave you to –’





PART FOUR


Place of Life


2006–2010

Varya





28.


Frida is hungry.

Varya enters the vivarium at seven thirty and already the monkey is standing up in her cage, holding on to the bars. Most of the animals warble and chirp, knowing that Varya’s arrival portends breakfast, but Frida releases the same rapid bark she has for weeks. ‘Shh-shh,’ says Varya. ‘Shh-shh.’ Each monkey receives a puzzle feeder that forces them to work for their food as they would in the wild: they use their fingers to guide a pellet from the top of a yellow plastic maze to a hole at the bottom. Frida’s neighbors scrabble at the feeders, but Frida leaves hers on the cage floor. The puzzle is easy for her; she could have the pellet in seconds. Instead she stares at Varya and calls in alarm, her mouth wide enough to hold an orange.

A flash of dark hair, a hand on the doorway, and Annie Kim pokes her head into the room.

‘He’s here,’ she says.

‘Early.’ Varya wears blue scrubs and two pairs of heavy, elbow-length gloves. Her short hair is protected by a shower cap, her face by a mask and plastic shield. Still, the odor of urine and musk is overpowering. She detects it in her condo as well as the lab. She isn’t sure whether her own body has begun to take on the scent or whether it’s now so familiar that she imagines it everywhere.

‘Only by five minutes. Look,’ Annie says. ‘The sooner you get going, the sooner it’ll be over. Like pulling a tooth.’

Some of the monkeys have finished their puzzles and call for more food. Varya uses her elbow to scratch an itch on her waist. ‘A weeklong dentist appointment.’

‘Most grant applications take longer,’ says Annie, and Varya laughs. ‘Remember: when you look at him, see dollar signs.’

She holds the door open for Varya with her foot. As soon as it closes behind them, the screeching is almost undetectable, as if it comes from a distant TV. The building is concrete, with few windows, and all the rooms are soundproof. Varya follows Annie through the hallway to their shared office.

‘Frida’s still on her hunger strike,’ Varya says.

‘She won’t hold out much longer.’

‘I don’t like it. She makes me uneasy.’

‘Don’t you think she knows that?’ Annie asks.

The office is a long rectangle. Varya’s desk is tucked into the short western wall; Annie’s rests against the long southern one, to the left of the door. Between their desks, opposite the door, is a steel laboratory sink. Annie sits and swivels to face her computer. Varya removes her mask and shield, scrubs and gloves, hair and shoe covers. She washes her hands, soaping and rinsing three times in the hottest water she can stand. Then she adjusts her street clothes: a pair of black slacks and a blue oxford shirt with a black cardigan buttoned on top.

‘Well, go on.’ Annie squints at the computer with one hand on the mouse, the other holding a half-eaten Luna bar. ‘Don’t leave him alone too long with the marmosets. He’ll start to think all our monkeys are that cute.’

Varya squeezes her temples. ‘Why can’t I send you?’

‘Mr. Van Galder was very clear.’ Annie doesn’t take her eyes off the computer screen, but she grins. ‘You’re the lead. You’re the one with the fancy findings. He doesn’t want me.’

When Varya gets out of the elevator, she finds the man facing the marmoset pen. The pen is the lab’s only public exhibit. It’s nine feet tall by eight wide, with walls made of stiff mesh and encased in glass. The man does not immediately turn around, which gives Varya the opportunity to observe him from behind. He’s perhaps six feet, with a dense shrubbery of blond curls, and wears clothes better suited to hiking than to a laboratory tour: some sort of nylon technical pant with a windbreaker and a complicated-looking backpack.

The marmosets crowd against the mesh. There are nine: two parents and their children, all but one of the latter fraternal twins. Fully grown, they measure roughly seven inches long, sixteen if you include their striped, expressive tails. The monkeys’ faces are the size of walnut shells but extraordinarily detailed, as if designed on a larger scale and perfectly shrunk: their nostrils the size of pinheads, their black eyes slanted teardrops. One squats on a length of cardboard tubing at a forty-five-degree angle. Its feet are turned out and its round thighs cloaked in hair, which give it the impression of a genie. It emits a piercing whistle that is only slightly blunted by the glass. Ten years ago, when Varya began work at the lab, she mistook the marmosets’ calls for alarms sounding in some hallway deep inside the building.