The Immortalists(81)
‘They do that,’ she says, stepping forward. ‘It isn’t what it sounds like.’
‘Abject terror?’
When the man turns, she is surprised by how young he looks. He’s lean as a whippet, with a face that lags behind a large and probing nose. But his lips are full, and when he smiles, his face splits into expected handsomeness. There’s a slight, boyish gap between his front teeth. Behind silver-rimmed glasses his eyes are a hazel color that reminds her of Frida’s.
‘It’s a contact call,’ she says. ‘The marmosets use it to communicate across long distances and greet newcomers. Rhesus monkeys, you don’t want to stare at them. They’re territorial and they become threatened. But marmosets are curious, and more submissive.’
It’s true that marmosets are less aggressive than the other monkeys, but this open-mouthed whistle is a call of distress. Varya is not sure what possessed her to lie so immediately, and about something of such little consequence. Perhaps it was the intensity of the man’s gaze, an intensity he now applies to her.
‘You must be Dr. Gold,’ he says.
‘Mr. Van Galder.’ Varya does not reach for his hand in the hope he won’t hers, but he does and so she brings herself to shake. Immediately she marks the hand in her mind, her right.
‘Please. Luke is fine.’
Varya nods. ‘Until your TB results come through I won’t be able to take you into the lab. So I thought today I’d show you the main campus.’
‘You don’t waste time,’ Luke says.
His teasing makes Varya anxious. This is what journalists do: they create a false sense of intimacy, ingratiating themselves until you become comfortable enough to tell them things you’d otherwise have the good sense not to. The last journalist they allowed in the lab was a TV reporter whose footage caused such a frenzy among donors that the Drake built a new play area for the monkeys to placate them. Of course, that reporter elected to include only the most damning B-roll, the rhesus monkeys shaking the cage bars and barking as if they had not just been fed.
Varya leads Luke to the entrance vestibule, where a heavyset man sits behind a security desk, reading the paper. ‘You’ll have met Clyde.’
‘Sure. We’re old friends. I was just hearing about his mother’s birthday.’
‘She turned a hundred and one last month,’ Clyde says, setting the paper down. ‘So my brothers and me, we went to Daly City and threw her a party. She can’t leave the house, so we paid the choir from her old church to come sing to her. She still knows all the words.’
Varya has not exchanged more than daily greetings with Clyde in the ten years she’s worked at the lab. She reaches for the heavy steel door and punches Annie’s latest code into the keypad beside it. ‘Your mother’s one hundred and one?’
‘You bet,’ Clyde says. ‘You should really be pricking her instead of those monkeys.’
The Drake Institute for Research on Aging is a series of angular, white buildings nestled within the perpetually green slopes of Mount Burdell. Its property – nearly five hundred acres – lies two miles south of Olompali State Historic Park and two miles north of Skywalker Ranch, almost all of it untouched countryside. The campus is confined to a plateau halfway down the mountain where great hulks of limestone sit amidst the bay trees and chaparral like an alien encampment. To Varya, the mountainside has always seemed unsightly in its lack of grooming – the shrubs tangled and thorny, the bays drooping like overgrown beards – but Luke Van Galder reaches his arms above his head and sighs.
‘My God,’ he says. ‘To work in such a place. Seventy degrees in March. You can hike in a state park during lunch.’
Varya reaches for her sunglasses. ‘I’m afraid that doesn’t ever happen. I’m at work by seven in the morning. Very often I have no idea what the weather is like until I leave that evening. See that building?’ she says, pointing. ‘That’s the main research facility. It was designed by Leoh Chen. He’s known for his geometric elements – you must have parked in the visitor’s lot, so you’ll have seen that the building is a semicircle. There are windows on all sides. From here they look small, but they’re really floor-to-ceiling.’ She halts, fifty paces from the primate lab and a quarter mile from the main facility. ‘Do you have a notebook?’
‘I’m listening. I can fact-check later.’
‘If that seems to you the best sequence of events.’
‘I’m getting my bearings. I’ll be here all week.’ Luke raises his eyebrows and smiles. ‘I figured we might sit down.’
‘Certainly, we’ll sit down,’ says Varya, ‘at some point. But I don’t usually meet with journalists and I trust you’ll understand if certain pieces of information are relayed in transit. Given the study design, it’s important that I spend as little time away from the lab as possible.’
At five ten, she stands almost at eye level with Luke. His face, as seen through her sunglasses, is subdued in color and dimension, but she can still see surprise play across it. Why? Because she is brisk, impersonal? Surely Luke would not be surprised if the lab were run by a man who displayed these qualities. What guilt she feels at her terseness is replaced by self-assurance. She is, in the world of primate research, establishing dominance.