The Immortalists(90)
Other people speak of the ecstasy to be found in sex and the more complicated joy of parenthood, but for Varya, there is no greater pleasure than relief – the relief of realizing that what she fears does not exist. Even so, it’s temporary: a blustery, wind-swept pleasure, hysterical as laughter – What was I thinking? – followed by the slow erosion of that certainty, the creeping in of doubt, which requires another check in the rearview mirror, another shower, another doorknob cleaned.
Varya has had enough therapy to know that she’s telling herself stories. She knows her faith – that rituals have power, that thoughts can change outcomes or ward off misfortune – is a magic trick: fiction, perhaps, but necessary for survival. And yet, and yet: Is it a story if you believe it? Her deeper secret, the reason she doesn’t think she’ll ever be rid of the disorder, is that on some days she doesn’t think it’s a disorder. On some days, she doesn’t think it’s absurd to believe that a thought can make something come true.
In May of 2007, six months after Daniel’s death, Mira called Varya in hysterics.
‘They’ve cleared Eddie O’Donoghue,’ she said: an internal review had found no evidence of wrongdoing.
Varya did not cry. She felt fury enter her body and settle there, like a child. She no longer believed that Daniel died of a bullet meant for the pelvis but which entered his thigh, rupturing the femoral artery, so that all his blood was lost in less than ten minutes. His death did not point to the failure of the body. It pointed to the power of the human mind, an entirely different adversary – to the fact that thoughts have wings.
32.
On Friday morning, while driving to work, Varya pulls to the side of the road, wrenches the car into park, and drops her head between her knees. She is thinking of Luke. For the past two days, he has met her at the lab at seven thirty and followed her into the vivarium. There he’s been useful – helping her weigh pellets for feedings, transferring heavy cages to the storage room for cleaning – and the animals have taken to him. On Wednesday he developed a game with one of their older males, Gus, a beautiful rhesus with a full orange coat and an ego to match. Gus came to the front of his cage and presented his belly to ask for a scratch. Then he either jumped back in an attempt to startle Luke, who laughed and played along, or sat there for as long as Luke scratched his exposed, salmon-colored stomach, smacking his lips in affection.
When Varya expressed surprise at his skill with the monkeys and his desire to help, Luke explained that he grew up on a farm, that physical labor and working with animals are familiar to him, and that this is what his editor at the Chronicle wanted, anyway: to get a sense of daily life at the Drake, so that the researchers come alive as real people, and the monkeys as individuals, too. On Thursday, while eating lunch in the office – Varya with her Tupperware of broccoli and black beans, Luke with a chicken wrap from the atrium – he asked her about this, whether she thought of the monkeys as individuals, and whether it troubled her to see them in cages. If he had done so on Monday, she would have been wary, but the days since have passed so easily, without crisis or judgment, that by Thursday she was relaxed enough to answer honestly.
Before she came to the Drake, she had never been around organisms of such size and flesh. The monkeys’ bodies were meaty and impossible to ignore: they smelled and screeched, they were covered in hair, they suffered from diabetes and endometriosis. Their nipples were pink as bubblegum and distended, their faces startlingly emotive. It was impossible to look into their eyes and not see – or think you saw – just what they were thinking. They were not passive subjects to be acted upon but opinionated participants. She was conscious of not anthropomorphizing them, and yet, in those early years, she was struck by the familiarity of their faces and especially by their eyes. When they gathered together and stared at her with those bottomless eyes they looked to her like humans in monkey suits, peering through cutouts in masks.
‘Which was obviously unsustainable,’ she tells Luke, ‘that kind of thinking.’
She sat at her desk, Luke at Annie’s. He had propped his right ankle up on his left knee, his long legs bent with the spider awkwardness of tall young men. Put at ease by the gentleness of his attention, Varya continued.
‘One Thanksgiving – this would have been my second or third year at the Drake – I visited my brother, who worked as a military doctor, and I shared all of this. He told me about a patient he’d seen that day, a twenty-three-year-old soldier with an infected amputation who cursed the Afghans every time Daniel touched his skin. Daniel remembered him from a medical screening a couple of years earlier, when the soldier expressed so much anxiety about the state of Afghanistan – so much concern for its people – that Daniel almost ordered a psychiatric evaluation. He was worried the boy was too soft.’
Daniel had sat much like Luke did on Thursday – one leg cast over the other, his large eyes intent – but the skin beneath his eyes was dark and his formerly thick hair sparse. In that moment Varya remembered him as a boy, her younger brother, whose idealism had been replaced by something more realistic but just as simple, something she recognized in herself.
‘His point,’ Varya said, ‘was that it’s impossible to survive without dehumanizing the enemy, without creating an enemy in the first place. He said that compassion was the purview of civilians, not those whose job was to act. Acting requires you to choose one thing over another. And it’s better to help one side than neither.’