Aerogrammes and Other Stories

What to Do with Henry




• • •




Saffa couldn’t tell how long the chimpanzee had been hanging by its ankle from the ndokuwuli tree. There was a frailty to the thing, suspended but still. The chimpanzee had to be female, judging by the baby huddled directly beneath her, squeaking hoarsely and baring its teeth. Of baby chimpanzees, he had heard that they never left their mothers, dead or alive or hanging by a single limb.

The trap had been set by Saffa’s uncle, who owned the surrounding papaya trees and was fed up with marauding monkeys. He had sent Saffa to check the traps that morning, and at the time, Saffa was pleased to be dispatched on what he considered a man’s errand. He was seventeen, and when his father’s friends came by the house, they still sent him to the kiosk to bring them back cold drinks, as though he were a boy. If only he were on his bicycle right now, rather than here, a rack of bottled beers clinking in his wire basket.

Saffa glanced at the long, curled toes. According to the paramount chief, he wasn’t supposed to set eyes on a dead chimpanzee, let alone kill it; the chimpanzee was a sacred animal, like the leopard and the bush cow, off-limits to hunters and farmers. But now what? He might have turned away and headed home and made himself forget everything were it not for the baby.

Saffa gathered the baby into his large, awkward hands, its terror reverberating through his palms. Its head was smaller than a mango, and its eyes were liquid and searching. He felt sorry for the orphaned thing, but ah!—a flash of hope. He knew exactly what to do with it.

He took the baby chimp to Nguebu Market. Sometimes Peace Corps people drifted through the market, their gazes casting about for souvenirs; they were known to pay high prices for baby chimps, which they liked to keep as pets. The Peace Corps people were built of a mystifying courage that made them unafraid of the animals those babies would become one day, wild and possessed of the strength of five men.

Saffa set up a stool beside the other vendors who lined Mahei Boima Road, which was so choked with commerce that hardly a bicycle could pass. People forged their way through on foot: a woman with a plate of pineapple on her head, a boy with a tower of twelve plastic buckets balanced on his own. Saffa put the baby in a cardboard box and waited. He tried to appear cool against the questioning eyes of the vendors, tried to ignore the mewling sound that the baby had begun to make. He fixed a careless gaze on the rice seller across from him, whose own baby straddled her back within a red wrap, perhaps the same placid position in which the baby chimp had been before its mother took one wrong step and flew into the sky.

•

A half hour later, a pair of tourists made their way down the road, a white woman behind sunglasses and a golden little girl in a frothy Western dress, with the dark braids of a local. The little girl held the white woman’s hand and trailed behind. He watched their twined fingers, the dark and light of them.

The white woman stopped before the cardboard box. In her, Saffa saw the yawning unhappiness of rich people, a kind of boredom with life that had brought her here, along with so many other tourists, to give color to her life. But Saffa did not fawn and pander like the handicraft people when they dealt with tourists. He remained on the stool, pinching the calluses at the base of his fingers.

When the white woman peered into the box, the baby chimp raised its hands to her. Saffa said, “He want you to carry him.”

The woman glanced at Saffa, obviously surprised that he knew English. She had no idea that he had been the smartest of his form-five class, that he had taught himself English from movies. He spoke a few words of Krio to the little girl, which made her smile. Somewhat relaxed, the woman picked up the baby chimp, and it sat quietly in the crook of her arm.

He could see how human the chimp looked to the white woman. The color of its face was nearly as pink as her own, though most likely its skin would later darken like its mother’s. Saffa did not mention the mother. He said that he had found the baby in a forest, abandoned.

Not only did Saffa know English words; he also knew English numbers, and refused to go below thirty-five dollars for the chimp. After paying him, the white woman removed the shawl from her shoulders and wrapped the baby inside it, oblivious to those who stared at her. She took the little girl by the hand, and together they made their way through the crowd. Saffa watched this strange little trio, pleased by the sale and yet reluctant to look away, curious as to what would become of them.

• • •

The woman who bought the chimpanzee was named Pearl Groves, and she was no idiot. She could smell the lies rolling off that poacher as strongly as his sweat, a nose for deceit that she’d acquired much too late in her marriage.

Pearl’s husband was a noted herpetologist who had visited western Cameroon in 1969 to research the Hairy Frog, Trichobatrachus robustus, whose males were not in fact hairy but covered with tiny, cilia-like extensions of skin, allowing them more surface area through which to breathe. His love affair with the Hairy Frog had lasted for months, permeating their breakfast conversation and even surfacing, embarrassingly, at some dinner parties. Pearl found it hard to be inquisitive on the subject. She had never shared her husband’s love for amphibians but contented herself with the idea that their marriage was like a frozen dinner, compartmentalized but complementary.

Six years after her husband ended his research trips, a letter followed. Pearl was gentle with the paper, torn along one corner, as fragile and baffling as a salvaged treasure map. The letter was written by an NGO worker in Sierra Leone, on behalf of an old woman whose daughter had died of malaria, leaving her with a granddaughter whose education and care she could not shoulder. Along with the letter came a small black-and-white photograph of a child with the eyes and dimples and mouth of Pearl’s husband. On the back of the photograph was written: Neneh, daughter of Mr. Groves.

Pearl was sixty years old, a retired schoolteacher who had never wanted children. Neither had her husband. People assumed that this was because Pearl considered her students her children, a pleasant lie to which she sometimes resorted, but in reality, she couldn’t see how children fit into the frozen dinner of her marriage. And as far as an extramarital affair was concerned, she had presumed that her husband had passed the window of foolish opportunity. A part of her eyed him with wonder, searching for the rogue within, the simmering of lust. But at sixty-four, he had a belly that sagged over his belt; he mumbled nonsense in his sleep. Sometimes, if he was especially riveted by The $10,000 Pyramid while brushing his teeth, he would continue to brush, like a machine, until the foam streamed down his chin as he yelled, “Things that bite! THINGS THAT BITE!” And now, reading and rereading the letter, she kept wondering if it all would have been different had she just gone to Cameroon with her husband, had she just pretended to love those disgusting frogs.

Maybe then he would have left his cleaning woman alone. The woman was originally from Bo, her husband admitted, haltingly. Sierra Leone. She had been new to Cameroon, like him, and lonely.

Everyone in Pearl’s family implored her to come to her senses; one did not leave her home in Canton, Ohio, to retrieve a girl from a hut in Africa. Send money their way and be done with it. This was her husband’s view as well, though he had lost most of his authority and his life had become a prolonged exercise in deference: submitting the TV remote to Pearl, making a tuna melt for Pearl, shuffling out of any room she entered. Pearl simply replied that adopting Neneh was the right thing to do, leaning upon the brand of Baptist conviction that had always sustained her. Behind that conviction was her intention to shame her husband every day, to raise the mirror to his face and show him she was not deceived; she knew exactly who he was.

Pearl’s husband thought her insane for going to Sierra Leone. He refused to accompany her or take her to the airport. She left him the number of the hotel in Bo where she and Neneh would be staying for a week, preparing for the flight back home. Whenever he tried to change the subject, Pearl switched it right back. Whenever he grudgingly referred to “the girl,” Pearl asserted her name—Neneh.

But when Pearl arrived in Bo to claim Neneh, all her stern conviction dissolved, displaced by the immediate necessities of the child made real. Because Neneh’s grandmother was too old to travel from her village, Neneh had come with a representative from the NGO, a plumpish woman wearing a head wrap of blue and green and a matching skirt that fishtailed around her ankles. They had dinner in the hotel restaurant, groundnut soup and country rice, while the woman talked about Neneh’s mother. Pearl had thought that learning of the other woman would crush her, but instead she was oddly fascinated. Isatu had taken any number of jobs to support her child, selling cassava by the road and dyeing gara fabrics. The NGO worker kept saying the word “suffer” over and over: “Even just for buy half back and feeding and clothing, she suffered a lot.” The whole time, Pearl was vaguely aware of Neneh regarding her with a strange vigilance, as if trying to memorize her entirely.

When it was time for the NGO woman to leave, she kissed Neneh once on each cheek and accepted the package Pearl had brought for Neneh’s grandmother, gifts that seemed all wrong. What would the old woman do with a flannel nightgown in this broiling heat? Pearl had also slipped money up the nightgown’s sleeve, but would Neneh’s grandmother know where to convert the dollar bills?

For Neneh, Pearl had brought a red headband and a lacy white dress that would surely attract swarms of sienna dust. Dutifully, Neneh fit the headband over her braids and refused to remove it until she went to bed. With equal resolve, she would not go anywhere without holding Pearl’s hand. While Neneh slept, Pearl stared at the girl’s curled fingers, her hard palm inscribed with the same lines that appeared on her father’s. The lines filled Pearl with wonder rather than hate, and it was at that moment, tracing the birdlike bones of Neneh’s hand, that Pearl understood how hate could carry her only so far.

Several days before they left for Ohio, Pearl thought it would be good to get Neneh out of the hotel. Pearl had chosen the hotel for its royal-sounding name—Sir Milton—but the toilet bowl was bereft of its seat, the water tasted of metal, and the mosquito nets had holes that left her scratching all night. The receptionist suggested that they visit the Cotton Tree, the site where the first African-American slaves, freed and arrived in 1792, had held a thanksgiving mass. Pearl felt apathetic about visiting a tree, but it turned out to be more astonishing, more alive than any monument she had seen, its massive trunk roped and coiled with fantastical vines as thick as her arm, with bat-filled branches that sprawled up against the pale blue sky. Deriving some strength from its ancient shade, Pearl felt that she could stand and stare forever at the tree, with Neneh at her side, and for the first time during her visit, she felt capable of everything her friends and family had dismissed.

When she and Neneh walked past the vendors, Pearl did not flinch at what she saw: the dismembered parts of what seemed to be a goat, lying in the heat, bright with blood; the stares of local children gleefully pointing at her and calling out, “Pumui! Pumui!” There were women selling fruits and vegetables piled on burlap, green plantains and thick fingers of cassava, tables of trinkets in bowls, balls of black soap, mountains of country and white rice, hills of sesame seeds and black-eyed peas. Toward the end of their walk, Pearl and Neneh came upon a baby chimpanzee in a cardboard box.

As Pearl reached for the chimp, she felt a rejuvenating sense of certainty, a rectitude with no moral or rational ground. She was destroying her old life, blow by blow, and building a new one out of new names. Neneh, and now Henry; the name came to Pearl as a breeze. She tucked Henry into her orange shawl and stroked the soft saucers of his ears. She did not consider what her husband would think of this latest development. It didn’t matter. He hadn’t called a single time, and Pearl had known all along that he would not be home when she returned.

• • •

On the plane, Henry was so wide-eyed and serene that the flight attendants let him ride in Pearl’s lap, swaddled in her shawl. It had been relatively easy for Pearl to secure the import and export permits necessary for his adoption, but later that year, the United States issued a ban on the importation of chimpanzees as pets, citing them as health hazards and possible vessels for disease. Pearl was relieved that Henry had slipped by the ban. She dismissed the thought that her little coconut could be a hazard to anyone.

So for a time, there was Pearl, Neneh, and Henry. In Canton, Henry adapted well to their lives, eating at the dinner table and watching television in earnest, especially if a nature documentary appeared on PBS. He enjoyed simple pleasures—a fried egg sandwich, a Dole fruit cup, the dial tone of an unhooked phone. Pearl grew so frustrated with finding phones off the hook that she gripped Henry by the arm and scolded him; he avoided her eyes. After she released him and sat down to watch the evening news, he leapt into her lap and planted an open-mouthed kiss on her lips.

Those were difficult years, when most of Pearl’s friends and family stopped visiting, their phone calls dwindling. Pearl made them uncomfortable. Once, in her mailbox, she found a folded drawing of herself as a chimp, with a sloping forehead, flaring nostrils, a bun. She’d had smart-ass students before, but this somehow made her face simmer with shame. She rolled up the paper and used it to twirl out the spiderwebs inside the mailbox.

Pearl forged ahead. She took it upon herself to homeschool Neneh in all subjects, well through the fourth grade. Neneh was a poor student, and sometimes Pearl wondered if she was progressing sluggishly on purpose, reluctant to join a school with children her own age.

When Neneh turned ten years old, she enrolled at Walden Middle School, a short bus ride away. On the second day of class, Jurgen Roberts turned to her and asked, “Is it true your brother’s a chimp?” Just as Neneh was about to answer, Miss Davis demanded to know why Jurgen would ever say such a thing about someone’s brother.

Neneh left school that day with the distinct impression that the answer she had almost given Jurgen Roberts was wrong. The correct answer to his question would have been: Henry’s not my brother, he’s my pet. She considered treating Henry as she had seen other people dealing with their dogs and cats, as though she were an authority whose job it was to tame his behaviors. One such behavior was his proclivity to blow kisses at the blond mailwoman who slipped their mail through the slot and blew him a kiss in return. It was weird. What if, by some slim and lovely chance, Natalie Sharpe came over to play one day? Would Henry, beguiled by her flaxen hair, try to kiss her, too?

But Natalie Sharpe moved to Indiana, and Jurgen Roberts started going with Allie Sanfilippo, the girl who sat in front of him, at which point he stopped turning his head farther than forty-five degrees. Everything about the world of school was mercurial, the alliances tenuous, the cafeteria a minefield; at home, Henry was always waiting for her on the foyer stairs. He was her brother, whose leathery soles she liked to tickle until he gave desperate, panting bursts of laughter. A brother who winced when the trunk door fell on her head, who rubbed his own head in sympathy. A brother who stole the last grape Popsicle before she’d had even one, but at the very least, if she complained, he would break off a melty half and hold it out to her on his palm. “The half with the stick,” Neneh would insist, and, playing innocent, he would look away, as if he couldn’t understand her.

Seven years later, Pearl was forced to donate Henry to a zoo. The county police department had been pressuring her to do so, ever since Pearl’s neighbor had informed the sheriff that Pearl was harboring an adult male chimpanzee, who, if angered, could lash out with savage strength. It didn’t matter when Neneh and Pearl tried to explain Henry’s many gentle aspects, how patient he was, how delighted by buttered popcorn, so much so that he stood rapt before the microwave, watching the flat envelope spin in the humming light, growing pregnant with his favorite food. He even knew how to press the Minute-Plus button, as well as Start and Open.

“Popcorn?” the sheriff said, as if to imply that Pearl was choosing popcorn over local security.

But gradually it became difficult for Pearl to ignore that she was aging. Her veins rose blue against her thinning skin, and various glands and muscles made her wake with a start in the night. She was seventy-two years old and Neneh was seventeen, too young to care for a fully grown chimp on her own.

After many disappointing zoo tours, Pearl gave her reluctant approval to the Willow Park Zoo, in Florida, which provided a wider sanctuary than the primate pens she had seen, where the chimps were often numb with depression and boredom, butting their heads against the walls of their cages or masturbating. Here, the chimpanzee enclosure appeared larger, almost the size of a gymnasium, with a multitude of trees, both live and dead, and a flaccid waterfall between knobby gray boulders. Some chimpanzees were busy grooming each other, others explored the underbellies of stones they had doubtless explored before, while the younger ones tickled and tumbled around one another. It seemed to Pearl the best she could do.

The zoo curator was eager to adopt Henry, as the zoo had no adult male chimpanzees and, thus, no way of breeding. Pearl refused any payment in return but was adamant in her negotiations: (1) that she and Neneh be allowed to privately visit with Henry, and (2) that Henry not be traded or sold. Papers were signed and promises made; Henry was brought to the zoo.

Upon first hearing the shrieks of his new family, Henry scrambled up to the roof of the cafeteria, his mouth stretched into a fear grin, all teeth and pink gums. Neneh coaxed him down, offering him a Dole fruit cup, while Pearl made kissing noises. She raised her hands to him. Eventually, he descended, but he continued yelping while Neneh and Pearl took turns embracing him. His legs were quivering.

Pearl paid no attention to the keepers and the curator who stood around, hands on their hips, exchanging worried glances. Pearl murmured softly but firmly to Henry, which was what she used to do when thunderstorms drove him out of his own bed and into her arms. She did her very best to comfort him, without crooning or condescending as though he were a baby or a dog, as much for Henry’s sake as for these keepers. She wanted them to know that Henry should be treated with as much dignity as they would afford to each other, and that he was as precious to her as any human being who had walked into or out of her life.

• • •

At the zoo, the female chimps despised Henry. The keepers had no idea what to do. Without support from a single female, Henry had no chance of melding with the group, let alone achieving the rank of alpha male.

There were four adult females plus Max, a baby boy. As the oldest female, Nana had taken up the position of alpha male, and though Henry made no effort to seize power, his very presence posed a challenge to her reign. Each morning during the first week, as soon as the chimps were released from their night cages, Nana and her gang of disgruntled females went after Henry in a screaming blitzkrieg that didn’t cease until he had been chased into the upper reaches of a tree. Sometimes Nana bit at his feet and drew blood, her allies screeching at Henry from below. Henry’s legs shook; he vomited. Nothing he ate stayed down for long anyway, owing to his preference for omelets and sausage over the zoo’s food pellets.

Joseph, the oldest keeper, felt for Henry. He remembered how Mrs. Groves had held Henry before she’d left. The way she’d cupped the crown of his head was not unlike the way Joseph’s sister Julia had cradled her son’s, though Chip was eighteen years old and lying in a casket. Drunk, he had sped his mother’s car across a patch of black ice and into a tree. Now his photographs were used in the drunk-driving videos shown to high schoolers and DUI offenders, a picture of Chip, pale and unprepared for the flash, and next to this, his Civic like a crumple of metal Kleenex. These thoughts had been fresh in Joseph’s mind as he’d offered Mrs. Groves his handkerchief. She had hesitated before taking it. After blotting her eyes, she’d said, “Thank you,” and pulled herself straight.

At Joseph’s suggestion, the keepers removed Nana from the sanctuary and kept her in separate quarters for a week. By the time she returned, the other females had grown used to Henry, who most enjoyed playing with little Max. The females had even begun to greet Henry as they would the alpha male, grunting before him as they lowered themselves onto their knuckles, as if doing quick push-ups. Joseph wondered how Henry knew to sit up tall before the bowing female, how he knew to bristle his coat so that he appeared larger than all the others. Whether from memory or instinct, Henry seemed to understand that he could gain authority from these daily greetings.

When finally Nana returned to the group, she chased Henry into a tree, but none of the other females joined her. The next day, Henry retaliated by staying his ground, bristling his coat and baring the dagger-sized canines that she lacked. When Nana growled at him, he slapped her across the face so hard that she fell and rolled onto her side. Screaming in protest, she fled to the other females, who embraced her and calmed her, but did not defend her.

•

Over the next ten years, keepers came and went. A Bengal tiger died after a visitor threw it a fudge brownie that had been sugared with ground glass. The zoo curator was fired, replaced by a woman intent on raising more money. The new curator used the negative publicity to hold a fund-raiser, which supplied the budget to enlarge several quarters so that animals were now kept at a greater distance from the visitors, behind a transparent plastic shield.

The shield proved frustrating for Henry, who was used to flirting in close proximity to blond women. Before, when a blonde would peer at the cage from behind the hip-high visitor bar, Henry would hoist himself onto the rock closest to her and blow kisses. He’d then drop to his hands and began swaying back and forth, his fur ruffled, ready to mate.

The visitors were amused by the spectacle, especially the blondes, who were happy to play Fay Wray and blow kisses in return, until they noticed his erection, and recoiled. It was no game to Henry. Rejected, he wandered away from the blondes to sit on a distant stone.

His attraction to blondes rendered him completely uninterested in females of his own kind. He refused to mate with any female chimp, even when she offered herself in times of estrus, the brief window in which she was willing. He kept at a distance, scrutinizing his nails or searching the sky. The youngest female, Gigi, became so enamored of Henry that when he didn’t respond, she would run up, thrust a hand between his legs, and try to manually raise his interest. This only provoked him to move away, at which point Gigi would throw herself to the ground, screaming until Max came along.

Max was now entering his adolescence and eager for every opportunity among the females. But unlike most alpha males, Henry did not grow jealous when Max mated with another female; nor did Henry exercise his dominance by disrupting the couple and chasing Max away. Ever the gentleman, and possibly relieved, Henry looked the other way as yet another orgasmic shriek split the sky.

“Give him time,” Joseph told the perplexed curator. “He might be depressed. Or gay.” The smile slid off her face.

Joseph sensed a long-steeping sadness in Henry, dark as his own. His girlfriend had been trying to snap him out of it. Elaine had even taken to stitching ugly pillows with Bible verses, and he loved each wobbly seam. He loved her, too, but he wondered when she would leave him. Joseph could tell that she was tiring of him, especially since he had refused to seek the services of a pastor or a shrink. He couldn’t help his beliefs—namely, that there was very little to believe in, though he did believe in Henry’s right to withdraw from females if he felt like it, to withdraw from the whole world when it seemed too harsh to weather. Sometimes it was a wonder that more people were not huddled like Henry, praying for life to pass quietly.

But in time, after the glass shield was erected, Gigi prevailed upon Henry. The keepers were unsure of when and how exactly this happened, but Joseph was the first to notice Henry mounting Gigi on a tranquil Saturday afternoon, without excitement or energy, simply because it seemed required of him. The act inspired a variety of responses among the zoo visitors. Some snickered and laughed; others primly turned away. As for Joseph, he sensed Henry’s sadness and surrender. On some occasions, Henry continued to court the blondes, even if from a distance, even if their rejections led him to perch among the branches of a dead oak and sullenly watch the clouds.

• • •

Henry was in his early twenties when a new volunteer joined the Willow Park staff, and at first, no one recognized her. Only Joseph, the oldest keeper still in employment, squinted at her in the sunlight and asked, “Aren’t you the Groves girl?”

Neneh smiled through her headache, caused by the red headband cinching her close-cropped hair. At twenty-seven, she was probably too old to be wearing a headband. At least that was what Pearl would have said, as she believed in “dressing your age, not the age you want to be.” In her last days, Pearl always wore her antique pearl-drop earrings, even to sleep, even to her grave.

Only a few people had attended the funeral the month before. Pearl had been sick for years, and over time, she’d withdrawn from her remaining friends and kept to the house. Toward the end, there were many nights when she tossed in her sleep, calling out for Henry until Neneh crept into bed and held her.

Pearl hadn’t spoken his name in years. She had refused to visit Henry, in spite of the contract; nor would she allow Neneh to do so, believing that he would survive among his fellow chimps only if he forgot his old life, his more human behaviors. “He can’t be two things at once,” she said, to which Neneh wanted to ask, Why not? But Neneh said nothing, knowing that Pearl also wanted to forget Henry, and the family they had been.

While in high school, Neneh found an article about Henry in a Florida newspaper, titled “The Ape Who Loved Blondes over Baboons.” She didn’t show it to Pearl.

Several years later, Pearl’s kidney began to fail. Neneh decided to live at home throughout college, to watch over Pearl. She accompanied Pearl on her thrice-weekly trips to the hospital, where Pearl was attached to a dishwasher of a machine that cleansed her blood and sent it back into her forearm. When they finally got the letter that a kidney was available, Neneh baked a kidney-shaped red velvet cake. “Ugly and damn good,” Pearl declared with a red velvet grin, and suddenly it seemed to Neneh that everything would be fine.

But soon after the operation, Pearl’s body began to refuse the new kidney. Her face swelled from the antirejection drugs; her limbs dwindled. Neneh could feel her own body humming with terror and energy. Whenever the hospice nurse tried to take Neneh aside and carefully talk about Pearl’s hypertension, “a bad sign,” Neneh bit at her fingernails so intently that all she heard was the sound of her clicking teeth. When Pearl began to murmur of funeral arrangements, Neneh went in search of fluffier pillows. Neneh made every effort to be of use, to pave the way toward Pearl’s decline with petals and prayers, as if death were a graceful thing, not the gradual gouging of life from Pearl’s eyes until what was left was only a decimating, and yet ordinary, stillness.

And now, here she was, at the Willow Park Zoo, a place she had longed for ever since she left it.

“How is your grandmother?” Joseph asked.

“She’s fine, just too old to travel.”

Neneh hadn’t planned on lying, but the truth would have led Joseph to treat her as everyone did, with equal portions of care and discomfort. Neneh knew how she was often perceived: a girl who had revolved around Pearl for decades and now, having no one else, was a planet spinning out into the unknown.

But as strong as her pull toward Pearl had been, Neneh had always felt an equal pull in Henry’s direction. She had done her college thesis on “Cooperative Behavior Among Captive Chimpanzees”; she had kept the newspaper clipping about Henry and the blondes; she had brought along the contract with the Willow Park Zoo. She could not have admitted it to herself when Pearl was alive, but as the end approached, Neneh had felt a small and terrible part of her waiting to be released.

• • •

Nervous about seeing Henry, Neneh wandered the grounds on her first day at the zoo. Many animals were new to her, like the antlered blesbok behind rusted grids of wire and the Chilean flamingos with their knotted knees. She meandered through the Bird Hut, filled with the soft hiss and squeak of the Balinese mynah, the toucan, and the fruit dove, mingled with the noise of stroller wheels and shouting children, disappointedly searching the cages.

Eventually, Neneh made her way through the Primate Forest, past the red-nosed mandrills and the goateed colobus monkeys, finally arriving at the chimp enclosure. A zoo worker named Britta was sitting on the bench in front of the enclosure, a pretty face if not for the poorly dyed orange blond of her hair. She seemed to know a great deal about the different chimpanzees, their alliances, their diets, their “mouth-mouth contact.” Neneh searched the enclosure, unsuccessfully, for a face she recognized.

Britta pointed out Henry, who was crouched before a termite mound, a stick in his fist, which he dipped into the mound to fish for termites. He looked darker and rangier than Neneh had expected, especially compared to Max, whom Britta called “the new alpha male.” Max’s thick, bristly hair was being groomed by one of the females while Henry sat alone. Neneh searched Henry’s face, but she was too far away to tell whether his eyes were still the hue of maple syrup. She waited for him to look up and notice the red headband she was wearing, which she had bought from a department store back in Canton, thinking that this might jog his memory to the first time they’d met in Bo. But he did not look up from his termite mound.

Britta explained last month’s upheaval, how Max had overthrown Henry through a mounting assault of bluff displays, which often ended in blows. Over the years, Max had grown to be Henry’s physical equal, and by nature Max was confrontational, often violent. Once, during a more brutal fight, Max tore a gash across the sole of Henry’s foot so that Henry limped for days. Presuming that this was a game, two of the newer children, Crouch and Walt, followed Henry in a single-file line, mimicking his limp.

As Britta chattered on, Neneh felt a thickening knot in her throat. “But no one stepped in to help Henry?” she demanded.

“Well, we can’t butt in whenever we want,” Britta said tautly. Neneh looked out at the man-made boulders, the man-made trickle of water between them. “We can’t just impose our world on theirs. Chimpanzees abide by their own rules, even if they’re in captivity.”

At that moment, Henry looked up. Neneh sat perfectly still. She imagined his world and her world, two distinct, delicate bubbles floating toward each other, hovering as he fixed her with his faraway gaze. Did he see the red headband? Did he recognize her voice?

He dropped his eyes and went back to poking the ground.

For that week, Neneh rented a room at the Motor Inn, which came equipped with a hot plate, a coffeepot, an iron, and a mirror that took up the entire wall opposite the bed. With the blue-green wallpaper and drawn shades, the room had a contained, nautical feel.

Here, she ruminated over Britta’s words, the note of accusation when she’d said “impose our world.” It was the same accusation Pearl had inflicted upon herself ever since leaving Henry at the zoo. By rescuing him, they had ruined him.

Sometimes Neneh wondered if Pearl had felt similarly about rescuing her. Pearl had never tried to contact Neneh’s relatives in Bo, and gradually Sierra Leone had come to seem to Neneh like yet another photograph in National Geographic, the natives serene and strange, the land lush and yet unyielding of its mysteries. With or without Pearl, Neneh would never visit Sierra Leone. Her birth mother was dead, and her grandmother had died soon after she’d left. Strangely, the only face that remained in her mind’s eye, like an icon, belonged to the boy who’d sold them baby Henry. She remembered the high, delicate bones of his cheeks, the sweatless sheen of his skin, but he would certainly never remember her. Maybe he was dead as well, or disfigured, or handless, another casualty in a war that was mentioned only marginally in their local paper. Neneh had sought out other newspapers, had read articles that displayed pictures of bandaged limbs and hard-eyed children holding guns. She had been spared.

In college, she had dated a boy, Carl, whose mother was black and whose father was white, both of them from Atlanta. He was proud of his parents’ union, forged at a time when some states still declared such intermixing illegal. He kept their picture in his desk drawer, his mother in a sleeveless white dress, bright against her smooth shoulders, smearing cake across her new husband’s mouth.

As for Neneh and Carl, the relationship ended in a matter of months. Neneh rarely spent a night away from Pearl, and evetually Carl started dating an Iranian girl who lived down the hall. “She’s chill about things,” Carl told Neneh. “She gets me.”

“Really? Even though she’s not your tribe?” Our tribe was a phrase that Carl had coined, referring to the racial kinship he shared with Neneh, their twinned experience. Whatever that meant. She would’ve given anything to have a single picture like the one in his desk, a captured second of ordinary love from the people who made her. Or maybe just her mother. What she had was her own reflection, which told her nothing.

So Neneh had come to the zoo without a plan, with only the belief that, at the very least, she had Henry. As a child, she had felt unrestrained around him, able to breathe freely, at ease with her place in the world. And despite the intervening years, she had come to believe that she shared more with him than with anyone else. They were two ruined souls doomed to wander their minds, if not the earth, trying to remember from whence they came.

Some of the keepers expressed concern over the fact that Neneh would have direct contact with an adult male chimpanzee. Neneh argued that she wanted only to interact with Henry, away from the other chimps; it was a demand that had to be met according to the contract Pearl had signed long ago.

The first reunion was arranged for the afternoon. A keeper named Ben called Henry into the cages while the other chimps remained outside. When Henry entered the cage, his eyes went to the Dole fruit cup, still sealed, sitting close to the bars of the opposite wall. Neneh was kneeling on the other side. Henry no longer moved with a limp, but it seemed to her that his spirit had atrophied, sucked from his frame. She wondered if he thought he was being punished. She raised her hand and waved, a gesture he used to mirror, but now did not.

“Looks like he’s in one of his moods,” Ben said. He tugged at the bill of his baseball cap and gazed at Henry with disinterest. “No one can talk him out of a funk.”

Neneh kept insisting on her privacy, so Ben moved away to sweep an empty cage within shouting distance. “Just don’t get too comfy with him. He’s still a wild animal. He might not remember old friends.”

She turned back to Henry, worried that he had detected the irritation in her voice, but he was avoiding her eyes in favor of the fruit cup. He seemed not to recognize her, despite the red headband, and for a time, there was only the scrape of Ben’s broom.

Henry took up the fruit cup. His fingers, long and slim and thick-knuckled, moved with all the care and precision of an old man’s, as if the object might jump from his hands if he didn’t handle it deliberately. He found the peel-back flap on the lid and opened it as Pearl had taught him to do, an act so perfect, so familiar, that Neneh had trouble containing her smile behind her hand. He drank the syrup first, and she almost laughed when he scooped out a yellow wedge of pineapple with a single finger; Henry always mined the pineapples first. Without hesitation, she reached an open palm through the bars, just as she used to do when asking him to share. Henry put down the fruit cup and watched her hand coming toward him.

With a lunge, he took hold of her wrist so quickly she almost cried out. His grip was frightening in its power and assurance; her bones and tendons were no more than flower stems in his fist.

“Henry, stop,” she said quietly, “it’s me …” But his lips remained sealed, his gaze cold and impassive. Was this the same face that had winced when the trunk door fell on her head? And didn’t he rub his crown just as she rubbed her own? She had collected those memories like precious stones, kept them all these years. Hadn’t he?

But his grip did not tighten or loosen, and she began to wonder if he was holding her there for a reason. Perhaps he was testing her, to see whether he could trust her as before, or whether she feared him and would squirm free of his clasp. She made herself as still as possible. She flexed her forearm and closed her fist as if to transmit her steadiness, her strength, the solid resolve of a promise, until a distant yell came bearing down on them both: “Henry, let go! … NO, HENRY, NO!”

Ben rapped his broomstick against the bars. Henry flinched but didn’t let go until Ben whacked the bars again, harder this time. Shrieking, Henry scrabbled across the cage to the farthest wall. “Wait,” Neneh said, almost to herself, and before she realized what she was doing, she had sprung up and wrenched the broomstick from Ben’s hands.

“What the hell,” he began to say, but stopped short, silenced by her wild, rage-reddened face.

“Leave him alone,” she said hoarsely, in a low, raw voice, as if she’d been shouting for days, years. Ben stood there, staring. “Just leave us the f*ck alone!”

Ben backed away, palms raised. “Okay. I’m leaving.”

Dropping the broom, she fell to her knees by the cage and reached her arm through the bars, calling to Henry, coaxing, begging even. No matter how she beckoned, Henry would not come. He had turned away from her, a watery blur of black, and all she could do was trace the air with her finger, the question mark curve of his spine.

Somewhere, behind her, Ben was muttering into his walkie-talkie. She knew they wouldn’t let her return. She wrapped her hands around the bars and held fast to the only thing that could keep her intact, the remembrance of last night’s dream, wherein Henry was being chased by the hunter. Neneh had thrown herself between Henry and the barrel of the hunter’s gun, but she felt no pain as the bullet entered her, only an electric tide that swept through her body. This was death—a last, luminous surge. The hunter was gone, but her death was prolonged, painless, as Henry crouched beside her. And though he could not talk, they were communicating in a wordless language all their own, and he was thanking her, he was telling her that he loved her, he was promising her that she was not alone.