‘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.
‘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?’