Possessing the Secret of Joy - Alice Walker [60]
Hartford swallowed. I held a glass of sweetened water to his lips. Suddenly his eyes rolled back in his head and his head dropped to one side. His pulse, when I took his arm, was faint as the heartbeat of an embryo.
At last he opened his eyes.
They were being raised for their kidneys, he said slowly, in a flat tone. Now that there was no longer a need to hunt them, I was assigned the job of decapitating them.
He paused, his eyes stormy, strong, and large enough to swallow me.
The screaming of monkeys, he said, musingly, studying my face as if he’d read a subtle change in me, is really unlike the scream of the peacock, which, as you know, is very human. But somehow, because of the chimps’ and monkeys’ faces, their screaming is even more human. Everything they think, everything they fear, everything they feel, is as clear as if you’d known them all your life. As if they’d slept in the same bed as you!
Do not disturb yourself, I said, gently, and still with a certain detachment. Even this horror could not penetrate to the level of numbness at which I dwelled. After all, I thought, how could he have anticipated the evil of civilization, having been indoctrinated from birth to believe it the only future.
The factory was vast, he said. Vast. For they were manufacturing vaccine to sell to the whole world. I discovered this when I read some of the literature they received written in English. Most of it was written in some other language. Perhaps German or Dutch. On the other hand, there were often Americans about. Australians and New Zealanders. Hearty fellows, always enthusiastic; as if they were on the track of a cure for all mankind.
A fit of coughing now shook Hartford’s emaciated frame. A spray of blood and mucus covered the rag I held to his mouth.
I had smiled jauntily, myself, the first year I worked for them, he said, as he lay back, resting, after the coughing fit. We were paid good money, and of course we ate or sold those animals who became—usually out of concern for their stolen families—meat. But soon I could not smile. I stood kneedeep in monkey heads, chimpanzee torsos…
Small boys with small knives were trained to make the slit…and haul the kidneys out. It was on these kidneys the men in white coats grew their precious “cultures.”
The vaccine left the factory at the other end from where the monkeys and chimps were raised and slaughtered. It left in small clear bottles with blinding white labels and shiny metal caps.
As Hartford’s voice became barely audible, a whispery rasp, an unbidden glimpse of what he was describing invaded my mind. I closed my eyes tightly to banish the sight. It was too late. I felt as if a whole other world of grief and disaster had just been dropped on my soul. I groaned in agony, almost exactly as he had done. The sound of my own sorrow was shocking to me. But, surprisingly, my sorrow made Hartford look, finally, released.
Father, thank you for hearing my confession, he said, savoring my pained expression with the same wonder with which he’d enjoyed my smile. As if he’d waited until certain he had transmitted the full horror of his existence to someone who could still feel, Hartford began to breathe the shallow, rustling wheeze everyone on the AIDS floor knew so well.
There were things to do. In the morning I would lose my wife and friend forever. Where were my sons? I wondered. Or my sister, Olivia, for that matter; whom, I suddenly realized, I had always depended on to be the feeling side of me; it was she who had first noticed the weeping that would stain my wife’s life. Perhaps they were with Tashi. I could not move to look for them. I sat where I was until, an hour after the death rattle began, Hartford—whose African name was perhaps lost forever—medical student and killer of monkeys and