Fear Nothing

challenging and angry look, and then coughs out that damn sound, that awful little laugh that makes your skin crawl. Then it seems to lose interest in Rod and me, in the gun. It eats the last segment of the tangerine and starts to peel another one.”

As I lifted the apricot brandy that I had poured but not yet touched, Angela returned to the table and picked up her half-empty glass. She surprised me by clinking her glass against mine.

“What’re we toasting?” I asked.

“The end of the world.”

“By fire or ice?”

“Nothing that easy,” she said.

She was as serious as stone.

Her eyes seemed to be the color of the brushed stainless-steel drawer fronts in the cold-holding room at Mercy Hospital, and her stare was too direct until, mercifully, she shifted it from me to the cordial glass in her hand.

“When Rod hangs up the phone, he wants me to tell him what happened, so I do. He has a hundred questions, and he keeps asking about my bleeding lip, about whether the monkey touched me, bit me, as if he can’t quite believe the business with the apple. But he won’t answer any of my questions. He just says, Angie, you don’t want to know. Of course I want to know, but I understand what he’s telling me.”

“Privileged information, military secrets.”

“My husband had been involved in sensitive projects before, national-security matters, but I thought that was behind him. He said he couldn’t talk about this. Not to me. Not to anyone outside the office. Not a word.”

Angela continued to stare at her brandy, but I sipped mine. It didn’t taste as pleasing as it had before. In fact, this time I detected an underlying bitterness, which reminded me that apricot pits were a source of cyanide.

Toasting the end of the world tends to focus the mind on the dark potential in all things, even in a humble fruit.

Asserting my incorrigible optimism, I took another long sip and concentrated on tasting only the flavor that had pleased me previously.

Angela said, “Not fifteen minutes pass before three guys respond to Rod’s phone call. They must’ve driven in from Wyvern using an ambulance or something for cover, though there wasn’t any siren. None of them are wearing uniforms, either. Two of them come around to the back, open the door, and step into the kitchen without knocking. The third guy must have picked the lock on the front door and come in that way, quiet as a ghost, because he steps into the dining-room doorway the same time as the other two come in the back. Rod’s still got the pistol trained on the monkey — his arms shaking with fatigue — and all three of the others have tranquilizer-dart guns.”

I thought of the quiet lamplit street out front, the charming architecture of this house, the pair of matched magnolia trees, the arbor hung with star jasmine. No one passing the place that night would have guessed at the strange drama playing out within these ordinary stucco walls.

“The monkey seems like he’s expecting them,” Angela said, “isn’t concerned, doesn’t try to get away. One of them shoots him with a dart. He bares his teeth and hisses but doesn’t even try to pluck the needle out. He drops what’s left of the second tangerine, struggles hard to swallow the bite he has in his mouth, then just curls up on the table, sighs, goes to sleep. They leave with the monkey, and Rod goes with them, and I never see the monkey again. Rod doesn’t come back until three o’clock in the morning, until Christmas Eve is over, and we never do exchange gifts until late Christmas Day, and by then we’re in Hell and nothing’s ever going to be the same. No way out, and I know it.”

Finally she tossed back her remaining brandy and put the glass down on the table so hard that it sounded like a gunshot.

Until this moment she had exhibited only fear and melancholy, both as deep as cancer in the bone. Now came anger from a still deeper source.

“I had to let them take their goddamn blood samples the day after Christmas.”

“Who?”

“The project at Wyvern.”

“Project?”

“And once a month ever since — their sample. Like my body isn’t mine, like I’ve got to pay a rent in blood just to be allowed to go on living in it.”

“Wyvern has been closed a year and a half.”

“Not all of it. Some things don’t die. Can’t die. No matter how much we wish them dead.”

Although she was thin almost to the point of gauntness, Angela had always been pretty in her way. Porcelain skin, a graceful brow, high cheekbones, sculpted nose, a generous mouth that balanced the otherwise vertical lines of her face and paid out a wealth of smiles — these qualities, combined with her selfless heart, made her lovely in spite of the fact that her skull was too near the skin, her skeleton too ill-concealed beneath the illusion of immortality that the flesh provides. Now, however, her face was hard and cold and ugly, fiercely sharpened at every edge by the grinding wheel of anger.

“If I ever refuse to give them the monthly sample, they’ll kill me. I’m sure of that. Or lock me away in some secret hospital out there where they can keep a closer watch on me.”

“What’s the sample for? What’re they afraid of?”

She seemed about to tell me, but then she pressed her lips together.

“Angela?”

I gave a sample every month myself, for Dr. Cleveland, and often Angela drew it. In my case it was for an experimental procedure that might detect early indications of skin and eye cancers from subtle changes in blood chemistry. Although giving the samples was painless and for my own good, I resented the invasion, and I could imagine how deeply I would resent it if it were compulsory rather than voluntary.

She said, “Maybe I shouldn’t tell you. Even though you need to know to…to defend yourself. Telling you all of it is like lighting a fuse. Sooner or later, your whole world blows up.”

“Was the monkey carrying a disease?”

“I wish it were a disease. Wouldn’t that be nice? Maybe I’d be cured by now. Or dead. Dead would be better than what’s coming.”

She snatched up her empty cordial glass, made a fist around it, and for a moment I thought she would hurl it across the room.

“The monkey never bit me,” she insisted, “never clawed me, never even touched me, for God’s sake. But they won’t believe me. I’m not sure even Rod believed me. They won’t take any chances. They made me…Rod made me submit to sterilization.”

Tears stood in her eyes, unshed but shimmering like the votive light in the red glass candleholders.

“I was forty-five years old then,” she said, “and I’d never had a child, because I was already sterile. We’d tried so hard to have a baby — fertility doctors, hormone therapy, everything, everything — and nothing worked.”

Oppressed by the suffering in Angela’s voice, I was barely able to remain in my chair, looking passively up at her. I had the urge to stand, to put my arms around her. To be the nurse this time.

With a tremor of rage in her voice, she said, “And still the bastards made me have the surgery, permanent surgery, didn’t just tie my tubes but removed my ovaries, cut me, cut out all hope.” Her voice almost broke, but she was strong. “I was forty-five, and I’d given up hope anyway, or pretended to give it up. But to have it cut out of me… The humiliation of it, the hopelessness. They wouldn’t even tell me why. Rod took me out to the base the day after Christmas, supposedly for an interview about the monkey, about its behavior. He wouldn’t elaborate. Very mysterious. He took me into this place…this place out there that even most people on the base didn’t know existed. They sedated me against my will, performed the surgery without my permission. And when it was all over, the sons of bitches wouldn’t even tell me why!”

I pushed my chair away from the table and got to my feet. My shoulders ached, and my legs felt weak. I hadn’t been expecting to hear a story of this weight.

Although I wanted to comfort her, I didn’t attempt to approach Angela. The cordial glass was still sealed in