"Pat Murphy - Rachel In Love" - читать интересную книгу автора (Murphy Pat)

interested in the banana that Jake has brought than in conversation. The chimp will not reply to her
questions, and after several tries, she gives up.

While Jake vacuums the carpeted corridors, Rachel empties the trash, finding a magazine called Modern
Romance in the same wastebasket that had provided Love Confessions.

Later, in the Janitor's lounge, Jake smokes a cigarette, sips whiskey, and flips through one of his own
magazines. Rachel reads love stories in Modern Romance.
Every once in a while, she looks over Jake's shoulder at grainy pictures of naked women with their legs
spread wide apart. Jake looks for a long time at a picture of a blonde woman with big breasts, red
fingernails, and purplepainted eyelids. The woman lies on her back and smiles as she strokes the pinkness
between her legs. The picture on the next page shows her caressing her own breasts, pinching the dark
nipples. The final picture shows her looking back over her shoulder. She is in the position that Susie took
when she was ready to be mounted.

Rachel looks over Jake's shoulder at the magazine, but she does not ask questions. Jake's smell began to
change as soon as he opened the magazine; the scent of nervous sweat mingles with the aromas of
tobacco and whiskey. Rachel suspects that questions would not be welcome just now.

At Jake's insistence, she goes back to her cage before dawn.

Over the next week, she listens to the conversations of the men who come and go, bringing food and
hosing out the cages. From the men's conversation, she learns that the Primate Research Center is
primarily a breeding facility that supplies researchers with domestically bred apes and monkeys of several
species. It also maintains its own research staff. In indifferent tones, the men talk of horrible things. The
adolescent chimps at the end of the corridor are being fed a diet high in cholesterol to determine
cholesterol's effects on the circulatory system. A group of pregnant females are being injected with male
hormones to determine how that will affect the female offspring. A group of infants is being fed a low
protein diet to determine adverse effects on their brain development.

The men look through her as if she were not real, as if she were a part of the wall, as if she were no one
at all. She cannot speak to them; she cannot trust them.

Each night, Jake lets her out of her cage and she helps him clean. He brings treats: barbequed potato
chips, fresh fruit, chocolate bars, and cookies. He treats her fondly, as one would treat a precocious
child. And he talks to her.

At night, when she is with Jake, Rachel can almost forget the terror of the cage, the anxiety of watching
Johnson pace to and fro, the sense of unreality that accompanies the simplest act. She would be content
to stay with Jake forever, eating snack food and reading confessions magazines. He seems to like her
company. But each morning, Jake insists that she must go back to the cage and the terror. By the end of
the first week, she has begun plotting her escape.

Whenever Jake falls asleep over his whiskey, something that happens three nights out of five, Rachel
prowls the center alone, surreptitiously gathering things that she will need to survive in the desert: a plastic
jug filled with water, a plastic bag of food pellets, a large beach towel that will serve as a blanket on the
cool desert nights, a discarded plastic shopping bag in which she can carry the other things. Her best find
is a road map on which the Primate Center is marked in red. She knows the address of Aaron's ranch
and finds it on the map. She studies the roads and plots a route home. Cross-country, assuming that she
does not get lost, she will have to travel about fifty miles to reach the ranch. She hides these things behind