After we saw Sandy, we spent the next day going door-to-door, trying to uncover some piece of information that might bring us closer to Yoro. Nothing. That horrific vision, that corner of hell, didn’t add a single piece of useful data to our search. Our experience in Los Alamos—where the woman who welcomed us didn’t offer any new clues, but at least our mutual distress over Yoro was relieved with her photos and memories—had been the exception. The guide showed up on the third morning to fetch us. We told him to give us until that evening to prepare, and under cover of darkness, we broke into the house and removed Sandy’s chains. At first she didn’t move. She kept the same position as when she was chained. We didn’t dare move her; she was huge, after all, and deep down we were afraid she might lash out at the whole species by pummeling us. A few anxious minutes passed, but then she looked at her wrists and licked the wounds left by the chains, still without looking up. She didn’t raise her eyes even when she threw her arms around my neck, which I shuffled off onto Jim because I couldn’t support their bulk, and Jim had to sit down on that filthy, humid bed under the weight of them. A few seconds passed by without us knowing quite what to do. We remained silent. I grabbed Sandy’s hand, which was soft and very cold; we made as little noise as possible leaving the cabin, and all three of us jumped into the guide’s jeep.
As we sped off, we could hear shouting and a random shot was fired. But we were already too far away; no vehicle in the village had the horsepower ours did and nobody came in pursuit. Once the adrenaline’s effects had subsided, I rubbed Sandy’s lipstick off with a handkerchief and removed the wig and top. She was trembling. Both of us were trembling. I felt fear again. Her body was so massive. What could have happened had she decided to take revenge against humanity by attacking me? An understandable impulse. But Sandy just stared out the window as we distanced ourselves from that horror. She didn’t move an inch. Her breath misted the glass and screened out the world. Then she closed her eyes and seemed to fall into such a deep sleep that anyone could have suspected she’d withstood all the torture, the mistreatment, the prostitution, with the sole aim of being able to die free. I bent close to her nose gingerly. She was still breathing. She was only asleep, and I was overcome with joy.
We stayed in Sarawak, a small town in Borneo, for forty-two days before returning to New York. We needed the time to arrange for Sandy to be vaccinated in an orangutan rescue center that worked in association with a center in Ohio. I insisted on taking her to the United States because I’d be able to visit her there several times a year, to assure her complete recovery and eventual return to the jungle where she’d been born, though after so many years of confinement, that possibility seemed remote. A return to her natural habitat would be tricky. Though Sandy was still young, nobody could be sure she’d recover enough to be free again. The physical wounds would scar over, but men had humiliated her, they’d sown the seed of slavery in her, which takes root quickly, grows strong and deep and is difficult to weed out. Most slaves never stop being slaves even once they are free.
I met Brigitte in the rescue center. My interest in non-normative sexualities continued long after I’d come to terms with my own. It was a passive kind of interest, though. I mean, I did not seek out sexual minorities, but my wounds had given me a kind of radar that allowed me to intuit things without necessarily looking for them. Things that might go unnoticed by others were obvious to me. Watching Brigitte interact with the orangutans, I immediately picked up on something that few others would have noticed. I should mention there were other female orangutans like Sandy who’d been used as prostitutes by the workers from the palm oil plantations, and also males who were exploited for boxing. The laws of the wild had been twisted in these false combats so that the orangutan’s thumping, which was meant to earn the respect of the weaker ones in their natural habitat, was emptied of meaning and had nothing to do with normal animal behavior, devolving instead into a perverse form of entertainment for humans.
So after I had been introduced to Brigitte and watched her work for a while, I could tell by the way she moved—using a kind of passive scrutiny and intuition—that she felt a particular compassion for the orangutans who had been mutilated in some way. Yes, it was compassion, but there was also something else: pleasure. Brigitte suffered a very uncommon sexual deviation called paraphilia, and I use this term not because I accept the idea of sexual deviancy, but in order to make myself understood. Specifically, she was an acrotomophiliac, someone who gets aroused by amputations. This doesn’t necessarily mean she had or ever wanted to have sexual relations with orangutans. But that’s not the point. She wasn’t, she never would, abuse her position as a caretaker to satisfy a sexual impulse. She shared the information with me because I didn’t hide that I had noticed it, and when these things are dealt with in a natural way, it’s usually a relief for the person who is suffering in silence. Brigitte forced me to reflect on a comment she made about how most pedophiles never actually touch a single child. According to Brigitte, pedophilia, whether you consider it a sickness or not, isn’t something you can really call into question because it unquestionably exists, and in most cases the feeling itself cannot be controlled. What the pedophile can control, though, is acting on that impulse. I thought about how hellish it must be to live that way, in a permanent state of strife with yourself, and it seemed to me like a commendable sacrifice.
Brigitte intuited that she could confide in me. Not long ago, one of those experts in creating labels in the form of Greek words told me that my happiness over the bomb having done a number on my genitals means that I belong to a group of abnormal or psychopathic people. The specialists obviously enjoy classifying people and naming their conditions, creating taxonomies. According to the specialist, I suffered from what is known as apotemnophilia, or body integrity identity disorder. People who suffer from BIID feel incomplete, as if some part of their body were missing, even though they are complete. And the only way to achieve the idealized notion of themselves is by amputating one or more of their limbs. I find it strange that anyone would think that wanting a limb that didn’t belong to me, a surfeit limb, removed means I have a disease. I explained all of this to Brigitte. She said her desire to mutilate herself was the result of a traumatic experience. A wartime love affair. She had been a soldier before working in the reserve, and told me her story.
She had been called up for duty, and could hardly remember when she’d signed up enthusiastically because she’d believed in peace, though she couldn’t remember ever believing in war either. There she was, dressed in the uniform assigned to her, with all those gadgets. A stockpile of arms. More than anything else, she insisted, there were so many arms, but not to defend the homeland, which she could hardly remember anyway, but to defend her head and her heart. She took off running to provide cover for a companion, with all the steel she was carrying. This was her mission. To protect him. He was more important than she was, they said. More important for the war. More important for peace. “And if you feel the fear of battle”—she recalled their warning them before the soldiers headed out—“remember this: you’re already dead.” Death is the military’s home remedy against fear. “We were already dead,” Brigitte said. So she ran crushed by the weight, sweat clouding her vision, never stopping to wonder if the dead could sweat or see, but knowing the person she was covering did. His life before hers. And so over the weeks and months spent protecting him, she fell madly in love with him. So Brigitte fell into the traps set for him on several occasions; he was more valuable than she was for war, for peace. One day she fell into a deep hole full of bayonets. Who knows how she survived that one, she said. Maybe it was for love. Or maybe it was because, as they had said, she wasn’t alive anymore. She preferred to believe it was for love. She lost two fingers. (And when she said that, I glanced at Brigitte’s two hands, intact, no wounds or mutilations: “The loss happened inside me,” she said, and continued her story.)