We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (14 page)

Ezra shoved his hand up the back of Madame Defarge’s dress. She leapt toward Harlow’s
neck, paddled about there. Ezra put words into her mouth. She might have been thanking
heaven for little girls. She might have been mouthing the lyrics to “La Marseillaise.”
Or “Frère Jacques.” That’s how bad Ezra’s French accent was; it might as well have
been French.

And talk about your uncanny valley response. I’ve never seen a more unseemly display
of puppetry. I’ve never seen a creepier sight.

I turned priggish. “We shouldn’t be playing with it,” I said. “It looks old. Probably
irreplaceable,” but Harlow said that only a moron would put something irreplaceable
in a checked suitcase.

And anyway they were being really careful with it. She took the dummy from Ezra, made
it shake its little fists at me. From the look on Madame Defarge’s face, I could see
that everything was going exactly as she’d planned. “Don’t spoil my fun,” Madame Defarge
said.

I had no time for this nonsense; I had a class to get to. I went into the kitchen,
phoned the airport, where my call was very important to them, and left a message.
And then Harlow came into the kitchen after me. She promised to put Madame Defarge
back in the suitcase and I promised to meet her later for a night of bar-hopping,
because, for God’s sake, Rosemary, no harm had been done and I should take a chill
pill.

And also because I wanted Harlow to like me.

I
F YOU ASKED
me about ninety-nine percent of the college lectures I once attended, I couldn’t tell
you a thing. That particular afternoon in that particular class falls into the one
percent that remains.

It was still raining. Not a hard rain but a clammy one, and me, soaking it in like
a sponge on a bicycle. A flock of seagulls were grazing on the soccer fields as I
pedaled past. I’d seen that many times during storms, the gathering of the gulls,
but it always amazed me. Davis, California, is profoundly inland.

By the time I reached the lecture hall, water had run down the legs of my jeans and
puddled in the bottoms of my shoes. Chem 100, where all the biggest classes were held,
was a large auditorium that sloped down to where the professor stood. You entered
from the highest point, the back of the room. Ordinarily, on a rainy day, attendance
would be sparse; students seemed to think classes were canceled like ball games for
rain. But this was the last class of the session, the last class before the final.
I was late so I had to descend the stairs, sit near the front. I raised the arm-desk
and prepared to take notes.

The name of the class was Religion and Violence. The professor, Dr. Sosa, was a man
in his middle years with a receding hairline and an expanding belly. He was a popular
teacher, who sported
Star Trek
ties and mismatched socks, but all ironically. “Back when I was at Starfleet Academy,”
he’d say while introducing some piece of ancient data or beginning some historical
anecdote. Dr. Sosa’s lectures were enthusiastic and wide-ranging. I counted him among
the easy-listening portion of my professors.

My father had once suggested, as an experiment, that I should nod every time a professor
looked in my direction. I would find, he said, the professors looking my way more
and more often, helpless as Pavlov’s dogs. Dad may have had an agenda. The only way
your absence was likely to be noticed in a class of a hundred or more was if your
professor had been carefully conditioned to look for you. Dr. Sosa and I had a silent
rapport. My father was a crafty man.

The lecture that day began with a discussion of violent women. Without openly acknowledging
it, this underscored the fact that the rest of the class had all been about men. But
that first part is not what I remember. I think maybe Dr. Sosa talked about the WKKK,
the Temperance Movement, an odd assortment of religious mobs and girl-on-girl mayhem.
I think we ranged from Ireland to Pakistan to Peru. But Dr. Sosa clearly thought of
all these less as independent movements and more as adjuncts to whatever the men were
doing. His heart was just not in the violent women.

Soon he’d returned to the topic of religiously motivated violence against women, a
standard thread throughout the class. And then, suddenly, with no warning at all,
he was talking about chimpanzees. Chimpanzees, he said, shared our propensity for
insider/outsider violence. He described what the border-patrolling male chimps do
and their murderous raiding parties. He asked us rhetorically if doctrinal differences
simply provided cover for our primate and viciously tribal selves, which was so much
like something my father would have said I felt an unreasonable impulse to object
on those grounds alone. Dr. Sosa glanced at me and I did not nod. He said that among
chimpanzees, the lowest-status male was higher than the highest-status female and
he was looking right at me the whole time he said this.

There was a fly in the room. I could hear it. My feet were freezing and I could smell
my sneakers, essence of rubber and socks. Dr. Sosa gave up and looked away.

He repeated a thing he’d said many times before—that most religions were obsessed
with policing female sexual behavior, that for many it was their entire raison d’être.
He described the sexual herding done by male chimpanzees. “The only difference,” he
said, “is that no chimp has ever claimed he was following God’s orders.”

Dr. Sosa had wandered off from the podium. He returned to it, consulted his notes.
He said that rape, like domestic abuse, was a chimp behavior, and he shared a recent
observation from Goodall’s team in Gombe of one female in estrus forced to have sex
with various males 170 times in one three-day period.

I had to put my pen down. My hands were shaking so hard my pen was vibrating on the
paper, marking it with a frantic Morse code of blots and dashes. I missed a few of
the things Dr. Sosa said next, because of the way my blood was rampaging through my
brain and, when the students around me turned to look, I realized that I’d been breathing
too loudly, wheezing or hissing or panting or something. I closed my mouth and the
students turned back.

•   •   •

I
HOPE YOU
haven’t assumed that just because I had no friends I’d had no sex; the bar for sexual
partners is much, much lower. Though it’s surprisingly hard to have sex without friends;
I’d often wished for someone who’d give me pointers and reassurance. Instead I’d had
to make the whole thing up on my own, wondering why I never experienced the glossy
sex of the movies. What is a normal sex life? What is normal sex? What if asking the
question already means you aren’t normal? It seemed as if I couldn’t get even the
instinctual, mammalian parts of my life right.

“You’re very quiet,” my first said. We’d met one evening at a frat party shortly after
I discovered Jell-O shots. We’d locked ourselves in the bathroom and the sex had been
plenty noisy from my perspective, what with the constant banging on the door and people
cursing us when they couldn’t get in. I’d had my back against the sink, the rim digging
into my spine and then, that angle having proved too difficult for beginners, we ended
up on the floor on a filthy bath mat, but I hadn’t complained. I’d thought I was being
a good sport.

Earlier in the evening, he’d called me shy, as if it were a compliment, as if he found
my silence strangely compelling or mysterious, or, at the very least, cute. I remembered
the noises I’d often heard on my parents’ side of the bedroom wall and I could have
made them myself if I’d understood they were desirable. I’d just thought of them as
creepy and parental.

I knew the first time would hurt; I’d been prepped for that by advice columns in various
magazines, so I wasn’t alarmed by that part. And it did hurt a hell of a lot. But
I’d also been prepped for blood, and there wasn’t any. And then it hurt the second
time and the third time, too, even though that was with a different guy and a smaller
penis. No magazine had suggested it would still be hurting by then.

I finally went to see a doctor at student health. She looked inside and told me that
the problem was my hymen, which was so small it had frayed but not broken, so the
deed was done in her office with special implements of hymen destruction. “That should
clear the way,” she said cheerfully, along with a lot of cautionary advice about not
letting myself be pressured into things that made me uncomfortable and the importance
of protection. Pamphlets were pressed into my hands. I had a terrible ache below,
as if a cramp had tied itself in a knot and then tightened. But mostly it was humiliating.

My point being: I’m no stranger to bad sex.

But I am one of the lucky ones. I’ve never in my life been forced into any sex I haven’t
wanted at the time.

•   •   •

W
HEN
I
COULD
hear again, Dr. Sosa had moved on from common chimps to their (and our) close relations,
the bonobos. “Bonobo society,” he said, “is peaceful and egalitarian. These laudable
qualities are achieved through continual and casual sexual congress, much of it same-sex.
Sex among the bonobos is just a form of grooming. Mere social glue,” said Dr. Sosa.
And then, “
Lysistrata
had it backwards. The road to peace is through more sex, not less.”

This went down well with the male students. They were surprisingly okay with being
told, by inference, that they were simple creatures entirely controlled by their dicks.
Ithyphallic, one might be tempted to say.

They were okay with being told, by inference, that reluctance, mostly female, was
the root of all evil. This reaction was less surprising.

A young woman a few rows to my right raised her hand and then didn’t wait to be called
on. She stood. Her blond hair was braided and beaded in complicated ways. The one
ear I could see was rimmed with silver cuffs. “How do you know which came first?”
she asked Dr. Sosa. “Maybe female bonobos find their males more attractive than women
find men. Maybe it’s sexy to be peaceful and egalitarian and not so concerned with
policing female sexuality. Maybe you guys should give that a try.” Someone in the
back made a sound much like the chimpanzee food hoot.

“Bonobos are matriarchal,” the young woman said. “How do you know it’s the sex and
not the matriarchy that makes a society peaceful? Female solidarity. Females protecting
other females. Bonobos have it. Chimps and humans don’t.”

“Okay,” Dr. Sosa said. “Fair point. You’ve given me something to think about.” He
glanced my way.

•   •   •

D
R.
S
OSA ENDED
the last lecture of the quarter by telling us that our preference for our own kind
begins at birth. We find it in three-month-old babies who prefer faces from the racial
category they see most often to all others. We find it among young children who, when
divided into groups along the most arbitrary of criteria—shoelace color, for example—vehemently
prefer the people inside their group to the people outside. “‘Do unto others as you
would have others do unto you’ is our highest, most developed morality,” Dr. Sosa
said. “And really the only one necessary; all the others flow from that; you don’t
need Ten Commandments. But if you do believe, as I do, that morality starts with God,
then you have to wonder why He simultaneously hardwired us against it.

“‘Do unto others’ is an unnatural, inhuman behavior. You can understand why so many
churches and churchgoers say it but so few achieve it. It goes against something fundamental
in our natures. And this, then, is the human tragedy—that the common humanity we share
is fundamentally based on the denial of a common shared humanity.”

End of class. Everyone clapped, either because they’d liked the lecture or else because
it was over. Dr. Sosa said a few more words about the final. It wouldn’t be a simple
regurgitation of dates and facts. He wanted to see the quality of our thinking. He
looked at me again. I could have given him one last reassuring nod, but I was still
upset. Extremely upset. Profoundly, heart-racingly upset.

I’d never even heard of bonobos. Suddenly everyone seemed to know a lot more about
chimpanzees than I did. This came as a surprise and a surprisingly unpleasant one.
But that was the least of what I’d been given to think about.

I’ll say it again: imitating human beings was not something which pleased me. I imitated
them because I was looking for a way out, for no other reason.

—F
RANZ
K
AFKA,
“A Report for an Academy”

T
ODAY, IN 2012,
with the whole of the Internet laid out before me like a Candy Land board (or maybe
Chutes and Ladders is the better metaphor—or maybe Sorry!—anyway, one of those games
that never ends because you never win), I’ve been trying to find out what happened
to other famous cross-fostered chimps. Information about the experiments is easy to
come by, not so easy to learn the fates of the subjects. When there is information,
it’s often disputed.

One of the earliest chimps, clever, docile little Gua, appears to have died in 1933
from a respiratory infection shortly after the Kellogg family returned her to the
Yerkes research lab, where she’d been born. She’d lived in the Kellogg home for about
nine months alongside their toddler son, Donald, effortlessly outshining him at using
a fork and drinking from a cup. She was two years old at the time of her death.

•   •   •

V
IKI
H
AYES WAS
born in 1947 and died in her home of viral meningitis when she was either six and
a half or seven, depending on what website you choose. After her death, her parents
divorced; at least one friend said that Viki had been the only thing keeping that
marriage together. She was an only child.

•   •   •

M
AYBELLE (BORN IN 1965)
and Salome (1971) both died of a severe diarrhea that developed within days of their
respective families’ going on vacation and leaving them behind. No underlying physical
condition for the diarrhea was found in either case.

•   •   •

A
FTER HIS RETURN
to a research facility, Ally (born 1969) also developed a life-threatening diarrhea.
He pulled out his own hair and lost the use of one arm, but none of these things killed
him. There are rumors, unsubstantiated, that he died in the 1980s in the medical labs,
victim of an experimental but fatal dose of insecticide.

•   •   •

A
T TWELVE YEARS OF AGE,
Lucy Temerlin (born in 1964) was sent from her home to live with the chimps in Gambia.
She’d been raised in Oklahoma by the Temerlin family. Lucy liked
Playgirl
magazine, tea that she brewed herself, and straight gin. She was a tool-using chimp
who took sexual pleasure from the household vacuum. She was a wild girl.

But she knew nothing of life in the wild. She’d been born at the Noell’s Ark Chimp
Farm and taken from her mother into a human home two days later. In Gambia, Janis
Carter, a psych grad student, took great care over many years trying to gently habituate
her. During this time, Lucy suffered a deep depression, lost weight, and pulled out
her hair. She was last seen alive, in the company of other chimps and apparently resigned
to being so, in 1987.

Some weeks later, her scattered bones were found and collected. The suspicion that
she was killed by poachers, into whose arms she eagerly ran, has been widely transmitted.
It has also been strongly contradicted.

•   •   •

N
IM
C
HIMPSKY (1973–2000),
star of book and screen, died at the far-too-young age of twenty-six. At the time
of his death he was living at the Black Beauty Ranch for horses in Texas, but he’d
had many homes and many surrogate families. He learned twenty-five or a hundred twenty-five
signs—reports differ—but his linguistic capabilities were a disappointment to Dr.
Herb Terrace, the psychologist who’d picked him for study. When Nim was four years
old, Terrace announced that the experiment was over. Nim was then sent off to live
at the Institute for Primate Studies (IPS) in Oklahoma.

Nim’s perceived failures had consequences for many of the signing chimps. Money for
these experiments dried up as a direct result.

He was eventually sold to the medical labs, where he lived in a small cage until one
of his former grad students threatened a lawsuit and launched a public fund that finally
got him out.

•   •   •

W
ASHOE (1965–2007),
the most famous of the cross-fostered chimps, also spent time at the IPS in Oklahoma.
The first nonhuman ever to learn American Sign Language, she had a vocabulary of 350
ASL words and died of natural causes in 2007, when she was forty-two. Roger Fouts,
who’d started working with her as a grad student, eventually devoted his life to her
protection and well-being. She died at the sanctuary he created for her on the Central
Washington University campus in Ellensburg, surrounded by humans and chimps who knew
and loved her.

About Washoe, Roger Fouts has said, she taught him that in the phrase
human being
, the word
being
is much more important than the word
human
.

•   •   •

T
HE IMPULSE TO WRITE
a book appears to run like a fever through those of us who’ve lived with apes. We
all have our reasons.
The Ape and the Child
is about the Kelloggs.
Next of Kin
is about Washoe. Viki is
The Ape in Our House
.
The Chimp Who Would Be Human
is Nim.

Maurice Temerlin’s
Lucy: Growing Up Human
ends in 1975, when Lucy was eleven years old. The Temerlins adopted her believing,
as did many of the cross-fostering families, as did my parents, that they were making
a lifelong commitment. But at the end of his book, Temerlin expresses a longing for
a normal life. He and his wife haven’t shared a bed for years, because Lucy won’t
have it. They can’t take a vacation or ask friends to dinner. There is no part of
their lives that Lucy doesn’t affect.

Lucy had an older brother, human, whose name was Steve. Post-1975, I can find no mention
of him. I do find a site that says that Donald Kellogg, the child raised for a year
and a half with little Gua—a period of time he would, of course, have had no memory
of, though it is well documented in papers, books, and home movies—killed himself
around the age of forty-three. Another site claims that Donald had had a distinctly
simian gait, but it’s a white supremacist site—there is no reason to give that any
credence at all.