We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (15 page)

A
FEW HOURS
after Dr. Sosa’s lecture, I met up with Harlow at a beer-and-hamburger place in central
Davis called The Graduate. The streets were dark, cold, and wet though the rain had
stopped. On another occasion, I might have been more appreciative of the black magic
around me, each streetlamp wrapped in its own bubble of mist, my bike-light briefly
igniting the puddles on the black streets as I passed. But I was still teetering on
the ragged cliff-edge of Dr. Sosa’s lecture. My plan for the evening was to drink.
In Davis, biking while drunk results in the exact same ticket as driving while drunk,
but this was so patently ridiculous I refused to acknowledge it.

By the time I locked my bike, I was shivering mightily. I remembered the scene in
It’s a Wonderful Life
when Clarence Odbody orders a flaming rum punch. A flaming rum punch would have really
hit the spot. I would have bathed in it.

I opened the heavy door to The Graduate and slid into the din. I’d been considering
telling Harlow what I’d just learned about chimp sex. Much would depend on how drunk
I got. But I was all about female solidarity that evening, and I thought it might
make me feel better to talk frankly to another woman about the horribleness of male
chimps. So I was not happy to see that Reg was joining us. Reg did not seem like someone
with whom you could profitably discuss chimp sex.

I was even less happy to see Madame Defarge. She was sitting on Harlow’s lap, weaving
her head from side to side and unhinging her jaw like a cobra. Harlow was wearing
a pair of worn jeans just barely held together with embroidered patches of mountains,
rainbows, and hemp leaves, so her lap was an interesting place. “I’m being careful
with her,” Harlow told me, apparently irritated by something I hadn’t even had the
time to say yet. She was making assumptions about my no-fun-at-all-ness. They were
good assumptions. Our relationship had started so promisingly, what with both of us
breaking things in best monkey-girl fashion and swinging off to jail together. But
I could see she was reassessing me now. I was not as gamesome as she’d thought. I
was beginning to disappoint.

She graciously put all that aside for the moment. Harlow had just learned that the
drama department would be putting on a gender-reversal version of
Macbeth
in the spring. Of course, she didn’t say
Macbeth
; she said “the Scottish play” in that annoying way drama majors do. The male roles
would all be taken by women, the women’s by men. Harlow had been chosen to help with
the sets and costumes and I’d rarely seen her so excited. Everyone was assuming, she
told me, that they would be cross-dressing the actors, but she hoped to talk the director
out of that.

Reg leaned in to say that there was nothing an audience liked better than a man in
a dress. Harlow brushed him away as the minor annoyance he was.

“Wouldn’t it be more challenging,” she said, “more of a mind-fuck, if the costuming
didn’t change?” That would suggest a place in which the dominant paradigm was female;
all those things that coded here in our world as female would represent power and
politics. Female would be the norm.

Harlow said that she was already doing sketches of the castle in Inverness, trying
to imagine a fantastical, female space. This could have segued into a conversation
about chimp rape, but not without harshing the mellow. Harlow was incandescent with
hopes and plans.

Men were buying drinks for Madame Defarge.

Reg offered me one of them, a dark ale with a strong hoppy smell. The chilled glass
mug was warmer than my hands and I’d lost all feeling in my thumbs. Reg raised his
own beer in a toast. “To superpowers,” he said, lest I get the impression we were
letting bygones be bygones. Let the wild ruckus commence.

Soon I was sweating. The Graduate was packed; there was a DJ, and some ill-advised
line dancing. The room smelled of beer and bodies. Madame Defarge gamboled on the
tables and the backs of the chairs. Green Day’s “Basket Case” pounded from the speakers.

Harlow and Reg had some words, shouting them over the music. I heard most of them.
The gist was that Reg thought she was flirting with every guy in the bar and Harlow
thought it was Madame Defarge doing the flirting. Harlow herself was simply engaged
in performance art and the guys in the bar all knew it.

“Oh, yeah,” said Reg. “Bunch of real sophisticates. Real art lovers.” Reg said that
men associated performance art with women who painted their faces in menstrual blood
and they didn’t like it. Sluts, though, sluts they liked.

Harlow thought there was an important distinction to be made between a slut and a
woman operating a slutty puppet. Reg thought there was no difference, or that maybe
women thought there was a difference but men didn’t care.

“Are you calling me a slut?” Madame Defarge snapped. “Like you should fucking talk!”

The music slowed without quieting. Harlow and Reg tended to their drinks. A white
guy in a backward baseball cap—“fucking milk chicken,” Reg told me, loud enough for
the guy to hear, which means very loud—came and asked for a dance. Harlow handed him
Madame Defarge.

“See?” she said to Reg. “She’s dancing with him and I’m dancing with you.” She held
out her hand and Reg took it, hauled her in. They moved away from the counter, wrapped
themselves tightly together, her hands on his shoulders, his in her shredded back-pockets.
The guy in the backward baseball cap stared at Madame Defarge in bewilderment until
I took her from him.

“She’s not for dancing with,” I said. “She’s very valuable.”

The DJ hit the strobe lights. The Graduate morphed into some ballroom of the damned.
Reg returned and talked to me at length, the strobe making a slide show of his face.
I nodded until nodding made me dizzy, then focused on the bend in his sharp nose to
reorient myself. He wasn’t shouting, so I didn’t hear a word.

I nodded some more and the whole time I was making this agreeable gesture, I was telling
him that his position on superpowers was balderdash and had no bearing on the real
world. “Poppycock,” I said. “Flapdoodle. Bollocks. Piffle. Crapola. Codswallop.”

My gaze had dropped to his chest. A bright yellow road-sign was printed on his T-shirt,
with the silhouette of a family running across it. The father was in front, pulling
his wife by the hand behind him. The wife was pulling their child and the child had
a doll, also by the hand. I’m from Indiana, and Davis is not San Diego. I didn’t know
this was an actual road-sign, an encouragement to not hit illegal immigrants with
your car. Both child and doll were airborne; that’s how fast the family was running.
I could see their legs pumping, the child’s braids whipping behind her. I should maybe
say here that I’d taken a couple of pills Harlow gave me. It’s a lucky thing I’d never
faced peer pressure before; I turned out to suck at it.

“Bullshit,” I said. “Baloney. Hooey. Horse feathers.”

Reg said he couldn’t hear me, so we went outside, where I told him about the mirror
test. I can’t remember how that had come to mind, but I gave him quite the lecture.
I told him that some species, like chimps and elephants and dolphins, recognize themselves
in the mirror and others, like dogs and pigeons, gorillas and human babies, don’t.
Darwin himself had begun to think about this one day when he put a mirror on the ground
in the Zoological Gardens and watched two young orangutans look at themselves in it.
And then, a hundred years later, a psychologist named Gordon Gallup had refined the
test, observed some chimps using the mirror to look inside their own mouths, see those
parts of the body only the mirror could show them. I told Reg that we’d been using
the mirror test to determine self-awareness ever since
fucking Darwin
and I couldn’t believe a guy like him, a college guy who thought he knew everything,
wasn’t familiar with something so fundamental.

And then I added that a psychomanteum was a mirrored room in which people tried to
communicate with spirits, for no particular reason except that I knew it.

I wondered suddenly what the impact of identical-twinness on the mirror test might
be, but didn’t say so, since I didn’t know the answer and he might pretend he did.

Probably I was trying to reestablish my shattered sense of authority on these matters
after the revelations of Sosa’s class. Definitely I was being a jerk. I remember Reg
saying I sure talked a lot and I remember clapping my hand over my mouth as if I’d
been found out. Then Reg said we should go back inside, because I was shivering again.
And because he now thought he knew everything he needed to know about the mirror test.

T
HE REST OF
the night remains in my brain as that disconnected montage the movies have trained
us to have.
The Monkey Girl Returns
, an episodic, demented Iditarod through the town.

•   •   •

H
ERE
I
AM,
trying to get a rice bowl at Jack in the Box. Reg had left in a snit sometime earlier.
Harlow is on my bike, with me balanced on the handlebars. We put a long order in through
the intercom, changing our minds many times and trying to be sure the woman on the
other end has it all straight, and then she won’t serve us because we aren’t in a
car; she says we have to come inside. An argument ensues, which ends with the woman
fetching another woman, a woman of more authority, who tells us to go to hell. The
words
go to hell
come crackling out of Jack’s big snowball of a head. Harlow takes out the intercom
armed with nothing but her house key.

•   •   •

H
ERE
I
’M IN
the G Street Pub, being chatted up by some black guy in a letterman’s jacket, which
probably meant he was in high school, but we kissed intensely and for quite some time
so I really hope not.

•   •   •

H
ERE
I
’M HUDDLED
by myself on a damp bench at the train station, my face on my knees. I’m sobbing and
sobbing, because I’ve gone and let myself imagine a thing I’ve never let myself imagine
before. I’ve let myself imagine the day Fern was taken away.

I’ll never know for sure what happened. I wasn’t there; Lowell wasn’t there. I’m betting
Mom wasn’t there and maybe even not Dad.

Fern must have been drugged. Fern must have woken up in a strange place just the way
I did that first afternoon in my new bedroom. Only when I’d cried, our father had
come. Who had come for Fern? Maybe Matt. I allow myself this one small consolation,
to imagine Matt beside her when she first woke up.

I’m picturing her as I last saw her, exuberantly five years old. But she’s not in
the Swiss Family Robinson tree house now; instead she’s in a cage with older, larger
chimps, none of whom she knows. Crawling shit, she says, and then she has to learn
her place, not only that she’s a chimp, but female and lower in status than any male.
I know that Fern would never have accepted that without a fight.

What did they do to her in that cage? Whatever it was, it happened because no woman
had stopped it. The women who should have stood with Fern—my mother, the female grad
students, me—none of us had helped. Instead we had exiled her to a place completely
devoid of female solidarity.

•   •   •

I
’M STILL CRYING,
but I seem to have moved to a booth somewhere I can’t identify—not a bar, because
I can hear everything everyone says. I’m with Harlow and two guys about our same age.
The better-looking one is seated by her, has his arm stretched along the seat back
behind her shoulder. He has longish hair and shakes his head frequently to keep it
out of his eyes. The other guy is obviously meant for me. He’s quite short. I don’t
care about that. I’m quite short myself. I prefer beta males to alphas. Only he keeps
telling me to smile. “Nothing’s as bad as all that,” he says. If I were five years
old, I’d have bitten him by now.

I’m also insulted because it’s so clear that I’m the consolation prize. No one is
even making an effort to pretend otherwise. It’s like we’re in a musical and Harlow
and her guy are the romantic couple and will get all the best songs and the big story
lines. Everything about them will matter. My guy and me are the comic relief.

“I don’t even know your name,” I say to him as an explanation of why I don’t owe him
a smile. Though, in all fairness, we probably were introduced at some point when I
wasn’t listening.

Maybe I didn’t say that out loud, because no one responds. He’s blinking fast, as
if he’s got something in his eyes. I’m wearing contacts myself and between them and
all the crying I’ve been doing, it’s as if I’ve scraped the Mojave Desert over my
eyeballs. Suddenly that’s all I can think about—my aching, stinging, burning eyeballs.

Harlow leans across the table, takes my wrist in her hand, shakes it. “Listen to me,”
she says firmly. “Are you listening? Paying attention? Whatever you’re upset about,
you’re just imagining it. It’s not real.”

I can see how tired of me the guy next to Harlow is. “For fuck’s sake. Get a grip,”
he says.

I refuse to be lower status than that insufferable twit. I refuse to smile. I’d rather
die.

•   •   •

W
E’RE STILL IN
the same booth, but now Reg is there. He’s seated by Harlow, and the guy with the
long hair is by me, and the short guy has gotten a chair and is seated at the open
end. I can’t remember how all this happened, and I’m angrier than ever over the upgrade.
I like the short guy better than the guy with the long hair, but who even asked?

The men all seem tense; any moment now, they’ll be firing up their lightsabers. Reg
keeps playing with the saltshaker, spinning it and saying whoever it stops at is a
douche bag, and the guy with long hair says that
he
doesn’t need a saltshaker;
he
knows a douche bag when he sees one just by looking. “Chill out, man,” the short
guy says to Reg. “You can’t have them both”—and Reg raises the temperature by making
the
Loser
sign with his hand against his forehead. Not just the simple, two-fingered L but
his middle finger, too, pointing out and straight at the guy, which retains its classic
meaning but also transforms the simple
Loser
into the
Loser any way you look at it
sign. The guy with long hair catches his breath loudly. We are this close to fisticuffs.

I wonder if I had sex with all three of them, would they calm down? Because it really
doesn’t seem like they would.

Apparently, this I do say out loud. I try to explain that I was being hypothetical.
I try to tell them about Sosa’s lecture, but I don’t get far, because
bonobo
is such a funny word and they all have such funny looks on their faces, it makes
me laugh. At first everyone else laughs, too, but then they stop and I don’t. Nobody
liked my crying and now that I’m laughing, I can see that I’m still irritating the
hell out of everyone.

•   •   •

N
OW
I
’M IN
a bathroom stall, puking up pizza by the slice. When I finish, I go out to the sinks
to wash my face and there are three men at the urinal. Wrong bathroom.

One of the men is Reg. I point to his face in the bathroom mirror. “Who’s that?” I
ask him. And then, helpfully, “It’s an intelligence test.” I take my contacts out
and drop them down the drain, because it’s what you do with disposables; you get rid
of them. Besides, what’s there to see? My own face in the mirror is a badly lit mug
shot, egg-white and staring. I reject it entirely. No way do I look like that. That
must be someone else.

Reg gives me an Altoid, which is maybe the most thoughtful thing any man has ever
done for me. Suddenly I find him very attractive. “You’re standing a little close,”
he says. “Has anyone ever told you that you kind of crowd people? Get in their personal
space?” And just like that, I’m over him.

I remember something. “You need a fucking lot of space,” I say. And then, before he
gets the idea that I care what he needs, I change the subject. “It’s really easy to
persuade people to be hateful,” I tell him, partly as a diversionary tactic and partly
just because it is, and it can’t be said often enough. “You can train any animal into
any behavior on cue if it’s a natural behavior to begin with. Racism, sexism, speciesism—all
natural human behaviors. They can be triggered any time by any unscrupulous yahoo
with a pulpit. A child could do it.

“Mobbing is a natural human behavior,” I say sadly. I’ve started crying again. “Bullying.”

Empathy is also a natural human behavior, and natural to chimps as well. When we see
someone hurt, our brains respond to some extent as if we’d been hurt ourselves. This
response is not located merely in the amygdala, where emotional memories are stored,
but also in those regions of the cortex responsible for analyzing the behavior of
others. We access our own experiences with pain and extend them to the current sufferer.
We’re nice that way.

But I didn’t know this back then. Nor, apparently, did Dr. Sosa.

“Time for you to go home,” Reg says, but I’m not feeling that. I don’t think it’s
that time at all.

•   •   •

H
ARLOW AND
I
are walking through the tunnel of the Shell station car wash. The tunnel has a very
distinctive smell, soap and tires, and we’re stumbling a bit, because we’re stepping
on rocker brushes and conveyor belts and other things we can’t see. We’re agreeing
that when we were kids we loved sitting in the car as it went through the car wash.
It was the best. It was like being in a spaceship or a submarine, the way the giant
cloth squids slapped the windows. I’m fingering the giant cloth squids as I say this;
they are as damp and rubbery as you’d expect.

How the water pours down and pours down, sheeting the windows, and you stay cozy and
dry. What could be better? Fern loved it, too, but I force that thought out of my
head. It comes right back in, Fern’s clever hands undoing the various clasps on her
car seat so she can ricochet from one side of the car to the other, not miss a thing.

Harlow says that sometimes you thought the car was moving but it was the optical illusion
of the brushes passing by you, and I say I’d had that exact same experience.
Exact same.
I shove Fern out of my mind again, and I’m high on Harlow’s concurrence, freebasing
her approval. We are so much alike! “When I get married,” I say, “I want the wedding
to be in a car in a car wash,” and Harlow thinks that’s a great idea, she wants that,
too.

•   •   •

I
’M BACK AT
the G Street Pub. Harlow and I have been playing pool and I’m having a hard time keeping
the balls on the table, much less sinking them into the pockets. “You’re an embarrassment
to the game of pool,” Harlow says, and then I lose track of her, can’t find her anywhere.

I’m looking down on a skinny guy with hair so bleached it’s almost white. I fall into
his arms and, without thinking, I call him by his real name. I press into his chest
as hard as I can, wanting to smell the way my brother smells, laundry soap and bay
leaves and Corn Chex. He’s bleached his hair and lost weight, not so much of an athlete
now, and I would know him anywhere, anytime.

I burst into tears. “You’re all grown up,” he says into my ear. “I didn’t recognize
you at all till you climbed onto the table.”

I have such a grip on his shirt; I don’t plan on ever letting go. But then Officer
Arnie Haddick is standing before me. “I’m taking you in,” he says, shaking his big,
round cop head. “You can sleep it off at county and maybe you’ll use the time to think
about the decisions you’re making. The company you’re keeping.” Officer Haddick says
he owes it to Vince (my father, in case you’ve forgotten his name) to get me safely
off the streets. He says that a drunk woman is a woman asking for trouble.

He leads me outside, helps me gallantly into the back of the cop car, no handcuffs
this time. Harlow is there ahead of me. We’ll soon be sharing a cell, even though,
as Officer Haddick will make clear the next morning, Harlow is the company I shouldn’t
be keeping. “We have to stop meeting like this,” Harlow says.

I want to ask Officer Haddick if he saw a guy with white-blond hair, but obviously
I can’t. My brother has vanished so completely I’m afraid I imagined him.