We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (20 page)

We heard the warning alarms on the crossing nearest us, the engine approaching from
the north. I was sorting madly through all the things I’d planned to say, looking
for the single most important. I made a hasty, ill-advised choice. “I know you’ve
always blamed me for Fern.”

“I shouldn’t have done that. You were five years old.”

“But I honestly don’t remember what I did. I don’t remember anything at all about
Fern leaving.”

“Serious?” Lowell asked. He was quiet for a moment; I could see him deciding how much
to tell me. This was a bad sign, that there were things he maybe shouldn’t say. My
heart grew thorns, each beat a stab.

The train arrived. The ticket collector set out a step for the debarking passengers.
Some people got off. Others got on. Time was running out. Already we were walking
toward the nearest door. “You made Mom and Dad choose,” Lowell said finally. “You
or her. You were always such a jealous little kid.”

He swung his backpack on board, hoisted himself up and in, turned to look back down
at me. “You were only five years old,” he repeated. “Don’t go blaming yourself.”

He stared at me then, the way you stare at someone you won’t see for a long time.
Her face when I left her.
“Tell Mom and Dad I love them? Make them believe it, that’ll be the hard part.”

He was still in the doorway, his face partly his own and partly, the tired part, our
father’s. “You, too, squirt. You can’t imagine how much I miss you all. Good old Bloomington.
‘When I dream about the moonlight on the Wabash . . .’”

Then I long for my Indiana home.

A middle-aged Asian woman in jeans and high heels came running. She took the step
in an agile leap, thwacking Lowell on the arm with her swinging purse. “God, I’m so
sorry,” she said. “I thought I’d missed my train.” She disappeared into the coach.
The whistle sounded.

“I’m really glad you have a friend,” Lowell told me. “Harlow seems to care a lot about
you.” And then the conductor came and made him take his seat. It was the last thing
I remember him saying, my big brother, my personal Hale-Bopp comet, streaming by and
gone again—that Harlow cared.

For all the brevity of the visit, he’d managed to get some licks in. I’d planned to
make him feel bad about my lonely life, but Harlow and her stupid friendship had nixed
that and I was the one left ashamed. I’d always known he blamed me for Fern, but I
hadn’t heard it aloud in ten years.

The things Lowell had said combined with his leaving combined with my lack of sleep
and the aftermath of the itchy, ugly narcotic I’d taken. Any one of those might have
done me in. The entirety was overpowering. I was sad and horrified, ashamed and bereft,
lonely and exhausted, caffeinated and guilt-ridden and grief-stricken and many other
things as well. The system crashed. I watched the fog swallow the train and all I
felt was tired.

“You love Fern,” someone said to me. It turned out to be my old imaginary friend,
Mary. I hadn’t seen Mary in almost as long as I hadn’t seen Fern and she hadn’t aged
a day. She didn’t stick around. She brought me the one message—“You love Fern”—and
then was gone again. I wanted to believe her. But the whole point of Mary had been
to reassure me where Fern was concerned. Maybe she’d just been doing her job.

We call them feelings because we feel them. They don’t start in our minds, they arise
in our bodies, is what my mother always said, with the great materialist William James
as backup. It was a standard component of her parenting—that you can’t help the things
you feel, only the things you do. (But telling everyone what you felt, that was
doing
something. Especially when what you were feeling was mean. Though as a child, I’d
always seen this as more of a gray area.)

Now I searched through my weariness, into every breath, every muscle, every heartbeat,
and found a reassuring, bone-deep certainty. I loved Fern. I had always loved Fern.
I always would.

I stood by the tracks, all by myself, in a sudden shower of images. My life, only
with Fern instead of without her. Fern in kindergarten, making a paper turkey from
the silhouette of her hand. Fern in the high school gym watching Lowell play basketball
and hooting when he scored. Fern in the freshman dorm, complaining to the other girls
about our crazy crazy parents. Fern making the hand signs we found so entertaining
back then.
Loser.
Whatev.

I had missed her desperately in every one of those places, every one of those moments,
and not even known it.

But as far back as I could remember, I’d also been jealous of her. I’d been jealous
again, not fifteen minutes past, learning that Lowell’s visit had been for her and
not me. But maybe this was the way sisters usually felt about each other.

Though clearly not so jealous that one sister forced another into exile. Had I really
done that? This was where the fairy tale ran out of road.

I decided not to think about it further until I was better rested. Here is what I
thought about instead: what kind of a family lets a five-year-old child decide such
things?

O
N THE BUS TO
V
ERMILLION,
Lowell told me, he’d sat for several hours next to a mail-order bride only a year
older than he was and just arrived from the Philippines. Her name was Luya. She’d
shown him the photo of the man she was marrying. Lowell could think of nothing good
to say about a man who wouldn’t even meet her at the airport, so he’d said nothing.

Another man on the bus asked her if she was in the business; neither she nor Lowell
knew what that meant. And another man leaned in from the seat behind, eyes darting,
pupils enormous, to tell them that the lead levels in breast milk were part of a deliberate
plot. Women didn’t want to be tied down to house and family anymore. If their milk
was toxic, that’d be just the excuse they’d been waiting for. “They all want to wear
the pants,” the man said.

“I’m seeing so much of America today,” Luya kept telling Lowell in nervously accented
English. It became a personal catchphrase for him—whenever things were not to his
liking, he’d say that—I’m seeing so much of America today.

I went back to my apartment. It was a chilly walk. Ghosts of Fern and Lowell swirled
around me, all ages, all moods, appearing and disappearing in the fog. I moved slowly
to give myself time to recover from Lowell’s visit and from Lowell’s departure. And
also, truth be told, to delay seeing Harlow.

I didn’t want to be worrying over Harlow. She shouldn’t have been the very last thing
Lowell said to me. She should have been the very last thing on my mind. But once I
got home, there she would be, lying in my bed and needing to be dealt with.

I didn’t like to think of Lowell as one of those guys who has sex with a girl and
then immediately ditches her. Leaving without a word was just Lowell’s thing and nothing
personal. Harlow could join the club.

In Lowell’s defense, he’d struck me as crazy. Real, run-out-of-medication crazy. I
know I haven’t conveyed that. I’ve made Lowell sound more lucid than I found him.
I did so out of love. But I’m trying to be nothing but honest here. And no one is
helped by this evasion, least of all Lowell.

So, out of love, let me try again. The whole time we were with Harlow, he’d seemed
perfectly ordinary, a completely believable pharmaceutical rep, which is what he’d
told Harlow and maybe really was, who knows? The things that disturbed me all happened
later, when we were alone at Bakers Square.

It wasn’t the flashes of anger—he’d been angry for as long as I could remember, a
foot-stamping, middle-finger-thrusting, boy-shaped storm. I was used to that. His
fury was my nostalgia.

No, this was something that looked less mad and more madness. It was subtle and deniable;
I could pretend not to see it, which is what I wanted very much to do. But even after
ten years empty of data, I knew Lowell. I knew his body language as well as I once
knew Fern’s. There was something wrong in the way his eyes moved. Something wrong
in the way he held his shoulders, worked his mouth. Maybe
crazy
isn’t quite the right word, after all—too internal. Maybe
traumatized
is better. Or
unstable
. Lowell appeared unstable in the most literal sense, like someone who’s been pushed
off his balance.

So I would just explain that to Harlow. He’s not a cad, I’d tell her. He’s just unstable.
She, of all people, should understand.

Then I put Harlow out of my mind so that Fern would have more room there. Enough with
the tears and regrets. Lowell had said that Fern was my job now. Hadn’t she always
been so? Past time to do my job.

Periodic reports were all well and good; our Fern could not be left in a cage in a
lab. But Lowell had been trying for ten years to free her. He’d come up against any
number of problems—how to take her quietly (and now Hazel) and whom to ask for help
and how to keep their whereabouts secret so they wouldn’t be instantly identified
and returned. The few chimp refuges operating in the U.S. were maxed out and none
of them would take a stolen pair of animals if they knew they were doing so.

Where to take her would have been an enormous problem even if she hadn’t needed to
be hidden. The financial difficulties were huge; the danger in introducing two new
chimps, one of them a child, into an established troop severe. How could I possibly
succeed where Lowell, so much smarter, better connected, and more ruthless, had failed?
And would Fern really wish to be uprooted again, taken again from the people and chimps
that she’d come to know? Lowell had told me she had good friends at the lab now.

I suspected that all these problems could be solved with cash. Lots of cash. Making-a-movie
or starting-a-foundation kinds of cash. You’ll-never-see-a-tenth-of-that kinds of
cash.

So many problems, however infinitely varied they first appear, turn out to be matters
of money. I can’t tell you how much this offends me. The value of money is a scam
perpetrated by those who have it over those who don’t; it’s the Emperor’s New Clothes
gone global. If chimps used money and we didn’t, we wouldn’t admire it. We’d find
it irrational and primitive. Delusional. And why gold? Chimps barter with meat. The
value of meat is self-evident.

By now I’d reached my own street. There were three cars parked in front of the apartment
house and one had its interior lights on. I could see the driver, a hulking shadow
in the lighted cab. My spider sense was tingling. FBI. How close they’d come to catching
Lowell. How terrible I would feel if I’d talked him into staying.

Then I looked more closely at the car. An ancient Volvo, white once upon a time. The
scrapings of a bumper sticker that someone had committed to and then thought better
of, with only the letter V remaining, or else half a W. I knocked on the passenger
window and slid inside when the door unlocked. It was warmer in there and smelled
gross but with a minty overlay, like morning breath on Altoids. The light was on because
the driver was reading—a large book,
Intro to Biology
. He was stalking his girlfriend and studying for his finals at the same time. He
was multitasking. “Good morning, Reg,” I said.

“Why are you up so early?”

“I’ve been off with my brother. Eating pie.” What could be more innocent, more rosily
American than that? “What’re you doing here?”

“Losing my self-respect.”

I patted his arm. “You did well to keep that for as long as you did,” I told him.

•   •   •

O
BVIOUSLY, THIS WAS
awkward. I’d told Reg on the phone the night before that Harlow wasn’t here. His presence
on the street, his little stakeout, openly called me a liar. It would have been nice
to have the time to feel the insult, marvel at the crazy of his jealousy, but it was
all spoiled by the fact that Harlow might, at any moment, walk out the front door.

“Go home,” I said. “She’s probably already back there now, wondering where the hell
you are.”

He looked at me hard, then looked away. “I think we’re breaking up. I think I’m breaking
up with her.”

I made some noncommittal sound. A brief sort of hum. He’d been breaking up with her
the first time I’d laid eyes on him and most times since. “Hathos,” I offered finally
and then thoughtfully provided the definition. “The pleasure you get from hating something.”

“That’s it exactly. I want a normal girlfriend. Someone restful. You know anyone like
that?”

“I’d volunteer if you were rich,” I told him. “Like hugely rich. I could be restful
for massive sums of money.”

“Flattered. But no.”

“Then stop wasting my time and go home.” I got out of the car and went into the apartment.
I didn’t watch to see what he’d do next, because I thought it would look suspicious
if I did. I took the stairs.

There was no sign of Ezra, it being too early in the morning to shoulder the burdens
of apartment management. Todd was still out. My bedroom door still closed. Madame
Defarge was on the couch with her legs folded friskily over her head. I carried her
with me into Todd’s bedroom and fell asleep holding her. I had a dream where Reg and
I argued as to which was more humane, the guillotine or the electric chair. I don’t
remember who took what side. I just remember that Reg’s position, whichever it was,
was not tenable.

I
OMITTED MORE
from my breakfast with Lowell than his instability. I also omitted a great many of
the things he’d said. These things were too ghastly to repeat, and really you already
know them. I omitted them because they were not things I wanted to hear and you don’t
want to hear them, either.

But Lowell would say that we all have to.

He’d told me about an experiment here in Davis that lasted thirty years. Generations
of beagles were exposed to strontium-90 and radium-226, their voice boxes removed
so that no one would hear them suffering. He said that the researchers involved in
this jocularly referred to themselves as the Beagle Club.

He talked about car companies that, as part of their crash studies, subjected fully
conscious and terrified baboons to repeated, horrific, excruciating blows to the head.
About drug companies that vivisected dogs, lab techs that shouted at them to cut the
shit if they whined or struggled. About cosmetic companies that smeared chemicals
into the eyes of screaming rabbits and euthanized them afterward if the damage was
permanent or else did it to them again if they recovered. About slaughterhouses where
the cows were so terrified it discolored the meat. About the stuffed battery cages
of the chicken industry, where, just as my uncle Bob had been saying for years, they
were breeding birds that couldn’t stand up, much less walk. About how chimps in the
entertainment industry were always babies, because by adolescence they’d be too strong
to control. These babies, who should have still been riding on their mother’s backs,
were shut into isolated cages and beaten with baseball bats so that later, on the
sets of movies, merely displaying the bat would assure their compliance. Then the
credits could claim that no animals had been harmed in the filming of this movie,
because the harm had all happened before the shooting began.

“The world runs,” Lowell said, “on the fuel of this endless, fathomless misery. People
know it, but they don’t mind what they don’t see. Make them look and they mind, but
you’re the one they hate, because you’re the one that made them look.”

They
, my brother said, whenever he talked about humans. Never
us
. Never
we
.

A few days later, I recounted all these same things in my blue-book final exam for
Religion and Violence. It was a sort of exorcism to write them down, an attempt to
get them out of my head and into someone else’s. This ended in Dr. Sosa’s office,
under a poster-sized full-color print of the Hubble photograph “Pillars of Creation.”
A quote hung on the opposite wall: “Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no
one thinks of changing himself.” Dr. Sosa’s office was clearly meant to inspire.

I also remember it as festive. Strings of Christmas bubble-lights festooned the bookshelves,
and he had candy canes for us to suck on while we talked. “I don’t want to flunk you,”
Dr. Sosa said, and we were on the same page there; I didn’t want that, either.

He sat sprawled back in his desk chair, his feet crossed over a makeshift pile of
magazines. One hand, resting on the roll of his belly, rose and fell with his breath.
The other held the candy cane with which he occasionally gestured. “Your earlier work
was good, and your final . . . your final had a lot of passion in it. You raised a
bunch of really important issues.” Dr. Sosa sat up suddenly, put his feet on the floor.
“But you must see that you didn’t answer the actual test questions? Not even close?”
He leaned forward to force me into friendly eye contact. He knew what he was doing.

So did I. Did I not train at my father’s knee? I mirrored his posture, held his gaze.
“I was writing about violence,” I said. “Compassion. The Other. It all seemed pertinent
to me. Thomas More says that humans learn to be cruel to humans by first being cruel
to animals.” I’d made this point in my blue-book essay, so Dr. Sosa had already withstood
Thomas More. But as I’d leaned forward, Christmas lights had sprung from his temples
like incandescent, bubbling horns. My side of the argument suffered as a result.

In point of fact, Thomas More doesn’t advocate doing away with cruelty to animals
so much as hiring someone to manage your cruelty for you. His main concern is that
the Utopians keep their own hands clean, which has turned out to be pretty much the
way we’ve done it, though I don’t think it’s been as beneficial to our delicate sensibilities
as he’d hoped. I don’t think it’s made us better people. Neither does Lowell. Neither
does Fern.

Not that I’ve asked her. Not that I know for sure what she thinks about anything anymore.

Dr. Sosa read the first test question aloud. “‘Secularism arose primarily as a way
to limit violence. Discuss.’”

“Tangentially pertinent. Do animals have souls? Classic religious conundrum. Massive
implications.”

Dr. Sosa refused to be diverted. Second question: “‘All violence that purports to
have a religious basis is a distortion of true religion. Discuss with specific reference
to either Judaism, Christianity, or Islam.’”

“What if I said science could be a sort of religion for some people?”

“I’d disagree.” Dr. Sosa sat back happily. “When science becomes a religion, it stops
being science.” The bubble-lights gave his dark eyes a holiday twinkle; like all good
professors, that man did love an argument.

He offered me an incomplete, because I’d been so attentive in class all quarter, because
I’d come to his office and put up a fight. I accepted.

My grades came just after Christmas. “Do you have any idea what we’re paying for you
to go to that college?” my father asked. “How hard we work for that money? And you
just piss it away.”

I was learning a ton, I told him loftily. History and economics and astronomy and
philosophy. I was reading great books and thinking new thoughts. Surely that was the
point of a college education. I said that the problem with people (as if there were
only one) is how they think everything can be measured in dollars and cents.

Between my grades and my attitude, my name went right onto Santa’s naughty list.

“I’m speechless,” my mother told me, which wasn’t remotely true.