We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (27 page)

B
ACK IN
F
EBRUARY
this year, my publicity agent called with the unwelcome and surprising news that she’d
been getting requests for bookings all morning from major media markets. She rattled
off a string of familiar names—Charlie Rose, Jon Stewart, Barbara Walters,
The View
. She said the publishing house was trying to see if it was possible to move the pub
date up and what did I think? Could I make that work on my end? Her tone, while delivering
this news, was strangely subdued. This is the way I learned that Lowell had been arrested
at last.

He’d been picked up in Orlando, where, in addition to a list of charges roughly the
size of
War and Peace
, the police contended he’d been in the final stages of planning an attack on SeaWorld.
They’d only just prevented it.

An unidentified female accomplice was still at large.

•   •   •

F
ERN IS THE
reason Mom and I decided to publish the notebooks. Taken together, Mom’s two journals
make for a sweet and cheerful children’s book. “Fern and Rosemary are sisters. They
live together in a big house in the country.” No women are trussed up like roasted
turkeys, no kittens are killed in the telling of that story. Everything in it is true—the
truth and nothing but the truth—but not the whole truth. Only as much of the truth
as we thought children would want and Fern would need.

That won’t be enough truth for Lowell.

So this story here is for him. And for Fern, too, Fern again, always Fern.

My brother and my sister have led extraordinary lives, but I wasn’t there, and I can’t
tell you that part. I’ve stuck here to the part I can tell, the part that’s mine,
and still everything I’ve said is all about them, a chalk outline around the space
where they should have been. Three children, one story.

The only reason I’m the one telling it is that I’m the one not currently in a cage.

I’ve spent most of my life carefully not talking about Fern and Lowell and me. It
will take some practice to be fluent in that. Think of everything I’ve said here as
practice.

Because what this family needs now is a great talker.

•   •   •

I
’M NOT GOING
to argue here for Lowell’s innocence. I know he’d think that the SeaWorld orca factory
is a callous monstrosity. I know he’d think that SeaWorld has to be stopped before
they kill again. I know he’d do more than think this.

So I expect the allegations are true, although an “attack on SeaWorld” might mean
a bomb, or it might mean graffiti and glitter and a cream pie in the face. The government
doesn’t always seem to distinguish between the two.

Which is not to suggest Lowell didn’t intend serious damage. Money is the language
humans speak, Lowell told me once upon a time, long, long ago. If you want to communicate
with humans, then you have to learn to speak it. I’m just reminding you that the ALF
doesn’t believe in hurting animals, human or otherwise.

I find myself wishing Lowell had been captured earlier. I wish I’d turned him in myself
back in 1996, when the list of charges was smaller and the country more like a democracy.
I expect he would still have gone to jail, but he’d be out and home by now. In 1996,
even those citizens charged with terrorism had constitutional rights. Lowell’s been
in custody for three months and he still hasn’t seen his attorney. His mental condition
is not good.

Or so I hear. Mom and I haven’t been allowed to see him, either. There are recent
photos in the papers and on the Web. He looks every bit the terrorist. Startled hair,
scraggled beard, sunken eyes. Unabomber stare. I’ve read that since his arrest he
hasn’t said a single word.

Everyone else is mystified by this silence, but his reasons couldn’t be more obvious
to me. He was halfway there when I last saw him sixteen years ago. Lowell has decided
to be tried as an animal. The nonhuman kind.

Nonhuman animals have gone to court before. Arguably, the first ALF action in the
United States was the release of two dolphins in 1977 from the University of Hawaii.
The men responsible were charged with grand theft. Their original defense, that dolphins
are persons (humans in dolphin suits, one defendant said), was quickly thrown out
by the judge. I’m unclear on the definition of person the courts have been using.
Something that sieves out dolphins but lets corporations slide on through.

A case was filed in Vienna in 2007 on behalf of Matthias Hiasl Pan, a chimpanzee.
It went to the Austrian Supreme Court, which ruled that he was a thing, not a person,
though the court regretted the lack of some third legal category—neither person, nor
thing—into which they could have slotted him.

A nonhuman animal had better have a good lawyer. In 1508, Bartholomé Chassenée earned
fame and fortune for his eloquent representation of the rats of his French province.
These rats had been charged with destroying the barley crop and also with ignoring
the court order to appear and defend themselves. Bartholomé Chassenée argued successfully
that the rats hadn’t come because the court had failed to provide reasonable protection
from the village cats along the route.

I’ve been talking with Todd’s mother recently and I think she’ll agree to represent
Lowell. She’s interested, but it’s a complicated case, likely to last some time. Great
quantities of money needed.

Always money.

There’s no money in Thomas More’s
Utopia
, nor private property, either—these things are too ugly for the Utopians, who must
be protected from life’s rougher aspects. The Zapolets, a nearby tribe, fight some
of their wars for them. Slaves butcher their meat. Thomas More worries that the Utopians
would lose their delicate affections and merciful sympathies if they did these deeds
themselves. The Zapolets, we are assured, delight in slaughter and rapine, but there’s
no discussion of the impact of butchery on the slaves. No Utopia is Utopia for everyone.

Which brings us back to Lowell. He’s worked for decades as a spy in the factory farms,
the cosmetic and pharmaceutical labs. He’s seen things we refuse to see, done things
no one should have to do. He’s sacrificed his family, his future, and now his freedom.
He is not, as More would have wanted, the worst of men. Lowell’s life has been the
direct result of his very best qualities, of our very best qualities—empathy, compassion,
loyalty, and love. That needs to be recognized.

It’s true that, as my brother grew larger, he also grew dangerous, same as my sister.
But they’re still ours and we want them back. They’re needed here at home.

•   •   •

T
HE MIDDLE OF
a story turns out to be a more arbitrary concept than I ever realized as a child.
You can put it anywhere you like. So, too, the beginning and so, too, the end. Clearly,
my story isn’t finished yet, not the happening of it. It’s just the telling that I’m
done with here.

I’m going to end with something that happened quite some time ago. I’m going to end
with the first time I saw my sister again after a separation of twenty-two years.

I can’t tell you what I felt; no words are sufficient. You’d need to have been in
my body to understand all that. But this is what we did.

Our mother had been visiting Fern for about two weeks by then. We’d decided not to
overwhelm her with both of us at once, and so I’d waited. When Mom’s reception was
so chilly, I’d waited longer. A few days after Fern and our mother had begun to sign
to each other, Mom told her I was coming.

I sent some items in ahead: my old penguin Dexter Poindexter, because she might remember
him; a sweater I’d worn so often I thought it must smell of me; one red poker chip.

When I came in person, I brought a second red chip. I entered the visitors’ room.
Fern was sitting by the far wall, looking at a magazine. I knew her first only by
her ears, higher on the head than most chimps’ and rounder.

I stooped courteously over and walked to the glass between us. When I knew she was
watching, I signed her name and then our sign for Rosemary. I pressed my palm, poker
chip in the middle, against the bulletproof glass.

Fern stood heavily and came to me. She placed her own large hand opposite mine, fingers
curling slightly, scratching, as if she could reach through and take the poker chip.
I signed my name again with my free hand, and she signed it back with hers, though
I couldn’t tell if she’d remembered me or was simply being polite.

Then she rested her forehead on the glass. I did the same and we stood that way for
a very long time, face-to-face. From that vantage point, I could see her only in teary,
floating pieces—

her eyes

the flaring of her nostrils

the sparse hairs on her chin and rimming her ears

the tiny rise and fall of her rounded shoulders

the way her breath painted and unpainted the glass

•   •   •

I
DIDN’T KNOW
what she was thinking or feeling. Her body had become unfamiliar to me. And yet, at
the very same time, I recognized everything about her. My sister, Fern. In the whole
wide world, my only red poker chip. As if I were looking in a mirror.

Many, many thanks are due here.

To Tatu, Dar, Loulis, and also the human animals at the Chimpanzee and Human Communication
Institute in Ellensburg, Washington.

To the wonderful people at the Hedgebrook Retreat, the staff and also my fellow residents,
all of whom gave me encouragement and space when I needed just those things, and most
especially to the amazingly awesome Ruth Ozeki for her friendship and support.

To my beloved friends Pat Murphy and Ellen Klages, who showed me the way out of a
corner into which I’d written myself.

To Megan Fitzgerald for some special Bloomingtonian research.

To the many readers who looked at bits and pieces for me—Alan Elms, Michael Blumlein,
Richard Russo, Debbie Smith, Donald Kochis, Carter Scholz, Michael Berry, Sara Streich,
Ben Orlove, Clinton Lawrence, Melissa Sanderself, Xander Cameron, Angus MacDonald.

To Micah Perks, Jill Wolfson, and Elizabeth McKenzie, who read the entire manuscript
more than once and gave me much smart and helpful criticism.

I am also very grateful to Dr. Carla Freccero for her readings and lectures on animal
theory.

Heartfelt thanks to the late Wendy Weil and her associates at the Weil Agency, Emily
Forland and Emma Patterson. And as always to the great Marian Wood.

But most of all, I owe this one to my daughter. She gave me the idea for this book
one year as a New Year’s gift and provided excellent feedback as I wrote it. She and
my son both contributed useful information on what college in the mid-’90s had looked
and sounded like to them, while my husband gave me his usual necessary and unstinting
support.