We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves Read online

  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?

  Two

  ON THE BUS TO VERMILLION, 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.

  • • •

  OBVIOUSLY, 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.

  Three

  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.

  Four

  BUT I’M GETTING ahead of myself.

  Back in Davis, Mr. Benson moved out of 309, the apartment directly below us. I knew Mr. Benson slightly, a man of indeterminate age, which usually means mid-forties, who’d once described himself to me as the only fat man in the city of Davis. He clerked at the Avid Reader bookstore and he often sang “Dancing Queen” in the shower, loud enough that we could hear it upstairs. I liked him.

  For the last month he’d been up in Grass Valley, taking care of his mother. She’d died one day after Thanksgiving and clearly there’d been an inheritance, because Mr. Benson quit his job, paid off his lease, and hired a moving company to pack up his stuff. He himself never came back. I heard all this from Ezra, who also said, sadly, that Mr. Benson had turned out to be more of a slob than he’d ever let on.

  While 309 was being cleaned, painted, repaired, and recarpeted for some new occupant, Ezra let Harlow move in. I’m guessing the apartment owner didn’t know this. Ezr
a was sorry to have her on the third floor with the miscreants, but ecstatic to have her in the building. He was in and out of 309 all the time; there was so much work to be done there.

  Harlow escaped the disruptions, the lack of furniture, and possibly Ezra’s attentions by spending a good chunk of the day in our place. Todd glowered, but it was so temporary. Soon we’d all go home for Christmas and when we returned, someone would have moved in for real. Presumably, I told Todd, this someone would want the apartment without Harlow in it, but Todd wasn’t so sure about that.

  My guess was that she’d eventually go back to Reg. I hadn’t seen Reg since that morning in his car, and Harlow had hardly mentioned him. I didn’t even know who’d broken up with whom.

  Harlow sat on our couch, drinking our beers and talking feverishly about Lowell. He’d warned her he wouldn’t be back, but she hadn’t believed him. Like everything else he’d said, she passed this under the microscope of obsessional limerence. I was his sister. Of course, he’d be back, if only to see me.

  What had he meant when he’d said she made him nervous? When he’d said he felt like he’d known her forever? Weren’t those two things contradictory? What did I make of them?

  She wanted to know everything about him—what he’d been like as a little boy, how many girlfriends he’d had, how many of them serious. Who was his favorite band? Did he believe in God? What did he love?

  I told her he loved Star Wars. Played poker for money. Kept rats in his room, most of them named after cheeses. She was enchanted.

  I told her he’d had only one girlfriend all through high school, a wild-eyed Mormon named Kitch. That he’d played point guard on his high school basketball team but ditched the most important game. Shoplifted Twizzlers with his best friend, Marco. It was like dealing dope; nothing I said was enough. I grew impatient. I had papers to write.