We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves Read online

  But what had he said to me about her?

  “He said he was glad we were friends,” I told her. “He said you really seemed to care about me.”

  “I do!” Harlow’s face was a glowing orb. “What else?”

  There was nothing else, but that seemed too cruel to be the right answer. Equally cruel to let her go on hoping. “Travers is gone,” I said, right into that glowing face. Maybe I was talking to myself as much as her. I’d spent half my life waiting for Lowell, and now we all just had to learn to live without that waiting. “Here’s the thing. He’s a wanted man. Like picture-in-the-post-office wanted. Wanted by the FBI as a domestic terrorist for the Animal Liberation Front. You can’t even tell anyone he was here or I’ll be arrested. Again. For real.

  “Before this weekend, I hadn’t seen him in ten years. I don’t have the first fucking clue what his favorite band is. Travers isn’t even his name. You really, really, really need to forget about him.”

  There I go again, not keeping my mouth shut.

  Because what could be more Casablanca? Suddenly Harlow saw that what she’d always wanted was a man of principle. A man of action. A domestic terrorist.

  Every girl’s dream, if she can’t have a vampire.

  • • •

  THE ANIMAL LIBERATION FRONT has no governing body, no headquarters, no membership roll. The structure is a loose one of autonomous cells. This is the headache for the FBI—one name leads at most to two or three others and then the line goes dead. Lowell had come to their attention by talking too much—a rookie mistake he’d never repeated (and ironic, considering all the times he’d said I couldn’t keep my mouth shut).

  Anyone can join the ALF. In fact, anyone involved in the liberation of animals, anyone who physically interferes with their exploitation and abuse, is automatically a member so long as the action takes place according to ALF guidelines. The ALF will not countenance physical harm to any animal, human or otherwise.

  Destruction of property, on the other hand—destruction of property is encouraged. The infliction of economic damage on those profiting from misery is a stated goal. As is the need to publicize abuse—bring those horrors occurring in their secret chambers out into the open. This is why a number of states are considering laws that make the unauthorized photographing of what goes on in factory farms and slaughterhouses a felony. Making people look at what is really happening is about to become a serious crime.

  Just as membership is automatically conferred with direct action, no membership is possible without it. You don’t join the ALF by sympathizing. You don’t join by writing about how sorry and sad the suffering of animals makes you. You have to do something.

  In 2004, Jacques Derrida said that a change was under way. Torture damages the inflicter as well as the inflicted. It’s no coincidence that one of the Abu Ghraib torturers came to the military directly from a job as a chicken processor. It might be slow, Derrida said, but eventually the spectacle of our abuse of animals will be intolerable to our sense of who we are.

  The ALF is not so interested in slow.

  How can they be? All that misery, all that misery is now.

  • • •

  HARLOW DETERIORATED. Her face was swollen, her eyes red, her mouth pinched, her skin pallid. She stopped coming to our apartment, hadn’t touched the food in our refrigerator in two days, which probably meant she wasn’t eating. Ezra, tool belt slung low about his waist, called a summit meeting on the fourth floor—just him and me—to say that he’d recently come upon her lying facedown on the newly installed carpet of 309. She was maybe crying, he said. Ezra was one of those men so deeply unnerved by a woman’s tears he didn’t even need to see them.

  He blamed Reg. For all his blithe confidence that he had his fingers on the pulse of the building and its occupants, Ezra had missed a beat. “You need to talk to her,” he told me. “Make her see that every ending is a new beginning. She needs to hear that from a friend.” He thought Reg might be a closeted homosexual or possibly a survivor of child abuse. Was he Catholic? If not, there was no explaining such cruelty and Harlow was lucky to have escaped when she did.

  Ezra said he’d told Harlow that, in Chinese, close a door and open a door were represented by exactly the same character. He himself had taken great comfort from that same observation whenever times got tough. I don’t know where he got this, though most of his quotes came from Pulp Fiction. I’m reasonably confident it’s not true.

  I told him that, in Chinese, the character for woman was a man on his knees, and that it wasn’t clear to me that the solution to Harlow’s heartbreak would be found in the ancient wisdom of the East. I didn’t go talk to her. I’ve often wondered what would have happened if I had.

  But I was still angry with her. Harlow, I felt, had no right to such grief, no real claim on Lowell. She’d known him for what? Fifteen minutes? I’d loved him for twenty-two years and missed him most of that time. Harlow should be taking care of me, is how I saw it.

  I wonder sometimes if I’m the only one spending my life making the same mistake over and over again or if that’s simply human. Do we all tend toward a single besetting sin?

  If so, jealousy is mine and it’s tempting to read this sad consistency as a matter of character. But my father, were he still alive, would surely protest. Who did I think I was? Hamlet? Current psychological research suggests that character plays a surprisingly small role in human behavior. Instead we are highly responsive to trivial changes in circumstance. We’re like horses in that, only less gifted.

  I myself am not convinced. Over the years I’ve come to feel that the way people respond to us has less to do with what we’ve done and more to do with who they are. Of course, it suits me to think that. All those people in junior high who were so mean to me? What unhappy people they must have been!

  So the studies don’t back me up. There’ll always be more studies. We’ll change our minds and I’ll have been right all along until we change our minds again, send me back to being wrong.

  Till then let’s give this one to my father and let me off the hook. Maybe my jealousy mattered less than the fact that I had finals. I felt honor-bound to complete at least some of my classes. Plus I had a term paper due and while I wouldn’t say I’d left it to the last minute, only a paltry number of minutes remained. I was quite interested in my topic, which was surprising, because the professor had forced us to clear that with our TAs some weeks ago, back when there was no way to predict what I’d be interested in by the time I wrote it. My topic was how the theoretical accommodation of evil in Thomas More’s Utopia expressed itself in the real world of his own life and politics. It was one of those subjects to which everything that slithers across your brain seems relevant. I find this to be true of most topics.

  And then there were all those phone calls I had to keep making about my suitcase. The woman who worked in luggage at the Sacramento Airport had started calling me sweet pea, that’s how intimate we’d become.

  So I back-burnered Harlow, the last person in the world you should back-burner. And then, twenty-four hours before I was supposed to be on a plane to Indianapolis, while I was in the very midst of packing a duffel bag borrowed from Todd, humming “Joy to the World,” thinking about what I should and shouldn’t say to my parents about Lowell and whether the new house might be bugged, too, the way we’d always assumed the old one was, which drove my father crazy—like we were lab rats or something, under constant surveillance, your tax dollars at work, he’d say—and was probably the real reason they’d moved. As well as trying to figure out how to ask them for a new bike for Christmas, since I’d lost the last one in a drug-induced fugue. While all this was happening, a policeman came to the door.

  It wasn’t Officer Arnie this time. This officer didn’t introduce himself. He had a triangular face, like a praying mantis, wide mouth, sharp chin, and a vibe of pure, implacable evil. He asked me to come with him nicely enough, but I sensed we weren’t going to be friends. He didn’t tel
l me his name, which was okay by me. I didn’t want to know it.

  Five

  I WASN’T HANDCUFFED this time. I wasn’t put into a cell. I wasn’t sent to the office to do the paperwork. Instead I was left by myself in an interrogation room, almost empty—two chairs, both in an uncomfortable orange plastic—one table, linoleum-topped. The door was locked to keep me in. The room was very cold and so was I.

  No one came. There was a pitcher of water on the table, but no glass. Nothing to read, not even a pamphlet on traffic or gun safety or what a tragic mistake doing drugs would be. I sat and waited. I stood and walked. I have the habit, never broken, of looking up, of noting how far I could climb in any given location, of how high Fern or Mary might get. There were no windows in this room and the walls were bare. None of us could have managed much.

  No one was coming for me with a cattle prod, at least I assumed not, but they were trying to teach me who I was, all the same. I was surprised to feel myself solidly unteachable on this matter. I’d never known who I was. Didn’t mean someone else did.

  There was a pill bug on the floor and eventually I watched it, since watching it gave me something to do. Fern used to eat pill bugs, which Mom tried to prevent but Dad said they weren’t really bugs but more like terrestrial crustaceans, that they breathed through gills and had copper in their blood instead of iron, and no one who’d ever eaten shrimp should turn up her nose at a pill bug. I don’t remember eating one myself, but I must have, because I know that they crunch in your mouth like Cheerios.

  The pill bug walked to the wall and then along the wall until it came to a corner. This either flummoxed or discouraged it. The morning passed. I learned how meager my inner resources were.

  The officer who’d picked me up finally appeared again. He had a tape recorder, which he set on the table between us, a great stack of papers, folders, and notebooks. On the top of the stack I could see an old newspaper clipping; I could read the headline. “Bloomington’s Sister Act.” Apparently, Fern and I had once been profiled in The New York Times. I’d never known that.

  The officer sat, sifting through his papers. More long minutes. In the old, old days, I would have been filling that silence and I could tell he was waiting for me to do so. It was a game we were playing, and I decided to win; I would not be the one to speak first. How amazed my long-ago babysitter Melissa and my Cooke grandparents would be if only they could see it. I tried to imagine them all in the room with me, offering encouragement. “Keep quiet!” they told me. “Stop your infernal talking! Give me a minute to hear myself think.”

  Put this one in my column. The officer gave up and turned on the tape recorder. He said the date and the time aloud. He told me to state my name. I did. He asked me if I knew why I was here. I didn’t.

  “Your brother is Lowell Cooke,” he said. This didn’t sound like a question, but apparently it was. “Confirm,” he told me tonelessly.

  “Yes.”

  “When did you last see him?”

  I leaned forward to establish the eye contact Dr. Sosa had recently used to such good effect on me. “I need to use the bathroom,” I said. “And I want a lawyer.” Maybe I was just a college student, but I’d seen a television show or two. I wasn’t afraid yet, at least not for myself. I figured they’d caught Lowell and that was terrible, terrible, but I couldn’t let its terribleness get in the way of the one thing I had to do now, which was to make sure I said nothing that could be used against him.

  “Why would you do that?” The officer got angrily to his feet. “You’re not under arrest. This is just a friendly chat.”

  He switched the recorder off. A woman with thin, peevish lips and shellacked, Republican hair came and took me to the bathroom. She waited outside the stall, listening to me pee and flush. When she returned me, the room was empty again. None of the papers nor anything else had been left on the table. Even the pitcher was gone.

  The minutes ticked away. I went back to my pill bug. It wasn’t moving and I began to worry that it was more dead than discouraged. I began to smell insecticides. My back was against the wall. I slid down it until I was seated, touched the bug with one finger, relieved to see it curl. An image came to me of a black cat with a white face and belly, curled up with her tail over her nose.

  I heard Lowell saying I couldn’t keep my mouth shut. I heard him saying I’d made Mom and Dad choose.

  This cat looked a lot like the cat my father had killed with his car, only this cat was only sleeping. Wrong cat, I heard a voice say, deep in my head, each consonant sharply bitten off. Wrong cat.

  I don’t know that I’ve ever heard the voice in my head so audibly. She didn’t sound like me. Who was that then, steering the clown car between my ears? What did she do when she wasn’t talking to me? What mischiefs, what detours? I’m listening, I told her, but not out loud, in case I was being watched. She didn’t answer.

  Very little outside noise reached through the walls of the interrogation room. The lights were the same unpleasant, sputtering fluorescents I’d noticed on my first visit. I used the time to plan out what I would say to the next person who came through the door. I would ask for my coat and for something to eat. I hadn’t had breakfast that morning. I would ask to phone my parents. Poor Mom and Dad. All three of their children incarcerated at once; that really was bad luck.

  I would ask again for a lawyer; maybe that’s what we were all waiting for now, the arrival of my lawyer even though no one had suggested I was getting one. I saw the pill bug beginning to cautiously uncurl.

  The woman who’d taken me to the bathroom came back in. She had a paper plate with a tuna fish sandwich and some potato chips on it. The sandwich was flattened, as if someone had pressed it between the leaves of a book as a keepsake. The potato chips were green at the edges, but that may just have been the lights.

  She asked if I needed the bathroom again and I didn’t, but it seemed best to go while I had the chance. It was something to do. I came back and ate some of the sandwich. My hands smelled like tuna fish, a thing I did not like to smell on my hands. They smelled like cat food.

  I asked the voice in my head a different question—was there a right cat? An image came to me of the moon-eyed stray we’d often seen around the farmhouse when I was little. My mother left food out for her in the winter and had tried several times to trap and spay her, but the cat was too cunning and my mother had too much to do. Ever since she’d read us Millions of Cats with its seductive illustrations, I’d wanted a cat in the worst way. We never got one, because of all the rats that came in and out of the house. “Cats are killers,” my father said. “One of the few animals that kill just for the fun of it. They play with their food.”

  I was becoming agitated. A cat’s fur springs up when it’s frightened, to make it seem larger than it is. So does a chimp’s hair, and for the same reason. The human version of piloerection is goose bumps, which I now had.

  I saw the drawing in Millions of Cats of the final kitten, the one the old couple keeps. I saw Fern, sitting with my mother in the big chair, putting her hand on the page, spreading and curling her fingers as if she could pick the picture up. “Fern wants a kitten,” I told my mother.

  The moon-eyed cat had kittens, three of them. I found them one afternoon, stretched out on a sunny, mossy shelf by the creek, nursing. They pressed their little paws into her belly, massaging the milk into their mouths. Two of them were black and just the same. The mother raised her head to look at us, but didn’t move. She seldom let me get this close to her. Motherhood had calmed her down.

  The kittens weren’t newborns. They were old enough to be running about, kittens in their full bloom of kitten cuteness. The longing to have one overwhelmed me. I knew I should leave them alone, but I pulled the NotSame one, the little gray, from the teat, turned him over to see his sex. He protested loudly. I could look down his pink throat, past his teeth and tongue. I could smell the milk on him. Everything about him was tiny and perfect. His mother wanted him back, but
I wanted him, too. I thought that if I’d just found him with no mother, if he’d been an orphan alone in the world, we would have to keep him.

  Back in the interrogation room, my shivering was severe. “It’s really cold in here,” I said aloud, just in case someone was watching. I didn’t want them thinking their tactics were getting to me. I didn’t want to give them the satisfaction. “Could I please have my jacket?”

  In fact, I wasn’t shaking because I’d been left for hours in a cold and empty room. Nor because the officer who’d brought me here gave off the same vibe you might have gotten from Keyser Söze; nor because he knew about Fern and me; nor because he’d arrested Lowell. I wasn’t shaking because of anything happening now or anything that might happen next. I was completely buried in the unremembered, much disputed, fantasyland of the past.

  Sigmund Freud has suggested that we have no early childhood memories at all. What we have instead are false memories aroused later and more pertinent to this later perspective than to the original events. Sometimes in matters of great emotion, one representation, retaining all the original intensity, comes to replace another, which is then discarded and forgotten. The new representation is called a screen memory. A screen memory is a compromise between remembering something painful and defending yourself against that very remembering.

  Our father always said that Sigmund Freud was a brilliant man but no scientist, and that incalculable damage had been done by confusing the two. So when I say here that I think the memory I had of the thing that never happened was a screen memory, I do so with considerable sadness. It seems unnecessarily cruel to our father, adding the insult of Freudian analysis to the injury of believing he killed cats with his car for no reason.

  You will remember how, in the days of Fern’s disappearance, back when I was five, I was sent off to stay with my Indianapolis grandparents. I’ve told you what happened there. I’ve told you what happened after.

  Here now, I believe, is what happened before. It comes with one cautionary note—that this memory is only as vivid to me as the one it replaces.