We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves Read online

  I’ll creep you out a little bit in that uncanny valley way I have. Or else I’ll annoy you; I get that a lot. Just don’t hold it against Fern. You would like Fern.

  I wish Mom could do the media instead of me, but she can’t be passed off as an innocent victim. The studio audience will shout at her.

  So here we are. The human half of Bloomington’s Sister Act, the phantasmagorical Rosemary Cooke, is about to take the show on the road. Every word I say out there will be on my sister’s behalf. I’ll be widely admired. Fern will be stealthily influential. That’s the plan.

  That was the plan.

  Six

  AND IF YOU won’t listen to me . . .

  My sister’s life, as performed by Madame Defarge:

  Once upon a time, there was a happy family—a mother, a father, a son, and two daughters. The older daughter was smart and agile, covered in hair and very beautiful. The younger was ordinary. Still, their parents and their brother loved them both.

  Mon Dieu! One day, the older daughter fell into the power of a wicked king. He threw her into a prison where no one would see her. He cast a spell to keep her there. Every day he told her how ugly she was. The wicked king died, but this did not break the spell.

  The spell can only be broken by the people. They must come to see how beautiful she is. They must storm the prison and demand her release. The spell will be broken only when the people rise up.

  So rise up already.

  • • •

  ON DECEMBER 15, 2011, The New York Times carried the news that the National Institutes of Health had suspended all new grants for biomedical and behavioral studies on chimpanzees. In the future, chimp studies will be funded only if the research is necessary for human health and there is absolutely no other way to accomplish it. Two possible exceptions to the ban were noted—the ongoing research involving immunology and also that on hepatitis C. But the report’s basic conclusion was that most research on chimps is completely unnecessary.

  Small victories. Fern and I celebrated the news with champagne. Our father used to give us one sip each on New Year’s Eve. It always made Fern sneeze.

  I wonder if she remembers that. I know she won’t have confused our little celebration with New Year’s. The holidays are observed at the center, and Fern has always been very clear about their order—first Mask Day, then Bird-Eating Day. First Sweet-Tree Day, and, only after that, No-Bedtime Day.

  I wonder about Fern’s memory a lot. Lowell said: She recognized me instantly. Mom: She doesn’t know me.

  Research at Kyoto University has demonstrated the superiority of chimps to humans at certain short-term memory tasks. A vast superiority. As in, We can’t even play on the same field.

  Long-term memory is more difficult to study. In 1972, Endel Tulving coined the phrase episodic memory to refer to the ability to remember incidents in one’s individual life with detailed temporal and spatial information (the what, when, where) and then access them later as episodes through a conscious reexperiencing of them, a sort of mental time travel.

  In 1983, he wrote: “Other members of the animal kingdom can learn, benefit from experience, acquire the ability to adjust and adapt, to solve problems and make decisions, but they cannot travel back into the past in their own minds.” Episodic memory, he said, is a uniquely human gift.

  How he knows this isn’t clear. It seems to me that every time we humans announce that here is the thing that makes us unique—our featherless bipedality, our tool-using, our language—some other species comes along to snatch it away. If modesty were a human trait, we’d have learned to be more cautious over the years.

  Episodic memory has certain subjective features. It comes with something called “a feeling of pastness,” and also a feeling of confidence, however misplaced, in the accuracy of recollection. These interiorities can never be observed in another species. Doesn’t mean they aren’t there. Doesn’t mean they are.

  Other species do show evidence of functional episodic memory—the retention of the what, where, and when of individual experiences. The data has been particularly persuasive with regard to scrub jays.

  Humans are actually not so good at remembering the when. Extremely good at remembering the who, though. I would guess chimps, social as they are, might be the same.

  Does Fern remember us? Does she remember but not recognize us as the people she remembers? We certainly don’t look the way we used to, and I don’t know if Fern understands that children grow up, that humans grow old, same as chimps. I can find no studies that suggest what a chimp might remember over a period of twenty-two years.

  Still, I believe Fern knows who we are. The evidence is compelling, if not conclusive. Only the exacting ghost of my father keeps me from insisting on it.

  Seven

  BACK IN FEBRUARY 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.

  • • •

  FERN 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.

  • • •

  THE 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.

  • • •

  For a complete list of this author’s books click here or visit

  www.penguin.com/fowlerchecklist

  Acknowledgments

  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.