We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (18 page)

We were the only customers. A waiter who looked like a young Albert Einstein came
immediately and took our order for two pieces of banana cream pie. He delivered them
with some cheerful remarks about the weather, pointing out the window to where the
rain had started again—“The drought is over! The drought is over!”—and then went away.

My brother’s face across the table was more and more like our dad’s. They both had
the lean and hungry look that Shakespeare found so dangerous. Cavernous cheeks, darkly
stubbled chins. Back at the Crepe Bistro, Lowell had already needed a shave. Now he
was a wolf-man, the dark beard making an odd but striking contrast with his bleached
hair. I thought that he looked exhausted, but not in the way people look exhausted
when they’ve been up all night having great sex. Just in the way people look when
they’re exhausted.

And he no longer seemed, as he always had done, so very much older than I was. He
noticed me staring at him. “Just look at you. College girl, so far from home. Do you
love it? Is life good?”

“Can’t complain,” I said.

“Come on.” Lowell forked a bite into his mouth, smiled at me around it. “Don’t be
so modest. I bet you can complain for days.”

L
OWELL AND
I
stayed at Bakers Square through the rest of the night. The rain started and stopped
and started again. I had eggs, Lowell pancakes, we both had coffee. The morning crowd
came in. Our waiter went home and three others arrived. Lowell told me he’d become
a vegetarian, and managed to be vegan except when he was on the road, which was most
of the time.

Up at the vet school, Davis had a famous fistulated cow, a cow with a deliberate hole
punched into its stomach through which digestive processes could be observed. She
was a popular destination for school trips, a reliable exhibit on Picnic Day. You
could reach right into that cow, feel her intestines. Hundreds of people had done
so. And that cow, Lowell said, lived the life of Riley compared to your typical dairy
cow.

It was his firm belief that Davis actually had multiple fistulated cows. They were
all named Maggie, each and every one of them, to fool people into thinking there was
only one cow and not start asking questions about excessive fistulations, Lowell said.

Lowell said that he’d always assumed he’d go to college and he really regretted missing
out on that. He did manage to read a lot. He recommended Donald Griffin’s book
Animal Minds
to me. Maybe I could get Dad to read it, too.

Despite not understanding Dad’s last paper, Lowell had a number of criticisms about
the work Dad did. It seemed to Lowell that psychological studies of nonhuman animals
were mostly cumbersome, convoluted, and downright peculiar. They taught us little
about the animals but lots about the researchers who designed and ran them. Take Harry
Harlow, whom we’d met as children and who, Lowell said, had given us all lemon drops.

I remembered Dr. Harlow. He’d come to dinner at the farmhouse and sat between Fern
and me. Later that night, he’d read us a chapter of
Winnie-the-Pooh
, doing Roo’s voice so high and breathy it made us laugh every time Roo spoke. I didn’t
remember the lemon drops, though I’d bet that was the part Fern would remember. I
had a fleeting thought that if Dad had really admired Harry Harlow, I might have been
named after him. I might be Harlow right now, same as Harlow was. How freaky would
that be?

But no one would name a baby after Harry Harlow. He’d taken rhesus monkey infants
away from their mothers and given them inanimate mothers instead, mothers made alternatively
of terry-cloth or wire, to see which, in the absence of other choices, the babies
preferred. He claimed, deliberately provocative, to be studying love.

The baby monkeys clung pathetically to the fake, uncaring mothers, until they all
turned psychotic or died. “I don’t know what he thought he’d learned about them,”
Lowell said. “But in their short, sad little lives, they sure learned a hell of a
lot about him.

“We need a sort of reverse mirror test. Some way to identify those species smart enough
to see themselves when they look at someone else. Bonus points for how far out the
chain you can go. Double bonus for those who get all the way to insects.”

Our new waitress, a young Latina with short, thick bangs, hovered about us for a while,
darting in to rearrange the syrups, take the coffee cups, push the bill into a more
prominent position on the table. Eventually she gave up, wandered away in search of
more suggestible customers.

Lowell had stopped speaking while she was there. When she left, he picked right up
without missing a stitch. “Look how much I’m talking!” he’d said, at some point during
the evening. “I’m more like you than you are tonight. I don’t usually get to talk
all that much. I lead a quiet life.” He’d smiled at me. His face had changed, but
his smile was the same.

“Here’s the problem with Dad’s approach.” Lowell tapped his finger on the Bakers Square
place mat, as if the problem were somewhere around the Scrambler Supreme. “Right in
the fundamental assumptions. Dad was always saying that we were all animals, but when
he dealt with Fern, he didn’t start from that place of congruence. His methods put
the whole burden of proof onto her. It was always her failure for not being able to
talk to us, never ours for not being able to understand her. It would have been more
scientifically rigorous to start with an assumption of similarity. It would have been
a lot more Darwinian.

“And a lot less rude,” Lowell said.

He asked me, “Do you remember that game Fern used to play with the red and blue poker
chips? Same/NotSame?”

Of course I did.

“She was always giving you the red chip. No one else. Just you. Remember that?”

I remembered it when he said it. It popped into my head as a brand-new memory, sharper
than the old ones, which had all worn thin as Roman coins. I was lying on the scratched
hardwood floor by Dad’s armchair and Fern had come to lie beside me. It was that time
I’d broken my elbow. Dad and the grad students were still discussing Fern’s surprising
laughter. Fern was still holding the poker chips—the red for same, the blue for not.
She rolled onto her back and I could see every little hair in the fuzz on her chin.
She smelled like sweat. She scratched the fingers of one hand over my head. A hair
came out. She ate it.

Then, with every appearance of careful consideration, she’d given me the red chip.
I could see it all again in my head—Fern looking out at me from those bright, shadowed
eyes and laying the red chip onto my chest.

I know what our father had thought it meant. Nothing useful. Once, she’d given me
a raisin for every raisin she’d eaten, and now she had two poker chips and was giving
me one. Two interesting behaviors—that was as far as Dad could go.

Here is what I’d thought it meant. I’d thought Fern was apologizing. When you feel
bad, I feel bad, is what I got from that red chip. We’re the same, you and I.

My sister, Fern. In the whole wide world, my only red poker chip.

Under the table, my hands, all on their own, found each other and gripped together
as I forced myself to ask the question I should have asked the minute we’d found ourselves
alone. “How is Fern?”

It came out in a whisper, and even before my mouth stopped moving, I was already wishing
I’d kept it shut. I was so afraid of what the answer might be that I kept talking.
“Start at the beginning,” I told him, thinking to put off any bad news as long as
possible. “Start with the night you left.”

•   •   •

B
UT YOU’D PROBABLY
rather get straight to Fern. I’ll condense.

I’d been right to guess that Lowell had gone to Dr. Uljevik’s lab when he left us.
He knew he had only a couple of days before we’d start looking and it took him about
that long to get there. South Dakota was bitterly cold, a landscape of packed snowless
dirt, black leafless trees, and a dry, peppery wind.

He’d arrived after dark and took a room at a motel, because he didn’t know where the
labs were and it was too late to go searching. Besides, he was asleep on his feet
after two nights on the bus. The woman at the desk had hair from the 1950s and a dead
stare. He was afraid she’d ask his age, but she was barely interested enough to take
his money.

The next day, he found Uljevik’s office at the university and introduced himself to
the department secretary as a prospective student. She was very midwestern, Lowell
said. So friendly. Face like a shovel, flat and open. Big, open heart. The kind of
woman he was born to disappoint. “Like Mrs. Byard,” he told me. “You know what I mean?”

Mrs. Byard had died about five years ago, so he wouldn’t be disappointing her again.
I didn’t say this.

He’d told the department secretary that he was particularly interested in chimp studies.
Was there any way he could see the work being done here? She gave him Uljevik’s office
hours, which he already knew. They’d been posted on the office door.

But then she left her desk to do some errand or other, which allowed him unsupervised
access to Uljevik’s faculty mailbox. Among other items, he’d found an electric bill,
quite high, with a country road address. He got a map and a hot dog at a gas station.
The place was six miles out of town. He walked it.

There were almost no cars on the road. It was sunny out, though painfully cold. It
felt good to be moving. He swung his arms for the heat of it and wondered how the
game with Marion had turned out. That game wouldn’t have ended well, even with him
playing. At best, they might have avoided downright ugly. Without him? What’s uglier
than ugly? He thought he maybe shouldn’t go back to high school, should take his GED
instead, go straight to college, where nobody would know he’d ever played basketball.
He wasn’t big enough for the college teams anyway.

He arrived finally at a compound with a chain-link fence. Ordinarily, chain-link fences
posed no problem to teenage Lowell; he laughed at chain-link fences. But this one
was threaded with the telltale electric wire. That told him he was in the right spot,
but also that he had no way inside.

The yard was thick with leafless trees, the ground bare dirt and boulders, fringed
with yellowed weeds. There was a tire swing hanging from a branch and a net for climbing,
like the ones the army uses in its obstacle courses. No one seemed to be about. Across
the road, Lowell found a half tree trunk that hid him from the wind and from view.
He curled into it and went promptly to sleep.

He woke when he heard a car door slam. The gate to the compound driveway was open.
Inside, a man was unloading great bags of Purina dog chow from the back of a green
station wagon. He piled them onto a dolly that he pushed across the dirt to what seemed
to be a garage. As soon as he disappeared inside, Lowell crossed the road and slipped
through the door into the main building. “I just walked right in,” Lowell said. “Simple
as that.”

He found himself in a dark hallway with a set of stairs leading up and also down.
He could hear the chimps. They were in the basement.

There was a strong odor in the stairwell, a mix of ammonia and shit. A light switch,
but Lowell left it off. The sun came in through a row of small windows set just above
ground level. It was bright enough for him to see four cages, all in a row, and at
least a dozen dark, squat figures inside them.

“What came next,” Lowell said, “was awful. I know you don’t like to talk about Fern.
Are you sure you want me to go on?”

He meant this as a warning to me. He wasn’t really offering to stop.

•   •   •

I
RECOGNIZED
F
ERN
right away, he said, but not because I actually recognized her in the dim light, just
because she was the youngest and smallest.

She was in a cage with four large adults. I don’t think I’d ever realized how different
one chimp looks from another. Her hair was redder than most, and her ears were set
higher, more like teddy bear ears. All very easy to figure out, all very logical even
though she’d changed quite a bit. Solid and squat where she used to be so graceful.
But she was eerie in the way she recognized me. It was as if she felt me coming. I
remember thinking Dad should do a study on chimp precognition.

I was walking across the basement toward the cages and she hadn’t even turned in my
direction when I saw her go rigid. Her hair started to rise and she began to very
quietly make those
oo oo
sounds she makes when she’s agitated. Then she spun around and leapt for the bars
of the cage. She was shaking them and swinging back and forth, by then she was looking
right at me. By then she was screaming at me.

I ran toward her and when I got close enough she reached through, grabbed my arm,
and pulled me so hard she slammed me into the bars. I hit my head and things went
a bit sideways for me. Fern had my hand inside the cage, inside her mouth, but she
hadn’t bitten me yet. I think she couldn’t decide if she was more happy to see me
or more angry. It was the first time in my life I’d ever been frightened of her.

I tried to pull my hand back, but she wouldn’t let me. I could smell the excitement
on her, a smell sort of like burned hair. She hadn’t had a bubble bath in a long time
or a good tooth-brushing. She kind of stank, to be honest.

I started talking to her, telling her I was sorry, telling her I loved her. But she
was still screaming, so I know she didn’t hear. And she was squeezing my fingers so
hard there were flashes going off like popguns in my eyeballs, and it was all I could
do to keep my voice calm and quiet.

By now, she’d gotten the other chimps pretty worked up. Another one, a big male and
fully erect, came and tried to take my hand from her, but she wouldn’t let go. So
he grabbed my other arm, and then they were both pulling on me, and between them they
bounced me repeatedly against the bars. I hit my nose, my forehead, the side of my
face. Fern was still holding my hand, but not in her mouth anymore. She turned and
bit the male chimp on his shoulder. She really clamped down. More screaming, coming
from all the cages, echoing off the concrete walls. It was like a mosh pit in there.
A really dangerous mosh pit.

The big guy dropped my arm and backed away with his mouth wide open, showing his canines,
I swear they looked like shark teeth. He was standing straight, his hair, like hers,
all up. He was trying to threaten her, but she wasn’t paying him any attention. She
was signing with her one free hand to me. My name, her fingers in the L with that
slap against her chest, and then good, good Fern. Fern is a good girl. Please take
me home now. I’ll be good. I promise I’ll be good.

The big chimp came crashing in from behind and Fern couldn’t defend herself and hold
on to me at the same time. So she didn’t defend herself. He opened these long, bloody
wounds on her back with his feet. And all this time, she was still screaming, all
the chimps were screaming, and I could smell blood and fury and terror, all that acrid
copper and musky sweat and ripe feces, and my head was spinning from the blows I’d
taken. And still she didn’t let go.