We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (21 page)

B
UT
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. Ezra 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.

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.

•   •   •

T
HE
A
NIMAL
L
IBERATION
F
RONT
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.

•   •   •

H
ARLOW 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 tell me his name, which was okay by me. I didn’t want
to know it.

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.