Alice thrust the discarded popcorn bag at me with instructions to breathe into it. Todd slid to the floor behind me, his legs to either side of my legs. He rubbed my shoulders. This was kind, since Todd wasn’t a toucher. And I do like to be touched; it’s a monkey-girl thing.
The shoulder-rub relaxed me enough that I began to cry. I was still breathing into the popcorn bag and my sobbing came as all manner of lovely ocean sounds, sometimes waves and sometimes seals. “Are you all right?” Todd asked me, which I clearly wasn’t and yet people do ask that. “What happened?” Todd’s thumbs pressed into the back of my neck.
“Are you all right?” asked Alice. “Should we call someone? What happened?”
I honestly didn’t know. I didn’t want to know. Something was rising from the crypt, and what I did know was that I didn’t want to see what it was. Nor did I want to see the rest of The Man in the Iron Mask. I said I was fine, all better now, and that I had no idea what had set me off. Made some excuse and left to go lie down where I continued to cry, only more quietly so as to not further upset Todd and Alice.
When there is an invisible elephant in the room, one is from time to time bound to trip over a trunk. I took my old escape route and I still knew the way. I fell asleep just as fast as I could.
Six
SOME YEARS PASSED.
Enter Harlow.
Now that you know me better, let’s take a second look at that first encounter. I’m sitting in the cafeteria with my grilled cheese sandwich and my milk. Harlow blows through the door like a hurricane, if hurricanes were tall, sexy girls in blue T-shirts and angelfish necklaces.
So maybe I’m less alarmed than you’d imagined the first time you heard this story. Maybe I could see that Harlow wasn’t as angry as she was pretending to be. The smashing of the dishes, the throwing of the coats—it was all performative. Maybe I could see how she was enjoying herself.
It was a good performance and she was enjoying that part, too, the satisfaction of a job well done, but it wasn’t a great performance or I wouldn’t have seen through it. Still, as a fellow impostor, I appreciated her vigor. I admired her choices though I wouldn’t have made them. Freak or fake, I’d been asking myself ever since I arrived at college, and suddenly here was someone bold enough to be both.
But I was still as much in the dark about my own reactions as you were the first time you heard this. Too busy ducking, chafing at the handcuffs, phoning Dad, filling out the paperwork. Fast-forward now to me returning to Davis after Thanksgiving vacation and finding Harlow in my apartment. No one would have liked that. Maybe I liked it even less. Here we go again, I said to myself. I said this so distinctly in my head that I heard it as well as said it. As if I was quite used to finding someone with no sense of boundaries in my space, fiddling with my things and breaking most of them. Here we go again.
And this, finally, was the moment the hypnotist snapped her fingers. My ease with Harlow’s tantrums and impositions had nothing to do with our shared humbuggeries. I was okay with her acting-out because I’d seen it before. Harlow could have pissed in the corner, and it would have been nothing I hadn’t seen before. Since she hadn’t, by the family metric, her behavior hardly even counted as a scene.
I was struck less by the familiarity of it all than by the time it had taken me to recognize that familiarity. It was one thing to conceal my essential monkey-girlness from others. It was quite another to completely forget it myself. (And yet, wasn’t that exactly what I’d been hoping for? Turned out I didn’t like it. I didn’t like it one bit.)
My father hadn’t been fooled. “I suppose someone put you up to it,” Dad had said on the phone, but I hadn’t noticed. I hated it when Dad understood me better than I did myself and often chose not to listen when he talked rather than run that risk.
When the revelation finally came, it complicated my feelings toward Harlow more than it illuminated them. On the one hand, I could see she was bad news. In the comments section of my kindergarten report card I’d been described as impulsive, possessive, and demanding. These are classic chimp traits and I’ve worked hard over the years to eradicate them. I felt that Harlow was maybe demonstrating the same tendencies without the same commitment to reform. In her company, I might fall back into bad old ways.
Yet I felt comfortable with her in a way I never felt comfortable with anyone. It’s hard to overstate how lonely I was. Let me just repeat that I’d once gone, in a matter of days, from a childhood where I was never alone to this prolonged, silent only-ness. When I lost Fern, I’d also lost Lowell—at least I lost him in the way he’d been before—and I’d lost my mother and father in that same way, and I lost all the grad students for real, including my beloved Matt from Birmingham, who, when the moment came, chose Fern over me.
So I could see that Harlow was fundamentally untrustworthy. Simultaneously, she seemed like someone with whom I could be my true self. I had no intention of doing so and, with an equal and counterbalancing intensity, a great longing for it. It would be so interesting to see who my true self was, I thought with that part of my brain that came from my father. And with the part that came from my mother—has our little Rosemary made a friend at last?
• • •
AND HERE WE ARE, finally back in the middle where we left me, a bright-eyed undergraduate saddled with her very own arrest record and someone else’s powder-blue suitcase. The prophetic stars are hopping about the sky like fleas.
One: The appearance and immediate disappearance of my mother’s journals.
Two: A muffled message from Lowell, the knock on the dungeon wall from an adjacent cell.
Three: Harlow.
When a portent repeats itself three times, like something out of Julius Caesar, even Caliban, a couple of plays over, is bound to notice.
• • •
MOSTLY I WAS focused on my brother’s return. I was sick with excitement, sick with the sort of Christmas-morning anticipation you might have if, in your family, sometimes Christmas turns out more like Nightmare on Elm Street.
My for-real Christmas break was less than two weeks away. If Lowell visited during finals, I’d have all sorts of free time for him. We could play poker and Rummikub. Maybe go to San Francisco, hike in Muir Woods. There’s a place up by Lake Berryessa where, on a clear day, if you drive on a road marked PRIVATE, NO TRESPASSING and climb over a fence posted TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED, you can see across the entire state—the Sierra Nevada to the east, the Pacific to the west. Very very trippy. Lowell would love it.
If he visited after, I’d be in Indiana.
So I hoped Ezra was telling the truth when he’d said that Lowell would be back in a couple of days, and I hoped a couple of days meant two. I hoped Lowell would guess I’d be spending Christmas with Mom and Dad. I hoped he knew I had to do that, if only because he never did. I hoped he cared.
A few weeks after my first arrival in Davis, I’d found my way to the newspaper archives in the basement of Shields Library and spent most of a weekend holed up there, reading the local coverage of the April 15, 1987, firebombing of the John E. Thurman Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory. This didn’t get much play in Indiana, where they hadn’t connected it with Bloomington’s most hated high school point guard ever. Even in Davis, details were thin on the ground.
The lab was under construction at the time it was destroyed. The damage was estimated at $4.6 million. The letters ALF had been painted inside the burned hull and some nearby university vehicles were also tagged with Animal Liberation Front graffiti. “Research on animals benefits animals, people, and the environment,” the university spokesman had said.
The ALF claimed that the diagnostic lab was meant to service the animal/food industry, but I knew that only from the Letters to the Editor; there was no mention in the stories themselves. According to The Davis Enterprise, the police had no suspects but the action had been classified as domestic terrorism and turned over to the FBI.
I widened my search to the string of fire
bombings throughout Northern California that had followed. The San Jose Veal Company warehouse, the Ferrara Meat Company, and a poultry warehouse were all hit in rapid succession. A fur store in Santa Rosa was burned. No arrests for any of these firebombings had ever been made.
I went upstairs to ask the reference librarian to help me find stuff on the ALF, to see if they seemed like Lowell’s sort of people. ALF tactics included animal rescue and release, and also the theft of notebooks and lab records. They took photographs of vivisections for release to the press. They destroyed lab equipment, including something called the primate stereotaxic device—I didn’t know then nor want to know now what that is. They harassed researchers, furriers, and cattle ranchers with hate mail, leaving death threats on their answering machines, sometimes vandalizing their homes or tacking up shocking photographs of animal abuse in the playgrounds where their children went to school.
Some of the press coverage seemed sympathetic. Most did not. Reuters had described the ALF raids as the story of the ark, only with Rambo instead of Noah at the helm. But everyone agreed it was only a matter of time before someone was killed. Someone who mattered. Someone human. There had already been a number of close calls.
I came to a report on a 1985 break-in at UC Riverside. Among the many animals stolen was an infant macaque named Britches. Britches’s little eyes had been sewn shut the day he was born, in order to test some sonic equipment designed for blind babies. The plan was to keep him alive for about three years in a state of sensory deprivation and then kill him to see what that had done to the visual, auditory, and motor-skills parts of his brain.
I didn’t want a world in which I had to choose between blind human babies and tortured monkey ones. To be frank, that’s the sort of choice I expect science to protect me from, not give me. I handled the situation by not reading more.
In 1985, Lowell had just left home. He’d been accepted to Brown University and we’d known he would be leaving us soon, but we’d thought we still had a few months left. A few months of him running about with Marco and Kitch, making us all believe he was ours, that, even as he left us, we could keep him.
The FBI had told my parents that the West Coast ALF was a slick operation of independent cells, safe houses, and an efficient underground railroad for the movement of animals. They wouldn’t say what had led them to Lowell or even confirm he was a suspect. They did say that the most militant of the animal rights activists were young, white, male, and from the middle class.
The Davis diagnostic lab had long ago been finished and was busily doing whatever the ALF hadn’t wanted it to do. I could bike over any time. I could bike over, but I couldn’t go in. As with all other animal labs these days, the security there was tight.
• • •
I WAS JUST about to call the airlines yet again, demand that they produce my real suitcase and take the pretender away, when Harlow showed up with a different idea. Harlow’s different idea was to pick the lock on the suitcase we did have, open it, and see what was inside. We would not take the stuff. That went without saying. But it was inconceivable to her that we’d return the case without even looking. Who knew what a strange suitcase from Indiana (assuming it had come from Indiana) might contain. Gold doubloons. A heroin-stuffed doll. Polaroids of some midwestern city council in flagrante. Apple butter.
Wasn’t I curious? Where was my sense of adventure?
I was impressed that Harlow knew about apple butter. That’s no excuse for the way I let her proceed. I counted on the combination lock stumping her. Tools were needed. Possibly a demolitions expert. In chimp studies, this kind of challenge is referred to as a food puzzle. Chimps are graded on achievement and speed, with bonus points for originality. Plus they get to eat whatever’s inside. Chimps would see it as a great injustice, opening the suitcase and not taking anything.
I made a few vague objections, trusted to the arithmetical probability of guessing the right combination (1 in 10,000), and let myself be sent off to the co-op in the rain to pick us up some coffees.
Apparently, you can open a combination lock in a matter of minutes by looking down into the shaft for indentations while rotating the wheel. Ezra demonstrated this to me on my return. Ezra had parlayed his paranoid delusions into a very real jungle-commando skill set. It was frightening to think about the things he could do.
Harlow had found him on the third-floor balcony, practicing tai chi under the overhang, and running through his kill lines. “Wipe that face off your head, bitch. Your ass is as dead as fucking fried chicken.” Ezra had told me once that, as he goes about his life, he’s constantly running the movie version in his head, but I think a lot of people do that. Though maybe in a genre different from Ezra’s.
So in the movie version, this is a romantic scene. Harlow enters, finding him all disciplined and moody and graceful. She twirls her hair, and we cut to the living room, two heads bent over the lock. In the movie version, there’s a bomb in the suitcase. I return with the coffees just in time to stop them.
Only I didn’t stop them. Instead I let Ezra explain the lock, watched him make the final triumphal spin, watched him open the suitcase—all without saying a word. He unpacked it suspensefully, item by dull item. Mostly what came out were clothes—a tracksuit, socks, a yellow T-shirt with THE HUMAN RACE written in a red curve across the chest. Harlow held this shirt up. Beneath the caption was the globe, spun to the side of the Americas. People of all colors were running the circumference, all of them in the same direction, which was like no human race I’d ever known. “Too big,” Harlow said with an admirable lack of disappointment.
Ezra fished deeper. “Okay!” he said. “Okay!” And then, “Close your eyes,” which no one did, because you’d be an idiot to close your eyes just on Ezra’s say-so.
Ezra lifted something out of the case. It rose like a ghost from a body, like a vampire from a powder-blue coffin. Unfolding its insectile limbs, it bounced in Ezra’s hand, eyes flat, mouth clacking. “What the hell do we have here?” Ezra asked.
He was holding a ventriloquist’s dummy—antique, by the look of it. It danced above the opened suitcase lid like a spider. There were knitting needles in one of its little hands and a red mob-cap on its little head. “Madame Defarge,” I told him and then added, “Madame Guillotine,” because I always forgot what a reader Ezra was; it seemed so out of character, so uncinematic.
Harlow was pink with happiness. We were in temporary possession of a suitcase belonging to a jogger/ventriloquist. An antique dummy of Madame Defarge was obviously exactly what she’d been hoping we’d find. It brought the roses to her cheeks.
Ezra shoved his hand up the back of Madame Defarge’s dress. She leapt toward Harlow’s neck, paddled about there. Ezra put words into her mouth. She might have been thanking heaven for little girls. She might have been mouthing the lyrics to “La Marseillaise.” Or “Frère Jacques.” That’s how bad Ezra’s French accent was; it might as well have been French.
And talk about your uncanny valley response. I’ve never seen a more unseemly display of puppetry. I’ve never seen a creepier sight.
I turned priggish. “We shouldn’t be playing with it,” I said. “It looks old. Probably irreplaceable,” but Harlow said that only a moron would put something irreplaceable in a checked suitcase.
And anyway they were being really careful with it. She took the dummy from Ezra, made it shake its little fists at me. From the look on Madame Defarge’s face, I could see that everything was going exactly as she’d planned. “Don’t spoil my fun,” Madame Defarge said.
I had no time for this nonsense; I had a class to get to. I went into the kitchen, phoned the airport, where my call was very important to them, and left a message. And then Harlow came into the kitchen after me. She promised to put Madame Defarge back in the suitcase and I promised to meet her later for a night of bar-hopping, because, for God’s sake, Rosemary, no harm had been done and I should take a chill pill.
And also because I wanted Har
low to like me.
Seven
IF YOU ASKED me about ninety-nine percent of the college lectures I once attended, I couldn’t tell you a thing. That particular afternoon in that particular class falls into the one percent that remains.
It was still raining. Not a hard rain but a clammy one, and me, soaking it in like a sponge on a bicycle. A flock of seagulls were grazing on the soccer fields as I pedaled past. I’d seen that many times during storms, the gathering of the gulls, but it always amazed me. Davis, California, is profoundly inland.
By the time I reached the lecture hall, water had run down the legs of my jeans and puddled in the bottoms of my shoes. Chem 100, where all the biggest classes were held, was a large auditorium that sloped down to where the professor stood. You entered from the highest point, the back of the room. Ordinarily, on a rainy day, attendance would be sparse; students seemed to think classes were canceled like ball games for rain. But this was the last class of the session, the last class before the final. I was late so I had to descend the stairs, sit near the front. I raised the arm-desk and prepared to take notes.
The name of the class was Religion and Violence. The professor, Dr. Sosa, was a man in his middle years with a receding hairline and an expanding belly. He was a popular teacher, who sported Star Trek ties and mismatched socks, but all ironically. “Back when I was at Starfleet Academy,” he’d say while introducing some piece of ancient data or beginning some historical anecdote. Dr. Sosa’s lectures were enthusiastic and wide-ranging. I counted him among the easy-listening portion of my professors.
My father had once suggested, as an experiment, that I should nod every time a professor looked in my direction. I would find, he said, the professors looking my way more and more often, helpless as Pavlov’s dogs. Dad may have had an agenda. The only way your absence was likely to be noticed in a class of a hundred or more was if your professor had been carefully conditioned to look for you. Dr. Sosa and I had a silent rapport. My father was a crafty man.
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves Page 12