We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

by Karen Joy Fowler

  We passed Central Park. Even in the dark, I could see how all the grass had been drowned in the winter mud; the ground was slick and black. Once I’d made mud-shoes for Fern and me from paper plates and shoestrings. Fern wouldn’t wear hers, but I’d tied mine onto my feet, thinking I would walk over the mud in them like snow-shoes over snow. You learn as much from failure as from success, Dad always says.

  Though no one admires you for it.

  “I tried to read Dad’s last paper,” Lowell said finally. “‘The Learning Curve in Stochastic Learning Theory.’ I could hardly follow from one paragraph to the next. It was like I’d never seen those words before. Maybe if I’d gone to college.”

  “Wouldn’t have helped.” I told him briefly about Thanksgiving and how Dad had annoyed Grandma Donna with his Markov chains. I mentioned Peter’s SATs and Uncle Bob’s conspiracy theories and I almost told him Mom had given me her journals, but what if he’d wanted to see them? I didn’t want to admit, even to him, that they were lost.

  We walked into Bakers Square, with their gingham curtains, laminated place mats, and Muzak. It wasn’t a bad setting for us, very old-school, as if we’d stepped back a decade or more to our childhoods, though perhaps a bit too brightly lit. The Muzak was even older—Beach Boys and Supremes. “Be True to Your School.” “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.” Our parents’ music.

  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.”

  Seven

  LOWELL 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.”

  • • •

  BUT 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 FERN 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.

  By now, people had arrived, two of them, both men,
running down the stairs, shouting at me, but I couldn’t hear what they were saying. They didn’t seem old enough to be professors, maybe grad students. Maybe janitors. They were big, and one of them was carrying a cattle prod, and I remember thinking, how is that going to work? How can they shock Fern and not get me? And how can I stop them from shocking Fern?

  Turned out, they didn’t need to shock anyone. The male chimp saw the prod and backed right off, whimpering, to the rear of the cage. Everyone got quiet. They showed it to Fern, and she finally let go.

  I took some shit in the face. It came from a different cage, landed with a stench, slid down my neck into my shirt collar. I was told to get the fuck out before the police were called. Fern was trying to press herself through the bars, still signing my name and also hers. Good Fern, good Fern. The men began arguing over whether to dart her or not. When they saw the blood, the argument was over.

  One of them left to call the vet. He took me with him, dragging me by my undamaged arm. He was a lot bigger than I was. “I’m calling the police next,” he said, giving me a shake. “You think you’re funny? You think you’re a real funny boy, tormenting caged animals like that? Get the fuck out of here and don’t you ever come back.”

  The other man stayed with Fern. He stood over her with the cattle prod. I think he was protecting her from the other chimps, but I know she saw it as a threat. Her signing got sloppy. Despairing.

  I still can hardly stand to think about it, Lowell said. How even after everything, she protected me from that alpha male. The price she paid for that. The way her face looked when I left her there.

  I never saw her again, Lowell said.

  Part Five

  Nowadays, of course, I can portray those ape-like feelings only with human words and, as a result, I misrepresent them.