We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

by Karen Joy Fowler

  —FRANZ KAFKA, “A Report for an Academy”

  One

  THERE WAS SOMETHING NotSame about Fern and me, something so outrageous that Lowell hadn’t even suspected it until he went to South Dakota. Something I hadn’t known until he told it to me ten years later over breakfast at Bakers Square. The NotSame was this: Like a chair or a car or a television, Fern could be bought and sold. The whole time she was living in the farmhouse with us as part of our family, the whole time she was keeping herself busy being our sister and daughter, she was, in fact, the property of Indiana University.

  When my father pulled the plug on the family project, he’d hoped to keep working with Fern under some as yet undetermined circumstances at the lab. But maintaining her had always been an expensive proposition and IU said they had no place to house her safely. They went looking for the exit. She was sold to South Dakota on the condition that they take her at once.

  Our father had no say in that. He’d had no authority to send Matt along, but he’d done so, and Matt had no official position in South Dakota, but he’d stayed as long as he was able and seen Fern as often as allowed. They’d done the best they could, Lowell said, and of all people, Lowell was the unlikeliest to cut anyone any slack about this. But it was hard for me back then—and still is, honestly—to understand how any parents could have ended up with so little power concerning their own daughter.

  “My visit caused nothing but more pain. Turned out Dad was right about not going to see her.” Lowell’s eyes were red with fatigue and he was rubbing them hard and making them redder. “Except for the part where he said it would make me feel better.”

  “Do you know where she is now?” I asked and Lowell said that he did, that she was still in South Dakota, still at Uljevik’s lab. Added to the emotional reasons not to visit again was this fact—the FBI was clearly waiting for him there. There was no way he could go back. So he had someone keeping an eye on her. He got reports.

  Uljevik himself had retired five years ago, good news for everyone in those cages. “He wasn’t really a scientist,” Lowell said. “More of a supervillain. The kind of scientist who belongs in a prison for the criminally insane.”

  Sadly, Lowell said, there were lots of those kinds of scientists still running about, wild and free.

  “He trained the chimps to kiss his hand when he walked through the cages,” Lowell said. “He made Fern do that over and over again. This guy who used to work there told me Uljevik thought that was funny.

  “Uljevik hated Fern, and nobody could ever explain to me why. Once I talked this rich guy into putting up the money to buy her, pay a sanctuary in Florida (already full up, like all the other sanctuaries) enough money to make it worth their while to ignore their waiting list and take her. Uljevik refused to sell. He offered the guy a different chimp and the guy figured one rescue was better than none, so the next thing I knew, he’d agreed. Turned out to be sort of a blessing, I guess. It’s always dicey introducing a new chimp into an established troop.”

  I had a momentary flash of my first day in kindergarten—of me, peculiar, undersocialized, and half a term late.

  “The chimp that went instead of her was attacked and beaten nearly to death,” Lowell said.

  • • •

  LOWELL SAID:

  I had a big scare in ’89, when Uljevik announced he was closing a budgetary gap by sending some of the chimps to the medical labs. Uma, Peter, Joey, Tata, and Dao were all sold off. Uma is the only one of those still alive.

  I was sure Fern would be on the list, but she wasn’t, maybe because she was breeding well. Growing up with us fucked with her sexually though; she’s not interested. They started inseminating her. I call that rape without the bruises.

  She’s had three children so far. Her first, a little boy they named Basil, was taken away almost immediately by an older female chimp. I hear that happens even in the best of families. Fern was pretty sad about it, though.

  And then he was taken away again. Uljevik sold Basil along with Sage, Fern’s second child, to the city zoo in St. Louis, a thing the best of families usually manage to avoid. Arguably, not ours.

  “You should go see them there,” Lowell told me. “It’s not great, but it’s not the medical labs.”

  A man at another table accused his breakfast partner of pulling rainbows and unicorns out of her ass. I don’t know if it was exactly this moment when I overheard that, but I’ve always remembered it. Such a painful image, so exactly what Lowell wasn’t doing. So exactly what Lowell never did. So when Lowell told me that everything had gotten better for Fern when Uljevik retired, I knew it was the truth. “The grad students love Fern,” Lowell told me. “Didn’t they always?”

  Lowell said that Fern had had one more child, a little girl named Hazel. Hazel had just turned two and Fern was teaching her to sign. It seemed likely Fern would get to keep her, as an experiment had been designed around them. The lab workers were forbidden now to use any sign in front of Hazel that she hadn’t already been seen using herself on at least fourteen occasions by at least four separate witnesses.

  Fern had more than two hundred documented signs herself, and the researchers were keeping a list to see how many of those she passed on. Would she only pass on the functional or would she include the conversational?

  “Hazel’s got the whole lab wrapped around her little finger,” Lowell told me. “She’s already making up signs of her own. Tree dress for leaves. Big soup for the bathtub. Smart as can be. Chess-playing Jesuitical.

  “Just like her mom,” Lowell said.

  • • •

  “DID FERN GIVE you that?” I asked, pointing to the scar on Lowell’s hand, and he said no, that was the calling card of a frightened red-tailed hawk. But I never heard that story, because Lowell hadn’t finished with Fern’s.

  Back in South Dakota, after his break-in, Lowell had needed medical attention. In addition to the facial drubbing he’d taken on the bars of the cage, two of his fingers had been broken and his wrist sprained. A local doctor came to tend him at a private home, the treatment taking place out of the office and off the books. He’d slept that night at that same home, with someone he didn’t know watching over him, waking him at intervals to check for signs of concussion. All this had come about because someone had maybe seen Lowell at the lab or else earlier that morning at the university or maybe it was someone back in Bloomington, someone impressed by the Great Rat Release. Lowell was very vague on this point. But whoever this person was, s/he didn’t like the way lab animals were treated, and thought Lowell might agree that something needed to be done.

  “By now, I’d figured out I couldn’t rescue Fern alone,” Lowell said. “I’d been stupid and childish, as if Fern and I could just go off together, like Han and Chewbacca. Make the leap to hyperspace.

  “Obviously, I hadn’t been thinking at all. I’d just wanted to see her, see how she was doing, show her she hadn’t been forgotten. Say that I loved her.

  “Now I saw that I needed a plan. I needed a place to take her and people to help. I saw that according to the law I’d be guilty of theft, and I saw that I didn’t give two shits about the law. I was told about this action coming up in Riverside, California, a car headed there with an empty seat. I said I’d go. My thinking was that anything I did would be bank to use on Fern later.”

  Lowell had his face turned away from me, looking through the big windows to the street, where the morning commute had begun. The tule fog had risen again. The rain was stopped and the sun was up but thin and strained, so the cars all had their lights on. It was as if the whole town had been stuffed into a sock.

  Inside Bakers Square, it was getting busier, silverware striking the china plates, the buzz of conversations. The sound of the cash register. The bell over the door. I was crying and not sure when that had started.

  Lowell reached over and took my hands in his own, rough ones. His fingers were warmer than mine. “The police showed up at the lab the next day looking for
me—I heard about it. I know they were told all about my visit, so Mom and Dad knew I’d been there and that I was basically okay. But I was still too mad to go home. This ride to Riverside seemed like my best bet for getting out of town without getting caught.

  “I thought I was thinking things through. Doing what was best for Fern. But I was so angry. At all of you. I kept seeing her face.

  “I didn’t mean to never come home,” Lowell said. “I just meant to take care of Fern first, get her settled somewhere good, somewhere she’d be happy.” He gave my hands a small shake. “Some farm.”

  Around then, there was one of those strange moments when all the noise inside the restaurant suddenly stopped. Nobody spoke. Nobody clicked the sides of their coffee cup with their spoon. Nobody outside barked or honked or coughed. Fermata. Freeze-frame.

  Resume action.

  Lowell’s voice dropped. “I was so stupid,” he said tonelessly. “I could have gone to college there. Maybe found a way to work at the lab. Seen Fern every day. Instead I go get made by the FBI and suddenly I can’t ever go back. Or to college. Or home.”

  And then all the air went out of him. “I’ve tried so hard to rescue her,” he told me. “Years and years of trying and what does Fern have to show for it? What a miserable excuse for a brother I turned out to be.”

  • • •

  HOURS AFTER OUR waitress had despaired of it, we paid the bill. Lowell shouldered his backpack and we walked through the fog down Second Street together. Drops of water collected on the dark wool of Lowell’s coat.

  I remembered a day when I’d been sick with a cold and Lowell had said since I couldn’t go outside, he’d bring the snow in. He’d fetched me snowflakes on the backs of his black leather gloves, promised me intricate six-sided crystals, miniature snow-queen castles. But by the time I’d gotten them to the microscope, they were just blank beads of water.

  It was before Fern left, but she wasn’t in this memory and I wondered about that. It was hard to keep Fern—a twirling, whirling, somersaulting carpe diem—out of anything. Maybe she’d been off working with the grad students. Maybe she had been there and I’d erased her. Maybe it was too painful just now to remember all that hairy exuberance.

  “Walk me to the train station,” Lowell said.

  So he was leaving. He hadn’t even stayed long enough for me to completely get past the sex-with-Harlow outrage. “I thought we’d maybe go hiking,” I told him, not even trying not to whine. “I thought we’d go to San Francisco for a day. I didn’t think you’d leave this fast.”

  So many things I’d stored up to tell him. I’d hoped, through patiently assembled implication, to make him see that he couldn’t abandon me again. Full-press guilt trip. I’d just been waiting for him to stop doing all the talking.

  Maybe he’d guessed. Not much got by Lowell, at least not much about me. “Sorry, Rosie. I can’t hang around anywhere, but especially not here.”

  A dozen students were crowded about the door to Mishka’s, waiting for the café to open. We cut a path through them—Lowell and his backpack, me beside him with my head down. Mishka’s was a popular place during finals week, but you had to be early to get a seat in the back. The front tables were designated no-study zones; this was known as The Rule.

  Outside the café, the fog smelled of coffee and muffins. I looked up and right into the face of Doris Levy from my freshman dorm. Fortunately, she gave no sign of recognition. I couldn’t have managed a chat.

  Lowell didn’t speak again until the students were more than a block behind us. “I’ve got to assume the FBI knows you’re here,” he said then. “Especially with that splendid arrest record of yours. Your apartment manager saw me. Your roommate. Harlow. It’s too risky. And anyway, there’s someplace else I have to be.”

  Lowell was planning another action, he said, something long-term and so deep-cover he’d have to completely disappear. This meant he couldn’t be taking those reports on Fern.

  So they’d be coming to me. Never mind how, Lowell said, I’d know when I got one. It was all arranged except for this last thing, which was to tell me that watching over Fern was my job now.

  It was the reason he’d come.

  We arrived at the train station. Lowell bought his ticket while I sat on the very bench where, a few nights back, I’d sobbed my heart out imagining the day Fern was taken away. What with one thing and another, I’d done so much crying since Dr. Sosa’s class, you wouldn’t have thought I had any tears left, but down they dripped. At least we were at the train station. Airports and train stations are where you get to cry. I’d once gone to an airport for just that purpose.

  We went out to the platform and walked down the tracks until we could be by ourselves again. I wished that I were the one leaving. Ticket to anywhere. What would Davis be like without that constant hope that Lowell was coming? Why even stay here?

  I’d been seeing Ezra’s habit of starring in his own life as a vanity; I’d been amused by it. Now I saw the utility. If I were playing a part, I could establish a distance, pretend to only pretend to be feeling the things I was feeling. The scene was cinematic, despite the sound track of my snuffling. To my right and my left, the tracks vanished into the fog. The train whistle approached. I could have been seeing my brother off to war. To the big city to make his fortune. To search the goldfields for our missing father.

  Lowell put his arms around me. My face left a damp and snotty smear on the wool of his coat. I took in a clogged breath, trying to smell him so I’d remember it. He smelled of wet dog, but that was just his coat. Coffee. Harlow’s vanilla cologne. I tried but couldn’t get to the smell underneath all that—the Lowell smell. I touched his scratchy cheek, fingered his hair the way I used to when I was little, the way Fern used to do to me. Once, in class, I’d reached out to touch a coil of braids on the head of the woman in the seat in front of me. I hadn’t been thinking at all, overwhelmed by the need to feel that intricacy of hair. She’d turned around. “My head doesn’t belong to you,” she’d said icily, leaving me stuttering an apology, horrified at the way my chimp nature still popped out when I wasn’t paying attention.

  We heard the warning alarms on the crossing nearest us, the engine approaching from the north. I was sorting madly through all the things I’d planned to say, looking for the single most important. I made a hasty, ill-advised choice. “I know you’ve always blamed me for Fern.”

  “I shouldn’t have done that. You were five years old.”

  “But I honestly don’t remember what I did. I don’t remember anything at all about Fern leaving.”

  “Serious?” Lowell asked. He was quiet for a moment; I could see him deciding how much to tell me. This was a bad sign, that there were things he maybe shouldn’t say. My heart grew thorns, each beat a stab.

  The train arrived. The ticket collector set out a step for the debarking passengers. Some people got off. Others got on. Time was running out. Already we were walking toward the nearest door. “You made Mom and Dad choose,” Lowell said finally. “You or her. You were always such a jealous little kid.”

  He swung his backpack on board, hoisted himself up and in, turned to look back down at me. “You were only five years old,” he repeated. “Don’t go blaming yourself.”

  He stared at me then, the way you stare at someone you won’t see for a long time. Her face when I left her. “Tell Mom and Dad I love them? Make them believe it, that’ll be the hard part.”

  He was still in the doorway, his face partly his own and partly, the tired part, our father’s. “You, too, squirt. You can’t imagine how much I miss you all. Good old Bloomington. ‘When I dream about the moonlight on the Wabash . . .’”

  Then I long for my Indiana home.

  A middle-aged Asian woman in jeans and high heels came running. She took the step in an agile leap, thwacking Lowell on the arm with her swinging purse. “God, I’m so sorry,” she said. “I thought I’d missed my train.” She disappeared into the coach. The whistle sound
ed.

  “I’m really glad you have a friend,” Lowell told me. “Harlow seems to care a lot about you.” And then the conductor came and made him take his seat. It was the last thing I remember him saying, my big brother, my personal Hale-Bopp comet, streaming by and gone again—that Harlow cared.

  For all the brevity of the visit, he’d managed to get some licks in. I’d planned to make him feel bad about my lonely life, but Harlow and her stupid friendship had nixed that and I was the one left ashamed. I’d always known he blamed me for Fern, but I hadn’t heard it aloud in ten years.

  The things Lowell had said combined with his leaving combined with my lack of sleep and the aftermath of the itchy, ugly narcotic I’d taken. Any one of those might have done me in. The entirety was overpowering. I was sad and horrified, ashamed and bereft, lonely and exhausted, caffeinated and guilt-ridden and grief-stricken and many other things as well. The system crashed. I watched the fog swallow the train and all I felt was tired.

  “You love Fern,” someone said to me. It turned out to be my old imaginary friend, Mary. I hadn’t seen Mary in almost as long as I hadn’t seen Fern and she hadn’t aged a day. She didn’t stick around. She brought me the one message—“You love Fern”—and then was gone again. I wanted to believe her. But the whole point of Mary had been to reassure me where Fern was concerned. Maybe she’d just been doing her job.

  We call them feelings because we feel them. They don’t start in our minds, they arise in our bodies, is what my mother always said, with the great materialist William James as backup. It was a standard component of her parenting—that you can’t help the things you feel, only the things you do. (But telling everyone what you felt, that was doing something. Especially when what you were feeling was mean. Though as a child, I’d always seen this as more of a gray area.)

  Now I searched through my weariness, into every breath, every muscle, every heartbeat, and found a reassuring, bone-deep certainty. I loved Fern. I had always loved Fern. I always would.