We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (19 page)

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.

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

—F
RANZ
K
AFKA,
“A Report for an Academy”

T
HERE 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.

•   •   •

L
OWELL 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.

•   •   •

“
D
ID
F
ERN 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.”

•   •   •

H
OURS 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.