Soon I was sweating. The Graduate was packed; there was a DJ, and some ill-advised line dancing. The room smelled of beer and bodies. Madame Defarge gamboled on the tables and the backs of the chairs. Green Day’s “Basket Case” pounded from the speakers.
Harlow and Reg had some words, shouting them over the music. I heard most of them. The gist was that Reg thought she was flirting with every guy in the bar and Harlow thought it was Madame Defarge doing the flirting. Harlow herself was simply engaged in performance art and the guys in the bar all knew it.
“Oh, yeah,” said Reg. “Bunch of real sophisticates. Real art lovers.” Reg said that men associated performance art with women who painted their faces in menstrual blood and they didn’t like it. Sluts, though, sluts they liked.
Harlow thought there was an important distinction to be made between a slut and a woman operating a slutty puppet. Reg thought there was no difference, or that maybe women thought there was a difference but men didn’t care.
“Are you calling me a slut?” Madame Defarge snapped. “Like you should fucking talk!”
The music slowed without quieting. Harlow and Reg tended to their drinks. A white guy in a backward baseball cap—“fucking milk chicken,” Reg told me, loud enough for the guy to hear, which means very loud—came and asked for a dance. Harlow handed him Madame Defarge.
“See?” she said to Reg. “She’s dancing with him and I’m dancing with you.” She held out her hand and Reg took it, hauled her in. They moved away from the counter, wrapped themselves tightly together, her hands on his shoulders, his in her shredded back-pockets. The guy in the backward baseball cap stared at Madame Defarge in bewilderment until I took her from him.
“She’s not for dancing with,” I said. “She’s very valuable.”
The DJ hit the strobe lights. The Graduate morphed into some ballroom of the damned. Reg returned and talked to me at length, the strobe making a slide show of his face. I nodded until nodding made me dizzy, then focused on the bend in his sharp nose to reorient myself. He wasn’t shouting, so I didn’t hear a word.
I nodded some more and the whole time I was making this agreeable gesture, I was telling him that his position on superpowers was balderdash and had no bearing on the real world. “Poppycock,” I said. “Flapdoodle. Bollocks. Piffle. Crapola. Codswallop.”
My gaze had dropped to his chest. A bright yellow road-sign was printed on his T-shirt, with the silhouette of a family running across it. The father was in front, pulling his wife by the hand behind him. The wife was pulling their child and the child had a doll, also by the hand. I’m from Indiana, and Davis is not San Diego. I didn’t know this was an actual road-sign, an encouragement to not hit illegal immigrants with your car. Both child and doll were airborne; that’s how fast the family was running. I could see their legs pumping, the child’s braids whipping behind her. I should maybe say here that I’d taken a couple of pills Harlow gave me. It’s a lucky thing I’d never faced peer pressure before; I turned out to suck at it.
“Bullshit,” I said. “Baloney. Hooey. Horse feathers.”
Reg said he couldn’t hear me, so we went outside, where I told him about the mirror test. I can’t remember how that had come to mind, but I gave him quite the lecture. I told him that some species, like chimps and elephants and dolphins, recognize themselves in the mirror and others, like dogs and pigeons, gorillas and human babies, don’t. Darwin himself had begun to think about this one day when he put a mirror on the ground in the Zoological Gardens and watched two young orangutans look at themselves in it. And then, a hundred years later, a psychologist named Gordon Gallup had refined the test, observed some chimps using the mirror to look inside their own mouths, see those parts of the body only the mirror could show them. I told Reg that we’d been using the mirror test to determine self-awareness ever since fucking Darwin and I couldn’t believe a guy like him, a college guy who thought he knew everything, wasn’t familiar with something so fundamental.
And then I added that a psychomanteum was a mirrored room in which people tried to communicate with spirits, for no particular reason except that I knew it.
I wondered suddenly what the impact of identical-twinness on the mirror test might be, but didn’t say so, since I didn’t know the answer and he might pretend he did.
Probably I was trying to reestablish my shattered sense of authority on these matters after the revelations of Sosa’s class. Definitely I was being a jerk. I remember Reg saying I sure talked a lot and I remember clapping my hand over my mouth as if I’d been found out. Then Reg said we should go back inside, because I was shivering again. And because he now thought he knew everything he needed to know about the mirror test.
Three
THE REST OF the night remains in my brain as that disconnected montage the movies have trained us to have. The Monkey Girl Returns, an episodic, demented Iditarod through the town.
• • •
HERE I AM, trying to get a rice bowl at Jack in the Box. Reg had left in a snit sometime earlier. Harlow is on my bike, with me balanced on the handlebars. We put a long order in through the intercom, changing our minds many times and trying to be sure the woman on the other end has it all straight, and then she won’t serve us because we aren’t in a car; she says we have to come inside. An argument ensues, which ends with the woman fetching another woman, a woman of more authority, who tells us to go to hell. The words go to hell come crackling out of Jack’s big snowball of a head. Harlow takes out the intercom armed with nothing but her house key.
• • •
HERE I’M IN the G Street Pub, being chatted up by some black guy in a letterman’s jacket, which probably meant he was in high school, but we kissed intensely and for quite some time so I really hope not.
• • •
HERE I’M HUDDLED by myself on a damp bench at the train station, my face on my knees. I’m sobbing and sobbing, because I’ve gone and let myself imagine a thing I’ve never let myself imagine before. I’ve let myself imagine the day Fern was taken away.
I’ll never know for sure what happened. I wasn’t there; Lowell wasn’t there. I’m betting Mom wasn’t there and maybe even not Dad.
Fern must have been drugged. Fern must have woken up in a strange place just the way I did that first afternoon in my new bedroom. Only when I’d cried, our father had come. Who had come for Fern? Maybe Matt. I allow myself this one small consolation, to imagine Matt beside her when she first woke up.
I’m picturing her as I last saw her, exuberantly five years old. But she’s not in the Swiss Family Robinson tree house now; instead she’s in a cage with older, larger chimps, none of whom she knows. Crawling shit, she says, and then she has to learn her place, not only that she’s a chimp, but female and lower in status than any male. I know that Fern would never have accepted that without a fight.
What did they do to her in that cage? Whatever it was, it happened because no woman had stopped it. The women who should have stood with Fern—my mother, the female grad students, me—none of us had helped. Instead we had exiled her to a place completely devoid of female solidarity.
• • •
I’M STILL CRYING, but I seem to have moved to a booth somewhere I can’t identify—not a bar, because I can hear everything everyone says. I’m with Harlow and two guys about our same age. The better-looking one is seated by her, has his arm stretched along the seat back behind her shoulder. He has longish hair and shakes his head frequently to keep it out of his eyes. The other guy is obviously meant for me. He’s quite short. I don’t care about that. I’m quite short myself. I prefer beta males to alphas. Only he keeps telling me to smile. “Nothing’s as bad as all that,” he says. If I were five years old, I’d have bitten him by now.
I’m also insulted because it’s so clear that I’m the consolation prize. No one is even making an effort to pretend otherwise. It’s like we’re in a musical and Harlow and her guy are the romantic couple and will get all the best songs and the big
story lines. Everything about them will matter. My guy and me are the comic relief.
“I don’t even know your name,” I say to him as an explanation of why I don’t owe him a smile. Though, in all fairness, we probably were introduced at some point when I wasn’t listening.
Maybe I didn’t say that out loud, because no one responds. He’s blinking fast, as if he’s got something in his eyes. I’m wearing contacts myself and between them and all the crying I’ve been doing, it’s as if I’ve scraped the Mojave Desert over my eyeballs. Suddenly that’s all I can think about—my aching, stinging, burning eyeballs.
Harlow leans across the table, takes my wrist in her hand, shakes it. “Listen to me,” she says firmly. “Are you listening? Paying attention? Whatever you’re upset about, you’re just imagining it. It’s not real.”
I can see how tired of me the guy next to Harlow is. “For fuck’s sake. Get a grip,” he says.
I refuse to be lower status than that insufferable twit. I refuse to smile. I’d rather die.
• • •
WE’RE STILL IN the same booth, but now Reg is there. He’s seated by Harlow, and the guy with the long hair is by me, and the short guy has gotten a chair and is seated at the open end. I can’t remember how all this happened, and I’m angrier than ever over the upgrade. I like the short guy better than the guy with the long hair, but who even asked?
The men all seem tense; any moment now, they’ll be firing up their lightsabers. Reg keeps playing with the saltshaker, spinning it and saying whoever it stops at is a douche bag, and the guy with long hair says that he doesn’t need a saltshaker; he knows a douche bag when he sees one just by looking. “Chill out, man,” the short guy says to Reg. “You can’t have them both”—and Reg raises the temperature by making the Loser sign with his hand against his forehead. Not just the simple, two-fingered L but his middle finger, too, pointing out and straight at the guy, which retains its classic meaning but also transforms the simple Loser into the Loser any way you look at it sign. The guy with long hair catches his breath loudly. We are this close to fisticuffs.
I wonder if I had sex with all three of them, would they calm down? Because it really doesn’t seem like they would.
Apparently, this I do say out loud. I try to explain that I was being hypothetical. I try to tell them about Sosa’s lecture, but I don’t get far, because bonobo is such a funny word and they all have such funny looks on their faces, it makes me laugh. At first everyone else laughs, too, but then they stop and I don’t. Nobody liked my crying and now that I’m laughing, I can see that I’m still irritating the hell out of everyone.
• • •
NOW I’M IN a bathroom stall, puking up pizza by the slice. When I finish, I go out to the sinks to wash my face and there are three men at the urinal. Wrong bathroom.
One of the men is Reg. I point to his face in the bathroom mirror. “Who’s that?” I ask him. And then, helpfully, “It’s an intelligence test.” I take my contacts out and drop them down the drain, because it’s what you do with disposables; you get rid of them. Besides, what’s there to see? My own face in the mirror is a badly lit mug shot, egg-white and staring. I reject it entirely. No way do I look like that. That must be someone else.
Reg gives me an Altoid, which is maybe the most thoughtful thing any man has ever done for me. Suddenly I find him very attractive. “You’re standing a little close,” he says. “Has anyone ever told you that you kind of crowd people? Get in their personal space?” And just like that, I’m over him.
I remember something. “You need a fucking lot of space,” I say. And then, before he gets the idea that I care what he needs, I change the subject. “It’s really easy to persuade people to be hateful,” I tell him, partly as a diversionary tactic and partly just because it is, and it can’t be said often enough. “You can train any animal into any behavior on cue if it’s a natural behavior to begin with. Racism, sexism, speciesism—all natural human behaviors. They can be triggered any time by any unscrupulous yahoo with a pulpit. A child could do it.
“Mobbing is a natural human behavior,” I say sadly. I’ve started crying again. “Bullying.”
Empathy is also a natural human behavior, and natural to chimps as well. When we see someone hurt, our brains respond to some extent as if we’d been hurt ourselves. This response is not located merely in the amygdala, where emotional memories are stored, but also in those regions of the cortex responsible for analyzing the behavior of others. We access our own experiences with pain and extend them to the current sufferer. We’re nice that way.
But I didn’t know this back then. Nor, apparently, did Dr. Sosa.
“Time for you to go home,” Reg says, but I’m not feeling that. I don’t think it’s that time at all.
• • •
HARLOW AND I are walking through the tunnel of the Shell station car wash. The tunnel has a very distinctive smell, soap and tires, and we’re stumbling a bit, because we’re stepping on rocker brushes and conveyor belts and other things we can’t see. We’re agreeing that when we were kids we loved sitting in the car as it went through the car wash. It was the best. It was like being in a spaceship or a submarine, the way the giant cloth squids slapped the windows. I’m fingering the giant cloth squids as I say this; they are as damp and rubbery as you’d expect.
How the water pours down and pours down, sheeting the windows, and you stay cozy and dry. What could be better? Fern loved it, too, but I force that thought out of my head. It comes right back in, Fern’s clever hands undoing the various clasps on her car seat so she can ricochet from one side of the car to the other, not miss a thing.
Harlow says that sometimes you thought the car was moving but it was the optical illusion of the brushes passing by you, and I say I’d had that exact same experience. Exact same. I shove Fern out of my mind again, and I’m high on Harlow’s concurrence, freebasing her approval. We are so much alike! “When I get married,” I say, “I want the wedding to be in a car in a car wash,” and Harlow thinks that’s a great idea, she wants that, too.
• • •
I’M BACK AT the G Street Pub. Harlow and I have been playing pool and I’m having a hard time keeping the balls on the table, much less sinking them into the pockets. “You’re an embarrassment to the game of pool,” Harlow says, and then I lose track of her, can’t find her anywhere.
I’m looking down on a skinny guy with hair so bleached it’s almost white. I fall into his arms and, without thinking, I call him by his real name. I press into his chest as hard as I can, wanting to smell the way my brother smells, laundry soap and bay leaves and Corn Chex. He’s bleached his hair and lost weight, not so much of an athlete now, and I would know him anywhere, anytime.
I burst into tears. “You’re all grown up,” he says into my ear. “I didn’t recognize you at all till you climbed onto the table.”
I have such a grip on his shirt; I don’t plan on ever letting go. But then Officer Arnie Haddick is standing before me. “I’m taking you in,” he says, shaking his big, round cop head. “You can sleep it off at county and maybe you’ll use the time to think about the decisions you’re making. The company you’re keeping.” Officer Haddick says he owes it to Vince (my father, in case you’ve forgotten his name) to get me safely off the streets. He says that a drunk woman is a woman asking for trouble.
He leads me outside, helps me gallantly into the back of the cop car, no handcuffs this time. Harlow is there ahead of me. We’ll soon be sharing a cell, even though, as Officer Haddick will make clear the next morning, Harlow is the company I shouldn’t be keeping. “We have to stop meeting like this,” Harlow says.
I want to ask Officer Haddick if he saw a guy with white-blond hair, but obviously I can’t. My brother has vanished so completely I’m afraid I imagined him.
Four
NO DOUBT I would have escaped my second incarceration by falling quickly asleep if only I’d been able. But Harlow’s little white pills were still buckin
g like broncos in the synapses of my brain. Worse, Fern kept riding them into my consciousness. After all those years of keeping her out of my head, suddenly she was everywhere. I couldn’t not see how I’d been put, drugged, into a cage just the way she’d once been put, drugged, into a cage. I was confident of my release come morning, and I wondered if she’d also been confident. It was far worse than imagining her frightened, to think of her certain that this was all a mistake and we were on our way to rescue her, that she’d soon be home in her own room and her own bed.
Also like Fern, I was not alone in my cell. In addition to Harlow, there was an elderly woman who took a motherly interest in getting us settled. She was wearing a bald terry-cloth bathrobe of a faded pink and had a smear of dirt across her forehead as if it were Ash Wednesday. Her gray hair sprang from her head like a blown dandelion, only dented on one side. She told me I was the spitting image of Charlotte. “Charlotte who?” I asked.
She didn’t answer, so I was left to guess. Charlotte Brontë? Charlotte of Charlotte’s Web? Charlotte, North Carolina? I found myself remembering how Mom had cried as she’d neared the end of Charlotte’s Web. She’d stopped reading with a sudden choke and I’d looked up, surprised by her red eyes, wet cheeks. I’d had a horrible premonition then of what this might mean, with Charlotte feeling so poorly, but not really, as I’d never before been read a book in which someone died, so it wasn’t in my range of possibility. In this, I was as innocent as Fern. Across our mother’s lap, Fern, lazily repeating her sign for spider. Crawling poo. Crawling shit.
Fern had particularly loved Charlotte’s Web, probably because she’d heard her own name so often when Mom read it. Was that where Mom had gotten the name? It had never occurred to me to wonder. And what had she meant by it then, naming our Fern after the only human in the book who can talk with nonhumans?