We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

by Karen Joy Fowler

My parents, who were still paying my expenses, found me aggravating. My mother was often aggravated those days. It was something new for her, analeptic doses of righteous aggravation.

There are moments when history and memory seem like a mist, as if what really happened matters less than what should have happened. The mist lifts and suddenly there we are, my good parents and their good children, their grateful children who phone for no reason but to talk, say their good-nights with a kiss, and look forward to home on the holidays. I see how, in a family like mine, love doesn’t have to be earned and it can’t be lost. Just for a moment, I see us that way; I see us all. Restored and repaired. Reunited. Refulgent.

Language does this to our memories—simplifies, solidifies, codifies, mummifies. An oft-told story is like a photograph in a family album; eventually, it replaces the moment it was meant to capture.

And why is there one thing that I remember distinctly, living color and surround-sound, but believe with all my heart never occurred? Bookmark that thought. We’ll come back to it later.

Scott Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag,”

One pass down the face would reveal him scowling. His hand back up would bring a smile. Down, scowl. Up, smile. Down, Melpomene. Up, Thalia. Tragedy and comedy performed as facial expressions.

To this day, I can feel the bump of the tire over the cat’s body. And to this day I am very clear in my mind that it never happened. Think of it as my own personal Schrödinger’s cat.

He was a great believer in our animal natures, far less likely to anthropomorphize Fern than to animalize me.

He referred to the human brain as a clown car parked between our ears. Open the doors and the clowns pile out.

calls me luv, me and Fern both. I wrap my arms around his legs, jump up and down on the toes of his boots. Fern hurls herself at Caroline, knocking her into the snow. When Fern stands up, she is powdered head to toe like a doughnut. Both of us are demanding in our own ways to be picked up and swung. We are so excited that, in the strangely illuminating phrase my mother favors, we’re completely beside ourselves.

It all had something to do with Umwelt, a word I very much liked the sound of and repeated many times like a drumbeat until I was made to stop. I didn’t care so much what Umwelt meant back then, but it turns out to refer to the specific way each particular organism experiences the world. I am the daughter of a psychologist. I know that the thing ostensibly being studied is rarely the thing being studied. When the Kelloggs first raised a child alongside a chimpanzee, back in the 1930s, the stated purpose was to compare and contrast developing abilities, linguistic and otherwise. This was the stated purpose of our study as well. Color me suspicious.

But it seems to me that much of the interesting data is mine. As I grew, my language development not only contrasted with Fern’s but also introduced a perfectly predictable x-factor that undermined all such comparisons. Ever since Day and Davis published their findings in the 1930s, there’s been a perception that twinness affects language acquisition. New and better studies took place in the 1970s, but I’m not sure our parents were looking in their direction yet. Nor would such studies have been completely relevant to a situation such as ours, where the twins had such disparate potentials.

One of the early grad students, Timothy, had argued that in our preverbal period, Fern and I had an idioglossia, a secret language of grunts and gestures. This was never written up, so I learned of it only recently. Dad had found his evidence thin, unscientific, and, frankly, whimsical.

Most home-raised chimps, when asked to sort photographs into piles of chimps and humans, make only the one mistake of putting their own picture into the human pile. This is exactly what Fern did.

There was something off about me, maybe in my gestures, my facial expressions or eye movements, and certainly in the things I said. Years later, my father made a passing reference to the uncanny-valley response—the human aversion to things that look almost but not quite like people. The uncanny-valley response is a hard thing to define, much less to test for. But if true, it explains why the faces of chimps so unsettle some of us. For the kids in my kindergarten class, I was the unsettling object. Those five- and six-year-olds were not fooled by the counterfeit human.

I remembered these things, most of the time. But where you succeed will never matter so much as where you fail.

When she left the scene, no one cared anymore about my creative grammars, my compound lexemes, my nimble, gymnastic conjugations. If I’d ever imagined I’d be more important without her constantly distracting everyone, I found quite the opposite. The graduate students disappeared from my life the same moment Fern did. One day, every word I said was data, and carefully recorded for further study and discussion. The next, I was just a little girl, strange in her way, but of no scientific interest to anyone.

house filled with love for Lowell, his favorite foods, books, games. We played Rummikub. We listened to Warren Zevon. We went to fucking Disneyland. It made him furious.

our shared and searing grief. Fern was gone. Her disappearance represented many things—confusions, insecurities, betrayals, a Gordian knot of interpersonal complications. But it also was a thing itself. Fern had loved us. She’d filled the house with color and noise, warmth and energy. She deserved to be missed and we missed her terribly. No one outside the house ever really seemed to get that.

Is there a character in all of fiction more isolated than the little red hen?

Years before, I’d figured out that school went best when I didn’t draw attention to myself, but knowing this and accomplishing it were two different things. So it happened gradually, over time, by dint of constant effort. First I eliminated the big words. They were getting me nowhere. Then I quit correcting other people when they used the wrong words. I raised the ratio of things I thought to things I said from three to one, to four to one, to five, to six, to seven. I still thought as much as ever, and sometimes I imagined the responses I would have gotten if I had spoken up and what I would have then said next, and so on and so on. Without the release of talking, these thoughts crowded my brain. The inside of my head turned clamorous and outlandish, like the Mos Eisley spaceport bar in Star Wars. Teachers began to complain of my inattentiveness. In the old days, even when I talked nonstop, I was still able to pay attention. I had become distractible, Mom said. Unfocused, said Dad. Lowell said nothing. Probably he hadn’t noticed.

adopted my usual strategy of saying nothing. The spoken word converts individual knowledge into mutual knowledge, and there is no way back once you’ve gone over that cliff. Saying nothing was more amendable, and over time I’d come to see that it was usually your best course of action. I’d come to silence hard, but at fifteen I was a true believer.

“You know how everything seems so normal when you’re growing up,” she asked plaintively, “and then comes this moment when you realize your whole family is nuts?” By the time I’d heard all that, I had known her for maybe twenty minutes. Scully was appallingly gregarious—so outgoing she was practically incoming.

Except that now I’d achieved it, normal suddenly didn’t sound so desirable. Weird was the new normal and, of course, I hadn’t gotten the memo. I still wasn’t fitting in. I still had no friends. Maybe I just didn’t know how. Certainly I’d had no practice. Maybe sedulously making sure that no one really knew me was an impediment to friendship. Maybe all those people coming in and out of my room were friends and I just hadn’t realized it, because I’d been expecting more. Maybe friendship was not as big a deal as I’d thought and I actually had lots of friends.

taking Philosophy 101, you’ve probably encountered the concept of philosophical solipsism. According to solipsism, reality exists only inside your own mind. What follows then is that you can only be certain of your own status as a conscious being. Everyone else might be some sort of mindless marionette operated by alien overlords or cat parasites, or possibly running about with no motivation at all. You’ll never prove otherwise. Scientists have solved the problem of solipsism with a strategy called inference to the best explanation. It’s a cheap accommodation and no one is happy about it, with the possible exception of those alien overlords. So I can’t prove that I’m different from you, but that’s my best explanation. I infer this difference from the responses of other people. I assume my upbringing is the cause. Inference and assumption, smoke and Jell-O, nothing you could build a house on. Basically, I’m just telling you that I feel different from other people. But maybe you feel different, too.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

He repeated a thing he’d said many times before—that most religions were obsessed with policing female sexual behavior, that for many it was their entire raison d’être. He described the sexual herding done by male chimpanzees. “The only difference,” he said, “is that no chimp has ever claimed he was following God’s orders.”

“Bonobo society,” he said, “is peaceful and egalitarian. These laudable qualities are achieved through continual and casual sexual congress, much of it same-sex. Sex among the bonobos is just a form of grooming. Mere social glue,” said Dr. Sosa. And then, “Lysistrata had it backwards. The road to peace is through more sex, not less.”

I’ll say it again: imitating human beings was not something which pleased me. I imitated them because I was looking for a way out, for no other reason. —Franz Kafka, “A Report for an Academy”

The impulse to write a book appears to run like a fever through those of us who’ve lived with apes. We all have our reasons. The Ape and the Child is about the Kelloggs. Next of Kin is about Washoe. Viki is The Ape in Our House. The Chimp Who Would Be Human is Nim. Maurice Temerlin’s Lucy: Growing Up Human

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.

My thoughts jumped from Charlotte’s Web to the famous experiments in which innocent, unsuspecting spiders were forcibly drugged with various agents. And then to the famous photographs taken of the webs they’d made under the influence. I was spinning a pretty crazy web myself, a sustained hypnagogic state in which I struggled to make sense of the images and associations coming at me like flotsam in a flood. Here a chimp. There a chimp. Everywhere a chimp chimp.

The flip side to solipsism is called theory of mind. Theory of mind postulates that, even though these cannot be directly observed, we readily impute mental states to others (and also to ourselves, since the bedrock proposal is that we understand our own mental states well enough to generalize from them). And so we constantly infer someone else’s intentions, thoughts, knowledge, lack of knowledge, doubts, desires, beliefs, guesses, promises, preferences, purposes, and many, many more things in order to behave as social creatures in the world.

He recommended Donald Griffin’s book Animal Minds to me.

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.

So many problems, however infinitely varied they first appear, turn out to be matters of money. I can’t tell you how much this offends me. The value of money is a scam perpetrated by those who have it over those who don’t; it’s the Emperor’s New Clothes gone global. If chimps used money and we didn’t, we wouldn’t admire it. We’d find it irrational and primitive. Delusional. And why gold? Chimps barter with meat. The value of meat is self-evident.

“Hathos,” I offered finally and then thoughtfully provided the definition. “The pleasure you get from hating something.”

“The world runs,” Lowell said, “on the fuel of this endless, fathomless misery. People know it, but they don’t mind what they don’t see. Make them look and they mind, but you’re the one they hate, because you’re the one that made them look.” They, my brother said, whenever he talked about humans. Never us. Never we.

a man of indeterminate age, which usually means mid-forties,

Like everything else he’d said, she passed this under the microscope of obsessional limerence.

In 2004, Jacques Derrida said that a change was under way. Torture damages the inflicter as well as the inflicted. It’s no coincidence that one of the Abu Ghraib torturers came to the military directly from a job as a chicken processor. It might be slow, Derrida said, but eventually the spectacle of our abuse of animals will be intolerable to our sense of who we are.

Ezra said he’d told Harlow that, in Chinese, close a door and open a door were represented by exactly the same character. He himself had taken great comfort from that same observation whenever times got tough. I don’t know where he got this, though most of his quotes came from Pulp Fiction. I’m reasonably confident it’s not true. I told him that, in Chinese, the character for woman was a man on his knees, and that it wasn’t clear to me that the solution to Harlow’s heartbreak would be found in the ancient wisdom of the East.

wonder sometimes if I’m the only one spending my life making the same mistake over and over again or if that’s simply human. Do we all tend toward a single besetting sin? If so, jealousy is mine and it’s tempting to read this sad consistency as a matter of character.

Current psychological research suggests that character plays a surprisingly small role in human behavior. Instead we are highly responsive to trivial changes in circumstance. We’re like horses in that, only less gifted. I myself am not convinced. Over the years I’ve come to feel that the way people respond to us has less to do with what we’ve done and more to do with who they are. Of course, it suits me to think that. All those people in junior high who were so mean to me? What unhappy people they must have been!

Sigmund Freud has suggested that we have no early childhood memories at all. What we have instead are false memories aroused later and more pertinent to this later perspective than to the original events. Sometimes in matters of great emotion, one representation, retaining all the original intensity, comes to replace another, which is then discarded and forgotten. The new representation is called a screen memory. A screen memory is a compromise between remembering something painful and defending yourself against that very remembering.