Feed Them Silence

by Lee Mandelo

hey cut that shit out. “i’m the worst” stop victimizing yourself when you’re the one messing up.

“And you can call those wolves collaborators or ‘mutual subjects’ all you like, you’re still using them as objects of study.

This wolf can’t consent to being studied by you, which involves a nonconsensual surgical procedure. The presumption you’re making in claiming to report on its real feelings, so you can make a name for yourself, violates its sovereign dignity. It can’t correct you when you put words in its mouth. So, yes, as an ethnographer I fucking disagree with the entire premise.”

“God, Sean, you are so astoundingly, myopically self-centered it shocks me.

Sometimes I feel like you’re making a checklist of things you imagine a ‘good scholar husband’ should do for her housewife, instead of listening to what I, your colleague and companion and equal, am asking you for.

“I do love you, though. So much,” Sean said. “I know. But abstract love isn’t the problem. Shit like this afternoon is the problem,” Riya said.

“But seeing how you treat your team, and the wolf pack, and the research itself makes me aware that—maybe, I’m on the same tier. I’m an object; you consume me, use me to build yourself up, put me in your story. Do you even know what course I’m teaching this term, or what I’m revising when I’m at the office? Do you read my work anymore?”

“Sometimes I’m not sure you see anyone besides yourself as a person,” she said.

Underneath the almost-filmic domestic evening lingered a bad taste, though, a gloss of unreality—as if the pair of them were each acting the life they’d rather be living, for the sake of a minute’s respite.

But I wonder if connecting your brain to a creature experiencing trauma is encouraging trauma-bonding? You seem to feel close to her, but she can’t reciprocate. A bit parasocial.”

“Developing our empathy is the point, though,” she said. Aseem lifted his hands in surrender and said, “I’m not talking about empathy, I’m talking about thinking there’s a back-and-forth relationship where there isn’t one.

“When I struggle with whether our relationship is still good for us, my concern isn’t focused on ‘what will the neighbors think.’ Instead I’m worried, am I going to be able to survive losing this, or will sustaining it be the thing that kills me.”

“she wished she could reach secretly into the deepest parts of her. Maybe she’d understand her better from there.” SEAN. she has told you in PLAIN FUCKING ENGLISH over and over again exactly what she feels and thinks!!!!! you’re just ignoring her cause it’s not what you want to hear

“I’m fine, and this is starting to feel disrespectful.” shut the FUCK UP SEAN. you fucking chronically foolish rat bastard. heartless void creature from hell

“Maybe if Riya had been at home, or her team had been willing to communicate with her,” you cannot seriously be blaming everyone else for your critically horrible ideas and parasocial obsessions with a wolf pack

I’m aware you’re … quite attached to this subject, but the animal is no different from the thousand and one mice your lab must’ve gone through this year.

Putting the mesh in might’ve killed Kate, using the interface might’ve killed her and did damage her, observing her through the winter was implicitly allowing her to die while we gathered data. It does seem hypocritical to set the life of an individual wolf as our moral event horizon.”