We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (16 page)

N
O 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 bucking 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?

I realized that my own hands now were making the same
crawling shit
sign. It didn’t seem as if I could stop them. I held them up and stared at the way
my fingers were moving.

“Let’s talk in the morning,” the woman suggested, unaware that I
was
talking. “When we’re fresh for it.” She told us each to pick out a cot, of which
there were four and none of them inviting. I lay down, forcing my eyes shut, but they
popped right back open. My fingers strummed. My legs twitched. 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.

I thought that if, as Reg kept insisting, superpowers are fixed rather than relative,
then Spider-Man is no more gifted than Charlotte. In fact, compared to Charlotte,
Peter Parker is a piker. I repeated that a few times in my head. Peter Parker is a
piker. Peter Parker is a piker.

“That’s enough of that,” the elderly woman told me and I was unsure if I’d spoken
aloud or she was reading my mind. Both seemed equally possible.

“Harlow. Harlow!” I whispered. There was no answer. I thought that Harlow might be
asleep and how that would mean she hadn’t taken the same pills she’d given me. Maybe
there weren’t enough and she’d meant to be nice, letting me have them and bravely
going without. Or maybe she’d known better than to take them herself, and it was just
easier to hand them to me than to flush them. Maybe I was just closer than the toilet.

Or maybe she was awake. “I still think superpowers are relative,” I told her, just
in case. “Charlotte isn’t a superhero just because she’s a spider and can leap from
wall to wall on her web. Her superpower is that she can read and write. Context matters.
Context is all.
Umwelt
.”

“Will you shut up?” Harlow asked wearily. “Do you even know you’ve been talking all
fucking night? And making no sense at all?”

I responded to this with an odd mixture of monkey-girl alarm and nostalgia. And resistance.
I hadn’t been talking so very much. If Harlow pushed me, I could show her what talking
all fucking night really meant. I pictured how, if Fern had been here, she would have
swung effortlessly up the wall, rained holy hell down on Harlow from above. I wished
for Fern so hard it stopped my breath.

“No more talking!” the elderly woman snapped. “Eyes closed and no more talking. I
mean it, buster.”

My mother always said that it’s very rude when people who can’t sleep wake up people
who can. My father had a different perspective. “You can’t imagine,” he’d told her
once over a bleary breakfast, when he’d poured his orange juice into his coffee and
then salted it as well. “You can’t imagine the white-hot fury someone who can’t sleep
feels toward the beautiful dreamer beside him.”

So I tried to be quiet. I began to see a kaleidoscope of webs. A great choreography
of spiders can-canned across my open eyeballs, kicking leg after leg after leg after
leg in waltz time. I could pan in on their honeycomb eyes, their ghastly mandibles.
Pan out, see them from above, turn the waving legs into fractal patterns.

No one put the lights out. The music from the spider chorus-line transitioned from
ballroom to gabber. Someone began to snore. I had the impression that the snoring
was what was keeping me up. My thoughts turned rhythmical in a Chinese water-torture
way:
Umwelt. Umwelt. Umwelt.

The rest of the night was an endless dream sequence directed by David Lynch. Periodically,
Fern twirled in. Sometimes she was five years old, turning her backflips, rocking
from foot to foot, trailing her scarves, or biting my fingers gently, just as a warning.
Sometimes she had the squat, heavy body of an older ape and stared at me so listlessly
she was almost lifeless and had to be moved through the scene like a doll.

By morning, I’d managed to get my thoughts organized into a neat if tiresome grid.
X-axis: things missing. Y-axis: last seen.

One: Where was my bicycle? I couldn’t think where I’d last had it. Maybe at Jack in
the Box. I remembered the vandalized intercom with a start. Probably best to avoid
Jack in the Box for a bit.

Two: Where was Madame Defarge? I hadn’t seen her since we’d left The Graduate. I wanted
to ask Harlow, but was too tired to figure out how. It was a question that was bound
to annoy her in the best of situations, and this was not that.

Three: Where were Mom’s journals? Would she really never ask me about them again or
would I have to confess at some point to having lost them? Which would be so unfair,
as I rarely lost things and, in the immortal words of Han Solo, it wasn’t my fault.

Four: Where was my brother? My relief that he’d seemed happy to see me was now shot
through with worry. What had he made of my coziness with the local police? What if
he’d never been there at all?

The elderly woman’s son arrived and took her back to the nursing home with many apologies
for the things she’d apparently said and the things she’d apparently broken. The snoring
went with her.

When the door to the cell finally opened for me, I was so tired I had to lever myself
through with my arms. Officer Haddick and I had a chat in which I was too beat to
participate, though that didn’t seem to shorten it.

Reg came to fetch Harlow and gave me a ride home as well, where I took a shower, dizzy
and swaying in the hot water. Went to bed, but still couldn’t close my eyes. It was
the most horrible feeling, to be so utterly wrung-out and still mentally trudging
on.

I got up, went to the kitchen, took the burners off the stove and cleaned beneath
them. I opened the refrigerator and stared into it even though I had no desire for
food of any kind. I thought that at least Harlow hadn’t given me a gateway drug. More
of a slammed-door drug. I would never ever take it again.

Todd got up and burned some toast, so that the smoke alarm went off and had to be
beaten into silence with a broom handle.

•   •   •

N
O ONE WAS
answering the phone at Casa Harlow and Reg. I called three times and left two messages.
I knew that I should walk right on over to The Graduate, see if anyone had turned
a dummy in. I was in a panic, thinking that I’d lost her and her so valuable and all.
My bike was one thing, but Madame Defarge didn’t even belong to me. How could I have
been so careless? And then, I guess, the drug finally wore off, because the next thing
I knew, I was waking up in my bed and it was night again.

The apartment had a nobody-home sort of silence. In spite of having slept for hours,
I remained exhausted. I dozed again, had a dream that slipped from me like hypnopompic
water as I surfaced from it to a memory. Once upon a time, Lowell had come in the
night and shaken me awake. I think I was six years old, which would have made him
twelve.

I’d always suspected that Lowell roamed after dark. His bedroom was off by itself
on the first floor, so he could leave by the door or the window with no one hearing
him. I don’t know where he went. I don’t know for a fact that he did go. But I knew
he missed the acreage we’d had at the farmhouse. I knew he missed the days of exploring
in the woods. He’d found an arrowhead once and some rocks stamped with the bones of
a little fish. That would never have happened in our current cramped yard.

On this occasion, he told me to get dressed quietly, and I was full of questions but
managed to keep my mouth shut until we were outside. A few days back, I’d put my foot
down in the grass and felt a sharp pain shoot up my leg. When I lifted my foot, screaming,
there was a stinger in the arch, the bee still attached by a thread, jerking at the
end of its tether and buzzing as it died. Mom had pulled the stinger, with me still
screaming, and carried me inside, where she soaked my foot and wrapped it in a baking-soda
poultice. I’d been queen bee of the household ever since, carried from chair to chair,
books fetched, juice poured. Apparently, Lowell had had enough of my invalidism. We
went out to the street and turned to walk up Ballantine Hill. My foot felt fine.

It was a summer night, hot and still. Sheet lightning crackled at the horizon, the
moon was out and the black sky smeared with stars. Twice we saw the lights of an oncoming
car and ducked behind trees or shrubs so as to not be seen.

“Let’s get off the street,” Lowell said. We cut across a lawn into a strange backyard.
Inside the house a small dog began to bark. A light went on in an upstairs window.

Of course, I’d been talking the whole time. Where were we going? Why were we up? Was
it a surprise? Was it a secret? How much past my bedtime was it? This was the latest
I had ever been up, right? This was very late for a six-year-old to be up, right?
Lowell put his hand over my mouth and I smelled toothpaste on his fingers.

“Pretend we’re Indians,” Lowell said. He was whispering. “Indians never talk when
they’re moving through the forest. They walk so quietly you can’t even hear their
footsteps.”

He removed his hand. “How do they do that?” I asked. “Is it magic? Can only Indians
do it? How much Indian do you have to be to do that? Maybe you have to wear moccasins.”

“Shhh,” said Lowell.

We went through a few more backyards. It wasn’t so hard to see in the dark as I’d
supposed. The night wasn’t so quiet. I heard the call of an owl, soft and round as
the sound you made blowing across a bottle top. The deep bass of a frog. The friction
of insect legs. Lowell’s footsteps, I noticed, were no quieter than mine.

We came to a hedge with a gap that we scrambled through on our hands and knees. Since
it was big enough for Lowell, it must have been plenty big enough for me. Still, I
got scratched by the barbed leaves. I didn’t say so; I thought Lowell might send me
home if I complained. So I pointed out instead how I wasn’t complaining even though
I had a scratch on one leg, which was stinging. “I don’t want to go home yet,” I told
him preemptively.

“Then stop talking for a minute,” said Lowell. “Look and listen.”

The frog was loud now, big-sounding, but I remembered from the creek at the old farmhouse
that a big voice could often be tracked to a little frog. I stood up on the far side
of the hedge. We were in a bowl of a yard, a secret garden like the one in the book.
The slopes were planted with trees and a softer grass than we had at home. At the
bottom of the slope was a pond too perfect to be natural. Cattails rose at the edge.
In the moonlight, the water was a silver coin, patched with the black of lily pads.

“There are turtles in the pond,” Lowell told me. “And fish.” He had some broken crackers
in a pocket. He let me throw them into the water and the surface pocked as if it were
raining, only upward, rain falling up from below. I watched the small and expanding
rings made by the fish mouths.

On the slope past the pond there was a walkway, guarded on both sides by a pair of
statues—two dogs shaped like Dalmatians, only bigger. I went to pet them, their stone
backs smooth, cool, and wonderful to touch. Past the dogs, the walkway twisted like
a snake, ending at a screened back porch on a large house. At every curve of the path,
there was a bush shaped into something else—an elephant, a giraffe, a rabbit. I was
filled with longing for this to be my house. I wanted to open the screen door, step
inside, and find my family, my whole family waiting there.