A FEW HOURS after Dr. Sosa’s lecture, I met up with Harlow at a beer-and-hamburger place in central Davis called The Graduate. The streets were dark, cold, and wet though the rain had stopped. On another occasion, I might have been more appreciative of the black magic around me, each streetlamp wrapped in its own bubble of mist, my bike-light briefly igniting the puddles on the black streets as I passed. But I was still teetering on the ragged cliff-edge of Dr. Sosa’s lecture. My plan for the evening was to drink. In Davis, biking while drunk results in the exact same ticket as driving while drunk, but this was so patently ridiculous I refused to acknowledge it.
By the time I locked my bike, I was shivering mightily. I remembered the scene in It’s a Wonderful Life when Clarence Odbody orders a flaming rum punch. A flaming rum punch would have really hit the spot. I would have bathed in it.
I opened the heavy door to The Graduate and slid into the din. I’d been considering telling Harlow what I’d just learned about chimp sex. Much would depend on how drunk I got. But I was all about female solidarity that evening, and I thought it might make me feel better to talk frankly to another woman about the horribleness of male chimps. So I was not happy to see that Reg was joining us. Reg did not seem like someone with whom you could profitably discuss chimp sex.
I was even less happy to see Madame Defarge. She was sitting on Harlow’s lap, weaving her head from side to side and unhinging her jaw like a cobra. Harlow was wearing a pair of worn jeans just barely held together with embroidered patches of mountains, rainbows, and hemp leaves, so her lap was an interesting place. “I’m being careful with her,” Harlow told me, apparently irritated by something I hadn’t even had the time to say yet. She was making assumptions about my no-fun-at-all-ness. They were good assumptions. Our relationship had started so promisingly, what with both of us breaking things in best monkey-girl fashion and swinging off to jail together. But I could see she was reassessing me now. I was not as gamesome as she’d thought. I was beginning to disappoint.
She graciously put all that aside for the moment. Harlow had just learned that the drama department would be putting on a gender-reversal version of Macbeth in the spring. Of course, she didn’t say Macbeth; she said “the Scottish play” in that annoying way drama majors do. The male roles would all be taken by women, the women’s by men. Harlow had been chosen to help with the sets and costumes and I’d rarely seen her so excited. Everyone was assuming, she told me, that they would be cross-dressing the actors, but she hoped to talk the director out of that.
Reg leaned in to say that there was nothing an audience liked better than a man in a dress. Harlow brushed him away as the minor annoyance he was.
“Wouldn’t it be more challenging,” she said, “more of a mind-fuck, if the costuming didn’t change?” That would suggest a place in which the dominant paradigm was female; all those things that coded here in our world as female would represent power and politics. Female would be the norm.
Harlow said that she was already doing sketches of the castle in Inverness, trying to imagine a fantastical, female space. This could have segued into a conversation about chimp rape, but not without harshing the mellow. Harlow was incandescent with hopes and plans.
Men were buying drinks for Madame Defarge.
Reg offered me one of them, a dark ale with a strong hoppy smell. The chilled glass mug was warmer than my hands and I’d lost all feeling in my thumbs. Reg raised his own beer in a toast. “To superpowers,” he said, lest I get the impression we were letting bygones be bygones. Let the wild ruckus commence.
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.