Animal Spirits

Animal Spirits

by

Grey Goddard

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 2011 by Grey Goddard

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CHAPTER 1

SUZANNE DUBOIS

Most people tool along in their lives in a semi-conscious way, rising and falling with fortune and effort, charisma and appearance, bad teeth but good gums. Then something comes along—metaphorically, say, a truck—and knocks them off the road. For most, it’s the calamity that ruins their lives. You hear of people turning to drink, or becoming bitter and mean. In nineteenth century novels, people eat arsenic, or throw themselves under moving trains. But others want to know why. Not why me? But Why with a capital W, in a cosmic sense. Their view of the open road is forever changed, and the rest of their life is about how the truck happened to be on that road in the first place. A nd who made that road anyway?

Suzanne DuBois, My Secret Diary

It was the last day of school, and as I twisted around in the taxi to look out the rear window I could confirm that I was the only one leaving for the train station. At last, an end to four years of exile to a military camp for wayward teens. Actually, it was only Andover boarding school, but from my inmate perspective, I might as well have been making license plates in Sing Sing for all the education I had absorbed.

I watched with an acid taste in my mouth as my fellow inmates were embraced by their parents, folded back into their lives, ready to join society. I bit my cheek, hard, and asked the cab driver for a cigarette. She snorted and kept driving.

On the train home I picked at some scabs on my legs and yelled at a young mother with a crying baby behind me. As the station signs counted down to New Rochelle I rubbed my clammy palms together. It was one thing to be done with boarding school, but another to face my family again.

My father was there at the train station, and I resisted needling him about why he hadn’t picked me up at the school, sparing me the embarrassment of leaving by cab. After clumsy hugs and mutual pats on the back, pulling into North Avenue I saw that he was tense, and wondered at his looking over his shoulder as we drove home. I joked, Germans advancing, Dad? He was grim and silent. What were those marionette lines around his nose?

I thought, they hate having me home again. Reminds them of all my screw ups. And I’m not exactly the prodigal daughter returning home a big success. What did they expect, sending me away after the accident with my brother. Somehow my memory of that whole incident was vague. I remembered an explosion…

My mother was not waiting at the back door like in an old sitcom. I walked in, holding one of my bags, my father bringing up the rear. I saw her standing on the first-floor landing, immobile, in black as always, her defective puppy-like fingers clutching at her black shawl.

For a full second she didn’t say anything, then put a mask on and said all the right things, welcome home and all that. Smiled and came down the stairs. She embraced me quickly and then held me away from her, examining my body in its new circumference. You look soft around the edges, she might have said in the past, but tonight she didn’t. I asked about my brother. She said he would be down later, right then he was in the attic—his favorite spot after the accident, in the attic.

As my father carried my things upstairs, he and mother exchanged a glance.

Cocktail hour? I said, wondering if they would let me drink with them before dinner. They never had, but it was worth a try.

Not tonight, Suzanne, my mother said. Actually, we don’t have a big meal planned. I ordered pizza in.

Oh, OK. I loved pizza, but this was not the homecoming I had manufactured in my starved heart.

As I dragged and bumped my suitcase up the stairs and into my room I became aware of the advancing gloom. Without flicking on the lights, Dad put my other bags on the bed and left quickly. I wasn’t expecting a welcome home chat, but even for him this was a bit mute. I stared at his retreating back, and after turning on the light, unpacked a little, dumped my toiletries into a basket on my dresser and then inspected myself in the spotted mirror.

Here at home, I was a little shocked at my appearance—overfed, puffy and stretched out. What else was there to do in school but ingest things? I thought defensively. I squeezed my plump cheeks with one hand to make a funny pursed lips face—that had always made my brother laugh. I turned to unpacking my old CDs, and after lining them up in last name order, I re-ordered them by titles. But I couldn’t delay any more. I inhaled and climbed the last set of stairs, calling my brother’s name.

I’m here, Suz, a muffled voice said. A ghostly boy materialized out of one of the cedar closets.

Are you speaking to me? Are we good? I said.

Sure. Welcome back. My brother, then aged eleven, had gained some height but he was thin now in an extraterrestrial way. I could literally see the fur coats in the closet through his translucent body.

Mom and Dad are acting strange. Jumpy, and kind of…fey, I said. He smiled at me in a reassuring way—my younger brother, reassuring me. His large squared off teeth were clearly visible. Are you coming down, for dinner?

Eating is a challenge, but I’ll be there, he said. His face was now dim, and closed.

Are you still doing spells?

No, not since then.

I knew what he meant. I nodded.

Suz… he said.

Yes? Then I heard my mother calling from downstairs. She sounded—and this was incredible—anxious. She was never anxious. Pizza’s here. Please come down, Suzanne, she cried.

What were you going to say buddy?

My brother’s eyes sought mine, and, as if he’d made a decision, turned away and disappeared into the fur coats with no reply.

Dinner that night …everything about it was wrong. My dignified mother had morphed into Chatty Cathy. She opened the pizza boxes at the table, and then tore the pizza apart with her fingers, giggling and sucking her fingers as if she’d burned them. She babbled on about my cousins, her sister, her students at school. My father sank into a kind of stupor, a bottle of gin at his elbow, little tonic. My brother hadn’t come down.

I asked for a drink. My mother said no, I wasn’t old enough, but my father in a reversal, said "Elena. Give her a drink, mon dieu."

I saw my mother blink and look as if she were about to cry. The whole scene was fantastic. I got up and went to the sideboard where they kept some of the choice bottles.

Take the 1959 Bordeaux, my father said. I watched him half-rise, then slump back into his chair. He was sweating.

That’s a very expensive vintage, I said. As if I had ever cared about spending their money.

TAKE IT, he shouted. I jumped.

The bottle in question removed itself from one of the upper shelves and floated down to the table. Surprised they would show their powers in front of me—after all, hadn’t they been more courteous in recent years, in respect for my feelings?—I warily popped the cork and poured the wine into a water glass without waiting for it to air. Downed the glass in a few quick gulps, then sat back down, staring at them for understanding. My pizza went cold, mother sat with her face buried in her hands, and my father had his eyes closed, his fist wrapped around a tumbler.

I’ll clear the dinner things, I told them, partly to show I had changed. A sham, but it seemed right at the moment.

Leave them, my mother said. Leave them all, she nearly intoned. Something was up, but I just shrugged it off as adult weirdness. I almost felt better, suddenly realizing it had nothing to do with me, whatever their unwelcoming manner was.

Back in my room I opened the window and leaned out, breathing in the moist air and smelling dirt from the garden beds below. Rain struck the leaves and sluiced down the gutters. Arching over the windowsill, in the twilight, I felt the drops strike my neck and my head while down below…odd that the flower borders were untended—by late June?, and a large branch fallen in my father’s rose bed, not cleared. I felt the night air close, oppressive. Shadows gathered in the dark as they sometimes did. I inhaled deeply, but couldn’t get my lungs full. With a chill, I closed the window and yanked the drapes.

There was nothing to do so I read War and Peace in bed until the early hours. I fell asleep during the battle of Austerlitz and dreamed about the soldier, Prince Andrei, studying the clouds as he lay dying on the battleground. Then I became the soldier. I felt my blood leaving my body and a terrible thirst take me over, and I woke up more than once to drink from the bathroom faucet, but back in bed I fell again into the dream, as I sometimes did.

The next morning, a Sunday, I went down to the kitchen to grab some breakfast before figuring out what to do with the rest of my life. College was out—no interest, no sir. I had some ideas, mostly involving points west. Far west. I imagined myself in a buckskin jacket with a lot of fringe; with or without beads, I wasn’t sure yet. Maybe a motorcycle, although I hadn’t yet progressed beyond a moped. The night before with my parents had unnerved me, but with the light of day now streaming through the kitchen windows and illuminating the tiled counters…the empty tiled counters.

I looked around the room. What I saw was nothing. There was nothing on those counters. Not a bowl of fruit, not an envelope. My eyes traveled to a lamp lit at the housewife’s work area in the kitchen—a doll-desk belying its usual hectic and constant use. But the small desk had been swept clean of all objects and papers, except a pile of cookbooks stacked on the wrought iron desk chair. There were no bills, no blizzard of post-its by the phone. The white memo board had been erased but for a splotch of blue at the corner. I put my index finger on it and smeared it, then examined the ink as if it held Rorschach-like clues to this micro mystery.

OK—since the night before the cleaning person had come and gone with a vengeance, and the books were stacked up to give away somewhere. I called out upstairs and downstairs, but my voice echoed through the house, evoking no response. Climbing to the third floor, I looked for my younger brother in the attic closets, but there was not a whisper of his ghostly self. In the garage, the cars were gone. I circled around the garden and the gazebo/folly thingee. No one there. Tool shed? In name only, as it had no tools. Nor any family members.

Growing nervous, I hurled down the basement stairs where it was cool and quiet and paced among the racks of my father’s wine collection. Back upstairs to search for them more thoroughly, I found empty closets and empty dresser drawers. After two more hours of searching, my nerves on fire, I had to conclude that the only things remaining in the house were me, my boarding school things and childhood belongings, the cookbooks (I didn’t cook), the furniture, silverware, food in pantries and ‘frig, and the wine collection.

More than once I told myself this was an elaborate joke—another family game of let’s mess with Suzanne to humiliate me. This stank to high hell of my cousins making everything vanish, in their ham-handed way, as a welcoming home joke…

But over the next few hours I would learn, after calling my parent’s phone numbers, that all were disconnected. Then aunts, cousins, grandfather—all disconnected. Gone gone all gone. Two nights later I lay spread-eagled on the kitchen floor gazing up at the ceiling fanlight, echoes of their voices reverbing in the chambers of my head. Flies buzzed above me.

On Tuesday, two days after my family disappeared, I picked up a voice message from the family law firm Scag & Cowl. My parents had left, they said, in a tone that suggested they had merely gone to the supermarket. The firm said they had my email address and they would be sending me some emancipation documents to sign. Minutes later I got an email attachment that was all legal and not a bit personal. I was to have the proceeds from the sale of the house and contents. My parents’ signatures were visible and recognizable, dated to a month earlier. S&C in a follow up message recommended a wine auctioneer.

I called S&C back to get more information. They were not forthcoming. I had the impression they were not going to talk no matter what I said, threatened or cajoled so I said I was prepared to go to the press. Loretta Scag, who, despite her name, was a put together attorney who favored bespoke silk suits, gently asked, "The National Enquirer? Go right ahead, dear. Cowl of S&C was openly gay and very charming. So charming he would whisk me out the door before I even remembered to get mad. I think they felt sorry for me because they gave me cookies whenever I came to visit." OK, more like, loudly menace them when they were obviously hiding what they knew.

I came to learn that not only my immediate family, but the lot of them had gone: The cousins, the second cousins, the first cousins once removed, the aunts and the favorite uncles. Even the divorced members. I continued to call, snail, text and email them all. No longer at this address, I learned, and got bounced email messages from postmaster. Calls to my family’s workplaces resulted in Quit his/her job a month ago.

They must have been planning this while I was away at school. How an entire family could vanish made me, in chronological order, scared, angry, outraged, peevish, suspicious, resigned.

And guilty. I believed my own role in this grand leave-taking wasn’t trivial, and as painful as it was to review it… I set up my school laptop in the kitchen and, perching on one of the stools, began an account of my family’s origins. In a retro mood I called it My Secret Diary although there was no one around to keep it a secret from. Feeling newly creative, I began to type:

For centuries the DuBois family and its twigs and branches have cast spells and generally ghosted around New Rochelle, a town founded in the 1600’s by French Huguenots, that religious tribe that left behind its food and sex-loving Gallic kin to find religious freedom over here.

But ghostly or not, it’s not every family that disappears totally, leaving you high and dry, so I need to theorize about why my parents had this animus towards me. It all started with my younger brother…

My fingers pounded the keyboard. I needed to get this down before my slacker tendencies engulfed me.

I think I half-killed him. One summer night when he was eight, we were in the attic and he tried out a new spell, a drop-your-pants-and-moon-the-world juvenile spell on me. I don’t remember exactly what happened, but he did something to me that made me panic, and I blasted the spell right back at him, even though I’d never been able to do anything before. That’s when he disappeared partway, literally.

He became permanently transparent, couldn’t eat properly, and I was shunned. That was when I was thirteen. Then I was packed away to a boarding school…

My diary/memoir occupied me for about four days, and when I ran out of guilt about my brother, and self-pity at being abandoned, I was consumed all over again with rage. I tore apart the cookbooks and fed some of the pages to the gas range with a pair of cooking tongs. The rest went into a bonfire in the garden until one of our—my –neighbors called the authorities. I turned to smashing some of the wine bottles in the cellar until the smell of alcohol of now mixed vintages filled the corners of the house.

After about a month of very satisfying self-destructive behavior that included not eating, yes drinking, and using up the drugs I had brought home from school, I fell into a comatose state. I didn’t answer the phone or return messages from Scag or Cowl. When they came to check up on me, I screamed at them through the mail slot: If you have nothing to tell me then get the fuck out of here. Later I found cookies on the doorstep.

One night close to the June anniversary of their departure, nearly passed out over rum and cokes at the kitchen counter as usual, I decided to update My Secret Diary. Taking large swigs of r&c, I merrily typed about the various effects of alcohol (weight gain), television stupefaction (weight gain), take out food (ditto), and the correct titration of uppers and downers.

Then I re-read the sections in My Secret Diary about my family’s powers, or abilities. How did they do it? Like children who never question where milk comes from, I had always assumed as a toddler that other families had the power to mentally move objects, hear thoughts, and disappear. Any number of movies and tv shows seemed to support that idea. I alone seemed to be the odd person out.

I was the great disappointment of their lives. From the start, I was both not interested and could master no spells. I couldn’t dematerialize, I couldn’t move objects, and I couldn’t even cheat on exams. Imagine, the daughter of witchery, and I had to resort to writing test answers on my palm with a pen.

To make up for my lacks, I became openly disdainful. I told them it all seemed somehow déclassé. All that waving of arms and mumbo jumbo. The vulgar Latin phrases. Not to mention my inbred family with their birth defects. When I wasn’t making fun of them, I laid around reading comic books about characters with superpowers that, I convinced myself, were much more interesting than those practiced around me.

I rested my elbows on the kitchen counter and cradled my chin. Of course later I had learned that my family was unusual, and when I got older, my parents made it clear that I was never to talk about what they did at home. They being the operative word. On occasion, I would overhear relatives talking about me, and it puzzled me when they said, at least she’ll have an untroubled soul. I wanted to shout I’d rather have a troubled soul. But I was too busy feeling tragic and not thinking about how earth-shatteringly non human they all were.

And after the incident with my younger brother…a turning point, for sure. I flunked out of most of my classes at Andover.

I snapped the laptop closed and slid off the stool, rum and coke still in hand. My cousins Merilee, Dwight, the cousin-twins Cherry and Duane… I never thought I’d miss them, although they had all improved with time. My uncle, Uncle Dabney the Dapper, I used to joke. Aunt Solaire, État C’est Moi, I used to call her. The only thing my family appreciated about me was my jokes. Otherwise, it was all about their powers.

After air-toasting my missing family with rum and coke, I went face down on the sofa to contemplate the microwave popcorn scattered on the floor, the tv on as constant background noise. With great effort I reached down and raised a kernel to my mouth just as a familiar voice came on. It was one of my science teachers at Andover, now a talking head on public television. He was decrying the American public’s belief in the occult, and saying a better science education would solve that problem. Then he repeated one of his favorite maxims: biology and behavior that isn’t fictional is constrained by natural laws

I reached for the remote under the sofa and jabbed up the volume. Then I achieved an unusual upright position. I thought, my life is not fiction, so there has to be an explanation for my family’s talents that lies in the natural world. I stood up. And that explanation, I thought, sweating heavily in the den, in the heat of an early summer in my abandoned house in Westchester County, New York, is not in the toes or the spleen or the heart. The answer must be in the brain.

I felt a surge. I would discover their secret. Through science.

I knew the days of gentleman scientists were over, which meant I would need to go to school. For the next month, I researched universities, requirements, costs. I began to apply to colleges. With my high school grades it was tough going, but I contacted some teachers in my boarding school who had said at various times that I showed great promise if not for my behavior. After I lied and told them my parents had died in a car crash, they wrote me glowing letters. And I practically aced the SATs. The College Boards people made me take them again because they thought it was a mistake, but there it was, nearly perfect scores. Hey, I never said I wasn’t smart.

I sold the house in New Rochelle to a couple with a baby on the way. Funds in hand for a college education, I went to Berkeley majoring in Psychology. For the first time I was on a mission, and I did well. Graduated with honors, and that gave me an entrée into Columbia University’s neuroscience Ph.D. program.

CHAPTER 2

They did magic—the whole family but me did magic. Now, in retrospect, it all seemed a little hammy, a little too Addams Family and later, Hogwarts and Dumbledore and Maggie Smith what was her character’s name? The twitching noses and occasional cackles. Gestures from bad movies and Aaron Spelling tv. The whole magic thing—a sham?

Suzanne DuBois, My Secret Diary

Aged 25, now a Columbia graduate student, I was studying the brain to figure out what happened to make my family disappear nine years ago, literally and altogether, from the face of the planet.

Living in Manhattan on the Lower East Side, I was LES thin. My first ever job as a graduate student was a research assistantship in neuroscience. Every day that I did studies on the brain, I thought about my family. I began studying brain implants and how you can make objects move by thought alone, as my family had done so effortlessly. For my experimental subjects (now termed volunteers), I recruited a paraplegic former truck driver Ralph Dotter, and an ex-sports jock gal Briony Putnam, whose spine had been crushed during a football pileup.

The work was not going well. My predoctoral fellowship money ran out, and I had nada results to show for it. Ralph, after some promising moves where he was able to draw a circle on a computer screen by thinking it through, said it was too hard, smashed his fist and broke the computer. Who wouldn’t be discouraged after spending an hour to draw a circle with your mind?

Briony never got started. She couldn’t move a robot car with her thoughts after hundreds of tries. And then the chip I implanted in her brain stopped transmitting. My doctoral advisor Professor Ed Melman was pressuring me to drop the project. What’s wrong with you Suzanne? You’re perseverating. For those not savvy to psych jargon, that’s You don’t know when to throw in the towel. I retorted that even Edison tried thousands of elements before he found the filament that would work in the electric bulb. Edison was a genius, no offense Suz. I want you to change your thesis topic or I’ll change it for you. Dr. Melman was one of those pioneers who discovered what happens when you cut the connections between the right and left hemispheres of the brain. Up for a Nobel, I heard it whispered. He was reaching the end of his rope with me after three years, and I couldn’t blame the guy.

Halloween was approaching, which always made me itchy. I had already shut the door to the lab and was making to go home. The usual kung pao chicken takeout from Jeff’s Chinese, feed the cat, try to avoid the costumed idiots and wear ear plugs to block out the bar scene and fall asleep in front of the tv. And so I was not exactly friendly when this guy strode into the lab, more confident than he had a right to be, I thought.

Opened the door without knocking, walked right up to me and said, I hear you’re recruiting subjects for your brain experiments.

You don’t look like you have brain or spinal cord damage, so I won’t need you. Please close the door on your way out. As I said, I was feeling itchy.

He was having none of it. Stood his ground. I guess he needed the money, although it’s hard to tell at Columbia where everyone looks shabby, regardless of income. His hair was vaguely upswept in the front, but pasted down on the sides. Dark thick hair framed a sallow face. I saw a plaid shirt under a grey hoodie, a little light for the chill in the air. He was standing in a distinct vertical way, ramrod straight, as if he might topple over if he leaned one way or another. He looked gaunt. I felt bad.

Hey, do you want a snack? I asked as if he were a pet dog, and then edged toward the door behind him. Maybe I could lure him toward the vending machine in the hall where I could buy him a cheese cracker snack and send him on his way.

After taking a minute, and I mean a full minute to, well, minutely scan the lab, his eyes rested on me. He looked like a pike stuck in the ground.

Look, he said, "I saw your ad. Are you saying you can’t hire me because I’m not disabled? I think that’s reverse discrimination with respect to the American Disabilities Act."

So what are you going to do, sue me for improper hiring practices? This was my best scornful voice, but it didn’t work. He stared at me with these grayish bluish greenish eyes, dark circles under them. I wondered if he was an addict.

I’m not a drug addict, if that’s what you’re wondering, he said, shifting his weight a