by Cody Sisco
Hieu nodded and walked with Victor to the garden; then he bowed his head and retreated inside.
The Eastmores sat in high-backed lounge chairs on a large bioconcrete patio, covered themselves in blankets, and received close friends and a few notable officials. They discussed science, politics, the weather, and, at intervals and always tactfully, their memories of Jefferson Eastmore.
Victor sat with them and said nothing, except when someone mentioned a new European astronomy project to observe patterns in cosmic microwave background radiation. Victor perked up and recited the planned telescope’s technical specifications. His ma responded by saying, “How interesting,” and the conversation moved on. Victor returned to his silence and his own memories of Granfa Jeff.
***
On a foggy winter day, when Victor was sixteen and in his final year of high school, Granfa Jeff brought him to the zoo. Moisture hung motionless over the Bayshore. Eucalyptus trees covered the landscape. There were no crowds—in 1983 only members of the Zoological Society could visit the expansive private menagerie.
They went first to the Africa enclosure. A few distant figures wandered the paths between the lairs of rhinoceroses, elephants, giraffes, and other exotic species. Ranger Mikke, one of the zookeepers, a tall man who had a slight limp and a dark beard that wrapped from ear to ear, met them at the penguin exhibit. He wore canvas shorts, unmindful of the cold. Victor thought maybe through years of study the ranger had gained an ability to live comfortably outdoors, a symbiosis with the environment that other humans lacked.
Speaking in a thick Northern League accent of melodically twisting vowels and soft consonant explosions, the ranger thanked Jefferson for a recent gift to the zoo. He said to Victor, “I bet you’re wondering how one hundred chimpanzees from halfway around the world ended up here?”
The ranger smiled, his mouth widening to a frightening degree. He reminded Victor of a gluttonous cartoon bear known for scooping up fish from rivers by the handful and eating them whole. Victor had no idea there were any chimps in the zoo, and he thought it strange that the ranger would assume anything about Victor’s mental state. He was wise enough to keep his thoughts to himself and simply nodded in response.
Ranger Mikke straightened and turned toward Jefferson. “Did you know Sir Louis Bradley?”
Granfa Jeff stopped walking. “Of course. A generous man.”
Victor sensed a boring conversation looming, so he broke away and walked to a fenced-off area, behind which a pride of lions lazed together, sharing their warmth. He wanted to squeeze through the bars, hurdle the dry moat, and cuddle with them. Logically, he knew they might not react well to that. Too bad he couldn’t feed them Personil to ensure they stayed calm. He only had enough for his next dose, due at dinner time.
The men’s voices carried to where Victor watched the lions. “That’s as I’ve heard it too,” the ranger said. “Not many people know that he was invited to Rhodesia in the sixties to help with the planning of a new national zoo.”
At the mention of another zoo, Victor turned around, curious to know if that was what this trip was about. Was Granfa Jeff going to buy a zoo? Or build a new one?
Granfa Jeff’s eyebrows rose. “He would have had to cross the green line.”
“He did.” Ranger Mikke scratched one of his meaty ears. “Sir Louis didn’t care about the travel ban.” He imitated an aristocratic lilt, “‘If no one helps them, we shall soon regret the demise of man’s cousins.’”
Victor turned to watch the lions. Some had retreated further into the enclosure, out of view, but one large lioness languidly paced the rocks. She settled onto her haunches and appeared to be watching him. Victor kept his eyes trained on her while he listened to the men’s conversation.
Ranger Mikke said, “Sir Bradley designed Rhodesia’s enclosures to preserve the extant African populations of chimps, apes, orangutans, and bonobos in something close to their natural habitat. It was wondrous. I’ve seen the real-pics.”
Victor turned away from the lioness, realizing he was missing some important piece of context about Rhodesia, which everyone knew as a major source of diamonds, platinum, and gold. “Why was there a travel ban?” Victor asked.
Granfa Jeff shook his head. “It’s a long story that ends with the decapitation of the king of Rhodesia. Another time.” He lightly touched Ranger Mikke’s arm. “You were saying that Sir Louis went to Rhodesia to save the hominids. I assume he brought back the chimpanzees from his trip?”
Ranger Mikke smiled lopsidedly. “Not intentionally. His assistant Maisie Winters fell in love with the chimps and smuggled a breeding pair back in a shipping container. Oh, it caused a big fuss, but she had secretly obtained permission from the king, so they weren’t sent back.”
Victor said, “When was he decapitated?”
“Hush, Victor,” his granfa said.
Ranger Mikke smiled. “The important part of this story is that Sir Louis had a soft spot for Maisie, treated her like a daughter. She convinced him they had to keep the chimpanzees for research. When Rhodesia fell, there were scores more that needed homes, and they came here.” Ranger Mikke pointed toward a building just barely visible through the trees. “We have over one hundred individuals now, the biggest community in the American Union.”
They resumed their journey and soon arrived at a neatly landscaped area dominated by a blocky modernist building that looked to Victor like a stripped-down Buddhist temple. Inside, beyond a small reception area crowded with potted plants, brightly colored carpets traced paths through a maze of desks and cubicles. The paintings and pictures on the walls resembled classic works of art, but with hominids instead of humans. The one nearest to Victor showed a bonobo female reclining on a stone bench as a group of males fought over her.
Victor and his granfa followed the ranger to a room with a few vidscreens, a MeshTerminal, and a large window. Beyond the glass, a chimpanzee—a muscular, hairy, and slack-breasted female—snacked on some grapes that hung in bunches from a padded rig of scaffolding.
The chimpanzee glanced up occasionally but never fixed her eyes on the observers. A one-way glass. Victor bristled. He and the chimpanzee had something in common already. They were both used to being scrutinized like cells under a microscope.
Ranger Mikke placed his hand on Victor’s shoulder, a too-familiar gesture for someone he had just met for the first time. Working with other species must have made the ranger feel closer to his own.
“You’re going to go meet Sofie in a moment,” Ranger Mikke said. “She’s thirteen, a young person like you. She loves puzzles. We give her the most complicated ones, and she always impresses us. We thought she would be a good first experience for you.”
Victor asked, “What am I supposed to do?”
His granfa put a hand on Victor’s other shoulder. “We’re going to observe your interactions. We’re only beginning to understand how great apes perceive and communicate. We also want to observe you. It may help us discover certain aspects of your cognitive process.”
“You mean you want to find out what’s wrong with me. Do I have to wear one of those helmets?” Since his diagnosis four years earlier, he had spent lots of time at Oak Knoll with a heavy bucket on his head to measure his brain activity.
“No, this is purely about observing behavior,” Ranger Mikke said. “Let’s introduce you to Sofie.”
“Is Dr. Tammet here?” Victor looked around but didn’t see her.
Granfa Jeff said, “No, Victor. She . . . We disagreed about the need for this . . . experiment.”
Victor followed the ranger, while his granfa stayed glued to the one-way glass.
Now I’m the show. Boy meets ape; hilarity ensues.
As he’d practiced many times before, Victor repeated Dr. Tammet’s mantra and became emotionally neutral, like a tuning fork at rest.
When Victor and Ranger Mikke entered Sofie’s enclosure, she approached the zookeeper and gave him a very humanlike hug, hooting and patting.
She seemed to think she was friends with the ranger. A massive case of Stockholm syndrome. Although, if she was born there, how would she ever come to know she lived in a prison?
Ranger Mikke took one of Sofie’s hands and slowly led her toward Victor. Her weight shifted from side to side in a kind of rolling wave, unlike the linear, contained gait of her human caretaker. “Sofie, this is Victor. I want you to say hello.”
The sides of her mouth pulled apart, revealing giant-sized teeth. She watched Victor with her nut-brown eyes and made a quick gesture with her fingers. Wrinkled skin piled around her face, rising in unfamiliar contours. Her gaze skittered over him, and her mouth worked, compressing and extending. Victor half expected her to speak.
“Can you shake hands?” the ranger asked both of them. Victor thrust his hand out, nobly attempting to bridge the gap between species.
Sofie’s large eyes looked at Victor’s hand and then his face, tracked his gaze to her own hand, and looked up again. She hissed. Before Victor could pull his hand away, she slapped it to the side, hard enough to make it sting. Her flat, worn-away teeth were visible in her dark mouth as she opened it and screamed at him, a loud pulsing shriek, deafening in the small room.
Victor stumbled backward into the wall, plugging his ears. The ranger was trying to calm Sofie, but she shrugged off his pats and hissed at him too. Her shrieks punctuated the zookeeper’s calm voice.
Victor bolted from the room. His granfa came out of the adjoining room, and Victor slammed into him.
Granfa Jeff grabbed Victor’s arm and kept him from falling. “Calm down. We’ll wait a few minutes and try again.”
“I want to go. She doesn’t like me.” Humiliation churned in his stomach. Still, there was something comical about it. Rejected by a chimpanzee. He must be the least likable human on the planet.
“You didn’t give her the chance. Hers was a natural reaction to your hostility.”
“I wasn’t hostile. I didn’t do anything.”
“Come here.”
His granfa led him to a set of vidscreens and input slabs. Victor saw the zookeeper through the window petting Sofie and heard his murmured reassurances through the sonofeed. She seemed as agitated as he felt.
Granfa Jeff pressed a cutoff switch for the sonofeed and activated a spectrum relay panel for the vidfeed recording devices in the chimp’s room. One of the vidcams had been trained on Victor. He watched as the image of his face expanded to fill the vidscreen.
“Look here.” His granfa pointed to the vidscreen, tracing Victor’s brow, eyes, and lips. “I’ll advance the feed slowly so you can see from the time you entered the room until she slapped your hand. This expression is a blend of anger, contempt, and fear. Your lips are compressed, nose slightly scrunched, brow furrowed. When you offered your hand, she saw it in that context, arm thrusting out like so. She didn’t see an invitation; to her it was a challenge.”
“So?” Victor looked away from the image of his face.
“You were projecting negative emotions, and Sofie registered them.”
“I wasn’t thinking, ‘Hey, chimp, let’s fight,’” Victor said.
“It doesn’t matter. You may not have been thinking it consciously, but what you were feeling was written all over your face.”
Victor looked away. His granfa’s explanation made sense. He was sure he’d been neutral, when in fact he’d been hostile and combative. To not be aware of his own emotions, and yet to succeed in broadcasting them to everyone in sight—it was like living in an inside-out body, wearing organs like clothes, and walking around oblivious to others’ screams of horror.
Victor said, “A chimpanzee with empathetic super powers. What’s next? Cats in space? Or are you saying she’s a Broken Mirror too?”
“I know you’re upset, but think for a moment. What does this experience tell us?”
Victor bit back another remark about him being so monstrous he couldn’t make friends with animals. His granfa was giving him a chance to use and demonstrate his intellect. He shouldn’t waste it. Especially before his next dose of Personil returned his mind to dullsville.
“I need to control my expressions,” he said, “so I don’t get into trouble.”
His granfa shook his head. “That comes later, and it’s an imperfect skill. Even the most skilled confidence men struggle to keep their true feelings from peeking through their masks. The lesson is more fundamental than that.”
Victor looked at the ceiling, replaying the encounter in his mind. He had walked in, following the zookeeper, observing Sofie. She had greeted the man, followed him by the hand, looked at Victor, at his face, at his hand—That’s it! She had examined him. “She read me; she read my emotions.”
His granfa nodded. “Precisely. And what does that mean?”
“It’s a process, a procedure. Like taking a measurement.”
“Go on.”
“It’s about observing the facts. Other people’s movements, gestures, and expressions, and then deducing what they mean. If she can read emotions like this, then I should be able to as well.”
“You’ve almost got it, very good. But I need to explain the significance. You see, for Sofie and other apes, and for humans as well, maybe for all the mammals, this process is automatic, almost unconscious. People pick up on these signs and interpret them without ever being aware of it. This is your special challenge. You are bombarded by this input, which triggers emotional reactions in you that are out of proportion to the context. You feel what they feel, but much more strongly, and—listen, because this is important: there is a mismatch in the timing. So you have reactions that seem odd to others. I believe by more closely scrutinizing cues in your environment, including social cues, you can moderate your responses. I believe it’s a skill that can be learned.”
Victor felt his eyes go wide. His granfa’s explanation, illustrated so perfectly by the experience he’d just had, gave him hope of overcoming his disability.
After a moment, he asked, “You mean, I can read people without automatically, you know, feeling them?”
Granfa Jeff rubbed Victor’s back. “You face bigger challenges in your life because of who you are, but the rewards of success will be that much greater. Think of the insights you have access to, to be conscious of the emotional relationships among a group of people, which others feel but don’t necessarily understand. I believe a career in diplomacy could be quite fitting.”
Victor looked again through the glass, and in Sofie’s face he now saw not a collection of hostile features but a forest of signs and signals that needed to be decoded.
“I want to learn how.”
Chapter 7
Although Victor had made great progress, due to the nature of mirror resonance syndrome, his mental state continued to be vulnerable to external influences and internal instabilities. I would have continued to work with Victor, but in September 1990, Jefferson Eastmore told me my services were no longer needed.
I had worked for the family for nearly a decade by then, helping Victor cope with his condition. I recommended additional mental health professionals to work with him in my stead, some of whom I had trained to work with people with MRS, but to my knowledge they were never contacted by anyone in the family.
—Statement by Dr. Laura Tammet, the Eastmore family’s neuroscience advisor (1998)
Semiautonomous California
23 February 1991
At dinner on the eve of Granfa Jeff’s funeral, six Eastmore family members sat clustered at one end of a long table that could have seated twenty. Old-fashioned sconces with incandescent bulbs were spaced along the wood-paneled walls every meter or so.
Granma Cynthia lightly squeezed the dinner table’s short edge, and the bell for first courses chimed. Soon Hieu and Granma’s assistant arrived bearing plates heaped with delicate lettuces, roasted winter beets, and a strong cheese with a smell that turned Victor’s stomach. He picked at the greens and beets and moved the cheese to the far side of his plate.
“I hate SeCa,” his cousin Robbie said. “Europe is wasting its money here.”
Victor looked up. It was bad manners to talk that way over dinner. Even he knew that. “What money?” he asked.
Robbie smirked. The expression twisted his otherwise plain, light brown face into something ugly and rodent-like. “Without Europe’s aid, SeCa would be a poor backwater, more than it already is.”
“I think you’re confusing propaganda with education,” Victor grumbled.
Robbie glared at him. “Confusion is your area of expertise.”
Victor bit his tongue.
“Europe fomented autonomy and self-determination in the United States to undercut a burgeoning rival,” Robbie said in a pedantic drone that sounded more like a stuffy professor than someone who was, at twenty-five, less than a year older than Victor. “During the Repartition, Europe cozied up to the fledgling nations of the A.U., and now all of them, including SeCa, are dependent on Europe for financing and foreign aid. It was a brilliant strategy at the time. But now the money would be better spent at home.”
“Home? You sound more European than American. Are you applying to change your citizenship?” Victor asked, knowing that his family would consider the suggestion akin to blasphemy.
Robbie straightened. “If dual citizenship were allowed, I’d consider it.” Victor’s ma sucked in her breath, and Granma Cynthia’s fingers tightened around her knife. Robbie faced them down unapologetically. “I like to side with the winners of history.”
“Enough, Robbie,” Victor’s fa said. He pronged his salad. “I suppose there will be questions about the future of the company.” Linus glanced at his ma and sister, affecting nonchalance, but Victor could tell from his voice that Fa was nervous.
“It’s a delicate balance,” Circe responded. She sat rigidly upright, addressing her ma at her side and her brother across from her as if they were her subjects, yet her narrow shoulders didn’t rise much above her place setting. Granfa Jeff had been the only tall Eastmore. “I have to show that Father’s actions over the past few months did no harm, yet at the same time steer the company in a different direction that puts all the rumors behind us. And I have to do all this without—how did you put it, Mother?—without dragging the Eastmore name through a manure pond.”
