We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler Read Free Book Online

there was some crisis with the show. All hands on deck.”
    “I thought you had this big test you had to study for. Your whole future hanging in
     the balance.”
    Reg grabbed a chair from a neighboring table and helped himself to Harlow’s beer.
     “You’ll thank me later,” he said.
    “Hold your breath, why don’t you?” Harlow suggested sweetly. And then, “Rosemary’s
     favorite superhero is Tarzan.”
    “No, he’s not,” Reg said, not missing a beat. “Because Tarzan doesn’t have superpowers.
     He’s not a superhero.”
    “I told her that!”
    This was true. I hadn’t had a favorite superhero until Harlow asked. And then I’d
     picked Tarzan on impulse, same as I’d done with her other questions, a freewheeling
     exercise in free-association. But the more she’d questioned my choice, the more committed
     I’d become to it. I tend to do that in the face of opposition. Ask my dad.
    And now that she’d reopened the argument, I thought it was cowardly of her, pretending
     to be convinced when she was really just lying low, waiting for backup to arrive.
    But outnumbered is not persuaded, at least not in my family. “It’s a matter of context,”
     I said. “Ordinary powers in one world are superpowers in another. Take Superman.”
    But Reg refused to take Superman. “Batman is as far as I’ll go,” he said. “I can go
     no farther.” Under that sexy cap, he had the brains of a bivalve and I was glad not
     to be the one sleeping with him.

Six
    I N FACT, I ’D never read Burroughs; it wasn’t a book my parents would have wanted in the house.
     All I knew about Tarzan was whatever was in the tap water. When Reg began to lecture
     me on the racism of the books, I didn’t know if the books were racist, which wouldn’t
     be Tarzan’s fault, or if Tarzan himself was racist, which would be more problematic.
     But I didn’t think I could win the argument by admitting ignorance. This left as my
     only option a quick
God, look at the time
withdrawal.
    I walked home alone through the dark grid of downtown streets. A long train thundered
     past on my right, setting off the lights and bells of the barrier arms. There was
     a cold wind flipping the leaves on the trees, and outside Woodstock’s Pizza, a loose
     scrum of men I crossed the street to avoid. One of them shouted an invitation to me,
     but it was uninviting.
    Todd was still up and he hadn’t read Burroughs, either, but there was a manga version—
New Jungle King Tar-chan
—and he was all over that. Tar-chan had superpowers. Most definitely. Todd tried to
     describe the series to me (which seemed to be a sprightly mix of cooking and pornography)
     and offered to bring me some issues next time he went home, but it wasn’t clear I
     wouldn’t have to be able to read Japanese.
    I couldn’t get him focused on the point now—that Reg was an asshole—because he was
     so busy making his own: that Masaya Tokuhiro was a genius. Anyway, it was becoming
     less clear to me that Reg had been so egregiously out of line. And why had I been
     jabbering away about Tarzan in the first place? That was indiscreet. I must have been
     very drunk.
    •   •   •
    A NIGHT OR TWO LATER, I finally treed Ezra. He had my suitcase, but I was still being punished; it wasn’t
     convenient just then to turn it over. “You’re too busy?” I asked incredulously. How
     many floors did he think this apartment building had?
    “Correctamundo,” he told me. “That you don’t think so just shows how little you know.”
    Two more days passed before he unlocked the broom closet—(there’s shit in there that
     could seriously fuck up the wells. You could poison the whole town if you wanted,
     Ezra had told me. It was his job to keep that shit out of the hands of the sort of
     terrorists who lived on the third floor)—and pulled the suitcase out. It was hard-shelled
     and powder-blue.
    “Oh, yeah,” Ezra said. “I forgot. This guy came by yesterday, said he