Chimpanzee Read online

  For Rima

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  CHAPTER ONE

  THEY DIDN’T ALWAYS SHOOT PEOPLE.

  In the beginning, when civic offenders were conscripted into the Homeland Renewal Project, they were monitored only by crew chiefs. Hourly employees with managerial experience. People used time sheets. Signatures. They carried their meals with them in paper bags.

  But when the crews organized, when they started collecting protection money, to keep you from harm at the hands of other people on the crew—gang affiliations, race riots—workers disappeared. The crews became micro-politics. They followed the examples of the mobs in the larger cities, looking for someone to blame. They carried weapons in their lunch bags. Renewal became a safe opportunity to sell your contraband, in your standard-issue, reflective red jumpsuit.

  They deputized the crew chiefs. Gave them shotguns. At first, they tried non-lethal rounds, but those caused an uprising. So they killed a few. It no longer makes the news.

  The lien against my education is twenty-three pages long. It contains abbreviated transcripts of my yearly audits, when I, like every other student borrower, sat down in the loan therapist’s office on campus and let him index my cognitive chemical tendencies, my entrained associations, my affective self-models, which source most of my intellect.

  It’s important to remember that we are not “in charge.” You don’t own your body, it owns you. It’s the same thing.

  You don’t own your education. It’s on loan until you pay it off.

  I am good at being unemployed. I can act interested and positive when Sireen, my wife, calls to check on me in the middle of the day. She stays concerned about my moods. About all of this.

  I am good at walking downtown—from our borough at the other end of the city because Sireen and I lease only one car, which she needs for the job she still has. I know which blocks are the most vacant, so to avoid them. I know whom to talk to. I know which times of day are safe for spending an hour in Sentinel Park, in the heart of downtown, doing nothing but being a guy with a coffee sitting in a park.

  It’s an illusion, Sireen said. She was irritated. The wind kept blowing her hair against her mouth while she tried to eat. It was a bad day to wear it down.

  Sleight-of-hand, she said. But I had told her I liked it down. It’s how I knew this was working.

  Each year of my education—each year of new cognitive associations—expanded the previous year’s index. Because association doesn’t mean causation.

  Just because two variables are correlated doesn’t mean they caused each other, she said. She put her sandwich in her lap to do something about this. Nothing was growing in the flowerbeds behind us, and their bricks were cold.

  If it did, that first audit would have always been enough. But subsequent audits charted all the discrete change—chemically and behaviorally.

  Cum hoc ergo propter hoc, I said.

  What? She looked at me with a bad taste in her mouth. Hair.

  With this, therefore because of this, I said.

  Yes, she said. Obviously. In exchange, she had told me she liked that—how I made things more complicated. It made her laugh.

  It’s a logical fallacy, I said.

  No, she said. We’re talking about numbers.

  They could detail how I learned. How I connected different principles and theories. How I thought.

  Ex nihilo nihil fit.

  Teeth in even rows, bleached by the air and sun. Her perpetual smile. It was bright here, on my side of campus. There weren’t as many trees.

  Learning new conceptual associations pushed causation further away. Every year, the more you learned. At a point, there would be no such thing as ultimate causality. No one to blame for rainbows or bankruptcy or the creation of the universe.

  Stop it, she said. I’m eating.

  Stop what?

  Being you!

  Eventually, time became money, and no one had any. Least of all the government.

  Experts joined the Senate Efficiency Committee to ensure that state agencies were maximizing employee potential. They started doling out tasks randomly in the Homeland Renewal Project. Some days, it’s raking gravel at highway construction sites. Other days it’s changing bed pans in veterans’ hospitals. It’s fair, and after they started randomizing the crews every morning, the power organizations of the old crews fell apart.

  Incorporating monitors into the project only made sense. As monitors, Renewal workers are given a reprieve from their uniforms and sent out as employees, patients, students—anything that pertains to anything. They report waste or malfeasance.

  They expanded into the neighborhoods, and now they have quotas. Failure to produce enough efficiency observations results in extra work hours. Since the monitor program started, no one knows anyone anymore.

  The Efficiency Committee became concerned with activities that could foment unrest. The country was no longer a powder keg, but it had dry rot. Anything that could incite anything was considered civic unrest. In some states, that meant fucking the wrong sex. In others, it was reading the wrong books, or jostling the American Dream. Mostly, the Committee doesn’t do anything with this information, but monitors collect it.

  Sometimes it gets leaked to gangs or cartels or separatists. The ones the Committee finds useful, who’ll do something about something.

  It’s important that Renewal dispatchers randomize their monitors. Different people see different things. Some see inequality. Some see waste. Some don’t see anything at all. They’re all the same, and it’s all about perceptual readiness and environmental priming.

  I should know. I studied all of this in graduate school. Perception isn’t about receiving information. It’s about creating it. The world in your own image.

  The yearly audits are important because educations are not repossessed wholesale—repossession therapists go after aspects of your education one at a time, starting with the most recent, in the hopes that you’ll get a job and start repaying the loans before they have to repossess your entire education, which is your means of earning to pay anything back.

  With everyone gone bankrupt, though, it no longer matters. There aren’t many still borrowing their ways through college.

  After 365 consistent days without a job, I have exceeded the allowable forbearance on my student loans. I cannot afford to make payments, even income-adjusted, which requires only partial Renewal service. Sireen and I want to buy a house. Start a family. So, we have options. We can empty our meager savings to buy another few months with my degrees, so I can pursue jobs that don’t exist, to provide for a wife and a someday child that don’t need me to. Sireen’s income covers our rent, which the university adjusted for us as a courtesy, after my dismissal, because, among many, they own the house we rent. Her income covers our car payment, our utilities, the credit cards we keep at a modest balance to maintain her rating. She feeds us.

  I have the option to make direct payments to the loans that financed my Master’s degree, my Bachelor’s, so I can keep them longer while they go after my Ph.D. So I might manage a decent conversation with Sireen at our dinner table, over inexpensive wine and discounted, factory-produce
d meats. We could use these degrees to spend more time thinking about a family. We might watch more programs about birth. About home renovation and investment. Getting ready. We might age Biblically, into our hundreds. We might sleep in caves for generations and emerge after the flood, to start our lives then. I could give Sireen a child in another life, still educated enough in this one to know such places exist.

  But I cannot get the teaching jobs that don’t exist at the universities that aren’t hiring without my Ph.D. They’re a package deal, those degrees. We must devour them all, like defective young or upstart gods. Like flesh. A Eucharist become our domestic dream, our shared lives. People have been creating things by consumption for a long time. Monsters. Men. Personal saviors and vision guides. It’s nothing out of the ordinary.

  Three different degrees in literature and literary theory. So I can know things like that. I specialized in cognitive theory and how it informs abstract fiction.

  After ninety days, if I do not report for repossession therapy, if I do not enlist in Homeland Renewal, then municipal officers will issue warrants for my arrest. They will initiate repossession therapy anyway. They will assign me to a Renewal dispatcher, and they will begin garnishing my payments from Sireen’s paycheck.

  While I work Renewal, I will be fed two state meals during my shifts because no one is allowed to bring anything along anymore. No paper bags.

  The same thing happens if you fail to pay your parking tickets, or file your taxes. Child support. They’re acts of civic fraud, which are categorized as domestic terrorism against the common good. Not everyone has an education to surrender—those people work longer sentences.

  In my case, it’s reneging on my financial agreements with the Department of Education. It’s theft, and it must be deterred—repossession alone is insufficient. Other borrowers need to be scared away from actions like mine. As if most of us have any kind of choice. As if we’ve got better things to do with the money we don’t have than pay our debts.

  Sireen teaches math at Central University, where I worked, and we make her loan payments on time. Because we must. After we graduated, she found a job first, a permanent one, and I followed her. That was our deal.

  I did what I could.

  My Renewal dispatcher works in a construction trailer in a municipal parking lot downtown, behind the main post office. There are no cars in the spaces. There are weeds between veins of exposed tar. An a/c window-unit sweats beside the front door, making puddles on the concrete for algae and other green things.

  Men and women, in their vivid Renewal jumpsuits, stand around. A few wear plain clothes. Most of them are black or Hispanic. You ring the buzzer to get into the trailer—a red utility light beside the door lights up when you may enter. Like a therapist’s office. Or a sound stage.

  Inside the trailer, a black man with a salt-and-pepper beard sits at an aluminum desk. His eyes glow behind a computer screen, which shines on photographs of children. They face me—on display. He can’t see them from where he sits. His nameplate reads JEREMIAH ROSEMEADE.

  He looks up, back down. “Name?”

  “Benjamin Cade,” I say.

  There are red jumpsuits on hangers against the far wall.

  He glances at the suits, too.

  “Go pick one out. They’re sorted by height.”

  It feels like a PVC tarp, with sleeves and cuffs. The lapels can be lifted and zipped around the nose and mouth.

  “Three years,” he says.

  “Right,” I say.

  “Mandatory repossession therapy.” He looks at me. “Professor.”

  Not that I ever was. That would connote permanence. A job for the ages. But whatever.

  His printer ejects a slip of paper, and he offers it around the computer screen. The linoleum squeaks as I cross the room back to his desk.

  “Your therapist is Cynthia St. Claire. Her office is at 520 North Main, Suite 3. You will report to her within five days.”

  “Yes, sir,” I say.

  He stops and looks at me. “I’m Rosie,” he says.

  I wonder what bills he pays. How he earned his way up to this job. There is a shotgun leaning against a windowless door behind his desk.

  He goes back to his screen. “You’ll report here by 6:00 AM, every shift. Meals will be provided. Wear comfortable shoes.”

  I act attentive. Like I did at orientation, at each of the schools that have employed me. The same spiel every time, to make you feel welcome.

  “Do I really need to go over everything?” Rosie says.

  “No, sir.”

  “There’s some literature in that cubby. Feel free.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He untangles a thumbprint scanner from the cables on his desk. Offers it up in his hand, like some palmist’s secret.

  “Give me your print,” he says.

  I think about words unto flesh. The mark of the beast. But it’s just a scanner. This is just a trailer. Rosie is just another man.

  I give him my print.

  When Sireen calls me, here, downtown, I step into the alcove of what was once the indie-theater’s canopied entrance. It was still open when we moved into town. Sometimes, on Sunday afternoons, Sireen and I would come for a movie. We’d take turns: she always picked French films—things full of space and contrast and meaningful settings. She learned it growing up, with English and Arabic, so she would listen—placing herself in conversations I couldn’t follow. I would watch her instead—the projector light on the slicks of her eyes—and listen to them babble. When it was my turn, I would pick existential dramas about nothing, which I convinced myself I liked. Sireen would hold my hand, as if we were watching horror films.

  The sun is out today, so the people are too. Loitering. Exchanging stories. Taking up space. I don’t want to be in anybody’s way while I talk.

  “Hey,” I say.

  “Hey,” Sireen says. It’s quiet around her. “What’s up downtown? Did you make your appointment?”

  I don’t respond to the first question, which is all right.

  “On my way.”

  “Did you get some lunch?”

  I was too nervous to eat.

  “Yeah.”

  I stand in the alcove, waiting out the silence of what to say next, which is the most important part of these phone calls.

  “Are you all right?” she says.

  “Yeah.”

  “Sure?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you want to go to dinner tonight?” she says.

  No.

  “Sure.”

  “Dimitri and I agreed to take one of the candidates out to his dinner. I think you ought to come.”

  Her department is hiring. A campus visit, the necessary pilgrimage, is part of every academic’s job search. Usually, a department hosts a few of them—one per candidate. The dinner is one of the most important parts. When the candidate is told to relax and not to worry about his or her performance of self. Which is not the truth. Other faculty, from other departments, are usually in the mix, like Dimitri, who is not in Sireen’s department. He is a sociologist. Inviting faculty from other departments demonstrates academic diversity.

  “Okay,” I say.

  “Could you shave?”

  “What?”

  “Well, I just want . . . I don’t want to make the wrong impression, you know? Until tenure.”

  “I can grow my beard when you get tenure?”

  “Ben, come on,” she says. “It just . . . you could just trim it.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah, what?”

  “I said ‘yeah.’”

  Repossession is therapeutic, the promissory note to my student loans explains. Painless. Repossessing aspects of associative thought, of “cerebro-ontogenetic development,” will, at worst, result in disorientation and nausea. Other side effects occur in rare instances.

  They can’t take the data out of your head. That’s impossible. They just make it something traumatic. Something to s
quirrel away in the small dark of your lower consciousness, where it becomes nightmares and suppressed experiences and terrible memories. The brain does the work for them by protecting itself from what’s become unpleasant. It’s like forgetting. Eating the lotus.

  You can’t use what’s theirs if you can’t pay for it, which makes sense. They financed it, after all. Collegiate enrollment spiked after everyone discovered that they were under-degreed to compete for dwindling employment, and several senators won their offices by campaigning for college degrees for everyone. But educating everyone doesn’t necessarily make them any money. Academic accreditation boards put caps on the number of graduates a university could produce in a given year. Because degrees had become so common, so easy to get, they no longer differentiated anyone in the workforce. The Department of Education had no choice but to start using our indices, from our audits. They were maps to a better future.

  Educating everyone doesn’t make the workforce any money, but repossessing degrees makes it for the banks. The moneylenders whose investments in an educated America are underwritten by the government itself. Reclaiming possession of a borrower’s indices is good for research, and it improves the fiscal odds for those graduates who can still make money by increasing the rarity and value of their degrees—those still capable of making their loan payments. The hope is that these achievers will create our new generation of jobs, above and beyond the corporate ladder, and we can all start again next time. With a new generation.

  It’s for the greater good.

  Downtown, I find my loan therapist’s office. The oxidized brass door handles. The nondescript text on the office door. REPOSSESSION THERAPY in clean Helvetica font. My phone vibrates, so I pull it out of my pocket before going in.