Chimpanzee Read online

  It’s a text message from Sireen.

  Sorry about the beard ;)

  CHAPTER TWO

  BEHIND ALL THIS, THE NEW DEPRESSION, THE MEANS OF production are fine. They were never the problem. Of course the workers went on strike. Of course there were Kangaroo Negotiations. Of course tear gas, and arson, and that perpetual image: young men throwing stones—a Biblical act, an assertion of lineage, of community. Justice. They threw them because they could. Because someone had to. Never mind the union men. This was talismanic. A sacred rite passed from fathers to sons.

  The means of production were never the problem. They were the question, begging itself. It’s the production that needs revolution. There are no means to an end.

  I used to teach my students not to beg the question.

  In the end, the ousted workers were invited to produce whatever they damn well pleased with the machinery. With the line assemblies. With the break rooms and warehouses. Because it didn’t matter. No one was buying anything, so there was no producing.

  Of course there were strikes. By that point, there were so many workers gone, so many forming lines, echelons, phalanxes on the concrete fields behind the picket line. It wasn’t even mob mentality. It was herd. Gathering in numbers against the inevitable. The country demonstrated and protested, full of sound and fury, until, eventually, we just didn’t anymore. We were exhausted and hungry. And still unemployed. The only way to eat was to get in line and shut up. The government was sorry about all this—it really was. They all were.

  Had we really cared, we would have simply burned everything. The factories, the offices, the servers and routers. Everything.

  In therapists’ offices, like this one, a hand always comes first, dowsing through the just-open door while the therapist conveys whatever very-necessary, last-minute instructions on the other side—to the receptionist, or the insurance rep, or the previous client, who won’t stop having issues even as he’s signing papers at the front desk.

  This is called “priming,” and it sources a particular subject role for the therapist. It’s nothing strange. Consciousness takes form in the situation around it. Identity is context. I tried to explain it to Sireen, over beers one afternoon in the bar at the edge of campus. We were with her math friends, and they laughed and called me a nihilist. Liberal arts. Sireen laughed, too. I realized then that it was funny, and she laid her fingers across the back of my hand. We weren’t married yet, and I was trying too hard.

  So, I sourced a new me that day. I remember. One amused by myself. Later, drunk, we lay on the flattened carpet in her tiny living room, smoking and listening to obscure bands I pretended to know.

  Someone was singing in Norwegian. I kissed her, and she tasted like apple vodka. We slept there, under some aunt’s afghan, and Sireen muttered vowels at her dreams.

  I am both subject and object in this office because that’s how this works. I have been primed to recognize time limits (55 minutes), authority (the therapist), and slight sexual arousal (manicured fingers and a panty-hosed kneecap).

  We could also call this a “hook.” It defines and sustains my interest in this encounter. Everything begins by making your audience pay attention.

  “Dr. Cade?” the therapist says, her hand once more leading the way as she commits to entering the office for good. She extends it to shake.

  This is the same gesture we use to keep assailants at bay. But then, she would be more object than subject. A victim-to-be.

  “Yes,” I say.

  “I’m Cynthia.”

  She wears her hair down. Which helps.

  “Can I get you anything?” she says. “Are you comfortable?”

  “No.”

  That stops her just enough. She should know better, cramming those two questions together.

  When she sits down, she is careful to tug her skirt toward her knees.

  “First of all,” she makes eye contact—a professional, “thank you for coming.”

  I smile. “Of course.”

  “Have you read the introductory literature?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can I call you ‘Benjamin?’”

  “You may.”

  “Well, Benjamin, today we won’t begin therapy. This is a chance to get to know each other.”

  I want to say this is my chance. She’ll have to get to know me all over again. Each time, as there is less of me to know. Blocking my education is going to take a few memories with it. Situations and contexts and exactly what it was like to learn this, or this, or this thing. Did a theory click for me in the shower, on a walk, during sex? It will take with it anything that pertains. My life, on borrowed time.

  “Let’s begin with questions,” she says. “What can I tell you? About our office? The process? Me?”

  “Let’s talk about value,” I say.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Let’s discuss how repossessing my education recovers the government’s lost investment.”

  “Benjamin, the investment isn’t lost yet.”

  “Ben.”

  “Fine, Ben.”

  She looks at her file, on her computer pad, which rests like a clipboard on her knees. Her skirt has receded, slowly, and now it’s several inches up her thighs.

  These are things I shouldn’t notice. But I do. I try to think about Sireen.

  “Your father suffered from frontotemporal dementia,” she says. Looks at me.

  “I don’t want to talk about my father.”

  “Working through longitudinal analyses of progressive indices, like yours, is making great strides in experimental treatments for dementia sufferers,” she says. “Like your father.”

  I don’t say anything. My mom cried when I told her about repossession. She just kept apologizing. Thanking God Dad wasn’t around for it. He didn’t think it was a good idea. The debt. The degrees. The idle study—the hours in libraries. He liked me just the way I was. Used to say it, when he was lucid. Just the way you are, son. Stuck in a timewarp. Warning me against myself over and over like some sentimental fugue.

  “Why don’t we change the subject,” Cynthia says. She makes eye contact again. “Your dissertation was about cognitive theory. Tell me how to define a ‘self.’”

  By the end of my last semester, before my appointment expired at our university, I just gave all my students “A”s. Because they weren’t the point. They were just a necessity, and I needed all the time I could get, which I mostly spent sitting on our front porch, drinking beer and twisting shoots off of Sireen’s morning glories. I couldn’t tell if I was feeling sorry for myself or making big plans. Nothing came together, either way.

  Sireen and I were lucky. Our university was private, which meant that it lost funding immediately—straight from the endowment, when the stock markets started sliding. So we knew. The administration knew what to do immediately. Whose contracts they couldn’t renew.

  The public universities went later, in size, in number. Surprised when their states started choking off cash flows. Property tax funds fell when foreclosures rose, when commercial buildings went vacant and office parks in-progress slipped into half-constructed limbo. Jobs followed. Income and sales went with them. Taxes became what we wished we could pay. We didn’t need representation anymore—we needed fucking taxation.

  Many of the public universities were dissolved, along with some municipal services. Tuition climbed to cover budget gaps. Most smaller schools folded, sacrifices to the larger, who trucked in temporary buildings and festival-sized tents to accommodate all the new enrollees. It was an Age of Enlightenment. Education would be the answer, from the top down.

  Faculty were released. Temporary, or part-time, mostly. Like me. Full-time faculty absorbed our teaching loads, creating classes so massive that the students had to teach themselves, largely through support groups and banks of communal notes. The faculty left behind their specializations and started teaching introduction to composition, and introduction to philosophy, and introduction to world
religions. College algebra. Macroeconomics. Political Science. The new university is mostly introductory, and no one cares who will pick up the task of advancing this basic knowledge.

  It was decided that departments would offer fewer upper-level courses within a given major, less often. It now takes the students longer, costs them more, and leaves them with dangerous ideas—the ideas of ideas—about disciplines that do more harm than good when left without conclusions.

  When we were children, we did not play with fire, but we loved the smell of gasoline. Someone was around to teach us the advanced consequences of studying combustion.

  This is not unusual. People often fill Sentinel Park. For drum circles. Footbag. Outdoor chess. Sometimes, on Saturdays, the city hosts children’s contests. Hula Hoop tournaments, or dance-offs, or synchronized jump-rope. It’s a reason to come downtown—other than bread lines and employment offices. A way to be a family. The idea is to stimulate the local economy. After dark, though, most people don’t come here because there are always too many transients, staying out of trouble in one place.

  It isn’t much of a park. It’s an amphitheater, really—slabs of cement shelving down into the earth, twenty feet or so beneath street level. There is no green space—the park is an urban hollow, a leftover gap between three streets converging in the old retail district. There is a gazebo on one side, a wrought-iron, powder-coated thing. Open-air, because that’s nice.

  The speaker, in that gazebo, doesn’t need a megaphone. I can’t tell exactly how many people have crowded themselves into the bottom-level flatspace to listen. From this angle, walking back toward my borough, I can only see the crowd’s marbled heads, swaying.

  We have class division again. University students are rich; their parents are rich—they have to be. The students take courses in poverty studies. They take part in poverty tours and poverty simulations. Financial aid is no longer a solvent investment, and it will disappear soon. It will follow the banks under the national umbrella, to reappear as highway construction and parks renovation. Anything that will create work.

  Among other things.

  The speaker in the gazebo has a posse—four or five comrades standing, staring, or lending their ears. They’re all wearing rubber chimpanzee masks.

  “Don’t ‘buy local’,” he shouts. “Don’t buy anything at all.”

  I look around. This is something. It takes courage, because they’ll be arrested. I’m surprised they were even able to gather for this long. Someone had to orchestrate it—get the word out. Crowds attract attention—they force outsiders to exist with the protest or performance or whatever. A network of brains, making the thing real for just however long.

  Which would be what these chimpanzee kids were after. Sucking your awareness in, just long enough. Making the audience pay attention.

  “Don’t organize,” the speaker shouts. “You can’t sustain yourselves. Not without food. Without funding. Without a workforce subordinate to your will.”

  I duck out of the sidewalk traffic to turn my phone back on. It vibrates—another message from Sireen.

  Dinner canceled. Candidate already took competing offer. Not coming.

  “You don’t have any idea what money even is,” the speaker shouts. “It’s just a token. It’s a convenient way to carry what, in theory, you’ve acquired. Food, water, precious metals. Things other people want.”

  I text her back. Can I buy some beer then?

  “And if value is based on scarcity,” he shouts, “we’re talking about conflict. Conflict is value.”

  People walk past me. They don’t look like conflict, laying one footstep after another on the sunblasted concrete. Trying not to make a scene—not to be a part of one.

  I feel like I should tell this kid that he’s getting his rhetoric wrong. He’s got hooks down, but if he turned in this transcript, as a paper, I’d fail him.

  Conflict follows value follows organization follows capital exchange. Non sequitur. He’s putting the cart before the revolutionary horse. He needs to cite some sources—something his crowd can relate to. Quickly, before some Renewal monitor’s text messages get to the police and the beatings and chemical dispersant begin.

  The phone vibrates again. Babe, stop asking permission.

  But the speaker’s got something going on. One of his comrades watches him carefully. A girl wearing sexual tension like a too-hot overcoat. This is politics, a bigger something than whatever, so she needs to be damn sure she’s read enough, seen enough, demonstrated enough before this entire operation, all this shouting, becomes just a metaphor. An expression between them for what goes on beneath bed sheets on futons in apartments without fixtures over the light bulbs. This “cause”—whatever they’re doing, shouting about—is the sex between them now, and it will be later, too, when it is nothing more than the parameters of their relationship.

  When Sireen and I dated, we talked about critical theory or non-positively curved geometry, which is her field.

  Tell me something, she said. About literature.

  About literature? I said.

  She laughed. That smile lipping morning teeth over her uneven kitchen table. She had found both chairs independently and then painted them, so it was artistic that they didn’t match the table. There weren’t any curtains, which just made the nook brighter—stamped it as hers, where things like light revealed the unwashed buff of wakeup skin. Where dark things became darker. Like coffee.

  I gave her Derrida, Saussure, De Man. And she traded the Hausdorff dimension and outer automorphism and lattice-ordered groups. Mathematics.

  Yeah, she said. Come on! I want to think like you do.

  She brought her lips together. It deepened the after-giggle. She did that often—prompting what she wanted with that female sound. Sourcing things.

  Okay, I said, okay. Um, how about border studies. Trans-regional discourse.

  Excited. Yes!

  Post-colonialism became a sexual politic. Nil radicals attracted us. Cognitive theory had no place in Utopian studies, or New Historicism, and the Moussong metric (on the Davis complex) meant, well . . . nothing. To me. Graduate school became nothing between us, which was the point.

  Close your eyes.

  Closed. Rolling beneath taut-thin lids. Following the light through the darkness.

  Place your fingers on your temples.

  Placed. What is this? she said.

  Culture. Be quiet. Say om.

  Om.

  Say oma.

  Oma.

  Omatul.

  Omatul.

  Om. Ah. Tul.

  Om. Ah. Tul.

  Om. Ah. Tul—I’m a tool.

  She opened her mouth like her eyes. An unveiling.

  Humorshock. She screamed as she laughslapped me.

  It actually hurt.

  You shit! You shit!

  Omatul . . .

  I was just talking, looking for ways to keep her smiling. Because I wasn’t good at telling dirty jokes, which is mostly what she laughed at. How the guys in her program made her laugh. They watched her move as closely as I did.

  The crowd likes what the kid had to say. They’re all shouting now. Over and around each other. Attracting attention. Being disturbingly obvious.

  There are a few more Renewal workers around now. Paying attention. The day laborers, at the other end of the park, who didn’t make it quickly enough into the bed of some hiring asshole’s pickup truck that morning, are paying attention.

  The noise is indecipherable, like nonsense. Or glossolalia—the holy spirit on the move downtown.

  I text Sireen back. Okay.

  She earns our money, so I ask.

  CHAPTER THREE

  OUR BAR HAS JUMPED IN ON SOME NEW FAD, SOME GAME, and Dimitri has convinced me to try it. He even set up my login ID and filled in the information for my public profile. We spend plenty of time playing video games at home, during the summers when he and Sireen have time off. She usually just watches us, taking notes sometimes.
Compiling them in lists on her computer. Dimitri and I are particularly good at sharing games intended for only one player. Sireen sometimes writes small programs of her own. Things to help her manage all those numbers.

  “It’s fun,” Dimitri says. He smiles as he walks back across the bar.

  It begins by not watching the drinks.

  I have a beer in each hand, and I have exhausted the game’s “free inspection”—already I can’t recall tiny details like the printed monogram on the pint glasses. This program simulates obsessive-compulsive disorder—Dimitri selected it from the menu of available disorders to simulate. The goggles I’m wearing are not rigged for VR—I can still see through them, albeit tintedly. There are electrode-pads affixed to my temples and forehead with disposable, sanitary adhesion pads. There are tiny earphones.

  The bartender is letting me try this for free. She’s just introduced it here. Another way to bring people in. Something else to do. Soon, she will charge per minute.

  You get a free inspection of the details around you before the simulation starts—later inspections will “cost” you. The OCD sim is about resisting impulse, resisting inspections. Carrying overfull pints of beer without watching them (to make sure they don’t spill) fits the rules.