Chimpanzee Read online

  The carpet here is long and red, faux-Victorian—fleur-de-lis, paisleys, clumps of dotted vines. It’s sarcastic. Out of place in the décor of this bar. It’s hip.

  Through the goggles, through the electrode pulses stimulating artificial neuro-chemical exchange, the carpet is no longer normal. It . . . spins, without moving. In asymptotic arcs and Fibonacci spirals. Pressure is gathering at the base of my skull as I study the carpet. Nothing would be finer. Nothing sweeter. Nothing would be more high than inspecting that carpet, tracing, tracing. Walking without stepping on paisleys so I don’t break my mother’s back. Which is another impulse I must resist.

  I can feel the importance, now. I must be sure. I have already inspected the layout of the tables. I will not step on the paisleys. But I will inspect again. I have just inspected, and I do not want to inspect again. I’m starting to feel ashamed. But I will inspect.

  Personally, Dimitri told me, he prefers the paranoid schizo sim.

  I am afraid to move. I will spill the beer. I must move, though—I’m growing nauseated. My blood is beginning to buzz. The lure of the carpet increases exponentially. I’m not gaining anything by looking at it—I’m losing.

  But pushing the episode.

  But the thrill.

  I look away before I start counting things, like people or dots, which I feel compelled to do. I wish I could stop inspecting. I won’t tell anyone how many times I have inspected. I am finished inspecting, so I will just inspect once more.

  The beer sloshes when I move. Most likely, this is because of the strange cocktail in my brain, which is guided by low-voltage pulses from the electrodes. Which is disturbing the information in my inner ear. It bends gravity. Spacetime. The physics of simulating someone else’s neurological imbalance.

  All I have to do is carry the beer to our booth, where Dimitri is sitting, watching, and I’ll “win.” I’m starting to feel feverish. Acid pumps are spraying my internal organs. Stop inspecting stop inspecting stop inspecting. The burn is crawling up my esophagus. The carpet surges, lapping at table legs and sandaled feet as if swallowing. But it hasn’t moved. I can’t see where I’m stepping now, which has caused my eyes to begin watering, and the beer is running across my fingers in scalding runnels.

  I need to think.

  Being. Existing. Me. Controlling this fucking situation is just a complication of “paying attention,” which is all awareness is. The goggles are fucking with what I see. I know what they’re doing. It’s change blindness—they can alter my visual field during the micro-second, saccadic shifts of my eyes. You can make anyone see anything, if you’re fast enough, and attention isn’t as fast as the microprocessors in these goggles.

  But, fuck.

  I take a few more steps across the faux-Victorian sea. It used to be carpet.

  I need to inspect. I need to inspect. I need to inspect.

  I need to think.

  It’s not real. I can make it. I don’t see anything. I’m not seeing any of this bullshit. I’m layering proto-objects from low-level neural processing and binding them with the neural excitation of paying attention. I see what I’m paying attention to. Except, in this case, it’s what the simulation is paying attention to.

  Pay attention pay attention pay attention.

  I’m creating scenery. Manipulating what I can recognize from the stupid part of my brain. The kindergarten brain that sees colors and square blocks and knows when it’s about to get hit.

  Perception is creation. My own fucked-up world.

  I’m creating vomit sliding up, up, up. The pressure has increased behind my eyes. I feel the beer falling in slops. I am not supposed to spill the beer.

  The goggles make you fuck yourself. A negative affirmation of how you’d like the world to go. They’re knock-offs of the equipment that therapists like Cynthia use. My graduate studies director used similar devices in the early days. When he and his gang were figuring it all out.

  This isn’t fucking fair.

  I put another foot forward. I’ve stepped on a paisley—I can feel it. The muscles clutching my femur shudder, and my groin begins to ache. Have I pissed myself?

  Here, here, here, here . . .

  There are thirty-three paisleys between me and Dimitri. This is not a prime number. I can step, longly, and not hit any more of them. I need to be sure.

  I need to be sure.

  Dimitri is suddenly before me. He slips the goggles off my forehead. Yanks the electrode-pads from my skin.

  “Jesus,” he says.

  He gets an arm around me before the sudden-relief vertigo G-forces my eyes closed. Sends me to the floor.

  He’s already bought me four beers, sheepishly. It was supposed to be fun. My head doesn’t hurt anymore, so it’s all right.

  “Well, why is it called ‘chimping?’” I say.

  Dimitri takes a drag from his cigarette. He watches twenty-somethings in second-hand T-shirts walking in and out of the bar.

  “I don’t know,” he says. “Monkey see, monkey do?”

  “I saw chimpanzee masks—at a protest downtown.”

  He shrugs at me.

  I take a drink with a trembling hand.

  “You can become addicted to it,” he says.

  “What?”

  “Chimping.”

  “What do you mean, ‘addicted’ Like, you want to play it all the time?”

  He shrugs again, smokes. “I don’t know. I’ve just heard. Some get stuck on the goggles. Can’t function without them. Over time.”

  “They . . . live the simulation? All-the-time goggle-insanity?”

  “So I hear.”

  Dimitri thinks just about everything is “cute,” or “asinine,” or “telling.” He tries most things: new games, drinks. He regularly attends shows at half a dozen venues across town—that is to say, at houses packed with young roommates, overfull with heat and alcohol and insufficient bedspace. They produce “shows” in their living rooms—he can name most of the bands they play in this bar. I can’t name any, but it’s close to my house, so I can walk here. Dimitri has to walk further. There are usually people along his way, asking for beer or food, and he gives them cash. Sometimes. They would’ve mugged him already, but he’s fast. I only have to walk through my neighborhood.

  “Smoke?” he says.

  I take one. He gives them to me all the time, now that Sireen and I agreed we shouldn’t spend on them. I know he feels sorry for me, but I don’t care. I didn’t want to quit. And when we started all this, being together, young men full of brains and anger and important opinions. Debating things, shouting things, affirming our shared, bar-time ennui, I still had a job. I still bought my own cigarettes. Expensive drinks. We built ourselves on this, and Dimitri keeps it up. He’s my only friend.

  One of the bartenders brings two bourbons to the table. She smiles, walks back, and says bartender things to some new-entries. To people who know her name. It is a very particular presentation of self, and not everyone can pull it off.

  “I took the liberty,” Dimitri says, reaching for a glass.

  This isn’t unusual, except he ordered the good one. The bourbon we don’t order unless we’re really just in the mood. We haven’t had it since I was able to buy it myself.

  “What’s the occasion?” I say.

  He purses his lips against the liquor. “Tell me about the shrink first.”

  “She’s hot.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Don’t start.”

  He lifts his hands, innocent. Smiling into the smoke between us. He’s a sociologist. Studies micro-economies and the politics of exchange. He wrote a paper on what we give up to attractive people.

  He drops the smile into his bourbon, like you’re supposed to when readying for a topic like this. He projects a new self, sources a new discourse position. An appropriate one.

  Although, really, the position sources him.

  He’s ready, I’m ready. That’s how it goes.

  “How was the sessio
n?” he says.

  “Fantastic.”

  “I’m sorry,” he says. He makes eye contact. A professional himself. “I didn’t mean—”

  “It was fine.”

  A pair of women are chimping at the bar, making out while their friends giggle. Girls’ night out. There’s a sign behind the bar—five minutes free when you order whatever special. I can’t read that part. They’re wearing sunglasses, the watching ones.

  “Good,” he says.

  Before we came to this town, Sireen and I, Dimitri was alone here. For a while, when I worked with them at the university, it was really something. The three of us carpooled. We listened to public radio, or checked out whatever latest CD he’d picked up from whatever latest DIY house-show. Record store. Whatever.

  Before we arrived, he was going to leave town. Get back on the job market and live somewhere else alone. Try again. He would live as his own source of attraction, like a gravity well. He cannot return to his native country because he dodged his mandatory military service to earn his Ph.D. in the U.S. His voice lilts because of his accent—too-perfect consonants like chipping teeth—and he remembers things like food shortages, unstable governments, and grocery stores filled with only one kind of each thing. Communist-issue.

  So, having a few years of grad school repossessed, without a job, is not to him what it is to me. We’ve talked about this.

  “Do you want to talk about it?” he says.

  He and Sireen still carpool.

  “She asked about my dissertation.”

  “Has she read it?”

  “Seems like.”

  “And?”

  That last semester, when I gave them all “A”s, now and then, one would ask the right questions, and I could give the answers I wanted. About selfhood and cognition and not being in charge. There were no ghosts in the machine. Now and then, I could undo everything Descartes fucked us with. Because, he had it backwards.

  I am; therefore, I think.

  I could help them understand being. All the sturm and drang. Even if we were supposed to be talking about writing. It changed a few lives. Mine, I think. Sometimes.

  I laugh at Dimitri. “Why are we drinking the good stuff?”

  “Tell me more about the shrink.”

  “She gets it,” I say. “I haven’t had that chance before. I haven’t talked, like that, about it. Nobody’s followed my theories all the way down the rabbit hole.”

  “That’s ironic.”

  “I know.”

  But mostly, I gave them “A”s because they were never supposed to be the point. My education was for me. This was my enlightenment, my debt. This would be my philosophy, and fuck anybody else. They could follow along, if they could keep up.

  But it’s important to remember that I love my wife. I love this place. Our life here.

  He looks into his glass.

  “What?” I say.

  “Nothing.”

  “What?”

  Mostly, I taught them to communicate. To move beyond grunts and text messages. I taught them the mathematics of comma splices and dangling modifiers and inclusive language. I showed them how to parse an argumentative paragraph, how to be assertive, how to slowly, slowly get a reader to think just the way they do. How to control disposition, which is what I did to them.

  But mostly, there was no place for cognitive theory, for experimental literature or abstract discourse. The university did Sireen a favor, handing me introduction-to-composition classes after they hired her.

  “Nothing.” He forces a smile. He’s got the face here of his entire country. Sometimes, he still has to ask me what certain words mean. He’d never had a funnel cake until Sireen and I bought him one. A corn dog. Cotton candy. I shoved him down the curly slide, at the state fair, and he nearly broke his ankle. He paid for all three of us to go.

  “Drink your bourbon,” he says.

  “Why are we drinking it?”

  Each glass costs as much as a regular tab.

  He sees something in it, staring at it, that I don’t. It is possible, like now, to occupy a subject position in discourse and be nothing but an object.

  “Never mind. Just drink it.”

  So I do. And I take another cigarette without asking.

  “Chimping looks like good business,” I say. Something else to talk about.

  “No doubt,” he says.

  By mentioning it, I give him the opportunity to turn around and have a look at the bar, which is not where chimping technically exists. But it is the last place where it existed for us, which makes it an extension of self. We are more than the meat in our heads. Dimitri and I, right now, are this entire bar.

  You see?

  The first researchers to work with ontogenetic mapping were psycho-linguists. My dissertation director had been one of them, when he was my age. They studied the intersection of language and cognition. Of language and everything. It became possible to index linguistic tendencies among the neurologically disturbed, which made it possible to begin studying how those tendencies are sourced. Language delineates or creates most “thoughts,” and it implies a constructed world.

  These are the things I had to learn, to earn my Ph.D. Perception as creation. Fiat lux.

  What we—they—eventually learned is that you can parse an entire person by indexing his or her probabilistic lingual deep structures. The existential urges, needs, or intentions “beneath” anything he or she says.

  Which is the wrong way to think about it, but still.

  It became possible to detect early signs, early psycho-linguistic ontogenetic trajectories. Which meant we learned to avoid and appropriately medicate neurological imbalances. It took a while, and we—they—got better at it. Faster.

  We’d cured crazy. Or, at least, indexed it. I was ten years old by the time the technology made it into the public schools. Health workers began ontogenetically indexing us with child-sized goggles. We were allowed to watch cartoons while the software marked our dispositions toward neurological imbalance. Anything over five percent sent us into federally mandated therapy at children’s psychiatry clinics. The costs were underwritten by the government, and it saved the healthcare giants a fortune.

  I never showed any signs, but some of my friends did. They said it was fun, learning to be normal. Playing games with goggles and electroencephalographic hats.

  Really, a self is just a matrix of cognitive associations. Learned behaviors, tastes, opinions. Conditioned fears and culturally imparted memories. A person, like Dimitri, is his bread lines and military service and worthless currency.

  And with a complete enough series of progressive cognitive indices, with a more-or-less full ontogenetic trajectory, you had a person. Theoretically, if you could activate this data, you could simulate an entire other person, not just the fucked up obsessions and tics we condition away.

  Such licensing rights are in the promissory note. Put there to sell what belongs to the moneylenders—to research institutions, originally.

  I watch them chimp at the bar. They wiggle and twitch and have a good old time. Those disturbances, free with purchase.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “WHAT’D YOU TEACH?” ROSIE SAYS.

  “English,” I say.

  He has a copy of a local arts circular rolled up in his fist, like a baton. It’s called The Mountainist. I read it sometimes at the bar, if I’m alone—gardening, music, local politics. I wouldn’t have pegged Rosie as a reader.

  He tucks it into one of his drawers and hands me a pair of canvas gloves and a litter picker.

  “To foreigners?” he says.

  “What?”

  “Like, illegals?”

  My Renewal suit is heavy, and it sticks to my skin. I can already feel the chafing.

  “No. English—writing and literature.”

  He crosses his arms, and his chair pops as he reclines. He has satisfied himself.

  “You married?” he says.

  “Yes.”

  “Kid
s?”

  “No.”

  He points to the window. Outside, there is a white school bus in the lot—an old kind. Diesel engine, security windows. There is a trailer with a portable toilet affixed to the back bumper.

  “See you at 3:00,” he says.

  The driver halts the bus ten miles outside of town, along Interstate 26. He is protected from us by security glass and a wire cage.

  Our wardens get out of their jump seats. They rode backwards, staring at us. There are twenty workers on this crew, and the wardens gesture us to our feet. The older workers brace themselves on the benches to stand. The young, the belligerent, make a point of rising slowly.

  One warden heads out of the bus with his shotgun. The other stands in the aisle.

  “You pick one piece of trash at a time,” he says. “Paper, plastic. You find metal or glass, you stop and raise your hand. If we see you with it, that’s an extra day on your record.”

  They wanded us, back at the dispatch lot, before we entered the bus. They found a pocket knife on one of the men, and he was ushered at gunpoint into Rosie’s office.

  “You need to piss, you raise your hand. You get tired, raise your hand. Don’t squat or kneel unless you’re unconscious. You’ll get fresh sun block at lunch.”

  There is an SUV on the shoulder of the highway. Our bus, which catches up to us every fifteen minutes or so, pulls ahead of the vehicle and stops. There are children in the SUV with their hands against the windows. Staring, learning. Their mother holds a tire iron as we approach. One of the back tires is flat.

  Our wardens don’t acknowledge the woman, but the bus driver gets out and talks to her. He is a large man, and he moves as slowly as we do.

  I skip over a scrap of tin foil in the grass in favor of a plastic drinking bottle. The weight of my litter satchel has become organic, like a tumor or a torn ligament. It pulls at my shoulder steadily, building pain. I am not permitted to switch the satchel to the other side until the wardens blow the whistle to do so.