Chimpanzee Read online

The driver shouts two names into our crew. We all stop to see. They do as they’re told, and the rear warden makes them dump their litter gear before they approach the SUV.

  The mother is slender, blonde. The two men, from our crew, are black. The only black men on the crew today. They change her tire while the driver fingers his sidearm.

  I find spent shotgun shells in a pile. Metal and plastic. I have to raise my hand.

  There are some things I can’t explain. Sireen has her own Ph.D., has written her own papers, is (in many ways) smarter than I am.

  Yet, when we go somewhere, I drive. We divide our household duties along mythic lines. Other people, other cultures, once created gods to keep household identity straight. They projected the hearth, the home, and killing other people into the stars. Into the hills. Into anyplace strange enough to be something else.

  We still know those ancient rites. I mow the yard. Clean the dishes. Handle things that involve manual tools, like screwdrivers, or bow saws, or kits for fitting gas caps with protective locks. She uses her hands, kneading flat bread or pizza dough. Tucks her fingers between folds of softened fabric. Puts things in old wooden drawers.

  When we leave town, like now, we no longer go to spend money. We aren’t hunting for antiques, or exploring new restaurants, or drinking familiar beers in strange pubs. Now, when we leave, it’s simply to walk someplace new. To hike new trees—any trees at all. It’s cheap.

  We’re driving west, crossing a river into what remains of the Qualla Boundary, the Cherokee land trust, where we will hike upon earth with its own history.

  The highway is litter-free.

  “Did Dimitri tell you about his article?” Sireen says.

  I take the opportunity to glance at her bronzed knee, where it escapes her cargo shorts. She almost looks like one of them, where we’re going, those Cherokee. The sun is in her eyes while I watch what the car’s wave motions do to her body. We dip and lift differently, sitting a foot apart, and it draws the eye.

  “What?”

  She looks at me, turning that sun my direction. “At the bar?”

  “Which article?”

  “He had another one accepted.”

  “Jesus. That’s, what? This year?”

  “Three. He said he might buy you a drink, to celebrate.”

  “Right.”

  She sees a house alongside a lake as we skirt a roadway levy. These days, we see houses. We construct worlds based on how our distributed neural networks source “need.” A house has become primary. Abstractly, it thinks us, and we have become territorial. We protect Sireen’s credit rating like our young, for it is the only one we have.

  I look across her cheekbones, the gleam of everything on her skin. But I don’t see that house. She’s smiling. Always. Even when she isn’t.

  Why are you smiling? I said. I had a hand up over my eyes, just so I could see her doing it against the sun. There were tiny, flesh-toned opals of sweat on her lip. On mine, too, where they didn’t feel like opals.

  I’m not, she said.

  But she was. She always was. Sometimes even when she was sleeping.

  You’re crazy, I said. It’s fucking hot. It was a booster sale, for her graduate student association. Raising money for some new kind of something the university wouldn’t pay for. Even back then.

  But it’s working, she said. The university should have just paid for it, instead of watching me help Sireen sell second-hand books in an overflow parking lot. Her friends stood around other tables, doing their own sweating for the departmental good.

  We’d put up flyers. Summer sessions were a tough time to get people’s attention on campus.

  She kissed me. Connecting sweat and heatflesh. I wiped my lip unconsciously, afterward, and she traced a finger across my cheekbone, like wiping a tear.

  I faked a smile, just to keep up.

  There are signs when you get close to the Boundary that say “Welcome.” But that’s not what they’re trying to say.

  Most of the tourist shops along the main avenue have closed. The casino still operates, but we haven’t gone. Primarily because you can’t drink in there. But plenty of other people go. It still does good business.

  We pass young men in parking lots, day laboring in their own city. Standing, smoking. There are more signs, more posters and handbills, printed in the tribe’s native language than there used to be. The dances and outdoor productions and traditional games don’t attract crowds anymore. The Tribal Council used to organize such things, to correct the discourse regarding tribal identity. While turning a small profit.

  The churches still operate. The schools are still open. Smooth-skinned, shirtless boys, white and Indian, play footbag in the yard, basketball on the blacktop. Girls gather in groups, to legislate how things are going. How to present themselves. How to get away with what needs doing. Some smoke in clandestine pockets, but no one cares, least of all the teachers, who are inside, out of the heat, doing anything else.

  People wander around the town—the jobless, like a horde. Later, they will cook frozen Renewal Welfare-issued lasagnas, or meals-in-a-box, or local bear meat—still herbed all these traditional years with sumac. They will find things to do, primarily in small groups, the same way we do, back in our town. They will talk about what they haven’t found yet—work, hope: a way to share the Depression—which is not what Sireen and I do because it would be a one-sided conversation.

  Ours is the only car in the small, graveled lot at the trail head when we get there. You’re supposed to put $5 in the padlocked entry-fee box. The money goes toward keeping up the trail, but there’s no one here to check.

  We hold hands as we walk between basswoods and pitch pines and black walnut trees. We walk among so many nameless things. It’s cheap, hiking. And it brings us together. A pursuit we’ve loved since grad school, when we had even less money than we do now.

  “I think I need something,” I say.

  “Like what?” Sireen says, looking elsewhere. You never look at each other when you’re hiking. There’s too much to see. Animal awareness. You talk into the distance.

  “To do. Other than therapy and Renewal.”

  “That’s a good idea.”

  I look anyway—I look at her legs, at the camber of her shins and the just-visible veins behind her knees. I can see scars, like granite chips, on the bulbs of her ankles, where, at some point, she has cut herself shaving.

  “What would you do?” she says.

  “I don’t know. Volunteer.”

  “You should,” she says. There is a swing to our arms now. Our handclasp is a fulcrum, dappled by the sunlight through green things. Her ponytail brushes the backs of her shoulders with the same swing, and I wish it could come far enough—just enough—to touch my shoulders, too. A touch she doesn’t even control. A natural phenomenon.

  “Maybe volunteer teaching. Writing and such,” I say.

  “Teach who?”

  “Whoever. The public.”

  Her smile becomes difficult. “What will they do with a writing class? They don’t have jobs.”

  She doesn’t resist when I lead us off the trail, up a confetti slope, where last fall’s dead leaves still pile the earth.

  “It’s not about them,” I say.

  She watches the ground now. “I’m sorry. It’s a good idea, Ben.”

  This is it. Light and air and how shoulders look, outside. The flush on her skin is everything. It’s important to remember that I love my wife. Our lives here. It’s important to remember that we are not in charge.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  TECHNICALLY, “VISUAL” RHETORIC COUNTED. IT WAS PART of the curriculum—something worth teaching, during introductions to rhetoric and composition because it communicated the principles of presentation and design. There are visual sciences behind this. The eye moves to things in threes. You’re not supposed to use positive and negative spaces in halves. You’re supposed to carve your space according to the golden mean, a spiral, mapping the imag
e, page, whatever with the interstices of classical aesthetics. Points of maximum visual strike. It’s the principle behind constellations.

  I didn’t teach any of them that this parallels principles of consciousness like motivated perception, revisionist memory, semantic priming. Because they wouldn’t get it anyway.

  But the artists are wrong. The eye is drawn to halves. To symmetry. When we wandered plains and savannahs and scrub-bushed basins, we learned to look first at things that appeared the same on both sides of a vertical axis. Because that’s exactly how it looked when something larger, something hungrier was giving you the look. An eye per side, a nostril, an ear.

  Like I said, everything begins by making the audience pay attention. Giving them attention is giving them awareness. Being. Life itself.

  Designing an advertisement is a good example.

  No one attends concerts advertised only in delicate, serif fonts. Unless the text is blocked and used as an element of design itself. No one attends debates, votes for presidents, or stops motor vehicles.

  No one attends free lectures on university-level introduction to rhetoric and composition, in Sentinel Park, Tuesday afternoon—all welcome.

  So I used a stencil of a chimpanzee, from an online database, and placed my ad in The Mountainist. Small-block Arial in the bottom left third of the page. Something stimulating—popular. Revolutionary.

  “Everything begins by making your audience pay attention,” I say.

  There are eleven of them, here in Sentinel Park, listening. During the last few days, while Sireen and I waited for the first day of class, she maintained delicate interest in the idea. She asked questions and offered suggestions. She brought home reams of paper and notepads and red pens from her department’s supply closet—none of which, we knew, I would use. We both knew there was no point to this.

  Nearby, a solitary Renewal worker sweeps the concrete. I don’t see his warden anywhere.

  “Communication is not a social endeavor,” I say. “When you speak—or write—to an audience, you project yourself. You become both subject and object because you must extend yourself into a position of understanding what you are saying.”

  They are not understanding what I am saying. They are squinting into the overcast glow, leaning forward or backward on their cement slabs. Trying to be comfortable.

  “Think of it like this,” I say: “each of us understands understanding. We know what it is to read or listen or watch and get the message, but we don’t know—can’t know—how this experience goes for others. It’s phenomenology.”

  No response. Like reptiles, out for the light and the heat. Only accidentally in class. They find themselves here—in any classroom—because it just happened. Not for a good reason.

  “So, when you speak or write or perform,” I say, “you construct your message for yourself.”

  One of them is not leaning. She sits upright, in that way, that posture that somehow girls learn. Sireen sits the same way. I barely notice the others around this girl—fallen pillars on their amphitheater slabs. She raises a caryatid arm, dreadlocks like fingers of blonde stone across her shoulders. It is sculptural hair, a doll’s hair—the best stone carvers can do.

  “Yes?” I say.

  “But others respond to what we say,” she says. “What is the difference between actually communicating with someone and only imagining yourself doing it?”

  “What is your name?”

  “Zoe.”

  Zoe is in her early twenties. She wears oversized sunglasses, distressed leggings, and expensive shoes. Likely, she’s a trustafarian, living in one of these condos downtown. Pretending in that way that goes well beyond simply simulating poverty. Because for whatever fucking reason, destitution is fashionable.

  “Look, Zoe: you create your message to make sense for the audience—really, the message creates itself, and ‘you’ have nothing to do with it, but never mind.”

  She blinks her sculptural eyelids. Slowly, like erosion.

  “The audience that you imagine, the audience’s understanding that you imagine, is based on your own. It’s based on your previous experiences. You can never experience your audience’s minds, so you’re always communicating with yourself.”

  “So there is no difference?”

  “Not really.”

  “You said we have to make the audience pay attention,” she says.

  “Everything begins that way.”

  “Well.” She crosses her arms. Her bra is darker than her shirt, which is not something I should notice. “How does imagining ourselves make others pay attention?”

  “Are you paying attention?” I say.

  I watch Zoe file out with the others, back up the steps, into the real world. She has moved beyond view when I hear a motorcycle engine start.

  One of the other students approaches me, at the bottom.

  “Dr. Cade?” he says.

  “Yes?”

  “Could you spare a dollar?”

  Cynthia is behind me. I am in her office, reclining on her therapeutic sofa, which doubles as a medical device. I lie here, field dressed by the sofa’s built-in diagnostic wires. It listens to my heartbeat. It measures my respiration. It touches my brow delicately with sanitary adhesion-pad fingertips. It gives me what I need through a polyvinyl umbilicus inserted into my wrist. I see what I’m supposed to—which seems to be this room, unaffected—through the sofa’s elastic goggles.

  Change blindness. She will make sure I don’t see what I’m not supposed to see.

  Cynthia is nothing but a warm voice in the darkness. The sedative she has given me through the sofa creates sensations of wave motion. I am tidal, and only later will I experience the motion sickness that repossession therapy causes.

  “Do you want me to think?” I say. “Should I try to . . . summon ideas?”

  “No, Ben.”

  I can hear the smile in her voice. The patience. She’s a psychiatrist—I wonder how much student debt she carries. How much she’s paid for this.

  “Why don’t you tell me a story,” she says. “About graduate school. Something you enjoyed.”

  “If I tell you this story, will I lose it?”

  “Parts of it. It might feel like someone else’s story. As if you can’t remember if you experienced it or heard about it.”

  I don’t believe her. Memory is not an act of recall, it is an act of creation. We create ourselves, every moment, in our own image.

  But it doesn’t matter.

  “All right,” I say. “The most difficult course I took, during my doctoral program, was simply called ‘Syntax.’ It was taught by the director of my program. He was a theoretical syntactician, a psycholinguist. One of those who developed the ideas behind the indexing technology.”

  “He sounds brilliant,” Cynthia says.

  “Syntax was exactly what it sounds like—a survey of models for explaining how language can mean anything, how its mathematics transcend vocal and aural abstraction and move, within the very materials of our brains.

  “But you must understand,” I say, “my director is a very gregarious person. He’s a great fan of poetry, of people, of anything that means anything to anyone. He’s funny.”

  I can hear Cynthia smile across the wine-dark sea. The sofa cushions deflate ever so slightly beneath me.

  I am sinking.

  “I was near the top of my class—there had been nothing he had introduced that I didn’t, after some effort, finally understand.

  “But eventually, there was. One of my classmates asked my director to explain the concepts behind his formative theory of syntax. So, he did. He taught it slowly—he wrote everything on the chalkboard.”

  “A chalkboard?”

  “He preferred them.”

  “Go on.”

  “With each new piece of his masterwork, he would turn, he would watch. He checked to make sure that we were following along. One by one, fewer and fewer of us were able to follow him. Fewer of us were able to assoc
iate ideas the way he did. And as he went further, as he tried to reveal the deep structures of this theory, this theory that explains our most basic, our most primary of abstractions—language itself—he spoke less to us and more to himself. He stopped checking to see if we were following along. I remember looking around at my classmates and watching them, like divers too long under the water. I could see when they could no longer see.

  “My director filled the chalkboard with linguistic equations. He was sweating as he worked, and there were only two or three of us who were still following. Who still deserved to be his students.”

  “Go on.”

  “He had nearly filled the chalkboard, but he wasn’t finished, so he picked up another piece of chalk and began finishing his equation by writing on the brick wall beside the board, clutching the chalk like a charred stick, like he was cave painting. He wrote with both hands at the same time. It was beautiful.”

  “Go on.”

  “Then I felt pressure on my eyelids, like staring at a strobe light. I looked at his mosaic, at everything he’d written. I looked at my notes. They were nonsense. I had no idea how he’d gotten from the beginning to the end. I was lost, and so were the other two students—the last two. I knew, then, for the first time, that I simply wasn’t smart enough. I felt calm. For the first time all semester.

  “It felt much the way I feel now.”

  “Why do you think that is?”

  I think about the truth.

  “I don’t fucking know.”

  “Do you feel different?” Sireen says.

  “I feel hung over.”

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t really remember.”

  I finished vomiting hours ago. We are lying in bed, beneath only a sheet. Because it’s hot. Sireen has it pulled down to her hips, and I watch how the moon’s blue light makes her skin seem violet, her breasts wine-dark.