Chimpanzee Page 5

  We are nothing but our entire lives here. I still feel calm—an aftereffect of the chemicals and sedatives Cynthia administered earlier. I think of Sireen’s skin in the sunlight, in the woods, and I wish we could build our house there. Around a tree, like Odysseus.

  She touches my neck, and I concentrate. This is how I contribute now. How I build a better life, family, place to be. Trading myself for our good.

  It’s important to remember that I love her.

  I’d made a friend.

  Ben, he said, finally. The bar was crowded when I arrived. There were pictures on the walls of the campus architecture. Which was looming just outside.

  He was another taciturn alcoholic. From my program, studying poetry. He knew Sireen, which darkened him. He had written poetry about how she didn’t love him and why this was the same thing as something more meaningful, like science.

  Meet Sireen, he said.

  She rolls over beside me. Brings those breasts against my ribcage. Divots her chin into my shoulder.

  “I read the doctor’s literature,” she says. Quiet. Straight into my skin. “About collateral memory damage.”

  We met when she was drunk and beautiful. Arms and legs in unsteady arcs.

  “To anything that pertains,” I say.

  Ben, Sireen said, extending a hand languidly from her seat. Sit down. She still had an accent then.

  My friend put Sireen’s hand in mine, to shake, because she was too drunk to coordinate it herself. He said, She’s another one from the math group—

  Non-positively curved geometry, Sireen said.

  One of Sireen’s neighbors, a woman, leaned into her. You look positively curved to me, darling! They laughed.

  Can I buy you a drink? I said.

  You know, Sireen said, I can predict your future with statistical theory. Her eyes widened, as if she’d impressed herself.

  My friend brought us drinks. Ben, I found out about the , he said. ’ - - .

  “I pertain,” Sireen says. We slip where she’s pressed against me, sweating like condensation. “Grad school was us. Beginning.”

  One semester, Sireen’s program got to her. It was too much, and she exhausted herself. We had to put her in the hospital, and she took incompletes for all of her classes. I took care of her, afterward, in her tiny apartment. I gave her everything she needed, and she fell in love for good.

  She laid on the sheets. The summer’s blue night louvered through uneven blinds. Naked against the heat. The sheets were topographic around us. Too soon. She wasn’t better yet. Wasn’t finished becoming worse. I was still worried about never-ending theories.

  She lips a whisper against my skin. “What will you forget?”

  “It’s all I can do, Sireen.”

  “I know,” she says.

  I’m sorry, she said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  I HAVE TO WAIT A LONG TIME BEFORE ROSIE TURNS ON THE light and summons me inside. Ten minutes. I don’t have anything to do, anything to read, standing there, so I listen to other workers converse quietly. We’re getting used to each other.

  When the light comes on, two young men, the ones who changed the white woman’s tire along the highway, emerge at once. I have never seen Rosie admit more than one worker at a time. They give me a good look, and I give it back, as if, eventually, we will learn to read each other’s minds. We might as well practice now.

  Rosie closes the windowless door behind his desk when I walk in. He moves piles of newspapers and circulars from his desk to the floor.

  “You saw the rockslide on the news?” Rosie says.

  West of town, in the mountains. It crippled the entire highway, and the expected repair costs are beyond both the state and the federal budgets. The newscasters reported talks with foreign investors to finance the work. Renewal from three states will absorb fifty percent of the workload.

  “Yes,” I say.

  Rosie grins. “You get to break rocks,” he says. “Just like old times.”

  He enters some information into his computer, points at the thumbprint scanner. I put my thumb in place, checking in. There are six other workers waiting in line outside.

  “But it isn’t all bad,” he says. “Two of your hours are just sitting in the bus. There and back.”

  “Yes, sir,” I say.

  “That big Methodist church downtown donated protein bars. Charity. You’ll get one at lunch.” He pulls one out of a drawer and unwraps it.

  “Yes, sir.” I look at the floor as I turn around. We’re having herbed rice and beans for dinner tonight. Sireen promised.

  “Cade,” Rosie says.

  I stand in front of the door and stare at my co-workers outside through the window. They watch, in line.

  “You know, I never went to college,” he says.

  He puts down the protein bar when I turn around. I can only see his eyes above the rim of his monitor.

  “You know,” I say, “I’m teaching a free course downtown. Writing, communication—that sort of thing.”

  “Is that what you’re doing.”

  It isn’t a question.

  There is a mansion in town. You can see it from the highway on your way into the mountains, where it seems small. Before, you could pay $40 to tour the inside. Learn the domestic secrets of the magnate who built it during the Gilded Age. When Civil War Reconstruction made white men rich. When they hired the men we’d freed.

  For $20 less, you could drive your car around the grounds, but you couldn’t get out. There used to be hundreds of acres of vineyards. There used to be guest houses and small hotels, done in the same style. You could visit during Christmas as a special event.

  Now, it is a club. People play golf upon the old vine beds. They swim and get massages and wave at the armed security guards on their ways in and out.

  The bus driver takes us off the highway, along the exit where the state’s brown road signs used to identify the mansion as a cultural destination. The rockslide is still fifty miles west, along the highway.

  We look at each other, at our wardens. No one says anything as the mansion’s security guards wave us through the front gate. We park behind a service building, where there is also a catering truck.

  You don’t get the same wardens every time. Like the crews, they rotate, along with the driver.

  The wardens stand. I can see our driver out of my window when he exits the cab. A man in a suit greets him—hands him an envelope—and the driver pulls money out of it. He starts counting.

  “Anyone here want to file a complaint?” one of the wardens says.

  We look away, hoping like students that they won’t call on us.

  “The alternative is to break rocks in the hills,” the other warden says.

  “You’ll be given rubber shoes to wear in the kitchen. Don’t touch them without permission. We see you bend over, that’s another day on your record.”

  The driver is satisfied. He signals the wardens.

  “Now, when we call your name, say ‘here.’” He pulls a small notepad out of his pocket. The other one is holding the worker manifest that Rosie brought him before we left.

  “Cade?”

  “Here.”

  Now they know. Whom to go after, if this gets out.

  I wait while they take attendance.

  Because I am the only one in the bar, because it is 12:15 in the afternoon—because I ordered hard liquor, the bartender is letting me chimp for free. Again. She’s good. A professional. Asks no questions. Which is why I had to ask her myself, for the goggles. I only have so much money for the afternoon, and drinks are important. Dimitri and Sireen are both at work. It’s Thursday, after all. She won’t be home until after dinner, which is to say, after our usual dinnertime, because she has a department meeting. Dinner is now whenever she gets home, not when we get hungry. Spaghetti tonight, which I’m good at.

  This is important. The meeting is important. Her department has to figure out what to do wit
h its vacant position.

  I’m not taking any chances this time. I’m already in the booth—I will not look at that carpet again while wearing these goggles. Apparently, sims have settings. Difficulty levels, which Dimitri didn’t tell me about. It also has networking capability. This bar offers access for free.

  I’m curious. I enable the network and set the difficulty level to its lowest. There is a tiny adjustment wheel on one of the earpieces. I need to see compulsion again. Obsession. I’m not interested in hallucinations or perversion. The menu offers thousands of available simulations.

  I sit still, quietly disturbed, and drink.

  What I’m seeing are feet. That is to say, the images appearing in my mind’s eye are feet. Mental seeing and vision are not connected, and there is no such thing as the mind’s eye.

  But whatever.

  The sim keeps stimulating disconnected images, none of which I care to see. Particularly annoying are the feet, which is why I think I keep seeing them. I’m looking down at them, as if they are my own—at the flip-flops they’re wearing.

  A network-connection request appears in my field of vision. I approve it.

  These flip-flops piss me off. They spin like synchronized propellers—their axes are the flip-flop support straps, which divide the large toe and the one beside it. I can’t control the image. I can’t make them stop. It is ridiculous, but watching, but counting. It doesn’t make me feel good. It keeps me from feeling bad.

  I hear a woman’s voice through the goggles’ earphones. When I glance at the TV behind the bar, I get a reprieve from the flip-flops. The TV is muted.

  “Authorities from the Center for Civic Renewal and the Downtown Chamber of Commerce believe the movement is tied to recent trends in social experimentation,” she says. Her voice sounds digitized.

  The bartender is in the back. I am alone.

  “Leah Johnson, a senior poverty studies major at Central, leads a field team surveying grassroots governance—”

  “Hello?” I say. Out loud.

  I decide to ignore the flip-flops, which creates a sensation of nausea.

  “—the unemployed or underemployed under 30.”

  “Hey,” I say.

  “Yes?” she says.

  “What are you doing?”

  “What do you want?”

  “Who are you?” I say.

  “Who are you?”

  “Ben.”

  The bartender is back. She ignores me. Ignoring the flip-flops isn’t working. I wonder whose feet these were. Whose life of hell. It is an asinine simulation, an introduction, the result of setting the difficulty to minimal.

  “Really?” she says.

  “Yes, really.”

  “You shouldn’t give out your real name.”

  “Oh.”

  “Hold on,” she says. “Thirty percent chance of rain. For this time of year, we are at positive two inches. Northern Georgia and the Piedmont, meanwhile, are still struggling with a now ninety-day drought.

  “That’s better,” she says.

  “What are you chimping?” I say. “Why are you telling me the news?”

  “I’m not telling you anything, and it’s none of your business.”

  “Right.” I need another drink anyway, and my head is starting to hurt. I’ve had enough.

  “What are you chimping?” she says.

  “Fuck you.”

  Attendance has grown. They sit clustered, in a stadium rectangle—up the rows, into the air. They have grouped themselves against the others in Sentinel Park. Like a class. Those from the first day are sitting in roughly the same places, as if identified there.

  Just like real students.

  I can tell they are in the same places because Zoe is in the same place. She is wearing a sundress today, a blue one, and her dreads are bound against the top of her head.

  They—someone—brought me something to write on. There at the bottom of the amphitheater, where the answers lie, where we always speak the truth from below, is an easel. It is duct-taped in places, but there is a large pad of bound newsprint upon it.

  There are at least twenty of them now.

  Up here, on the sidewalk. People stare.

  “So, why do I say that ethos is the most important?” I say.

  Some of them are taking notes. A few smoke cigarettes. Most just stare, underwhelmed. I am the weakest of this afternoon’s street performers.

  “Because,” one of them says, “we have to believe what you’re saying?”

  “I can make you believe using logical data,” I say, “or I can manipulate you into doing so with pathos.”

  “I don’t know then.”

  “I said everything begins by making the audience pay attention.”

  The policeman, up on the street level, where the sidewalk chessboards and hotdog vendors are, is paying attention. He watches us without moving.

  “Will logic make you pay attention?” I say.

  No.

  “Will pathos?”

  No. They think they know how to play the academically loaded question game.

  “Of course it will,” I say. “I can certainly make you pay attention if I can manipulate your emotions. Who earns more handouts? An able-bodied transient, or one without legs, injured in the war?”

  “Then what?” Zoe says.

  “It’s because,” I say, “ethos is the only one of the three that belongs to you. Pathos and logos reside with the speaker. Ethos is your idea of why, how, or to what extent I should be believed.”

  One of them turns around and looks at the cop. Intuitive. I’ve seen him with Zoe, before and after class. David? Something.

  “What did I say, before, about speaking?” I say.

  “We’re only ever talking to ourselves,” David says, returning his attention to the class. The cop has wandered off.

  “So if ethos belongs to you,” I say, “how do I manipulate it?”

  I motion for a cigarette from one on the first row. He gives it hurriedly.

  They are quiet. Cars move, people chat on the sidewalks above, or in the empty space around our classroom.

  Finally: “You don’t?” Zoe says.

  “Which is why it’s the most important—the most dangerous. I want what’s yours, but you cannot give it to me, so I will do everything I can to make it an advantage, not a weakness.”

  “Including deception?”

  “Of course. Now, hand in your introductory essays.”

  “You didn’t bring your essay?”

  “I did it,” Zoe says. “It’s just not here.”

  Of course. Can I run back to my dorm room? My computer froze. No, I don’t have a copy.

  “Come see,” she says.

  Recruitment is a discipline unto itself. Governments, revolutions, and religions know this. It is an application of rhetoric—how to align someone’s disposition with an ideal, an action, which is usually anathema to personal fulfillment. How do you convince a suicide bomber? How do you sell laundry detergent? How do you sell university enrollment?

  You don’t. Nothing can be described, nothing portrayed or sold, in any fashion that induces action. You sell, instead, a world without your product. You sell longing and regret, which are cheap. You sell hindsight, insurance—which is nothing but a life without.

  Which is why, then—when they made us recruiters, when they forced faculty to turn away from their articles, and conferences, and evening dinners—it didn’t work. Enrollment is everything. The university needed more money. More students. More promises. And what is life without education? Never mind repossession, loss of self, being less than all you can be, writ large and terrifying. Universities employ salespeople whose job it is to sell un-education, to recruit. But they could only do so much. So the administration made us do it, too. Applied rhetoric. Education in action. Correcting perception.

  The first of many small losses of self.

  But the initiative came late in the term—handed down in departmental meetings I didn�
�t attend. Because I already knew. I was already giving out “A”s because why the hell not? The sciences were exempt—they were forced to secure more grants. To fund a better fertilizer, a new math, or cheaper bombs.

  I dialed the phone number printed on my register. Someone, somewhere. Adjusted my earpiece.

  “May I speak to [name]?” I said.

  “It’s pronounced [name].”

  “My apologies. I’ve argued for IPA transcriptions.”

  “What?”

  “May I speak to [name]? This is Dr. Cade from Central University.”

  “Oh! Yes. Hold on.”

  Muted scrambling. The university. Yes, to you!

  “Hello.”

  “Hello, [name]. This is Dr. Cade from Central University. I’d like to talk to you about our languages and cultural studies program.”

  “Okay.”

  “This conversation may be recorded for training purposes. Is that all right, [name]?”

  “Sure.”

  “Have you chosen a university yet?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t. Particularly not this one.”

  “What?”

  “Do you know anything about HVAC repair or installation?”

  “What is that?”

  “What about locksmithing?”

  “Like, picking locks?”

  “Both of these professions earn more money than I do. Enjoy greater job security. Do you have a new car, [name]?”

  “No.”

  “Do you want one? Nice clothes? An apartment with granite counter-tops?”

  “Sure, I guess.”

  “Do you know what an aircraft marshaller is, [name]? It’s the person who use neon wands to wave planes in and out of terminal gates.”