Chimpanzee Read online

  “Ok.”

  “They’re very important, [name]. An essential service, like plumbing. It’s a good trade, but I can teach you the secrets of consciousness, being, and the existential nature of language, here at Central University. Would you like me to teach you these things, [name]?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Fuck you, [name]. Have a nice day.”

  I follow Zoe out of the park. A few students stop me, here and there, on the stairs. Shaking hands, saying thanks. Can I make up the first assignment?

  Up top, at street-level, I follow Zoe. It’s awkward: my artificial student-essays and notes clutched against my chest, walking single-file—at least David took the newsprint and promised to bring it back, so I wouldn’t have to carry it out of the park. There isn’t enough room on the sidewalk to walk abreast. Transients and children and people in distribution lines take up most of the pavement. Zoe seems to know every tenth person.

  Sireen sends me a text message. Finished? How’d it go?

  “Still back there?” Zoe says.

  Someone must have handed Zoe a cup of coffee. A cup of something. She holds it at a right angle to her chest, looking at her shoulder, which, in this context, stands in for me. Turning to look at me fully would mean colliding with something in front of her. This is how we source gaze. Only, she owns hers. Young, female, liberated. I am male, and I know enough gender theory that I have been trained to be ashamed of mine.

  In this instance, she is substituting me for the tiny hairs—soft blonde—standing on her polished scapula. Bright white in the sun. Easier and safer to see than me.

  “Yes. Still here.”

  Coming home? Sireen texts.

  “Good,” Zoe says. “It’s not far.”

  Soon, I text. Chatting with some of the students.

  “Good,” I say.

  Love you.

  Zoe walks us across the street, between pedi-cabs and smart cars. The architecture casts parallelograms, trapezoid shadows—its faces and finials and loft-apartments. We watch police on foot patrol. There is screaming somewhere in the arts district.

  “So how did you come up with this idea?” Zoe says.

  We walk abreast now.

  “The assignment?”

  “The class.”

  “I didn’t invent class, Zoe.”

  She adjusts a free-hanging dread as we make a turn. We’re off-street now, between and behind buildings. Fire escapes throw new shadows.

  “People are talking about you,” she says.

  “What do they say?”

  “The new Socrates. A teacher for the people.”

  She laughs.

  Finally.

  “Here it is,” Zoe says.

  “This is your essay?”

  “Among other things.”

  I think about bedroom silence. About the house Sireen and I will buy. How I will spend my evenings quietly, un-educated. A full suppression of identity. By that time, I will have reduced myself to zero, and I won’t need beer, or sex, or drugs to do it.

  Homeownership. Peace. The fulfillment of all things, our parents tell us. Our government tells us. I think about standing with a student—a woman half my size in a sundress and sandals, five blocks deep into a half-abandoned commercial borough. I think about why people don’t turn their essays in on time.

  Her essay lies on the concrete. She has written it upon the skin of a young man her age with a black marker. He lies limp against an un-refurbished Art Deco brick foundation. He wears only a pair of black shorts like a dark flag against his pale, hairless skin.

  He doesn’t move. There is a wheatpaste poster of a chimpanzee slathered onto the bricks above him.

  “Among other things?” I say.

  “I also needed to create a proposal,” Zoe says. “The introductory essay was perfect.”

  His forehead reads ‘Everything begins by making your audience pay attention.’

  “What is this proposing?” I say.

  She shrugs and lights a cigarette. I motion for one, and she hands it over. I look both ways down the alley.

  “Are you going to read it?”

  I am her teacher.

  “Of course I am,” I say. He doesn’t look like he’s breathing.

  I ignore my phone when it vibrates in my pocket.

  “Did I get your attention, Dr. Cade?”

  “Yes.”

  “So I’m doing well?”

  “Do you think I’m creating the meaning you intended?” I say.

  She looks at him. “I don’t know.”

  “Do you think I’m stacking images and unpacking ideas just the way you did, communicating this to yourself?”

  “Are you?”

  “Probably not.”

  “I see.”

  “But Zoe.” I touch her shoulder, and she plants her student’s gaze back on me. It’s different. “I’m paying attention.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  SIREEN AND I GO ON A HOME PRE-POSSESSION TOUR. IT’S sponsored by the realtor’s office, downtown, with which we have decided to do business. The tour is free, and it includes coffee, croissants, and informative guidebooks with glossy printed photo sheets and professional copy, perfect bound.

  At 7:30 AM, we file into a chartered tour bus. Air-conditioned, pneumatic brakes. It rides like a Cadillac. I let Sireen have the window seat. I prefer the aisle, where I can see a hand-made chimpanzee decal stuck to the footboard. The board’s rubber ridges have worn free of the sticker—it only exists in the troughs between. A poor-resolution printout from some nature magazine.

  Because the tour is full, the bus drives through downtown. The guide describes prominent buildings, explains the architecture. Our town was spared Civil War damage because it is tucked away in the tail-end of the Appalachians. The town went bankrupt later, Art Deco poor, and spent eighty years paying its debts rather than filing for relief. The town lacked money for too long to build anything newer—now, the architecture is culture. Identity. The last seven sitting presidents have all vacationed in its most historic hotel. Enjoyed its hillside golf. Its distant Smoky Mountains.

  We skip dangerous parts of town, maneuvering through boroughs. Our first stop is a recently renovated ’20s-era bungalow. Its owners defaulted on their home improvement loan, so it is now in short sale. They are fourth-generation owners.

  “Are you excited?” Sireen says. She is wearing a sundress today—a rarity. Her position as a professor is better suited to pants. She smiles. The hair on the right side of her forehead moves in the shaft of tubed air blowing from the conical twist-vent overhead. Her hair is down today.

  I smile back. The fabric of her dress is thin between my palm and her thigh. It is pale against her skin. The next few days on her ovulation calendar are important. She told me before we left. It thrums her, every time, even if it hasn’t worked yet, and I can see it in everything she does. The statistics and calculation of it.

  “Yes.”

  I am.

  Every home on this tour is either in short sale or has been foreclosed upon. Our realtor is only one branch of a national franchise. It offers signed affidavits from every bank that owns a property on this tour. Short sale offers are guaranteed a response within fourteen days, and the banks are prepared to accept up to 40% losses, should appraisal values not match asking price. Several inspection firms are also partnered in this pyramid. Ready to go.

  The bungalow sits at the top of a hill in a mixed neighborhood. There are tenement apartments and rent-controlled houses about a mile away. But that no longer means what it used to mean.

  It is a red brick house with white trim. It boasts a study with original windows and molding. Bookshelves.

  Sireen looks forward. She is five houses ahead, in the guidebook.

  We tour our lives together in these houses. It is a fast and easy way to spend the early part of the day. Living ahead of oneself in a place one doesn’t—could—own. The selling points of our futures together, in these places, appear in cl
ean, bold font in our guide. WINTER VIEWS OF THE MOUNTAINS. Sireen in her bare feet—pads of feminine skin against the STAINED CONCRETE. She wears one of my shirts, taking a break for a glass of water from the CUSTOM FILTRATION SYSTEM. She brines Thanksgiving turkeys overnight in a five-gallon bucket that we keep in the MUDROOM, OR SOLARIUM. Will keep. She grades papers in her study, wearing sweat pants and faded alma mater T-shirts. She complains about her committee, a fully fluted glass of pinot in one hand, her anger in the other.

  She spins past the ORIGINAL WAINSCOTING in this one, past the CONDITIONED PLASTER in that, her face alight with tenure. Publication. A new course approval. Travel funds.

  I see her dirty fingers in these HANGING FLOWERBEDS—her domestic anger between the REFURBISHED BALUSTERS, upstairs. I am on my knees in this half-bath, sick from too much eggnog. It speckles my dark turtleneck. Winks in the lights of our Christmas tree.

  A baby cries somewhere.

  There are two houses left on the tour, but this one is only three blocks from where we live, so we’re done. We’ve seen enough. We hide in a pass-through closet while everyone else vacates the premises. We are having a good time, skipping out. In grad school, after we’d started dating, we would cut classes to meet for shots of house whiskey at the campus bar. We would kiss it from each other’s lips, like drinking bitters to remedy some discomfort caused, really, by drinking too much. When I could, I would press the bulb of my upper lip against her teeth, when that smile climbed. Because I could. We would spend our student loan disbursements on cigarettes and small gifts. She likes chocolate.

  I liked how it made her bounce around the room, when she’d had some. I gave her a box, and we each ate one before taking our shots.

  Oh, Ben, she said. It’s disgusting.

  I chased her around the billiards table, just to be obnoxious, and she could barely speak for all the breathing and grinning.

  You ruined chocolate, she said.

  And whiskey, I said.

  We hold hands down this hallway—a ranch-style. Long and bricked and endless. Quiet walls. The master bedroom is carpeted.

  “What do you think?” she says.

  “I love you.”

  “About the house, ass.” She slaps. She laughs through white teeth.

  “It’s fine.”

  In the bedroom, the light is pale dark.

  “I like it.”

  I can see black walnut leaves through the blinds. Someone else’s household dust is still upon the sill. Sireen’s hips are strong against mine. The gears and schedules of her flesh. Conception thinks her. Even—especially—here.

  “I like all of them,” she says.

  This is not my home—not our bedroom, with its histories and identities and roles. Its failing duties. This house is what I am giving. What I can get. The duty of the contemporary male, who really shouldn’t want to provide. It’s antiquated. So he gives himself away instead, securing futures. When my father was my age, he spent afternoons in the garage, routing trim or leveling bookshelves. He cut pipe for leaky faucets and showed me how to hold knives. He would do these things on weekends, or after work, when pocketed time made simple crafts meaningful.

  I do not own power tools.

  I pull Sireen’s dress up over her hips. They are alluvial—polished stone in the room-light, dressed with cotton and lace. The shelves of her ribcage open like vents when she lifts her arms.

  “I like anything you want,” I say.

  I mean it.

  There is empty money in this place—the utilities still function because it must appeal to people like us, even empty, if it is to sell. No one buys a hot house, a stale fridge—a dry toilet. We leave the lights off so no one knows we’re here.

  The water is hot, thanks to the active gas line and the tankless water heater, which saves the average homeowner a great deal of money, given a long enough timeline. I learned this from our guide book. This shower is lined with Travertine tile, and it is not enclosed. One wall remains open because the rain-flow showerhead, with digital temperature control, does not spray in a wide enough cone to dampen the floor. The shower is large enough that condensation doesn’t gather on the telescopic shaving mirror.

  Beneath that water, that heat. I am. Some Tibetan meditation on some alpine bluff. A waterfall as God—enlightenment is the pressure of falling things—water, peace, gravity. You try to think of nothing, be nothing, reduce the complications of yourself to something primal. Something that sleeps and fucks, looks askance at natural threats without worrying. No one has a Ph.D. in the shower. No one has sex like a genius.

  No one lives in this house.

  “Are we doing the right thing?” Sireen says.

  “Yes,” I say. “All we can do is stay smart. Be smarter than the situation.”

  “It wasn’t supposed to go like this,” she says.

  “What?”

  “Like this.”

  That makes me smile. An old smile. One that belonged to a graduate student in a bar. Angry and loud—opinions about all things. About theory, my director, women. I am the collected lineage of my fathers—the bloodline. The brightest star. My grandfather was a plumber. One of them. The other sold mattresses and grew tomatoes. One of our ancestors fought in the Revolutionary War. I am the brilliant fluid in my mother’s belly—the stars and sine waves of her ambitions, first dates, girlhood dolls. What she expected of a son like me.

  I am Sireen’s childhood dream—the husband she awaited.

  “We don’t have to do this,” she says.

  I shouldn’t have left her alone in this room, where I couldn’t be touched. Laughed with among friends around cheap drinks, sharing ignorance, even that first night in her apartment.

  I percuss a finger along the knobs of her spine. Which is absurd. No one owns a spine. An elbow. Feelings. There is no owner in the mind—no extra-planar ghost steering identity from a magic realm.

  Sireen is her spine. I am my drumming finger. Selfhood is just the brain behaving, like running is just legs moving.

  But she is my wife. I feel it, from forehead to groin. It’s important to remember that I love her. I have to. There is so much to lose to Cynthia’s machines. So much of me tied up in how I became so, with Sireen, studying. The collateral damage is our history—why, for example, I love her at all.

  “Yes,” I say, “we should do this. It’ll be okay.”

  In our own house, in our bed, we don’t touch. We source romance with boundaries. A bed is two halves, which are sometimes impenetrable. Space and breathing and unconsciousness of one’s own. We must drool and snore and stink on our own halves. We must dampen sheets with natural body oils, at different rates, between linen-washings.

  Or else, what is marriage?

  A married house is a system of designated spaces, regularly used. Which is how selfhood works. I have to remember. Designated practices, routine patterns. Our homes are what we learned from our parents. Our first house is every house afterward—we measure them all this way. Religious faith is family lineage, not belief. Political party loyalty is the preservation of grandma’s Saturday pancakes, uncle’s birdhouse collection, father’s cancer.

  This is what it means to me, buying a house.

  You don’t sell houses or rhetorical disposition. You sell their lack.

  I’m not supposed to write any of this down. During repossession. It’s a violation of the agreement. But no one will know. Eventually, not even me.

  Sometimes, Sireen joins me and Dimitri at the bar. We can buy cigarettes on these occasions because she feels more guilty than I do about taking them from him. About both of us taking them. He gives them to her sometimes on their way to work.

  “It’s gorgeous,” she says, leaning in to me.

  Dimitri is a bachelor. He appreciates fine things, like designer aftershave, tailored suits, or original kitchen hardware. He is good at appreciating all things over the rim of his tumbler.

  “We’re thinking of putting an offer in,” she says.
/>   “That’s great,” he says. Orders a round of the good bourbon. Another celebration.

  “It’s only a twenty-minute walk from your place,” she says. A little drunk.

  “Which one?”

  “The red-brick bungalow,” I say.

  “That’s fucking fantastic,” he says. “You kids.”

  I drink my bourbon quickly when it comes. Sireen holds my hand under the table.

  “It’s going to be great,” I say.

  “Yeah.”

  “Sounds like.”

  “Hey,” he says, “how’s class?”

  They both look at me.

  “Good, you know. The students listen.”

  “Seriously?” he says. “I can’t get mine to stay awake.”

  Sireen laughs. Deep, sensual. The female drinking laugh. “Mine are fucking zombies,” she says.

  “Some of them have given me a nickname,” I say.

  “Yeah?”

  “Socrates. ‘An educator for the people.’”

  They laugh with me, then we fall silent, watching the waitress negotiate the bar, the crowd. The drinks.

  “Hey,” he says, “you guys want to chimp?”

  Sireen looks at him over her drink. “I don’t know,” she says.

  “It’s nothing,” Dimitri says.

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  He offered us tickets to a forthcoming show, downtown, when we got here. No one we’ve heard of, but a band he likes.

  We told him no.

  “Which sim do you have in mind?” Sireen says.

  “A new one,” he says. “Called ‘Jim and Carol.’”

  “The fuck?” I say.

  “They’ve more or less perfected it. Entire identities—this couple is codified and indexed and bat-shit crazy in love.”

  Here we go.

  “It’s supposed to be intense—in a good way. Like taking X.”

  “Who will you be?” Sireen says.

  “The friend,” he says, “over for a visit.”