Chimpanzee Read online

  “Okay.”

  “Okay. Let’s do it.”

  Dimitri orders the goggles. A martini.

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “That’s okay,” Cynthia says. She smiles. It’s supposed to be for me, but she looks too quickly down into her notes. Smiles at them instead. “We can talk about something else.”

  Rosie orders me onto a stool near the Renewal suits while he checks the others in. He is sending them into the mountains again. I am not going.

  The bus leaves. Plainclothes monitors disappear in different directions down the sidewalks, beyond the chain link and razor wire that lines the edge of this lot. One warden remains, and he secures the gates with a padlock.

  Rosie is checking his worker manifests against the display on his monitor. From here, I can’t see what he sees.

  “You’re working on the lot today,” he says.

  “Yes, sir.”

  He looks up and squints at me, like a stranger in the corner. It takes him a minute to figure things out.

  “That means trimming the weeds, hosing off the trailer, etc., etc. There’s a list.”

  “Like chores,” I say.

  “You think that’s funny?”

  “No, sir.”

  “I give my son lists of chores,” he says. “It’s important.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  That stops him. He puts his manifest down and swivels his chair. He’s got a look in his eyes. A face that sweats in this tepid trailer. He’s got a blue denim jacket on the back of his chair. He wears a short-sleeved button-down that exposes a surgical scar along one arm.

  I understand. I’m sweating in here, too. This suit.

  “Why do you do that?” he says.

  “What?”

  “‘Sir.’ All the time ‘sir.’”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “You’re in charge.”

  “Did your students call you ‘sir?’”

  “Some of them.”

  He stands up and unlocks the door behind his desk. “Come over here,” he says. There is no chair beside his desk, so I carry the stool with me across the trailer. There is no light in the room behind the door—I can only see what is incidentally lit by the windows out here. Half of a portable cot, a pile of laundry, rumpled bedding. He steps out of the room with a mason jar and sets two shot glasses on his desk. He is careful how he moves the photo of his kids to make room. I don’t see any photos of their mother.

  When he goes back to the dark room, he kicks the cot further into the darkness before closing the door and returning to his desk.

  Up here, on this stool, I can see when he smiles—I can see the bridgework among his teeth. The false teeth are too bright. Their artificially jaundiced finishes haven’t kept up with the natural patina of the real ones.

  “You drink?” he says.

  “Yes.”

  He concentrates on removing the lid from the jar. “No ‘sir’ this time?”

  “Well, now we’re drinking.”

  He pours two drinks, and we hold the glasses to our lips, inhaling, like two men sniffing for poison. We are at an impasse until Rosie swallows his.

  “That’s from the hills,” he says.

  It’s unpleasant.

  “One of my monitors found the still,” he says.

  “Fringe benefits,” I say.

  “They shot him, right after he got his observation off. Text message.”

  “Jesus,” I say.

  “Sweet Jesus,” he says.

  “How’d you get the jar?”

  He pours me another. “We look after our own.”

  The phone rings on his desk. He ignores it.

  “Why’d you pick me for this?” I say.

  “You got lots of friends?” he says.

  “No.”

  “Then don’t ask stupid questions. A man does what he does.”

  We drink three more shots each. I feel like a bird. Something domestic, perched on this stool over Rosie’s desk.

  “I been where you are, you know,” he says.

  “A worker?”

  “Yeah.”

  He has another drink, but he doesn’t pour one for me this time.

  “Property taxes,” he says. “House was worth too much. My daddy’s. Had to let them take it, or it would have been an extra five years in Renewal.”

  “How long was it?” I say.

  “Doesn’t matter.” He sucks his teeth. “Renewal doesn’t leave time for real work. Lost everything else, too. Job, car, wife. Momma lived long enough in the home to hear about them taking the house.”

  “Jesus,” I say. In graduate school, I couldn’t work a real job either. Class schedules and homework loads and teaching duties kept me beholden to student loans for survival.

  He nods. “Turns out, I’m damn good at it though. Got me this job after long enough. You learn things in here, Cade.”

  I wonder what else is behind that locked door.

  He pours me another drink. “You learn to be careful.”

  I lift the glass, and he catches my gaze. Sets his jaw. I can no longer read his expression. He holds it for a good while until he’s convinced I’ve got it.

  “Best you get to work,” he says. There are only three hours left in my shift.

  I swallow the drink, and my eyes swim. “Yes, sir.”

  He nods. “You’re my first repossession, you know that?”

  “No, sir.”

  “People can’t really call you Dr. Cade anymore, can they?” he says.

  “No, sir.”

  He gives me another good stare. Leans into it.

  “Don’t forget your sunblock.”

  It’s regulation.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THIS TIME, I’M SHAKING. IT IS A SIDE EFFECT OF THE chemicals Cynthia is delivering into my bloodstream via the therapeutic sofa’s intravenous lines.

  “It happens sometimes.”

  She has applied a cold compress to my forehead above the goggles. Darkened the tint on the lenses. She runs her fingernails through my hairline, delicately, professionally. This is to source a feeling of safety, of comfort. The presence of others during times of duress engenders serenity among the afflicted. Most of our waking efforts, our genetic imperatives, involve the struggle against isolation. Consciousness is largely a social process, despite what we tell ourselves about personal landscapes and the mysterious interiority of our come-and-go selves.

  What she is doing is sterile. Medicinal. We have known this since women first clutched butchered men to their breasts in our greatest wars. Since men learned to stay with each other as they died. To lay on hands. Solitude is only a means of better seeking company.

  She says soft things while I convulse on these cushions. The room is filled with her perfume. Hypersensitivity is another problem of this process—hence the goggles. They restrict stimuli in soothing, dark ways.

  “Are—we accomplishing anything?” I say. Barely.

  “Hush, Ben.”

  “But we’re not—talking.”

  “You’ll be better soon.”

  This time, I do not float. There is no wine-dark sea. I weigh like Tungsten. A neutron star. The world is drawn across geometric arcs and probabilities, to me. We’re fixing what I know—too much—by bringing me everything else. I am a singularity, an event horizon, a form of myself beyond the confines of my brain. Beyond spherical time and distance—the light in this room will never escape the pull of my mind.

  The sofa makes meditative sounds, long mechanical vowels. The voice of God, formless upon the water. I have some shape—God’s own image—I am a self in other realities. The convergence of all things—every life at once. Sometimes, the only difference between dimensions is the particular motion of something tiny—electrons, neutrinos, and the quarks of higher consciousness. I am.

  That’s all it takes—one blip, one influence from something you can’t control. Like Brownian motion, or beta decay, or losing your job. Somewhere, something falls apa
rt invisibly—an electron breaking rules—and a new reality is born. They all exist, every possibility in every instance. In some other life, I have darker skin. Somewhere, I am alone. Somewhere, I am the one doing this to Cynthia.

  It happens here—the center of the galaxy on this sofa, buzzing, buzzing.

  I try to hum with the sofa. The room is so thick through these goggles.

  “Are we—accomplishing anything?”

  Somewhere, I exist. A different me, sourced here, outside the confines of normal time. I still remember parts of the theory, but not its name. It will collapse entirely. A black hole I can’t even see—that never existed—by the time Cynthia is finished.

  I remember talking about it with someone, somewhere. It’s a figure from a dream: several people at once, and we talked in places that were not what they were. That changed every continuing instant, until I woke up. Sometime. It might have been Sireen. I can’t remember which theories she likes and which make her uncomfortable.

  Field Methodology was almost as hard as Syntax. He set us loose on a language we didn’t know.

  Figure it out, my director said to us. That’s the point.

  Sign language. He’d hired a deaf man to sign. About anything he wanted to. And we had to break his code. Turn him from a cipher into a human. We’d been warned that, now and then, there had been FBI in these classes. Clandestine students on the long con, looking for the next crack troupe of cryptographers. Even if they didn’t even know it yet. I knew people who were approached. Some went on to help organize Renewal.

  How did the old woman get her husband into bed? my director said, to break the classroom tension. Some loaded joke I wouldn’t understand until later.

  She a - when he ’ .

  “Yes, Ben,” Cynthia says. “We’re accomplishing things.”

  He was the only one who could laugh.

  Cynthia hums with me, her enameled nails like chips of red earth. The dust at the beginning of time.

  She finally administers a sedative. She has been pinching the line between the fingers of her off-hand, waiting. Counting minutes like days. All things in time.

  Now we may begin. Let there be light.

  The piece of paper, which Cynthia advised me to give to Sireen, once I got home, claims that I may be experiencing flattening of affect as a side effect of today’s session. That seems to mean that I’ll lack emotional reactivity. Cynthia suggests that Sireen give me some painkillers and a sleep aid, if I become confused or disoriented.

  I feel fine. Just a little uninterested. I’m not big into emotion in the first place. I don’t think anyone still is. It’s certainly not worth it.

  I think about something else. About air and buildings, things immediately around me while walking the safe, sun-filled alleys back toward our house.

  “Space” is important. I have to remember. It is simply what it is—area, possibility. The potential for things to be. Space has no meaning.

  “Place” has meaning. It is human psychology. Sociology. The projection of importance onto meaningless things. Even an empty building—like these old storefronts—is a place.

  It’s a big part of understanding “meaning.” Being. I think.

  Space is important because spaces imply things—like organisms. For example, even though nothing lives on the moon, it still implies an organism. The organism it implies does not require water, is impervious to ultraviolet radiation, and has no use for air. It doesn’t exist, but if it did.

  This city block implies only that structures adhere to the laws of gravity and eventual decay.

  But space also implies what you can do with it, to it. The nature of what you can do to or with a thing is an affordance. I remember.

  This empty sidewalk before these empty storefronts implies that two men can attack another one because there is ample room for it. There are two men demonstrating this across the street. I’m waiting beneath a fire escape until they are done. It seems the best reaction.

  The sidewalk implies that the man with the coffee cup and the candy bar can smash his face into its pavement when his attackers knock him down. Which he does. It implies that he may bleed upon it.

  They don’t take his wallet. What’s the point anymore? One attacker picks up the candy bar where it fell. Candy bars afford dropping. He runs away. The other attacker bends over the discarded coffee cup, lifts it, sees that too little coffee remains inside, and demonstrates that paper cups afford crushing. He walks away.

  This is how it all works. So I wait a few minutes before emerging. The downed man is not in my way, which affords my avoidance of him. I can’t imagine how hot the pavement must be on his skin. Gray-white-hot, like the surface of the moon. Which burns a different way. Doubtless, even the moon implies muggings, should you live there.

  This is how we understand our place in the universe. The real one. The meaning of life.

  I feel fine. I have my hand in my pocket. The note to Sireen folded safely under my fingers.

  I’ll need a new safe route home.

  I wait to meet Zoe near the alley where she turned in her introductory essay—her performance art proposal. The heat is dry, which is odd. It rains often here. Our valley traps vehicle exhaust and industrial pollutants. It revisits them upon us in ozone alerts and acid rain.

  Sireen and I don’t go out in the heat. What it does to the skin isolates us. We forget the other of us in our discomfort, reduced from our higher selves. A “flattening of affect,” I guess. I looked it up. It used to happen to schizophrenics.

  Zoe has invited me for lunch.

  I don’t remember which of these bricked spaces she chose for her performance-art essay, so I don’t bother searching. It’s enough to stand near this block of newspaper bins and pretend to read The Mountainist. It’s counter-cultural, hip—something to keep the intelligent young busy.

  The feature article is about adults who are facing eviction or foreclosure. Most of them take to the streets or join tent cities. The socially forward—who once ate tofu and flax seed in their expensive homes, who thought they understood free trade, who dislike chemicals—are different. They’ve begun offering themselves up for adoption by other families, where they will perform domestic services for their new family. The taxable heads of these households, in addition to a sense of entitled philanthropy, the article explains, are eligible for additional tax deductions because the adoptees become dependents.

  Some of the hopeful have even taken to creating handbills and online profiles that infantilize them. A few are posted in The Mountainist itself. In the back, where the escort services and beauty products are advertised.

  “Dr. Cade!” Zoe says. She is carrying a motorcycle helmet under her arm, jogging through the sun. I can understand why she wears only a bikini top and cut-off shorts.

  The number of host families is increasing, I read quickly.

  “Dr. Cade—”

  “Ben. Please.”

  Technically, I am no longer a doctor. I am now lacking the full completion of my final credit hours, since Cynthia has repossessed what I learned during my last semester. At the conclusion of our last session, I signed the affidavit that surrenders my rights of ownership of my dissertation. My alma mater will be forced to surrender them as well. It’s the law.

  Zoe shifts her helmet to her other arm and squints into the sun, as if trying to find me there. Which would be absurd. The sun affords very little, while also affording everything.

  “Ben,” she says. “Let’s eat.”

  They look at me in here. Blank, sweating. There are fans pulling the dead air through repurposed industrial windows. There is no air conditioning. Most homes and small businesses in this city don’t use it. The temperature is usually too mild, and most remaining a/c units don’t work anyway.

  “What is this, Zoe?” It looks like a soup kitchen.

  She lays a palm on my shoulder—the undershirt I’m wearing—as she moves past, already sourcing handshakes from half a dozen of these people. She
has the moves that make them happen.

  She’s doing something to her consciousness. Pushing it. Something.

  “Come on, Dr. Cade.”

  I’m realizing that they’re only looking at me because of how attention works. I think. Attention is consciousness, which requires a certain minimum time period of steady neuronal stimulation. It’s not very long, but it’s long enough. I can’t remember.

  And, really, it was probably Zoe’s cleavage that drew their eyes this way.

  Beyond the thirty or so people, against a white cinder block wall, cans of gelatinized fuel burn on top of a folding table lined with chafing dishes. Some things are warm. There are also sandwiches. Fruit.

  Zoe puts her arm around my shoulders.

  “It’s all local,” she says. “The building is co-op owned.”

  “That’s good,” I say.

  I see David, Zoe’s friend from class, behind the table—he looks proud, glad that I’m here to share his progressive enthusiasm. He wears the clothes. The hair. I don’t really care.

  “David,” I say. “Good to see you.”

  “You too, Dr. Cade,” he says. He smiles at Zoe. “Hey.”

  “What would you like?” Zoe says to me.

  “Nothing for me. Thanks.” I smile for her, too. “I don’t have . . . I didn’t bring any money.”

  She pulls a stack of bill-sized papers from her crocheted handbag. They look like toy money. Something from a grocery store. From years ago, when they sold toys like essentials.

  Zoe peels a few off the stack and hands them to David. He tucks them into stacks of other bills inside a cash box. He looks like he’s trying to pay attention to anything but her.

  “Get whatever you like,” she says.

  “How does it work?”

  Zoe hands me one of the bills. I examine it with my off-hand. I am using the other to eat a blemished apple. The placard in front of the basket of apples informed me that these were grown within my zip code. “Nothing but sun and rain.” Which is good. The radon gas trapped in all these hills is going to kill us anyway. No sense hurrying it with bad food or chemical fertilizers.