Chimpanzee Read online

  I think about it. There had only been a dozen or so of them on the first day of class. Now, weeks later, there are between sixty and a hundred, depending on what else is going on around town that night. It is a place to be seen, so people watch. I don’t bother learning their names.

  “Maybe.”

  Maybe it’s gotten too big for itself. It became its own sociological entity, so it was subject to the same entropic breakdown of its constituent parts as anything else. Organizations, marriages, educations.

  Which would have made me the figurehead. Godhead. The end of all things as far as class was concerned. Their behavior was mine. I used to study the psychogeographical effects of one’s surroundings on one’s consciousness. On the emotions it creates to keep the world in line. Space itself.

  “There’s no maybe about it. You caught the wrong attention,” she says.

  She’s parroting my thoughts. It’s making me angry.

  The martini helps.

  “I don’t think you even know, Ben. They formed study groups.”

  “What?”

  She doesn’t sound submissive anymore. I think she’s dialed down her intensity.

  “Your class pets ran them, in their apartments and in community centers and in civic clearspace with bottles of cheap beer.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Miss Johnson ran one. So did David Forrester.”

  “Wait.” This is running together. You can’t dial the intensity to zero without canceling the sim. I’m losing control, and it’s making my hands shake.

  “Why study groups? It was fucking introductory rhetoric. Composition. A little philosophy sometimes.”

  “You were hard to understand, and getting harder. Not all of your lessons were complete.”

  “Were you a student?”

  “Don’t worry, Ben. The class will go on.”

  “The fuck it will! I’m not getting fucking arrested for a bunch of unemployed kids in a city park. I have a wife! We’re buying a fucking house!”

  I get a little warmer. Shake a little less. The bartender gives me an eye from across the room. Calm the fuck down, sir.

  “It will be secure this time,” she says. “Not just a place to be seen. You’ll be driven there.”

  “And you’re going to what, bus all my students to this place?”

  “Some of them. The good ones.”

  Admissions criteria. Restricted enrollment. The same old shit.

  “You’re defeating the fucking point, whoever the fuck you are. Sounds like elitist horseshit to me.”

  “You know who I am.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Use your fucking brain, Ben.”

  Sireen and I attend a grocery auction. One of her colleagues told her about it. Someone for whom the professorial salary isn’t enough. Someone with kids to feed, two car payments, and old medical expenses. Something.

  I hate grocery shopping. The people, the carts, the bovine suppression of awareness. Everybody’s alone at the grocery store, getting in each other’s ways. But I go with Sireen. She likes to take her time, selecting vegetables, inspecting cans. I try to say as little as possible while we’re there. I carry the reusable bags. We used to shop with actual baskets, at an organic co-op down the road from her apartment, and I would select obscure beers while Sireen sampled the oils and hand lotions. The hand-knit scarves she tied around her throat in the fall. She laughed at the workers’ jokes, and meant it.

  Sireen’s colleague told her that most of the groceries at the auction are legal—surplus or near-expiration. There are a few pallets of produce from local farmers, for whom the shrinking federal subsidies aren’t enough. They farm to keep busy. Raising food that can’t pay for itself, for inflation. I imagine they haven’t heard yet about SHARES.

  Some of the goods are stolen, by teamsters, inventory managers, petty thugs.

  I park our sedan in the community center parking lot. There are very few empty spaces. The auction takes place on the basketball court, inside.

  We hold hands as we browse the impromptu aisles. There are cabbages and damaged canned goods and packages of toilet paper with defective labels. There are colorful ziggurats of vitamins and supplements, the products of a buy-in, sell-yourself pyramid scheme I looked into a few months ago. They call it multi-level marketing. The farmers and vendors and wholesale representatives stand against the walls, talking in cross-armed groups. They drink coffee from Styrofoam cups and watch us askance. Like parents, waiting for something in this gymnasium to cheer about. Like the dispossessed adults in The Mountainist, looking for adoption, who would gladly play basketball for these people.

  The aisles are not tall—a foot or two, at most. Sireen points out lot numbers, and I jot them down on a legal pad she took from her department’s supply closet. As attendees, we’re given an hour to inspect the lots before we must take our seats in the bleachers.

  When we sit, thigh-to-thigh with our neighboring strangers, I hold Sireen’s purse so she can unfold the tabs on our bidding paddle. It folds in on itself and tucks into place. Many people are using them as fans.

  Sireen listens to the auctioneer, glancing at our list of lot numbers. Waiting.

  “So,” I say, “I heard something about the class.”

  “Yeah?” she says, arching one eyebrow. Performing attention even though she isn’t paying it. She watches her list.

  Someone bids fiercely on a crate of expired saltine crackers.

  “They formed study groups. Before it was canceled.”

  Sireen laughs. Then she looks up quickly—exaggeratedly interested, to cover the slip.

  “That’s great,” she says. “They must really have been interested.”

  I watch one of the farmers drag his tomatoes front and center with a hand truck. It’s his turn. I’m still holding Sireen’s purse.

  “Maybe they still get together,” I say.

  She purses her lips. Looks at her ledger. “We’re next.”

  “Apparently, some of my lectures were hard to understand.”

  She laughs for real this time. Gets a hand on my knee, as if she’s reaching for balance.

  We have to balance our goods in teetering stacks in the parking lot. Some of the other people came prepared. They have dollies and repurposed luggage wheelers outfitted with plastic crates and bungee cords. We are careful, moving with the exodus toward our car.

  Sireen says something about the savings. About the auction next week. There are two men arguing over a box of produce five parking spaces over from ours. Each of them has his fingers laced through the ventilation holes in the box. The trunk of the mini-van behind them lights their foreheads.

  I let Sireen arrange our things. I hand them to her and watch the argument. People are ignoring the men, even in the adjacent spaces.

  “Ben,” Sireen says, capturing my attention.

  I turn to look. Behind me, gunshots erupt. Loud ones. A handgun with a short muzzle—a revolver, maybe. Sireen squats, her hands upon her ears. I see her pivot on the balls of her feet— left, right. She’s unsure what to do. People are screaming. Footfalls slapping. I feel the thundering herd against my shoulders. Fear is one of our most primary emotions. It is the clash of reflex, instinct, muscle memory against the social self. Which is the hesitation to ignore one’s better sense, one’s sleeping self, because this is civilization after all. There are no predators in the savannah grass here. Nothing to be afraid of.

  There is only one man behind the mini-van now. The trunk canopies him. The interior light now reveals very little. He is on the pavement. His fingers still grasp the overturned box. Its lid is sealed with packing tape. There are more shots, not far away. Screaming.

  I feel that pressure behind my eyes. Like the simulation. Those fists upon my spine. The urge, the dominant impulse that the goggles have taught me to resist. To crave. I want to give in. Do what a man should do. I am a pump—fear and light and instinct trapped by the valves in my bloodstream.

  “Ben!�
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  I want to open those valves—to destroy them with some adrenal blast. I want to release the tide and watch it rain for forty days.

  “Ben! Please!”

  I allow my sense of self to rearrange itself, from higher- to lower-scalar orders. It creates the illusion of control. So I can do what a man does. Despite my immediate fear.

  I run. Through the jostling crowd. There are people standing around the victim. Staring. Some at the box of produce. He isn’t moving. I dig my fingers into his neck, but I can’t tell. His pulse or mine? There’s nothing about him doing any of the things that look like living. What are the clues? I can’t remember. My pants sponge his blood where my knees touch the pavement. I’m not in control here. My bloodstream is moving things along in pressurized bursts. Clenching and sealing and flowing away. I am only the flotsam of my fluid self.

  Other people are touching him now, too. Laying on hands, and palming blood, and being part of the process. None of us are good at it.

  Someone grabs the box of produce. He isn’t one of us, down here, being together in the blood. He doesn’t get very far before I bloodstream him to the ground and face face face against the concrete. I’m only good enough at it. Because it is difficult to grasp his head with so much blood between my fingers.

  Sireen’s sudden hands are cool on my neck. Hard and deep into my windpipe, and we’re halfway back to the car, and I’m surprised. She makes me set down the dead man’s box of produce. I dumbgrabbed it, getting up. Maybe. I don’t know. Someone else carries it immediately away.

  There is a traffic jam, exiting the parking lot. Sireen drives.

  CHAPTER TEN

  TODAY, I HAVE BEEN INSTRUCTED TO WEAR PLAIN CLOTHES during my Renewal shift. Rosie moved me up in the monitor rotation, but he wouldn’t explain why. I’m not sure if he despises me or thinks I’m okay.

  He hands me a mobile phone. It is more advanced than the one I own, and it has a serial number stenciled along the back. The artist was careful to avoid the camera lenses.

  “You’re only responsible for two efficiency observations, since it’s your first time,” Rosie says. “Disorderly conduct counts.”

  “Where do I have to do this?” I say.

  He hands me a printout of some city streets that are within feasible walking distance of downtown—so it won’t look strange that I’m on them. One of the streets is zoned commercial.

  “Don’t tell anyone what you’re doing,” he says. “Be discreet when you’re ready to send me what you see. Find someplace out of the way.”

  I study the map. The header states that I am not allowed to remove it from my dispatcher’s office. It contains digital signatures from the Senate Efficiency Committee under the motto that “Efficiency is everyone’s responsibility.”

  I hand it back to him, and I stand there. He’s watching me. He just waves the map away, so I fold it into my pocket.

  “I don’t want to do this,” I say.

  “I know.”

  “You know they canceled my class,” I say. “The one I was teaching for free downtown.”

  He sucks on the bridge in his teeth.

  “Yeah.”

  “Was there a monitor in that class?” I say.

  “Of course there was.”

  The day-by-day calendar on his desk is two weeks out of date. I could report him. He isn’t using state resources correctly.

  “Jesus, Rosie,” I say. “I was helping people.”

  He looks. Outside, someone coughs. Waiting to check in.

  “You are one dumb motherfucker,” he says. “You think I had a choice?”

  I decide it’s better not to ask why the cops are after Zoe.

  Being a monitor turns me into a tourist. I walk my own city’s streets in search of things to notice, to remember. I look for evidence that I am someplace more interesting, more dangerous, more romantic than my home. I listen for other languages and expressions, so I can be sure this trip was worth it. I take photographs of simple things in foreign circumstances.

  This turns us all into strangers. I can’t know anyone. Their lives and answers. I have to see them as a monitor because they are threats to themselves.

  I did this once in Paris, before, when Sireen and I had a little money, and Central was paying for her ticket so she could give a lecture. I wandered the streets around the Sorbonne, looking for things to look at. Mostly, I smoked cigarettes and tried to hide from the winter air. I tried to get lost, but I just ended up at the Eiffel Tower. Sireen met me there, after her talk, and we climbed the steps in the freezing evening rain.

  The lights were large and dispassionate. They strobed, in their thousands, to make the tower glitter for tourists in the distance. I’d forgotten about them. The guidebook said they were not to be missed. A holdover from an installation as old as the new millennium.

  Jesus, Sireen said. They’re fucking bright. She was doing all the talking. I only knew enough French to buy cigarettes and croissants. And only sort of. They couldn’t tell the difference between my de and deux. The air warmed, close to the lights. I pulled us there, and she squealed. Her teeth were cold when I pressed my lips into her smile. We squinted against the rain and the light.

  It’s Romantic, she said. Being bright and cold. Really makes you pay attention.

  The next day, climbing the stairs from the riverwalk along the bank of the Seine, we became accidentally trapped between protesting students and the police force’s shield wall. Sireen nearly caught a billy club to the head, but one of the cops figured us out in time. I jogged us away, past the gathered gendarmerie, so helpfully labeled by the stencils on their raincoats, and they weren’t interested except in their submachine guns and who was taking pictures of the conflict.

  I wanted the students to win.

  Where are we going? Sireen said. I dragged her into plaza, a little urban hollow of lichened marble and oxidized brass fencing. They built it to commemorate his contributions to - - , which was just a casual reality over here.

  , I said.

  This is how I loved her.

  This block contains mostly apartment buildings. I see chimpanzee stencils on two different walls in two different alleyways. I try to look like I belong, which is what we do in foreign territory.

  This apartment is empty. The door handle had a realtor’s lock box on it, but both the box and the front door were unlocked. One of the other tenants saw me walking down the hall. She turned her head quickly because I indicate bad things to her, by not looking away first.

  There is nothing in the apartment. Even the doors to some of the cupboards are missing. The light fixtures, the copper tubing under the sink. Its living room windows face the street, so I sit cross-legged in front of one. I place Rosie’s phone within reach.

  I see only the city. It feels meditative. Almost religious. As if I’m supposed to divine meaning from the patterns of sunlight or the routes of wandering pedestrians. Civic haruspex—learning secrets by looking into our municipal entrails.

  There is a mail center across the street, on the bottom floor of the apartment building facing this one. Its neon sign says OPEN, but no one moves behind the window. Above it, there is the play of shadow from the pecan trees outgrowing their cleared spaces in the sidewalk concrete. There are stone stringcourses and ornamental water spouts on some floors. There is laundry hanging from small balconies, still in the day.

  If I could move through these walls, then this would be easier. This job I don’t want. I could move between planes of sheet rock, decaying insulation, fiberglass grit. I could move like a miner, underground, inhaling small things that are too sharp for my lungs, things that glitter in the dark air, as if there is something there. If I could stick my fingers through electrical outlets, I could take photographs of people doing things—using the toilet, or smoking pot, or fomenting revolution. At night, I could dust them with cleaning powders and chemical agents, between chapped night-lips or upon pulsing eyelids. I could correct things, chemically, like repos
session in reverse. I could make them see with my fistfuls of black mold and rust. I might hear their evening prayers.

  It’s hot in here, like a sweat lodge. My feet begin to fall asleep, so I get up to pace. I become my own silence. A quiet mind. There is less of me in this apartment by the moment, and I create what I see. Perception is involved, somehow. I don’t remember. It’s not seeing things.

  I know Dimitri does this type of thing. He and his colleagues sit in small rooms on research campuses and watch footage of people. They study behavior, isolation, the suspension of higher faculties. I know they keep records and make notes and send their graduate students for fresh trays of coffee. Meanwhile, people in rooms, like this one, watch TV or perform menial tasks or exhibit whatever specific behavior. He told me once about an inmate in solitary confinement he studied during grad school. The guy plucked out and ate his own eyeball after enough time in the small dark. Because it made sense, under the circumstances. He cooperated when Dimitri came in with three guards to record the color of his remaining eye. After all, he wasn’t crazy. He’d been conditioned against it, just like the rest of us.

  It is a particular instinct, that type of predatory observation. I didn’t have to do it, earning my degrees. I simply read others’ studies. I begin to become what I can see here, across the street. This apartment is my experimental chamber. It becomes all things. I become nothing but walls and floor tiles. An amnesiac resident. I have no past, no context. I am a monitor. Society itself. I become its breathing hallways, its empty spaces and windows. I become the man between the walls, like some ascetic in a holy space. Place. I become the woman across the way, cutting a man’s hair in the light from the window. I become her neighbor, looking down, tugging at socks and damp floor towels as he prepares to shower. I become the singing silence of all these threatening images.