Chimpanzee

For Rima

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Acknowledgments

About the Author

CHAPTER ONE

T
HEY DIDN
'
T ALWAYS SHOOT PEOPLE
.

In the beginning, when civic offenders were conscripted into the Homeland Renewal Project, they were monitored only by crew chiefs. Hourly employees with managerial experience. People used time sheets. Signatures. They carried their meals with them in paper bags.

But when the crews organized, when they started collecting protection money, to keep you from harm at the hands of other people on the crew—gang affiliations, race riots—workers disappeared. The crews became micro-politics. They followed the examples of the mobs in the larger cities, looking for someone to blame. They carried weapons in their lunch bags. Renewal became a safe opportunity to sell your contraband, in your standard-issue, reflective red jumpsuit.

They deputized the crew chiefs. Gave them shotguns. At first, they tried non-lethal rounds, but those caused an uprising. So they killed a few. It no longer makes the news.

The lien against my education is twenty-three pages long. It contains abbreviated transcripts of my yearly audits, when I, like every other student borrower, sat down in the loan therapist's office on campus and let him index my cognitive chemical tendencies, my entrained associations, my affective self-models, which source most of my intellect.

It's important to remember that we are not “in charge.” You don't own your body, it owns you. It's the same thing.

You don't own your education. It's on loan until you pay it off.

I am good at being unemployed. I can act interested and positive when Sireen, my wife, calls to check on me in the middle of the day. She stays concerned about my moods. About all of this.

I am good at walking downtown—from our borough at the other end of the city because Sireen and I lease only one car, which she needs for the job she still has. I know which blocks are the most vacant, so to avoid them. I know whom to talk to. I know which times of day are safe for spending an hour in Sentinel Park, in the heart of downtown, doing nothing but being a guy with a coffee sitting in a park.

                
It's an illusion, Sireen said. She was irritated. The wind kept blowing her hair against her mouth while she tried to eat. It was a bad day to wear it down.

                    
Sleight-of-hand, she said. But I had told her I liked it down. It's how I knew this was working.

Each year of my education—each year of new cognitive associations—expanded the previous year's index. Because association doesn't mean causation.

                    
Just because two variables are correlated doesn't mean they caused each other, she said. She put her sandwich in her lap to do something about this. Nothing was growing in the flowerbeds behind us, and their bricks were cold.

If it did, that first audit would have always been enough. But subsequent audits charted all the discrete change—chemically and behaviorally.

                    
Cum hoc ergo propter hoc, I said.

                    
What? She looked at me with a bad taste in her mouth. Hair.

                    
With this, therefore because of this, I said.

                    
Yes, she said. Obviously. In exchange, she had told me she liked that—how I made things more complicated. It made her laugh.

                    
It's a logical fallacy, I said.

                    
No, she said. We're talking about numbers.

They could detail how I learned. How I connected different principles and theories. How I thought.

                    
Ex nihilo nihil fit.

                    
Teeth in even rows, bleached by the air and sun. Her perpetual smile. It was bright here, on my side of campus. There weren't as many trees.

Learning new conceptual associations pushed causation further away. Every year, the more you learned. At a point, there would be no such thing as ultimate causality. No one to blame for rainbows or bankruptcy or the creation of the universe.

                    
Stop it, she said. I'm eating.

                    
Stop what?

                    
Being you!

Eventually, time became money, and no one had any. Least of all the government.

Experts joined the Senate Efficiency Committee to ensure that state agencies were maximizing employee potential. They started doling out tasks randomly in the Homeland Renewal Project. Some days, it's raking gravel at highway construction sites. Other days it's changing bed pans in veterans' hospitals. It's fair, and after they started randomizing the crews every morning, the power organizations of the old crews fell apart.

Incorporating monitors into the project only made sense. As monitors, Renewal workers are given a reprieve from their uniforms and sent out as employees, patients, students—anything that pertains to anything. They report waste or malfeasance.

They expanded into the neighborhoods, and now they have quotas. Failure to produce enough efficiency observations results in extra work hours. Since the monitor program started, no one knows anyone anymore.

The Efficiency Committee became concerned with activities that could foment unrest. The country was no longer a powder keg, but it had dry rot. Anything that could incite anything was considered civic unrest. In some states, that meant fucking the wrong sex. In others, it was reading the wrong books, or jostling the American Dream. Mostly, the Committee doesn't do anything with this information, but monitors collect it.