Chimpanzee (19 page)

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.

I eat my Renewal-issue sandwich and wonder about empty apartments. It is the spaces we must be concerned with because
people
don't originate their actions, threatening or otherwise—the contexts around them do. The brain initiates movement, action, cognition long before conscious awareness even gets involved. It's called readiness potential. I still remember. Cynthia hasn't gotten it yet. There are gaps, of hundreds of milliseconds, of non-being, when the brain gets going with the activities and ideas we think are
ours
before we even get a clue.
We
aren't in charge. The spaces around us, with their threats and opportunities and contextual stimuli are. They
react
the brain.

I am more than my defaulted loans. I am their consequences.

Meaning isn't an action in context, it's just context. We can't even properly perceive actions before we're doing something about them.

It is the spaces we must be concerned with. With clearing them out. Because of the contexts within them. With less context
reacting
us, we might all be safer. More efficient. I stare at the building across the road, and I wonder about its presence. Its residential spaces. Its malice.

I text Rosie.

Sorry. Nothing to report. Beginner's bad luck. Tack another day onto my record.

I leave my lunch trash on the floor as I stand to go.

Yes, you did, he texts. You saw a father teaching his son to play baseball, speaking Arabic. You saw people selling second-hand books without paying taxes on them.

I'm standing still. This conversation is having me.

What the fuck? Doesn't the government read these messages? This is fraud.

I am the government, Cade.

I didn't see those things.

Yes you did. It's better this way. Come turn in your phone.

I won't report Rosie either. It's better this way.

The heat wave broke like a blister. Last night, rain hammered between the mountain slopes that surround the city. It punched tiny holes in the smog that caps our valley, drawing fresh ozone like a chemical agent onto cracked leaves and aging roof shingles. It made things shine.

It's still raining this afternoon. I drag water from our flooded basement in five-gallon bucketfuls. The sump collects dirt down there, bugs. Odd metallic objects from previous tenants, because the pump is broken. I should feel honest, doing this work, but
it pisses me off. We have fucking plumbing these days. Forget carrying essential things.

“Where are you going?” Sireen says.

She's watching an old movie. Black and white. She loves all of them—their shimmer and gleam. The poor resolution and lighting like paint. I usually watch with her because we take turns. She sits with me when I watch something she doesn't enjoy. Like documentaries about urban gangs or the World Wars. She sits close, where I can smell the almond oil she mixes into her lotion. When she gets bored, she starts to smile more. Sometimes she tries to put the lotion on my hands, because I hate it, to start something we can wrestle over.

“To teach,” I say.

“In the rain? I thought class was canceled.”

There's room for me on the couch. Her books on matrix mechanics, Algebraic K-theory, and differential topology are stacked neatly on the loveseat. She always leaves them where she's been. Or where I want to be.

                    
I'm on—my books, she said. We'd started this in the kitchen. With a bottle of wine and a new album from one of her French bands.

Context is a bitch.

“You go to work in the rain,” I say.

“Yes, but—”

                    
That's sexy, I said. She had been studying in here earlier. The bedroom. There were hardback corners and unsteady sheets of paper against our wrists and necks. The comforter was dimpled where she'd lain, earlier.

Every conversation is fifty conversations at once.

“Don't worry,” I say. “I won't let any cops see me teaching.”

Every argument.

                    
It's uncomfortable, she said.

                    
You should recite—some formulae. From the books. Something exotic.

“Ben,” she says—she's not smiling, “I wish you wouldn't.”

Every damn thing at once.

                    
Not while—

                    
Try it, I said.

                    
Ω
_n
R
^n-1
sinh
^n-1
—she stopped. That's enough.

“Are you asking me to stay?” I say.

Fucking contexts. Like strata. Down in the dark. The good, the bad. The good, the bad. Everything is made of what it was before. Even this.

                    
Kinky.

                    
She pulled a book from under herself and halved it open behind my neck. She pulled it against my skin. Held on.

Especially this. She left me a note this morning, scheduling our next ovulation fuck. Listing her meetings for the day.

“No,” she says. Looks away. “Do what you need to.”

                    
Your turn, she said. But I didn't.

I don't need to go. I could stay. Fuck the students. I'm just delaying the inevitable.

But I've already upset her. What the hell. Before I'm even out the door, she's on the phone. In French. Which she saves for her old girlfriends.

“Tu étais supposé de me le faire savoir—”

On the front porch, I have no idea where I'm going. The text message I received yesterday, sent from some spoofed number, said only to go to the bus stop down the hill from our rental, near the halfway house. The wind blows my umbrella in all directions.
At the bus stop, under the canopy, I receive another text message:
TEN MINUTES
. The plexi-glassed schedule beside me reveals that no bus is due for another twenty.

There doesn't seem to be anyone watching me. No cops.

Eventually, Zoe drives up in a compact hybrid, and David gets out, folds down the front seat, and climbs into the back.

“Hello, Dr. Cade,” Zoe says, inside. The car moves silently but for the hammering of the windshield wipers. Most of her dreads are concealed beneath an oversized black headband.

“Good evening,” I say.

“Crazy, huh?” she says.

“This?”

“The rain.”

The arts district doesn't seem very clandestine to me, but I don't complain. It exists along the rail line that cuts through town, down beside the river bottom beneath the commuter bridge. Most of the old depots and warehouses are studios now. Were studios. Ceramics, and sculpture, and oversized canvases. Dimitri brought me to show openings down here once or twice.

Now, they just look like derelict warehouses again.

Zoe drives between and around several. She pulls the car through a loading garage beneath a gantry tower.

“We're here.”

There are work lights chained to the girders in the ceiling. They've been hooded with sheets of riveted tin, and they shine thirty feet down, between struts and pillars, to the circle of students. Twenty or thirty of them. They sit cross-legged on aged rugs and throw pillows. Someone has placed an easel in the center. With the oversized pad of newsprint I used in every class.

“Who set this up?” I say.

Zoe smiles at me.

“Answer me.”

“We did, Dr. Cade,” David says, behind me.

“All of you?”