Chimpanzee (20 page)

“Everyone here. There.” He points at the circle of students. The odor of cigarette smoke moves through the wet air. The rain is loud upon the corrugated steel lining the walls. It is dirty through the windows near the ceiling.

Someone lowers the overhead door behind us.

“And who are you all supposed to be?” I say.

“Come on,” Zoe says.

There are two packs of hand-rolled cigarettes in repurposed packaging waiting for me upon the easel. A sandy-haired young man, Zoe's age, hands me a stack of
SHARES
as he takes my jacket. He looks familiar. One of the other students passes a bottle to the girl beside her. It is unlabeled, a repurposed whisky bottle. Clear and heavy inside. I point at it as I push the lid off one of the markers on the easel.

“What exactly does ‘meaning' mean?” I say.

Zoe tries. “Purpose?”

“No.”

This group is young. They have left the retirees, the indigents, and the too-hip, from the class downtown, out of it. I imagine those others sitting in the amphitheater. Alone in the dark and the rain. I wonder: here or there?

“Interpretation?” says another. He is in the back, just beyond the spill of the work lights, where David went to stand. The lights are so bright, they press against my eyelids. It feels like a strobe, like heat and light and sinking darkness at the top of my head.

“No.”

A door closes in the distance, and one of the standing ones, outside the circle, jogs across the warehouse. I hear his footfalls. The wind sucks at the building's walls. I'm the only one standing in the fucking spotlight. It won't do any good to go anywhere now. I light a cigarette and wait.

The jogger comes back, and a newcomer picks his way through the carpets—others move aside for him. The bottle comes his way.

“I'm sorry, Dr. Cade,” he says. I've seen him before.

“You're late.” It's a joke. Who cares? We're in a warehouse in the rain.

“I'm sorry,” he says. “My other class got out late.”

“Your other class?”

“Dr. Swanson's chemistry class.” He digs in his duct-taped messenger bag. “She wrote a note for me.”

“Did she?”

I look at Zoe. She's counting heads, writing down names.

Whatever.

“Meaning,” I say, “is nothing so complicated. It is context.”

They take notes furiously.

“Actions happen around us—to us. Even those you think you're controlling. They're . . .”

I can't remember.

“Sourced,” Zoe says.

“They're sourced,” I say, “by association.” Saying it, trying to think it, is unpleasant. I wave dismissively, curling the air with cigarette smoke. I feel vertigo, like I'm afraid of my own height, standing on this concrete floor. It takes a moment to pass. Seems Cynthia hasn't taken this idea back yet, not fully. Repossession is with you everywhere.

They sit and wait.

“Probability . . .
sources
action,” I say, through clenched teeth, “and it occurs some
place
, sometime. If someone smiles at you on the street, it means what it means. If someone smiles at you as you stand before a firing squad, it means something else. Context. The action that occurs within it is unimportant. The probabilities, the things you might, or will, or can do—that's what generates meaning out of context. What generates it out of you.”

“Is this the same as the rhetorical triangle?” one says.

“Yes. Except, you can always change the context—you play at ethos by beating it to death with pathos and logos.”

I pull my notes from my bag, trying not to vomit.

“Even when you're talking action, and not composition,” I say.

I try to remember something else, but I don't. They will never get the conclusion to introductory composition and rhetoric. I feel like a fucking metaphor. Like college itself, the way it is now. I'm living proof of everything I'm trying to tell them. About how little
selfhood or consciousness or being actually means. It's the best I can do, falling apart for them.

I'm doing this for them.

“Now,” I say, “let's discuss research when you lack the resources to conduct it.”

I gesture into the darkness for one of them to join me. She does. A small thing with hair longer than her arms. I hand her my notes, written on the map from my monitor shift, and point to the easel. She bends over to transcribe.

“These,” I tell them, “are a handful of addresses, from neighborhoods across town. Work in groups. Find out what they
mean
. What contexts those spaces force upon us. You'll give argumentative presentations next week.”

“In front of everyone?” one says.

That makes me smile. “You'll give them on street corners around town, and you'll grade each other.”

They are quiet. The shadows, leaning in the back, exchange secrets.

“Time to try all this out,” I say.

After class, Zoe leads me into the darkness. Most of the students disperse, deeper into the warehouse complex via its catacomb entryways. The ways into and out of this room are large enough to accommodate construction vehicles. The students pass through them several abreast. Like miners, looking for a way up, back to earth. Coal trains, from further into Appalachia, are the only ones that still pass along this line, but I have never heard of them stopping here. These warehouses were mostly for the textile industry, created on the backs of slave harvest in the south, so long ago.

The shadowy ones, the students who stood outside the light throughout class, make no show of leaving. They wander into other areas of this same chamber. Keeping watch. Something.

Zoe and I ascend a steel staircase. It climbs past the age-scummed windows near the ceiling. Outside, the rain still moves the light. The upper floors of this building don't have
work lights, and all I can see are broken, dripping things. Once, people talked about revitalizing these places—taking them back from the artists and putting them to good use—because there was nothing else to talk about, standing in picket lines outside modern industrial parks and hospital entrances. The company officers and senior staff, whom they hated so much, had long since left them to stand alone on the pavement. To protest fate, even if no one was listening.

Some of the studios, in this district, still display the oversized American flags the artists found in their derelict buildings. Floor managers had once hung them between girders, so people behind machines could see what they were so proud of. The artists didn't have to do anything but frame them, and it became immediately controversial.

On the fourth floor, Zoe opens an office door—it has an unbreakable window. Filaments of diagonal wire in the glass, I understand, provide a view while repelling things. Like angry workers with steel implements.

She closes it behind me. The room resembles some sort of control room. Perhaps a switch tower for the rail lines. A series of brushed nickel work stations line the windowed wall. Their buttons are dark, their displays shattered. There are levers without handles. I can see the gantry tower below. The rain.

“Draw the shade, Dr. Cade.”

The shade is just some form of oiled paper—she helps me uncoil it over all of the windows. When we've finished, I listen to her feet in the darkness. She turns on a floor lamp with a paper shade. It takes a moment for the low-wattage compact bulb to light up.

“Where are you getting the power?” I say.

She leans over the back of a sofa, stretching for another lamp. “There's a generator downstairs, in the old server room.”

She rights herself on the couch. “We try not to use too much.”

“I see.”

Another couch sits on the far side of a large rug—something oriental. Threadbare arm chairs close the open sides between the couches—mismatched. There are piles of paper and envelopes on the glass coffee table, which is undersized for the arrangement. There are notes in red pen on the pages of an unfolded issue of
The
Mountainist
. Shirts and undergarments on wire hangers festoon a wall of steel pipes.

I'm still standing by the old work stations. “This is where you live?”

“It is now,” she says.

“Hiding from the police?”

“You know about that?”

“You know they canceled my class. Looking for you.”

“Why would I know that?”

That's funny. “Well. Do you have anything to drink?”

Sitting on the opposite couch, I can see her bed, now. It looks simple—a sunken mattress on a simple frame. In an old office behind her changing screen.

I watch her roll a joint on the table.

“Zoe, doesn't this strike you as a bit obvious?”

“What do you mean?”

“What
do
I mean.” I'm still her teacher. “Tell me.”

She looks flustered. She won't look at me. “I don't know.”

“You're a smart girl,” I say. “Figure it out.”

She tucks a dread into her headband and fidgets with her joint. “Dr. Cade, I didn't—don't—mean—”

“Are you sure you've got it?”

She looks up now. “What?”

She's readied herself for the wrong conversation. Semantically. I remember that much. We're not talking about the same thing.

“Hiding here? In warehouses and galleries that are already known for artists and subversives?”

She looks away and exhales. “Oh.”

I wait.

“Oh. Well.” She gets up and waves a beckoning finger into her bedroom.

That stops me. But I am in control, here. I need to be in control.

I step carefully around the unmade bed. The piles of books. There is a small window, and she stands beside it, holding a pair of binoculars.

“Here,” she hands them to me. “Look across, to the next building. Same floor.”

All I can see is rain. A few windows and a roofline. I hear her strike a lighter beside my head. After a minute, an orange pinprick flares behind a dark window in the other building. It's gone.