Chimpanzee (22 page)

The sweat on her arms, her thighs, is gold, lamped by the lights behind us. Beneath her black button-down, she was wearing a spaghetti-strapped tank top. Is wearing. A real-life tense shift. The shirt is pooled on the rug beneath the sofa, along with her jeans. She did not ask me how I felt about that. “It's the sim,” she said.

I lean over and dial up the intensity. One last time.

She goes nearly limp.

“Zoe, what do the chimpanzees mean?”

She whispers, “Will you stay?”

“Here?”

“Here.”

“Will you answer my question?”

“Will you stay?”

It's important to remember that I love my wife.

“You know you're a walking cliché,” I say.

She just lies there and looks at me.

“The student, attracted to her instructor. She knows better.”

“Yes,” she says. “But only if this was my idea.”

“What?”

“We're chimping, Dr. Cade.”

“You think I'm responsible for everything I do,” she says. She dials down the difficulty. “You taught us that we're not in control.”

“That's not what I meant,” I say.

“You don't get to pick and choose.”

“Please. We all control our urges.”

“Who's talking about urges?” she says.

When she pulls her goggles off, I do the same. She sits bent over, elbows on her knees.

“You didn't feel anything,” she says. “The entire time.”

“No.”

She gathers her dreads in her fist behind her head and holds them there while she makes a note on her coffee table. She looks at me.

“You think I'm a stupid girl,” she says.

“Zoe—no.”

“Yes,” she says. “You think I haven't thought any of this through.”

I am no longer in control.

“Maybe I should just go,” I say.

What was that sim? Who were we chimping?

She gets up and finds a band for her hair. The lamplight is sharp upon her legs. Crescents and lines of bright skin.

“I drove you here,” she says. “Remember?”

Outside the rain thunders the walls.

“And anyway, you shouldn't just go because you don't like the conversation,” she says. “Doesn't that mean I'm doing well?”

“I suppose so.”

She lights a cigarette and leans against the busted control panels. “I said I have questions, too.”

“What is it that you're supposed to be thinking through?”

She smokes. “You, class. Everything. What it's like living in a warehouse. Why I would do illegal things. People see a young woman, they try to tell her what to do.” She gives me a look. “Even other women.”

“Are you in some kind of trouble, Zoe?”

She folds her arms. Her cigarette smoke ropes past her temples. A taste of things to come—pale dreads, thin and smoky with age. Wasted youth. “What if I am, Dr. Cade? What will you do about it? Will you and your wife take care of me?”

I sit still. A teacher with a crazed student. An unwanted F. A dying grandmother. Problems with her degree plan.

“Me and my wife, Zoe?”

She stares at me across the industrial shadows. I wait her out.

“They told me therapy wouldn't make you stupid,” she says. “Just forgetful.”

“Who told you?”

“You know I cover for you,” she says. “I fill in the gaps from my notes, when you forget your terms and principles.”

“I know.”

“I make sure the others are getting it. I don't even know what you expected us to get.” She paces the control panel. “Which is why we filled in the gaps ourselves. It's how we got the other instructors to help. They liked the plan.

“You want to know what chimpanzee means,” she says. “It doesn't mean anything, which is what has everybody so pissed off. It's just people with masks and spray paint. Leaving marks and causing trouble. It's an indulgence—a smokescreen. They just took the name from ‘chimping' because they like the idea of being somebody else.”

“Are you all chimpanzees?” I say. “Here?”

“Does that matter?” she says. “We're in a lot more trouble than they are, just running these classes.”

“Then perhaps it's time we stop,” I say.

“What's it like?” she says. “Falling apart like this. Doing collateral damage.”

“That's just it,” I say. “I don't know what's missing. That's how this works.”

She looks down, young again. Sitting without pants in a cold warehouse. Looking thin and alone.

“We can't stop,” she says. “People are counting on us.”

Zoe navigates us out of the clustered warehouses. David stayed behind this time. He shook my hand as I left, in thanks or understanding. I'm not sure. He's a quiet kid.

I can see students through garage doors. Teachers with newsprint and easels of their own. I can see them calling on upraised hands. The rain is louder than the car.

We ride quietly up, out of the river bottom, along the rail bridge. Zoe drives past the bus stop and up my hill.

“You can just let me out here,” I say.

She keeps driving and pulls up outside my house. “What does your wife think about all this?”

“What do you mean by ‘this?'”

She turns to look at me, past me. I see her seeing the light in my home. Her face crawls with rainlight and unreadable emotion.

“Do you talk about it?” Zoe says.

I look at the house, too. At the water and the wind. I will be cold and uncomfortable when I step out of this car. “She doesn't want me to get into any trouble.”

“Like I told you,” she says. “People are counting on us.”

She squeezes my hand. “You need to figure it out, Dr. Cade.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

                
W
E
'
RE GOING TO FIGURE OUT WHAT MAKES THINGS
beautiful, my professor said. He wasn't my director yet. I was still an undergraduate.

                    
Things? I said.

                    
Poetry, he said, literature. Took another drag from his cigarette, outside between buildings where the smoking ban couldn't see us. Political discourse, advertisements—anything, he said.

                    
I was accepted to Northern, I said. For the creative writing program.

                    
No, Ben. You're a good student, and there's more important work to do. We don't need more writing—we're going to figure out why there's any point in bothering in the first place. With anything.

                    
How? I said.

                    
He smiled. Sepia in the gleam of a sodium-vapor lamp. We needed to get back inside. The break was almost over. I think he created them for just this purpose. Having a cigarette. Night classes just ran too long. It was my final undergraduate semester, and this class was one last survey of everything worth learning, which you would only really do in-depth if you kept at it—in a graduate program. A self-perpetuating system of understanding. It would be really something at the top.

                    
He tapped at his temple. Dropped an avuncular hand on my shoulder. We're going to
understand
.

I stop under the vestibule of an old bar, a place that served pizza and offered regulation-sized billiards tables upstairs. Dimitri and I used to come here, before it closed. We mostly talked about how frustrated we were with our jobs. His girlfriends. The price of beer. I always felt a little guilty, going out with Dimitri for a guys' evening. We'd always invite her, but Sireen usually wouldn't join us. She never has found any local girlfriends. Not since we left graduate school. Between me and her job, she's got it all covered.

I text her: Something is happening downtown.

I keep my phone in my hand. In my pocket, sometimes, I don't feel it vibrate. I don't use ringtones because they're intrusive. They bring your world into everyone's around you. It is rude and uninteresting.

Even the sidewalks are backed up. The avenues leading toward the old retail district are filled with unmoving cars. Most of their drivers have turned off their engines and are now sitting on hoods and kneeling on bumpers. Gathering against the problem, talking to see if anyone has information. Becoming a community by sharing their stillness. Suffering together, which is how they did it during the first depression—the Great Depression. Except now, the minute someone knows something, they will go back into their cars, to check their email and text their spouses.

Even the sidewalks are backed up. Pedestrians stand in slow-moving herds, approaching whatever-it-is that's blocking traffic. As if drawn by gravity or tropism.

What is it? Sireen messages.

Massive traffic jam. People are out of their cars.

Will you make your appointment?

Yeah.

It gets thicker the further I go. I can hear police sirens. People with upper-floor windows, along the avenue, stand and stare. Some gather on balconies to share what they can see. Like oracles outside of town, upon some classic hilltop—misshapen people and
demigods and creatures with human heads. With all the answers. There is a price for the truth about all things. They already know what is going to happen when I get to it. They can see it from up there. Whatever it is. A singularity. A way to stop time and break a society.

The crowd is nearly impenetrable, upon the cusp, the event horizon. I can feel its stillness, the nothing stopping all these people. It radiates quietly, like a terrible accident or a giant meteorite. Something that must be stared at for a time, before we can figure out which experts should take custody and rope the area off. The cars here are stopped at odd angles. Like detritus, something littoral—they have pushed each other together as the tidal urge from the massed cars behind them rolled. Moved forward and back in tiny, immeasurable increments.