Chimpanzee (23 page)

I can't get through the crowd, so I step onto the back bumper of a sedan that has become nearly perpendicular in its efforts to move away, around whatever is ahead of it. No one says anything as I crawl across the roof of the car.

There are hundreds of policemen encircling Sentinel Park—the streets around it. Their squad cars are nowhere in sight—no doubt they had to walk here, just like me. The only difference is that they carry guns.

There are people lying everywhere. In the streets, the crosswalks. They're piled half on top of each other along the sidewalks, draped across the chess tables above the park. People lie at angles upon, across, and along the amphitheater steps. There are no spaces between them. Each wears a pair of black shorts, or a black bikini. Some are in their underwear, which must have been the best they could do.

None of them move.

It's a protest, I text Sireen.

Around me, the crowd listens. What truth will come of this demonstration? Where were you when the people lay in the streets, confounding the police, causing problems?

I would guess, by their numbers, that this is most of the on-duty police force in town. Someone has gathered them all here, with these piles of useless, useless people. Doing nothing in the roadway.

What are they protesting?

One of the protesters is only a few feet away. Was he late, banished to the edges where it is less safe? Where he will be the first to feel teargas upon the soft tissues of his eyes, to feel billy clubs along his ribs, or even to simply be carried out of the way?

Or was he early? The first to lay himself down in this street. A way to stop the cars, the town, the police.

I force my way around staring people and kneel alongside him. He looks at me. He is young, but I do not recognize him.

He wears his protest upon his skin, like all the others. He is covered in text written with black permanent marker.

His forehead reads “Everything begins by making your audience pay attention.” Zoe has learned to seize ethos—she has forced it out of her audience. This is physical, the science of changing motion with ideas. Applied rhetoric. They have no choice, these watchers. Me.

We're paying fucking attention.

I take a picture and send it to Sireen: Who knows?

I look, but there is not a chimpanzee logo in sight—simply smooth people in the urban day, unmoving. There are brilliant things between them.

I see Rosie leaning against a street lamp, staring. It would be difficult to reach him, and what would be the point? This is probably his lunch hour.

He isn't watching the demonstrators. He watches one of the clusters of police officers. He writes notes into a pad the size of his palm and whispers things to a young black man beside him.

Certainly, this would be the sort of thing he wants me to report.

I move away, along the edge of the crowd. On the other side, I can see people in a distribution line outside an old soda shop. The government didn't even have to buy the place—they seized it when the owners' back-taxes finally caught up. Unpaid. Criminal.

It is a good facility for distributing aid—there are several kiosks inside, behind the old fountain bar.

It makes sense.

The people in line move in small steps, a foot at a time. They don't watch the protest. They watch anything else, particularly the
people leaving the facility, their arms full of brown relief bags. The police have cleared a small way in and out for them.

It's not a problem. There is another way to Cynthia's office.

Today, I am not permitted to lie on Cynthia's sofa. I must sit on it. She taps her pen against her computer pad as she stares at me. She wears trousers, hair in a bun.

“How is your house hunt?” she says.

I fold my hands into my lap. Whatever she is doing—however this is supposed to go down—today, I don't care.

“Fine. We were outbid on our first offer.”

“Will you make another?”

“I'm here, aren't I?”

She reads something on her pad.

“We'll put the goggles on now,” she says.

I know how to do it, so she stays seated. I pile the sanitary plastic wrappers from the adhesion pads on the cushion beside me. I pull the I.V. line out of its recessed coil in the armrest.

She looks up. “Not today.”

I release it, and it snakes back into its coil, disturbing the pile of wrappers.

“Shall we begin?” I say.

She has a panel on her pad that interfaces with the sofa and the goggles. She punches at it with her pen, and the room darkens for me.

“I'm going to ask you some questions, Ben.”

She's never made it this dark before.

“I understand.”

I feel my phone vibrate in my pocket. A text message. I'm not sure I could even read it in this darkness.

“Can you tell me what ‘affect' is?” she says.

“Emotion.”

My head hurts. A sudden behind-the-eye pain. Some vessel gone awry.

“Wait,” I say. “No. It is the
experience
of emotion.”

“What is its significance?”

“I learned this as an undergraduate, you realize,” I say.

“Answer the questions, please.”

“Are we that far back? Already?” I feel like one of those people in the bread line. Welfared. I should have written something on my face, for Cynthia to see.
Affect is the experience of emotion.
I could lie in the street, outside her home.

“It is one of the three divisions of modern psychology,” I say. “How far back have we gone?”

“Do you know the other two divisions?” she says.

“I'm sure I do.”

“List them, please.”

It's so dark. She is merely light. A being before me. The way and the truth. I feel hungry.

“I can't,” I say.

“Try.”

“You think I'm lying? Give me the answer. Isn't that your job?”

“Would you like a sedative?”

“No.”

She brings something over to the couch, and the darkness smells like lilacs. I can see her because her blouse is white. A celestial body, dim and floating. Something to stare at behind tinted lenses, so you do not harm your retinas. When I was a child, I did this by punching holes in boxes and seeing the sun as a dot of white-hot cardboard.

Back in her chair, she brightens my view. I can see a pencil and a legal pad upon the cushion beside me.

“Please write down the other two divisions of modern psychology,” she says.

I write them without thinking.
Cognitive
.
Conative
.

“Odd,” I say. I no longer associate fully, consciously. I wonder if I will dream my education, when she is finished. If I will become something greater when unconsciously triggered. A still being, enlightened, counting breaths and shriving myself of psycho-social material baggage. Experiencing my old self as a series of confusing nightmares.

“Not all associative processes react at the same rate to this treatment,” she says. “You still remember all three divisions.”

“But you asked in context. Association,” I say.

“Do you know what ‘affective discharge' is?” she says.

I remember the term. I built my dissertation around it. The psychology of experimental fiction. The aesthetic implications of my director, my teacher, and what he did with affect, indexing madness. However it worked.

“Will you tell me?” I say.

She is quiet for a time.

“You don't want to know,” she finally says.

“Why not?”

She is looking at her clipboard.

“You don't want to know how far back I've gone.”

The door opens, and she stands without thinking. I remember that this is an act of one of those psychological divisions. It has important consequences.

“Excuse me,” she says. “Get out!”

They push her deeper into the room, without contact, like some force of nature. She is repelled by a six-foot abyss between herself and the intruders. When they get closer, I can see it is because they are holding guns. They wear plain T-shirts and jeans. Bandanas across their faces, and sunglasses. One of them backs her into a corner and presses the muzzle of his gun against her throat.

The other stops in front of me. I shield my eyes when I look up, as if I am staring into the sun.

“You shouldn't be here,” he says.

“I have an appointment,” I say.

He grabs the wires affixed to my head in one handful. They come away easily. He isn't pointing the gun at me. He reaches for my goggles.

“Ben! Shut your eyes!” Cynthia says.

I remember Zoe in the warehouse. Her reaction when I pulled off the goggles.

I close them, and the room is suddenly cold against my skin when he pulls the goggles from my face.

“Breathe slowly!” Cynthia says. Her gunman does something. “He can be seriously hurt,” she says, more quietly.

“Give me your phone,” the gunman says before me.

I pull it from my pocket and hold it into the darkness. An unlit torch. My only way back to the light. Useless.

“You didn't read this text message,” he says.

“We were busy.”

“You should have.”

“Hurry up,” the other says.

“Just breathe deeply,” the gunman says before me. “Keep your eyes closed.”

I am not panicking. I am hungry, and the room no longer smells like lilacs. It smells like air conditioning and floor cleaner.

The gunman pulls something out of the sofa's access panel. I feel the tug through the cushions.

“What are you doing?” Cynthia says. “You can't. Those are
people
.
He's
on there.”

There is a snipping of wires and the aroma of burning plastic.

“Come over here,” he says.

I choose to understand that he means someone other than me.

“Give me your phone,” he says.

“Take his hand,” he says.

Cynthia's fingers are cold in my palm.

“Please don't do this,” she says.

“Lead him out,” he says.

“Please.”

“Do it.”

I follow her out of the room, down the stairs. I can hear one of the men behind me. Cynthia's receptionist is crying behind her desk. I can tell—it is a small waiting area. People are doing things here, but not what they should be. I can feel them around me. Celestial bodies. I have learned to see in the dark.

Outside, in the alley behind the clinic, there are more people. Cynthia lets me open my eyes, and I see that they are young. Like my students. They watch us, unmasked, smoking cigarettes. They are crowding the ways in and out of the alley, but you wouldn't see them from the street. I do not see any more guns. In the distance, I can hear downtown. The protest has become loud, and the alleys thrum with the sound of it. It sounds like a far-off stadium. Like they're having a good old time.