Chimpanzee (27 page)

There are more people than usual in line outside of Rosie's trailer. Or he's taking longer checking each in. I can't tell.

After the woman in front of me leaves the trailer, it is several minutes before Rosie turns on the red “next” light beside the door. The buzzer sounds, and the electronic lock snaps open.

Inside, Rosie sits with his feet up on his desk, reading something. A newspaper. Whatever.

“Name?” he says.

“Cade, sir.”

He lowers the pages and looks at me. He has rearranged the photographs on his desk to make room for his feet. Against the wardrobe wall, there are only a few renewal suits still on hangers.

Rosie puts his feet down and reaches for his coffee, which he keeps on a mug-sized warmer that plugs into the wall behind him.

“Let's see,” he says, situating his keyboard. “Cade. Crew 15, beautification.”

“Do I need any equipment?” I say.

“Nope,” he says, leaning back. “It's all on campus, waiting for you.”

Campus. I don't move. It makes him laugh.

“Relax, Cade. They probably won't recognize you. Central is a big campus, and I'm sure you'll be wearing a respirator or something. It's yard work, you know. Unless one of the wardens picks you for asbestos removal.” He winks. “But I don't think they will.”

He picks up his reading again.

“Sir,” I say, “may I go with the crews to the rockslide instead?”

“No,” he says, turning a page. “You need to do this.”

“Sir, please.” I don't belong on that campus. I don't belong where Sireen's co-workers can see me shoveling garden manure, or blowing leaves, or mucking out the gutters. I don't belong where my old students will be attending their junior and senior seminars, now, talking about the importance of social progress and education.

He holds up his reading. It's an issue of
The Mountainist
. He's always got them piled around his desk. “You read this, Cade?”

I turn around and look through the window. The line is even longer than before.

“I've seen it,” I say.

“It's always good,” he says. “This issue in particular—” he flips backward through the pages “—about that protest downtown. You see that?”

“I saw it,” I say.

“Of course. You had therapy that day.” He points at me, wags a finger. “Good with appointments.

“Anyway,” he says, “you should read this. Thing's gone underground—hard to get a copy these days.” He turns the page around and points at the article. “This one, she's good—I like her articles. Leah Johnson, Cade. She has a lot to say about a lot of things. Seems the government has finally decided to tax
SHARES
.”

Zoe has no idea. If anyone can find her, it's Rosie, with his thousand, thousand eyes. With his cell phones and text messages and workers who owe him favors. Like me.

How long has she been writing? How many has he read?

“Yes, sir.”

How many of my classes have his monitors seen? The students and connections there?

“You know where most of those protesters ended up?” Rosie asks. He picks up his mug, but he does not drink.

“No, sir.”

He spreads his arms. “Here, working off their hours against the common good. Those that weren't arrested, anyway. They tell me all kinds of things, Cade. Crazy things.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Some of them will have to be tax-collectors,” he says. “For those
SHARES
. You know
SHARES
, don't you Cade?”

“Yes, sir,” I say.

“Damn shame,” he says. “Renewal just always cuts against the grain. It changes people—makes them do what they don't want. Makes them want to change things.”

I look at the floor.

“Don't you think?”

I nod.

“Just remember, Cade. It's better this way.”

They've finished the new chemistry building on campus. When I left, before, it was still a series of scaffold walls, like some giant wire sculpture. The idea of a building. Something sarcastic for the new age.
Remember buildings? Here's one.

Now, it's a hard-lined megalith. To construct it, the administration approved the demolition of a commuter parking lot. Which didn't matter—it was never as full as it had been designed to be. Not during my final days here. There are wall-spanning windows, and bright concrete pathways that wind around and between trees, shrubs, outlining any route but a direct one. There are benches in strategic places, where one can sit and ponder chemistry. Each carries a tiny plaque to identify which aging alumni couple donated it. There are fresh squares of sod along the walkways, to heal the scarification caused by laying new sewer lines and electrical boxes.

The university had approved, drawn up, and broken ground on the thing before the full force of the depression occurred. Most of the funds were already in place—the panel that secured the grants to cover the rest of the cost were given awards and merit raises. The building is several stories tall, and it generates 65% of its own electrical needs via a system of solar, wind, and bio-diesel-fueled generators.

Someone has already vandalized one of its cosmetic stucco columns. A tiny chimpanzee with his head in his hands, stenciled clean onto the thing. Our wardens tasked two older women with cleaning it off.

A few of the students on campus watch us work Renewal. They take notes, cross-legged on the grass, as their professor points out this and this and this Renewal worker. Each one's particular job today. The color of its skin and its likely socioeconomic status. The ages of the workers. The students sit, on safari, and they secretly hope I won't come any closer, while they watch. Human influence always affects animal behavior, which ruins the point of watching at all.

Other students don't care, and we stop our lawnmowers and leaf blowers and trimming shears when they pass us on the walkways. The wardens told us on the bus not to let them catch us looking at
any of the students, so we avert our eyes. We look at things like the sun, or our feet, or the ultralight panels of glass on the sustainable chemistry building.

Now and then, we look at each other. At how familiar we've become. Rosie is not randomizing the crews the way he should, and we're learning to trust each other. We're learning what that look could mean, on the young black man's face, holding the trimming shears, the one I saw Rosie talking to at the protest. The one who was in the trailer with another worker once. We can see in his face what else he can do. He hides expressions between the branches of sweat on his face, and we're learning to read them. He can tell what I'm thinking between my eyes. We all can. But we keep quiet. We think about the wardens and their guns.

The chief warden didn't send me into the old chemistry building. They sent half our crew to a hazardous materials tent, outside the old building, where they were outfitted with additional clothing and equipment to protect them from the asbestos inside, which they would be stripping from walls and shoveling into wheelbarrows. They would glitter with the light, with airborne particles of fibrous rock, thinner than anything but light, or maybe cancer. Later on.

I wonder why they're renovating the old building. What they will do with it. What other sciences or arts one can purpose a chemistry building for. Its tubes and histories and safety records.

There are temporary doors into the building that support polyvinyl ventilation tubing. There are signs that warn the students and the faculty away. There is a sign that identifies the job as another successful and worthwhile use of the Homeland Renewal Project.

Dimitri walks out of the tent. He is wearing a hard hat and the sport coat that he thinks projects an image of authority to his students. Men in black suits follow him out. A trio of students struggle with tubes of paper and clipboards, behind them.

I am holding a handful of weeds, which I have extracted from this flowerbed. I'm not far. It makes sense that Dimitri sees me, which is all right. He knows, so it's all right. He waves, and the burdened students follow his attention across the lawn. The class of students, with their pointing zookeeper, watch us interact, as if
we are lifting plumage or dancing or ramming our heads against each other to establish which of us is which of us.

I wave back.

“Cade,” the nearest warden says. He swings his shotgun off his shoulder. “What'd I tell you?”

“I'm sorry, sir,” I say.

“You keep your eyes on the fucking dirt.”

The worker with the trimming shears doesn't watch the dirt. He watches the warden.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

F
ROM THE DAY
S
IREEN BOUGHT THE HOUSE, IT TOOK LESS
than a week to fully close the deal and transfer ownership. Every entity in the deal—from the bank that owned the foreclosure, to the attorneys who monitored the signing, to our real estate agent—was ready to go. They have arrangements, teams. There are incentives to buy. We didn't have to make a down payment. Sireen's credit was fine. Which is to say what used to be average, which put her in the top two percent of eligible buyers. The realtor's office even paid for the crew to move our things into the new house—they'll arrive at our old place tomorrow morning.

The realtor left us a fruit basket and a bottle of wine on the kitchen counter. We didn't bring a corkscrew with us. We weren't expecting a round of drinks. We just wanted to walk around the place. Swing our arms and smile and listen to the hollowspace echo, now that it's ours. This is our chance to turn on all the lights and burn the evening glow of streetlamps and incidental shine from the windows. All of our curtains and drapes and bamboo privacy coils are still at the rental house, which leaves these windows as something obscene, without modesty or attire. This is our chance to turn our rooms into one-way mirrors, forcing people outside to watch us turn blind eyes to them all. We bought a house, and now they don't exist. We can't see them through the gleam of our own interior reflections. This house is now all houses—inside, with these lights, there is no outside world—nothing to see through the dark windows but reflected versions of what's in here, each
containing thinner doors and coats of paint and pockets of wood-smelling air.

Let them see. For once, we have something they don't. For once, there was a point to all this. For once, I am not among the poor and disaffected. I am privileged and warm, staring at windowblack images of myself staring at myself. I exist endlessly here.

Not that it matters much. There aren't many of them to watch us—this nearly empty neighborhood.

There are three bedrooms. I find Sireen in the smallest one. When we imagined this, it would have been my study: a place for my books and vintage science fiction posters and stacks of student papers. The other would have been Sireen's study, and there would be the bedroom. Now, my study will be a nursery. I look at the ceiling fan and wonder if infants should have them in their rooms. The things I don't know.

When she sees me in the doorway behind her, Sireen turns around and runs past me. Without furniture in here, her laughing sounds haunted. Flat and damp. In the kitchen, she grabs the bottle of wine and smashes the neck against the sink. She squeals. We entertain ourselves by slopping wine into the glasses..

Outside our kitchen window, there is the river bottom, so dark-far below. There is the arts district, with its pinpricks of light traded by students with cigarette lighters in broken rooms, like fireflies. There is Zoe, beckoning to the others with the spark of her being.

But I can't see them, standing in the light like this, illuminating the hillside with the panes of my house, letting people in dark places know there is something better in the distance. Something safer than rocks or clouds or unstable terrain along the shore.

Sireen takes my chin between two fingers and turns my gaze from the window.

“Here we are,” she says.