Chimpanzee (30 page)

This is the last time I will do this.

In the mailbox, I found a letter with an address for a private message board, online, with instructions not to enter the address into my personal computer. Which is Sireen's computer—the university issued it to her. The instructions stated that the password for the board was the most important of the three principles addressed early in the term.

The term.

I found enough change to buy a cup of coffee and ten minutes on a public computer at the franchised coffee shop two miles from my house.

I still remember:
ETHOS
.

There was only one message on the board:

NEXT CLASS. THREE MILE WALK. WEAR COMFORTABLE SHOES, DARK CLOTHES. A GUIDE WILL WAIT UNDER THE GANTRY TOWER OF THE CRISS BUILDING IN THE ARTS DISTRICT. NEXT TO THE TRAIN TRACKS. 7:00 PM.

I responded:

THIS IS THE LAST CLASS.

I called Dimitri and left him a message. An invitation to come along, for his study.

He texted me later. No thanks. Busy night.

I'm not inviting Sireen. This is bad enough.

This kid, my guide, leads me into the trees—state property along the railway, where it winds away from the city center. I can see headlights along the hillside, across the miles. They blink between
the trees, climbing, climbing into the mountains. They look like magnesium flares.

This kid's got a flashlight with a red balloon stretched over the lens, so we can see without burning the darkness out of our eyes. We walk straight down the center of the tracks, where at least it's flat. The embankments abutting the tracks are nothing but loose gravel and twisted ankles.

I'm not sure if I recognize him. My memory is not what it used to be. A taste of things to come. He takes this seriously. He's got a walkie-talkie on his belt. It chirps at him every few minutes, and he holds it to his ear—looks into the dark as if orienting by analog waves. His comrades report distances and cardinal directions. It sounds like a moon landing. Something orchestral, polyphonic. The business of taking one's endeavor seriously.

We don't speak, but he looks at me sometimes.

Once we're off the tracks, back into the trees, I can't see the city anymore. Even its overglow, which it bounces against the surrounding hills. It was brighter at night when Sireen and I first moved here.

There's a tent city in the trees. They use firelight. It comes at us, smokeless and inconstant. A glow like something else—some place with woodland creatures and supernatural people. They have a queen, but I can't remember her name. Some neat trick of Shakespeare's, but I'm no longer allowed to know. It would be stealing from the government—taking what's theirs, what they took back.

But at least there's that glow—it darkens tree trunks against itself, so that we might see them.

There are hundreds of tents, pitched in one long firebreak. There are clotheslines and windsocks and improvised metal stoves. There are yellow nylon ropes, hanging waist-high, tied to things in the trees on the other side of the break. Like traffic lanes or handrails. A way to know where you're going. To take a shit or have sex or disappear without getting lost. There are people in
small groups, packing boxes and taping them shut. The tribe, on the move.

My guide leads me a hundred yards down the main avenue between the tents. We pass clusters of people in semi-circles, listening to lectures about chemistry, politics, military science. The instructors work with flashlights, which they aim at their newsprint-laden easels. Directing the eye to their hand-scrawled truths. Most of the instructors look older than I am.

Near the center of the camp, the brightest spot, the indigent's capital city, people stand in mobs. Families, students. Groups of young men wearing gang attire—their colors made uniformly brown by the firelight. There is a clear space with an untended easel. Students already sit in rows.

My guide leads me to a canvas tent—an antique with wooden poles and room to stand upright inside. It looks like some general's castoff, when he finished laying plans and making things true by discussing them with other men over inadequate maps.

Zoe is inside. She is sitting on a cot opposite another woman, on her own cot. There is a small, collapsible table at the far end bearing a battery-powered lantern.

“Hello, Dr. Cade,” Zoe says.

I don't say anything. The other woman, who is older, excuses herself, and my guide follows her out.

“This is it,” Zoe says, lifting her eyebrows and planting her palms on her knees. As if we are about to give an encore performance. Something that should make us nervous.

I take the other woman's place.

“I'm afraid so,” I say.

She lowers her eyes.

“My therapist has taken what there is to take. It's over.”

She rummages through a bag on her cot.

“Do you all live here now?” I say. “Are there that many?”

“No,” she says. “We stay here sometimes, but they were here first. We bring them things, so they'll let us blend in.”

She hands me a glasses case.

“Something for you,” she says.

They're chimping glasses like hers.

“We can keep in touch,” she says.

I put them on and stare through the rose-colored lenses.

“Have we been in touch?” I say.

She lowers her eyes, and her eyelashes are white, like spun glass in the lantern's cheap light.

“Have you figured everything out?” she says.

I could tell her that I figured out my own life. My new house and my civic duty. How light moves and touches the brain is all there's left to see of me.

“No.”

But I'm not even sure that's it.

“It's probably better this way,” she says.

Most of them come to listen to me. Those that can't sit, in one of those important rows, stand behind. People with nothing but these tents. Their children and past lives. The gangs come, too, and I see them clearing spaces so that others—more important, better-ranked—have a clear view.

I see the man with the angry eyes, from my Renewal crew—he who brandished those shears. Who held them still against the wardens and their guns. He waves—points me out.

I grab Zoe's arm. “There is a Renewal worker here.”

“I know,” she says. She doesn't struggle.

“Do you know how monitors work?” I say. “I do.”

“They aren't monitors.”

They.
I let her go.

“They're invited—you don't have to worry.”

“I'm not worried, Zoe—not about me.”

“It wasn't my idea,” she says.

“Let's get started.”

“Those of you who have been in class, since the beginning, will remember the work we did in research, when one lacks resources.”

They nod, in the rows.

“What was the point? Behind that information—those assignments?”

They've learned when I'm not actually asking questions.

I pull my lecture notes out of my back pocket—like a handbill I'd forgotten, right before doing laundry.

“There's something I wanted you to know,” I say. “When I still knew.”

I give them a good look. The faces in the light. Learning in the dark how to make truth. Training for the ages.

“Good luck,” I say.

It takes me a minute to arrange my papers. I can't see well enough to read by the firelight, so my guide returns, and he brings his red light.

“The ‘extended self' is the most fascinating,” I read. “The most troubling. The ability to posit a future is what some claim separates the human mind from the animal's. But this isn't true. Animals are genetic futurists. Their very reflexes, like ours, choreograph futures. Muscle memory and spinal fluid are our best analogs for tomorrow. The mule deer stops, listens, perceiving threats without the inconvenience of a judgmental self-awareness. It twitches, jumps, listens—moves always away from those natural situations that posit a future wherein it ceases to exist. An alternate reality.

“Men with powerful rifles hunt mule deer for sport. Enforcing one reality over another, anticipating food and weekends in camouflage with other men around fraternal fires. Once, we did this with sharpened stones, and the fire had things to say in the voice of the dead deer.