Chimpanzee (36 page)

“What about the real owners?” Dimitri says. He seems to surprise himself, not knowing what his students are doing.

“They won't check 'til Monday,” she says.

“What will you do in the meantime?”

“We filled in our own gaps, Dr. Cade.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

S
IREEN DOESN
'
T WAKE UP WHEN
I
GET OUT OF BED
. H
ER
hair is a fan across the expanse of her pillow. I spent most of the night unable to sleep, making shapes with that hair. Symbols. Arcane things that only mean anything on a pillow, in a bed.

I'm not going to report Zoe's gasoline. It's all I can do.

Sireen surprised me. She didn't wear any underwear, and as soon as she lipped this information into my ear, in the front yard at the party, while Zoe said goodbye to Dimitri, we started carrying that party thrum all the way home. I didn't think about my indices, or the gasoline in the garage, or conspirators and heroines and being everyone's biggest secret. Not then. Sireen held on every way she could, trying to make it happen. She has plans. We'll raise the kid speaking English and French. It'll be allowed to paint on the walls of its bedroom.

I think about it all now.

In the kitchen, I fill a tumbler at the sink. Through the window, it is as dark outside as in, so I stare into the river bottom I can't see. I wonder if Sireen thinks about math, sometimes, when she thinks about kids. About giving birth, breast-feeding, the dark worlds she contains. I can't understand the divisions. A professor, a wife, a mother. A modern twist on the maiden, the mother, the crone.
Something ancient and traditional. A quiet power, a series of roles that gets things done.

I thanked her, for getting everything back, right after I pulled away her jeans against the living room wall.

She gave me that grad school smile. That same expression, like she was up to something, walking down the wedding aisle. The look she sleeps in. The way she sees me beyond repossession and Renewal and my fascination with watching things fall apart. Like me.

“No problem,” she said.

At first, they're nothing—my imagination come in from the woods, hiking along that river bottom. Dots or will-o'-the-wisps. Swamp gas. Tiny rednesses on the move.

But, eventually, they're as real as I am. Those people on the march, from the trees—red balloons stretched over their flashlights so they can see beyond their own glow. They hug the riverbank, in their long hundreds, carrying things.

I dump the water from my glass. There are a few fingers of bourbon left in our reserve bottle. The one we keep for Christmas or New Year's or emergencies. I pull it out of the cabinet, and it's slow in my glass.

I watch them come. They disappear into Zoe's old warehouses—one, two, a handful at a time, winking dark like pinpricks in windows. I watch them. In our bedroom, Sireen talks in her sleep.

The television is dead. I haven't been paying attention to the outage schedule. So I sit in silence at our table, drinking rebrewed coffee. I couldn't get back to sleep.

Nothing was moving in the river bottom when I looked again, earlier. The warehouses just look like themselves.

Sireen kisses my head when she comes in. That smile. It was a good night. She fills a tumbler at the sink, and I watch her stare through the window.

“Ben?”

“Yes?”

“Who are all those people?”

I guess they're up.

“What people?”

She moves to fill a mug. “The ones on the bridge.”

I take a look, and there they are. People marching across the bridge that spans the river. Blocking traffic. Carrying signs.

“I don't know,” I say. “The TV's out.”

“Let me get my phone,” she says. “Somebody's got to be talking about it.”

“It's the grain shortage,” she says. “They're protesting it.”

“A protest?” I say.

She looks up from her phone. “I know.”

“The police?”

She looks back down. The chatter from whatever feed she's streaming sounds like something bubbling. She has it turned down.

“Come see this,” I say. Sireen is in the living room, listening to Dimitri's latest recommendation. Watching things on her phone.

She steps into the kitchen.

“Turn off the light,” I say.

When she does, the fires are immediately visible through the window.

She joins me in front of it and wraps her hands around my elbow. We finished our dinner half an hour ago. I don't mind doing the dishes. It just takes a while.

The city glows, and I can hear sirens over Dimitri's music.

Sireen gets the bourbon out of the cabinet. She pours what's left into two tumblers. It's more than I'd usually pour at once.

So we stand there.

“Riot police have been deployed,” she says.

“I don't see anything about a riot,” I say. I thumb my phone's browser to a different site.

“I think this is nation-wide,” she says.

“Shit,” I say.

“What?”

I turn my phone so she can see its face. “They're mobilizing Renewal for this. All of us.”

She jumps when her phone rings. “Jesus.”

It takes her a moment of staring at it. As if she's never used it as a phone before. “It's my mother.”

She answers it.

My phone vibrates a text message onto the screen. It's not from a number I recognize.

ATTENTION, RENEWAL! ALL PERSONNEL PLEASE REPORT TO LOCAL DISPATCH. EMEGENCY DERELICTION IS A CLASS B MISDEMEANOR PUNISHABLE BY A FINE AND/OR 180 DAYS INCARCERATION WITH MANDATORY RENEWAL SERVICE EXTENSION. EFFICIENCY IS EVERYONE'S RESPONSIBILITY!