Chimpanzee (4 page)

Sireen and I were lucky. Our university was private, which meant that it lost funding immediately—straight from the endowment, when the stock markets started sliding. So we knew. The administration knew what to do immediately. Whose contracts they couldn't renew.

The public universities went later, in size, in number. Surprised when their states started choking off cash flows. Property tax funds fell when foreclosures rose, when commercial buildings went vacant and office parks in-progress slipped into half-constructed limbo. Jobs followed. Income and sales went with them. Taxes
became what we wished we could pay. We didn't need representation anymore—we needed fucking taxation.

Many of the public universities were dissolved, along with some municipal services. Tuition climbed to cover budget gaps. Most smaller schools folded, sacrifices to the larger, who trucked in temporary buildings and festival-sized tents to accommodate all the new enrollees. It was an Age of Enlightenment. Education would be the answer, from the top down.

Faculty were released. Temporary, or part-time, mostly. Like me. Full-time faculty absorbed our teaching loads, creating classes so massive that the students had to teach themselves, largely through support groups and banks of communal notes. The faculty left behind their specializations and started teaching introduction to composition, and introduction to philosophy, and introduction to world religions. College algebra. Macroeconomics. Political Science. The new university is mostly introductory, and no one cares who will pick up the task of advancing this basic knowledge.

It was decided that departments would offer fewer upper-level courses within a given major, less often. It now takes the students longer, costs them more, and leaves them with dangerous ideas—the ideas of ideas—about disciplines that do more harm than good when left without conclusions.

When we were children, we did not play with fire, but we loved the smell of gasoline. Someone was around to teach us the advanced consequences of studying combustion.

This is not unusual. People often fill Sentinel Park. For drum circles. Footbag. Outdoor chess. Sometimes, on Saturdays, the city hosts children's contests. Hula Hoop tournaments, or dance-offs, or synchronized jump-rope. It's a reason to come downtown—other than bread lines and employment offices. A way to be a family. The idea is to stimulate the local economy. After dark, though, most people don't come here because there are always too many transients, staying out of trouble in one place.

It isn't much of a park. It's an amphitheater, really—slabs of cement shelving down into the earth, twenty feet or so beneath
street level. There is no green space—the park is an urban hollow, a leftover gap between three streets converging in the old retail district. There is a gazebo on one side, a wrought-iron, powder-coated thing. Open-air, because that's nice.

The speaker, in that gazebo, doesn't need a megaphone. I can't tell exactly how many people have crowded themselves into the bottom-level flatspace to listen. From this angle, walking back toward my borough, I can only see the crowd's marbled heads, swaying.

We have class division again. University students are rich; their parents are rich—they have to be. The students take courses in poverty studies. They take part in poverty tours and poverty simulations. Financial aid is no longer a solvent investment, and it will disappear soon. It will follow the banks under the national umbrella, to reappear as highway construction and parks renovation. Anything that will create work.

Among other things.

The speaker in the gazebo has a posse—four or five comrades standing, staring, or lending their ears. They're all wearing rubber chimpanzee masks.

“Don't ‘
buy local
',” he shouts. “Don't buy
anything at all
.”

I look around. This is something. It takes courage, because they'll be arrested. I'm surprised they were even able to gather for this long. Someone had to orchestrate it—get the word out. Crowds attract attention—they force outsiders to exist with the protest or performance or whatever. A network of brains, making the thing real for just however long.

Which would be what these chimpanzee kids were after. Sucking your awareness in, just long enough. Making the audience pay attention.

“Don't
organize
,” the speaker shouts. “You can't sustain yourselves. Not without food. Without funding. Without a workforce subordinate to your will.”

I duck out of the sidewalk traffic to turn my phone back on. It vibrates—another message from Sireen.

Dinner canceled. Candidate already took competing offer. Not coming.

“You don't have any idea what
money
even
is
,” the speaker shouts. “It's just a token. It's a convenient way to carry what, in
theory, you've acquired. Food, water, precious metals. Things other people
want
.”

I text her back. Can I buy some beer then?

“And if value is based on scarcity,” he shouts, “we're talking about conflict.
Conflict
is value.”

People walk past me. They don't look like conflict, laying one footstep after another on the sunblasted concrete. Trying not to make a scene—not to be a part of one.

I feel like I should tell this kid that he's getting his rhetoric wrong. He's got hooks down, but if he turned in this transcript, as a paper, I'd fail him.

Conflict follows value follows organization follows capital exchange.
Non sequitur.
He's putting the cart before the revolutionary horse. He needs to cite some sources—something his crowd can relate to. Quickly, before some Renewal monitor's text messages get to the police and the beatings and chemical dispersant begin.

The phone vibrates again. Babe, stop asking permission.

But the speaker's got something going on. One of his comrades watches him carefully. A girl wearing sexual tension like a too-hot overcoat. This is politics, a bigger something than whatever, so she needs to be damn sure she's read enough, seen enough, demonstrated enough before this entire operation, all this shouting, becomes just a metaphor. An expression between them for what goes on beneath bed sheets on futons in apartments without fixtures over the light bulbs. This “cause”—whatever they're doing, shouting about—is the sex between them
now
, and it will be later, too, when it is nothing more than the parameters of their relationship.

When Sireen and I dated, we talked about critical theory or non-positively curved geometry, which is her field.

                    
Tell me something, she said. About literature.

                    
About
literature
? I said.

                    
She laughed. That smile lipping morning teeth over her uneven kitchen table. She had found both chairs independently and then painted them, so it was artistic that they didn't match the table. There weren't
any curtains, which just made the nook brighter—stamped it as hers, where things like light revealed the unwashed buff of wakeup skin. Where dark things became darker. Like coffee.

I gave her Derrida, Saussure, De Man. And she traded the Hausdorff dimension and outer automorphism and lattice-ordered groups. Mathematics.

                    
Yeah, she said. Come on! I want to think like you do.

                    
She brought her lips together. It deepened the after-giggle. She did that often—prompting what she wanted with that female sound. Sourcing things.

                    
Okay, I said, okay. Um, how about border studies. Trans-regional discourse.

                    
Excited. Yes!

Post-colonialism became a sexual politic. Nil radicals attracted us. Cognitive theory had no place in Utopian studies, or New Historicism, and the Moussong metric (on the Davis complex) meant, well . . . nothing. To me. Graduate school became nothing between us, which was the point.

                    
Close your eyes.

                    
Closed. Rolling beneath taut-thin lids. Following the light through the darkness.

                    
Place your fingers on your temples.

                    
Placed. What is this? she said.

                    
Culture. Be quiet. Say om.

                    
Om.

                    
Say oma.

                    
Oma.

                    
Omatul.

                    
Omatul.

                    
Om. Ah. Tul.

                    
Om. Ah. Tul.

                    
Om. Ah. Tul—I'm a tool.

                    
She opened her mouth like her eyes. An unveiling.

                    
Humorshock. She screamed as she laughslapped me.

                    
It actually hurt.

                        
You shit! You shit!

                        
Omatul . . .

I was just talking, looking for ways to keep her smiling. Because I wasn't good at telling dirty jokes, which is mostly what she laughed at. How the guys in her program made her laugh. They watched her move as closely as I did.

The crowd likes what the kid had to say. They're all shouting now. Over and around each other. Attracting attention. Being disturbingly obvious.

There are a few more Renewal workers around now. Paying attention. The day laborers, at the other end of the park, who didn't make it quickly enough into the bed of some hiring asshole's pickup truck that morning, are paying attention.

The noise is indecipherable, like nonsense. Or glossolalia—the holy spirit on the move downtown.

I text Sireen back. Okay.

She earns our money, so I ask.

CHAPTER THREE

O
UR BAR HAS JUMPED IN ON SOME NEW FAD, SOME GAME
, and Dimitri has convinced me to try it. He even set up my login ID and filled in the information for my public profile. We spend plenty of time playing video games at home, during the summers when he and Sireen have time off. She usually just watches us, taking notes sometimes. Compiling them in lists on her computer. Dimitri and I are particularly good at sharing games intended for only one player. Sireen sometimes writes small programs of her own. Things to help her manage all those numbers.

“It's fun,” Dimitri says. He smiles as he walks back across the bar.

It begins by not watching the drinks.

I have a beer in each hand, and I have exhausted the game's “free inspection”—already I can't recall tiny details like the printed monogram on the pint glasses. This program simulates obsessive-compulsive disorder—Dimitri selected it from the menu of available disorders to simulate. The goggles I'm wearing are not rigged for VR—I can still see through them, albeit tintedly. There are electrode-pads affixed to my temples and forehead with disposable, sanitary adhesion pads. There are tiny earphones.