Chimpanzee (5 page)

The bartender is letting me try this for free. She's just introduced it here. Another way to bring people in. Something else to do. Soon, she will charge per minute.

You get a free inspection of the details around you before the simulation starts—later inspections will “cost” you. The
OCD
sim
is about resisting impulse, resisting inspections. Carrying overfull pints of beer without watching them (to make sure they don't spill) fits the rules.

The carpet here is long and red, faux-Victorian—fleur-de-lis, paisleys, clumps of dotted vines. It's sarcastic. Out of place in the décor of this bar. It's hip.

Through the goggles, through the electrode pulses stimulating artificial neuro-chemical exchange, the carpet is no longer normal. It . . .
spins
, without moving. In asymptotic arcs and Fibonacci spirals. Pressure is gathering at the base of my skull as I study the carpet. Nothing would be finer. Nothing sweeter. Nothing would be more high than inspecting that carpet, tracing, tracing. Walking without stepping on paisleys so I don't break my mother's back. Which is another impulse I must resist.

I can feel the importance, now. I must be sure. I have already inspected the layout of the tables. I will not step on the paisleys. But I will inspect again. I have just inspected, and I do not want to inspect again. I'm starting to feel ashamed. But I will inspect.

Personally, Dimitri told me, he prefers the paranoid schizo sim.

I am afraid to move. I will spill the beer. I must move, though—I'm growing nauseated. My blood is beginning to buzz. The lure of the carpet increases exponentially. I'm not gaining anything by looking at it—I'm losing.

But pushing the episode.

But the thrill.

I look away before I start counting things, like people or dots, which I feel compelled to do. I wish I could stop inspecting. I won't tell anyone how many times I have inspected. I am finished inspecting, so I will just inspect once more.

The beer sloshes when I move. Most likely, this is because of the strange cocktail in my brain, which is guided by low-voltage pulses from the electrodes. Which is disturbing the information in my inner ear. It bends gravity. Spacetime. The physics of simulating someone else's neurological imbalance.

All I have to do is carry the beer to our booth, where Dimitri is sitting, watching, and I'll “win.” I'm starting to feel feverish. Acid pumps are spraying my internal organs. Stop inspecting stop
inspecting stop inspecting. The burn is crawling up my esophagus. The carpet surges, lapping at table legs and sandaled feet as if swallowing. But it hasn't moved. I can't see where I'm stepping now, which has caused my eyes to begin watering, and the beer is running across my fingers in scalding runnels.

I need to think.

Being. Existing. Me. Controlling this fucking situation is just a complication of “paying attention,” which is all awareness is. The goggles are fucking with what I see. I know what they're doing. It's change blindness—they can alter my visual field during the micro-second, saccadic shifts of my eyes. You can make anyone see anything, if you're fast enough, and attention isn't as fast as the microprocessors in these goggles.

But, fuck.

I take a few more steps across the faux-Victorian sea. It used to be carpet.

I need to inspect. I need to inspect. I need to inspect.

I need to think.

It's not real. I can make it. I don't
see
anything. I'm not seeing any of this bullshit. I'm layering proto-objects from low-level neural processing and binding them with the neural excitation of paying attention. I see what I'm paying attention to. Except, in this case, it's what the simulation is paying attention to.

Pay attention pay attention pay attention.

I'm creating scenery. Manipulating what I can recognize from the stupid part of my brain. The kindergarten brain that sees colors and square blocks and knows when it's about to get hit.

Perception is creation. My own fucked-up world.

I'm creating vomit sliding up, up, up. The pressure has increased behind my eyes. I feel the beer falling in slops. I am not supposed to spill the beer.

The goggles make you fuck yourself. A negative affirmation of how you'd like the world to go. They're knock-offs of the equipment that therapists like Cynthia use. My graduate studies director used similar devices in the early days. When he and his gang were figuring it all out.

This isn't fucking fair.

I put another foot forward. I've stepped on a paisley—I can feel it. The muscles clutching my femur shudder, and my groin begins to ache. Have I pissed myself?

Here, here, here, here . . .

There are thirty-three paisleys between me and Dimitri. This is not a prime number. I can step, longly, and not hit any more of them. I need to be sure.

I need to be sure.

Dimitri is suddenly before me. He slips the goggles off my forehead. Yanks the electrode-pads from my skin.

“Jesus,” he says.

He gets an arm around me before the sudden-relief vertigo G-forces my eyes closed. Sends me to the floor.

He's already bought me four beers, sheepishly. It was supposed to be fun. My head doesn't hurt anymore, so it's all right.

“Well, why is it called ‘chimping?'” I say.

Dimitri takes a drag from his cigarette. He watches twenty-somethings in second-hand T-shirts walking in and out of the bar.

“I don't know,” he says. “Monkey see, monkey do?”

“I saw chimpanzee masks—at a protest downtown.”

He shrugs at me.

I take a drink with a trembling hand.

“You can become addicted to it,” he says.

“What?”

“Chimping.”

“What do you mean, ‘addicted' Like, you want to play it all the time?”

He shrugs again, smokes. “I don't know. I've just heard. Some get stuck on the goggles. Can't function without them. Over time.”

“They . . .
live
the simulation? All-the-time goggle-insanity?”

“So I hear.”

Dimitri thinks just about everything is “cute,” or “asinine,” or “telling.” He tries most things: new games, drinks. He regularly attends shows at half a dozen venues across town—that is to say,
at houses packed with young roommates, overfull with heat and alcohol and insufficient bedspace. They produce “shows” in their living rooms—he can name most of the bands they play in this bar. I can't name any, but it's close to my house, so I can walk here. Dimitri has to walk further. There are usually people along his way, asking for beer or food, and he gives them cash. Sometimes. They would've mugged him already, but he's fast. I only have to walk through my neighborhood.

“Smoke?” he says.

I take one. He gives them to me all the time, now that Sireen and I agreed we shouldn't spend on them. I know he feels sorry for me, but I don't care. I didn't want to quit. And when we started all this, being together, young men full of brains and anger and important opinions. Debating things, shouting things, affirming our shared, bar-time ennui, I still had a job. I still bought my own cigarettes. Expensive drinks. We built ourselves on this, and Dimitri keeps it up. He's my only friend.

One of the bartenders brings two bourbons to the table. She smiles, walks back, and says bartender things to some new-entries. To people who know her name. It is a very particular presentation of self, and not everyone can pull it off.

“I took the liberty,” Dimitri says, reaching for a glass.

This isn't unusual, except he ordered the good one. The bourbon we don't order unless we're really just in the mood. We haven't had it since I was able to buy it myself.

“What's the occasion?” I say.

He purses his lips against the liquor. “Tell me about the shrink first.”

“She's hot.”

“Yeah?”

“Don't start.”

He lifts his hands, innocent. Smiling into the smoke between us. He's a sociologist. Studies micro-economies and the politics of exchange. He wrote a paper on what we give up to attractive people.

He drops the smile into his bourbon, like you're supposed to when readying for a topic like this. He projects a new self, sources a new discourse position. An appropriate one.

Although, really, the position sources
him
.

He's ready, I'm ready. That's how it goes.

“How was the session?” he says.

“Fantastic.”

“I'm sorry,” he says. He makes eye contact. A professional himself. “I didn't mean—”

“It was fine.”

A pair of women are chimping at the bar, making out while their friends giggle. Girls' night out. There's a sign behind the bar—five minutes free when you order whatever special. I can't read that part. They're wearing sunglasses, the watching ones.

“Good,” he says.

Before we came to this town, Sireen and I, Dimitri was alone here. For a while, when I worked with them at the university, it was really something. The three of us carpooled. We listened to public radio, or checked out whatever latest CD he'd picked up from whatever latest DIY house-show. Record store. Whatever.

Before we arrived, he was going to leave town. Get back on the job market and live somewhere else alone. Try again. He would live as his own source of attraction, like a gravity well. He cannot return to his native country because he dodged his mandatory military service to earn his Ph.D. in the U.S. His voice lilts because of his accent—too-perfect consonants like chipping teeth—and he remembers things like food shortages, unstable governments, and grocery stores filled with only one kind of each thing. Communist-issue.

So, having a few years of grad school repossessed, without a job, is not to him what it is to me. We've talked about this.

“Do you want to talk about it?” he says.

He and Sireen still carpool.

“She asked about my dissertation.”

“Has she read it?”

“Seems like.”

“And?”

That last semester, when I gave them all “A”s, now and then, one would ask the right questions, and I could give the answers I wanted. About selfhood and cognition and not being in charge. There were no ghosts in the machine. Now and then, I could undo everything Descartes fucked us with. Because, he had it backwards.