I pour another glass of moonshine instead.
“I think it’s time you answered some questions,” I say. “You’ve taken over my class.”
“I have questions, too,” she says.
“I don’t work for you,” I say.
“Okay.”
“You understand me?”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for it to happen. It wasn’t my idea.”
“Start talking.”
She looks for something, over her shoulder. Looks back. “Do you mind if I chimp while we talk?”
“What?”
“There’s a sim I need to try out. It’s in progress.”
“You keep chimping goggles here?”
She looks suddenly like a student. Someone young, toting computers and portable electronics from class to class across the lawns of a springtime campus. She trades messages with her friends and waits until her instructors aren’t listening before she shares invitations to Friday-night parties. She is old enough to buy alcohol, so she can host them.
But campuses don’t behave that way—not anymore. She looks older than she should be, at this age.
She owns chimping goggles.
I try to remember the timeline. Could she be the one from the bar? The network?
“Do you mind?” she says.
“No, go ahead.”
“Will you join me?”
There’s no reason to be a dick.
“Sure—if it makes you feel better.”
Zoe’s goggles are smaller than the ones at the bar. Than Cynthia’s. They look like old aviator sunglasses. There are tiny LEDs along the earpieces. The pair she’s given me look normal. Like those at the bar. The tinted lenses make this dark room darker, which has an immediate effect.
The potential for action in context. Chimping is going to mean something right now.
“What’s the sim?” I say.
“It’s restricted.”
If I could see her eyes behind the lenses, I’d know what her smirk means.
“But what is it?”
“It’s just two people. You’ll see.”
I take the goggles off and turn them over in my hand, to be doing something. I can’t tell which LEDs indicate what.
“Where did you get these?” I say.
She plugs my goggles into an adapter at the end of her line—the adapter into her mobile phone, which is barely the size of a credit card.
“They were a gift,” she says. “Custom made.”
A rich boyfriend, or her father. Someone.
I look at her phone. “Are we going to network this sim? Is that wise?”
She punches commands into her phone. “No, we’re streaming it. The author won’t let me download it.”
“Won’t the police be able to find you? Through your phone?”
“No.”
I put the goggles back on. Lean back on the couch. It’s old—the seams are worn and the batting is flattened. Like something from a community theater shop. Something donated, or stolen.
“Ready?” Zoe says.
I nod. She taps her phone a final time and grabs her joint from the coffee table. She leans back with her lighter for a long drag.
The room is as dark as it was before.
I don’t feel anything. Zoe is humming softly—a steady tone, like something mechanical. Like Cynthia’s sofa.
I pull the goggles off and check the LEDs along the earpiece. They’re definitely on. The electrodes tug at the skin on my forehead
“Don’t do that!” Zoe says.
I put the goggles back on. I can feel warmth now—it’s radiating from the metal frames, pulsing in undetectable waves through my cheekbones, along my brow. Stimulating things near my brainstem and across the surfaces of my frontal lobes.
That’s weird.
“Jesus. Are you okay?” she says.
“Yes.”
“You shouldn’t take the goggles off like that, not in the middle of a sim.”
“Okay.”
She touches my forehead with a dark finger, as if I am wounded. “You don’t feel dizzy?”
“No.”
“Sick?”
“No.”
She drops her hand into her lap. “Okay. Tell me if you start to feel weird.”
“I don’t feel anything,” I say. “At all. I was checking the goggles.”
She uses the opportunity to lean in for a closer look. I can no longer tell if I sourced these actions on purpose. People are responsible for encounters of all kinds—conversational, martial, sexual. Someone is always to blame.
I’m not supposed to remember about behavioral subjectivity. And thinking about sourcing didn’t nauseate me like it did downstairs. I don’t understand.
“They’re working,” Zoe says. “It’s working. You don’t feel . . . it?”
She smells like tea. Like steeping leaves. Green things.
“No. What’s it supposed to be?”
She tucks her feet under her legs and leans over the table. I see her dial up the intensity via the interface on her phone. I see the magenta polish on her toenails. It looks like blood in the goggled light.
She leans back. “That should do it.”
Whatever.
“So, someone else is teaching, too,” I say.
She stares at the ceiling, breathing heavily. It’s getting to her— the new difficulty. “Yes.”
“By coincidence?”
“No,” she says, barely. “We reached out to some others. Trying to round things out.”
I wait.
“We can’t just study writing,” she says. “You don’t even grade our papers.”
“I hear you have study groups for that now,” I say.
She shrugs.
“Where did you find the others?”
It takes her a while. “A few of us knew some people.”
“And you’re paying them, too? With SHARES?”
“Yes.”
“And you control who may attend class?”
She tucks her hands into her armpits. I can tell she is trying to get a grip. But I’m in control now. I still can’t tell what this sim is supposed to be. My face feels warm, behind the goggles. Whatever it’s trying to stimulate, in my brain, isn’t there. Or it already is.
“We have to,” she says.
“Why?”
“Not everyone can be trusted with the secret,” she says.
“But you all can.”
Her neck has become flushed. “What does it matter? The classes are still free, and everyone gets paid.”
“The police won’t like this,” I say.
“They don’t. We’re hiding it.”
“Which is why you use a fake name,” I say.
She exhales, deflating. “Wouldn’t you?”
“But they know the real one.”
That makes her smile. “It’s not fake—it’s just my middle name.”
“How many other instructors?” I say.
“Right now, ten. I don’t know them all. Others do.”
Now it smells like fruit in here. Like oranges and rose water. I look around for some candle or potpourri or whatever. I remember that people used to suffer something like this. These random smells, before we learned to condition it away. I wonder if this sim has conditioned it back in. Some side effect.
“You’re starting a whole university,” I say.
“Dr. Cade.” She alters her position to recline against the armrest. This sofa is not as long as Cynthia’s, but this is how we sit, there. “It’s starting itself.”
I drink my moonshine.
“You started it,” she says.
I watch her curl and uncurl her toes. Her fists at her sides. “You’re still not feeling it,” she says.
I can’t tell.
“Just remember,” I say, “I don’t work for you.”
“We know,” she says. “It’s the other way around.”
“What?”
“She feels . . . wonderful,” sh
e says.
“What?”
“This sim. Her index.”
“Who is it?”
She rolls her head toward me and smiles. “Figure it out.”
“Do you all know what’s happening to me?” I say.
“What’s happening to you,” she says.
“Repossession therapy. Renewal.”
“We know. It’s okay. It’ll be okay.”
The sweat on her arms, her thighs, is gold, lamped by the lights behind us. Beneath her black button-down, she was wearing a spaghetti-strapped tank top. Is wearing. A real-life tense shift. The shirt is pooled on the rug beneath the sofa, along with her jeans. She did not ask me how I felt about that. “It’s the sim,” she said.
I lean over and dial up the intensity. One last time.
She goes nearly limp.
“Zoe, what do the chimpanzees mean?”
She whispers, “Will you stay?”
“Here?”
“Here.”
“Will you answer my question?”
“Will you stay?”
It’s important to remember that I love my wife.
“You know you’re a walking cliché,” I say.
She just lies there and looks at me.
“The student, attracted to her instructor. She knows better.”
“Yes,” she says. “But only if this was my idea.”
“What?”
“We’re chimping, Dr. Cade.”
“You think I’m responsible for everything I do,” she says. She dials down the difficulty. “You taught us that we’re not in control.”
“That’s not what I meant,” I say.
“You don’t get to pick and choose.”
“Please. We all control our urges.”
“Who’s talking about urges?” she says.
When she pulls her goggles off, I do the same. She sits bent over, elbows on her knees.
“You didn’t feel anything,” she says. “The entire time.”
“No.”
She gathers her dreads in her fist behind her head and holds them there while she makes a note on her coffee table. She looks at me.
“You think I’m a stupid girl,” she says.
“Zoe—no.”
“Yes,” she says. “You think I haven’t thought any of this through.”
I am no longer in control.
“Maybe I should just go,” I say.
What was that sim? Who were we chimping?
She gets up and finds a band for her hair. The lamplight is sharp upon her legs. Crescents and lines of bright skin.
“I drove you here,” she says. “Remember?”
Outside the rain thunders the walls.
“And anyway, you shouldn’t just go because you don’t like the conversation,” she says. “Doesn’t that mean I’m doing well?”
“I suppose so.”
She lights a cigarette and leans against the busted control panels. “I said I have questions, too.”
“What is it that you’re supposed to be thinking through?”
She smokes. “You, class. Everything. What it’s like living in a warehouse. Why I would do illegal things. People see a young woman, they try to tell her what to do.” She gives me a look. “Even other women.”
“Are you in some kind of trouble, Zoe?”
She folds her arms. Her cigarette smoke ropes past her temples. A taste of things to come—pale dreads, thin and smoky with age. Wasted youth. “What if I am, Dr. Cade? What will you do about it? Will you and your wife take care of me?”
I sit still. A teacher with a crazed student. An unwanted F. A dying grandmother. Problems with her degree plan.
“Me and my wife, Zoe?”
She stares at me across the industrial shadows. I wait her out.
“They told me therapy wouldn’t make you stupid,” she says. “Just forgetful.”
“Who told you?”
“You know I cover for you,” she says. “I fill in the gaps from my notes, when you forget your terms and principles.”
“I know.”
“I make sure the others are getting it. I don’t even know what you expected us to get.” She paces the control panel. “Which is why we filled in the gaps ourselves. It’s how we got the other instructors to help. They liked the plan.
“You want to know what chimpanzee means,” she says. “It doesn’t mean anything, which is what has everybody so pissed off. It’s just people with masks and spray paint. Leaving marks and causing trouble. It’s an indulgence—a smokescreen. They just took the name from ‘chimping’ because they like the idea of being somebody else.”
“Are you all chimpanzees?” I say. “Here?”
“Does that matter?” she says. “We’re in a lot more trouble than they are, just running these classes.”
“Then perhaps it’s time we stop,” I say.
“What’s it like?” she says. “Falling apart like this. Doing collateral damage.”
“That’s just it,” I say. “I don’t know what’s missing. That’s how this works.”
She looks down, young again. Sitting without pants in a cold warehouse. Looking thin and alone.
“We can’t stop,” she says. “People are counting on us.”
Zoe navigates us out of the clustered warehouses. David stayed behind this time. He shook my hand as I left, in thanks or understanding. I’m not sure. He’s a quiet kid.
I can see students through garage doors. Teachers with newsprint and easels of their own. I can see them calling on upraised hands. The rain is louder than the car.
We ride quietly up, out of the river bottom, along the rail bridge. Zoe drives past the bus stop and up my hill.
“You can just let me out here,” I say.
She keeps driving and pulls up outside my house. “What does your wife think about all this?”
“What do you mean by ‘this?’”
She turns to look at me, past me. I see her seeing the light in my home. Her face crawls with rainlight and unreadable emotion.
“Do you talk about it?” Zoe says.
I look at the house, too. At the water and the wind. I will be cold and uncomfortable when I step out of this car. “She doesn’t want me to get into any trouble.”
“Like I told you,” she says. “People are counting on us.”
She squeezes my hand. “You need to figure it out, Dr. Cade.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
WE’RE GOING TO FIGURE OUT WHAT MAKES THINGS beautiful, my professor said. He wasn’t my director yet. I was still an undergraduate.
Things? I said.
Poetry, he said, literature. Took another drag from his cigarette, outside between buildings where the smoking ban couldn’t see us. Political discourse, advertisements—anything, he said.
I was accepted to Northern, I said. For the creative writing program.
No, Ben. You’re a good student, and there’s more important work to do. We don’t need more writing—we’re going to figure out why there’s any point in bothering in the first place. With anything.
How? I said.
He smiled. Sepia in the gleam of a sodium-vapor lamp. We needed to get back inside. The break was almost over. I think he created them for just this purpose. Having a cigarette. Night classes just ran too long. It was my final undergraduate semester, and this class was one last survey of everything worth learning, which you would only really do in-depth if you kept at it—in a graduate program. A self-perpetuating system of understanding. It would be really something at the top.
He tapped at his temple. Dropped an avuncular hand on my shoulder. We’re going to understand.
I stop under the vestibule of an old bar, a place that served pizza and offered regulation-sized billiards tables upstairs. Dimitri and I used to come here, before it closed. We mostly talked about how frustrated we were with our jobs. His girlfriends. The price of beer. I always felt a little guilty, going out with Dimitri for a guys’ evening. We’d always invite her, but
Sireen usually wouldn’t join us. She never has found any local girlfriends. Not since we left graduate school. Between me and her job, she’s got it all covered.
I text her: Something is happening downtown.
I keep my phone in my hand. In my pocket, sometimes, I don’t feel it vibrate. I don’t use ringtones because they’re intrusive. They bring your world into everyone’s around you. It is rude and uninteresting.
Even the sidewalks are backed up. The avenues leading toward the old retail district are filled with unmoving cars. Most of their drivers have turned off their engines and are now sitting on hoods and kneeling on bumpers. Gathering against the problem, talking to see if anyone has information. Becoming a community by sharing their stillness. Suffering together, which is how they did it during the first depression—the Great Depression. Except now, the minute someone knows something, they will go back into their cars, to check their email and text their spouses.
Even the sidewalks are backed up. Pedestrians stand in slow-moving herds, approaching whatever-it-is that’s blocking traffic. As if drawn by gravity or tropism.
What is it? Sireen messages.
Massive traffic jam. People are out of their cars.
Will you make your appointment?
Yeah.
It gets thicker the further I go. I can hear police sirens. People with upper-floor windows, along the avenue, stand and stare. Some gather on balconies to share what they can see. Like oracles outside of town, upon some classic hilltop—misshapen people and demigods and creatures with human heads. With all the answers. There is a price for the truth about all things. They already know what is going to happen when I get to it. They can see it from up there. Whatever it is. A singularity. A way to stop time and break a society.
The crowd is nearly impenetrable, upon the cusp, the event horizon. I can feel its stillness, the nothing stopping all these people. It radiates quietly, like a terrible accident or a giant meteorite. Something that must be stared at for a time, before we can figure out which experts should take custody and rope the area off. The cars here are stopped at odd angles. Like detritus, something littoral—they have pushed each other together as the tidal urge from the massed cars behind them rolled. Moved forward and back in tiny, immeasurable increments.
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