Dimitri has finished with the tree.
“How?” I say.
“To solve problems,” she says. “Difficult ones.”
“What?”
“With chimping goggles. Like those people, from that sim at the bar. They were real. We thought them—like them—during that sim.”
It’s an oversimplification, but I can feel that pressure behind my eyes. I can’t remember how to tell her.
“So,” I say.
She crosses her arms. “If you could think like some genius, who has a record of solving problems, then you could solve more.”
“I guess you could.”
She studies me, catches the liminal forest light, alive and dying, in her eyes. We haven’t been out enough—as much as we used to. Her skin has paled.
“Could I talk to Cynthia about this?” she says. “Would you mind?”
“No,” I say. “I don’t mind.”
Dimitri is beside us now. His camera hangs on a strap around his neck. He has a bottle of wine in a cylindrical satchel over his shoulder.
“May I come to one of your sessions?” she says. “To take notes for the proposal?”
I don’t know how long it will take Cynthia to replace the equipment in the sofa. Repossession is federal, so, a while.
“May I come, too?” Dimitri says.
He hands me a plastic glass filled with wine. Sireen found a suitable clearing, and she has removed her shoes to practice yoga where she can’t hear us. I can see her across the trail, all elbows and sunlight. She doesn’t want any of Dimitri’s wine.
“Why do you want to come to a session?” I say.
He braces himself against the loam with an elbow. “Why does Sireen?”
It’s a pinot. My favorite. Usually, Dimitri doesn’t care for them. I can see the mountains over the tree line behind Sireen’s clearing. We’re both watching her. I feel like I’ve done this before. With someone, sometime. Watching Sireen, keeping an eye out. Checking for weakness in the other man. I wonder sometimes.
The wine tastes cold. Like earth.
“She wants to bring in grant money,” I say. “Something about chimping great minds.”
“Good idea,” he says.
She sinks her belly into the grass. A practice of non-being. Reduction. There is nothing before us but a clearing of wild grass and the idea that there may be a woman within it.
“Why do you?” I say.
“I’m doing a study.”
I look at him. His cheekbones are pale. His skin is manicured, and he smells faintly of cedar and rose oil. Some cologne.
We’re so close to the Qualla Boundary, I want to laugh at him. A brilliant doll, like some shamanic talisman, who doesn’t belong. He lives only this one life, but they live two, divided by those mountains into American and not. “Native” is just an afterthought.
“About repossession?” I say.
He looks back. “Repossession. People like you.”
“There’s not a lot of sociology involved,” I say.
“Sure there is.”
That stops us. We drink. Sireen stretches toward something—air, tension?—above the grass. I would rather be in that field, but she dislikes it when I interrupt her.
“Sure,” I say. “You can come, too.”
He hands me a cigarette. “I need a case study. I’ve been taking notes.”
“Of course you have.”
Sireen is the first to stop. On the way back. Dimitri is telling me about the albums he’s copied for me. Most of them came from his students. I wonder who makes music anymore.
There are two white men standing between us and the trailhead, blocking our path. They’re wearing ball caps and jackets. I move in front of Sireen.
“Afternoon,” the blond one says. He lifts a hand. I can’t tell if he’s waving or halting us.
I walk closer. Within ten feet. I can hear Dimitri, or Sireen, following me.
“Hello,” I say.
“I’m Ronnie,” he says, “and this is Ken.”
“Hello,” I say to Ken.
“You folks have a nice hike?”
Ken has a hunting knife on his belt. I can’t see what’s under Ronnie’s hunting jacket.
I can feel the anger. Like that sim. It wants to reward me, but I have to earn it.
“Yeah. You two ought to head up,” I say. “It’s a nice day.”
“We won’t take but a minute,” Ronnie says. I can’t tell what Ken is looking at.
“What can we do for you?” I say.
“We just want to extend an invitation. We’ve got a little place, outside of town. A bit of a farm—we’re looking for workers.”
“Thanks,” I say. “We’re taken care of.”
“Who are you folks?” he says, nodding past me.
I turn my head. Make a show of looking.
“I’m Ben,” I say.
“Steve,” says Dimitri.
Sireen tucks her hair behind her ears. “Tina.”
Ronnie and Ken don’t move.
“Well, maybe you two’d be interested?” Ronnie says. He’s staring at Sireen. “Y’all are all good Americans, aren’t you?”
How much of Dimitri’s accent could he have heard in “Steve”?
“Of course,” I say.
“White Americans?”
“Listen, friend,” I say. “We need to get back. The kids are at home with a sitter.”
“It’s a safe place,” Ronnie says. “There’s shelter and plenty of food. Plenty of protection. Your kids would be great there.”
The insides of my elbows are starting to ache. There’s pressure behind my eyes.
“It’s open to all of us,” Ronnie says. “You just got to invest whatever you’ve got. What you can afford, and we’ll look after you.”
“The whole town’s involved,” Ken says.
“There’s no welfare bastards out there,” Ronnie says. “It’s the way it’s supposed to be.”
“Thanks, but no,” I say.
Ronnie holds up his hands. “Suit yourself. We didn’t mean to go alarming you folks.”
They don’t move.
“Maybe you’d care to make a donation, for our efforts,” Ronnie says. “Give a little to those as aren’t taken care of.”
“We already put five dollars in the trail box,” Sireen says. Dimitri did. He insisted.
“Well, that’s for the trail, Tina,” he says. “For good folks like you.”
“We’re looking for the farm,” Ken says.
“We’re not carrying any money,” I say. “We’re hiking.”
“But you had money for the trail box? Gas for that sedan?”
Ronnie takes a few steps forward. Ken staggers himself a pace behind.
“Ben,” Sireen says.
I hold up a hand to her. This is a different me. There’s a reason.
“I told you ‘no,’” I say.
“Now, Ben—”
It feels like the sim, when I bury my head in his midsection, like my reward for giving in, for being aggressive. Dominant. The sensation of his fingers tearing at my hair is like picking scabs. Relief. The rush of his air across my forehead, as the trail comes up behind his back. The breeze through the sweet gum trees. The handfuls of earth that I grind into his eyes. Dimitri hits Ken with the half-empty bottle of wine. It doesn’t break.
I fill Ronnie’s nose with the air that I scream. Creation. I am the darkness he cannot see, from which all important things come. I am remaking him with God’s earth, where it becomes red in the pockets of his bleeding face. I leave him choking and crawl towards Ken, where he has pinned Dimitri in the leaves. I am my own missing link, learning to walk again.
Ken gets his knife from its sheath, and Sireen’s shadow comes between us.
“Stop,” she says.
“What are you doing?” Ken says to her. Dimitri cuts a glance at me.
I look at Sireen. She is brandishing her phone. Its camera lens.
“Taking pictures
,” she says, “of you.”
Ronnie coughs behind me. She moves the phone, and it clicks him, too.
“I can send these to Renewal,” she says, “with our location, or we can be on our way.”
Ken lets his head fall against the earth. “You’re a fucking monitor.”
“Throw your knife into the woods,” she says.
He does.
“Yours, too.”
Ronnie does.
These two, fishers of men.
This is my girlfriend, Sireen.
My director nudged her in the ribs when he shook her hand. It took a strange geometry to pull it off.
Do you want to hear a joke? he said. He gave me his tobacco-toothed grin, like we’d planned this.
Sireen tucked her hair behind her ears, and he was excited because she was already smiling. If he only knew. I don’t remember when I gave her the pearl earrings she was wearing. It was to commemorate something. I wore my sport coat, which my parents bought for me as an undergrad. This was an important lecture. The speaker was from . There was a reception afterward, and we made fun of the wine and the other graduate students. Sireen drank four glasses.
Yes! Sireen said.
How do you find an old man in the dark?
How?
It’s not hard!
She laughed so hard she planted her palms on his shoulders. As if it might have knocked her over, and he took hold of her thin wrists gracefully. A gentle catch the way he might have held a door for her or led her through a waltz.
Nice to meet you—I’m Sireen, she said. Ben says so much—
Ben knows more about - than any of my other students. I’m so glad he brought you.
They looked at me.
Well, she said. I always wanted to know more about and -whateveryoucallits.
’ ! he said. Right, Ben?
On the way back through town, there is still kudzu. Still handicraft furniture and rusted antiques. I can see now, between the buildings, that the houses on the adjacent avenues have all been boarded up. They work here, it seems, the old and the infirm, but they sleep where it’s safe, at that farm. I wonder where the young are hiding. Watching. What would Zoe and her friends think about this?
It’s a good idea.
“You shouldn’t tell strangers your real name,” Sireen says.
“I needed to,” I say.
“I know,” she says.
“The phone was a good bluff,” I say.
“I know.”
We dropped Dimitri off at our bar, down the street. He wanted to go inside, dirty, scratched, to grab a drink and write. He smirked at me as he got out of the car.
Sireen didn’t say anything as we drove up the hill.
I stand in the shower. I feel hung over. Heavy. The water runs brown as it carries the earth out of my hair, out of the tiny hollows in the skin on my arms.
My arms. That used to amuse me. Owning arms.
The tub beneath me is white. The tiles at my shoulders, white. There is nothing of liminal sunlight and grunting men in the earth, here. There is nothing here but white light—a clean space at the center of my universe.
Sireen steps into the shower, and I surrender the water. She looks at me, a white washcloth in one of her fists.
I don’t know what to say.
“I don’t know,” I say.
Beads of clean water gather along her dark hairline.
“I’m not stupid,” she says.
“I don’t think giving them money—”
“I said I’m not stupid.”
She dabs at the lacerations on my forehead. Ronnie became desperate as I piled the earth into his eyes. Trying to make him see. His fingernails were long and hard.
I think about the shooting outside the grocery auction. About Sireen screaming my name. It is a new feature of our lives together, like catching episodes of our favorite shows, or discovering a new restaurant. We scream now.
“Dimitri’s doing a study,” I say. She takes my hand, to dig the earth from beneath my nails.
“I know.”
“About me.”
She smiles. “What else?”
There is nothing but vapor between us. Thin and hot and white in this clean light. I think about the trail. About the dark mountains, the beech trees and the staring hawks. About everything outside this house—our life together.
In the woods, her skin looked like it had grown pale, but here, she is darkness. An evening-toned woman, a thing made of ribs and exhalations. The water in her hair smells like clay, and my fingers leave shapes where I press them against her shoulders.
I’ve had it backwards. Outdoors, we are nothing but what we aren’t here. It is better, inside. We can be all ages at once on the sofa, or in the kitchen, or standing in the shower. We can be each of those things, those moments, that made us—that I keep losing to Cynthia. Our history doesn’t need me to give it meaning.
She finishes with the washcloth. “When is your next session with Cynthia?”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“215 SANDWAY, 4021 OLD BREVARD, AND 100 NORTH MAIN,” the kid says, “are all empty homes. They were foreclosed upon between fourteen and three months ago.”
One of my students is giving his presentation on the sidewalk outside my bar. Two of his classmates sit out of the way, on the bench that once marked a municipal bus stop. They are wearing sunglasses and holding folded sheets of paper in their laps. Grading their classmate, as I instructed.
Or so I assume.
He sees me, but he does not break his presentation.
“Each mortgage was held by a different company—two local, one national. The local companies moved forty percent slower through the foreclosure proceedings, allowing the residents—Mr. and Mrs. Hamilton and their two daughters, at Sandway, and Mr. Vaughn at Old Brevard—to occupy the residence for between sixty and ninety additional days.”
There are holes in his information, but I couldn’t get much more out of the records office myself, when I compiled the list.
Three or four passersby have stopped to listen. They look up at him, standing with his legs askew on the supports of an enameled bike rack. The people wear plain shirts and pants they’ve stitched themselves from swathes of discount fabric. At one time, these fabrics would have made window treatments or pillowcases. Now they are clothes.
Their low-top sneakers are clean against the pavement. Sharp and washed.
“At my best estimate, thirty-eight percent of the homes, apartments, condos, and townhomes in the city are vacant.
“And where are those people now?” he says.
The watching people smoke cigarettes. One scratches at the tattoos sleeving his arms.
“What should we do with what they’ve left behind?” the kid says.
What, indeed.
He hops down and whispers to his classmates. They disappear at a jog down the hill, into my neighborhood. The bystanders walk away, un-entertained.
I turn to see: a police cruiser trolls slowly down the avenue. I step inside the bar.
I select PARANOIA from the goggles’ menu. The caption claims that the sim offers varying levels of a sense of causality. Of meaning between disparate stimuli. Something to believe in.
I think only briefly about the SHARES in my pocket. About spending them on something other than alcohol. I’m getting better at not thinking about it.
As soon as the paranoia sim begins, I get it. I realize how fortunate I am that the squad car drove down the street. Who knows what other sim I might have chosen instead, given even a slight delay in my decision-making process? Causation.
This is important.
She finds me within minutes. I can’t help but wonder: the students outside this bar, the police car, Zoe’s custom chimping goggles. Everything in its coincidental place. I feel like everyone’s behind this but me.
She chirps right into my ear phones—in the middle of something.
“—/(n - 1)]*Σ{[(xi-x-)/sx]*[(yi-y-)/sy]},” she says.
“The fuck is that?” I say.
“You took Statistics,” she says. There is a golf game on one of the TVs behind the bar. I am impressed people still play golf. Who plays golf? What agreements, deals do they make on that grass? Military, financial. Legal.
I hate golf.
“That was a long time ago,” I say. “And how do you know?”
“It’s public record, Ben,” she says. “What you studied. It belongs to the state. And anyway, that isn’t important. You’ve got what it takes.”
“What?”
A stack of file directories appears in my field of vision—ever so slightly transparent. The directories list disorders—cognitive, social, etc. I have accessed these before. Each time I load a simulation.
“What’s this?” I say.
“I’m sending you a simulation,” she says. “Sit tight.”
Directories scroll away, their names so immediately vanished and replaced by the interface’s animation that I cannot make them out.
She must be Zoe. It makes sense. She’s been doing this all along. Gaining access to how I think. I should tear the goggles off.
“Sit tight,” she says, blurring through directories.
They’re getting smaller, deeper. They flash and reload new file names in an instant. In less time than it takes my eye to track them, so I am not sure it is happening.
But it is, I’m sure. There’s a term for it.
“What is it?” I say.
“It’s new. A private simulation.”
“Zoe . . .” I don’t know if I can revisit that type of sim, like in her warehouse. If I should.
“My name is not Zoe,” she says.
But everything adds up. There are causal relations between what I’ve seen and what’s going on here. She’s lying.
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