Chimpanzee isn’t real because they needed it not to be. They needed a diversion so they could safely stare at themselves in young, meditative ways—to watch the rest of the world in suspended wonder, trying to figure them out. The stencils and posters and subversive messages. The chimpanzee brand and its consequences. It makes people pay attention.
Chimpanzee doesn’t mean anything, which is why it’s so important. Like me.
This is the last time I will do this.
In the mailbox, I found a letter with an address for a private message board, online, with instructions not to enter the address into my personal computer. Which is Sireen’s computer—the university issued it to her. The instructions stated that the password for the board was the most important of the three principles addressed early in the term.
The term.
I found enough change to buy a cup of coffee and ten minutes on a public computer at the franchised coffee shop two miles from my house.
I still remember: ETHOS.
There was only one message on the board:
NEXT CLASS. THREE MILE WALK. WEAR COMFORTABLE SHOES, DARK CLOTHES. A GUIDE WILL WAIT UNDER THE GANTRY TOWER OF THE CRISS BUILDING IN THE ARTS DISTRICT. NEXT TO THE TRAIN TRACKS. 7:00 PM.
I responded:
THIS IS THE LAST CLASS.
I called Dimitri and left him a message. An invitation to come along, for his study.
He texted me later. No thanks. Busy night.
I’m not inviting Sireen. This is bad enough.
This kid, my guide, leads me into the trees—state property along the railway, where it winds away from the city center. I can see headlights along the hillside, across the miles. They blink between the trees, climbing, climbing into the mountains. They look like magnesium flares.
This kid’s got a flashlight with a red balloon stretched over the lens, so we can see without burning the darkness out of our eyes. We walk straight down the center of the tracks, where at least it’s flat. The embankments abutting the tracks are nothing but loose gravel and twisted ankles.
I’m not sure if I recognize him. My memory is not what it used to be. A taste of things to come. He takes this seriously. He’s got a walkie-talkie on his belt. It chirps at him every few minutes, and he holds it to his ear—looks into the dark as if orienting by analog waves. His comrades report distances and cardinal directions. It sounds like a moon landing. Something orchestral, polyphonic. The business of taking one’s endeavor seriously.
We don’t speak, but he looks at me sometimes.
Once we’re off the tracks, back into the trees, I can’t see the city anymore. Even its overglow, which it bounces against the surrounding hills. It was brighter at night when Sireen and I first moved here.
There’s a tent city in the trees. They use firelight. It comes at us, smokeless and inconstant. A glow like something else—some place with woodland creatures and supernatural people. They have a queen, but I can’t remember her name. Some neat trick of Shakespeare’s, but I’m no longer allowed to know. It would be stealing from the government—taking what’s theirs, what they took back.
But at least there’s that glow—it darkens tree trunks against itself, so that we might see them.
There are hundreds of tents, pitched in one long firebreak. There are clotheslines and windsocks and improvised metal stoves. There are yellow nylon ropes, hanging waist-high, tied to things in the trees on the other side of the break. Like traffic lanes or handrails. A way to know where you’re going. To take a shit or have sex or disappear without getting lost. There are people in small groups, packing boxes and taping them shut. The tribe, on the move.
My guide leads me a hundred yards down the main avenue between the tents. We pass clusters of people in semi-circles, listening to lectures about chemistry, politics, military science. The instructors work with flashlights, which they aim at their newsprint-laden easels. Directing the eye to their hand-scrawled truths. Most of the instructors look older than I am.
Near the center of the camp, the brightest spot, the indigent’s capital city, people stand in mobs. Families, students. Groups of young men wearing gang attire—their colors made uniformly brown by the firelight. There is a clear space with an untended easel. Students already sit in rows.
My guide leads me to a canvas tent—an antique with wooden poles and room to stand upright inside. It looks like some general’s castoff, when he finished laying plans and making things true by discussing them with other men over inadequate maps.
Zoe is inside. She is sitting on a cot opposite another woman, on her own cot. There is a small, collapsible table at the far end bearing a battery-powered lantern.
“Hello, Dr. Cade,” Zoe says.
I don’t say anything. The other woman, who is older, excuses herself, and my guide follows her out.
“This is it,” Zoe says, lifting her eyebrows and planting her palms on her knees. As if we are about to give an encore performance. Something that should make us nervous.
I take the other woman’s place.
“I’m afraid so,” I say.
She lowers her eyes.
“My therapist has taken what there is to take. It’s over.”
She rummages through a bag on her cot.
“Do you all live here now?” I say. “Are there that many?”
“No,” she says. “We stay here sometimes, but they were here first. We bring them things, so they’ll let us blend in.”
She hands me a glasses case.
“Something for you,” she says.
They’re chimping glasses like hers.
“We can keep in touch,” she says.
I put them on and stare through the rose-colored lenses.
“Have we been in touch?” I say.
She lowers her eyes, and her eyelashes are white, like spun glass in the lantern’s cheap light.
“Have you figured everything out?” she says.
I could tell her that I figured out my own life. My new house and my civic duty. How light moves and touches the brain is all there’s left to see of me.
“No.”
But I’m not even sure that’s it.
“It’s probably better this way,” she says.
Most of them come to listen to me. Those that can’t sit, in one of those important rows, stand behind. People with nothing but these tents. Their children and past lives. The gangs come, too, and I see them clearing spaces so that others—more important, better-ranked—have a clear view.
I see the man with the angry eyes, from my Renewal crew—he who brandished those shears. Who held them still against the wardens and their guns. He waves—points me out.
I grab Zoe’s arm. “There is a Renewal worker here.”
“I know,” she says. She doesn’t struggle.
“Do you know how monitors work?” I say. “I do.”
“They aren’t monitors.”
They. I let her go.
“They’re invited—you don’t have to worry.”
“I’m not worried, Zoe—not about me.”
“It wasn’t my idea,” she says.
“Let’s get started.”
“Those of you who have been in class, since the beginning, will remember the work we did in research, when one lacks resources.”
They nod, in the rows.
“What was the point? Behind that information—those assignments?”
They’ve learned when I’m not actually asking questions.
I pull my lecture notes out of my back pocket—like a handbill I’d forgotten, right before doing laundry.
“There’s something I wanted you to know,” I say. “When I still knew.”
I give them a good look. The faces in the light. Learning in the dark how to make truth. Training for the ages.
“Good luck,” I say.
It takes me a minute to arrange my papers. I can’t see well enough to read by the firelight, so my guide returns, and he brings his red light.
“The �
��extended self’ is the most fascinating,” I read. “The most troubling. The ability to posit a future is what some claim separates the human mind from the animal’s. But this isn’t true. Animals are genetic futurists. Their very reflexes, like ours, choreograph futures. Muscle memory and spinal fluid are our best analogs for tomorrow. The mule deer stops, listens, perceiving threats without the inconvenience of a judgmental self-awareness. It twitches, jumps, listens—moves always away from those natural situations that posit a future wherein it ceases to exist. An alternate reality.
“Men with powerful rifles hunt mule deer for sport. Enforcing one reality over another, anticipating food and weekends in camouflage with other men around fraternal fires. Once, we did this with sharpened stones, and the fire had things to say in the voice of the dead deer.
“But the fear of nothingness is hardly selfhood. We know this. Nothingness is so often the goal. A quiet mind. A new pill—a better way of shutting up for a while. All things being equal. A temperature-neutral, safe place—homeostasis. This is what we seek.
“What separates us is that constant speculation about a reality other than this one. In the afternoon, we picture ourselves this evening. What will we eat? Do? Watch? And each possibility comes modeled—a partition in our own minds that creates, situates, animates the us in these not-yet-existent situations. Or in those that have already happened, placing ourselves in the past again. To do it right this time. Say this thing. Kiss that missed person.
“If we are modeling ourselves, states of being based on now, where do the imaginary ‘we’ exist? Where do our patterns of routinized logic, our entrained associations, our senses of being and fear exist? They can’t exist in this mind, now, because we’re talking about a different time, when none of this did, or will, exist. If we exist in these non-realities, anticipating predators and basing the non-existent future on the never-experienced past, are we us? We are another step away from non-being.
“We are all these empty houses—the ones you’re studying. We are the homes that existed for other people, even though we cannot prove that. We cannot point to those lives except by referencing artifacts that only exist now. We are extending selfhood from ‘here’ to ‘there.’ We are the wince when someone else stubs a toe because it is our toe, too. We experience this happening to us, in a different place than this one, at the same time. Parallel universes racing infinitely onward, tracking domestic pains and forgettable damage. We are not here, there, fucking that person, not this one. Consciousness doesn’t work that way. It likes to change what’s come before, to better appreciate this.
“Selfhood is just the brain behaving, like running is legs moving. It’s important to remember that ‘we’ are not in charge. The mind is not aware of the brain’s processes.
“There’s no such thing as time. There is no such thing as your home, your marriage, your children. There are only these so-many empty houses.
“We occupy old homes, the dead shells of other owners—their dust and tub-scum and home-odors. Our quiet evenings, and coats of renovation paint, and stillness in the night are not the activities of homes. They are us hiding from the predators in the savannah grass. The twitches and sniffs and moments of fear. The instants when we cease to exist because that must be a genetic possibility. A physical one.
“Homes are extensions of self. Expansions of consciousness. Places that think and hurt and make noise. They do not exist as whole buildings because no one can keep an entire house in his or her mind at once. Only the rooms that immediately, in fragments, concern your fear of death exist. There are sciences that prove this.
“You can call this solipsism, if it makes you feel better.
“But some people sleep in houses. Eat there. Create new people. The entire Danse Macabre.
“The extended self is the most troubling, for it must exist somewhere, and the mind violates time as it sees fit. The extended self—the liberated, freely roaming—is what separates us. It fears a world without—sells itself what marketing experts would like to. It is what builds empires.
“Don’t get excited. It isn’t a ‘soul.’ It’s an operating metaphor that the brain uses to model itself in an inherently psycho-social existence with others of our species. Conspecifics. This is the last theory I mastered before I wrote my dissertation and graduated. It won’t be with me, now, when you hear it, because my repossession therapist works in reverse order. What I am doing is against the law.
“Empty houses are like idle hands. The tools of the devil. When I was a child, I would break into them with my friends. We would tear mantel pieces off brick-faced chimneys. We would empty leftover five-gallon buckets of sulfuric acid into pools and hot tubs. We would write obscenities with oven cleaner on carpeted floors. A chemical that would stay—much better than a charcoal stylus and a cave wall. We would burn things.
“When we were caught, we defended our empty houses, told lies about why we were in them, because they were ours. Make a boy responsible for a home, and he becomes a man. Joins the community of other homes. Sleeps, and eats, and posits himself harmlessly elsewhere. Extends himself on sofas and recliners. Knows what it is to exist, a figment of himself, under other circumstances. Better ones.
“Which is the point.
“Breaking into empty homes is not difficult. Especially with assistance.
“But remember, sometimes, a house is just a house. A yard to mow. You build shelves and small things in the garage.”
When I look at them, I see it on their faces. Divers too long underwater. Parsing knowledge like nonsense. I take the flashlight from my guide, and I drop the lecture in the fire. I leave them watching it burn, looking for meaning in the movement of light.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
NOTHING REALLY HAPPENS ON THE DAY FOLLOWING YOUR grand design. You simply rest, trying to remember what the big plan was in the first place.
I walked three miles through the dark last night, after I finished—back across the rail bridge and up the hill to my beaming new home. After one mile, I was no longer interested in what I had done. I no longer cared what they made of my lecture, the class, themselves. Brilliance, and power, and meaningful actions are only around for as long as they’re around.
Sireen was asleep on the sofa. She had our throw blanket twisted around her legs, her phone in a weak fist. I sat down beside her and watched the muted television, my legs full of those six dark miles. They felt light and infinite. As massless as flesh-pink nebulae, moving oxygen and heavy metals in meaningless patterns that, from far enough away, look like horse heads and crabs and cats’ eyes. Toxically beautiful. Massive and throbbing, and heavier than anything I can imagine.
I sat and felt them expand. I became distant with each heartbeat.
This morning, I woke up after Sireen had left for work. My legs were sore. That was all. The day passed, and then there was another one.
The lenses of my chimping glasses are smoked pink, and without a simulation running, they make my living room look like salmon flesh. I watch the television through them, its red faces and brown-leafed trees—its skies like watercolor violet. Through these lenses. The public access channels were one of the first initiatives of the New Depression. The government bought a block of channels on credit, and it started using them for PSAs, educational programming—dramatic and arcane explanations for why nothing was working. We would watch spokespeople and university professors, in their offices, the backs of their heads bookshelved and out of focus, coaching us through the domestic effort, the unified ring, the very lump of contemporary being. They taught us how to say nothing in so many words, which was the best commentary we could use. The anthem for the New Depression.
It was considered an issue of public safety—making sure everyone had access to the government channels. The rolling losses of service began earlier this month, after we lost a telecommunications satellite. There was no going up for it, the dumb, dark thing. Space itself.
Today is only mine and Sireen’s second schedule
d loss of service. Two days, then it will be back. One has a civic duty, now, to alert one’s neighbors in the event of a crisis, since we won’t all be able to see the programs that will let us know.
The last stoppage was fascinating. Something to see. Objects in motion do not tend to stay in motion, not when the FCC pops your IP address into the blotter. The world went error-screen blue in one quick blink, and it looked afterward like the screen was expanding, to swallow the whole room. It’s an illusion, caused by staring at the screen-motion for too long. One slides closer to the television, without moving at all. A traveler on one’s own couch.
Today, the screen is violet when my service ceases. Because of these glasses. It comes for me: my house, expanding. We’ve done it, Sireen and I. The plan worked, and now, at the end of the world, I’m left with television light of the incorrect color, as if I magnetized it or dropped it, as if I forgot how to care for massless events.
But black is black, when I turn it off.
’ , . , ’ . , ’ .
’ , . ’ .
’ — ’ . . ’ “ ” or - - .
, . . .
, . ’ “nothing,” I said. , , . .
And another day.
The interface is different. The public goggles that I rent at the bar present the simulation titles in larger blocks of letters. They’re easy to read, and there isn’t much negative space surrounding the interface panes. The menus are tighter through these glasses. The resolution is higher, and there are expanses of semi-transparent, primary-colored panes at all edges of my vision. This software doesn’t need as much space, not when you make all things sharper, and so the active panels bleed into the coolspace around the lenses, where my flesh is free to breathe.
Chimpanzee Page 16