Chimpanzee

by Darin Bradley

  I wonder if I assigned it.

  “We probably ought to go,” I say.

  “You think?” Dimitri says. He sounds genuinely uncertain. In here, our voices echo. They sound metallic, as if we’re speaking through chimping software.

  The door opens behind us, and Zoe steps through. She has cut the dreadlocks out of her hair. It’s short now, and it reveals the points and angles of her skull, how much forehead she’s got to work with.

  She wears dark makeup around her eyes, like Sireen.

  “Hi,” she says.

  “Some party,” I say.

  With her hands in her pockets, she looks just like a girl, standing there. Nothing more.

  She looks at Dimitri. “You found the gas.”

  “What’s going on?” he says.

  She looks at me. Raises an eyebrow.

  “I have no idea,” I say.

  She stares at Dimitri. She’s got something on him here. She doesn’t look like someone trapped, caught. Like a girl with forced hands. I look at Dimitri, too—like the way people are attracted, in museums, to things others are already looking at.

  “Leah is one of my students,” he says.

  Zoe does not look bothered by this revelation. She came out here to fuck him on this. She’s making a move.

  What can I say? I am her teacher. We have that dynamic. It has defined us—its borders and near-misses. What does it mean that she studies under him, too?

  “Sociology?” I say.

  “Poverty studies,” she says.

  I think about the warehouses, about those generators and the repurposed furniture and the unlikelihood of not being found there, when the cops were looking.

  “It was a poverty simulation?” I say. “Are you fucking kidding me?”

  I give Dimitri a look now. “You set it up. The arts district.”

  “It was part of the research for the grant,” he says. “How to get at those SHARES.”

  I turn to Zoe. “What does that make you? An informant?”

  She looks back. “A college student.”

  “You know the cops are after her,” I say to Dimitri. “Which means you’re fucking next.”

  “Leah?” he says. To her. He remembers, after, that I’m the one who told him. “No,” he says to me, “I didn’t know.”

  “They don’t stay in your buildings anymore,” I say. “They’re on the lam.” It makes me laugh.

  He hasn’t taken his eyes off her. “Sorry I didn’t tell you,” he says to me. “They were just doing double-duty—keeping an eye on you. A single-blind for my study. It wouldn’t have worked if I did it myself.”

  “I don’t really care, Dimitri.”

  “It’s all there,” he says. He gives me a hopeful look. “In the study—everything you did. It’s preserved. All of it. You can have it all back.”

  “What? How?”

  “They were just making copies, Dr. Cade,” Zoe says.

  “They?”

  “Your wife, too.”

  “Copies of what?”

  Sireen sees Zoe before we meet her in the hallway. She looks immediately at me. I don’t introduce them when we come together in the kitchen. Sireen does not look angry or embarrassed. She looks happy to see Zoe. Happier than she was drinking beer on the back porch.

  “You, too?” I say. “What were you doing?”

  She ignores me and puts a hand on Zoe’s shoulder. “Est-ce qu’il est prêt?” she says.

  Zoe cuts a glance at me. “Ce n’est pas ici.”

  “You speak French?” I say to Zoe.

  She blinks at me. Her smile looks like Sireen’s. “Didn’t you study any languages in college, Dr. Cade?”

  “Leah’s helping me with a project,” Sireen says. She keeps her eyes on Zoe.

  I can’t tell what bothers me about this. I can’t find the deception, from each of them. I’m not sure I didn’t know.

  “Wait,” I say. “What kind of project?”

  “Ça commence à être sérieux,” Sireen tells Zoe.

  For a minute, Zoe gives Sireen her full attention. She works this expression, this idea, like she’s about to ask an embarrassing question.

  “J’aurais peut-être besoin de l’aide,” Zoe says. Quietly.

  Sireen pulls her into an embrace. She quiets her. A hand on Zoe’s shorn head. Small words in her earlobe.

  I turn to Dimitri: “The fuck?”

  He claps me on the shoulder. “I helped,” he says. “I gave Sireen Leah’s name. She’s been helping.”

  “With what?”

  “Keeping you here, man,” he says. “Up among the living. We’re bringing you back.”

  “You’re not making any sense,” I say.

  Sireen releases Zoe. Sireen is taller, so she has to dip her chin to hold Zoe’s gaze when she lifts her eyes, when she arches her brows to show Zoe whatever she’s showing her. An expression of her own. A thing between women in a crowded party in a strange house beside a garage full of gasoline.

  “Sure I am,” he says.

  “Leah’s getting your indices back,” Sireen tells me.

  “From who?” I ask.

  “Jesus, Ben,” Sireen says. That little smile. “Don’t be so obtuse.”

  “Did you break into the clinic?” I say to Zoe. “Jesus, did you all attack Cynthia?”

  I turn to Sireen. “Why didn’t you tell me this was going on?”

  “Would that have been a good idea?” Sireen says. “Going to repossession therapy with the idea that we’re getting it back?”

  “We haven’t done anything wrong,” Zoe says.

  “The fuck you haven’t,” I say.

  They all stop. It comes together. All three of them. They’re waiting. I’ve got to take it all in somehow. They watched me on my sofa. Pissing myself and convulsing, surrendering the last of myself to Cynthia’s program. They told Zoe, and she knew, and the students took care of things. Me. Sireen let me fall apart on my own, so there would be a division, between what was happening to me and what it meant to still be a husband. So they wouldn’t be the same. A man. A guy with a dick and a brilliant wife and self-absorption about both.

  Sometimes, you aren’t in charge.

  I give up. I’m only fighting myself. They aren’t even playing along.

  “What am I going to do with my indices?” I say.

  Sireen wraps her fingers around my wrist, in a fashion one uses in situations like these.

  “How are your new glasses?” Zoe says.

  “You guys want me to chimp myself.”

  They stare.

  “It’ll make me sick,” I say. “You saw.”

  “All things in time,” Sireen says.

  I don’t know about this.

  I look at Zoe. “That garage is full of gasoline.”

  “Yes,” she says. “And many others like it.”

  “If no one bought this house, why are you all here?”

  “So the neighbors think it’s ours,” she says. “So they don’t make a fuss.”

  “What about the real owners?” Dimitri says. He seems to surprise himself, not knowing what his students are doing.

  “They won’t check ’til Monday,” she says.

  “What will you do in the meantime?”

  “We filled in our own gaps, Dr. Cade.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  SIREEN DOESN’T WAKE UP WHEN I GET OUT OF BED. HER hair is a fan across the expanse of her pillow. I spent most of the night unable to sleep, making shapes with that hair. Symbols. Arcane things that only mean anything on a pillow, in a bed.

  I’m not going to report Zoe’s gasoline. It’s all I can do.

  Sireen surprised me. She didn’t wear any underwear, and as soon as she lipped this information into my ear, in the front yard at the party, while Zoe said goodbye to Dimitri, we started carrying that party thrum all the way home. I didn’t think about my indices, or the gasoline in the garage, or conspirators and heroines and being everyone’s biggest secret. Not then. S
ireen held on every way she could, trying to make it happen. She has plans. We’ll raise the kid speaking English and French. It’ll be allowed to paint on the walls of its bedroom.

  I think about it all now.

  In the kitchen, I fill a tumbler at the sink. Through the window, it is as dark outside as in, so I stare into the river bottom I can’t see. I wonder if Sireen thinks about math, sometimes, when she thinks about kids. About giving birth, breast-feeding, the dark worlds she contains. I can’t understand the divisions. A professor, a wife, a mother. A modern twist on the maiden, the mother, the crone. Something ancient and traditional. A quiet power, a series of roles that gets things done.

  I thanked her, for getting everything back, right after I pulled away her jeans against the living room wall.

  She gave me that grad school smile. That same expression, like she was up to something, walking down the wedding aisle. The look she sleeps in. The way she sees me beyond repossession and Renewal and my fascination with watching things fall apart. Like me.

  “No problem,” she said.

  At first, they’re nothing—my imagination come in from the woods, hiking along that river bottom. Dots or will-o’-the-wisps. Swamp gas. Tiny rednesses on the move.

  But, eventually, they’re as real as I am. Those people on the march, from the trees—red balloons stretched over their flashlights so they can see beyond their own glow. They hug the riverbank, in their long hundreds, carrying things.

  I dump the water from my glass. There are a few fingers of bourbon left in our reserve bottle. The one we keep for Christmas or New Year’s or emergencies. I pull it out of the cabinet, and it’s slow in my glass.

  I watch them come. They disappear into Zoe’s old warehouses—one, two, a handful at a time, winking dark like pinpricks in windows. I watch them. In our bedroom, Sireen talks in her sleep.

  The television is dead. I haven’t been paying attention to the outage schedule. So I sit in silence at our table, drinking rebrewed coffee. I couldn’t get back to sleep.

  Nothing was moving in the river bottom when I looked again, earlier. The warehouses just look like themselves.

  Sireen kisses my head when she comes in. That smile. It was a good night. She fills a tumbler at the sink, and I watch her stare through the window.

  “Ben?”

  “Yes?”

  “Who are all those people?”

  I guess they’re up.

  “What people?”

  She moves to fill a mug. “The ones on the bridge.”

  I take a look, and there they are. People marching across the bridge that spans the river. Blocking traffic. Carrying signs.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “The TV’s out.”

  “Let me get my phone,” she says. “Somebody’s got to be talking about it.”

  “It’s the grain shortage,” she says. “They’re protesting it.”

  “A protest?” I say.

  She looks up from her phone. “I know.”

  “The police?”

  She looks back down. The chatter from whatever feed she’s streaming sounds like something bubbling. She has it turned down.

  “Come see this,” I say. Sireen is in the living room, listening to Dimitri’s latest recommendation. Watching things on her phone.

  She steps into the kitchen.

  “Turn off the light,” I say.

  When she does, the fires are immediately visible through the window.

  She joins me in front of it and wraps her hands around my elbow. We finished our dinner half an hour ago. I don’t mind doing the dishes. It just takes a while.

  The city glows, and I can hear sirens over Dimitri’s music.

  Sireen gets the bourbon out of the cabinet. She pours what’s left into two tumblers. It’s more than I’d usually pour at once.

  So we stand there.

  “Riot police have been deployed,” she says.

  “I don’t see anything about a riot,” I say. I thumb my phone’s browser to a different site.

  “I think this is nation-wide,” she says.

  “Shit,” I say.

  “What?”

  I turn my phone so she can see its face. “They’re mobilizing Renewal for this. All of us.”

  She jumps when her phone rings. “Jesus.”

  It takes her a moment of staring at it. As if she’s never used it as a phone before. “It’s my mother.”

  She answers it.

  My phone vibrates a text message onto the screen. It’s not from a number I recognize.

  ATTENTION, RENEWAL! ALL PERSONNEL PLEASE REPORT TO LOCAL DISPATCH. EMEGENCY DERELICTION IS A CLASS B MISDEMEANOR PUNISHABLE BY A FINE AND/OR 180 DAYS INCARCERATION WITH MANDATORY RENEWAL SERVICE EXTENSION. EFFICIENCY IS EVERYONE’S RESPONSIBILITY!

  In the bedroom, I find my favorite Renewal-day shirt. It doesn’t stick to the jumpsuit when I sweat. Most of my others do. The phone rings—the number is masked. It almost makes me laugh. Like I’m some kind of spy.

  “Hello?”

  “Cade.”

  “Rosie?”

  “You got the summons?” he says. “You heard?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Wear comfortable shoes.”

  “What? Why?”

  He’s quiet on the line. I hear a sound like wave motion, like digital noise. Something my new glasses do all the time. “Good shoes,” he says. “Like, for jogging.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  All the smoke has curtained the town. I can see banks of it rising from behind one of the forested ridges. I remember the last time we had a wildfire. It took Renewal weeks to contain it. Dozens of them died, and there was an inquiry. Somebody resigned somewhere.

  There are many more workers at the lot than normal. Rosie checks them in several at a time, and he deploys them, like squads. Riot shields, fire suits, construction vests. It is efficient. Workers gather and order themselves upon the asphalt. They shift positions, onto and off of the Renewal busses. They move in orderly fashion, seemingly nowhere, around the Renewal lot. The wardens stare at them like cattle. Something to keep an eye on. Movement is fine, as long as nobody gets spooked.

  I ring the buzzer on Rosie’s trailer. He ignores me. When the light finally indicates that I may enter, there is no one left in the lot. The wardens left the gates open. The wind across the pavement, between those gates and me, is dark and uncomfortable.

  Inside, Rosie is cleaning his shotgun behind his desk. “Come in, Cade.”

  I let the door latch behind me, shutting out the smoke. In here, it smells faintly of vomit and body odor—the unpleasant accident of too many cleaning agents too often together. The place is spotless, in its surplus-furniture, refurbished-trailer kind of way. Things can be clean, but they will never be their original colors again. Their original brightnesses and edges.

  Rosie watches me. The message lights on his telephone are blinking. Several of them. Things are happening, on that line, and he has quieted them for just this minute. There is a monitor’s phone on his desk. He gestures at it with the muzzle of his shotgun. He has broken its back—hinged it across the spine, so that he may get his solvents into the barrel.

  I take the phone.

  He studies his gun. I know that he’s paying full attention to me, but he would prefer that I think that he isn’t. That he’s thinking larger thoughts.

  “Sir?” I say.

  He snaps the barrel back into the stock. Making the point he was waiting for.

  “You know I look out for you, Cade,” he says.

  Here we go. Every time, it’s something else. He needs me to know he has things to say. He knows I know this, which is what thrills him. That I will listen. That I have to.

  Even so, I’m not sure what he means. “Sir?”

  “It’s not just me,” he says. “Lots of folks. You got people looking after you all over the place.”

  “Yes, sir,” I say.

  He puts the gun down. “Why do you think that is?”

 
; “I don’t know.”

  He gets up from behind the desk and puts a hand on my shoulder.

  “You know, I don’t even have to send you anyplace tonight,” he says. “You could send in your monitor reports from right here.”

  He pulls a phone out of his pocket. It looks like a standard-issue monitor’s phone, except this one has his name on it, not a serial number.

  “I think—” he says. He pulls up the phone’s messaging function “You’ve seen plenty. You just need a whole shift to type it all up.”

  “Sir?”

  He plants his thumbs on the phone’s keypad. Composes. When he sends his message, it takes only a second for my phone to vibrate. He looks at me.

  The message reads, How is Central University connected to the activity in the arts district?

  He doesn’t move. He’s just text on the other end of my phone now. I’m not even supposed to be in here, for this part of this particular conversation. It was supposed to happen somewhere else. Before.

  I don’t know what you’re talking about, sir.

  He reads it. Punches another message into the keypad.

  “I’ll tell you why it is,” he says. “It’s one of those things that happens. An accident. When other things come together.”

  What’s your relationship to Leah Johnson?

  We’re still standing. Standing still. I can smell Rosie’s aftershave. The lineament he applies to his joints. The detergent in his jacket. The paste on his discolored teeth.

  I can feel my heartbeat getting serious. “I guess I’m just lucky, sir.”

  It makes him smile. “That’s just it, Cade. Why are you lucky? Even after everything. After default. After repossession, you’re still lucky. Things are still working out.”

  I lie: I don’t understand the question, sir.

  He reads it. Looks up again. “That isn’t how it goes for most people. The ones I see here. Things go wrong, Cade. That’s how we know who’s ready to help. Who’s got the misfortune it takes to change things.” He’s angry. “It’s how I knew.”