He sends another message, but he grabs my shoulder before I can read it. He gestures with his phone, like he might slap me with it or shove it between my ribs.
“You give me a reason, Cade,” he says. “Send me anything that compromises the effort, I’ll bring us all down. Her. Me. You.”
“Sir?”
“You don’t even get what’s going on, Cade. You just wander your way through, and everything falls into place. It would make more sense if I just ruined everything.”
He doesn’t give me a chance to ask.
“Why?” he says. “Why, Rosie? What, Rosie? I don’t understand, Rosie.”
“I don’t understand.”
“If I ruined everything, at least that way you would understand what’s happened to the rest of us. Caught up in your broken world.”
He sits back down at his computer. “But I said I’d keep you safe, so here you are. I have to send you someplace tonight, or they’ll catch it in the service audit. Monitor’s as safe as you’re going to get.”
He looks up. “All alone. Late to the action.”
“Where do you want me to monitor, sir?”
He lets go of me and turns around. “You’ll figure it out.”
I look at his last text message. It’s a photo of me and Sireen at the party. She’s talking to Zoe. Dimitri’s back is turned. It looks like I’m staring directly at the camera lens, across the room.
“What the fuck is this?” I say.
He doesn’t look at me. “That is collateral. If you compromise the effort, if she backs out, it all comes down. I’ll keep these messages in my phone, and if I surrender it, they’ll see how you didn’t answer—what she’s been up to.”
“Who?”
“She said you’d cooperate,” he says, “but I can’t take that risk. You saw all those workers earlier . . .”
He gives me an eye. “All those soldiers.”
“Soldiers?”
“Stop asking so many fucking questions, Cade.”
He looks at the lights blinking on his phone. At his computer. When he looks at me again, there’s pain on his face. There’s a fucked marriage and an absent home and a dead father. There’s joint custody of his kids, of his own life. A cot in a closet and a bottle of contraband liquor. A shotgun. There’s everything. There it all is.
“Today’s a big day,” he says, “but it’s just the beginning, and I’ve got to think about the long haul. People are counting on me. Here. Not least of all the federal government.”
I understand that what’s happening here should be clear. I should already understand what’s happening. It isn’t complicated. Rosie is not pushing me through labyrinths. Everyone understands everything, until they don’t. I probably did understand, when I got started here.
“You’ve been safe,” he says, “because that was her price. For this. People counted on you. I counted on you.”
“Just tell me who you’re talking about,” I say.
“No,” he says. “Not this time. Just know who.”
“Zoe?”
He laughs. It’s something he can’t help. “You ever try to save an animal? When you were a kid? Like a baby bird or a little squirrel? Something that fell out of some innocent place?”
“Yes, sir,” I say.
“Yeah,” he says. “Me too. Got my smell all over it before my mama could teach me not to. God damn thing died anyway.”
I watch him.
“Thing is, Cade,” he says, “this all has to work. Now. Or it won’t work anytime else.”
He gets back up and stands in front of me. The whites of his eyes have gone soft yellow. There isn’t much edge left in them. Probably hasn’t been for a long time.
“You need to figure it out, Cade.”
“Yes, sir.”
I can hear their noise, deeper downtown. It sounds like the noise from Sireen’s phone earlier—something bubbling. People are moving in important directions on all the sidewalks. Eyes down. Up. Jogging. Bubbling into their phones.
Dimitri is out of breath when he runs up to me, outside the Renewal Lot’s fencing. He plants his hands on his knees and folds himself in half. I pat him on the shoulder. I’m not sure why.
“I thought—I would miss you,” he says.
“What are you doing here?” I say.
When he looks up, his hair is tousled. Shirt’s untucked, but the sleeves are rolled evenly. I can smell his cologne, even over the smoke.
“I heard about the summons,” he says. “All of you.”
I just look at him.
“I can’t let you—alone,” he says.
There are Renewal workers everywhere, I report to Rosie.
“Can you see anything?” I say to Dimitri. I’ve got a hold of his shoulder. The crowds seep like water, massaging things apart. Moving people in organic directions. I’m fighting the motion.
I know, Rosie messages.
All I can see is this smoky, Art Deco architecture. You can tell the smoke from the tear gas because one is darker than the other. It doesn’t matter which.
The Renewal workers keep the people moving. The march is mechanical. The chants, the shouts. It’s orchestral. The voice of God in the machine. The wardens watch their crews. Checking the herd.
Where did they all come from?
Recent enlistees, Rosie messages. Lot of them were yours. Demonstrators, too.
“Look,” Dimitri shouts ahead of me. “They’ve set up checkpoints.”
I look. Renewal workers pat and frisk. They issue civilians in safe directions.
Are you safe? Rosie messages.
Are you safe?
Cade?
The workers turn their riot shields on the police. The wardens. Shock and awe gone wrong. There is no reversing the insurgence. Wardens shout and gesture and shoot holes through people’s chests. The shots are harder to hear than I would expect. They’re less impressive than I imagine everyone wants them to be. And the workers kill them anyway, mostly with blunt-force trauma they deliver through the edges of their polyvinyl shields and the crush of their thousand, thousand fists.
The dead lie in piles with workers in blood-red vinyl. Like a protest. A taking of space to make us all pay attention. They’ve each got uniforms for this. Police, wardens, workers. It makes it easier to sort the corpses. Civilians shove and drag, pulling bodies into even lines along the sidewalk, as if they know a better way to arrange people on pavement.
The shields look reptilian in their scattering. Like scales. Slick and fractured. A sloughing.
Dimitri shouts something at me, but they’re chanting now, and I can’t hear him. He steers us through a different corridor of smoke, and we stop in some corner while a cluster of people thunder past. In a hurry. Places to be.
I’m safe. The citizens want food. They’re shouting about grain. Workers have turned.
Stay safe, Cade. I said you’d be safe.
I stop Dimitri before he marches into a cluster of workers. They have a warden on his knees. One of them has stolen his shotgun. Has it at his face.
Where are you, Cade?
I can’t tell. I shout into Dimitri’s ear: “The fuck are we?”
He watches them. The warden cries.
Dimitri points, and I see the gazebo, just through a bank of haze. Sentinel Park.
They’re shouting addresses. All those houses.
The fires make it downtown. The human crush is more than Dimitri and I can fight. We move away from each other, like continental drift or glacial crawl. Things we can’t help. There are more shots. Chimpanzee masks. Renewal workers with bandanas around their mouths.
I’m leaving. Fires downtown now. Chimpanzee masks. I’m leaving.
You see now, Cade.
There aren’t supposed to be chimpanzee masks. It wasn’t a movement. Just people making noise. Distraction.
Distraction from what, Cade?
Cade?
All of it.
Ideas have consequences.
Li
ke me.
Things work out, Cade.
Goodbye, Rosie.
I make it out because I am good at walking downtown. I know which blocks are the most vacant. I know whom to talk to. I know which times of day are safe for spending an hour in Sentinel Park, in the heart of downtown, doing nothing but being a guy with a coffee sitting in a park. It’s my new skill set.
I can’t see the river yet—our hillside. I try to text Dimitri, but I don’t have his number memorized. It’s in my phone. This one belongs to Renewal.
I run along the footbridge, alongside the pavement that spans the river. Cars have stopped in the road, caught by their own headlights, by what they’re seeing in the darkness ahead. What they’re hearing on those radios. Reading on those phones. My kids in the park, learning how to make people think. And Rosie’s big deal. His workers, gone chimpanzee. Which means what it means. Now.
The city is on fire. There are pillars of it in all directions. People run around me, in both directions. No one is quite sure which way is best. Where they should be.
I pull my chimping glasses out of my pocket and jack them into my phone. I have to stop running to do this, and the crush of running strangers leans me against the rail. I can finally see the warehouses from here, my hillside, but that’s it—not as close as it looks. I get the glasses on, the connection active in the phone. Now, when I look, I notice how many of these runners are wearing glasses of their own. I think about how many were wearing them downtown, chimping their way through whatever mindset it takes to revolt. To execute wardens and crush riot police with the mass of your own numbers. To own space by being. Like light.
Come on. Where are you?
She finds me.
“Ben,” she says. She sounds nervous.
I’m running again. I choose a sim quickly. PANIC. Lowest difficulty setting.
“Where are you?” she says.
“I’m safe,” I say. “That was Rosie’s deal. He’s in with the chimpanzees. All of Renewal is, it seems.”
She is quiet, and the sounds of my slapping feet divide the seconds between us.
“Who did it?” I say. “Who brokered that deal?”
“They’re burning houses,” she says.
“Among other things,” I say.
“You should go home. Your wife will need you.”
“Zoe wasn’t doing this on her own,” I say. “Not all this.”
I have to stop. I can’t run and talk like this.
“There is a student in a chimpanzee mask on the local news,” she says.
“Why?”
“He says they’re burning to create meaningful space.”
“What does that mean?”
“You tell me.”
I can see ahead now. My field of vision is no longer shocked by each footfall, each panicked slap. I’m taking deep breaths, fighting this simulation. The idea is not to panic.
“He’s asking the reporter what she thinks empty buildings mean,” she says. “He keeps bringing up ‘context.’”
I lean over. Plant my hands on my knees.
“The National Guard is mobilizing,” she says. “The Marines.”
The simulation moves shadows and bright corners through my field of vision. Things to make me jump.
“But chimpanzee isn’t fucking real,” I say. “It never was.”
“Are you sure?” she says. “Your friend has found them.”
“Who?”
“Dimitri. His text record indicates he found your students downtown. He’s trying to find you.”
“Jesus,” I say.
The interface menus brighten in the lower range of my vision. There is a new simulation available. Its bandwidth is increasing so rapidly that the display isn’t even numbers. It’s just blurred symbols, like hieroglyphs, animated as they roll over and advance higher up whatever archaic scale. Whatever unknowable pace. It’s popular.
REVOLUTION, it’s called.
There are workers advancing behind me, from downtown. They collect people, running from their cars. Running downtown. Climbing up from the river bottom. Out of the woods. The workers put them in place and show them where to go. There will be no one to keep the peace, put out the fires, protect the common good. Without Renewal, nothing.
“Do you have the simulation they want?” I say. “The one that’s . . . me?”
“Several people have that simulation,” she says. “I’m one of them.”
“How’s it working out?” I say. I walk.
“Just fine,” she says. “I know where you’re going, what you’ll do.”
“How’s that?” I say.
“I’m running your simulation, and I can already see myself doing things. Thinking ahead.”
Downtown, where they don’t want me—to protect me from myself—Dimitri and the students will bleed. Burn. Experience broken noses and suppressive fire. They will take rifle butts to the head. They will be detained and interrogated. Exposed to coercive electricity, harassment, molestation. They will be disappeared, dreaming of community gardens and underground currency. Of circular discussions and a real use for education. They will wait for me to finish what I started. To share the conclusion I was never going to be able to provide: the rifle butts and projectiles in the instants before they hit, when they merely share electrons with those parts of us at the outer reaches of physical space. The sense of being. The reality that vicious metal will soon occupy the brain-spaces where all of this has taken place. For each of us who played along. Did as they were told. Or forced. Or taught.
And across the river, Sireen waits in our house—an unsmoking safe place, bright over the water. The centrality of all things. My life and being. She waits to repair me. She will give me back what Cynthia stole. A bit at a time. The female of the species. And we will make children and mourn parents and fill that house with an entire life on high. Through our gleaming windows, this city will burn forever. Making room for something better.
People run. Chimping themselves through the revolution. Guiding the migration. Watching things burn. In fashions that do not induce panic, since we know how firefighters and riot police organize themselves—their prisoners and fires. We have plenty of their indices to chimp.
I think about the Qualla Boundary. About piled leaves and trail heads and the people who’ve intruded on mine and Sireen’s time. What we were supposed to do and be. How it was all supposed to go. Why we wander woods and forests and antique sales in small towns. Why we feel the need to get out of town and ourselves. I think about Dimitri, wearing cologne to a riot. Ironed cuffs. I think of him losing that fight in the woods. Everything he did to help.
I remember something, and it makes my head hurt. I don’t even notice this PANIC sim anymore. It just isn’t inappropriate to the situation. The collective state of things. It fits right in.
“I offered once,” she says “to tell you who I am.”
“I know who you are,” I say.
“Then what’s it going to be?”
I know where I need to be. I start moving, in that direction I should. The light and color and shape of it, that direction, that future, that me that does not yet exist. Like the past I don’t have, now.
Like a disguise. A chimpanzee. That either did or didn’t mean anything at all.
I didn’t even know. Or I knew.
I remember something, and it makes my head hurt. That we aren’t in charge. That nothing is so complicated, so vast and important, as we would like it to be. Not once it’s over, or repossessed, or burned to the ground.
“What’s it going to be?”
I watch things burn. The world in Sireen’s image—everything she did. For me. It’s important to remember that I love my wife. Our lives together.
I know where I need to be.
I keep going. Running is just legs moving.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
“What reasonable man would like to be a city of demons, who behave as if they were at home, speak in many tongues, and who, not sat
isfied with stealing his lips or hand, work at changing his destiny for their convenience?”
—Czeslaw Milosz, “Ars Poetica?”
BY THE TIME CHIMPANZEE FINALLY LET ME GO, ITS EXECUTION had spanned several chapters in my life—it followed me back and forth across the country, through several jobs, and into an entirely new sense of self. Which won’t come as a surprise. Without help, though, it never would have found the page. My sincerest appreciation to my agent, Kris O’Higgins, and my editor, Mark Teppo. Endless thanks to my initial readers, who followed me all the way down the rabbit hole—Srđjan Smajić, Berrien Henderson, Roger Sneed, Trey Edgington, George Neal, Ashley Scott, and Cody Robinson. And for production assistance, translations, and expert opinions, I’m indebted to Aaron Leis, Laura Thomason, Daniel Boudreault, and, as ever, my wife, Rima Abunasser.
Darin holds a B.A., an M.A., and a Ph.D. in English Literature and Theory. He has taught courses on writing and literature at several universities and has served in a variety of editorial capacities at a number of independent presses and journals. He lives in Texas with his wife, where he dreams of empty places. Chimpanzee is his second novel.
Also by Darin Bradley
Noise
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Chimpanzee is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used in an absolutely fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons—living or dead—is entirely coincidental.
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