Chimpanzee (12 page)

No one lives in this house.

“Are we doing the right thing?” Sireen says.

“Yes,” I say. “All we can do is stay smart. Be smarter than the situation.”

“It wasn't supposed to go like this,” she says.

“What?”

“Like this.”

That makes me smile. An old smile. One that belonged to a graduate student in a bar. Angry and loud—opinions about all things. About theory, my director, women. I am the collected lineage of my fathers—the bloodline. The brightest star. My grandfather was a plumber. One of them. The other sold mattresses and grew tomatoes. One of our ancestors fought in the Revolutionary War. I am the brilliant fluid in my mother's belly—the stars and sine waves of her ambitions, first dates, girlhood dolls. What she expected of a son like me.

I am Sireen's childhood dream—the husband she awaited.

“We don't have to do this,” she says.

I shouldn't have left her alone in this room, where I couldn't be touched. Laughed with among friends around cheap drinks, sharing ignorance, even that first night in her apartment.

I percuss a finger along the knobs of her spine. Which is absurd. No one
owns
a spine. An elbow. Feelings. There is no
owner
in
the mind—no extra-planar ghost steering identity from a magic realm.

Sireen
is
her spine. I am my drumming finger. Selfhood is just the brain behaving, like running is just legs moving.

But she is
my
wife. I feel it, from forehead to groin. It's important to remember that I love her. I have to. There is so much to lose to Cynthia's machines. So much of me tied up in how I became so, with Sireen, studying. The collateral damage is our history—why, for example, I love her at all.

“Yes,” I say, “we should do this. It'll be okay.”

In our own house, in our bed, we don't touch. We source romance with boundaries. A bed is two halves, which are sometimes impenetrable. Space and breathing and unconsciousness of one's own. We must drool and snore and stink on our own halves. We must dampen sheets with natural body oils, at different rates, between linen-washings.

Or else, what is marriage?

A married house is a system of designated spaces, regularly used. Which is how selfhood works. I have to remember. Designated practices, routine patterns. Our homes are what we learned from our parents. Our first house is every house afterward—we measure them all this way. Religious faith is family lineage, not belief. Political party loyalty is the preservation of grandma's Saturday pancakes, uncle's birdhouse collection, father's cancer.

This is what it means to me, buying a house.

You don't sell houses or rhetorical disposition. You sell their lack.

I'm not supposed to write any of this down. During repossession. It's a violation of the agreement. But no one will know. Eventually, not even me.

Sometimes, Sireen joins me and Dimitri at the bar. We can buy cigarettes on these occasions because she feels more guilty than I
do about taking them from him. About both of us taking them. He gives them to her sometimes on their way to work.

“It's gorgeous,” she says, leaning in to me.

Dimitri is a bachelor. He appreciates fine things, like designer aftershave, tailored suits, or original kitchen hardware. He is good at appreciating all things over the rim of his tumbler.

“We're thinking of putting an offer in,” she says.

“That's great,” he says. Orders a round of the good bourbon. Another celebration.

“It's only a twenty-minute walk from your place,” she says. A little drunk.

“Which one?”

“The red-brick bungalow,” I say.

“That's fucking fantastic,” he says. “You kids.”

I drink my bourbon quickly when it comes. Sireen holds my hand under the table.

“It's going to be great,” I say.

“Yeah.”

“Sounds like.”

“Hey,” he says, “how's class?”

They both look at me.

“Good, you know. The students listen.”

“Seriously?” he says. “I can't get mine to stay awake.”

Sireen laughs. Deep, sensual. The female drinking laugh. “Mine are fucking zombies,” she says.

“Some of them have given me a nickname,” I say.

“Yeah?”

“Socrates. ‘An educator for the people.'”

They laugh with me, then we fall silent, watching the waitress negotiate the bar, the crowd. The drinks.

“Hey,” he says, “you guys want to chimp?”

Sireen looks at him over her drink. “I don't know,” she says.

“It's nothing,” Dimitri says.

“I don't know,” I say.

He offered us tickets to a forthcoming show, downtown, when we got here. No one we've heard of, but a band he likes.

We told him no.

“Which sim do you have in mind?” Sireen says.

“A new one,” he says. “Called ‘Jim and Carol.'”

“The fuck?” I say.

“They've more or less perfected it. Entire identities—this couple is codified and indexed and bat-shit crazy in love.”

Here we go.

“It's supposed to be intense—in a good way. Like taking X.”

“Who will you be?” Sireen says.

“The friend,” he says, “over for a visit.”

“Okay.”

“Okay. Let's do it.”

Dimitri orders the goggles. A martini.

“I don't want to talk about it.”

“That's okay,” Cynthia says. She smiles. It's supposed to be for me, but she looks too quickly down into her notes. Smiles at them instead. “We can talk about something else.”

Rosie orders me onto a stool near the Renewal suits while he checks the others in. He is sending them into the mountains again. I am not going.

The bus leaves. Plainclothes monitors disappear in different directions down the sidewalks, beyond the chain link and razor wire that lines the edge of this lot. One warden remains, and he secures the gates with a padlock.

Rosie is checking his worker manifests against the display on his monitor. From here, I can't see what he sees.

“You're working on the lot today,” he says.

“Yes, sir.”

He looks up and squints at me, like a stranger in the corner. It takes him a minute to figure things out.

“That means trimming the weeds, hosing off the trailer, etc., etc. There's a list.”

“Like chores,” I say.

“You think that's funny?”

“No, sir.”

“I give my son lists of chores,” he says. “It's important.”

“Yes, sir.”

That stops him. He puts his manifest down and swivels his chair. He's got a look in his eyes. A face that sweats in this tepid trailer. He's got a blue denim jacket on the back of his chair. He wears a short-sleeved button-down that exposes a surgical scar along one arm.

I understand. I'm sweating in here, too. This suit.

“Why do you do that?” he says.

“What?”

“‘Sir.' All the time ‘sir.'”

“I don't know,” I say. “You're in charge.”

“Did your students call you ‘sir?'”

“Some of them.”

He stands up and unlocks the door behind his desk. “Come over here,” he says. There is no chair beside his desk, so I carry the stool with me across the trailer. There is no light in the room behind the door—I can only see what is incidentally lit by the windows out here. Half of a portable cot, a pile of laundry, rumpled bedding. He steps out of the room with a mason jar and sets two shot glasses on his desk. He is careful how he moves the photo of his kids to make room. I don't see any photos of their mother.

When he goes back to the dark room, he kicks the cot further into the darkness before closing the door and returning to his desk.

Up here, on this stool, I can see when he smiles—I can see the bridgework among his teeth. The false teeth are too bright. Their artificially jaundiced finishes haven't kept up with the natural patina of the real ones.