Chimpanzee (14 page)

I wait to meet Zoe near the alley where she turned in her introductory essay—her performance art proposal. The heat is dry, which is odd. It rains often here. Our valley traps vehicle exhaust and industrial pollutants. It revisits them upon us in ozone alerts and acid rain.

Sireen and I don't go out in the heat. What it does to the skin isolates us. We forget the other of us in our discomfort, reduced from our higher selves. A “flattening of affect,” I guess. I looked it up. It used to happen to schizophrenics.

Zoe has invited me for lunch.

I don't remember which of these bricked spaces she chose for her performance-art essay, so I don't bother searching. It's enough to stand near this block of newspaper bins and pretend to read
The Mountainist
. It's counter-cultural, hip—something to keep the intelligent young busy.

The feature article is about adults who are facing eviction or foreclosure. Most of them take to the streets or join tent cities. The socially forward—who once ate tofu and flax seed in their expensive homes, who thought they understood free trade, who dislike chemicals—are different. They've begun offering themselves up for adoption by other families, where they will perform domestic services for their new family. The taxable heads of these households, in addition to a sense of entitled philanthropy, the article explains, are eligible for additional tax deductions because the adoptees become dependents.

Some of the hopeful have even taken to creating handbills and online profiles that infantilize them. A few are posted in
The Mountainist
itself. In the back, where the escort services and beauty products are advertised.

“Dr. Cade!” Zoe says. She is carrying a motorcycle helmet under her arm, jogging through the sun. I can understand why she wears only a bikini top and cut-off shorts.

The number of host families is increasing, I read quickly.

“Dr. Cade—”

“Ben. Please.”

Technically, I am no longer a doctor. I am now lacking the full completion of my final credit hours, since Cynthia has repossessed what I learned during my last semester. At the conclusion of our last session, I signed the affidavit that surrenders my rights of ownership of my dissertation. My alma mater will be forced to surrender them as well. It's the law.

Zoe shifts her helmet to her other arm and squints into the sun, as if trying to find me there. Which would be absurd. The sun affords very little, while also affording everything.

“Ben,” she says. “Let's eat.”

They look at me in here. Blank, sweating. There are fans pulling the dead air through repurposed industrial windows. There is no air conditioning. Most homes and small businesses in this city don't use it. The temperature is usually too mild, and most remaining a/c units don't work anyway.

“What is this, Zoe?” It looks like a soup kitchen.

She lays a palm on my shoulder—the undershirt I'm wearing—as she moves past, already sourcing handshakes from half a dozen of these people. She has the moves that make them happen.

She's doing something to her consciousness. Pushing it. Something.

“Come on, Dr. Cade.”

I'm realizing that they're only looking at me because of how attention works. I think. Attention is consciousness, which requires a certain minimum time period of steady neuronal stimulation. It's not very long, but it's long enough. I can't remember.

And, really, it was probably Zoe's cleavage that drew their eyes this way.

Beyond the thirty or so people, against a white cinder block wall, cans of gelatinized fuel burn on top of a folding table lined with chafing dishes. Some things are warm. There are also sandwiches. Fruit.

Zoe puts her arm around my shoulders.

“It's all local,” she says. “The building is co-op owned.”

“That's good,” I say.

I see David, Zoe's friend from class, behind the table—he looks proud, glad that I'm here to share his progressive enthusiasm. He wears the clothes. The hair. I don't really care.

“David,” I say. “Good to see you.”

“You too, Dr. Cade,” he says. He smiles at Zoe. “Hey.”

“What would you like?” Zoe says to me.

“Nothing for me. Thanks.” I smile for her, too. “I don't have . . . I didn't bring any money.”

She pulls a stack of bill-sized papers from her crocheted handbag. They look like toy money. Something from a grocery store. From years ago, when they sold toys like essentials.

Zoe peels a few off the stack and hands them to David. He tucks them into stacks of other bills inside a cash box. He looks like he's trying to pay attention to anything but her.

“Get whatever you like,” she says.

“How does it work?”

Zoe hands me one of the bills. I examine it with my off-hand. I am using the other to eat a blemished apple. The placard in front of the basket of apples informed me that these were grown within my zip code. “Nothing but sun and rain.” Which is good. The radon gas trapped in all these hills is going to kill us anyway. No sense hurrying it with bad food or chemical fertilizers.

The bill is done up in black and red ink. A sort of mid-century modern design block. It says 1
SHARE
in impressive, hip letters. I could use it in class, teaching visual rhetoric. It follows all the rules.

“Same principle as regular cash,” she says.

“You're printing your own money?”

“Does that bother you?”

She likes this. Whether she intended to or not, she . . . arranged, or whatever, this conversation according to her self-satisfaction with things like free education, dreadlocks, riding motorcycles, and flaunting her skin. Certainly, she has to be abrasive about these things with her peers—establishing order, rank, genuine interest. Not with me. She wants me to be impressed with her street-wise expertise. She wants validation, of the things she thinks.

More importantly, though, she's compensating, acting authoritative, even (especially) around David. But for what, who the fuck knows.

I put my apple down. “Not really.”

She stabs at a bowlful of greens. “These people can't get jobs, but they have things to offer. Skills, labor hours, apples. You sign up with the
SHARE
committee, record a number of volunteer hours, or produce donations, or whatever you have, and then the committee hands you a stack of bills.”

“Are you on the committee?”

“No. The office is upstairs, though. We could meet some, I'll bet.”

“How does the committee fund itself?”

“It takes dues from those who buy in and sells what it can.”

“I see.”

There is a small piercing hole in her cheek, near her nose, where she must sometimes wear a stud. I can see that now.

“Where do you spend them?” I say.

“There's a registry,” she says, “of participants. People, establishments. You can trade labor for more
SHARES
, or you can spend them on produce, handcrafts—whatever.”

“Clever,” I say. Until the committee gets out of hand.

“It's all underground,” she says. I'm sure she likes that part. “Un-taxed.”

Un-taxed. Despite the committee's dues. It's important to own one's language. The usage and meaning of it, for things like this.

“Do you want me to sign you up?” she says.

I give her a look, like I'm thinking. “Why are you taking my class, Zoe? Are you learning anything?”

One shouldn't ask two questions in a row, rhetorically speaking. It yields the initiative when sourcing subject-object discourse relationships. I know better. It feels weird to know better.

She points at the copy of
The Mountainist
that I carried in with me.

“Did you like the article?” she says.

“It's disturbing.”

“Did you think it was well-written?”

“Well enough. The journalist could use some practice.”

“That's why.” She's not posturing when she smiles now. The dead air blows between us.

“You want to write articles,” I say.

“Something like that,” she says.

“Yes, then,” I say.

“Yes, what?”

“Yes, I want you to sign me up.”

Outside, a kid walks past wearing a pair of chimping goggles. They are plugged into his mobile phone via a cord and a small adapter.

“They use wireless phone signals now,” Zoe tells me. “To network. It's all mobile.”

“I see.”

CHAPTER NINE

T
HERE ARE TWO POLICEMEN WAITING AT THE TOP OF THE
amphitheater stairs in Sentinel Park. My students wait quietly, in rank and file, on the stone terraces beneath them. There are around sixty of them. By this point, it has become clear which ones are friends. Which ones are dating. Who thinks he's smarter than the others. The retirees are the most diligent.

For many of them, this class is the characterization of their entire lives. Their frustration. Their underground madness. Like me, most of these have been conditioned against neurological imbalance since childhood—standing in line outside the school nurse's office, waiting for their vaccinations and their turns with the adhesive pads that warmed their brains against madness. This is as close as they can come to being disturbed. Doing things that agitate their better sense.

This or a pair of chimping goggles.

“Benjamin Cade?” one of the officers says. The other stares at the students, at the traffic in the surrounding thoroughfares. Anything.

“Yes.”

He looks about my age. He is armed with a sidearm, a taser, a telescopic billy club, and several canisters of chemical irritant.

Police officers often do not go to post-graduate school. Some departments no longer even require a bachelor's degree, because it is unfeasible, considering their hiring needs. I read an article that explained as much.

“I need to ask you about your relationship with Leah Johnson,” the officer says.

Declarative intent is not a question. It is insidious. It establishes a position of subject authority. It performs the task of making demands without making them. I can cooperate, if I like.