Chimpanzee (17 page)

Sireen and I had sex that night. All the liquor. The goggles. That simulation. It scared me, though it shouldn't have. I'm not Jim.

I didn't want to talk about it.

I adjust the goggles' microphone. “I'm back,” I say.

“Did you miss me?” she says.

“Fuck you.”

“I'm feeling submissive tonight.”

“You should.”

“Don't flatter yourself,” she says. “It's the sim.”

“It's all the same to me,” I say. “You might as well be a sim yourself.”

She makes a little noise.

“Your name isn't Carol, is it?” I say.

“Do you want to know my name?”

“Isn't that supposed to be a secret?”

“I'll tell you.”

“And I'm supposed to believe you?”

“Please,” she says. “I'll tell you the truth.”

The dial for the intensity of the simulation is on the opposite earpiece from the one housing the broadcast button. I thumb it up a couple of degrees. I'm enjoying this. It enjoys me.

“What do you want?” I say.

“Do you want to meet me someplace? Private?”

I change my mind and dial the sim back down. I don't know what this woman is on, but all I can think about is being arrested. I have no idea how far you can go on public channels like this.

The coincidence makes me nervous. I randomly selected something dominant, and tonight she's being submissive. I don't like it.

“I'm married,” I say. “Jesus.”

“I know.”

Jesus.

“What do you mean, you know?”

She makes a little noise. I'm feeling pressure behind my eyes. In my fingertips. She's making me angry.

“Answer me!”

I feel a thousand tiny fists along the top of my skull, down my spine. I close my eyes against the warmth, the vertigo. Breathe deeply.

I want to shout again.

“People know who you are,” she says. “You teach downtown.”

“Jesus. How do you know that?”

“I told you not to use your real name. People find things.”

“Yeah, thanks for the fucking tip.”

“So, what's new?” she says.

“You want to
chat
?”

“That's the point, Ben,” she says. “It's not as fun alone.”

It takes great effort not to lash out at her again. To call her a cunt and threaten to find her, on the other end, and teach her a lesson.

Which must be the point of this sim.

Jesus.

I swallow some martini. “You know I teach. Well, class has been canceled.”

“It's getting too big. You're making a scene.”

I think about it. There had only been a dozen or so of them on the first day of class. Now, weeks later, there are between sixty and a hundred, depending on what else is going on around town that night. It is a place to be seen, so people watch. I don't bother learning their names.

“Maybe.”

Maybe it's gotten too big for itself. It became its own sociological entity, so it was subject to the same entropic breakdown of its constituent parts as anything else. Organizations, marriages, educations.

Which would have made me the figurehead. Godhead. The end of all things as far as class was concerned. Their behavior was mine. I used to study the psychogeographical effects of one's surroundings on one's consciousness. On the emotions it creates to keep the world in line. Space itself.

“There's no maybe about it. You caught the wrong attention,” she says.

She's parroting my thoughts. It's making me angry.

The martini helps.

“I don't think you even know, Ben. They formed study groups.”

“What?”

She doesn't sound submissive anymore. I think she's dialed down her intensity.

“Your class pets ran them, in their apartments and in community centers and in civic clearspace with bottles of cheap beer.”

“Jesus.”

“Miss Johnson ran one. So did David Forrester.”

“Wait.” This is running together. You can't dial the intensity to zero without canceling the sim. I'm losing control, and it's making my hands shake.

“Why study groups? It was fucking introductory rhetoric. Composition. A little philosophy sometimes.”

“You were hard to understand, and getting harder. Not all of your lessons were complete.”

“Were you a student?”

“Don't worry, Ben. The class will go on.”

“The fuck it will! I'm not getting fucking arrested for a bunch of unemployed kids in a city park. I have a wife! We're buying a fucking house!”

I get a little warmer. Shake a little less. The bartender gives me an eye from across the room.
Calm the fuck down, sir
.

“It will be secure this time,” she says. “Not just a place to be seen. You'll be driven there.”

“And you're going to what, bus all my students to this place?”

“Some of them. The good ones.”

Admissions criteria. Restricted enrollment. The same old shit.

“You're defeating the fucking point, whoever the fuck you are. Sounds like elitist horseshit to me.”

“You know who I am.”

“Who are you?”

“Use your fucking brain, Ben.”

Sireen and I attend a grocery auction. One of her colleagues told her about it. Someone for whom the professorial salary isn't enough. Someone with kids to feed, two car payments, and old medical expenses. Something.

I hate grocery shopping. The people, the carts, the bovine suppression of awareness. Everybody's alone at the grocery store, getting in each other's ways. But I go with Sireen. She likes to take her time, selecting vegetables, inspecting cans. I try to say as little as possible while we're there. I carry the reusable bags. We used to shop with actual baskets, at an organic co-op down the road from her apartment, and I would select obscure beers while Sireen sampled the oils and hand lotions. The hand-knit scarves she tied around her throat in the fall. She laughed at the workers' jokes, and meant it.

Sireen's colleague told her that most of the groceries at the auction are legal—surplus or near-expiration. There are a few pallets of produce from local farmers, for whom the shrinking federal subsidies aren't enough. They farm to keep busy. Raising food that can't pay for itself, for inflation. I imagine they haven't heard yet about
SHARES
.

Some of the goods are stolen, by teamsters, inventory managers, petty thugs.

I park our sedan in the community center parking lot. There are very few empty spaces. The auction takes place on the basketball court, inside.

We hold hands as we browse the impromptu aisles. There are cabbages and damaged canned goods and packages of toilet paper with defective labels. There are colorful ziggurats of vitamins and supplements, the products of a buy-in, sell-yourself pyramid scheme I looked into a few months ago. They call it multi-level marketing. The farmers and vendors and wholesale representatives stand against the walls, talking in cross-armed groups. They drink coffee from Styrofoam cups and watch us askance. Like parents, waiting for something in this gymnasium to cheer about. Like the dispossessed adults in
The Mountainist
, looking for adoption, who would gladly play basketball for these people.

The aisles are not tall—a foot or two, at most. Sireen points out lot numbers, and I jot them down on a legal pad she took from her department's supply closet. As attendees, we're given an hour to inspect the lots before we must take our seats in the bleachers.

When we sit, thigh-to-thigh with our neighboring strangers, I hold Sireen's purse so she can unfold the tabs on our bidding paddle. It folds in on itself and tucks into place. Many people are using them as fans.

Sireen listens to the auctioneer, glancing at our list of lot numbers. Waiting.

“So,” I say, “I heard something about the class.”

“Yeah?” she says, arching one eyebrow. Performing attention even though she isn't paying it. She watches her list.

Someone bids fiercely on a crate of expired saltine crackers.

“They formed study groups. Before it was canceled.”

Sireen laughs. Then she looks up quickly—exaggeratedly interested, to cover the slip.

“That's great,” she says. “They must really have been interested.”

I watch one of the farmers drag his tomatoes front and center with a hand truck. It's his turn. I'm still holding Sireen's purse.

“Maybe they still get together,” I say.

She purses her lips. Looks at her ledger. “We're next.”

“Apparently, some of my lectures were hard to understand.”

She laughs for real this time. Gets a hand on my knee, as if she's reaching for balance.

We have to balance our goods in teetering stacks in the parking lot. Some of the other people came prepared. They have dollies and repurposed luggage wheelers outfitted with plastic crates and bungee cords. We are careful, moving with the exodus toward our car.

Sireen says something about the savings. About the auction next week. There are two men arguing over a box of produce five parking spaces over from ours. Each of them has his fingers laced through the ventilation holes in the box. The trunk of the mini-van behind them lights their foreheads.

I let Sireen arrange our things. I hand them to her and watch the argument. People are ignoring the men, even in the adjacent spaces.

“Ben,” Sireen says, capturing my attention.

I turn to look. Behind me, gunshots erupt. Loud ones. A handgun with a short muzzle—a revolver, maybe. Sireen squats, her hands upon her ears. I see her pivot on the balls of her feet— left, right. She's unsure what to do. People are screaming. Footfalls slapping. I feel the thundering herd against my shoulders. Fear is one of our most primary emotions. It is the clash of reflex, instinct, muscle memory against the social self. Which is the hesitation to ignore one's better sense, one's sleeping self, because this is
civilization after all. There are no predators in the savannah grass here. Nothing to be afraid of.