Chimpanzee (29 page)

I can't tell what Cynthia's done, but I have clenched my fists.

“Are you a religious man, Ben?” she says.

“No.”

“But you are familiar with the Bible.”

“I studied it in graduate school. Narrative things in sacred texts.”

“Yes,” she says, “but you do not take personal meaning from such narratives?”

“No.”

“Can you tell me how you're sure?”

She's fighting me with something. My teeth come back together.

“I just am.”

“Did you ever find meaning in such narratives?”

My face is starting to sweat. My lower legs twitch.

“Remain seated, please,” Cynthia says to Sireen, who is fidgeting.

“Ben,” Cynthia says.

I would like to punch something with these fists. Myself, namely.

“What?” I say. It's difficult. My jaw adheres to my skull.

“Did you ever find meaning in such narratives?”

I can feel urine on my thigh.

“It'll be over soon,” she says, “then you'll be safe.”

“Yes,” I say.

“What meaning did you find?”

The rest of my body begins to tremble. I want to run, to scream. I want to throw myself against the walls of my new house, to pass
through them. To exist between chemically treated wooden studs and pillows of fiberglass insulation. I want to be something other than myself. Containing a version of myself that is not this version.

“God's voice, the formless waters,” I say. “All of it.”

“Why is that?”

“I—was—a—child.”

“Do you wish now that you still believed?”

“N—o.”

I shake I shake I shake I shake

I think I see Sireen turn away. I can't tell—her image is bobbing up and down too violently in my peripheral field. Dimitri looks like respiration. Something rising and falling without moving at all.

“Why, Ben?” Cynthia says. “You're almost finished. Just tell me why.”

In an instant, I know what she wants me to say, how she wants me to psychologize my distant self. I know the lecture she wants to hear. This is me. All of me. Before I ever entered her office. Before I signed her affidavits and waivers and began showing up for Renewal shifts. She's given it back, and I'm thinking in grids, in longitudinal studies. I'm thinking about ontogenesis and affect and readiness potential. I'm thinking about semantic priming and the constructed nature of perception. I am scalar modality. I am a persistent self in Cynthia's therapeutic darkness.

I am.

                
My director was at our wedding. He danced with Sireen's mother and chatted with my friends from the program. He had made an art piece from one of the poems we were studying in the program—my favorite—and how we'd trussed it up with diagrams and charts to divine its beauty. Of all the salad bowls and blenders and sets of silverware we received, we cherished his gift most. It was a Saturday night, and Sireen and I would be back in our classes on Monday morning.

                    
He danced with Sireen, too, and she smiled with him like a brilliant moon, full of contrast and hypnotic topography.

                    
He brought her back to me, and he leaned into us. He smelled of old tobacco and sweet aftershave.

                    
You're my best student, he said. And your bride is beautiful and brilliant and as unknowable as any line we parse or any paradigm we chart. Never bring yourself to her the way you do to the work. Cherish everything you can't know about her.

                    
He looked at her. You do the same, he said.

                    
She stopped smiling and nodded at him. I couldn't . . . , she said. Rolled her supernal eyes onto me. I remember, I could see the tea lights reflected in them. The chatter of our other guests clinked and giggled and coughed around us.

                    
. . . because Ben doesn't make as much sense as math does, she said.

                    
He smiled, and then he stepped away. He even had a hat to retrieve before leaving quietly through the double doors.

                    
I didn't know what to say.

                    
I will always take care of you, she said.

                    
I know.

                    
When she smiled this time, it was because she knew something I didn't.

                    
No, she said. You don't.

I can't tell if the darkness is caused by the glasses or if Cynthia's equipment has agitated my occipital lobes, where all of this is taking place. She wants me to prove that I know what she's done. She's given everything back, for now, as a simulation from her machine, and this is the result—the collected nightmare of what she's repossessed. How she has reformed it, me, into something I can't physically handle. If I
were
capable of associating stimuli and information in the manners I used at the height of my education, if
I
were
capable—this would be the new me. Something condensed. A superconductor that can't handle itself—not without severe clinical intervention. This is how she has locked me into the walls of my mind.

This is what it is like, now, to think like me. It is called negative reinforcement, and we used to debate its effectiveness at training our young.

“I. Ca—n't.” I say. “Too. Too. Too. Much.”

“Ben?” Cynthia says. A voice in the night. She speaks from the surface, directly into my brain as I fall, fall into the wine-dark sea.

“It's me,” I say. I don't know if she can hear me. I can't hear myself. “I get it. It's me. Before you.”

“Come back,” she says.

This is what I did, what I studied, what it was for—center stage. A heightened state of being, like agitated matter. Firing on all cylinders, the best and brightest I could possibly be. A state I could never achieve, not without Cynthia's chemical and behavioral accelerants. I never went through graduate school on purpose. I just didn't know what else to do. My friends stayed on, earned extra degrees. Sireen was there—she had a plan, and we're living it. I needed to be around her. It was all just an accident, understanding being. This is me understanding it, complicating it, realizing that it isn't anything at all. And now, how much worse I am for knowing.

I want her to take it away. I don't want this in my home, which is how we got it. Letting things go.

I'm no longer shaking, but I can't see yet. I'm still. A centered being. Like gravity on this couch.

Someone is running her fingers along my brow. I'm no longer wearing the glasses. I can feel all three of them, around me, like a medium at a séance. I am what they're here to see. What they wish to be near. I am the dark sun.

“Ben,” Cynthia says, “what did you feel?”

“I don't remember,” I say.

“But you remember feeling it?”

“Yes.”

“What can you remember?” she says.

“Getting it all wrong,” I say.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

T
HE HANDWRITING IS MINE, SO
I
KNOW
I
HAD SOMETHING
to say. I wrote it late, that night—after Sireen and I had sex in the empty house. Because I was still angry enough. Stealing my own knowledge before Cynthia did. It was something I wanted to teach—something they needed to know, then. But now, I'm not so sure. I can't know. I'm not even sure what all this is about.

But I have nothing left to teach, and I can't leave them without a conclusion. I must send them out to write and communicate in their unemployed worlds, their weary toil, with some reason to bother.

I must be a lesson in all this. A living example. They are doing important things, and someone must scream and march and call attention to himself. The center of gravity that keeps them together—a concept that exists, even though it physically doesn't. Someone must catch their attention while they build illegal universities and subversive economies. While they occupy derelict buildings and discuss philosophy in beautiful, useless circles. I smoke their cigarettes and spend their
SHARES
and drink their moonshine. I give them lessons without context, so that they must make their own meanings. About what to do with a fading man. About what they think he's
really
telling them, even though I no longer know. I make them find help—how to fill in the gaps—and they find other teachers who do the same thing. All of us in motion. Things out of hand. Other important phrases.

Chimpanzee isn't real because they needed it not to be. They needed a diversion so they could safely stare at themselves in young,
meditative ways—to watch the rest of the world in suspended wonder, trying to figure them out. The stencils and posters and subversive messages. The chimpanzee brand and its consequences. It makes people pay attention.

Chimpanzee doesn't
mean
anything, which is why it's so important. Like me.