Chimpanzee (3 page)

“Well, I just want . . . I don't want to make the wrong impression, you know? Until tenure.”

“I can grow my beard when you get tenure?”

“Ben, come on,” she says. “It just . . . you could just trim it.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah, what?”

“I said ‘yeah.'”

Repossession is therapeutic
, the promissory note to my student loans explains. Painless. Repossessing aspects of associative thought, of “cerebro-ontogenetic development,” will, at worst, result in disorientation and nausea. Other side effects occur in rare instances.

They can't take the data out of your head. That's impossible. They just make it something traumatic. Something to squirrel away in the small dark of your lower consciousness, where it becomes nightmares and suppressed experiences and terrible memories. The brain does the work for them by protecting itself from what's become unpleasant. It's like forgetting. Eating the lotus.

You can't use what's theirs if you can't pay for it, which makes sense. They financed it, after all. Collegiate enrollment spiked after everyone discovered that they were under-degreed to compete for dwindling employment, and several senators won their offices by campaigning for college degrees for everyone. But educating everyone doesn't necessarily make them any money. Academic accreditation boards put caps on the number of graduates a university could produce in a given year. Because degrees had
become so common, so easy to get, they no longer differentiated anyone in the workforce. The Department of Education had no choice but to start using our indices, from our audits. They were maps to a better future.

Educating everyone doesn't make the workforce any money, but repossessing degrees makes it for the banks. The moneylenders whose investments in an educated America are underwritten by the government itself. Reclaiming possession of a borrower's indices is good for research, and it improves the fiscal odds for those graduates who can still make money by increasing the rarity and value of their degrees—those still capable of making their loan payments. The hope is that these achievers will create our new generation of jobs, above and beyond the corporate ladder, and we can all start again next time. With a new generation.

It's for the greater good.

Downtown, I find my loan therapist's office. The oxidized brass door handles. The nondescript text on the office door.
REPOSSESSION THERAPY
in clean Helvetica font. My phone vibrates, so I pull it out of my pocket before going in.

It's a text message from Sireen.

Sorry about the beard ;)

CHAPTER TWO

B
EHIND ALL THIS, THE
N
EW
D
EPRESSION, THE MEANS OF
production are fine. They were never the problem. Of course the workers went on strike. Of course there were Kangaroo Negotiations. Of course tear gas, and arson, and that perpetual image: young men throwing stones—a Biblical act, an assertion of lineage, of community. Justice. They threw them because they could. Because someone had to. Never mind the union men. This was talismanic. A sacred rite passed from fathers to sons.

The
means
of production were never the problem. They were the question, begging itself. It's the
production
that needs revolution. There are no means to an end.

I used to teach my students not to beg the question.

In the end, the ousted workers were invited to produce whatever they damn well pleased with the machinery. With the line assemblies. With the break rooms and warehouses. Because it didn't matter. No one was buying anything, so there was no producing.

Of course there were strikes. By that point, there were so many workers gone, so many forming lines, echelons, phalanxes on the concrete fields behind the picket line. It wasn't even mob mentality. It was herd. Gathering in numbers against the inevitable. The country demonstrated and protested, full of sound and fury, until, eventually, we just didn't anymore. We were exhausted and hungry. And still unemployed. The only way to eat was to get in line and shut up. The government was sorry about all this—it really was. They all were.

Had we really cared, we would have simply burned everything. The factories, the offices, the servers and routers. Everything.

In therapists' offices, like this one, a hand always comes first, dowsing through the just-open door while the therapist conveys whatever
very-necessary
, last-minute instructions on the other side—to the receptionist, or the insurance rep, or the previous client, who won't stop having issues even as he's signing papers at the front desk.

This is called “priming,” and it sources a particular subject role for the therapist. It's nothing strange. Consciousness takes form in the situation around it. Identity is context. I tried to explain it to Sireen, over beers one afternoon in the bar at the edge of campus. We were with her math friends, and they laughed and called me a nihilist. Liberal arts. Sireen laughed, too. I realized then that it was funny, and she laid her fingers across the back of my hand. We weren't married yet, and I was trying too hard.

So, I sourced a new me that day. I remember. One amused by myself. Later, drunk, we lay on the flattened carpet in her tiny living room, smoking and listening to obscure bands I pretended to know.

                    
Someone was singing in Norwegian. I kissed her, and she tasted like apple vodka. We slept there, under some aunt's afghan, and Sireen muttered vowels at her dreams.

I am both subject and object in this office because that's how this works. I have been primed to recognize time limits (55 minutes), authority (the therapist), and slight sexual arousal (manicured fingers and a panty-hosed kneecap).

We could also call this a “hook.” It defines and sustains my interest in this encounter. Everything begins by making your audience pay attention.

“Dr. Cade?” the therapist says, her hand once more leading the way as she commits to entering the office for good. She extends it to shake.

This is the same gesture we use to keep assailants at bay. But then, she would be more object than subject. A victim-to-be.

“Yes,” I say.

“I'm Cynthia.”

She wears her hair down. Which helps.

“Can I get you anything?” she says. “Are you comfortable?”

“No.”

That stops her just enough. She should know better, cramming those two questions together.

When she sits down, she is careful to tug her skirt toward her knees.

“First of all,” she makes eye contact—a professional, “thank you for coming.”

I smile. “Of course.”

“Have you read the introductory literature?”

“Yes.”

“Can I call you ‘Benjamin?'”

“You may.”

“Well, Benjamin, today we won't begin therapy. This is a chance to get to know each other.”

I want to say this is
my
chance. She'll have to get to know me all over again. Each time, as there is less of me to know. Blocking my education is going to take a few memories with it. Situations and contexts and exactly what it was like to learn this, or this, or this thing. Did a theory click for me in the shower, on a walk, during sex? It will take with it anything that pertains. My life, on borrowed time.

“Let's begin with questions,” she says. “What can I tell you? About our office? The process? Me?”

“Let's talk about value,” I say.

“I'm sorry?”

“Let's discuss how repossessing my education recovers the government's lost investment.”

“Benjamin, the investment isn't lost yet.”

“Ben.”

“Fine, Ben.”

She looks at her file, on her computer pad, which rests like a clipboard on her knees. Her skirt has receded, slowly, and now it's several inches up her thighs.

These are things I shouldn't notice. But I do. I try to think about Sireen.

“Your father suffered from frontotemporal dementia,” she says. Looks at me.

“I don't want to talk about my father.”

“Working through longitudinal analyses of progressive indices, like yours, is making great strides in experimental treatments for dementia sufferers,” she says. “Like your father.”

I don't say anything. My mom cried when I told her about repossession. She just kept apologizing. Thanking God Dad wasn't around for it. He didn't think it was a good idea. The debt. The degrees. The idle study—the hours in libraries. He liked me just the way I was. Used to say it, when he was lucid.
Just the way you are, son.
Stuck in a timewarp. Warning me against myself over and over like some sentimental fugue.

“Why don't we change the subject,” Cynthia says. She makes eye contact again. “Your dissertation was about cognitive theory. Tell me how to define a ‘self.'”

By the end of my last semester, before my appointment expired at our university, I just gave all my students “A”s. Because they weren't the point. They were just a necessity, and I needed all the time I could get, which I mostly spent sitting on our front porch, drinking beer and twisting shoots off of Sireen's morning glories. I couldn't tell if I was feeling sorry for myself or making big plans. Nothing came together, either way.