Chimpanzee (33 page)

Dimitri and Sireen come with me. He had to cancel class to do so, but Cynthia is one of us now—one of me. The repossessed. She fits into the parameters of his study, so the least he can do is come along.

Sireen doesn't teach today. She gathered a small bouquet of flowers from the beds around our house. They were there when we moved in. Someone else once thought all of that space was lovely, too.

“Will she get it back?” Sireen says. In the back seat, Dimitri leans forward.

“Yes,” I say. “I don't know. I suppose it depends.”

Ahead, I see cars coming to a stop. There are police-lights spinning, blinking in primary colors on the sides of the road, just before the bridge. We're taking the back way to the hospital.

Sireen stares at her bouquet.

“Does the technology exist to put it back?” Dimitri says.

“It isn't gone,” I say. “She was clear about that. It's been copied, essentially—I don't remember all of the trends, and habits, and things the technique indexes. But there's nothing to put back. It's still there. The problem is how severely she's been blocked from it.”

I think. I still have the explanatory literature at home.

The traffic moves in slow fits. Like glacial ice. Our tires turn so little, with such force, that, eventually, we'll move the earth instead of ourselves. I can see people moving around, near the squad cars.

“She could be more blocked than you?” Dimitri says.

I think about it. “Mine is clinical. If I could pay it back, I could get it back, if it hadn't been too long—I'd just need a different kind of therapy, to overcome my reactions. Like you saw on the couch.”

“And Cynthia?” he says.

“It wasn't clinical,” I say. “They probably held her down and forced the kit on her. Who knows what they injected her with.
How much. Who knows why they wanted to block her out instead of simply making their own index.”

“It sounds like assault,” Dimitri says, “not theft.”

“Who knows how much they went after. I doubt they were working from an audit record,” I say.

There are Renewal workers ahead. Wardens with shotguns sitting on the hoods of their cars. The drivers in line ahead of us get in, get out of their cars.

“They might have scarred her. Like trauma. They've put her out of business for a while,” I say.

“Maybe that's why,” Sireen says.

“What?”

“To put her out of business. For a while.”

Renewal workers approach the cars ahead of us in pairs. It's a checkpoint. Two come alongside my front bumper. The hood. My window and Sireen's. I see the pair at the car ahead. They gesture the driver out of the car.

I roll down my window.

He's bearded, this worker. A round midsection and crow's feet outside his eyes. A man who smiles and drinks beer in the evening, watching his shows.

“Step out of your car, sir,” he says.

“What's this?”

“Please step out of the car.”

I look across. The worker on Sireen's side is gesturing her out of the car as well. He points at Dimitri and waves at idle workers up ahead who are already finished. I watch across my hood as the driver in front of me leans against his car, hands forward.

“I'm a Renewal worker, too,” I say.

He steps back so I can open the door.

“Then you can expect this,” he says. “Probably your next shift.”

They're frisking the man from the car ahead. Studying his license and asking questions. The Renewal worker has a small metal detector, and he wands it between the driver's legs, dowsing for secrets.

Across my hood, I see the other worker put his hands on Sireen's shoulders. He turns her around and she plants her palms on the car. Stares at me across the planes and paints and tiny hail dents
of galvanized steel. It's supposed to just be the hood of a car. But not today.

We spread our legs, and a third worker settles Dimitri against the back of the car.

“Name?” the worker says.

“Benjamin Cade.”

“Identification.”

I reach back and extract my wallet; Sireen hands her purse to the worker behind her.

“What's your business today?”

She closes her eyes when his palms find her inner thighs. The lower inches beneath her waistband. I can feel the ridge of his index finger against my testicles. The heel of his palm against my spine.

“We're going to the hospital. Visiting.”

He is not delicate as he drags the ridge of his smallest finger along the contours of Sireen's bra.

“Thank you for your assistance,” he says. He steps back. “Enjoy your trip to the hospital.”

They put us back in the car, and we sit quietly with our papers. They let five cars through the checkpoint at a time. We're number four.

Sireen reassembles her bouquet and stares at her hands.

“You're the first,” the nurse says to us in the hallway. Her gait is evenly broken, the rolling strut of eight hours every day in orthopedic footwear. Standard issue, which the nurses pay for themselves.

She shows me her clipboard, so I'll care. There are no names listed under
VISITOR IN
/
VISITOR OUT
. I pull my lips against my teeth, tight together to make it clear I've gotten the message. This is how you do it.

“Is there family?” Sireen says.

“None that we've seen,” the nurse says.

The door to her room looks heavy enough to repel germs and invaders. A cell and a fortress to partition degrees of healthy spaces down this hallway. Each room contains its own atmosphere. Its
own pressures and smells and systems of discomfort. The doors bring division to overlapping categories. Pain, not. Healthy, not. Alive, not.

Cynthia lies in her bed. She stares at us, but she doesn't move.

Sireen puts her bouquet on a rolling table, which is askew, only somewhat aligned with Cynthia's shoulders, so that she might better eat from it, or drink from it, or reach its entertaining things.

“Just a minute, Ben,” Sireen says. She goes after Cynthia's hair with her fingertips. She tends it, like a child Cynthia can't look after. It's oily, and the press of her skull against her hypo-allergenic pillowcase has flattened it in ways that look thin. Like chemo. She has a leg out from under her sheets, her gown in a pile over one hip. One does not wear underwear in a coma.

“Come on,” I say.

Dimitri follows me out, taking notes, while Sireen makes her presentable. In the hallway, I stare at each thing for a few seconds in turn. I want to look like I'm comfortable here.

“How much do you remember?” I say.

Cynthia watches for a moment.

“Why you?” she says.

“We . . .” I look for help from Sireen. She's caught between a shrug and her uncomfortable smile. She has her arms crossed. Dimitri sits against the wall. He's discreet, with his notepad.

“I don't know,” I say. “Why not?”

“You're my patient.”

“Is there anything I can get you?” Sireen says. She sits on the bed, up against Cynthia's hips. She leans in that way some people can, occupying liminal space on sickbeds or sofa cushions. She compacts herself into someone who needs less room than normal, to simply sit and be present. If I were to try, it would be clear that I am uncomfortable, sit-leaning on something so small, putting up a larger performance.

Cynthia watches Sireen. “I don't know,” she says.

“Did you speak to the police?” I say.

She changes targets. Rolls her eyes to my side of the bed. “Yes.”

“So you know.”

“Mostly.”

“Will you go into rehab?” I say.

She looks at the ceiling. I am only just noticing that her eyes are green. Or I don't remember noticing. It could have been part of the repossession therapy process. Distance. Sterility. Keeping my therapist archetypal and unspecific. Something that makes sense in dreams.

“I am eligible for a federal pension,” she says.

“If you go to rehab?” I say.

“If I don't.”

Her lips are chapped. They look like stone. Like erosion.

“They would like me to make room for another,” she says. “A recent graduate who hasn't worked the program yet.”

Sireen looks at me across Cynthia's body. Across her cotton shroud, her vague topography.

“Will you?” I say.

“You shouldn't be here,” she says.

“We just thought—”

“I'm not your friend, Ben. You are a damaged person. You require my attention to protect you from yourself.”

“You're going to spend the rest of your life being you,” I say, “you realize?”

She closes her eyes. Lifts herself into her own darkness. The room will be only red light through her eyelids.

“I remember it all, Ben,” she says. “You asked.”

“They're worried that we're for sale,” I say. “Black market sims.”

“You should go,” she says.

“Who will I go to?” I say. “Your replacement?”

It makes her laugh. An expression of air—grit and humidity across her lips. “Jesus, Ben—you won't need any more sessions.”

She finally touches Sireen's hand upon the sheets, but she looks at me.

“It isn't as arcane as you wish it was,” she says.

“What isn't?” I say.

“Being you.”

Dimitri stands up, against the wall. It catches Cynthia's attention, and they watch each other for a moment. Remembering other occasions, perhaps. An evening in my living room. Professional attire and cologne. This hospital room is the conclusion of anything they may have envisioned together. Consciously or not.

“Did you get everything?” Cynthia says to him.

He looks at me. I shrug. She sounds like no one impressive now. I sized her up, too. That first day in her office. Wondering about different lives and partners and intimate truths. It would always end with one of us undergoing medical treatment.

“Yes,” he says.

“I hope it's enough,” she says.

He stands at the foot of her bed. Wraps his fingers around her ankle for a squeeze. Something better than shaking hands, when one has a mechanical bed with plugs and outlets and intravenous lines in the way. There are indexing goggles hanging from the wall behind Cynthia's head, their wires spooled into a neat compartment.

“It won't be,” he says.

“See,” she says to me.

I'm not sure what she means, but I give her a good look. Like watching light in the darkness.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

S
HE WAS RIGHT
. T
HERE WILL BE A GRAIN SHORTAGE
. T
HIS
news program tells me so. Some enterprising journalist, at some dying news agency, leaked his under-normal-circumstances career-making exposé on some-or-other agricultural conglomerate's hush operation on the USDA recalls of its patented, genetically engineered wheat. This reporter was given a gag order by the Department of the Interior because his findings would likely cause a grain shortage, once the public learned about the recalls and demanded their enforcement, in turn costing the conglomerate-in-question millions in government contracts to produce the grain that produces the breads, cereals, and other sundry products that the unemployed are eligible to collect after registering at their local Renewal Welfare depots.