Chimpanzee (34 page)

It is very informative. The journalist has been detained. People are angry at the Welfare Depots. Renewal workers have been given riot shields. The wardens fire a few shots.

I hope Sireen doesn't see this. She'll worry if Rosie sends me into crowd control.

I turn the television off. The world almost looks normal now, when I see things through my chimping glasses. Especially at night like this, when everything is already faintly red anyway. Orange. The sepia effects of artificial light.

Sireen is gone. She is holding office hours for the students in her night class.

I wake the glasses up with a stiff tap to the earpiece, and nets of public-access simulation menus come to light. There's a blinking one—a suddenly popular one—called
FAMINE
. I don't see the point of it, but the bandwidth numbers, in
FAMINE
's sub-menu, indicate that many do. They're chimping hunger by the thousands, teaching themselves what it's like to be hungry, desperate, then dead. They're watching the news.

I try it out.

A network request appears. It displaces my active menus. She always masks her account information, her IP address, which catches the glasses' attention. They dislike things without names.

I hear some white noise. Like static, if it could exist here. There's no room for universal noise in these digital networks. That leftover Big Bang buzz. As if it never happened.

I don't feel the sim yet. I wonder how much of it is about wondering when you'll feel it.

“Dr. Cade,” someone says. Her voice isn't distorted. She sounds young.

No one I've heard before.

It gets me off the couch. I rest the fingertips of my left hand against one of the earpieces, as if I'm tuning in—holding onto a weak signal in the darkness.

“Who is this?” I say. My legs move me around my couch.

“There's going to be a party,” she says.

Through the kitchen window, I can see downtown glow in the distance. Its still-lit grids. On important streets that still need light—that still deserve it.

“What?”

“We want you to come to the party.”

“Who are you?”

“Students.”

There have been reports of people in other cities getting into trouble. Students with underground classes of their own, marching and protesting and giving people food. They would like to be in charge, and they generate these ideas on couches in secret places. Drinking and smoking and having a good time in the New Depression.

“You shouldn't contact me,” I say. “People are looking for you.”

The sim makes me resent myself. I own a refrigerator, after all.

“It's safe,” she says.

“The party?”

“Contacting you here.”

I lean over the sink. With my forehead against the window glass, I can just see the old arts district across the river bottom. The service lights, affixed to its towers and gantry spans, don't work. I've never seen them on, as many times as I have looked, usually at night, passing through the kitchen and stopping for a glance as I move from one part of the house to another on important evening business. Usually, it's back to the living room with Sireen.

It sounds like patterns, that noise behind her voice. Something I should be smart enough to understand.

“What are you celebrating?” I say.

“Sometimes a party is just a party,” she says.

“Is it?”

“Not this time.”

“You can tell me where it is, when it is, then I'm going to close this connection,” I say. “That's all you get.”

It's an address. A time. A date.

Not long now.

I see pinpricks through these lenses. Orange dots in the dark warehouse windows. Like cigarette lighters. Like will-o-the-wisps. We used to put lights like these on our bridges and radio towers, to make sure helicopters and low-flying planes didn't smash into them. The idea began with lighthouses, and people tended them—kept them. We trusted them to protect sailors from our shoals and outcroppings—that sacred task, to simply throw light across the formless waters. Because it should be there.

The reality is that I'm too far away to see lights in those warehouse windows. But there they are.

She is excited, even if she doesn't want to be.

“A party?” Sireen says.

“Yes,” I say. I have my phone in my hand. I'm calling Dimitri next.

“Sounds pretentious,” she says.

I tug a pair of her jeans off the shelf in the closet. I'm smiling when I toss them at her on the bed.

                    
It made her laugh.

                    
We're going to be late, she said. I was making bad decisions. Trying to get her to wear a skirt. Again.

                    
I dangled the tie over my whiskey.

“Look at you, professor,” I say. “Too grown up to get drunk in some stranger's kitchen.”

                    
Don't you dare, she said. I love that one.

                    
Wear the skirt, I said.

She complies. Legs out of her sweat pants.

“Can you blame me?” she says. “Who can we even drink with anymore. Grad students?”

“If you want to,” I say.

                    
This isn't a negotiation, she said. She downed her drink.

She throws her shirt at me. Trying to catch it makes me drop my phone. As if all tasks are difficult at this age.

                    
It definitely was.

She's excited. She likes that I'm laughing in our bedroom. It's a good sign. We're just talking about a party, after all.

“Who's throwing it?” she says. She's taking her time with a new shirt. A different colored bra. She's pacing it—the encounter, the idea. Something other than our debts and this house. It's a reason to slow the flesh down. Keep things open a bit longer—that domestic way of doing normal things slowly in an erotic manner.

I stand like a moron in my closet, watching my wife. People pray and meditate and dance in circles for hours for this much suppression of thought. This simple frame of mind.

“Some scensters from around,” I say. “There'll probably be music. Open invitation.”

“Jesus. We'll be the oldest people there.”

“Does that matter?”

“It's lame.”

“We could use the air.”

But she isn't serious. She's excited. She pushes me deeper into the closet and shuts me in. It's funny.

“Any requests?” she says.

She means her underwear. She hasn't asked in a while. But it's in the air again. Bodies and schedules on the mind, month by month.

I press my forehead against the closet door. “Surprise me.”

Shadows move when she does, through the light underneath the door.

“You're right,” she says. “We could use the air.” I hear her feet on the bathroom tile.

I call Dimitri from in here, just to hear the closeness of my own voice in a small, dark space. I don't spend much time in closets. It seems about as unexpected as attending parties thrown by my old students. Somehow, I just want Sireen to see, now that it's over. That I'm done. Even if she won't realize it, I saw something through.

The neighborhood is as sparse as ours. At least one vacant house for every one occupied.
FOR SALE
signs like primary-colored trees stand in most of the lawns. A few houses are simply boarded up. Someone's financial embarrassment, sealed against anyone getting a clue or taking a look around.

There are more cars on the street than I'm used to seeing in neighborhoods like this, parked in parade-lines against the curbs. One of those suburban invasions. A neighbor with guests, helping himself to more street than he deserves.

“It's there,” Sireen says, points. She's been counting house numbers.

The
FOR SALE
sign in the front yard says
SOLD
! A trio of yellow balloons climb thin ribbons into the neighborhood air.

“It's a housewarming party?” Sireen says. She looks at me. She's wearing dark eye makeup and bright earrings. She looks ready for this. Nothing like a math professor. Simply a woman who wants to look attractive. Sometimes, she's both, but not tonight.

In the back seat, Dimitri cranes his neck to see—surveying foreign lands, getting ready for the discomfort of sharing someone else's invitation. He has one hand idly on a case of beer. He insisted on paying.

“Don't worry,” I say.

The students don't look too young, standing on the porch. There are three of them, holding cans of soda, and they wave as I drive by.

After I park the car, it takes several minutes to walk back to the house. Neighbors are behind their mini-blinds, their peepholes. Dimitri moves the beer from one arm to the other, and the heels of Sireen's boots make percussive sounds on the sidewalk. We try to be less foreign, try to avoid the public abrasion of being styled for a party but not yet at it.

One of the students comes to help Dimitri carry the beer. He's no more than a few years younger than I am. He wears plain clothes, and his beard is just long enough to need a trim. I don't recognize him.

“You all from the neighborhood?” he says.

We stop and stand with him.

“No,” I say.

“Doesn't matter,” he says. He gestures us inside, in case we didn't get the idea. “Everybody's inside.”

The other two, on the porch, just smile. Young blonde women. The welcome wagon. They do a good job.

“This is weird,” Sireen says into my ear. She has a grip on my elbow. A good one. I turn, but she's wearing her little smile.

“So what did you decide?” I say back.

“What?”

“Underwear.”

She squeezes harder, shows me her teeth. It's an expression with more than one meaning.

There is only lawn furniture inside the house—folding chairs and tables with retractable legs. People carry drinks in plastic
cups and mason jars. Cigarettes. Tank-top shoulders, and tattooed elbows, and leggings beneath short skirts. They lean against walls and create cross-legged circles on the carpet to share ashtrays and mobile phones, into which they jack several sets of chimping goggles—glasses, depending—through pocket-sized adapters. There are more people wearing chimping equipment than not, and the LEDs glow differently for each of them. Some are simply wearing a pair, no doubt, without chimping anything—some are fucked out on some poor bastard's index. Perhaps each other's.

I follow the front-door man through whitepaint hallways. He holds Dimitri's beer over his head as if carrying a torch. An oriflamme. Sireen has her hand on my belt now, behind me, which causes train motions between us, back and forth, as I start and stop through the crowd.