Chimpanzee (39 page)

I make it out because I am good at walking downtown. I know which blocks are the most vacant. I know whom to talk to. I know which times of day are safe for spending an hour in Sentinel Park, in the heart of downtown, doing nothing but being a guy with a coffee sitting in a park. It's my new skill set.

I can't see the river yet—our hillside. I try to text Dimitri, but I don't have his number memorized. It's in my phone. This one belongs to Renewal.

I run along the footbridge, alongside the pavement that spans the river. Cars have stopped in the road, caught by their own headlights, by what they're seeing in the darkness ahead. What they're hearing on those radios. Reading on those phones. My kids in the park, learning how to make people think. And Rosie's big deal. His workers, gone chimpanzee. Which means what it means. Now.

The city is on fire. There are pillars of it in all directions. People run around me, in both directions. No one is quite sure which way is best. Where they should be.

I pull my chimping glasses out of my pocket and jack them into my phone. I have to stop running to do this, and the crush
of running strangers leans me against the rail. I can finally see the warehouses from here, my hillside, but that's it—not as close as it looks. I get the glasses on, the connection active in the phone. Now, when I look, I notice how many of these runners are wearing glasses of their own. I think about how many were wearing them downtown, chimping their way through whatever mindset it takes to revolt. To execute wardens and crush riot police with the mass of your own numbers. To own space by being. Like light.

Come on. Where are you?

She finds me.

“Ben,” she says. She sounds nervous.

I'm running again. I choose a sim quickly.
PANIC
. Lowest difficulty setting.

“Where are you?” she says.

“I'm safe,” I say. “That was Rosie's deal. He's in with the chimpanzees. All of Renewal is, it seems.”

She is quiet, and the sounds of my slapping feet divide the seconds between us.

“Who did it?” I say. “Who brokered that deal?”

“They're burning houses,” she says.

“Among other things,” I say.

“You should go home. Your wife will need you.”

“Zoe wasn't doing this on her own,” I say. “Not
all this
.”

I have to stop. I can't run and talk like this.

“There is a student in a chimpanzee mask on the local news,” she says.

“Why?”

“He says they're burning to create meaningful space.”

“What does that mean?”

“You tell me.”

I can see ahead now. My field of vision is no longer shocked by each footfall, each panicked slap. I'm taking deep breaths, fighting this simulation. The idea is
not
to panic.

“He's asking the reporter what she thinks empty buildings mean,” she says. “He keeps bringing up ‘context.'”

I lean over. Plant my hands on my knees.

“The National Guard is mobilizing,” she says. “The Marines.”

The simulation moves shadows and bright corners through my field of vision. Things to make me jump.

“But chimpanzee isn't fucking real,” I say. “It never was.”

“Are you sure?” she says. “Your friend has found them.”

“Who?”

“Dimitri. His text record indicates he found your students downtown. He's trying to find you.”

“Jesus,” I say.

The interface menus brighten in the lower range of my vision. There is a new simulation available. Its bandwidth is increasing so rapidly that the display isn't even numbers. It's just blurred symbols, like hieroglyphs, animated as they roll over and advance higher up whatever archaic scale. Whatever unknowable pace. It's popular.

REVOLUTION
, it's called.

There are workers advancing behind me, from downtown. They collect people, running from their cars. Running downtown. Climbing up from the river bottom. Out of the woods. The workers put them in place and show them where to go. There will be no one to keep the peace, put out the fires, protect the common good. Without Renewal, nothing.

“Do you have the simulation they want?” I say. “The one that's . . . me?”

“Several people have that simulation,” she says. “I'm one of them.”

“How's it working out?” I say. I walk.

“Just fine,” she says. “I know where you're going, what you'll do.”

“How's that?” I say.

“I'm running your simulation, and I can already see myself doing things. Thinking ahead.”

Downtown, where they don't want me—to protect me from myself—Dimitri and the students will bleed. Burn. Experience broken noses and suppressive fire. They will take rifle butts to the head. They will be detained and interrogated. Exposed to coercive electricity, harassment, molestation. They will be disappeared, dreaming of community gardens and underground currency. Of circular discussions and a real use for education. They will wait for me to finish what I started. To share the conclusion I was never going to be able to provide: the rifle butts and projectiles in the
instants before they hit, when they merely share electrons with those parts of us at the outer reaches of physical space. The sense of being. The reality that vicious metal will soon occupy the brain-spaces where all of this has taken place. For each of us who played along. Did as they were told. Or forced. Or taught.

And across the river, Sireen waits in our house—an unsmoking safe place, bright over the water. The centrality of all things. My life and being. She waits to repair me. She will give me back what Cynthia stole. A bit at a time. The female of the species. And we will make children and mourn parents and fill that house with an entire life on high. Through our gleaming windows, this city will burn forever. Making room for something better.

People run. Chimping themselves through the revolution. Guiding the migration. Watching things burn. In fashions that do not induce panic, since we know how firefighters and riot police organize themselves—their prisoners and fires. We have plenty of their indices to chimp.

I think about the Qualla Boundary. About piled leaves and trail heads and the people who've intruded on mine and Sireen's time. What we were supposed to do and be. How it was all supposed to go. Why we wander woods and forests and antique sales in small towns. Why we feel the need to get out of town and ourselves. I think about Dimitri, wearing cologne to a riot. Ironed cuffs. I think of him losing that fight in the woods. Everything he did to help.

I remember something, and it makes my head hurt. I don't even notice this
PANIC
sim anymore. It just isn't inappropriate to the situation. The collective state of things. It fits right in.

“I offered once,” she says “to tell you who I am.”

“I know who you are,” I say.

“Then what's it going to be?”

I know where I need to be. I start moving, in that direction I should. The light and color and shape of it, that direction, that future, that me that does not yet exist. Like the past I don't have, now.

Like a disguise. A chimpanzee. That either did or didn't mean anything at all.

I didn't even know. Or I knew.

I remember something, and it makes my head hurt. That we aren't in charge. That nothing is so complicated, so vast and important, as we would like it to be. Not once it's over, or repossessed, or burned to the ground.

“What's it going to be?”

I watch things burn. The world in Sireen's image—everything she did. For me. It's important to remember that I love my wife. Our lives together.

I know where I need to be.

I keep going. Running is just legs moving.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

       
“What reasonable man would like to be a city of demons, who behave as if they were at home, speak in many tongues, and who, not satisfied with stealing his lips or hand, work at changing his destiny for their convenience?”

—Czeslaw Milosz, “Ars Poetica?”

B
Y THE TIME
C
HIMPANZEE
FINALLY LET ME GO, ITS EXECUTION
had spanned several chapters in my life—it followed me back and forth across the country, through several jobs, and into an entirely new sense of self. Which won't come as a surprise. Without help, though, it never would have found the page. My sincerest appreciation to my agent, Kris O'Higgins, and my editor, Mark Teppo. Endless thanks to my initial readers, who followed me all the way down the rabbit hole—Srđjan Smajić, Berrien Henderson, Roger Sneed, Trey Edgington, George Neal, Ashley Scott, and Cody Robinson. And for production assistance, translations, and expert opinions, I'm indebted to Aaron Leis, Laura Thomason, Daniel Boudreault, and, as ever, my wife, Rima Abunasser.

Darin holds a B.A., an M.A., and a Ph.D. in English Literature and Theory. He has taught courses on writing and literature at several universities and has served in a variety of editorial capacities at a number of independent presses and journals. He lives in Texas with his wife, where he dreams of empty places.
Chimpanzee
is his second novel.

Also by Darin Bradley

Noise

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Chimpanzee is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author's imagination or are used in an absolutely fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons—living or dead—is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2014 Darin Bradley

All rights reserved, which means that no portion of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is U014, and it has an ISBN of 978-1-63023-018-0.

This book was published by Underland Press, an imprint of Resurrection House (Puyallup, WA).

Do not run in straight lines.

Edited by Mark Teppo

Cover Design by Jennifer Tough

Book Design by Aaron Leis

Copy Edit by Shannon Page

First Hardback Underland Press Edition: September 2014.

www.resurrectionhouse.com