Chimpanzee (7 page)

There are some things I can't explain. Sireen has her own Ph.D., has written her own papers, is (in many ways) smarter than I am.

Yet, when we go somewhere, I drive. We divide our household duties along mythic lines. Other people, other cultures, once created gods to keep household identity straight. They projected the hearth, the home, and killing other people into the stars. Into the hills. Into anyplace strange enough to be something else.

We still know those ancient rites. I mow the yard. Clean the dishes. Handle things that involve manual tools, like screwdrivers, or bow saws, or kits for fitting gas caps with protective locks. She uses her hands, kneading flat bread or pizza dough. Tucks her fingers between folds of softened fabric. Puts things in old wooden drawers.

When we leave town, like now, we no longer go to spend money. We aren't hunting for antiques, or exploring new restaurants, or drinking familiar beers in strange pubs. Now, when we leave, it's simply to walk someplace new. To hike new trees—any trees at all. It's cheap.

We're driving west, crossing a river into what remains of the Qualla Boundary, the Cherokee land trust, where we will hike upon earth with its own history.

The highway is litter-free.

“Did Dimitri tell you about his article?” Sireen says.

I take the opportunity to glance at her bronzed knee, where it escapes her cargo shorts. She almost looks like one of them, where
we're going, those Cherokee. The sun is in her eyes while I watch what the car's wave motions do to her body. We dip and lift differently, sitting a foot apart, and it draws the eye.

“What?”

She looks at me, turning that sun my direction. “At the bar?”

“Which article?”

“He had another one accepted.”

“Jesus. That's, what? This year?”

“Three. He said he might buy you a drink, to celebrate.”

“Right.”

She sees a house alongside a lake as we skirt a roadway levy. These days, we see houses. We construct worlds based on how our distributed neural networks source “need.” A house has become primary. Abstractly, it thinks us, and we have become territorial. We protect Sireen's credit rating like our young, for it is the only one we have.

I look across her cheekbones, the gleam of everything on her skin. But I don't see that house. She's smiling. Always. Even when she isn't.

                    
Why are you smiling? I said. I had a hand up over my eyes, just so I could see her doing it against the sun. There were tiny, flesh-toned opals of sweat on her lip. On mine, too, where they didn't feel like opals.

                    
I'm not, she said.

                    
But she was. She always was. Sometimes even when she was sleeping.

                    
You're crazy, I said. It's fucking hot. It was a booster sale, for her graduate student association. Raising money for some new kind of something the university wouldn't pay for. Even back then.

                    
But it's working, she said. The university should have just paid for it, instead of watching me help Sireen sell second-hand books in an overflow parking lot. Her friends stood around other tables, doing their own sweating for the departmental good.

                    
We'd put up flyers. Summer sessions were a tough time to get people's attention on campus.

                    
She kissed me. Connecting sweat and heatflesh. I wiped my lip unconsciously, afterward, and she traced a finger across my cheekbone, like wiping a tear.

                    
I faked a smile, just to keep up.

There are signs when you get close to the Boundary that say “Welcome.” But that's not what they're trying to say.

Most of the tourist shops along the main avenue have closed. The casino still operates, but we haven't gone. Primarily because you can't drink in there. But plenty of other people go. It still does good business.

We pass young men in parking lots, day laboring in their own city. Standing, smoking. There are more signs, more posters and handbills, printed in the tribe's native language than there used to be. The dances and outdoor productions and traditional games don't attract crowds anymore. The Tribal Council used to organize such things, to correct the discourse regarding tribal identity. While turning a small profit.

The churches still operate. The schools are still open. Smooth-skinned, shirtless boys, white and Indian, play footbag in the yard, basketball on the blacktop. Girls gather in groups, to legislate how things are going. How to present themselves. How to get away with what needs doing. Some smoke in clandestine pockets, but no one cares, least of all the teachers, who are inside, out of the heat, doing anything else.

People wander around the town—the jobless, like a horde. Later, they will cook frozen Renewal Welfare-issued lasagnas, or meals-in-a-box, or local bear meat—still herbed all these traditional years with sumac. They will find things to do, primarily in small groups, the same way we do, back in our town. They will talk about what they haven't found yet—work, hope: a way to share the Depression—which is not what Sireen and I do because it would be a one-sided conversation.

Ours is the only car in the small, graveled lot at the trail head when we get there. You're supposed to put $5 in the padlocked
entry-fee box. The money goes toward keeping up the trail, but there's no one here to check.

We hold hands as we walk between basswoods and pitch pines and black walnut trees. We walk among so many nameless things. It's cheap, hiking. And it brings us together. A pursuit we've loved since grad school, when we had even less money than we do now.

“I think I need something,” I say.

“Like what?” Sireen says, looking elsewhere. You never look at each other when you're hiking. There's too much to see. Animal awareness. You talk into the distance.

“To do. Other than therapy and Renewal.”

“That's a good idea.”

I look anyway—I look at her legs, at the camber of her shins and the just-visible veins behind her knees. I can see scars, like granite chips, on the bulbs of her ankles, where, at some point, she has cut herself shaving.

“What would you do?” she says.

“I don't know. Volunteer.”

“You should,” she says. There is a swing to our arms now. Our handclasp is a fulcrum, dappled by the sunlight through green things. Her ponytail brushes the backs of her shoulders with the same swing, and I wish it could come far enough—just enough—to touch my shoulders, too. A touch she doesn't even control. A natural phenomenon.

“Maybe volunteer teaching. Writing and such,” I say.

“Teach who?”

“Whoever. The public.”

Her smile becomes difficult. “What will they do with a writing class? They don't have jobs.”

She doesn't resist when I lead us off the trail, up a confetti slope, where last fall's dead leaves still pile the earth.

“It's not about them,” I say.

She watches the ground now. “I'm sorry. It's a good idea, Ben.”

This is it. Light and air and how shoulders look, outside. The flush on her skin is everything. It's important to remember that I love my wife. Our lives here. It's important to remember that we are not in charge.

CHAPTER FIVE

T
ECHNICALLY
, “
VISUAL
”
RHETORIC COUNTED
. I
T WAS PART
of the curriculum—something worth teaching, during introductions to rhetoric and composition because it communicated the principles of presentation and design. There are visual sciences behind this. The eye moves to things in threes. You're not supposed to use positive and negative spaces in halves. You're supposed to carve your space according to the golden mean, a spiral, mapping the image, page, whatever with the interstices of classical aesthetics. Points of maximum visual strike. It's the principle behind constellations.

I didn't teach any of them that this parallels principles of consciousness like motivated perception, revisionist memory, semantic priming. Because they wouldn't get it anyway.

But the artists are wrong. The eye
is
drawn to halves. To symmetry. When we wandered plains and savannahs and scrub-bushed basins, we learned to look first at things that appeared the same on both sides of a vertical axis. Because that's exactly how it looked when something larger, something hungrier was giving you
the
look. An eye per side, a nostril, an ear.

Like I said, everything begins by making the audience pay attention. Giving them attention is giving them awareness. Being. Life itself.

Designing an advertisement is a good example.

No one attends concerts advertised only in delicate, serif fonts. Unless the text is blocked and used as an element of design itself. No one attends debates, votes for presidents, or stops motor vehicles.

No one attends free lectures on university-level introduction to rhetoric and composition, in Sentinel Park, Tuesday afternoon—all welcome.

So I used a stencil of a chimpanzee, from an online database, and placed my ad in
The Mountainist
. Small-block Arial in the bottom left third of the page. Something stimulating—popular. Revolutionary.

“Everything begins by making your audience pay attention,” I say.

There are eleven of them, here in Sentinel Park, listening. During the last few days, while Sireen and I waited for the first day of class, she maintained delicate interest in the idea. She asked questions and offered suggestions. She brought home reams of paper and notepads and red pens from her department's supply closet—none of which, we knew, I would use. We both knew there was no point to this.

Nearby, a solitary Renewal worker sweeps the concrete. I don't see his warden anywhere.

“Communication is not a social endeavor,” I say. “When you speak—or write—to an audience, you project yourself. You become both subject and object because you must
extend
yourself into a position of understanding what you are saying.”