Chimpanzee (8 page)

They are not understanding what I am saying. They are squinting into the overcast glow, leaning forward or backward on their cement slabs. Trying to be comfortable.

“Think of it like this,” I say: “each of us understands
understanding
. We know what it is to read or listen or watch and
get
the message, but we don't know—can't know—how this experience goes for others. It's phenomenology.”

No response. Like reptiles, out for the light and the heat. Only accidentally in class. They find themselves here—in any classroom—because it just happened. Not for a good reason.

“So, when you speak or write or perform,” I say, “you construct your message for
yourself
.”

One of them is not leaning. She sits upright, in that way, that posture that somehow girls learn. Sireen sits the same way. I barely notice the others around this girl—fallen pillars on their amphitheater slabs. She raises a caryatid arm, dreadlocks like fingers of blonde stone across her shoulders. It is sculptural hair, a doll's hair—the best stone carvers can do.

“Yes?” I say.

“But others respond to what we say,” she says. “What is the difference between actually communicating with someone and only imagining yourself doing it?”

“What is your name?”

“Zoe.”

Zoe is in her early twenties. She wears oversized sunglasses, distressed leggings, and expensive shoes. Likely, she's a trustafarian, living in one of these condos downtown. Pretending in that way that goes well beyond simply simulating poverty. Because for whatever fucking reason, destitution is fashionable.

“Look, Zoe: you create your message to make sense for the audience—really, the message creates itself, and ‘you' have nothing to do with it, but never mind.”

She blinks her sculptural eyelids. Slowly, like erosion.

“The audience that you imagine, the audience's
understanding
that you imagine, is based on your own. It's based on your previous experiences. You can never experience your audience's minds, so you're always communicating with yourself.”

“So there is no difference?”

“Not really.”

“You said we have to make the audience pay attention,” she says.

“Everything begins that way.”

“Well.” She crosses her arms. Her bra is darker than her shirt, which is not something I should notice. “How does imagining ourselves make others pay attention?”

“Are you paying attention?” I say.

I watch Zoe file out with the others, back up the steps, into the real world. She has moved beyond view when I hear a motorcycle engine start.

One of the other students approaches me, at the bottom.

“Dr. Cade?” he says.

“Yes?”

“Could you spare a dollar?”

Cynthia is behind me. I am in her office, reclining on her therapeutic sofa, which doubles as a medical device. I lie here, field dressed by the sofa's built-in diagnostic wires. It listens to my heartbeat. It measures my respiration. It touches my brow delicately with sanitary adhesion-pad fingertips. It gives me what I need through a polyvinyl umbilicus inserted into my wrist. I see what I'm supposed to—which seems to be this room, unaffected—through the sofa's elastic goggles.

Change blindness. She will make sure I don't see what I'm not supposed to see.

Cynthia is nothing but a warm voice in the darkness. The sedative she has given me through the sofa creates sensations of wave motion. I am tidal, and only later will I experience the motion sickness that repossession therapy causes.

“Do you want me to think?” I say. “Should I try to . . . summon ideas?”

“No, Ben.”

I can hear the smile in her voice. The patience. She's a psychiatrist—I wonder how much student debt she carries. How much she's paid for this.

“Why don't you tell me a story,” she says. “About graduate school. Something you enjoyed.”

“If I tell you this story, will I lose it?”

“Parts of it. It might feel like someone else's story. As if you can't remember if you experienced it or heard about it.”

I don't believe her. Memory is not an act of recall, it is an act of creation. We create ourselves, every moment, in our own image.

But it doesn't matter.

“All right,” I say. “The most difficult course I took, during my doctoral program, was simply called ‘Syntax.' It was taught by the director of my program. He was a theoretical syntactician, a psycholinguist. One of those who developed the ideas behind the indexing technology.”

“He sounds brilliant,” Cynthia says.

“Syntax was exactly what it sounds like—a survey of models for explaining how language can mean anything, how its mathematics transcend vocal and aural abstraction and
move
, within the very materials of our brains.

“But you must understand,” I say, “my director is a very gregarious person. He's a great fan of poetry, of people, of anything that means anything to anyone. He's funny.”

I can hear Cynthia smile across the wine-dark sea. The sofa cushions deflate ever so slightly beneath me.

I am sinking.

“I was near the top of my class—there had been nothing he had introduced that I didn't, after some effort, finally understand.

“But eventually, there was. One of my classmates asked my director to explain the concepts behind his formative theory of syntax. So, he did. He taught it slowly—he wrote everything on the chalkboard.”

“A chalkboard?”

“He preferred them.”

“Go on.”

“With each new piece of his masterwork, he would turn, he would watch. He checked to make sure that we were following along. One by one, fewer and fewer of us were able to follow him. Fewer of us were able to associate ideas the way he did. And as he went further, as he tried to reveal the deep structures of this theory, this theory that explains our most basic, our most primary of abstractions—language itself—he spoke less to us and more to himself. He stopped checking to see if we were following along. I remember looking around at my classmates and watching them, like divers too long under the water. I could see when they could no longer see.

“My director filled the chalkboard with linguistic equations. He was sweating as he worked, and there were only two or three
of us who were still following. Who still deserved to be his students.”

“Go on.”

“He had nearly filled the chalkboard, but he wasn't finished, so he picked up another piece of chalk and began finishing his equation by writing on the brick wall beside the board, clutching the chalk like a charred stick, like he was cave painting. He wrote with both hands at the same time. It was beautiful.”

“Go on.”

“Then I felt pressure on my eyelids, like staring at a strobe light. I looked at his mosaic, at everything he'd written. I looked at my notes. They were nonsense. I had no idea how he'd gotten from the beginning to the end. I was lost, and so were the other two students—the last two. I knew, then, for the first time, that I simply wasn't smart enough. I felt calm. For the first time all semester.

“It felt much the way I feel now.”

“Why do you think that is?”

I think about the truth.

“I don't fucking know.”

“Do you feel different?” Sireen says.

“I feel hung over.”

“What happened?”

“I don't really remember.”

I finished vomiting hours ago. We are lying in bed, beneath only a sheet. Because it's hot. Sireen has it pulled down to her hips, and I watch how the moon's blue light makes her skin seem violet, her breasts wine-dark.

We are nothing but our entire lives here. I still feel calm—an aftereffect of the chemicals and sedatives Cynthia administered earlier. I think of Sireen's skin in the sunlight, in the woods, and I wish we could build our house there. Around a tree, like Odysseus.

She touches my neck, and I concentrate. This is how I contribute now. How I build a better life, family, place to be. Trading myself for our good.

It's important to remember that I love her.

                    
I'd made a friend.

                    
Ben, he said, finally. The bar was crowded when I arrived. There were pictures on the walls of the campus architecture. Which was looming just outside.

                    
He was another taciturn alcoholic. From my program, studying poetry. He knew Sireen, which darkened him. He had written poetry about how she didn't love him and why this was the same thing as something more meaningful, like science.

                    
Meet Sireen, he said.

She rolls over beside me. Brings those breasts against my ribcage. Divots her chin into my shoulder.

“I read the doctor's literature,” she says. Quiet. Straight into my skin. “About collateral memory damage.”

We met when she was drunk and beautiful. Arms and legs in unsteady arcs.

“To anything that pertains,” I say.

                    
Ben, Sireen said, extending a hand languidly from her seat. Sit down. She still had an accent then.

                    
My friend put Sireen's hand in mine, to shake, because she was too drunk to coordinate it herself. He said, She's another one from the math group—

                    
Non-positively curved geometry, Sireen said.

                    
One of Sireen's neighbors, a woman, leaned into her. You look positively curved to me, darling! They laughed.

                    
Can I buy you a drink? I said.

                    
You know, Sireen said, I can predict your future with statistical theory. Her eyes widened, as if she'd impressed herself.