Chimpanzee (16 page)

                    
                                                                                                                -                                    .      '                                                                      .

Sireen points the screen at me, and extends her arm.

“Hello, Ben,
,” Huda says.

I lift a hand and wave. “Hello, Huda.”

                    
She loves you, Huda said. She'll do everything. Just like you.

                    
She lived the civil war, back in Lebanon. Was still steely with it. Still looking at everything like a revolution. Including us.

Sireen says.

                    
Especially us.

Sireen goes over to see her sometimes, a few weeks in the summer. She hasn't mentioned it in a few months.

She ends the call.

“They canceled the class,” I say.

“What?” Sireen says. “Who canceled it?”

She sets down her phone, tucks her legs underneath her on the couch. There is a glass of wine on the floor beneath her. She is still wearing the nylons she worked in today.

“The police.”

“What?” She moves a pile of rosters and homework assignments from one cushion to another. Making room for the conversation. For me.

“They were just looking for one of the students,” I say.

“Are you in trouble?” she says. I can't tell if she's angry or afraid.

“No.”

She looks down at her wine. “Shit. I'm sorry.”

We didn't get the bungalow we liked. One of the other tourists outbid us.

“I'm going for a drink,” I say. “You want one?”

“I can't,” she says. Hefts the papers to demonstrate.

“Okay.”

There is a sign on the door. My neighborhood bar now accepts
SHARES
. That changes things. I walk inside quickly, and I can see through the other door that most of the patrons are on the large patio in the back, drinking and flirting under out-of-season Christmas lights and neon beer signs. They wear layered clothing in casual, ironic ways, despite the heat.

The bartender recognizes me.

“Gin martini,” I say. “Whatever's in your well.”

She turns around.

“And a pair of goggles,” I say.

I start picking
SHARES
out of the stack the committee gave me when Zoe signed me up. Back pay, they called it. For all I was doing for the community as a teacher. I took them—all two hundred. I don't care. I can order a decent drink now.

I walk to a booth. The bartender can bring the drink to me.

I enjoy feeling like I'm in control. I don't know what this sim is, what I'm experiencing. I didn't even bother reading the title from the menu. The goggles' microchip selected it at random from the list of simulations that have been approved and licensed for public use. The subscriber fees for the simulations with restricted licenses, those for use only in private theaters, are too high to pay.

Even if you could pay, and you hacked the appropriate servers, databases—whatever—if you altered the registry for your goggles you'd be arrested if you were caught chimping restricted sims in public places. Disorderly conduct against the common good.

The sim takes the edge off. Things feel a little better. It is making me micromanage my impulses. Choosing, selecting, directing the stream of my own consciousness. At least, that's how it feels. If I had to guess, I'd say that the neuronal processes generating my sense of self are being regrouped in some scalar fashion, higher-order to lower, that creates the illusion of associative control. A feeling of control is just the dump and slosh of communicative neuro-chemicals anyway. I remember that much.

What had kept Zoe from class? She never skipped. And David, going to ground when he saw the cops across the street. I didn't bother noticing who else wasn't in class. Who else knew not to show up. I should have paid attention. I can't figure out if I'm angry or not. If I would have been once.

Emotion is just auto-correction, I tell myself. My self tells me— the sim reclaiming control. It's the brain qualifying whatever experience for proper storage. Having names for emotions, like anger—and figuring out how to create them with goggles made of cheap plastic and electrodes manufactured in plants overseas— those are the consequences of being both a psychological
and
a sociological being. The sim in action. We exist
out there
, beyond ourselves, whether we like it or not. Behavior must be named and moderated by the masses. We feel what the outside world has best taught us to feel. To keep things in line.

The martini helps.

The goggles superimpose a network connection request icon in my field of vision.

No one is sitting particularly near to me; I can talk to myself all I want.

I approve the request.

“You're back,” she says, “Ben.” Her voice, like the first time, is digitally altered.

The last time I chimped, when Sireen and Dimitri and I played “Jim and Carol,” I didn't tell them that Jim, the associative identity that had been fully indexed and processed and offered up to the simulation for the sake of whatever behavioral research his debtors sold him to, and then again to the company manufacturing and distributing consumer-grade goggles and simulations—I hadn't told them that, in love though he was, he was afraid of what would become of him and Carol. He had doubts. I had them for him. We are more than our simulated selves, real or otherwise, but it sure didn't fucking feel that way.