Chimpanzee (18 page)

There is only one man behind the mini-van now. The trunk canopies him. The interior light now reveals very little. He is on the pavement. His fingers still grasp the overturned box. Its lid is sealed with packing tape. There are more shots, not far away. Screaming.

I feel that pressure behind my eyes. Like the simulation. Those fists upon my spine. The urge, the dominant impulse that the goggles have taught me to resist. To crave. I want to give in. Do what a man should do. I am a pump—fear and light and instinct trapped by the valves in my bloodstream.

“Ben!”

I want to open those valves—to destroy them with some adrenal blast. I want to release the tide and watch it rain for forty days.

“Ben! Please!”

I allow my sense of self to rearrange itself, from higher- to lower-scalar orders. It creates the illusion of control. So I can do what a man does. Despite my immediate fear.

I run. Through the jostling crowd. There are people standing around the victim. Staring. Some at the box of produce. He isn't moving. I dig my fingers into his neck, but I can't tell. His pulse or mine? There's nothing about him doing any of the things that look like living. What are the clues? I can't remember. My pants sponge his blood where my knees touch the pavement. I'm not in control here. My bloodstream is moving things along in pressurized bursts. Clenching and sealing and flowing away. I am only the flotsam of my fluid self.

Other people are touching him now, too. Laying on hands, and palming blood, and being part of the process. None of us are good at it.

Someone grabs the box of produce. He isn't one of us, down here, being together in the blood. He doesn't get very far before I bloodstream him to the ground and face face face against the concrete. I'm only good enough at it. Because it is difficult to grasp his head with so much blood between my fingers.

Sireen's sudden hands are cool on my neck. Hard and deep into my windpipe, and we're halfway back to the car, and I'm
surprised. She makes me set down the dead man's box of produce. I dumbgrabbed it, getting up. Maybe. I don't know. Someone else carries it immediately away.

There is a traffic jam, exiting the parking lot. Sireen drives.

CHAPTER TEN

T
ODAY
, I
HAVE BEEN INSTRUCTED TO WEAR PLAIN CLOTHES
during my Renewal shift. Rosie moved me up in the monitor rotation, but he wouldn't explain why. I'm not sure if he despises me or thinks I'm okay.

He hands me a mobile phone. It is more advanced than the one I own, and it has a serial number stenciled along the back. The artist was careful to avoid the camera lenses.

“You're only responsible for two efficiency observations, since it's your first time,” Rosie says. “Disorderly conduct counts.”

“Where do I have to do this?” I say.

He hands me a printout of some city streets that are within feasible walking distance of downtown—so it won't look strange that I'm on them. One of the streets is zoned commercial.

“Don't tell anyone what you're doing,” he says. “Be discreet when you're ready to send me what you see. Find someplace out of the way.”

I study the map. The header states that I am not allowed to remove it from my dispatcher's office. It contains digital signatures from the Senate Efficiency Committee under the motto that “Efficiency is everyone's responsibility.”

I hand it back to him, and I stand there. He's watching me. He just waves the map away, so I fold it into my pocket.

“I don't want to do this,” I say.

“I know.”

“You know they canceled my class,” I say. “The one I was teaching for free downtown.”

He sucks on the bridge in his teeth.

“Yeah.”

“Was there a monitor in that class?” I say.

“Of course there was.”

The day-by-day calendar on his desk is two weeks out of date. I could report him. He isn't using state resources correctly.

“Jesus, Rosie,” I say. “I was helping people.”

He looks. Outside, someone coughs. Waiting to check in.

“You are one dumb motherfucker,” he says. “You think I had a choice?”

I decide it's better not to ask why the cops are after Zoe.

Being a monitor turns me into a tourist. I walk my own city's streets in search of things to notice, to remember. I look for evidence that I am someplace more interesting, more dangerous, more romantic than my home. I listen for other languages and expressions, so I can be sure this trip was worth it. I take photographs of simple things in foreign circumstances.

This turns us all into strangers. I can't know anyone. Their lives and answers. I have to see them as a monitor because they are threats to themselves.

I did this once in Paris, before, when Sireen and I had a little money, and Central was paying for her ticket so she could give a lecture. I wandered the streets around the Sorbonne, looking for things to look at. Mostly, I smoked cigarettes and tried to hide from the winter air. I tried to get lost, but I just ended up at the Eiffel Tower. Sireen met me there, after her talk, and we climbed the steps in the freezing evening rain.

                    
The lights were large and dispassionate. They strobed, in their thousands, to make the tower glitter for tourists in the distance. I'd forgotten about them. The guidebook said they were not to be missed. A holdover from an installation as old as the new millennium.

                    
Jesus, Sireen said. They're fucking bright. She was doing all the talking. I only knew enough French to buy cigarettes and croissants. And only sort of. They couldn't tell the difference between my
de
and
deux
. The air warmed, close to the lights. I pulled us there, and she squealed. Her teeth were cold when I pressed my lips into her smile. We squinted against the rain and the light.

                    
It's Romantic, she said. Being bright and cold. Really makes you pay attention.

                    
The next day, climbing the stairs from the riverwalk along the bank of the Seine, we became accidentally trapped between protesting students and the police force's shield wall. Sireen nearly caught a billy club to the head, but one of the cops figured us out in time. I jogged us away, past the gathered
gendarmerie
, so helpfully labeled by the stencils on their raincoats, and they weren't interested except in their submachine guns and who was taking pictures of the conflict.

                    
I wanted the students to win.

                    
Where are we going? Sireen said. I dragged her into                  plaza, a little urban hollow of lichened marble and oxidized brass fencing. They built it to commemorate his contributions to        -                            -                , which was just a casual reality over here.

                    
                                                                          , I said.

                    
This is how I loved her.

This block contains mostly apartment buildings. I see chimpanzee stencils on two different walls in two different alleyways. I try to look like I belong, which is what we do in foreign territory.

This apartment is empty. The door handle had a realtor's lock box on it, but both the box and the front door were unlocked. One of
the other tenants saw me walking down the hall. She turned her head quickly because I indicate bad things to her, by not looking away first.

There is nothing in the apartment. Even the doors to some of the cupboards are missing. The light fixtures, the copper tubing under the sink. Its living room windows face the street, so I sit cross-legged in front of one. I place Rosie's phone within reach.

I see only the city. It feels meditative. Almost religious. As if I'm supposed to divine meaning from the patterns of sunlight or the routes of wandering pedestrians. Civic haruspex—learning secrets by looking into our municipal entrails.

There is a mail center across the street, on the bottom floor of the apartment building facing this one. Its neon sign says
OPEN
, but no one moves behind the window. Above it, there is the play of shadow from the pecan trees outgrowing their cleared spaces in the sidewalk concrete. There are stone stringcourses and ornamental water spouts on some floors. There is laundry hanging from small balconies, still in the day.

If I could move through these walls, then this would be easier. This job I don't want. I could move between planes of sheet rock, decaying insulation, fiberglass grit. I could move like a miner, underground, inhaling small things that are too sharp for my lungs, things that glitter in the dark air, as if there is something there. If I could stick my fingers through electrical outlets, I could take photographs of people doing things—using the toilet, or smoking pot, or fomenting revolution. At night, I could dust them with cleaning powders and chemical agents, between chapped night-lips or upon pulsing eyelids. I could correct things, chemically, like repossession in reverse. I could make them see with my fistfuls of black mold and rust. I might hear their evening prayers.

It's hot in here, like a sweat lodge. My feet begin to fall asleep, so I get up to pace. I become my own silence. A quiet mind. There is less of me in this apartment by the moment, and I create what I see. Perception is involved, somehow. I don't remember. It's not seeing things.