Chimpanzee (31 page)

“But the fear of nothingness is hardly selfhood. We know this. Nothingness is so often the goal. A quiet mind. A new pill—a better way of shutting up for a while. All things being equal. A temperature-neutral, safe place—homeostasis. This is what we seek.

“What separates us is that constant speculation about a reality other than this one. In the afternoon, we picture ourselves this evening. What will we eat? Do? Watch? And each possibility comes
modeled—a partition in our own minds that creates, situates, animates the
us
in these not-yet-existent situations. Or in those that have already happened, placing ourselves in the past again. To do it right this time. Say this thing. Kiss that missed person.

“If we are modeling ourselves, states of being based on now, where do the imaginary ‘we' exist? Where do our patterns of routinized logic, our entrained associations, our senses of being and fear exist? They can't exist in this mind, now, because we're talking about a different time, when none of this did, or will, exist. If we exist in these non-realities, anticipating predators and basing the non-existent future on the never-experienced past, are we us? We are another step away from non-being.

“We are all these empty houses—the ones you're studying. We are the homes that existed for other people, even though we cannot prove that. We cannot point to those lives except by referencing artifacts that only exist now. We are extending selfhood from ‘here' to ‘there.' We are the wince when someone else stubs a toe because it is
our
toe, too. We experience this happening to us, in a different place than this one, at the same time. Parallel universes racing infinitely onward, tracking domestic pains and forgettable damage. We are not here, there, fucking that person, not this one. Consciousness doesn't work that way. It likes to change what's come before, to better appreciate this.

“Selfhood is just the brain behaving, like running is legs moving. It's important to remember that ‘we' are not in charge. The mind is not aware of the brain's processes.

“There's no such thing as time. There is no such thing as your home, your marriage, your children. There are only these so-many empty houses.

“We occupy old homes, the dead shells of other owners—their dust and tub-scum and home-odors. Our quiet evenings, and coats of renovation paint, and stillness in the night are not the activities of homes. They are us hiding from the predators in the savannah grass. The twitches and sniffs and moments of fear. The instants when we cease to exist because that must be a genetic possibility. A physical one.

“Homes are extensions of self. Expansions of consciousness. Places that think and hurt and make noise. They do not exist
as whole buildings because no one can keep an entire house in his or her mind at once. Only the rooms that immediately, in fragments, concern your fear of death exist. There are sciences that prove this.

“You can call this solipsism, if it makes you feel better.

“But some people sleep in houses. Eat there. Create new people. The entire Danse Macabre.

“The extended self is the most troubling, for it must exist somewhere, and the mind violates time as it sees fit. The extended self—the liberated, freely roaming—is what separates us. It fears a world without—sells itself what marketing experts would like to. It is what builds empires.

“Don't get excited. It isn't a ‘soul.' It's an operating metaphor that the brain uses to model itself in an inherently psycho-social existence with others of our species. Conspecifics. This is the last theory I mastered before I wrote my dissertation and graduated. It won't be with me, now, when you hear it, because my repossession therapist works in reverse order. What I am doing is against the law.

“Empty houses are like idle hands. The tools of the devil. When I was a child, I would break into them with my friends. We would tear mantel pieces off brick-faced chimneys. We would empty leftover five-gallon buckets of sulfuric acid into pools and hot tubs. We would write obscenities with oven cleaner on carpeted floors. A chemical that would stay—much better than a charcoal stylus and a cave wall. We would burn things.

“When we were caught, we defended our empty houses, told lies about why we were in them, because they were ours. Make a boy responsible for a home, and he becomes a man. Joins the community of other homes. Sleeps, and eats, and posits himself harmlessly elsewhere. Extends himself on sofas and recliners. Knows what it is to exist, a figment of himself, under other circumstances. Better ones.

“Which is the point.

“Breaking into empty homes is not difficult. Especially with assistance.

“But remember, sometimes, a house is just a house. A yard to mow. You build shelves and small things in the garage.”

When I look at them, I see it on their faces. Divers too long underwater. Parsing knowledge like nonsense. I take the flashlight from my guide, and I drop the lecture in the fire. I leave them watching it burn, looking for meaning in the movement of light.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

N
OTHING REALLY HAPPENS ON THE DAY FOLLOWING YOUR
grand design. You simply rest, trying to remember what the big plan was in the first place.

I walked three miles through the dark last night, after I finished—back across the rail bridge and up the hill to my beaming new home. After one mile, I was no longer interested in what I had done. I no longer cared what they made of my lecture, the class, themselves. Brilliance, and power, and meaningful actions are only around for as long as they're around.

Sireen was asleep on the sofa. She had our throw blanket twisted around her legs, her phone in a weak fist. I sat down beside her and watched the muted television, my legs full of those six dark miles. They felt light and infinite. As massless as flesh-pink nebulae, moving oxygen and heavy metals in meaningless patterns that, from far enough away, look like horse heads and crabs and cats' eyes. Toxically beautiful. Massive and throbbing, and heavier than anything I can imagine.

I sat and felt them expand. I became distant with each heartbeat.

This morning, I woke up after Sireen had left for work. My legs were sore. That was all. The day passed, and then there was another one.

The lenses of my chimping glasses are smoked pink, and without a simulation running, they make my living room look like
salmon flesh. I watch the television through them, its red faces and brown-leafed trees—its skies like watercolor violet. Through these lenses. The public access channels were one of the first initiatives of the New Depression. The government bought a block of channels on credit, and it started using them for PSAs, educational programming—dramatic and arcane explanations for why nothing was working. We would watch spokespeople and university professors, in their offices, the backs of their heads bookshelved and out of focus, coaching us through the domestic effort, the unified ring, the very lump of contemporary being. They taught us how to say nothing in so many words, which was the best commentary we could use. The anthem for the New Depression.

It was considered an issue of public safety—making sure everyone had access to the government channels. The rolling losses of service began earlier this month, after we lost a telecommunications satellite. There was no going up for it, the dumb, dark thing. Space itself.

Today is only mine and Sireen's second scheduled loss of service. Two days, then it will be back. One has a civic duty, now, to alert one's neighbors in the event of a crisis, since we won't all be able to see the programs that will let us know.

The last stoppage was fascinating. Something to see. Objects in motion do not tend to stay in motion, not when the FCC pops your IP address into the blotter. The world went error-screen blue in one quick blink, and it looked afterward like the screen was expanding, to swallow the whole room. It's an illusion, caused by staring at the screen-motion for too long. One slides closer to the television, without moving at all. A traveler on one's own couch.

Today, the screen is violet when my service ceases. Because of these glasses. It comes for me: my house, expanding. We've done it, Sireen and I. The plan worked, and now, at the end of the world, I'm left with television light of the incorrect color, as if I magnetized it or dropped it, as if I forgot how to care for massless events.

But black is black, when I turn it off.

                    
                '                                                                              ,                                                                                                                                .                                                                                                                                            ,                                '  .                                      ,              '                    .

                    
    '                        ,                  .                    '                                          .

                    
              '  —              '                  .                          .            '                                                          “            ”  or                                        -      -        .

                    
                                                    ,              .                                      .                      .

                    
                                                        ,                              .                                                    '      “nothing,” I said.          ,          ,                .                        .