Chimpanzee (35 page)

“What are they chimping?” I say to our guide. “The groups.”

He glances sideways, bringing the caravan to a minute halt. “Home ownership,” he says.

The fuck?

We move on.

David comes alongside, in the human shuffle, his hands full of cans of beer. I'm struck by how quiet everyone is. These are not loud people.

“Hi, Dr. Cade,” he says, orbiting away, into the crowd.

I just smile.

Sireen makes a point of looking elsewhere.

Our leader changes directions. Dimitri isn't behind Sireen anymore. He blends in well. Is better at this than I am.

“Who bought the house?” I say to our guide.

“You're Dr. Cade?” he says.

“Yes.”

“And you don't know?”

“No.”

He walks us into the back yard and settles the beer on an overturned cardboard box. There are fewer people out here, gathered in small groups. Some are trying to light a trio of leaning tiki torches.

“Come on, man,” he says. It's funny to him. “Nobody bought the house.”

When he walks away, Sireen comes out from behind me. “What's going on? Are these your students?”

“I'm not sure. Some of them, I guess.” I extract two beers from Dimitri's box. I hand her one with my best party motion.

Another student moves across the lawn. I recognize this one. He has the face of a waiter or a barista.

“Hi, Dr. Cade.”

“Hi.”

He smiles at Sireen. “Would you like cigarettes?”

She is stopped by the strangeness. Being offered plural. It cracks her suspicion, and she gives him an expression like seeing one's student in public—pretending against the oddness of being outside classroom authority. Of being equal and normal together. It forces difficult smiles.

“Sure, thank you,” she says. Tosses her hair over her shoulder.

He hands her a repurposed pack. A full one.

“Good to see you again, Dr. Cade,” he says.

I let him get away with it.
Dr.
Cade.

“Strange kid,” Sireen says when he's gone.

“Come on, let's smoke.”

We party like this. Avoiding everyone together. It's better than staying at home. We try to look busy with ourselves.

“I have to pee,” Sireen says.

“Let's go.”

Inside, finding a bathroom is not difficult. You can relate to all houses by their bathrooms. Their locations and specific designs against discomfort. The ways they mask the inconvenience of the entire domestic endeavor.

Sireen disappears inside one.

Dimitri is behind me again. “Come look at this,” he says. He is carrying a can of beer that he did not bring to this party.

I follow him through the kitchen. A few people give us a look and then move away as we approach the door to the garage.

He turns on the light when we're inside.

It's empty except for the gas cans. Twenty of them. I can tell by tapping one with my foot that it is full. I wonder how long they've been collecting it. Through how many shortages?

“Some party,” he says.

“What the hell?” I say.

“I think they're going to burn it.”

They're up to something—the clandestineness and simplicity of a plan. Good plans aren't complicated or affected. The ones anyone ever really pulls off, anyway.

There are reasons to be here, for each of these students. There are reasons for them to have me here. They wanted me to see a bunch of gas cans in an empty garage, in a house none of them have actually bought. This is more than chimpanzees and stencils on city walls, or lectures in public parks. This is something they're doing—have probably been working toward for a while. A term project, under other circumstances.

I wonder if I assigned it.

“We probably ought to go,” I say.

“You think?” Dimitri says. He sounds genuinely uncertain. In here, our voices echo. They sound metallic, as if we're speaking through chimping software.

The door opens behind us, and Zoe steps through. She has cut the dreadlocks out of her hair. It's short now, and it reveals the points and angles of her skull, how much forehead she's got to work with.

She wears dark makeup around her eyes, like Sireen.

“Hi,” she says.

“Some party,” I say.

With her hands in her pockets, she looks just like a girl, standing there. Nothing more.

She looks at Dimitri. “You found the gas.”

“What's going on?” he says.

She looks at me. Raises an eyebrow.

“I have no idea,” I say.

She stares at Dimitri. She's got something on him here. She doesn't look like someone trapped, caught. Like a girl with forced hands. I look at Dimitri, too—like the way people are attracted, in museums, to things others are already looking at.

“Leah is one of my students,” he says.

Zoe does not look bothered by this revelation. She came out here to fuck him on this. She's making a move.

What can I say?
I
am her teacher.
We
have that dynamic. It has defined us—its borders and near-misses. What does it mean that she studies under him, too?

“Sociology?” I say.

“Poverty studies,” she says.

I think about the warehouses, about those generators and the repurposed furniture and the unlikelihood of not being found there, when the cops were looking.

“It was a poverty simulation?” I say. “Are you fucking kidding me?”

I give Dimitri a look now. “You set it up. The arts district.”

“It was part of the research for the grant,” he says. “How to get at those
SHARES
.”

I turn to Zoe. “What does that make you? An informant?”

She looks back. “A college student.”

“You know the cops are after her,” I say to Dimitri. “Which means you're fucking next.”

“Leah?” he says. To her. He remembers, after, that I'm the one who told him. “No,” he says to me, “I didn't know.”

“They don't stay in your buildings anymore,” I say. “They're on the lam.” It makes me laugh.

He hasn't taken his eyes off her. “Sorry I didn't tell you,” he says to me. “They were just doing double-duty—keeping an eye on you. A single-blind for my study. It wouldn't have worked if I did it myself.”

“I don't really care, Dimitri.”

“It's all there,” he says. He gives me a hopeful look. “In the study—everything you did. It's preserved. All of it. You can have it all back.”

“What? How?”

“They were just making copies, Dr. Cade,” Zoe says.

“They?”

“Your wife, too.”

“Copies of what?”

Sireen sees Zoe before we meet her in the hallway. She looks immediately at me. I don't introduce them when we come together in the kitchen. Sireen does not look angry or embarrassed. She looks happy to see Zoe. Happier than she was drinking beer on the back porch.

“You, too?” I say. “What were you doing?”

She ignores me and puts a hand on Zoe's shoulder. “Est-ce qu'il est prêt?” she says.

Zoe cuts a glance at me. “Ce n'est pas ici.”

“You speak French?” I say to Zoe.

She blinks at me. Her smile looks like Sireen's. “Didn't you study any languages in college, Dr. Cade?”

“Leah's helping me with a project,” Sireen says. She keeps her eyes on Zoe.

I can't tell what bothers me about this. I can't find the deception, from each of them. I'm not sure I didn't know.

“Wait,” I say. “What kind of project?”

“Ça commence à être sérieux,” Sireen tells Zoe.

For a minute, Zoe gives Sireen her full attention. She works this expression, this idea, like she's about to ask an embarrassing question.

“J'aurais peut-être besoin de l'aide,” Zoe says. Quietly.

Sireen pulls her into an embrace. She quiets her. A hand on Zoe's shorn head. Small words in her earlobe.

I turn to Dimitri: “The fuck?”

He claps me on the shoulder. “I helped,” he says. “I gave Sireen Leah's name. She's been helping.”

“With what?”

“Keeping you here, man,” he says. “Up among the living. We're bringing you back.”

“You're not making any sense,” I say.

Sireen releases Zoe. Sireen is taller, so she has to dip her chin to hold Zoe's gaze when she lifts her eyes, when she arches her brows to show Zoe whatever she's showing her. An expression of her own. A thing between women in a crowded party in a strange house beside a garage full of gasoline.

“Sure I am,” he says.

“Leah's getting your indices back,” Sireen tells me.

“From who?” I ask.

“Jesus, Ben,” Sireen says. That little smile. “Don't be so obtuse.”

“Did you break into the clinic?” I say to Zoe. “Jesus, did you all attack Cynthia?”

I turn to Sireen. “Why didn't you tell me this was going on?”

“Would that have been a good idea?” Sireen says. “Going to repossession therapy with the idea that we're getting it back?”

“We haven't done anything wrong,” Zoe says.

“The fuck you haven't,” I say.

They all stop. It comes together. All three of them. They're waiting. I've got to take it all in somehow. They watched me on my sofa. Pissing myself and convulsing, surrendering the last of myself to Cynthia's program. They told Zoe, and she knew, and the students took care of things. Me. Sireen let me fall apart on my own, so there would be a division, between what was happening to me and what it meant to still be a husband. So they wouldn't be the same. A man. A guy with a dick and a brilliant wife and self-absorption about both.

Sometimes, you aren't in charge.

I give up. I'm only fighting myself. They aren't even playing along.

“What am I going to do with my indices?” I say.

Sireen wraps her fingers around my wrist, in a fashion one uses in situations like these.

“How are your new glasses?” Zoe says.

“You guys want me to chimp myself.”

They stare.

“It'll make me sick,” I say. “You saw.”

“All things in time,” Sireen says.

I don't know about this.

I look at Zoe. “That garage is full of gasoline.”

“Yes,” she says. “And many others like it.”

“If no one bought this house, why are you all here?”

“So the neighbors think it's ours,” she says. “So they don't make a fuss.”