Chimpanzee (6 page)

I am; therefore, I think.

I could help them understand being. All the sturm and drang. Even if we were supposed to be talking about writing. It changed a few lives. Mine, I think. Sometimes.

I laugh at Dimitri. “Why are we drinking the good stuff?”

“Tell me more about the shrink.”

“She gets it,” I say. “I haven't had
that
chance before. I haven't talked, like that, about it. Nobody's followed my theories all the way down the rabbit hole.”

“That's ironic.”

“I know.”

But mostly, I gave them “A”s because they were never supposed to be the point. My education was for
me
. This was my enlightenment, my debt. This would be my philosophy, and fuck anybody else. They could follow along, if they could keep up.

But it's important to remember that I love my wife. I love this place. Our life here.

He looks into his glass.

“What?” I say.

“Nothing.”

“What?”

Mostly, I taught them to communicate. To move beyond grunts and text messages. I taught them the mathematics of comma splices and dangling modifiers and inclusive language. I showed them how to parse an argumentative paragraph, how to be assertive, how to slowly, slowly get a reader to think just the
way they do. How to control disposition, which is what I did to them.

But mostly, there was no place for cognitive theory, for experimental literature or abstract discourse. The university did Sireen a favor, handing me introduction-to-composition classes after they hired her.

“Nothing.” He forces a smile. He's got the face here of his entire country. Sometimes, he still has to ask me what certain words mean. He'd never had a funnel cake until Sireen and I bought him one. A corn dog. Cotton candy. I shoved him down the curly slide, at the state fair, and he nearly broke his ankle. He paid for all three of us to go.

“Drink your bourbon,” he says.

“Why
are
we drinking it?”

Each glass costs as much as a regular tab.

He sees something in it, staring at it, that I don't. It is possible, like now, to occupy a subject position in discourse and be nothing but an object.

“Never mind. Just drink it.”

So I do. And I take another cigarette without asking.

“Chimping looks like good business,” I say. Something else to talk about.

“No doubt,” he says.

By mentioning it, I give him the opportunity to turn around and have a look at the bar, which is not where chimping technically exists. But it is the last place where it existed for us, which makes it an extension of self. We are more than the meat in our heads. Dimitri and I, right now, are this entire bar.

You see?

The first researchers to work with ontogenetic mapping were psycho-linguists. My dissertation director had been one of them, when he was my age. They studied the intersection of language and cognition. Of language and everything. It became possible to index linguistic tendencies among the neurologically disturbed, which made it possible to begin
studying how those tendencies are sourced. Language delineates or creates most “thoughts,” and it implies a constructed world.

These are the things I had to learn, to earn my Ph.D. Perception as creation.
Fiat lux
.

What we—they—eventually learned is that you can parse an entire person by indexing his or her probabilistic lingual deep structures. The existential urges, needs, or intentions “beneath” anything he or she says.

Which is the wrong way to think about it, but still.

It became possible to detect early signs, early psycho-linguistic ontogenetic trajectories. Which meant we learned to avoid and appropriately medicate neurological imbalances. It took a while, and we—they—got better at it. Faster.

We'd cured crazy. Or, at least, indexed it. I was ten years old by the time the technology made it into the public schools. Health workers began ontogenetically indexing us with child-sized goggles. We were allowed to watch cartoons while the software marked our dispositions toward neurological imbalance. Anything over five percent sent us into federally mandated therapy at children's psychiatry clinics. The costs were underwritten by the government, and it saved the healthcare giants a fortune.

I never showed any signs, but some of my friends did. They said it was fun, learning to be normal. Playing games with goggles and electroencephalographic hats.

Really, a self is just a matrix of cognitive associations. Learned behaviors, tastes, opinions. Conditioned fears and culturally imparted memories. A person, like Dimitri, is his bread lines and military service and worthless currency.

And with a complete enough series of progressive cognitive indices, with a more-or-less full ontogenetic trajectory, you had a person. Theoretically, if you could activate this data, you could simulate an entire other person, not just the fucked up obsessions and tics we condition away.

Such licensing rights are in the promissory note. Put there to sell what belongs to the moneylenders—to research institutions, originally.

I watch them chimp at the bar. They wiggle and twitch and have a good old time. Those disturbances, free with purchase.

CHAPTER FOUR

“W
HAT
'
D YOU TEACH?
” R
OSIE SAYS
.

“English,” I say.

He has a copy of a local arts circular rolled up in his fist, like a baton. It's called
The Mountainist
. I read it sometimes at the bar, if I'm alone—gardening, music, local politics. I wouldn't have pegged Rosie as a reader.

He tucks it into one of his drawers and hands me a pair of canvas gloves and a litter picker.

“To foreigners?” he says.

“What?”

“Like, illegals?”

My Renewal suit is heavy, and it sticks to my skin. I can already feel the chafing.

“No. English—writing and literature.”

He crosses his arms, and his chair pops as he reclines. He has satisfied himself.

“You married?” he says.

“Yes.”

“Kids?”

“No.”

He points to the window. Outside, there is a white school bus in the lot—an old kind. Diesel engine, security windows. There is a trailer with a portable toilet affixed to the back bumper.

“See you at 3:00,” he says.

The driver halts the bus ten miles outside of town, along Interstate 26. He is protected from us by security glass and a wire cage.

Our wardens get out of their jump seats. They rode backwards, staring at us. There are twenty workers on this crew, and the wardens gesture us to our feet. The older workers brace themselves on the benches to stand. The young, the belligerent, make a point of rising slowly.

One warden heads out of the bus with his shotgun. The other stands in the aisle.

“You pick one piece of trash at a time,” he says. “Paper, plastic. You find metal or glass, you stop and raise your hand. If we see you with it, that's an extra day on your record.”

They wanded us, back at the dispatch lot, before we entered the bus. They found a pocket knife on one of the men, and he was ushered at gunpoint into Rosie's office.

“You need to piss, you raise your hand. You get tired, raise your hand. Don't squat or kneel unless you're unconscious. You'll get fresh sun block at lunch.”

There is an SUV on the shoulder of the highway. Our bus, which catches up to us every fifteen minutes or so, pulls ahead of the vehicle and stops. There are children in the SUV with their hands against the windows. Staring, learning. Their mother holds a tire iron as we approach. One of the back tires is flat.

Our wardens don't acknowledge the woman, but the bus driver gets out and talks to her. He is a large man, and he moves as slowly as we do.

I skip over a scrap of tin foil in the grass in favor of a plastic drinking bottle. The weight of my litter satchel has become organic, like a tumor or a torn ligament. It pulls at my shoulder steadily, building pain. I am not permitted to switch the satchel to the other side until the wardens blow the whistle to do so.

The driver shouts two names into our crew. We all stop to see. They do as they're told, and the rear warden makes them dump their litter gear before they approach the SUV.

The mother is slender, blonde. The two men, from our crew, are black. The only black men on the crew today. They change her tire while the driver fingers his sidearm.

I find spent shotgun shells in a pile. Metal and plastic. I have to raise my hand.