Free Chimpanzee by Darin Bradley Page B

Even—especially—here.
    â€œI like all of them,” she says.
    This is not my home—not our bedroom, with its histories and identities and roles. Its failing duties. This house is what I am giving. What I can get. The duty of the contemporary male, who really shouldn’t want to provide. It’s antiquated. So he gives himself away instead, securing futures. When my father was my age, he spent afternoons in the garage, routing trim or leveling bookshelves. He cut pipe for leaky faucets and showed me how to hold knives. He would do these things on weekends, or after work, when pocketed time made simple crafts meaningful.
    I do not own power tools.
    I pull Sireen’s dress up over her hips. They are alluvial—polished stone in the room-light, dressed with cotton and lace. The shelves of her ribcage open like vents when she lifts her arms.
    â€œI like anything you want,” I say.
    I mean it.

    There is empty money in this place—the utilities still function because it must appeal to people like us, even empty, if it is to sell. No one buys a hot house, a stale fridge—a dry toilet. We leave the lights off so no one knows we’re here.
    The water is hot, thanks to the active gas line and the tankless water heater, which saves the average homeowner a great deal of money, given a long enough timeline. I learned this fromour guide book. This shower is lined with Travertine tile, and it is not enclosed. One wall remains open because the rain-flow showerhead, with digital temperature control, does not spray in a wide enough cone to dampen the floor. The shower is large enough that condensation doesn’t gather on the telescopic shaving mirror.
    Beneath that water, that heat. I am. Some Tibetan meditation on some alpine bluff. A waterfall as God—enlightenment is the pressure of falling things—water, peace, gravity. You try to think of nothing, be nothing, reduce the complications of yourself to something primal. Something that sleeps and fucks, looks askance at natural threats without worrying. No one has a Ph.D. in the shower. No one has sex like a genius.
    No one lives in this house.

    â€œAre we doing the right thing?” Sireen says.
    â€œYes,” I say. “All we can do is stay smart. Be smarter than the situation.”
    â€œIt wasn’t supposed to go like this,” she says.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œLike this.”
    That makes me smile. An old smile. One that belonged to a graduate student in a bar. Angry and loud—opinions about all things. About theory, my director, women. I am the collected lineage of my fathers—the bloodline. The brightest star. My grandfather was a plumber. One of them. The other sold mattresses and grew tomatoes. One of our ancestors fought in the Revolutionary War. I am the brilliant fluid in my mother’s belly—the stars and sine waves of her ambitions, first dates, girlhood dolls. What she expected of a son like me.
    I am Sireen’s childhood dream—the husband she awaited.
    â€œWe don’t have to do this,” she says.
    I shouldn’t have left her alone in this room, where I couldn’t be touched. Laughed with among friends around cheap drinks, sharing ignorance, even that first night in her apartment.
    I percuss a finger along the knobs of her spine. Which is absurd. No one owns a spine. An elbow. Feelings. There is no owner inthe mind—no extra-planar ghost steering identity from a magic realm.
    Sireen is her spine. I am my drumming finger. Selfhood is just the brain behaving, like running is just legs moving.
    But she is my wife. I feel it, from forehead to groin. It’s important to remember that I love her. I have to. There is so much to lose to Cynthia’s machines. So much of me tied up in how I became so, with Sireen, studying. The collateral damage is our history—why, for example, I love her at all.
    â€œYes,” I say, “we should do this. It’ll be