Chimpanzee Read Free Page B

yet.”
    â€œBen.”
    â€œFine, Ben.”
    She looks at her file, on her computer pad, which rests like a clipboard on her knees. Her skirt has receded, slowly, and now it’s several inches up her thighs.
    These are things I shouldn’t notice. But I do. I try to think about Sireen.
    â€œYour father suffered from frontotemporal dementia,” she says. Looks at me.
    â€œI don’t want to talk about my father.”
    â€œWorking through longitudinal analyses of progressive indices, like yours, is making great strides in experimental treatments for dementia sufferers,” she says. “Like your father.”
    I don’t say anything. My mom cried when I told her about repossession. She just kept apologizing. Thanking God Dad wasn’t around for it. He didn’t think it was a good idea. The debt. The degrees. The idle study—the hours in libraries. He liked me just the way I was. Used to say it, when he was lucid. Just the way you are, son. Stuck in a timewarp. Warning me against myself over and over like some sentimental fugue.
    â€œWhy don’t we change the subject,” Cynthia says. She makes eye contact again. “Your dissertation was about cognitive theory. Tell me how to define a ‘self.’”

    By the end of my last semester, before my appointment expired at our university, I just gave all my students “A”s. Because they weren’t the point. They were just a necessity, and I needed all the time I could get, which I mostly spent sitting on our front porch, drinking beer and twisting shoots off of Sireen’s morning glories. I couldn’t tell if I was feeling sorry for myself or making big plans. Nothing came together, either way.
    Sireen and I were lucky. Our university was private, which meant that it lost funding immediately—straight from the endowment, when the stock markets started sliding. So we knew. The administration knew what to do immediately. Whose contracts they couldn’t renew.
    The public universities went later, in size, in number. Surprised when their states started choking off cash flows. Property tax funds fell when foreclosures rose, when commercial buildings went vacant and office parks in-progress slipped into half-constructed limbo. Jobs followed. Income and sales went with them. Taxesbecame what we wished we could pay. We didn’t need representation anymore—we needed fucking taxation.
    Many of the public universities were dissolved, along with some municipal services. Tuition climbed to cover budget gaps. Most smaller schools folded, sacrifices to the larger, who trucked in temporary buildings and festival-sized tents to accommodate all the new enrollees. It was an Age of Enlightenment. Education would be the answer, from the top down.
    Faculty were released. Temporary, or part-time, mostly. Like me. Full-time faculty absorbed our teaching loads, creating classes so massive that the students had to teach themselves, largely through support groups and banks of communal notes. The faculty left behind their specializations and started teaching introduction to composition, and introduction to philosophy, and introduction to world religions. College algebra. Macroeconomics. Political Science. The new university is mostly introductory, and no one cares who will pick up the task of advancing this basic knowledge.
    It was decided that departments would offer fewer upper-level courses within a given major, less often. It now takes the students longer, costs them more, and leaves them with dangerous ideas—the ideas of ideas—about disciplines that do more harm than good when left without conclusions.
    When we were children, we did not play with fire, but we loved the smell of gasoline. Someone was around to teach us the advanced consequences of studying combustion.

    This is not unusual. People often fill Sentinel Park. For drum circles. Footbag. Outdoor chess. Sometimes, on Saturdays, the city hosts