Read Online Chimpanzee by Darin Bradley - Free Book Online

are my own—at the flip-flops they’re wearing.
    A network-connection request appears in my field of vision. I approve it.
    These flip-flops piss me off. They spin like synchronized propellers—their axes are the flip-flop support straps, which divide the large toe and the one beside it. I can’t control the image. I can’t make them stop. It is ridiculous, but watching, but counting. It doesn’t make me feel good. It keeps me from feeling bad.
    I hear a woman’s voice through the goggles’ earphones. When I glance at the TV behind the bar, I get a reprieve from the flip-flops. The TV is muted.
    â€œAuthorities from the Center for Civic Renewal and the Downtown Chamber of Commerce believe the movement is tied to recent trends in social experimentation,” she says. Her voice sounds digitized.
    The bartender is in the back. I am alone.
    â€œLeah Johnson, a senior poverty studies major at Central, leads a field team surveying grassroots governance—”
    â€œHello?” I say. Out loud.
    I decide to ignore the flip-flops, which creates a sensation of nausea.
    â€œâ€”the unemployed or underemployed under 30.”
    â€œHey,” I say.
    â€œYes?” she says.
    â€œWhat are you doing?”
    â€œWhat do you want?”
    â€œWho are you?” I say.
    â€œWho are you ?”
    â€œBen.”
    The bartender is back. She ignores me. Ignoring the flip-flops isn’t working. I wonder whose feet these were. Whose life of hell. It is an asinine simulation, an introduction, the result of setting the difficulty to minimal.
    â€œReally?” she says.
    â€œYes, really.”
    â€œYou shouldn’t give out your real name.”
    â€œOh.”
    â€œHold on,” she says. “Thirty percent chance of rain. For this time of year, we are at positive two inches. Northern Georgia and the Piedmont, meanwhile, are still struggling with a now ninety-day drought.
    â€œThat’s better,” she says.
    â€œWhat are you chimping?” I say. “Why are you telling me the news?”
    â€œI’m not telling you anything, and it’s none of your business.”
    â€œRight.” I need another drink anyway, and my head is starting to hurt. I’ve had enough.
    â€œWhat are you chimping?” she says.
    â€œFuck you.”

    Attendance has grown. They sit clustered, in a stadium rectangle—up the rows, into the air. They have grouped themselves againstthe others in Sentinel Park. Like a class. Those from the first day are sitting in roughly the same places, as if identified there.
    Just like real students.
    I can tell they are in the same places because Zoe is in the same place. She is wearing a sundress today, a blue one, and her dreads are bound against the top of her head.
    They—someone—brought me something to write on. There at the bottom of the amphitheater, where the answers lie, where we always speak the truth from below, is an easel. It is duct-taped in places, but there is a large pad of bound newsprint upon it.
    There are at least twenty of them now.
    Up here, on the sidewalk. People stare.

    â€œSo, why do I say that ethos is the most important?” I say.
    Some of them are taking notes. A few smoke cigarettes. Most just stare, underwhelmed. I am the weakest of this afternoon’s street performers.
    â€œBecause,” one of them says, “we have to believe what you’re saying?”
    â€œI can make you believe using logical data,” I say, “or I can manipulate you into doing so with pathos.”
    â€œI don’t know then.”
    â€œI said everything begins by making the audience pay attention.”
    The policeman, up on the street level, where the sidewalk chessboards and hotdog vendors are, is paying attention. He watches us without moving.
    â€œWill logic make you pay attention?” I say.
    No.
    â€œWill pathos?”
    No. They think they know how to play the academically