Animal Money

by Michael Cisco

  In one of the western slums, which were considered the worst, a group of bereaved women calling themselves the League of Disgusted Mothers initiated the Desgoustadore movement protesting high rents in the rest of San Toribio. It was the inability of the inhabitants to move out of the slums, they argued, that empowered the gangs. The Desgoustadores created housing committees to place families in affordable housing; and when Tripi took power, she coordinated the government with the committees, extending their efforts, and this finally reduced the sway of the gangs. Now that she has disappeared, and as the likelihood of her return seems to have dwindled away to nothing, there is an ominous mood. An emergency election has been scheduled in the next few weeks and the two major parties have been going at it tooth and nail in the press. Without Tripi, the country will likely become steadily more factionalized and this is likely to stymie the big collaborative projects the country needs to reduce poverty; then of course anyone would want to know what happened to her, how she could have vanished without a trace. Some believe she was abducted by the CIA directly or indirectly, and others fear her disappearance was the work of a heretofore unknown guerrilla group, Achrizoguaylan Contras. No one has taken responsibility for the kidnapping, but there have been many hoaxes.

  Now we are installed in beach chairs on a little stone platform shaded by garish umbrellas. We, of course, could not become naked without removing our bandages and therapeutic gear, but then again, our bandages mark us as exceptions. Such is the naiveté of celibacy! I do not think it even occurred to the other economists to check the dress codes of the various beaches they considered before they sent us off to this one. They probably chose the first one they had all heard of. It is, at any rate, a magnificently beautiful shore. The day shouts with blue sun, the waves are scintillating, the refreshing air is fragrant with spray, and, since it is the middle of a Wednesday, there are very few heliophiles here. A naked waiter hastens from the kiosk about fifty meters away, taking our non-alcoholic drink orders without any sign of irritation or disappointment, and briskly returns with a rolling step, obviously he has had a lot of practice going to and fro on hot sand in bare feet—easier than with shoes on—deftly balancing his tray.

  We sit facing the ocean of course, squinting. Even the reflected sunlight is palpably intense, like a subtle pressure sensed a little within the body surface, but the steady wind off the water reduces the heat to a low simmer. I think again of the captive man in the zoo. I imagine him braining his chimp with a rock, impaling the other apes with carefully sharpened bamboo spears he has been hoarding. Then roll a boulder down the slope and through the glass into the observation gallery, a leap to freedom, frenzy, revenge, he is indestructible, a hail of police bullets does not faze him.

  Our conversation is desultory. This is the most harrowing conference any of us has ever attended and we are all very badly rattled. None of us knows what to expect, what will come next. It seems as if anything might happen, and we are completely exposed to the whims of chance. We are constantly finding ourselves drawn into circumstances that exacerbate our injuries. We dare not speak, even here in the open, without anyone in earshot, about the success of our experiment. There is not much to be said about it, anyway. Our success is both significant and insignificant—I hate expressing myself in that spuriously clever way, one might imagine that, by now, I would have a firm enough grasp on my own way of thinking not to be so readily swayed, but there is something insidious or tempting about that way of expressing oneself. At present, our success is nothing more than a stunt, albeit a unique one, something no one has attempted since the days of the alchemists. What our experiment shall do, if anything, is the only genuine significance it might have.

  Two of the most beautiful human beings I have ever beheld, a man and a woman, entirely naked, emerge from the shimmer above the parking lot and come straight toward us. Neither of them speaks until they are near enough to us so that they do not need to raise their voices at all for us to hear them. They ask us if we are economists. We say yes.

  “From the conference?”

  “Yes.”

  “Although,” I say, to be entirely accurate, “our injuries have prevented us from attending any of the sessions.”

  “That’s all right,” the woman says.

  They are Baruch Plano and Carolina Duende, reporters from La Censura, and they want to interview us about the idea of animal money.

  (We converse with them easily, almost in a dream, they are both so supernaturally beautiful, radiantly healthy, unabashedly naked, with teeth as black as snow, brand new teeth that have never touched food and which glow in their faces like seams of daylight in dawn clouds.)

  The waiter produces a pair of folding beach chairs for them, they seat themselves between us and the sea, and we explain our idea to them. Since they carry nothing, they take no notes, but they seem to absorb without effort every one of our words with an easy attentiveness and interest. Their follow-up questions are germane, acute, and indicate comprehension of our ideas.

  There they sit, and here we sit. They in pagan splendor, like a pair of idols, and we in bandages and appliances, our plain clothes of priestly intrigue, huddled together like crippled ravens. There is a blast of sub-lingual static among us. We all mutually ask each other, without speaking—do we mention the experiment? We all answer in the same moment—

  No!

  No!

  No!

  No!

  Well... I mean, no! No, of course not!

  Animal money ... there it is under your pillow when you wake up. Maybe not. It is not for spending; you never part with it.

  But if you buy a Che poster from someone, then you now have it and he no longer does, and he did not give it to you, he bought it, so surely he must get something in exchange. If all property is held in common, then that is another matter, but then there is no buying or selling. This obstacle seems insurmountable. So insurmountable that, and it is to be hoped that you take this comment in the contributory spirit that prompts it, no competent economist could fail to recognize the futility of any attempt to overcome it.

  You are right, but it is important not to underestimate the boundless appeal of the prospect lying beyond that obstacle.

  But the obstacle is insurmountable. It is a wall no one can even see over. Isn’t your idea a fantasy?

  It is like that and not. We still are not entirely sure what we mean by animal money. Whether or not it is a fantasy is something that will never be known, unless we are successful. And whether or not it is a fantasy is perhaps not the only important question. This fantasy has an internal consistency that is instructive. This is not a stunt. We want, very much want, a currency that offers every person who uses it nothing to save, or to spend, or to exchange to the exclusion of someone else, so, in exchange for exchange itself, you take participation.

  The aim is not to overthrow anything, we hasten to point out. We only want to streamline existing economic systems by removing hindrances to full and efficient participation by all. What hindrances? Well, systemic inequalities, wages, salaries, investments, finance, profits, capitalism ... yes, the idea is definitely post-financial. The impedimenta of administration, laissez faire, banking, shares, stocks, insurance, markets, would have to fall by the wayside. Inefficiency and insufficiency. Animal money is latently present in any exchange already; it is only a matter of making a certain adjustment.

  We consider laissez faire an impediment? Sure, because it generates bottlenecks and blockages in the flows of money and goods. We all sense that the inequality between a rich man and a poor one is not the same inequality that exists between a master sculptor, let us say, and a neophyte or a bad one. The deficit is excavated into the poor by the rich, while the supremacy of the master over the tyro is a matter of intensity and altitude, and has nothing to do with selfishness. The cheat, snug in a nest of falsehoods that grows like the nest of an eagle. Baruch Plano and Carolina Duende listen attentively and in silence. It is easy to feel foolish talk
ing into this silence, but there is reassurance in their intelligence.

  No, you need records, that is a fact. But those records need not be the lifeless articulations of the Misled. The Latino, or whatever they end up calling it, could become an entirely new form of currency which would behave more like language than money. One word is not interchangeable with another word. Conversation does not mean I replace my words with yours and I do not lose the words I use with you, you see? A book, a conversation, is not a heap of ‘word coins’. The currency in language is composition, elemental arrangements of words ... the treasury ... what is a word for a sort of repository of language, not just the words?—A colloquium.

  Will this new currency be a digital currency?

  Animal money is not a new currency, it is a new currency form. Digital currencies like bitcoins and litecoins are just fiat currencies that privilege timing and computer access. Being limited in their production, they can only appreciate in value, which rapidly makes each unit too valuable to use in comparison to existing currencies. And why spend today what will be worth more tomorrow, and yet more the day after that? Animal money is community fiat.

  Baruch Plano and Carolina Duende listen healthily. The wind tosses her hair, riffles his. They do not perspire. They are not following our every word, not recording us, it is more like they are tasting us, they came out here to taste us the way you would drive out to a vineyard to taste the wine, and this seems natural, and right, and preferable in fact, to us. I think that we are now entirely adjusted to their nudity, we do not notice it any more. My new shoes are filling up with sand, even though they rest on concrete. How is that possible? Perhaps all this is a fantasy. But then, what is fantasy? Sooner or later, everybody ends up taking a fantasy seriously.

  They now want us to hypothesize about the effect the return of Tripi would have on the development of the Latino. Would we be willing to work with her, if she were to return?

  Once, she had been Adela Trini Pina, but when she began her political life, she became Tripi. Her name is blazoned everywhere, but, at her request, images of her were produced only in the press. Everyone knows the one photograph of her, standing on the balcony of the Ministry of Finance, passionately addressing the crowd, a slender woman with a bun of grey hair, her mouth open and her eyes straining with an anguish drawing and quartering her features so that the picture is more like the capture of tortured appeal and indignation than a portrait. Only the scarf around her neck, loosely gathered into a silver band in the front, is really characteristic. One month ago, while returning from a visit to the interior, Tripi vanished into the mountains. Her car needed gas. As the tank was being filled, the proprietor of the gas station invited her to tour the curious little terraced garden he had built entirely by himself behind the station. He saw his wife pull up to the station in her car, and ran back to fetch her. She would not want to miss an opportunity to meet Tripi. But when they returned to the garden, Tripi was not there. She has not been seen since. Her telephone? They found it where she left it—in the car. A half-smoked cigarillo was discovered at the brink of the terrace. Tripi smoked cigarillos, and always down to the filter. She was known for that. On numerous occasions, she had carefully snuffed and pocketed a cigarillo when it was necessary for her to stop smoking unexpectedly, then retrieved and relit it at the next opportunity. The habit was so firm that this discarded half cigarillo suggested dire scenarios, but after all it was not exactly a commandment, and quite imaginable that she might toss aside a half-smoked cigarillo once in a while. She had no husband or close family; no one was in a position to say, really, how she smoked. That’s all. Tripi is gone, and Archizoguayla must assume the worst.

  On the way back to the hotel, we are looking over our shoulders and in the rear view mirror, but, as none of us is native, how can we know what is suspicious?

  This observation is not calculated to relax us, and we become desperate for the safety of the hotel, but is the hotel safe?

  Accustomed to the sacerdotal stillness of economics departments, we are easily overwhelmed by crowds, any noisy gregariousness upsets our delicately-balanced cerebral escapements. Economics conferences are always virtually silent; they are conducted as if they were not being conducted. Even our banquets are silent affairs; we gather in the dining hall, and one of the junior faculty is recruited to read canonical economics treatises aloud to us while we eat our modest fare in unbroken abstraction. Studying economics lowers the voice and inclines the head; studying economics induces discretion, tact, caution, even cowardice, and an exaggerated circumspection in writing and speech. For us, our hotel rooms are oases of silence where we can recompose ourselves carefully, as economists. So who was it that suggested we stop for dinner? And why did we choose this boisterous cafe, packed with people and thrashing the tranquil night air with earsplitting music? Suddenly we simply had to eat, right now, at the first place we found, notwithstanding even the proven excellence of the hotel restaurant. The suggestion might have come from me; I thought it had, but it seems as if everyone was looking at Professor Aughbui—no, Budshah—when it happened.

  This place is so loud we all have to take out our little notebooks, all the same, and write out our orders for the waitress. We have been waiting for the food to arrive for a long time. Now it is here, expensive, arcane, and looking more like plastic decorations than food. A whipped beet aioli with caramelized prawn heads and raisins accompanied by raw sliced new potatoes and tarragon; a strip of charred beef in coffee-seaweed soup topped with cinnamon shavings; champagne carrots and duck livers stuffed with goat cheese and chocolate chips. The other customers, who mostly congregate at the bar, are young, toned, well-dressed, orange, and staring at us in our bandages and other medical accessories, our Quakerish economist-apparel. We wanted to talk, to further review the thoughts and answers our interview had stirred up in us and let loose in us. But it is hard when we have to strain to speak, strain to hear, repeat everything three times, trade notes it is too dim in here to read. And we are ravenous. We fall on this bizarre, unintelligible cuisine as if it were hearty country fare—even Professor Budshah, who must draw in his soup between his teeth.

  We are lost in this senseless rapture of eating when the eyes of the second Professor Long suddenly snap up into his head showing only two livid whites. Thin vapor escapes his writhing, contorted lips, which shape words with a terrible strain. The words rush from his mouth like frigid saliva.

  “This voice ... is censored ... travelled ... by exorcism ... from ... under the darkness of ... human vision ... the darkness and light of ... human vision ... this voice ... is ... the censor ...”

  His eyes reappear and his taut face goes slack. With a groan, he slumps forward, nearly falling out of his chair, hands gripping the edge of the table. Then, with a violent start, his eyes snap back into his head:

  “Go on our instrument.”

  His eyes reappear.

  “I’m not your instrument,” the second Professor Long groans angrily.

  Eye snap: “river doctor fill empty pockets with change cloud money paid in galaxies and they still came back as she will one day you can have though the idea that you can.”

  The spasm releases him only to seize hold of him more ferociously. He bares teeth coated in frozen saliva.

  “She holds it now at the right angle try to do this without breaking the breath of the dreams this means this will be things the dying legions dying masters the elastic riot of ecstatic censors the dark cloud of giant somnambulists looking down at the first casualties the blue-white hellparadise the red cocaine the black salt.”

  The second Professor Long rallies as the evening unfolds. He knows something has just happened, but he remembers nothing of what he said. To him it was only a series of brief blackouts.

  “It was like ...” he raises and lowers his palm before his eyes, “a shutter opening and closing, that abrupt.”

  It is difficult to say whether or not anyone else noticed the voice. Cloud money, he said. P
aying in galaxies.

  It takes us ten minutes to fit ourselves into the cab. We are talking about nothing as the car whisks us away through streets still lit by sunset, where sunset seems to linger and linger—even as the sky is now completely dark, the streets continue to glow pink and gold—when the cab driver says he wants to pick up another fare, already pulling over, opening the passenger door in front, admitting a massive man with a cannonball gut who rocks the cab as he lowers himself into the seat.

  “They’re holding auditions for The Mummy today,” he says in English, jostling the driver. He looks back at us and laughs uproariously.

  Turning his back to the door, he lays his arm along the seat; obviously we are going to have to make conversation with him.

  “So what happened to all of you?” he asks, smiling openmouthed, incredulous. Our answer, terse, disjointed, unfriendly, elicits a giddy stream of inane laughter from him, just soft enough so that he can still hear us over it.

  “And now you are looking for a place, eh?”

  He swats the driver familiarly on the shoulder. The driver nods.

  “You’re economists, aren’t you?”

  Surprise again.

  He points to his face.

  “I know the markings. I studied the subject myself in University, but in my case ...”

  He shrugs, smiling open mouthed.

  “I was seduced into a different line of business.”

  The buildings vanish. The side of the road is lined with dense tropical foliage, plants I do not know, with enormous leaves and rubbery green trunks. We pull up in a dirt lot by a Victorian mansion vividly painted in turquoise and lavender. Both the passenger and driver get out of the cab.

  “Come on in,” the passenger says, waving to us. “I’ll treat you!”

  We look at each other with misgivings.

  “Come on, come on! Why the suspicion?”

  There are people coming and going from the house, in evening dress, emerging from or vanishing into black mercedes, valets pulling cars up and wheeling them off somewhere behind the house. At least half the people I see are transvestites.