Animal Money

by Michael Cisco

  It wasn’t the lobby, it was the little store in the corner of the lobby.

  She’s only an acquaintance, and we haven’t known each other all that long. Perhaps a year at most.

  Dorothy Bright smiled and came right over to me, that is, she finished buying batteries and then came over to me, saying “Hello Vincent.” Everyone is talking, everyone is a little concerned, actually no one is discussing the idea but only the publicity, economists in stunt. What stunt? Who knows what we did? She’s an upright black hyphen with black bananas for earrings, black hair in crescent moons around a yellow cyclops face, although she has both her eyes, big black scoop shoes. Process points pop out all over her like old hat pins, with black beads at the ends.

  That day’s issue of La Censura prominently displayed our interview. That’s the reason.

  It wasn’t prominent, on the fourth page, but there was a bad photograph of the five of us at the beach, and the naked reporters. The photo was clear, but it doesn’t show our faces, not quite, but only almost shows our faces, because of the bandages.

  “There go the economists,” I said. Through the small panes of the window there, the economists were visible, trooping out to the vehicles that would convey them to the General Assembly. A Gothic air of suspicion and funereal seriousness veiled them. Half of them were grave girls from oppressive boarding school and the other half were sinister governesses and devious priests cagily dabbling rosaries. I notice Professor Crest. The whites of his eyes stand out even within the white oval mark. You can see them distinctly, around his irises, even from this far away. He really picks up his knees a lot when he walks, almost like a marionette, and his hand swings up like a marionette’s hand would, the pointing finger ready, swinging up to point categorically into the air, as he redraws the protocol.

  “Here come the physicists,” Dorothy Bright said.

  White silhouettes came through the archway wearing nametags, not like ours, which have pictures of various San Toribio landmarks on them. Theirs were just white. Some were blue. But just plain colors, no pictures. One had a picture.

  Leo Buzzati, Collin Curtis, Assiyeh Nemekeseyah, Nathalie Krahl, Dolores Fajardo, Ayaka Torup, Uwa Wilson, Alicia Fortuny, Xalbadora Flores, Rex Kornblut, Arshile Okayev, and Vard Bajamian.

  Their conversation process came whirling up and engulfed me and the next moment I was going to breakfast with them. Rex Kornblut and Leo Buzzati were disagreeing and scoring points. Leo Buzzati is a white bar of soap with the little banners that skiiers put out to mark lanes. He’s flat and spreads like a sail. Rex Kornblut is a thin rhinoceros with an inverted horn, moving along the other axis to Leo Buzzati. There’s bagginess around his eyes that is held up by seams to either side of the nose, and below the seams it’s all smooth, the mouth loose as a mummy’s.

  Ayaka Torup is really something and Nathalie Krahl talked steadily too. She’s got a vaudeville comedian’s face, with a wry mouth, and a sheaf of papers, keeps waving to the star field off to her left somewhere. Her big pink toes poke through her sandals. Assiyeh Nemekeseyah is more aggressive, and seems taller than she really is, trying to pry her way into the binary argument. Her eyes are voracious, eating their way out of a brown almond-shaped marzipanned face with a swinging cape of black hair.

  We sat and the toast came and landed. Arshile Okayev is round and desiccated and darkly tanned with rigid furrows along his spacious brow. He has a slow, weary affect; his eyes are alert birds in lookout posts. He’s interested in what’s being said, not duelling. Vard Bajamian is aloof, resting his hands nearly at arms’ length on the edge of the table, hair in Van Gogh spirals flat against the pasty, olive-ivory skin. Uwa Wilson, who has a brilliant, daffy look, is chatting with Dolores Fajardo, who is tall tragic athletic and conservative. Xalbadora Flores is talking on her cell phone, her heavy, unflappable eyes glazed.

  Dorothy Bright hangs me on tiny Alicia Fortuny, liked by everyone. Her lips, philtrum, and nose are sharply defined. She has glistening sable snakes that are always trying to get away for hair. Luckily Alicia Fortuny partners Ayaka Torup, who is really something and who has all my attention. Collin Curtis is in this group as well; he’s a bulky snowman, full of remote, bare stretches crossed by long shadows in primary colors, and presided over by a silent, motionless planet. There in the mirror across the counter where I ordered my food, that tensely frozen vortex of stained glass, eyes squeezing painfully out in knots from thick black outlines, staring from under free-ranging scratched eyebrows, that one was me.

  The physics conference topic is weak measurements and quantum uncertainty. This is explained to me in terms I can’t understand. I can understand them, but I don’t. Somehow I ended up relating an anecdote I heard once about an economist and a physicist having dinner together. The economist describes a certain difficult problem in economics. The next day, the physicist finds the economist and shows him a solution to the problem, complete with a chart and so on. The economist looks at the solution and smiles. He says the physicist is using math like a hammer. No finesse.

  I didn’t hear that one, I read it, and the economist didn’t smile, or if he did, that was not part of the information I was given. I don’t know how he smiled.

  If he said anything about a hammer, that was not part of the information I was given either. I don’t know why he put in the bit about the hammer. I wasn’t trying to score points with this story; I only told it for the obvious reasons. Arshile Okayev laughed. Not much. Alicia Fortuny made two different laughing sounds.

  In all the visualized music, fields of color, running along the to and fro of the ground following the dotted spirals, bird trails, everything is tumbling particles. Particles—particles, particles—money, particles circulate, money circulate via electronic signals via electrons, money to electrons via signals, what’s next? Hard to follow. I was a child so intelligent that, being born retarded, I turned out to have average intelligence. I am so expert at second guessing myself that it has become the first thing I do, even before I first guess, pain and pleasure, human nervous signals, but then those can be also chemical can’t they? That makes my brain a calculator omputer of feelings or an imputer of ompressions, if there’s a difference.

  I’ve always basically been—for a long time I’ve been an individualistic communist.

  No, a communistic individualist, I don’t know, there’s a forced choice in making the one or the other an adjective, I’ve generally been, usually been, an individual, communistically. There.

  Adjectives both. I can live with that. I’m an economist, I don’t have to make sense. That’s a joke. I do have to make sense, urgently make sense, make urgent sense, make sense urgent.

  Physicists, back to. Chemicals—molecules. Molecules circulate but not like electrons. So what? Particles, not parts. That’s like saying piecels instead of pieces. Piece-lons. Pixels. Ayaka Torup is really something, she has too much face for me, too many. Rotoscoping. She’s wearing an enormous white collar that conceals her entire throat, like something out of a Dutch painting. The upper curves of her cheeks are like vents, they make the air tremble the way hot pavement does.

  The physicists were discussing the latest collider results. They smash particles into each other at fantastic velocities and then they try to capture and identify all the jailbreaking smaller particles. The particles don’t like to be recognized, Alicia Fortuny explained to me. They shift form when you try to look at them.

  I burst out laughing, no I didn’t burst out, but I laughed at the idea that someone would be explaining this to me. Here I am a professional, academic economist, with nothing hanging on my wall at home except a BA. A BA in drawing.

  It isn’t even hanging on my wall. I don’t know where it is. In storage probably. By that I don’t mean ...

  I’ll do a drawing of it and hang that on the wall. That would be funny.

  What’s animal money? That’s our project, I explain. You want more? Well, this world, I explain, is being destroyed. It isn’t being destroyed
, it’s being replaced, by which I mean that there will still be a world in the future, but it will be a world that exists literally at the expense of this one. What will destroy this world of ours won’t be, probably, the booms of nuclear war or the slobber of rising waters. Those things could destroy this world, but they won’t. Most likely, not. This world will be destroyed by its economy. The global economy is out of control. The answer is not to control it, though, I don’t think.

  It is symbolic, I mean, no! It isn’t! I’m not speaking symbolically!

  “But after nuclear war, you have a dead earth,” Arshile Okayev says.

  “Who has it?”

  He keeps talking over me.

  “And economic problems can only exist where there is human life!”

  “It won’t be a dead world,” I say. “I mean, it will be a dead world, but it will be dead because commerce will have replaced nature. And society. You’ll have to pay for your air, and light, and you’ll have, you know, a gravity bill every month, and there’ll be like a discount tether system for people who can’t afford real gravity, luxury brand gravity. Every now and then you see a deadbeat whipped screaming into space. The idea behind animal money—and I can tell you aren’t taking me seriously any more because you don’t believe my gravity joke, but you have to admit that it’s something that would happen if it were feasible, because there’s ... because it’s only the technical impossibility that is saving us there, not goodwill. They’ll call the gravity monopoly Goodwill Gravity and there will be a smiling logo on your shutoff notice that condemns you to fly off the earth. Point is, we want to prevent that, we want to change that. Well, we want, at least, to keep things from going in that direction, or very far in that direction.”

  “Dystopia and utopia,” Vard Bajamian says, solomonically.

  “We’re not utopists,” I say. “We are followers of Turms—we’re not followers, we’re celebrants.”

  Assiyeh Nemekeseyah was like a diagram, an arrow emerging from a mass toward another, winged mass, and the eyesight is looking out from the arrow’s travel. She was talking about a beam, and she was always so erect that I thought she meant gymnast beam. She told some of us about her project to achieve absolute motionlessness. An object cooled to absolute zero has no internal motion of its particles. That is, the object at absolute zero is only absolutely at rest on the inside, relative to itself, irrespective of how that self is distinguished from the rest of nature. Relative to other objects, it may still move while remaining at absolute zero. Assiyeh Nemekeseyah wanted to do the reverse, which is to bring an object to absolute zero motion relative to other objects, even while its inner motions continue. She calls this an interruptor beam.

  The other physicists were dubious. Then they were all staring at me, suddenly. I hadn’t seen them turn their heads in my direction. They were simply, all at once, staring, like a film edit, at me.

  “Oh,” I said.

  “What did you just say?” Leo Buzzati asked, looking incipiently angry.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I said something?”

  Leo Buzzati nodded very emphatically. “Yeees, you did.”

  “I have—” I said, embarrassed, not knowing where to look and confused, reaching for an adjective that never existed.

  “I have Tourettes,” I lied. “It doesn’t happen very often now,” I added immediately, trying to get out from under censure, appeal to pity, represent myself as someone with a long story behind him, flashing images of weary explanations, painful misunderstandings, stoic endurance, stigma, the usual.

  “Should I have said something?” I asked then, to put them on the defense.

  “No no, of course not,” Leo Buzzati said. My plan was working. He stopped looking at me and, paving over, resumed his conversation with Rex Kornblut.

  “What did I say?” I asked Alicia Fortuny, who was looking at me sympathetically.

  “‘Less choicelessly elegiant in tone,’ ... something like that, you said first.” Her earrings swung.

  “There was a pause, then you laughed a little,” Assiyeh Nemekeseyah said precisely, like a court recorder reading the transcript back at the judge’s request. “Then you said, ‘Aren’t we all?’ Your eyes were rolled back. Your mouth, it looked like you had mercury in your mouth. It was all over your teeth. Are you one of those people who are compelled to play with mercury?”

  That alarmed me. Those eyes of hers saw. None of the physicists knew what she meant. Her eyes were launched and calmly tracing me. I didn’t want her reading my mind. Fortunately, she looked sharply away from me the next moment.

  It wasn’t fortunate, or it was only insofar as it relieved me of her attention, because she was obviously disgusted with me and snapped me off like a light. It was just at that moment the pregnant woman walked by. I noticed her because I never know where to look when I’m humiliated, and so I look all around. She was wearing jeans, so she was still early enough in her pregnancy for that. Perhaps not, she was a small woman. She walked surprisingly fast, swinging her arms at full length, with long, stiff hair behind her.

  Then Ayaka Torup smiled at me. I couldn’t be certain she wasn’t only trying to put me at my ease, but instead I began speculating uncontrollably. I give myself away when I think about what I want; I have to pretend to want something else to have the feeling safely. Otherwise, obstacles will be placed between me and what I want. Alicia Fortuny was smoothing things over with hostess manners. Assiyeh Nemekeseyah abruptly excused herself and vanished. Nathalie Krahl’s head rose out of the physicists and studied me. Then we were all looking at watches and phones and getting up, and Nathalie Krahl came up right next to me and asked me if I were heading back to the hotel and I said yes.

  What I said was, “I suppose so.”

  I was trying to insinuate myself into the social draft trailing behind Ayaka Torup and Alicia Fortuny, with Collin Curtis as neutron. Zany enthusiasm and space-enveloping gestures were coming out of Ayaka Torup, expatiating on the subject of string theory. Nathalie Krahl kept trying to draw me out with questions about economics and what she called “hard metrics.” How much did we rely on them and so on. I told her that “hard metrics” in economics is just management bullshit. I look at money, I told her. Money is another way of measuring energy, and there’s positive and negative money, capital and debt, and there’s spin, which is the rate of appreciation or depreciation.

  Money is not energy but it is a measure of energy, specifically energy understood in temporal units, like kilowatt hours. So flows of money are movements of fixed energy moments which create a latent charge, either positive or negative, depending on which end of the movement the observer is at. If the money is flowing away from you, the charge is negative, towards you, positive. The negatively charged field at one flow pole sucks up all the money within the field, but repels money from outside the field, and the reverse is true at the other flow pole.

  “So the money flows in,” she said, “at the other end, but then that positive end repels money from outside its field?”

  I explained that no, the positive field attracts money. If it repelled money, it wouldn’t be opposite to the far end. The commotion was beginning by then, I think. We were nearly at one corner of the square. Twisting cries of alarm ascended from the other corner, past the colossal oak tree in whose shade we had been sitting before. We all stopped.

  Most of us stopped. There were a few who were already far enough ahead, Leo Buzzati and Rex Kornblut, Vard Bajamian, Uwa Wilson, that they did not hear and kept going. They might have heard and kept going. Those of us who heard and did not keep going stopped and looked back. Two women, one of whom, a big woman, had been minding the counter where we’d gotten our breakfast, were carrying another woman, the pregnant woman I’d seen before, over to a bench.

  They weren’t carrying her, they were half-dragging her, and she was half-crawling. She was distraught. She kept screeching. She struggled along on one hand, the other she held across her belly. Her clothes were askew,
and wet. Xalbadora Flores trotted heavily in the direction of the woman.

  “Did someone attack her or something?” Nathalie Krahl asked rhetorically.

  I opened my telephone and dialled for an ambulance. I always take down important numbers before I go anywhere.

  I don’t always take them down; I did in this case. As I told the dispatcher where we were, I hurried over, at least I went over, toward where the women were. The wetness on the body of the pregnant woman was monstrously dark. She was dripping with it, wailing now on her back on top of the bench while the woman I didn’t know was kneeling beside her, and the heavy woman from the counter was hurrying away for something, and noticed me coming up with my phone.

  “Did you call?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “They’re coming.”

  The woman on the bench didn’t look pregnant now. Her jeans were all undone and her white underwear was sticking out the fly. Her face darkened and darkened, her eyes whitened and whitened, staring, her teeth opened and closed, her mouth was a square, her whole head was like a palpitating undersea invertebrate creature. I heard the up and downing siren somewhere in space. The other woman was asking her about the baby, did it come out, did it come out? The woman on the bench went crazy, the whole throat gaped inside that square mouth and she shouted every breath and horror whited her eyes. Then she held herself with both arms and moaned. She was terrified and it sickened her.

  The heavy woman was back with some towels. She waved me away.

  “You’d better go,” she told me.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “Something in the bathroom.”

  There were bathrooms on that other corner of the square. That’s where the pregnant woman had been heading when she walked by us before. The one with the woman’s silhouette on the door had thick, dark streaks of liquid on its marble threshold. I went in. An animal smell overpowered the detergent smell. A confused trail of wet led to the rear stall beneath a window that was high, broad, short, and open. There was blood in the toilet of the rear stall, and in a splash down the front and onto the floor. Still wet, dripping. The other stall, there were only two, was ajar.