Animal Money

by Michael Cisco

  “We all wish Tripi were still with us,” she says, her firm voice suavely overdubbed by the translator. “However, her dream of democracy will die if we fail to follow electoral committee procedures, or if we fail to ensure that the elections are properly administered and the counting of votes is carried out publicly with the full participation of all parties.”

  She is a strikingly classical person in both appearance and in her way of speaking, reminding me—no doubt by design—of a Stoic peasant matriarch. She is also the least Caucasian politician I have seen in Achrizoguayla.

  I still ponder over the peculiar story, and the way it simply rests atop the promiscuous jumble of recent events. Am I overlooking any secret pattern in those events? I think again of the dark economists. To create an economy of secrets, the secrets would first have to be made. Anyone can make a secret, although some secrets are more valuable than others. How are the values of secrets compared? Not by the lengths to which one goes to conceal it; the concealment of a secret is not the secret, any more than the bank vault is the wealth of the bank. But a secret shared is devalued, after a certain point. A secret only one person knows is almost not a secret. No. A secret known only to one person might be called an absolute secret, because such secrets are usually determinative of something, like a revealed murder. That secret has an immense value, but it can only be realized in a single transaction. By contrast, a conspiratorial secret will increase in value as it is shared. The value of the conspiratorial secret depends on the likelihood that a given end will be achieved, and escalates as that end approaches. The value grows as the secret is maintained, but there is a temptation to turn informant and cash it in for the wrong kind of value, instead.

  I begin, it seems, to understand why the dark economists are always reading hermetic and occult literature. Secrecy is the medium of magical transactions (call them A) which compound value across exchanges instead of simply shifting equivalent values. These A still are and have been the unspoken elements of their specific use cultures, that is, specific cultures are used, elements like “of” and “that,” “because” and “desired.” Alternately, art sees effects “truth” them, that is, make them true. How? With grammar. “Are-on” words, by which we mean words that are currently switched on, live, effective. Categorization goes to the mullahs who financially attempt external-sacred sacred-A. A arguments are purchasing-magics, various, inherent magics. Yet when used their A needs time, nearly needs a primary-sacred ritual, which is different from external-sacred, as modes themselves demand first instruments, then emotions. Invoke, that is, be producing, and those in-cultures of theirs must have that Magical language, emotive regarded magical types. The result of the primary-sacred invokes deposits within accepted use, and without in-types, you get more mullahs. Magical amounts that link value to power have that-language. The more various, the more savings-boundaries. The scientific suggestions operate within the style, usually at the level of one’s own deposits or between financial institutions, and therefore communication with the outside distinguishes exclusive religious financial instruments from those developed in incantation, or the main focal element is that A of magicians, because to do personal monetary power they declared themselves over to K magic, which comes from what derives as nature.

  An economy using animal money will have to be a secrecy economy. By definition, the animal emerges from the secrecy of the wilderness and returns to it again. Tracking now has come to mean its opposite. Now, tracking means to watch someone all the time. No secrecy possible. However, tracking used to mean entering into the secrecy of the person or animal tracked, following traces rather than staring fixedly at what made those traces. Tracking, in the old sense, ended the moment the quarry was found. Tracking, in the modern sense, means the quarry can never be lost. Any economy will experience loss, and the animal money economy will provide for loss by making sure that getting lost continues to be possible. If nothing can ever get lost, from the point of view of the state, there can be no secrecy, and hence no living money. The secret of life is life.

  Sounds profound.

  Well, it is profound.

  What does profundity mean?

  It means deep.

  The words are not themselves physically deep. They don’t sit any further down inside the paper than other words that aren’t profound. They don’t hit the ear at a lower frequency because of their content, or weigh down the air. To be profound is to be deep, but why invoke depth?

  Because what is high up is visible. The higher the more visible. It’s good to be profound because that means penetrating perception, seeing what is buried and therefore hard to see. When we say something is profound, we mean, that was brought up from down below, someone dowsed it, there’s magic in dowsing out something in the depths. A whale, plunging into icy darkness and pressure, listening as the echoes of its own voice tell what’s all around it.

  Whose voice is this? Is it still my voice? Am I now, like the second Professor Long a few nights ago, being used as a transmitter? Which economist am I?

  That echo returns a new voice. New to you, although it’s your own voice, calling to you from just around the corner of a moment ago.

  *

  The day the conference officially closes, Professor Aughbui leaves the hotel to take a few pictures. The swelling has gone down, and he has been able to reduce the bandaging so as not to feel too conspicuous. As the group heals, they will leave San Toribio, one by one. Professor Aughbui is nearly well enough to leave, and prolongs his stay so as to continue participating in the conversation about animal money.

  He crosses Corrientes y Contreras and finds the hidden train station under its turtle-shaped carapace. People smile at Smilebot tripping along at his heels, and Smilebot returns their smiles helplessly, without paying anyone any particular attention. Smilebot watches Professor Aughbui’s feet, so as never to lose him.

  The train is a gleaming, futuristic silver cylinder, beautifully air conditioned. It glides over its rails with a low singing rasp. Professor Aughbui is standing toward the front of the first car, which is half full with commuters, possibly going to lunch, or coming back from lunch.

  Now he notices a passenger at the far end of the car, who stands gazing out through the windows in the doors. Professor Aughbui notices this passenger because he does not list backward when the train accelerates, nor forward when it slows down. He doesn’t sway to the side when the train swerves. His hands are at his sides; he isn’t holding on. The train turns sharply and everyone teeters, the seated passengers bending at the waist, the standees either stumble or throw a leg out to brace themselves. The passenger does not tilt or bend. It’s as if he were only an image, without mass, without inertia.

  Professor Aughbui gets off at Ante Lobo to make a connection. At the next stop, a voice comes over the PA system.

  “Everyone will please leave the train except Aughbui.”

  Professor Aughbui freezes. Did he hear it?

  People are leaving the train.

  “Will everyone except Aughbui please leave the train,” the voice says again. In English. Where before it had been quiet, now it’s raucous. Professor Aughbui joins the other passengers quitting the train.

  “I see you Aughbui,” the voice says knowingly. “Get back inside.”

  Swallowing with effort he continues to walk, heading now for the exit, the back of his neck tingling, not knowing, thinking about taxis. No other passenger can know that he is the one the voice is calling, but if it were to sing out:

  “I see you, there! You! With the little robot!”

  —then everyone would know. Did he actually hear that?

  Hurrying down the street, the station receding at his back, he can hear a squawking, inhuman voice over the station PA, louder and louder, threatening, unintelligible, speaking and speaking and speaking—

  Now seated on a bench under one of San Toribio’s many famous colossal trees—every public square seems to have one, or to have been built to accommodate o
ne—Professor Aughbui composes himself. His back still smarts from the sticky, spectral blows of that voice. Perhaps he’s overexerting himself, and exacerbating hallucinations out of his infection. He isn’t tired or poorly rested; he hasn’t eaten anything out of the ordinary or disagreeable. Then again, it is hot, and the bandages over his head can’t be making him any cooler.

  Was it that passenger, who didn’t seem to be physically interacting with anything? So, what then? He followed him? Spoke to him over the PA system?

  Professor Aughbui tries opening himself to the unfamiliar everydayness of the city around him. The square is bright, clean, and broad, sifted over with San Toribio’s ubiquitous dun-colored flour. Two men in white coveralls are sweeping the pavement in front of a building under renovation. There’s a little comisaria at one end of the square where a handful of people are eating lunch under a plain canvas awning. A few children in student uniforms are frisking around in front of a school.

  He hasn’t noticed anything strange since he left the train station, nor was there anything strange prior to his taking the train. Unless this were something that would have happened at this particular time, wherever he happened to be. 1:52. If that’s true, then the problem is in himself and will either wear off or become something new to adjust to. Has he ever done anything that would cause a ghost to haunt him? He’s flunked his share of students, but he has an excellent memory for faces, and that passenger was definitely a stranger. Not tall or short, with a sharp profile, short hair aiming away from the face like porcupine quills, and grizzled, light eyes like poached eggs, thin, crescent mouth, hands slender, weak, gentle, like a tubercular pianist’s. Nothing threatening. The terror had all been in the prospect of that presence being there, in that particular place. Professor Aughbui jerks around, to see if that passenger is there again, if there’s someone there for him, anyone, just for him, and not for anyone else. Nothing. Windows, shops, alleys, streets. The peculiar people of San Toribio, not demonstrative, not sullen.

  To note his location for future reference, just in case, Professor Aughbui takes out his camera and snaps a picture of the street sign. Perhaps something strange happened here, or at the nearby train station, and, like a ghost story, he won’t know the most important thing until later. He glances at the picture and notices someone is standing by the streetsign. He would not have taken the picture if there had been anyone there; his habitually excessive caution would have warned him against giving offense and he would have waited for a clear shot. The memory is too new to give any sound corroboration to a nevertheless perfect impression that there had not been anyone there.

  The figure in the photo is half obscured by the sign and the heavy shadow of a telephone pole. It seems to be a man in midstride, wearing light colored pants and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, showing a copper brown forearm and hand. The only refuge for plausibility that presents itself is the idea that this man might have darted through the frame while Professor Aughbui’s attention was on the camera, or perhaps in an eyeblink.

  Impulsively, he twists and takes a picture of a corner of the plaza, where a group of schoolchildren is bustling along in a rough column, escorted by three teachers. Professor Aughbui checks the picture. There are the children, and both teachers.

  Gleaming in the sun, the children have turned the corner and are disappearing down the street, one teacher in the rear. Professor Aughbui gets up and walks several steps forward, trying to see the whole column, but without following them it won’t be possible. He looks at the picture again. He feels conspicuous and it suddenly occurs to him that taking pictures of schoolchildren is an easily misinterpreted thing to do. He sits down again and puts away his camera. The teachers had been there guiding the children, one in front, one in the back, and the third had been facing him, looking in his direction, a round, seamed, scowling face of unclear gender. Smilebot is scrutinizing an acorn it holds between its two rigid hands. Smilebot lifts its gaze to him. For an instant, Professor Aughbui is afraid that Smilebot’s painted face will come to life or betray his trust in some other horrible way, but it’s just good old Smilebot, unlike the now haunted sunlight and camera and the city whose mask he might just have seen slip. San Toribians may be selectively visible to outsiders. Or it may be there are some he can see that his camera can’t see, and some he can’t see that his camera can.

  Could his camera be having hallucinations? Or will no one else see the man in the shadow of the telephone pole?

  Professor Aughbui looks around himself again. It’s all unfamiliar but normal, and sort of nice. San Toribio smells like blanching cornmeal, something like that. He can’t place the smell. It’s nice, but not for him. Professor Aughbui feels left behind. He’ll go back to the hotel, and the other economists will all be gone. Academics meet at conventions, trade email addresses and cards, making new friends moment by moment, and then they never speak to each other again. The hotel will be completely empty, without guests or staff, and his bags will be packed and sitting outside his locked, inaccessible room, with the ticket back to Europe lying neatly across the top of his suitcase.

  The seamed, scowling, uncertainly gendered face of the person he saw but who did not somehow manage to make it into his picture comes back to him again. Perhaps the people here resent tourists, Professor Aughbui thinks, and, since they can’t show the feeling openly and keep the tourists coming, their resentment manifests itself as a refusal to appear in photographs.

  Like a huge block of ice dropped from a height, there lands in him the groundless assurance that he’s wrong. Jarringly he knows that third teacher, the passerby, and the passenger, are all dead, and so were many of the people on the train, in the crowds. Some are living, and others are ghosts only he can see.

  He scratches the back of his right hand. He’s getting a rash there, as he is prone to rashes and always has been. His wristwatch says it’s 2:12. Putting his camera away, he wonders if the rash might be related to his insect bite, and looks at it, rubbing it gently with his fingers. His watch now says 2:13. So soon? Perhaps it was only a few seconds shy of 2:13 the first time. There’s a digital clock inserted into a billboard advertising car insurance not far from where he sits, and it says 2:13. He looks at his hand. He can’t quite tell whether there are minute red pinpricks there or not; they seem to come and go as he turns his hand.

  He gets to his feet. When he starts, the billboard clock reads 2:14. When he is standing fully upright, the clock reads 2:15.

  The idea appears uncertainly in the midst of other ideas, while his watch reads 2:16 and then 2:17, that it isn’t safe to discuss or even to conceive of animal money, that any idea so different would have to have enemies.

  Two men sweep the pavement with long regular plunges of their brooms. Though they sweep with method, it doesn’t seem as if they’re any closer to being done sweeping. 2:18. They’re sweeping the idea away, Professor Aughbui thinks. His watch says 2:19 and so does the billboard clock. He sees huge, oily breasts oozing over each other like travelling sand dunes and behind each one there’s a long purple tear in the clay, ragged and straight in carnelian sand, stretching back to the horizon. A fierce, tingling irritation blooms across his skin, spreading to his eyes, the inside of his mouth, his ears, his genitals and rectum; a blizzard of colorless static attacks him. He looks up at the tree, a gargantuan tower that spreads its canopy like a second sky, and the enormous face of Smilebot bends above him.

  *

  As the evening comes on, we gather as now is customary in the room of the first Professor Long. None of us has seen Professor Aughbui all day, and the second Professor Long has also been impossible to find and only just now bursts in with every indication of bearing urgent news.

  (I embellish nothing, and yet I find everything embellished once said. These incidents, as they unfolded, had none of the solidity and decisiveness they have as I now recount them. They were diaphanously chaotic experiences for me as they happened. Now it is as if I were repeating in a normal ton
e of voice something told to me in a whisper, and so imparting them with an emphasis that has no counterpart in the event, and that is a troubling discrepancy I do not know how to correct.)

  “Professor Aughbui collapsed in the street,” he says. “In a square, Procounseles Quarche. I mean, he’s in the hospital. Lend.”

  The ambulance attendants apparently found his hotel key among his effects and contacted the man at the front desk.

  Naturally, we drop everything and go to the hospital directly. Professor Aughbui has a room to himself, with a shady window and blinds, cool and neither bright nor dark. Apparently he has been delirious ever since he arrived, and is speaking from time to time from among his phantoms. Smilebot stands in an empty corner beside the wastebin. I had the presence of mind to bring the test book and beads belonging to Professor Aughbui. The nurse currently on duty is fluent in English, and the scandalized expression on her face is succinct testament to the sort of things Professor Aughbui has been saying. The first Professor Long speaks to her woman to woman, and presently informs us that Professor Aughbui has evidently been dreaming vividly of Assiyeh Melachalos.

  In his dream, Assiyeh, having vanquished the decapitated vampire with her tranquilizer gun, vanishes chuckling into the night. Her ostensible purpose is to capitate the body and decontaminate it of its vampirism. However, in the vision tormenting Professor Aughbui, Assiyeh instead returns to her home and placing the still unconscious head and entrails into a fish tank in her basement, which she then fills with some nutritive fluid. Some time later, she returns to find the head awake if listless. Without removing it from the tank, which is topped with a grill-like cage, Assiyeh seduces the head. There then followed a very protracted and upsetting series of fragmentary utterances indicating that the dream-Assiyeh was enjoying the caresses of the vampire’s entrails which were reaching out to encircle her through the bars of its cage. To me it sounds reminiscent of the dream of the wife of the Japanese fisherman. Perhaps Professor Aughbui happened to see a reproduction of the print somewhere recently.