I wake up groaning, contracting into a ball, my hands clapped to my face. I saw something horrible. A lamb’s face, a very young lamb, maybe newborn, inert but alive, and a disgusting pair of long fleshy blue talons with claws like black nails, bound together like a bouquet of claws, rigid, moving toward the face of the lamb. They are going to rake across the face. The caressing viciousness and helplessness, the pornographic way I was being made to see it, was an intense malice directed at me.
“This is going to happen to you,” was what it meant, meaning I was going to be onlooker, lamb, and those horrible talons, that was going to be the last and forever for me ...
—Unless—
So, it was a warning.
*
Honorable professor,
We have been following you and your colleagues escapades with profound amusement, and we want to congratulate you on having thought of an idea so obvious and useless as “animal money.” I can’t tell you how refreshing it is to see intellectuals going to the trouble of showing everyone else in the world that they need not bother payin g attention to them. It saves all kinds of time to know whos an idiot and whos not in advance.
You should all take great pride in having conned yoru credentials out of whatever “universities” gave you your degrees, and in having managed to carve out your pointless careers, duping students and real economists. We ourselves are all very thankful for your contributions, which will distract and confuse laymen and force those who really know what their doing to waste time explaining just how brainless and masturbatory your animal money thing is.
Have you ever givena ny thought to retirement? While none of you is that old, except perhaps you, Professor (w)Rong, and maybe Professor Bullshitah, you have alreayd managed to foment in a few days as much bewilderment and frutiless conjecture as most of your ilk take years to do. You’ve done so well, why not take a well-deserved rest? I realize it takes time and effort to construct such elaborate garbage, a lot of midnight oil, and you all merit the heartfelt gratitude of the three or four dumb fucks who fall for your crap. Take a moment to appreciate yourselfs. You deserve it!
Now, why not hang it up and quit while your behind? Nobody ever really gave a shit abou tyou or your work, nobody really gives a shit now. What about us? Well, of course we care! We want to you to know that at least someone admires your accomplishments for what it’s really worth—FUCK ALL. None of you are married, isn’t that interesting? Impotence, sexual dysfunction, or being just plain hideously ugly would bring anybody down. We applaude and admire the grit you have shown in overcoming these handicaps, and we hopethat Professor Wong can stop whacking her secret dick off in front of the ciomputer for a moment and share our compliments with the rest of you studs. Maybe you could have all finally lost your virginity in an old fashioned gangbang.
It’s because we know you so well taht we send this letter in complete confidence that you will take it in the spirit of respectful and constructive criticism that intended it. When at last you leave Rooms 421, 611, 521, 223, and 248, and fly from this country to your homes agian, take our advice and blow your honorable worhtless brians out.
best wishes for a bang-up year!
XOXO
signed
—the greater intellectual community
*
I am the desk chair in room 248. Through the grapevine, I learn that, the morning after Professor Budshah notices the two men, the first Professor Long wakes up and finds the note, slipped under her door. It was printed out, there is no envelope, and the page is dented at the top, presumably by the thumb of the deliverer. A photograph was printed on the reverse side of the paper. The first Professor Long blanches as she reads it, then crumples it, then uncrumples it and studies it closely. The same day, according to the desk chair at the nurse’s station, with which I am also in contact, Professor Aughbui is examined and found fit to leave the hospital. He is discharged and returns with Smilebot to the hotel, meeting with the others here, in the first Professor Long’s room. His bandages have been entirely refreshed, and he looks like a different person.
The first Professor Long turns to the second, with an obvious air of reluctance.
“There’s something ... for you ...” she says, turning the paper over and handing it to him.
The second Professor Long’s head droops over the photograph. Then he straightens and hands it back to her.
“It’s nothing,” he says.
“Do you mind if ...?”
“I don’t think it concerns them,” he says. “No,” he adds a moment later, “It concerns them. Show them.”
The picture shows the second Professor Long in what appears to be an arbor, kissing a woman invisible in the shadows. In bronze sparkle-ink, someone has drawn a heart around the two of them, and written “Third Base?” alongside. Professor Crest re-enters the room, having gone off to wash his hands again. He stares at the picture incredulously.
“But I dreamt this!” he says. “Did I dream it?!”
*
I hadn’t realized I’d been thinking about her all this time until I saw her again. So that’s all right, that’s all right. She’s talking with me now, it’s all right, it’s all right. It’s too much for me to handle, that’s all right, I’m used to not being used to it. That’s all right. There she is, in the middle, that’s stable. The carousel of the day whirls around her faster and faster. The usual speed. Which is faster. I’m at my usual speed. Slower. She is stable. Stable herself, not stabilized by me, there’s no stability in me. The garden is one continuous ravishing confusion today; the leaves teeter producing bow tie arcs, vertical, opposed parentheses, and simultaneously the leaves describe circles with their tips as their stalks and boughs are brushed down by the wind and twirl back up again, moving color geometry. Not measured, though, not metric. Her eyes lanced me from the far end of a diameter, the circular patio with circular tables and chairs, all those circles and she a line looking right at me and phalanxes of reason arrayed behind the whites, four white spearheads and two target shields. She walked directly over to me the moment she saw me. How can she be so certain? But then again it’s in her nature, obviously. It isn’t in her nature. It’s in her training. Training follows nature. But it isn’t itself natural. It’s more natural, in some ways. Her face is a pale turning field, a luminous field very pale, edged in blue, and her mouth is very precise and speaking over very white, small teeth, turning this way and that, like some arresting meteorological phenomenon. She talks to me smiling purposively, and though she turns her face this way and that her eyes stay each exactly opposite mine, looking both through and into. I thought about her too much for this to be a purely innocent encounter, why was she allowed to come to me?
I let her talk. No, I talk on and on. I’m telling her about animal money. We’ve overlooked, I say, something important, that is, we’ve recently realized we were overlooking something important, a problem with our theory, and it’s this: the idea was to come up with a form of qualitative money as opposed to quantitative money, and the problem we’ve uncovered is that the quantitative aspect of money is an essential quality of money. We don’t want to pull a boner and end up making qualities into quantities, like this many beautys and that many winterisms. She wants me to explain what I mean by the quantitative being a quality. That just means that it’s in the nature of money to give off this quasi-toxic quality of “wealth” when the quantity is great and this other quasi-toxic quality of “poverty” when it’s in short supply. Those are relative conditions, she says. I know, I say, but then they aren’t. You see? Precisely because wealth and poverty are qualities of “more than enough” and “not enough.” But wealthy people never have enough, she says, and her spectacles flash just at that moment. Sure, but they want more than enough. More is quantitative, she says. No, that is, yes. It is the quality of quantitative surplus. Wealth is distinct from the quantity of money even if it is a function of it, and the principle of wealth is extravagance inefficiency and waste, ac
cording to current practices. Wealth is the idea of money released from quantity; it’s like the idea of infinite space understood, misunderstood as the idea of an infinite amount of a quantity of space. You’re suggesting you can conceive of a kind of money that is not an accumulation of quantities but unique values? she asks. We are working on such a concept, I tell her.
We walk together through the garden. She explains her economic research to me. She does not explain anything to me, that is, she speaks very little of herself and what she does explain I find it difficult to follow. In time, we kiss under the arbor. That was when the picture was taken. The attention she was paying me was ferocious. I was alarmed by it. I wasn’t alarmed by it at all, I was impressed. She was not interested in fooling around. We made love seriously the night before she had to leave. The night before that night. She was impatient and very active, I was surprised, I was only present at her sexhaving. I never lose count, she said. She dressed and left. I start and she floats in landscapes of dense dark green vegetation and generous, curving country roads. She wants to get off at the columns. The gaslight ice cream palaces look like they were carved out of light, seeming cool as cakes utterly unaffected by the wet heat like ghosts, a single lamp creates a room through a spacious single paned window, the gaslight jets there in its hollow coffin shaped gem, listening absently to the African music of the frogs.
*
Eugenio Urtruvel models himself on the grand old journalistic gadfly and omnicritic and is getting to be more convincing at it all the time. He makes his name as a brash leftist contrarian; he latches on to Fanon and in no time he’s leaving little caustic deposits of ersatz Fanoniste controversy all over the place. Today he will write it strychnine, and next week cyanide, arsenic, brown recluse, or, when he’s really firing on all cylinders, sizzling cocktail of all of them. The waistband is a big one but he manages to fill it with the coordinates of his literary caricature painstakingly plotted, little cigars, cheap whiskey, a shapeless sweater whose color no two people called by the same name, hair like this, contacts instead of glasses, and so on. Soon the powerful of the earth would quake, a little, whenever his name slithered into their ears. But some people have the right kind of radar and note from the very beginning a fairly patent careerism steering his wheel, and when it comes down to the real test, that is, of solidarity with the losers, he becomes a stagecraft avenger and very phoney. He wants to be vindicated with the underdogs without ever being under too much himself.
His ambition is nothing rare or special. He has talent, but how effective a use does he put it to? He’ll never know how far his talent alone might have taken him, because something else intervened in his case. A few years ago, swimming in the sea, he’d been stung by a sea wasp, passed out before he could be hauled out of the water, and remained unconscious for weeks. Being a reasonably vigorous alcoholic, he pulled through, but not unscathed. When he finally recovered consciousness and began to speak, there was a strange resistance and thickness in his voice. The nurse noticed something pale inside his mouth, asked to look inside, and then fainted dead away the moment she did. Evidently, in the few moments he’d spent floating unconscious in the waves, he had somehow picked up a specimen of tongue-eating sea louse, cymothoa exigua. These parasites live inside fish mouths, anchoring themselves by burying their fang-like front legs in the victim’s tongue and sucking the blood out until the tongue atrophies away to nothing. Then they grab hold of the tongue-stub and hang on, sucking blood and eating mucus, for as long as possible. At the same time, the body of the louse acts as a prosthetic tongue for the fish. Urtruvel was the first documented case of sea-louse parasitism in a human being. The louse had gone unnoticed in his mouth during his coma, and now his tongue was completely gone. After some deliberation he decided to keep the louse, since he could just manage to use it to talk. His new louse voice had an almost unbearable whirring quality, like the hum of marine intestines deep under the sea. No one could stand to look at him when he spoke—the sight was too nightmarish, too unreal; the louse was a pale, leprous thing that wriggled detestably as he formed words with it.
When he recovered enough to leave the hospital, he did an about face and began praising brutal crackdowns and mass arrests while somehow maintaining that he was on the left. He crafted cunning arguments designed to weaken opposition to violent oppression. He temporized over the use of torture when he found outright denial unpromising. Suddenly he was belching sludge on his erstwhile allies and making excuses for private parties, his former supposed enemies, all the while shellgaming his own past commitments and positions with a bewildering display of deft rearrangement and re-explanation designed to make him seem perfectly consistent. Giving up his long-vaunted independent status, he took a position with the International Organization for Standardization, run by an umbrella organization known only as the Replicate. The lords of the Replicate were so unnerved by his louse that they forbade him to speak at all, ordering him to learn sign language; at times he would wear a kerchief across his lower face bandit-style. Talking to people in the dark worked out badly—the darkness seemed to amplify the liquid squirm of the louse. Those who heard it lost all self-control and fled, stopped their ears, and many vomited. But Urtruvel kept his job on the strength of what his louse tongue could do; it was a unique qualification not to be tossed aside. And it turned out that the louse knew things. It talked in Urtruvel’s sleep, whispering the secrets of the ocean depths in icy, gelatinous words, condensed under enormous pressure and utterly black, except for the occasional glimmer of bioluminescence, of ghostly silver sea wasps with petticoat feelers and dangling intestines, penanggalans of the ocean floating through frigid, lifeless ink. They record these words in secret and pay secretaries exorbitant fees to transcribe them. The money has to be good, because that voice in a pair of headphones is loathsome enough to induce dementia. The transcripts are set aside for a rainy day in a locked binder labelled Night Whispers of a Sea Louse.
Urtruvel plunged into his work. In Nigeria, he introduced a daylight savings plan that required monthly time shifts, in some cases as many as three or four hours at once. Nobody ever knew what time it was supposed to be. Alarm clocks go off, people look blearily up from their pillows at the midnight sky in the window, shrug, and trudge miserably off to face screaming bosses who gesticulate insanely at the shop clock, which has jumped another hour in the time it took them to get to work. Within a few weeks the country is a complete shambles; streets full of staggering exhausted people collapsing helplessly to sleep. Lagos looked like a massacre, but the bodies were snoring. In Afghanistan, he presided over an initially benign plan to standardize spelling that rapidly became a malevolently abusive campaign to impose the Greek alphabet. Street and government signs in Kabul are actually all replaced with Greek versions and the city immediately snarls and bursts out in all directions like a busted watch. During the year he served as chief officer for peer review journals, not a single paper was accepted for publication. No sooner had everyone adjusted to his arbitrary demand for a single space after the period than he altered it to three spaces. Papers were returned for revision with exasperated notes—“book titles underlined, not italicized!!”—resubmitted with all underlined titles, come back “book titles italicized!! are you in fourth grade?!” ... Alphabetical order swapped out for chronological order swapped out for alphabetization by city of publication with a repetition of the citation for every city listed after the publisher swapped out again for chronological order based on the age of the author or translator or editor. Exasperated authors throw away their papers in rage and disgust. Subscriptions are cancelled and journals die for lack of material. Cackling fiendishly, his louse tongue waving its legs in sympathetic glee, Urtruvel receives the submissive petitions of mighty editors, whose superciliousness and condescension had made them dreaded men and women in their respective fields. Now they had to grovel before him—Urtruvel, with his B.A. from Fuck U., had the whip hand and he was going to starve those brie-eating bastards.
Now he has received a new promotion and is writing again, with five dossiers from a scaly hand that knocked on the metal manhole in one corner of his office, the topic being animal money, the idiocy of.
*
“Mephitioso,” Professor Budshah says, glancing at a fire truck gliding down the street.
“Rejoinder,” I reply.
The fire truck swings toward us and begins yelping and flashing its lights as it rolls up carefully onto the sidewalk. The truck stops and a single fireman emerges from behind the wheel and comes up to us, sweating in his heavy fireproof jacket and helmet.
“Are you Aughbui Budshah, Crest, Long, and Long?” he asks us, still approaching.
We uncertainly identify ourselves.
The fireman says “well” and seems to be preparing himself to say something further. He does not seem to want to meet our eyes and yet he is suppressing a grin. He takes a step forward, moving like an actor in a musical, and gives a sort of bow.
“You’re all fiiiiirrrrrrred!” he sings.
While we stand nonplussed, he produces five letters, one from each of our colleges, and distributes them amongst us. They are all genuine termination notices. The second Professor Long sighs explosively and turns away, rubbing the back of his bandaged head.
“What in hell do you mean with this?” Professor Budshah asks, sounding almost wounded.
“Those letters all came through the US embassy first.”
“The US embassy?” the first Professor Long asks, baffled.
“Who are you supposed to be?” I ask.
“I’m a fireman!” he says. “Get it? You’re all fired?”
“Letters from Shanghai and Europe come through the US embassy?” the first Professor Long asks.
“Looks that way!” the man, whose name is Oscar Rentaxuaga, badge 495—as transcribed by me from his name tag—says. “Sorry!”
He turns to go back to his truck.
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