Animal Money

by Michael Cisco

  “I felt bad,” he says at last, bashfully dropping his gaze. “About the fire truck thing. I just thought it would be funny, you know. Maybe make the news less of a blow.”

  “How did you know what the news was in the first place?” Professor Crest snaps.

  The man sucks air and his lips clap shut. He holds the breath for a fraction of a second and lets it out again, evidently biting back a response.

  “I just wanted to say,” he says, “I apologize for that. And I felt bad, and I wanted to tell you that in person, and I wanted to make amends if I could, and I know some people at the University here, and I talked it over with them, and—”

  He waves his fan of envelopes.

  “—since there’s been a lot of retirements in their economics department lately, they’re offering you all full time positions.”

  He hands us each a letter. Each contains a formal invitation to join the department of economics at the University of Archizoguayla.

  “So,” he says, compressing his lips and waving, “Hope this makes up for it all, a little ... Yeah, so, good luck again. Bye.”

  Stunned by this news, Professor Crest has taken several steps toward the wall, inadvertently clearing an escape path for Oscar; and, as he speaks, he makes his way to the door, scooping up his discarded bag, and goes.

  *

  We are well aware that our theories are badly received by some economists, but not by all, and we have not been abandoned by the IEI. In fact, we have received no instructions of any kind with respect to our ideas.

  Yes, our theories do raise hackles. They don’t. They don’t raise hackles. Or no, the hackles are raised, obviously they are, but not by our theories. The ones whose hackles are up say that they are offended by our theories, but we suspect that it is our theorizing that really disturbs them. What we say is not unimportant, but that we can and do say it at all is that of which the scandal seems actually to consist.

  With respect to our having been dismissed by our respective universities. We are very eager to address this point publicly. Extremely eager. Addressing this issue is the first thing on our list. Absolutely. Thank you. Yes. On the topic of our dismissal, we as a group have this to say:

  In her professional work, her published papers, and in her private correspondence, Assiyeh Melachalos speaks frankly about her many failures. While she is considered a physicist professionally, she found the term confining and did not consider herself anything other than a scientist, with all manner of interests the pursuit of which frequently led her to cross the imaginary dividing lines between so-called disciplines. Her research never ran counter to the axiomatic sternness of her censorious Islamic upbringing because she hadn’t had a censorious Islamic upbringing; her father had been a thoroughly secular and rationalistic Greco-Mexican man, her mother Franco-Tajik. The flat, circular lenses of her father’s perfectly clear spectacles reflected every object in his surroundings in frigid moonlit facets—which might be why Assiyeh is aroused by precision, above all by needless, perversely exaggerated precision for its own sake. Her mother was a vivacious chatterbox who loved pranks. Both were so-called biologists, and they first met at an academic conference. They both specialized in genetics: she in human, he in the rest, and together they studied the variability in difference between plant, animal, and fungal genes.

  When they decided to have a baby together, they naturally saw it as an experimental opportunity in addition to whatever personal significance the choice had for them. They relocated to Malta, to avoid legal difficulties. There, they designed Assiyeh’s genetic profile carefully, building in a variety of useful traits, eliminating certain others (such as her father’s extreme myopia and her mother’s migraines), and aligning all factors so as to maximize potential intelligence. Then an egg was fertilized in vitro and implanted into Assiyeh’s mother. Assiyeh was born fully formed an efficient eight months later, in Greece. Completely hairless, dark grey in color like a newborn rhinocerous. Her armpits were webbed as far down as the elbow; this webbing was surgically removed.

  Assiyeh matured rapidly, and, much to the satisfaction of her parents, grew hair, gradually lost her pachydermous color and acquired the coppery complexion of her father. Her earlobes, however, grew steadily and curled tightly on themselves, making her look like she was wearing earrings. In the end, they amputated these growths, and that put an end to them. She exhibited an immediate and profound interest in science. Her intellect was astounding and she seemed able to assimilate any amount of information virtually without effort. When her parents became old and sick, her botched attempts to rejuvenate them through a series of horrible operations and the imposition of a draconian regimen actually killed them.

  With her father, Athanasio, she’d tried a series of local procedures instead of an overall treatment. She pulled all his remaining teeth and replaced them with alarmingly white artificial replicas, which were too big. To get rid of his wrinkles, she performed tightening surgeries that left him looking like he’d been shrink-wrapped in his own skin; his upper lip was so stretched over those enormous teeth that he couldn’t properly close his mouth, which impeded clear articulate speech and allowed his saliva to trickle steadily down his chin. She blinded him with an operation intended to save his sight and crippled him with replacement joints that didn’t bond properly and fouled his digestion with a malfunctioning colonic implant that led to a septic infection and blood poisoning, arrested only partially by a surgically implanted filtration device that had to be flushed regularly six times a day by a huge and expensive machine. The scalp transplant was an encouraging success though, and he suffered the degrading agony of this lethal rejuvenation program sporting a thick mane of flowing, magnificent ash-blonde hair.

  She subjected her mother, Siamaa, to a protracted series of excruciating spinal injections that turned her, over the course of ten days, a scintillant blue like she had lead powder injected under the skin. She ended up looking like a hood ornament. Assiyeh maintained it was only a phase and a sign that an equally drastic overhaul of Siamaa’s health was immanent. When at last a CAT scan revealed her to be completely solid in cross section, Assiyeh could barely bring herself to call it a setback. In the end, however, she had to concede that she had orphaned herself.

  *

  The University is even more than usually deserted for this time of year, because the entire country is on tenterhooks about the current election. As of now, we are in the sixth day of deliberations over the election results, and the atmosphere throughout the country is increasingly volatile. Violence might break out at any moment, but the electoral committee continues to mull over the results.

  Given the short notice with which we were added to the faculty, the University could offer us only makeshift accommodations at first. While I am in no way aware of any reason for it, I am the only one of us to receive a situation in the building that actually houses the economics department, albeit not in the department itself. Instead, I share an unused office in the art history department with a collection of stored dropcloths, easels, pigments, and the other impedimenta of painting. The department secretary, a pert, efficient man in his fifties, takes me there on my first day and gives me the keys.

  “A bit out of the way,” he says, with an apologetic smile.

  And once we are inside—

  “So this is it,” he says, gesturing. “Desk, shelfs (he pronounced the f). All right?”

  “Yes, fine.”

  “Not mad?”

  I return his smile with hypocrisy.

  “Of course not.”

  To get to me, you have to go down a long corridor, all the way to the end, and turn with it down a narrower passage with an arched roof, unlike the flat roof of the corridor. The narrower passage has no windows and no source of light whatever apart from several absurdly weak light bulbs that hang from their cords in no order. The lights are always on, as far as I am aware, with no switch that I can find to operate them. I looked for one, I assure you. I searched the almos
t sooty walls with my bare hands, in the vain hope that I might find the switch, and that it would be a dimmer switch whose gain I could increase, so as to have something better than the feeble glow of these bulbs, cool to the touch and as useless as the lamps of giant fireflies. The passage, however, has no bends and no doors other than mine, which is at the end of it, so the voyage through the dark and the pale globules of light is sure of the right conclusion, anyway. It is certain that this passageway antedates the corridor to which it is attached.

  My office has no window either, but only a rather small skylight set deep into the high studio ceiling. During the day, such a vibrant and dense shaft of light beams through it that the rest of the office seems plunged in gloom, by contrast with the golden blaze it lets down. I have only a desk lamp, which lacks force. The desk is enormous, made of metal enamelled green, with a vulcanized rubber top. The light from the desk lamp is so feeble, it doesn’t even reach the outer edges of the desk. I have also an inadequate bookcase that I imagine was stored here because no one could conceivably make use of the thing, which is too short, too narrow, and too shallow. What books I can fit into it constantly fall to the cement floor, startling me.

  No one ever comes to see me. I suppose I am amusing myself with this description. I suppose that was my intention. Perhaps I did not succeed in amusing myself. That is not obvious.

  The others fared far worse than I, and had to accept makeshift quarters until something better could be sorted out. The majority of the faculty and administration are away for the summer, so this state of affairs will last a while longer yet. It is vitally essential that we have offices, so that we may continue our work. The idea we received en masse, but we have now each taken it up in our own way. Perhaps the result will be five different books, but I suspect one would be best, if only to begin. However I do not entirely trust the University; their offer was made so easily, so swiftly, and it was so generous. The prospect that this offer was prepared in advance is the obvious explanation. What a blunder, then, to use the same person, implausibly named “Oscar Rentaxuaga,” as the instrument! In vain I essayed to show the others how readily these incidents could be made to expose themselves for the trap they almost certainly are, designed to gather and corral the five of us at the same University, the easier to keep track of us, no doubt.

  The first Professor Long accepted immediately. Professor Aughbui hesitated. Professor Budshah did not accept until he had consulted with a great many colleagues and other persons, which left him taciturn and ill-looking. The second Professor Long accepted the offer shortly after it was made, only to retract his acceptance shortly after that. Then he accepted again shortly after that, but with the proviso that he be completely assured of his actual termination at Ottawa, which, according to him, could only be determined in person. So, he prepared to return to Canada.

  If we take the second Professor Long’s conditional agreement for acceptance, then I held out the longest. I will not describe the exchanges—I do not choose to dignify them with the term “conversations”—between myself and those persons in New York that I was able to reach. It was wasted labor. My carefully-timed telephone calls to the persons I calculated were most likely to help me did not go through. The fragmentary words and phrases barked at me over disintegrating connections were worse than any clear rejection would have been.

  I succumbed after a sleepless night of shameful histrionics. I wish I could believe that I surrendered to free myself from an embarrassing loss of emotional control. Instead, I suspect my motive was fear. It could be nothing more than pessimism behind that suspicion, but I trust pessimism. If I am not a Professor, then I am not important. To my shame, I confess I must be important. There were, and are, no alternatives. My father once told me that, to get a job, it was necessary to have a job. This is true, so, even if it is my intention to take the first, or the first good, position elsewhere on offer, I am more likely to succeed as a Professor full-time at the University of Archizoguayla than as a free lance. The others can look after themselves, of course, but, should there be any plot afoot, then my vigilance may do them some good as well.

  Now I am sitting dutifully in my office. I will say this for it: it is cool. The walls must be quite thick. Waves of heat emanate from the column of light that now stands like a tent post in the middle of the floor. The shade it creates around itself, that column, perpetually obscures the rest of the office, so that I am not able, as I was tempted to do just now, to describe it as a cube, since I do not know exactly what is the shape of this room. The wall behind me is square at the bottom, but I can not say whether it meets the ceiling at an angle or a curve, or how many corners there are here. At the moment, I have struck at an impasse in my treatment of the theme of animal money, accumulating on the long legal pad before in minute, even hand writing. I am diverting myself with the newspaper. Popular protests across Mexico to end the subsidization of private banks. The official US position is unintelligible, strobing between threats of military intervention and bland approval. The wealthy are dead set against secession. No new theaters. Nothing but far-fetched, sketchy schemes, prevaricating and dithering in Mexico, trying to buy time, hoping to see the wave crest and melt away, drafting concessions.

  To sum up: incandescent with messianic dreams, we envision a revolution at the level of money. Is it happening? Is this the effect of the experiment? Professor Budshah and the first Professor Long are skeptical. Professor Aughbui is neutral. I edge cautiously toward an affirmation. The second Professor Long thinks the relationship, while not exactly causal, is nevertheless clear and obvious. The Duelling Committee has yet to determine the outcome of the duel with Professor Delatour, and the Information Committee can not explain our coordinated terminations, although we receive assurances from them that we will be notified if any new facts are discovered in the case.

  “Not mad?”

  Did he actually ask that? Ask me that? And exactly what, I wonder, is the answer he expects? Shall I tell him that my capacity for anger is infinite? That I am angry every single day? That I have been angry for so long that I am unable to imagine not being angry? That all my emotions are only inflections of anger? Every day I am angry. When I should be sleeping, I lie awake, my anger resting on me like a hot coal I will not brush away. Shall I explain, in a casual conversation with a stranger, that anger is so firmly fixed and constant for me that it has hardened like permafrost, and that no amount of activity can ever soften me?

  If I did explain this to someone, it is reasonable to assume it would be received in the sense of an impersonal warning, but everything I do is an act of anger already. This is not “my” anger, to be “released” or in some other way exorcised from me; I tell you it is me, I am a living anger sculpture.

  *

  Of the five of us, the first Professor Long has the most pull with publishers, and she has managed to get a few university presses interested in our project. The resulting book is to be called simply Animal Money: Citation, Communication, and Power. Authorship will be attributed to the “CL Lab,” an anagram of the letters of our last names. This was a conceit of the second Professor Long, and in the interest of full disclosure I will add that I did not vote in favor of it. We still will not mention anything about experiment X13—not only to protect ourselves, but to prevent any interference, just in case it does something.

  The more rigorously technical our approach, the more obvious it becomes that we are writing an occult book. I reject this line entirely, but the idea of magic seems to be forcing itself on us, just as the original idea was to a certain degree forced on us:

  Magic potential phrases magical surroundings, currency, instruments, this being all art in any view. Citation communication and power, spells, isolation purchasing blessings, theory as nature. The religion, A, is an exclusive language for them. K are languages and, whereas money man’s talk is a speech measure with personal meaning, the sacred causes the one who enacts ritual and language necessarily to perform a ceremony. For money
, particularly money of the Only A, the money types worship. The objective A can be Magical by the truth cause that makes its respect the magician’s respect. The Western economy, the universal These, lives a life of incomprehensible difference by and in phrases, agencies, age instruments. Magic is linked of man by the difference of A and them.

  The book seems to write itself, and yet it is only now just coming into existence. Our different sections all have the same style, recognized by none of us as our own. I have begun laying the groundwork in anticipation of future allegations that we are in reality “dark economists.”

  Perhaps the chief difficulty lies in the variability in the concept of animal money as a medium of exchange. At first, it seemed to articulate itself as a form of exchange reciprocally doubling all risked values, but as we worked out the ramifications of this kind of exchange in practice, we realized—and the algorithmic models of Professor Aughbui reproduce this finding—that the it was in reality a total loss exchange system. All risked values would vanish in an exchange of animal money, and, to our great embarrassment, we found ourselves unable to provide anything better than speculations about the destiny of those values. As the first Professor Long painstakingly demonstrated, since there was nothing in the exchange that could possibly destroy values, their disappearance in the exchange had to be regarded as either an illusion of some kind, or as an escape to some unknown other place.

  With some reluctance, I had to accede to the inclusion of a theory formulated by the second Professor Long and championed, not surprisingly, by Professor Budshah. It was also supported, and this was a surprise, by a certain reading of results produced by the models of Professor Aughbui. The second Professor Long postulates that the exchange of animal money does double all risked values after all, and more, it also doubles the parties. While he was never able to present this idea clearly enough for my satisfaction, he seems to believe that there is a doubling of the roles of the participants, which idea has some plausibility in its favor at least. However, at other times he seems to be saying that spectral participants are drawn into an animal money exchange, absconding with the values to another dimension.