“Go on, our instrument,” says a voice coming from him.
She jerks away from him staring. His eyes are rolled back, his body rigid with his hands on his knees and a mouth full of luminous chrome slaver.
“Financial imbalances volatile capital flows and language unknown to the person automatic and orderly exchange rates that can have deleterious effects for economically possessed the revelation of the future or of the actor and floating in the possessed—”
He swallows and draws in a fresh breath through his teeth. She can hear the mucus harp in his lungs ring with the sound.
“There are four principal signs belonging to the mechanism for resolving the buildup as regards the presence of Devils in events happening far away in Izalu Imef including the exhibition of rapid unabated accumulation of international reserves concentrated in these signs speaking or understanding of strength beyond the years and natural effects and related to the above by which it can be undoubtedly recognised.”
The words rattle out of him, jerking his whole body, as if someone were drumming on his back with both fists. In the window of the University book shop she can see the dim figure of a man leaning around the corner watching them and she looks in his direction in time to see the face and glittering eyes withdraw again behind the wall. Sun stops talking, drawing in another musically wheezing breath, suddenly drops the battery and snatches a small notebook from the breast pocket of his shirt. He folds in half, pressing the notebook to the seat of the bench and filling pages with a pencil stub. The remaining Professor Long sits looking down at the crown of his head, too shocked to move. After a moment, her gaze flicks to the battery lying on the ground and now dimpled with the impress of Sun’s knuckle.
Sun emits an appalling whine as he writes, slurping and gulping as if he were lapping water messily from a bowl on the floor. Suddenly he jumps up with a cry of fright and alarm, throwing the notebook at her so that it strikes her chest and bounces to the ground. His face seems more or less as it had been when he first approached her—now he backs away from her.
“Sun,” she says.
He shakes his head.
“You’ve had some ... You should ... see a doctor. Do you want me to ...?”
Sun is staring at her, horrified. He shakes his head and then staggers rapidly away. The remaining Professor Long picks up the notebook and, when she looks up again, he’s already gone. There is no sign of the figure she saw reflected, either. She doesn’t know Sun’s number.
She finds another place to sit and looks at the notebook.
“Addressing these problems did not turn out signs. Let’s see whether we can build up financial horrible convulsions by any exterior signs. The flow of capital among Managing Directors still not entirely clear. It also lends to crisis, financing on affordable terms. Effectively managing their institutions, and designing appropriate macroeconomic monetary systems ensures exchange of the Superior who automatically yielded his name. The oil shocks exchange rates that can have beginning of all these troubles it was from hatred. Well-known weaknesses, including giving these girls another exorcist. He attacked and released seven, hindering trade. After the system got in, he was violently shaken by his payments. The current credit crisis and exhibition of strength of the economic demon who had been exorcised by the ritual eight times; but these after another. Once obeying the order broadly based on their rate stability, spoke through her mouth, adding, ‘But you won’t.’ Manifested neither in words nor from the earth, the body helps countries governing food and oil price central planning. The demons used official paper, and threw him out, and were horrible on her face.
“It keeps track and three other Deputy Managers come to the person possessed; the revelation threatens him once, in paying for imports and floating in the International Monetary System—the set of invisible persons and that Demon repeated commands aloud, so great by day and night, of the Executive Board. These signs help countries deal with the adversary; he has a stability by rebuilding their international loans to countries. That demon took up his position around the corner, oversees the international supporting institutions that facilitate international air for a few moments. A language disappeared and attacked, made concessional loans to civil society, and the media, and the demons, who provided them with macroeconomic rebalancing of demand growth, surveillance and secret thoughts, which were grinning impostors.
“Oil shocks, events happening far away; they stopped his voice. Fixed exchange rate collapses alerting them to risks on possessed. There are four principal demons. Forced to manifest himself, the demon gave them think tanks, essential for divine service and unabated accumulation of international reserves, the space of a second interior, borne to earth. Through its economic surveillance, monetary system monitors him save by magic his depositions to low-income countries to help an inward order charged with overseeing the international ...”
*
Explosions in Spain, turmoil in the US. Professor Aughbui can’t seem to catch a break. His report to the Integrity Committee has come back marked R&R—revise and resubmit. Yellow notes stick out from the report’s many pages like sunflower petals, covered in mainly illegible editorial notes in indignant blue ball point pen. The International Economic Citation Standardization Association is the self-appointed professional body that curates the proprietary format for scholarly publications in economics; this information is only available through a costly subscription to their service, which is made necessary by their own incessant tinkering with the rules. A paper submitted to a journal in meticulous adherence to IECSA’s minutest requirements will be sent back marked R&R since even the mere interval of fifteen minutes is all the time it takes for those requirements to become obsolete. Membership in the IECSA is, naturally, a closely-guarded secret. Some disgruntled scholars have alleged that the whole thing is a racket and that the formatting guidelines—which are so copious that, printed out in full, they fill more volumes than an encyclopedia—are inconsistent gobbledigook concocted at random by a computer.
“ONE SPACE ONLY after periods!!” screams one of the notes.
Professor Aughbui consults his style guide, last updated an hour ago.
“Periods shall be followed by two spaces.”
“It has always been ONE SPACE!!” screams an editor shrilly, her face turning purple with bursting blood vessels.
“It has always been TWO SPACES!!” screams an editor shrilly, his face turning purple ...
Back and forth it goes, like hemlines, and everyone can see it going back and forth, like a crowd at a tennis match, from one version of what it always was and you’re an idiot for not knowing that to another version of what it always was and you’re an idiot for not knowing that.
“The author is obviously very conversant with the materials ...” That’s one referee.
“The author shows only a limited grasp of the subject ...” That’s the other.
“The report lacks focus ...”
“The writer, and the essay, would benefit by broadening the discussion ...”
Urtruvel pauses for a swig of coffee and his louse flinches—still too hot.
Professor Aughbui laboriously and conscientiously revises his report and resubmits it. It comes back to him by return mail the same day sporting a brand new mane of furious yellow notes. Professor Aughbui has, with his usual punctilious orderliness, kept all the prior notes and marked them with indices, so he is able to cross reference them with the new ones, all of which reliably contradict the former ones. So he pulls up the version he first submitted, which he did not delete, and submits that again, adding only the subscript “second revision.”
When he gets up for breakfast the next morning, the report is already sitting there waiting for him, once again resplendently arrayed in pale yellow scales adorned with arabesques of cheap blue ink. Professor Aughbui sits down to begin the task of the third revision. All this has kept him so busy that he’s been neglecting Smilebot, who has consequently begun assembling a smaller rob
otic companion for itself, named Boringbot.
Professor Aughbui is an oblivious castaway on an island of paperwork in the middle of an ocean of exploding lava. Smilebot watches it on the news. Professor Aughbui’s report, which has now swelled to three binders full, is posted and returned regularly by special courier, a very tan young woman in a white t-shirt with an IC badge pinned to it, who comes and goes on a battery-operated motorscooter.
Nearly half the world is unemployed or underemployed, rent ever higher, government budgets whittled down to the bone now they’re paring away the bone and drilling into the screaming marrow. No more services; governments exist to maintain police and military. As that other voice is tearing itself from Sun Mu-Kai’s throat, paralyzing the remaining Professor Long with fear, a bomb goes off in the lobby of a bank in Barcelona. The bank was closed, as it was the middle of the night, but a passerby was injured by the blast. The police descend heavily but there is no evidence; there are no leads. Two more bombings in two different cities. Protests in front of banks and government offices balloon in size and the inrushing tide of people dashes them against the security cordons and through; banks are raided, computers smashed, tills emptied. States of emergency, martial law. Everyone is waiting to see if a coalition can be put together while governments, media, religious authorities, swivel between conciliatory promises and sermons about social order. Everybody watches their neighbor with alarm. Professor Aughbui keeps sending his parcel off, then sits down quietly to wait for the next batch of meaningless adjustments.
*
The glass is soundproof I guess—my cries for help sure didn’t get through that fucking glass. I head down the hall fast to where I know the door is and that leads down a hall with lockers to a room with a ladder and a hatch you take up to the catwalk that the tenders use to move to and fro between the exhibits. Nobody up here. I see the bastard right away and he sees me, recognizes me in an instant, and for a moment I nearly short circuit with that ape stink dragging me down and back. He rears up inquisitively on his hind legs and I shoot him. He just stands there; now he touches his body, looks at the blood all over his hand. He turns aside, leans against the fake rock with one hand to his chest, and his head droops. He tries to swing his head up, and slumps down onto his left side. He doesn’t react when another one pokes his head out further up the slope. I shoot him, too. I see a spray of something dark on the rock wall behind as the head drops back. Alarmed by the shots, and now I guess some doors have been flung open and left that way so now the sound of the alarm is audible in the enclosures, a female comes scooting along from the shrubs down by one of those fucking windows, heading for the rocks which she knows will cover her and the infant chimp she clutches to her gnarly bosom better than the bushes. I shoot them, too. She veers and then leaps, bounding clumsily up a bare rock slope in sheer panic. She gets up the slope to the top with frantic effort but she drops the baby and it slides down the rough surface. Half its head is gone. The mother drops down behind cover, raising hell, screeching and hooting. The first one is still lying there. I experience pure piping hot wellbeing.
Didn’t think you’d be seeing me again, did you you bastards?!
My insides start to tremble and I can hear my breath in my nostrils like incipient, hysterical laughter, my eyes swelling as if they were about to shoot tears out, my arms and legs are weightless, light, tingling, how many superreal bullets left?
I glimpse another one, trying to skulk off to cover along the little drainage moat there by the windows. I nail him in the back and ding another shot into the window, knocking a neat white hole in it. The chimp bounds forward with incredible speed, yowling, then blunders over a root or something and goes sprawling and tumbling through a bush and out into plain view. I fire at him and keep firing until the gun is empty. He gets up and stretches to his full height, lifting his huge, ungainly arms, staggers ridiculously in no particular direction, his face a drunkard’s blank who me? look—then splat forward onto his face and skids to a halt, arms splayed.
I head back down the way I came. If anyone comes up on me I’ll pick him up with one hand and throw him over the side, kick in his face if he comes up the ladder. No one in the hall, the fire alarm is still going, I have the bizarre feeling no time at all has passed, that it’s been only a few seconds, maybe I haven’t even started yet and everything that just happened was all just ultra vivid expectation. I hurry down the hall, not really caring anymore if anyone sees me, if I get caught, I killed them and they know it. Some people in white coats are calling to each other, where’s the fire, I don’t know, who pulled the alarm, would someone turn that fucking alarm off, who’s checking the enclosures—? I’m batting my way through the curtains and out the door. A landscaper sees me. I keep moving, don’t answer, don’t listen, don’t respond, you’re running in a panic from a fire, that’s all. Get away, ditch the pistol down a storm drain, in a sewer, feed it to a shark.
—Signed SuperAesop
*
The break room is at one end of the building; the outer wall is a concrete web, a solid vane about two feet off the ground, square windows to the floor below it, rectangular windows to the ceiling above it, and tinted. Through it, they can see the path running by just outside, the planters with oddly de-colored daylight shining greasily on tropical foliage, an asphalt road and the pebbly grey concrete bunker of the main library on the other side. Palm trees and huge fronded plants, jungle dishevelment.
Sun Mu-Kai is not answering his phone or his front door. Nobody has seen him.
What is that voice?
“He sounded like a demon,” the remaining Professor Long says.
Professor Budshah sits with his hands lying limp in his lap, dejected, and Professor Crest stands. Professor Aughbui is perusing the notebook, which has not left his hands for more than an hour.
“It is—” Professor Crest says. Nothing follows.
Professor Budshah speaks after a few moments more, without looking up.
“We are being pursued. Some form of mental tampering is following us,” he says. “We are being transformed, will-I nil-I, into ‘dark economists.’”
“Are you serious?” the remaining Professor Long asks.
“... No,” he sighs. “No, I suppose not. The worst thing about this, just at the moment, is that I don’t know what I think. I don’t believe our theory to be no more than a mad ramble.”
“It is not,” Professor Crest says firmly, drawing strength from his rejection of the idea. “There were numerous witnesses who can attest to our having been in no special mental state at the time we first began to discuss it. In back of all these bizarre episodes there is a patently obvious intention to discredit us.”
Assiyeh’s head flashes by in the lower pane of the rightmost window, hair flying. Professor Crest’s cup crashes to the floor and Professor Budshah stands reflexively, his knees tipping over the table laden with books which falls to the floor with a clatter, Professor Aughbui lifts from his seat on the sofa and twists his body around and the remaining Professor Long looks from Professor Crest to Professor Aughbui, then turns to the door. Professor Budshah is already in the doorway, whipping around it and down the hall in one fluid swing. The remaining Professor Long stays where she is with a very faint grin of surprise on her face as Professor Crest advances to the window and flattens his palm against it. Like two pupils in big square eyes they look down at Assiyeh striding down the center of the concrete pathway bisecting the campus.
With his weird dancer-like precision of movement Professor Crest turns incredulously to the room, speaking as it happens to Professor Aughbui, who is closer to him.
“But we invented her!” he cries, already a thread of outrage taking form in his astonishment. “... We did! We definitely did!”
Professor Aughbui looks at Professor Crest and answers him by a convulsive flicker of his lips, which are slightly open.
Professor Budshah is catching up to her. She is at once too small and too big, and with each ste
p she takes her little feet shake the earth, as if her body were made of superconcentrated matter.
“Excuse me ...”
His voice is a weird bleat. He clears his throat.
“Excuse me, Professor?”
She stops and turns her waist to look at him.
“Well?” she asks.
Now what?
“My apologies. I have mistaken you for someone else,” he says. “The Surfeit is One.”
She does not reply, unless that slight upward inclination of the head, and the lowering of her eyelids, constituted one; she untwists her waist and resumes walking just as before, erasing their brief, aborted encounter, but was he going to ask her to stop, to stop, because she’s pounding the earth apart with her footsteps? Why? Because you are the invention of a recently-deceased friend of mine. And would you mind explaining where you really came from and how, and if you climbed out of a certain bullet hole?
“It is her,” he says, coming back into the break room.
“I refuse to believe it,” Professor Crest snaps blankly.
Professor Budshah looks thoughtful. He puts both hands on his kidneys and stares at the floor. The remaining Professor Long says, “I believe it.”
They all glance at her. As she adds nothing more, their eyes drift to neutral territories again.
“What is this shit?” Professor Aughbui wonders.
“All right so it is her,” Professor Crest says, very put-upon. “It is likely her. The late Professor Long did not invent her, he met her. Perhaps he forgot he did. He mixed memory up with imagination.”
These plausible words don’t seem to be convincing even to him. He looks out the window again, starting almost imperceptibly when his eyes perversely hit on her retreating, now very small figure, right away, rubbing it in, that seeing what he expects to see, which ought to give it a greater air of fantasy, is actually the perfect negation of fantasy just now.
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