Animal Money

by Michael Cisco

  The break room is a vacuum whitewashed in daylight. Professor Crest staring, Professor Budshah wondering, Professor Aughbui calculating, the remaining Professor Long congratulating.

  ASSIYEH MELACHALOS—Institute of Applied Physics, Achrizoguayla University. That’s what the website says. There’s a small photo of her next to her name, white sparks for eyes, her hair-cape floating as if she were standing in a light breeze, even though the photo was plainly taken indoors, against a white wall.

  The police inspector, Liszpuertha, is a gaunt, neurasthenic-looking young man with hollow cheeks and a goatee whose arms seem to sweep the ground around him when he walks. He shakes hands with them all, his hands large soft and cool like silk cushions. When he goes to sit down, he misses, only just managing to keep from dropping down on his ass and he bursts out in a peal of laughter that doesn’t seem possible for a real police officer. He laughs like a cartoon, or a clown. His smile, as he rights himself, is sunny, and suddenly makes him seem like the rawboned village idiot type.

  Once stably seated, he explains that he has been sent to inquire further about their security, and to ask a “little few more” questions.

  Professor Crest saw it all coming. In his mind’s eye, the police officials were far more minatory and ominous, but that was all casting.

  You are police. A group of five economists come to your country for a conference. One is anomalously mugged, another is abducted, and yet another dies by violence.

  The police inspector is chatting affably with them all in turn, asking them what they think of Archizoguayla, how much of the country have they seen, how they like San Toribio, have they been to the Bolithadio (prime tourist attraction) yet, and so on.

  “Now, the interesting thing about that hotel they took you to,” he says to Professor Aughbui, “is that day they were spraying some of the rooms for insects, so they were not taking guests. Just that day. Isn’t that something? Did you know? Any other day, there would have been so many more customers, and maids, and other employees, but on that one day, no one, just a man at the front desk, and the exterminators. The men who abducted you, Professor, did not succeed, which means they were not lucky enough to find an empty hotel by chance, so they must have known the hotel would have been empty. That ties them to the hotel, even if there are no witnesses. The desk clerk did not recognize you, Professor, but did you know that one of the hotel maids has a foreign boyfriend named Kovak? He hasn’t turned up yet. It’s funny—well, it’s not funny, I mean it’s strange, that you, Professor (turning to Professor Crest) should be attacked in the street when you were, that is, before you had this idea you have all been working on. It’s just too peculiar a coincidence, if it was unrelated, but if it is related, what were they thinking? How can they warn you away from an idea you haven’t had yet?

  “We have been in touch with Canadian police, and they have been kind enough to give us some of the details they found out about your friend’s death. They say that his house was locked, that nothing seemed to be disturbed or missing, there was no note, there were only his fingerprints on the gun, which was his own and only fired the one time, no one heard the shot, which, as the coroner says, would have been fired in the middle of the afternoon, when, apparently, nearly everyone in the neighborhood would have been away. It does seem like he committed suicide. However, while he had recently lost his position at the University there, he had already been offered a new position here, which would have made his continued work with you possible, and it seems that this was what he wanted to do. He had a new project, this project of yours, to work on, and with such a project there always comes a sense of purpose and improved morale that is not consistent with suicidal despair. While he was, perhaps, slightly irregular, mentally, there is no record of hospitalization or of any extreme or violent behavior. None of his neighbors, I would like to add, even knew about the pistol. My department is taking this case very seriously, and we have referred our reports up ... upwards? To the federal authorities, because of the possibility of foreign involvement or interference. In the meantime, that is, as we continue to look at the information, please do not leave, and we offer you protection—”

  Here he makes a gesture with the back of his right hand, raising it and turning the reverse of the fingers toward us in an arching motion.

  “—if you feel you require it, which you may ask for by calling the number there, on my card.”

  *

  Professor Budshah is sitting in the library after hours again. The doors have just been closed and locked, and the staff are already mostly gone. There may be a custodian somewhere, but as a rule the tidying up is done in the mornings, before the doors open for the day. From his chair, he can see out through the glass wall to the distant mountains and the setting sun beyond. Facing him is himself, a phantom in the glass, looking up nearly through his eyebrows, bent over the desk, illuminated by the desk lamp. He realizes that, for some time now, he has only been looking at the words, not reading them. He puts a marker in the book and closes it, then sits up, rubbing his stiff neck. He gets up and makes his way to the water fountain, has a drink, then into the dark bathroom. He snaps on the light and the fluorescents scatter the dark. There’s his reflection, more solid than before, looking like something he’s typing on a screen. He washes his hands before visiting the urinal and then again afterwards, feeling solid and well-bred in his fastidiousness. When he’s finished drying his hands, he throws the paper towels into the trash and stands there, gazing at nothing in particular. A portentous feeling is coming over him. He is in the presence of an idea. Sometimes, when the mind is too tired to sustain its cachinnation, the system sloughs its glamor and the gold turns out to be straw, not by the true sunlight but under lifeless fluorescents. Just bullshit after all. He knows this will pass, anticipating other moments of compensatory enthusiasm. But just now it is possible to have an idea along other lines, an idea that brings its own lines with it. If you can annex that idea as it comes up, you often wind up with a real find.

  It doesn’t happen. Instead, he gets a trickle of admonitory wind blowing through the jungle gym of the system. Feeling like Dickens’ Signal-Man, Professor Budshah hurries to the computer that they leave on for him and sends a series of messages; everyone reports back OK within fifteen minutes. Professor Aughbui has just received his report back with the latest batch of suggested revisions, most of which involve reverting to draft sixteen. Someone like Warren is both perfect and perfectly wrong for this kind of back and forth; he can keep track of everything and do exactly as he is told, which is exactly why there is always more to do. He forgets nothing, which is why they, the editors, can’t forget anything either. Affection billows through him for a moment, a flash of Professor Aughbui working diligently away with pen and paper, although of course he would be using a computer. The good old scholarly type; unworldly, altruistic, conscientious, hapless. He shouldn’t think of him that way, he thinks, it’s condescending. He is back at his own desk and sitting down again, no, it’s not really respectful. He shouldn’t like to be thought of that way himself.

  Professor Budshah looks down at the book in front of him. He picks it up, and becomes suddenly aware of his dim likeness reflected in the cellophane wrapper. The outline warps as it travels to and fro, which he can make it do by tilting the book. A wobbling greyish funhouse silhouette of himself. It acts like a time lapse film of a cloud, a raincloud, in a uniform red sky with black characters, and a splash of moonlight—the chill fluorescent glow of the desk lamp reflected there too. So he’s like Chernobog or some other titan dark figure stretched out against a Stygian sky, the roof of hell, which has daisies growing out the reverse side, the earthside, which is green in cardinal opposition to that red hellroof dotted with the cindery remains of imperfectly burned hell money, so animal money should remain green being the antidote of hell money. Then it should be heaven money, the blue and white of the blue-white hellparadise, a familiar-sounding phrase that crosses his mind in English, and which he
is sure he has never before encountered.

  You try to pin something down, but it eludes you like a bar of soap, or it goes in circles. When you pin something down, it’s dead, because that’s all it is permitted now, and not dead with the nurturing decay of the Teeming. It’s the slipping and sliding out and away that shows you something is still alive; you can feel its life there in the evasion, which is a kind of resistance, like an animal wriggling in your grasp, jump back into the water or the shrubbery or the sky, whatever ambivalent element it lives in, jump back and melt back into the throng and the mass and the motion and away from the haunted, eerily beautiful morgue world of your terrible mind. So you have to listen. Yes, but if your way of listening is just another form of saying, then ...?

  Suddenly a darkness that moves from right to left blankets his mind. Inside it, the late Professor Long slumps in his chair, the diffuse, venetian-blinded haze of the blurred room behind him. There’s something moving above the head; smoke still trickles from the blackened puncture in the temple. The lips have stiffened in a vacant smile and the dim face, wan light falling around it, is composed in a dreamy, half-listening expression. He is singing to Professor Budshah. The voice high and thin, a falsetto, forming a few short words then a drawn-out one, phrase after phrase. The long, sweet, crooning notes are unbearable, coming from this grinning corpse.

  Professor Budshah is on his feet. The chair he was sitting in a moment ago lies on the floor behind him. He’s panting. Sweat bursts painfully across swaths of his skin. He can feel his throat pulsing against his collar, and he swallows with difficulty. Absently, staring all around him, he turns to right his chair, but stops in an awkward half-bow, his arm extended. It’s as if he were thrusting his face down into a suffocating mass of stale air that had collected somehow on the floor, a heavy gas that sinks like smoke. It fills his lungs thickly, almost like water. He rears back and exhales with an inward shove, then gasps. This air is better, but not much. The books have sucked up all the oxygen like sponges, and the library is hermetically sealed. Professor Budshah hastens to an exit door he sometimes uses—he props it open, which is against the rules, with a little stone. The door would lock behind him otherwise. Now he doesn’t care if he’s locked out. The idea that he can find someone to open the place for him again if he needs to flits through is mind, but he imagines the library, the entire floorplan, like a gigantic killing jar charged to bursting with smothering dead air and he doesn’t want to get back in he needs to get out. He flings open the exit door and rushes out under the stars, unselfconsciously opening his mouth to take in huge draughts of fresh air. A leaden torrent of inert staleness gushes out behind him in a subsiding pyramid and the door snaps shut; no knob, no latch on this side. Just a keyhole.

  Professor Budshah doesn’t care. He walks a few steps now in one direction, now in another, hands on his kidneys, head back, collar loosened, just breathing. His panic ebbs. He looks at his wristwatch—nearly eleven. He thinks about what has just happened to him, and touches his head gingerly at the right temple, wondering if he’s losing his mind. Looking up again a moment later, the night around him seems vacuous and boundless, seeming at once empty and expectant, a grave before the burial. The fear stirs and flows again, lifting up past his diaphragm. Without hearing or seeing anything but what is there around him, he nevertheless knows that the second Professor Long still sings in his chair, smiling vacantly as wisps of smoke from his own violated brain trickle up through his hair and splash against the white ceiling so far overhead. The campus is under a spell. It looks like a collection of gigantic photographic flats, propped up with fiendish deceptiveness to block the blackness beyond them from sight. So the blackness can keep stealing.

  His sense of safety is on a fast crumble. Professor Budshah knows he is completely alone and that anything can happen to him because no one is there to see it. The campus is haunted by colossal slabs of crystallized darkness and formless shadows. He knows he’s being foolish and the thought only increases his anxiety, because it means he’s losing self-control. Professor Budshah sets out for one of several different locations, not yet deciding on which one but most of them are in the same direction, where he could expect to find other people, and he needs to move. He gets halfway to the student union before he remembers that it will of course be closed, then thinks he might be better off heading back to the library. The thought of that suffocating air instead sends him in the direction of the campus security office, which is where he ought to have gone in the first place, but instead he turns from that path when he sees the wide boulevard bordering the campus on the south side, and the lights of the battered trolley car rolling toward the stop. He runs. Some passengers call mock encouragement to him as he hurries up to the wrong side of the car and then recklessly dashes around the front. He mounts the steps. The heavy train operator smiles bemusedly at him. Professor Budshah fumbles for change. Luckily, he has his wallet and coins on him; this is not really lucky—but it’s promising somehow, as though an antagonist missed an easy chance to hinder him. The money looks like magic talismans. The driver merrily drops the fare into his change drawer and hauls the heavy steel lever around. The doors close and, with a clanging of the bell, the trolley groans forward down the tracks, clashing and rattling. All the seats are full, and there are people standing in the front. Professor Budshah makes his way through them to an open space at the rear of the car, where the open windows let in more of that fresh air. A few passengers turn their heads to study him a moment.

  The trolley rolls the length of the botanical gardens, heading into the center of San Toribio. Professor Budshah can’t manage to gather his thoughts; his impressions jostle too loudly and too brightly, the contrast of this well lit car and the dark campus falling away into the night like a deadly planet. The trolley is like a room on rails, accompanied on either side by luminous rhomboids of light on the street, some adorned with foggy human silhouettes that make him think randomly of the indistinct skulls and eyes on the wings and bodies of certain species of insects. The night outside is too deep and spacious. It wobbles. It rolls around the trolley car crazily. The trolley car seems to be flying through space, a box of light, the jovial voice of the huge tram operator shouting out the stops, the names of planets and moons, the less familiar names therefore belonging to comets, asteroids, curds of dark matter. Am I getting away? he asks himself. The image in his mind was just like the photographs and it’s nothing at all like the photographs. Most of the passengers are staying on board, and many of them are carrying large square objects. Like a single strand of cobweb, there’s a thread attached to him that is being followed. He needs to brush it off, break it. Go downtown and plunge into a crowd. He won’t be touched in front of witnesses. Those sorts of things don’t happen. Actually, nothing like this happens; this is already something that doesn’t happen, it’s all in his mind. The tram shudderingly goes over a crossing and then veers to the right with an alarmingly stiff jerking. As they turn, he glances off to the left and there is something there.

  It was outside the trolley. A flash of movement, or perhaps it really was a flash, like the glint of the trolley lights on a knife out there in the dark, just the instant before it was concealed again, taken out for a moment for sheer eagerness, but then hidden once more.

  It’s real, he thinks. The trolley now seeming very large around him, a great deal of space around him and even more outside. This is it, this is really it, this really is it, a fact, and plain. Any moment now. Little lights of all colors sail by in shoals, dart away into the blackness, and golden windows hang in the racing mid-darkness showing calm lamps lighting tranquil rooms.

  Drab city blocks sweep alongside the car, brick houses, wide intersections with concrete office blocks, all steeping in the rancid urine of sodium lights. Then the wide boulevard lined with cafes and other night spots. End of the line. No passengers.

  He emerges in packed streets filled with shouting people. The big square objects—placards. It’s a rally or a
protest. The elections. Have the run-offs happened already? No, soon, but not yet. An amplified voice comes leaping from wall to wall towards him from some square nearby. The streets here are narrow, for the most part, and lined with three and four storey buildings. He has to swim through the crowd without stopping—a man can get knifed in a crowd, it happens all the time. The people around him are Incienzoa supporters, to judge by their buttons, their banners, their sashes. Their heat turns the street into a cauldron. Hands lifted, point, clench, shake, wipe the face, grip the sign, wave, reach, knead the air, stir and paddle it. Here the two sides nearly meet, across a trench of bare pavement barred with sawhorses. The supporters of the AUP are bellowing across the gap at the Incienzoans, and vice versa. Like stones in a stream—in this case, a stream flowing in opposite directions at once—officers of the San Toribio police stand in the gap, strained amiability on their faces. Back and forth, up and down, they walk with affected casualness, hands on their hips or arms folded, smoking, whistling, but not chatting, and throwing glances now this way and now that. One of them remains stationary; Professor Budshah suspects he is in charge, a large man in a green police tunic, hands on hips, smoking, one of his two legs rocks back and forth inside his slacks.

  Someone tries to vault the sawhorses on this side and at once the standing man has his baton out, using it to gesture to the nearest cop. The would-be vaulter is driven back with weird, grimacing smiles on the faces of the police, while the man in charge is turning his attention to the AUP side, making sure they stay in place.

  If the elections don’t work out, the country will explode. That is completely clear. The military will restore order, and then what?

  Professor Budshah spends the night walking, stopping from time to time for coffee, reading a newspaper. What happened to him has lost none of its sickening reality, but, while his fear for himself has not diminished, thinking about the fate of Archizoguayla has put the idea of his jeopardy into a bigger picture. His point of view has opened around the fear. The next morning he wearily rides back to campus on the trolley, nodding off and missing his stop. He has to walk back. The library is open and no different inside than ever. A number of dorm rooms show stoved-in locks on the hallway upstairs and it’s in answer to his questions that the custodian tells him about the break-in around eleven-thirty last night, some dorm room doors forced, nothing taken, but a computer was smashed; he doesn’t ask which computer.