Animal Money

by Michael Cisco

  Now I see, I still see, because the pipes, the elemental pipes are still running through me, too. I don’t have to be corporeally present for that. That’s my connection to them, and why I am still directly aware of the elemental, I am still spavined in its jungle gym frame of vibrating tubes. I’m not spavined, I’m caught, that’s all. Or I have caught.

  The second time I was homeless I was delivering pizzas for gas money and leftovers. I lived and breathed pizza filling the shower with phosphorescent orange grease, drive all day playing the same three damaged hardcore tapes and tracing and retracing those streets I can draw a map in my sleep of that town, and it is to that job I owe the presence of all those hideous street names like “Suel Avenue.” I spent every second of my life driving to and fro on Suel Avenue, so that the name started to crash against my ears whenever I heard it, like saying the name of God. I’d go into convulsions if I ever had to drive down Suel Avenue again.

  Number four will you be able to in a safe manner carry out all job assignments associated with this position? Despite my answers they hired me and the first week I get dispatched about fifteen minutes before the end of my shift to a motel less than five minutes away. I don’t realize right off that a room number starting with two would be on the second level so I’m wandering up and down in dark rain looking for 215 when I see a woman disappearing into an end room on the ground floor, between two men. I peek in through the blinds in time to see them stuffing her in the closet. There are just the same two men: a doughy white man with a moustache and another one who looks like James Bond. I pull back and two seconds later the blinds snap shut. I hear the door squeal abruptly and there’s a shadow on it that startles me, so I drop back and get the ice and soda machines between us. I hear the door shut. Then a car door. The engine goes and I see the car roll by, moustache man winding up the wheel.

  James whips the door open at my knock. He has an impatient look on his face. I think he must have been expecting the other man.

  “Got your pizza!”

  “Wrong room,” he says, swinging the door to.

  “You don’t want it?” I ask, opening the box and showing it to him.

  “No I don’t want it,” he says.

  “It’s real hot,” I say ramming it into his face and knocking him down and rushing in and half falling on top of him. He’s flailing out and yelling, muffled by the pizza. I am on the other side of him when he tears his face out of the cheese and I kick him as often as I can. I grab a chair and try to hit him with it and it drops too early and falls on him. He’s swearing and groping. I dive across the twin bed, get up, open the closet, pick the woman up off the floor, lose my balance, pivot, drop her on the bed, she starts kicking wildly and there’s a sweatshirt over her head. I fall on my ass, get up, whip off the sweatshirt so she can see what’s going on and stop kicking me hopefully, then I dive again across the beds pick up a lamp and throw it and the cord yanks it back so it hits me instead and I trip onto the second bed take up two fistfulls of top blanket and throw the whole thing over James who’s pawing at his eyes. Anyway, I carry the woman out, nearly falling as my feet plunge into the mattress then down the other side with a heavier jolt than I was ready for so my knees buckle but I don’t go down, only slouch-scoot out the door and dash for my shitty hatchback in time to hear someone yell. I reach the car open the door throw her in the passenger seat shut the door get around to the driver’s side get in start the car the passenger door opens we’re in reverse by accident and the open door of shitty hatchback clotheslines the man with the moustache as he’s trying to drag the woman out again and she’s staring at him with crazy eyes and kicking at him. I race shitty hatchback out of the motel and as we hit the speedbump she nearly flops out of the car. Jumping into traffic four minutes later I reflect that killing the pizza light would be a good idea, and I start yanking the cable. It won’t come loose. As a black man with a tied-up woman crying in his car I would prefer not to be stopped. I don’t remember what kind of car they were driving and cars all look the same to me anyway so everybody might as well be following me.

  “Who are you? Who are you?”

  That’s my voice so I don’t have to answer. I keep asking because something has me all wound up, and she keeps crying.

  “Are you all right?”

  “My hands ...”

  I pull into a parking spot in a strip mall.

  “I’ll get your hands,” I say.

  They’re bound with a white plastic tie and they’re turning purple. I have a pocket knife and after some sawing and fussing I manage to get her hands loose and they spring forward. She cries out and begins chafing her wrists. Now she sits up in the chair and looks at me.

  “Let me go.”

  “I saw them hauling you in there, so ...”

  I shrugged.

  She’s nonplussed, so I take this opportunity to get out and haul on the cable with both hands. The light goes out finally. Then I get back in and ease the car out of the spot, turning tail to the street and then going along the other row of shops to the side exit.

  “Where should I take you?”

  She names a hotel downtown.

  “I’ll have to get gas.”

  Her name is Carolina Duende. She’s an investigative reporter from La Censura. The two men grabbed her, etc.

  “You think they were trying to shut you up?”

  “Yes,” she says seriously.

  She’s been working on a story, following up leads that others have tried and failed to trace. Here’s her story:

  It’s nearing midnight at the Universidad Achrizoguela zoo. The economics conference is in full swing. Intermittent flashlight beams slice the darkness as six silhouettes, one of which only stands as high as the others’ knees, break into the biology lab. Their heads are enormous, smooth, misshapen, their black ski masks drawn down over bandages and therapeutic appliances. They have managed to get this far unnoticed, but they had a close call when the second Professor Long tripped over some rabbits and set off a timer.

  Now they have gathered around a table in the biology lab, illuminating it with a portable lamp after having blocked the windows. Professor Crest has the metal; a handful of special alloy blanks purchased under false pretenses from a metallurgical supplier, which he now lays out carefully in two neat rows on the marble top. The first Professor Long, easily recognizeable through her disguise by the black Chinese surgical smog mask, has the germ cultures in small vials. She finds some fresh petri dishes and sets to work sporing them with modified versions of a sample she got from the virology lab. Professor Aughbui has brought the mathematics and design notes, which he hangs from the projecting ventilation hood and consults as he assembles the simple machinery that will run the experiment during their absence. He holds the pieces in place while Smilebot welds the joints. The second Professor Long brought the absence, the skull of a banker, taken from the anatomy department. He positions this precisely among the other elements of Professor Aughbui’s machinery. He also searches the biology lab until he finds a suitable hiding place for the experiment, which they must leave behind, and which must go on for at least a full day. Luckily, there is an electric oven that can hold their apparatus. He sabotages it carefully, severing the power wires inside their insulation, so no fault can be seen. Professor Budshah brings the power, in the form of solar and lunar energies contained in a battery he salvaged from one of the displays intended for the physics conference.

  When they are all ready, at the stroke of midnight, the metal blanks are inserted into the skull’s gaping gold-toothed mouth, painted with the cultures under a mingled beam of recorded solar and lunar light while being gently agitated and tickled with minute bursts of electricity by the pin-like arms of the experimental machinery. Six pairs of eyes peer out from ski mask slots, riveted on the experiment’s slow action; it’s like watching the little plastic hand snatch the quarter. Once the coins have been saturated with the culture and celestial energies, the machinery silently lowers the maxi
lla and cranium, sealing the experiment for its full day’s gestation. The five economists all rest their hands on the crown of the skull and recite formulae of ancient rites of sacrifice and plenty, fertility and want. Then each produces a high-denomination bill and burns it to nothing in the acetylene torch. The barking of a dog freezes them. They stand paralyzed around their baroquely hermetic instruments, staring with wild stupidity at the unfinished work before them. The dog stops. A silent release of stopped breath. They complete their operations and then allow Professor Crest, who, while he is not the strongest, is the most careful and precise in his movements, to pick up the experiment and carry it to its hiding place. Once all of them are convinced that it can remain there a full day without being discovered or damaged, they place a special seal on the oven. Then, bumping and groping, they find the wholesome outer air uncontaminated by sorcery’s densely intoxicating musk of fragrances and decay. That night they all toss and turn in horrible nightmares and wake up looking as if they’d all lost fights.

  That day is an agony of suspense. They avoid each other, and anything else that might remind them of the experiment, ticking away—they hope—undetected in the oven in the biology lab, as students and professors go about their daily routine, maintenance personnel empty trash bins and make the rounds, tours are conducted, facilities checked. They try to lose themselves in devotional activities, doing extra exercises in their problem books, separating and reseparating the beads. The second Professor Long swims lap after lap, trying to exhaust himself, trying to keep his thoughts from influencing events. Professor Aughbui painstakingly rechecks his diagrams. Professor Crest goes and looks at every single object on display in the art museum, making sure he spends no less than a full minute in front of each. The first Professor Long watches one movie after another, visiting one theater after another, even though she doesn’t understand the language well enough to follow what’s going on. Professor Budshah translates poetry, producing several pages of incomprehensible, pedantically-labored renderings of simple poems.

  Midnight. At last. Once again the six silhouettes enter the biology lab, block the windows, trip and blunder, knock down stools. The oven is not hot, the seal is not broken, the experiment sits inside within the guidewires they’d put around it. The economists join hands, while Professor Crest extracts the experiment and brings it back to the table. He joins the circle, and they all chant in a low murmur until the stroke of midnight. When the campus campanile strikes its twelfth chime, lightning flashes and thunder booms, and the maxilla of the skull silently lifts. And lo a stream of discolored coins gushes from chapless jaws and spreads rustling across the table top. The coins are a diseased, purulent color, but they begin to change the moment they are exposed to the air. Within moments they turn pink, then faint magenta, then a pale blue, before settling at last to a more or less fixed bluish-white, like soured milk. The coins twitch and breathe with a scarcely perceptible sussurrus. The economists trade looks, radiant with success. Alive! Producing black bags with black skulls and crossbones on them, they each reach out and take several handfuls of these living coins, which are warm and yielding in the hand, each one a distinctly palpable disc, but vitalized, like living bones—the hum of life is unmistakeable, even though it can’t be traced to any distinct sensation. Once all the coins are gathered, the experiment is quickly disassembled and they toss its remains down the incinerator chute.

  Over the course of the next few days, each of them will be slipping these living coins in among regular money: passing them in change, inserting them into vending machines, dropping them unnoticed into open cash register drawers and tip jars. Their animal money is gathering virulence. From these seed points, the living money begins to proliferate through treasuries of the world. The bison on one coin is fucking the eagle on the other, and the resulting eggs hatch into more living coins sporting Abyssinian centaurs and other chimeras, letters and numbers no one can read, denominations that rely on entirely different categorization schemes.

  That was the story. She sent it in to the paper, but the email bounced. The paper had ceased to exist overnight, somehow. Then, when she couldn’t find her partner, she got frightened and decided to hide in an out-of-the-way place for a while. Then she decided she should try to get over the border, and that’s when they grabbed her. A bus station, a grab, the back of a van that stank of old vomit, then the motel, and me.

  It’s a three day trip by car. I don’t know how the fuck she stays alive because I’ve never seen her eat anything but mastodon doses of acid and botanical hallucinogens washed down with plain water. She is obviously supernatural, at least in part. I suspect she has some way of making acid, or whatever it is. She never talks about it; either that or she must have loaded up a few laundry bags full a little before we met. She never buys any, and from time to time she’ll catch a nanoflash of something inducive growing in a field or through a stand of trees that look as visually impenetrable as a wall to me, and bug me to pull over and go back.

  She is my adventure now.

  “Could you take me to the train station? Don’t you have any tobacco?” she asks me, since I’m driving with an empty pipe in my teeth.

  “I don’t smoke,” I say. “I just like having the pipe sometimes.”

  I shift lanes when the sign for the train station comes up.

  “The nice thing,” I say, “about a pipe is that you still have it when your smoke is done.”

  I don’t ask where she’s going. I can’t be made to tell what I don’t know.

  “What if I paid you to drive me?” she asks.

  “Sure,” I answer instantly. “You mean, instead of the train, right?”

  “Can you take time off?”

  I snicker.

  “I’m probably fired. Just tell me which way to go.”

  “Head east,” she says, pointing.

  “But,” she adds after a moment, “your things. This drive will take a few days.”

  I thumb the back seat.

  “Those are my things,” I say. “You have gas money, right?”

  “Yes.”

  Three days will take us to Etsimen, right next door to San Toribio and a virtually unreachable pain in the ass because they’re building a highway between the two cities starting in the middle and working in both directions as slowly as possible, forcing all traffic onto what is basically just open land, decorated with the occasional sign. There are a few roadside stops without the road; tents where you can get food or stay overnight. Those who want more privacy, us included, can park alfresco and get breakfast and a shower for a lower rate. So the bigger tents have a couple of cars pulled up, people sitting at crates and spools lit by acetylene lamps playing cards or eating to tinny speakers or watching the news on their phones or tablets. Then you see the shadow cars parked in an archipelago around the tent and rocking gently. The owner has several big dogs to keep voyeurs away. Lying next to her, I can look up and see all the constellations I’ve forgotten, and hear the night bugs spicing up the dry air, so loud they drown out the sound of the motel-camp. And yet I can hear her even breathing, as well as feeling it on my shoulder, and spilling up the side of my neck. She told me why we were going to Etsimen: there’s someone there who contacted her about what happened to Tripi. It’s a story no amount of interference could disappear. So we’re going after Tripi. Fine. I can’t think of anything I’d want to do more. She sighs and changes her position. Sing. Sing, answer. Answer back. Answer what? Answer the beauty. Answer it back. When it hits, answer. It seizes and squeezes, crushes with its force. Let it. Or fight it. I can’t lay claim to the voice that commands me to answer, no one can. Not the beauty. The voice is not in it, from it, not any-slippery-preposition it, not any-slippery-preposition me. Answer! Answer! Not even an idea, not even a thought, just a flash—answer! Now you! Your turn! Right now your turn! You are your turn or nothing right now. While it’s still there and alive in front of you. In dreams you edit your love lines, but when the one you love is there and i
t’s now, you are your turn or nothing. The answer joins the beauty or tangles with it. It might destroy it. Come back and try to put it together yourself later and you won’t be able to, memorybeauty isn’t the same, bring back the feeling, but you tamper, only by touching it you tamper it too much. It was too much to begin with. How can you conjure it out of yourself if it was bigger than you were to begin with? Answer! Answer the question how. How it is, not what not when. How? How? Howch? You get hit on the head—how! Howch, howtheshit, howfuck? Look arhownd. Howfuck did this? Howshits? Howsluts am I? Bitchow did it get this way, all these ways, these slapfuckle blind ways? How blind? Not just to blind or not to but how blind is it? How is it blind, I mean in what way? Which flavor is the blindness of it, which kind of blind was it, how does it go from day to day? How does blindness work? My lungs are blind. My liver is blind. Only my eyes see, and how well? How is seeing? How is living with my liver? No you can’t just lie there! I don’t care if you’re dead! How is it going? Answer me! How dead are you now? More dead than yesterday, or less? Give it to me on a scale of one to five, one being least alive, five being most dead. Is it cruel of me to keep asking? No you can’t just lie there rotting—you have to report on it: how is your rot going? No I won’t leave you alone! Fucking punk lazy dead ass no I won’t! Answer me! You can be dead, but you can’t be exempt. The voice of the cruelty of the beauty of life of how’s-it-going reaches us all down to the molecule the ant the atom the every. Everyday!