That morning, the remaining economists are each personally approached by an official messenger from the IEI, informally ordering them to attend a series of unofficial hearings on the subject of their current project, animal money, as described in section 1310 of the Routine Articles of Investigation. Professor Crest, who has a thoroughgoing familiarity with the Articles, informs the others that this means someone within the IEI has filed a complaint about them.
“Is it Professor Delatour?” the remaining Professor Long asks.
“He would not have the right,” Professor Crest responds. “He is on the committee.”
“Committee members can’t bring charges?” Professor Budshah asks.
“They can,” Professor Crest answers. “But they can not file complaints. Not even through a proxy.”
They will be questioned separately by an unknown panel.
“What happens if ...?” the remaining Professor Long asks.
“... at worst, we could be formally arraigned for unacceptable heterodoxy.”
“They can’t disbar us, surely? It would take the violation of one of the Oaths to disbar us, wouldn’t it?” Professor Budshah asks.
“Correct,” Professor Crest says. “However, they can place us under suspension in heterodoxy, which would mean an indefinite period of isolation.”
The remaining Professor Long will have to make her averral in a conference room belonging to a different hotel, right on the coast. San Toribio’s beaches are unfortunately rocky and precipitous, the water is cold all year, and while the surf is high, boulders and reefs make surfing too risky. She arrives early, and decides to look in on Professor Aughbui.
The Achrizoguayla University Aquagation Program is headquartered in an old naval fortification that protrudes obliquely out into the bay. It has a great stone platform sticking out of it and jutting far out into space, at least forty feet above the deep water of the bay. The platform has a battlemented wall with egg-shaped bartizans at fifteen-foot intervals. Professor Aughbui was given one of these to use as an office. Opening the bartizan door, she enters a domed white cylinder about ten feet across. Opposite the door, not ten feet away, there is a window with interior shutters. The wall beneath the window is built out to form a step and a seat, and there’s a slot just below the sill for a plank. Professor Aughbui perches on the seat, with the plank for a desk, and the windowsill for an armrest. With a flip of his wrist, he could toss his pen into the see-sawing green baywater just below, which would receive and smother it, hiding it forever. A milky white glass block is glued into the apex of the ceiling with discolored, pinkish caulk, and the power cable is bracketed to the wall inside a chafed and corroded-looking zinc hose, angling down to the switch by the door. Wind coils and churns inside the bartizan even when the door is closed, obliging Professor Aughbui to weight his papers with iron slabs. The wind also causes the shutter facing him to swing against him, rapping his forehead. Pushing the shutter back out of his face seems to have become instinctual to Professor Aughbui already. Smilebot arrives after a moment carrying two mugs of tea. Someone on the shore, or perhaps in one of those boats out there, is practicing Achrizoguaylan bagpipes. Professor Aughbui offers the remaining Professor Long his seat, the only one available, but she declines.
Professor Aughbui is a cipher; he never talks about himself, and seems content to bury his nose in his work. Since his near-kidnapping, the repeated encounters with the police, and then seeing Assiyeh in the flesh, he has become no less quiet, since he was virtually silent to begin with, but events may be inducing a softening that is disquieting in its glimpses. She dreads an abrupt dissolution into tears with a foreboding that is wildly out of proportion, as if it could only end in a horrifying liquefaction of the whole man. However, Professor Aughbui answers her questions succinctly, and his decorum is gradually smothering her fears. The place is very beautiful. Perhaps the sight of it is beneficial. Now he has launched into a detailed summary of what she can expect at the hearing, what she is and is not by statute required to say. The music continues, and now she can see a party straggling along the water’s edge in the distance, dressed in lumpy, peculiar Achrizoguaylan formal dress; it must be a wedding. There seem to be a lot of them down by the water. The music is lively and intricately patterned. She can see an outlandishly-dressed group of what are obviously tourists edging around the party, which is making its way from the street far beyond to the park overlooking the water. The light is blocked by clouds that come and go, and just now the light is dazzling, like a kind of steam. It’s time to go.
Professor Aughbui offers to accompany her as far as the hotel, the discouragingly-named Hotel Federal. She declines the offer. She wants to collect her thoughts en route, and smoke, and Professor Aughbui seems to disapprove of tobacco.
As she comes around the tower, the remaining Professor Long catches sight of a distinct black ball in the blue sky—the new moon. The clouds are receding into the distance, and a passenger plane floats below their level. They create a fuming, radiant ceiling above the city, but they give her an impression of toy imitations. Lightning flashes far away, over the mainland. There’s the San Toribian skyline, looking like chandeliers hanging in the dimness. Water and land alternate, bordered by dimly luminous white surf, and then the dull gold lights of the houses and the bottle green streets. Lightning flashes on the far side of the city; she can see the bolts through the buildings. No sign of any companion up there, only the crescent moon. How do I know that’s the right moon?
The Hotel Federal makes no impression on her. She can see lighted windows pasted on to the featureless and distorted German Expressionist silhouettes of the surrounding buildings.
A woman in a sports jacket accosts her with cordial hesitancy as she comes into the lobby. None of the panel members have arrived yet, and at least two are going to be significantly delayed. She apologizes on their behalf, and relays their message: the remaining Professor Long should stay at the Hotel Federal until they arrive. In the meantime, perhaps she would like something to eat? No? If she is tired, they have set aside a room ...
The remaining Professor Long is directed to a room on the second floor. She washes her face and hands, then lies down, as if the bed had conjured sleepiness in her. There are so many pillows and bolsters and thick comforters that she can’t seem to lay herself out evenly and, while she feels unaccountably tired all of a sudden, and her mind is a blank, sleep doesn’t come. She lies on her side, eyes open to the dark room.
There’s no sound. The heavy drapes are drawn all the way across the windows so that not even a seam of light is visible. The corner of the bathroom hides the bright line under the door. There’s only the vertical dark edge of the wall and a thin glow that does not penetrate at all into the room.
Someone crouches near her in the dark. She knows someone is there who has conjured a toy hotel and diverted her into it. There is no Hotel Federal, but then there is no real anywhere; the realness of a place is something that breathes and gelatinously reorganizes its past parts all the time. The firm clarity and novelty of this idea puts her on a more confident footing and when she startles awake, she has no idea how long she has been asleep or what woke her. She lies in the dark and sweats. Gets up and feels her way to the bathroom, getting a not very refreshing drink of water by the dim light from under the door. Lie back down, wondering how they will get in touch with her, or whether she will have to stay all night, and pay for the room. Will the phone jangle her awake violently?
She thinks again of the crouching presence on the floor somewhere. It watches her fixedly from the dark. It breathes the air, and she breathes its breath. It holds her captive. The trap is a hotel, a city, night, money, the hearing. She breathes its breath—her body hardens. It becomes the final piece of the trap.
In numbed horror she realizes that her body is not the final piece. Her mind is becoming an empty black frame, framing a vortex of stale air that’s being sucked out of it. The light beneath the door dims suddenly and the r
oom becomes all but totally dark. The phone rings. She rises groaning, not knowing where to find the noise, her body as heavy as stone. Drawing the drapes back, she exposes the dingy buildings across the way, in a grimy dusk like a dead breath of stagnant flatness. The phone rang once, or did it?
She goes back downstairs and lets the same sportsjacketed woman know she’ll be in the restaurant. Inconceivably animated Achrizoguaylans careen around her table and the dining room is like a carousel. But now it’s turning back into a scene. The flatness and distance are creeping up, forming a moat around the remaining Professor Long. While her behavior doesn’t change, to her—in this weird, forced self-consciousness that is also somehow originating outside of her—she seems to be play-acting. The whole world is a zoo of phoney habitats and segregation and staring for the sake of staring. You go to a zoo to see animals behaving the way animals behave in zoos. Her visitor from the hotel room has found her again, is very near to her. Not crouching now. He’s been playing out her leash and now he’s yanking it in. He isn’t any one person in particular; he’s the guiding spirit that bides darkly in upper corners.
She has a cup of coffee and listlessly eats a sandwich. The food is surprisingly good and her mood brightens slightly. The moment she gets up to leave, there is someone passing behind her chair she bumps into. She reaches to open the door and someone darts in, compelling her to stand back. She steps out onto the sidewalk for a smoke but there is already someone stepping there, already lighting up. The moment she thinks of turning, stepping, there is someone there, blocking the way with an open door, or carrying a big bag or parcel. Thinking to go round a pair of slow-moving older people she nearly collides with a baby carriage thrust out suddenly from between two parked vans. Turning back, there’s a small boy where she just was, walking along obliviously in his knit cap. She opens her mouth to say something and a car horn blasts, holding the note until a siren takes over, drowning out her words before she can say them. It’s as if her visitor were reading her mind and balking her every impulse by moving people and things to check her like chess pieces.
The chubby black man with the white shirt, black tie, and black nylon bomber jacket, currently browsing at the newstand, was also in the hotel restaurant; in fact, he had come in around when she did. He never glances in her direction or comes too close, but the remaining Professor Long is increasingly sure he’s watching her; he may be following or he may be gravitating along without meaning to, it doesn’t matter which it is. Suddenly resenting this, she wants to step out of the stream of pedestrians and head back inside when a small woman appears from behind a garbage can and stops, blocking her way while rummaging noisily in a fistfull of plastic bags. It’s always the same rather paltry kind of person; small, thrown together, animated by a shrewish viciousness. She realizes she is seeing the people around her the way her mysterious visitor does, and that it wants to reduce her to a shoddy knock-off human. The visitor runs things around here, or around her.
Then at her elbow there stands the man in the black bomber jacket and he calls her gently by name.
“You’re wanted for questioning. Will you come with me, please?”
“You’ve been following me, haven’t you?” she demands, flushing with rage.
The man is completely calm, even compassionate, and his voice is light and sweet. He has a strange, bread-loaf shaped head and a broad, high brow. He shows her a document on his phone, complete with an image of a badge and a rectangular scribble that might be a computer scanning code.
“You can see here,” he says.
The remaining Professor Long gives him a withering look.
“I was to meet with an unofficial panel in this hotel. Nothing was said about some sort of officer, anything of the kind.”
“This is official,” he says, still unfazed.
“Show me your badge, then.”
He shows her the phone again.
“That’s a picture of a badge, not a badge.”
“You have to come in for questioning, Professor Long. It won’t take very l—much time. You aren’t being arrested.”
She gives her head a brief shake, and her features are shuttered.
“I have an appointment here.”
“That will have to wait. We have a car here,” he says quietly, bowing to take her briefcase. She snatches it up before he can take it, leaving him still doubled forward, his fingers stretched out. He unbends again, in no rush, hand falling to his side, and lets his head roll slightly on his shoulders.
“I think, Professor—”
“You’re trying to ...!” she says sternly, raising her voice.
“Professor ...”
He sighs through his nose, opens his mouth and then closes it. Then he opens it again, with the same patience.
“I think, Professor, you should look at this.”
He holds out his phone again.
“The Surfeit is One!” she says sternly and walks away. The big, copper hotel doorman about fifty years old in a heavy, double-breasted coat with gold buttons and braid, comes ambling over, brow furrowed.
“Something wrong?” he asks.
She points to the man in the bomber jacket.
“That man tried to steal my bag. He’s been following me ...”
The doorman approaches the man in the bomber jacket, who remains as he was, his phone still in his hand. Other people are pausing or slowing to watch.
“Excuse me, sir,” the doorman says. “Can you show me identification?”
The man shows him his phone. The doorman makes an inquiry through his own phone. Both men stand together, thumbing their phones. The remaining Professor Long enters the lobby and takes refuge in the ladies’ room.
After waiting for a few minutes, she glances outside as another woman comes in. The man in the bomber jacket is visible just outside the door. He’s standing in profile, looking toward the lobby, a splash of lamplight on his face.
“You should go with him,” she tells herself then. “You should get this matter cleared up right away.”
And a moment later:
“Things like this don’t get cleared up. They never get cleared up, you know that.”
She waits until the bathroom is empty again, but, when it is, what was she waiting for?
“They are designed never to be cleared up. They are designed to get messed up. More and more messed up.”
She tries calling Professor Aughbui, then Professor Crest. No answers. What if the panel members have arrived and are waiting for her? What if they leave, thinking she’s stood them up?
“I’m going to attend the panel,” she says. “The Surfeit is One.”
“Miss ... Miss ...” follows behind her.
She ignores the man in the bomber jacket and makes her way to the nearest conference room, which might be the only conference room here.
The face of the man in the bomber jacket is swimming up toward the shrinking gap between the door and the frame as she closes it. The room is filled with people, sitting in rows. There are three people dressed as economists, their faces each equipped with economists’s marks, sitting at a long table in the front of the room.
The door frame is not set directly into the wall, but into a kind of apron of glass panes set in wooden ... somethings, not sashes. She doesn’t know what you call them. The one just at the level of her nose is painted white—they all are—and the paint is dingy, cracked, peeling, flaking off. These wooden somethings don’t belong with all this hotel stuff; hotels are made out of materials that age inconspicuously. A bizarre object, right beneath her nose. A wooden something between panes of glass, and the glass has flecks of paint around its edges, and there is a particularly large flake of paint that seems to have something blackish lodged under it. At first, she thinks it’s a dead fly, but it’s only a flake of paint, except that there are thin, hairlike or twiggy things projecting from underneath it. It could be a dead fly or other similar insect wedged beneath a paint flake, or maybe it’s a kind of bushy mi
ldew, a tiny clod of dirt held together with clumped rootlets. The door is opening against her and she angles to one side.
“Miss ... Miss ...”
The door stays open, someone standing in it, looking at her. The clod under the flake casts a shadow, and it’s starting to look like a hole. The remaining Professor Long turns to survey the room again. People are still settling into their seats, and they are all also wearing the plain grey and brown clothes of economists, and marked with the wan white symbols of the IEI on their faces. There are some open seats on the far side of the room, a few in from the aisle. She crosses around behind the back row and slips into a free seat between two others. The man in the bomber jacket sits in the next seat over, with an unknown economist between him and the remaining Professor Long. He asks his neighbor to change seats with him, but is refused. He gets up a moment later and then makes his way down the next row forward, to stand directly in front of her, blocking her view of the table, but a colleague, someone she recognizes, Professor Borores, is making her way down the same aisle—a billowy, obese woman who walks with the assistance of two canes. She indicates that she wishes to sit in the chair currently blocked by the man in the bomber jacket.
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