Animal Money

by Michael Cisco

  “Professor Simon? May we speak with you—”

  His voice cuts off abruptly in mid sentence as the regional economics chair swings around to reveal the face of a radiant child. The face, the whole head—on that old man’s decrepit body—the effect is so bizarre that none of them can make any sense of what he’s saying. The body is old but the head is young; the seam around the throat is distinctly visible, just above the drooping adam’s apple; the tissues below the line are discolored, crepey; the tissues above are firm. Rosebud mouth, translucent cheeks and forehead and delicate ears, flesh like frosted glass, enormous limpid sapphire eyes, gossamer golden hair in gleaming ringlets that play about the frayed lapels of his threadbare jacket, and cut across the brow in an even fringe that half conceals the tenuous, downy eyebrows.

  His reply was intended for someone else, because, as his head bobs with recognition of each of them in turn, his expression changes. From the look of someone who is never finished with being pestered, he brightens up.

  “Ah, you’re here!” he cries, and begins a round of shaking hands. His pink, sticky hands are a child’s hands, like his head. “That’s a relief! Lend! Lend!”

  Professor Simon’s voice is the wheezing rasp of old lungs and the clarion purity of bright, fresh vocal chords, at the same time. The voice of a hoarse, asthmatic child reciting the speeches of a worn-out old man, word for word and intonation for intonation, from memory, his pearl teeth dancing in scarlet gums. He gestures in the direction he was going, through the shadowy archway.

  “I happen to have a moment just now. If you’re not too tired?”

  He nods and waves to the the shieldbearers. They lower their shields at once and walk directly to the nearest seats, where they sit down and light cigarettes. Arieto turns her back right away and saunters off. The economists follow Professor Simon through several open areas where economists pray, fill out ledgers, and groups of workers prepare pots of soup or stew, wash and dry and press laundry, pushing hampers and coal carts, blowing glass, and all manner of other business. Professor Simon chats away blithely, walking with surprising speed through these spacious rooms. Sunlight pours in through large windows, combed and daubed by ivy which hangs over them like vertical venetian blinds.

  “Let’s try in here.”

  Professor Simon leads the economists into an indistinct room facing the trees outside. Through the two narrow if large windows there is view of only the middles of the trees, the trunks, with the canopy overhead and the roots down below both out of sight. The forest thickens in that direction, so that an eye can make out only the ever-gathering shade among the trunks. Golden flies and gnats spin up into a ray of sun, making it visible by obliviously giving it their own bodies to bounce off of.

  The room strongly smells of fresh laundry. They can almost taste soap on their tongues. Professor Simon seats himself on a leather divan pushed up lengthwise against a wall and stacked with a bar graph of clean towels in color-coded piles. The Professor sits with the towels at his back like an imperial fan, while transmitting to them a tacit invitation to seat themselves in the various cameo-back chairs.

  “There’s water in the pitcher there, if you want it,” he says.

  His facial expressions are completely indecipherable. It’s possible he doesn’t have complete control over his features. His face has a way of lopsiding itself that conveys an archly aristocratic cynicism often at odds with his tone of voice, which seems more caring. Eyes that seem wide and ingenuously clear one moment take on a recessed cunning look the next.

  “I wanted to hear a bit more from you personally about animal money,” he says. The words animal money sound shocking coming from someone else; it’s as if he’d just named a secret friend.

  “I thought we were here to discuss the duel. That is what we were told just now,” Professor Crest says.

  “There’s plenty of time. We offer hecatombs to Turms here—you do that, don’t you? Ah, good. We make the offering at the new moon, and the day before we rest, which is today. We can discuss every topic we like. I’m happy, naturally, to talk with you about the investigation into the duel, but I am bound over in certain matters and I won’t be able to speak as freely about it, just now, as you might like. The question belongs to the working group now, and they haven’t even set a date for their next meeting yet. They haven’t met in years, I think. The group members are all available. But ... I would prefer to discuss your idea directly with you, first, if you don’t mind. We’re very interested in this idea, that is, I am, and certain others. There are those without a doubt who wish you’d never come up with it, but I think it’s brilliant.”

  He sighs briefly.

  “How to begin,” he wonders aloud. “Ah! Well, my appearance—that’s only a selectivity. We all use some parts more than others, and we all make compensations.”

  Then he seems almost to tuck his head between his knees and roll forward. He gives such a clear impression of being about to somersault that Professor Aughbui lunges, with hands outspread, to catch him. But Professor Simon only lifts himself to his feet with an apology fondly smiled at the floor. He turns, swinging his arms for balance as if he were pushing at the air, as if he were in the water. He swims over to the wall by the windows and pulls a big china chamber pot out from a cabinet, setting it on a low table and turning his back. A spatter of piss in the bowl follows after a few seconds and he grunts with relief in an eerily unchildlike way.

  “I remember when all I had to do was open up and out it came!” he says. “Bang! Now it has to loop-de-loop a few times first. ... Where once there was a concentrated stream,” he says, his voice now louder, “now there’s just this spray—ah!”

  He swivels his legs.

  “Can’t hardly keep it from getting all over my trousers—coming out at an angle, sometimes a ninety degree angle! Straight up into my face sometimes.”

  “Ahem ...” Professor Crest says.

  “What’s that?”

  “I say, ‘by the way,’ ...”

  “Yes?” Professor Simon asks loudly, his head swivelling bizarrely toward them, like a long-necked dinosaur’s.

  “Has the security committee made any finding yet, about the abduction of Professor Aughbui?”

  “He’s right there.”

  “He escaped.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t know about that. Ask Dr. Oa.”

  “Who?”

  Professor Simon fastens his fly and puts a wooden cover on the pot. Clearing his throat, he turns to us and swims over to the divan again, settling in, then freezing with a gasp, then settling the rest of the way.

  “The rulers of the world are in the process of trying to get control over certain global problems. They don’t want a single government, but they do want transnational institutions to manage things like pollution, population, surveillance. Unaccountable. International economic institutions already exist, and they are being used as models, even as they themselves are being given new and broader missions. Coordinated surveillance would make what I’m sure they and their lackeys would call ‘management of the population of the world’ a pretty straightforward business and more difficult for that population to resist effectively.

  “As you know, there is a parallel process underway among the disfranchised, who are also trying to put the world in order and exert some influence when it comes to global problems. Groups are formed or repurposed, but they are fractious and their missions are rather circumscribed, albeit important. Despite all this, and constant harassment from the rulers and their minions, all these groups must, insofar as they persist and continue to interpret and understand events, sooner or later triangulate in on global capitalism as the problem they all have in common, and the capitalists know this, or dimly intuit it anyway. Your idea of animal money is currently unworkable, I think, but there is something to it, a certain novelty! No economics theory, no monetary policy, could possibly overturn capitalism of course, but I think your idea has enormous potential, even if it does lie somew
hat out of my field of professional expertise. You may remember my dissertation was on types of chairs—what was I thinking?”

  He smiles and shakes his head in fondly nostalgic disbelief. The left side of his mouth suddenly veers up toward his eye in a repellent sneer, a sneer the eye doesn’t join with or seem to notice.

  “Ah, but the world was nothing like it is now! In those days, we didn’t dare show our marks on our faces, or so much as allude to the separation of beads or our testing books in public. Anyway, your work on animal money is, as you know, already very popular. You have my support in taking this as far as you can.”

  He presses one disproportionately small, pink hand to his sweater vest, which emits a puff of chalkdust, to indicate himself.

  “As I mentioned, there are others who disagree with you and who quite frankly see their interests on the opposing side. Some of them, in fact, many of them—most of them, I suppose ... Well, they are basically influential enough to do something about it, and I have to warn you that some have been discussing the possibility of not renewing you or even defrocking you.”

  The economists exchange worried glances. Professor Crest seems most alarmed at the idea, but, sitting bolt upright on the last two inches of his seat, one leg neatly folded over the other, he still radiates a kind of tense alertness and intrepidity. Professor Budshah rests his chin on his two thumbs, hands clasped before his mouth and elbows on the arms of the chair. The remaining Professor Long’s eyes are phosphorescent, full of chessboards. Professor Aughbui deflates in exhaustion.

  “I can head off anything like that from happening—anything serious, but I won’t always be here,” Professor Simon goes on. “You will have to watch out from opposition within the IEI as well as from those outsiders who don’t like your theory. I suggest you find a surer way to stay in our organization, at least as long as that will protect you—indefinitely, I hope. Now, can you tell me, very simply, what your idea really is. Because, you see, in some of your writings it’s described one way, and another way in other writings.”

  The economists look at each other self consciously. Professor Budshah speaks.

  “To the present, money ... conventional money, we’ll call it for now ... has involved proof in exchange, which means that the money is nothing in itself insofar as it is money and not, let’s say, bits of paper or metal, sea shells, or other kinds of small, portable, interchangeable objects, more or less natural or at least requiring no excessive effort to make, easily fashioned that is. It is only something to be held up to a transcendent standard of value considered in the abstract, and this abstraction is the form of property as such. Which is to say, it is not the question of who has how much money that is of primary importance, but who owns how many shares of the abstraction by means of which the value of money is determined at any particular time, or, to mince things a little finer still, how the value is divided into real shares. Conventional money is a proof with respect to that abstraction. It is a phantom value which is never present in the here and now, because, when something purchased is then used, or enjoyed (where possible), the value of that thing is its use or enjoyment (where possible), rather than its monetary value. The monetary value has flown the coop, and is itself never used nor enjoyed (where possible) except perhaps by collectors or hoarders, who deal only in relative quantities and for whom the character of the thing exchanged is neutral and unimportant.”

  “Animal money—if I may—” Professor Crest breaks in eagerly, a light in his eyes, and with a glance at Professor Budshah who graciously, if not entirely happily, subsides to him. “—Thank you, Professor Budshah—Animal money is different, in that it does not operate by proof and reference but by being itself something, which is to say doing something, an act. Conventional money does nothing but come and go, but animal money intervenes by taking what is there and creates more. Animal money is creative money as opposed to merely circulating money.”

  “And that is why it does not exchange, but doubles across any encounter?” Professor Simon asks.

  “Exactly,” Professor Crest says.

  “Yes,” Professor Budshah says.

  “Correct,” Professor Aughbui says.

  The remaining Professor Long points to him.

  “But how does that work?” Professor Simon asks.

  The remaining Professor Long explains.

  “The animal money is living,” she says. “It is not owned and spent. It moves through populations on its own, by itself. It has a habitat, which attracts it; the habitat is exchange. What we have had up until now has no behavior because it is not living. The conventional money is to the animal money what a puppet is to an animal that’s living. It has been, up until now, a taxiderm which only imitates life the actual life of the bankers and those who are setting policy and so on, and who pretend to be following the money, as if the money were leading. But the animal money is alive and it actually does lead, to reproduce like animals. Aristotle condemned interest as money with a life that is false. This is money will grow naturally, rather than simply accumulate.”

  “To make this happen,” Professor Aughbui says, reviving, “animal money must establish viable populations in the wild. There has to be a habitat of wild exchange for it; to be conceived of as a natural institution autonomous to government and business. Wilderness is preserved by cordoning off wild areas, however it is the man-made world that is actually cordoned off; the nature preserves are also man-made. Nature produces the man-made world and sustains it, and everything inside is already natural insofar as it is natural for humans to form institutions. The conflict with nature is an economic conflict in which nature is the lowest class in a hierarchy that refuses to acknowledge the legitimacy or existence of natural institutions. Animal money is an attempt to neutralize this conflict by economic animalization.”

  Professor Simon is nodding attentively as the economists explain, but this does not stop him from coquettishly examining his face in a compact mirror, turning his face this way and that, pouting, smiling, and even winking at himself, again and again.

  “You Professors!” he now chortles after a few moments’ silence. “You must forgive me for saying so, but there’s nothing at all to you. Nothing!”

  Professor Simon lowers his compact and fixes his gaze on each of the four in turn.

  “Look at yourselves,” he says, smiling, and seeming to be filled with a sort of wonder. “What could anyone say about you? How could anyone begin to describe you? You go on rambling endlessly about your animal money, but what kind of figures do you think you cut as human beings? You want living money, and you’re just talking furniture! I mean, you are alive, but ...”

  Professor Simon splutters a little, owing to a constriction of his throat and face brought about by a half-stifled chuckle. He searches visibly for the right turn of phrase.

  “... but, you’re alive in all the wrong ways! Like living furniture, not like people. May you sit down sir? Will you hang your hat on me, ma’am? You’re ridiculous! You’re hatracks!”

  The economists receive this outburst with some surprise. Professor Budshah unflappably leans forward now, laying his hands on the armrests and looking with some hauteur at Professor Simon, who anticipates him, saying—

  “So now, the great king will rebuke me, right?”

  Professor Budshah brushes off this remark with dignity.

  “If we are all nothings, or next to nothings, as you say, then I should be obliged to you if you could inform me who is to blame, because it certainly isn’t any of us. We are Professors, sir, and we watch what we say. We make no unqualified statements, no unverified claims, and why is that, if not because we stand to lose everything if we are caught out having made even a single mistake! Every-thing, remember that! Perhaps you expected a band of merrymakers? Of gay vandals?

  “We come to you, I remind you, at your own command—”

  Professor Simon is about to speak, but Professor Budshah raises his voice and perseveres, causing Professor Simon to rai
se his hand in bemused, mock self-defense.

  “—and what you think of us, sir, is of no significance! Do you understand that? It is of no consequence whatever whether you think of us as funny little fellows, whom you may treat inconsiderately, or if you think we are geniuses!”

  Professor Budshah pauses.

  Professor Simon says, “Well—”

  Professor Budshah interrupts him.

  “It matters no more than our opinion of you matters! Whether or not we regard you to be an ally, who understands what we have been put through, all of us, and also our aims, and sympathizes, if not with us, then at least with those aims, or whether we think of you in some other way—a way which you might not find flattering! None of it is of the slightest importance!”

  Professor Simon waits for a moment or two, still smiling blandly.

  “Now may I speak?” he asks at last.

  “Feel free,” Professor Budshah says sharply.

  “Colleagues,” Professor Simon says palliatively. “I apologize for my outburst. I retract it. In its entireity. From time to time, I find I succumb to a feeling of candidness that somehow falls short of what I know to be the truth. That is, I speak with the feeling of bluntness and honesty, or should I say, of freedom, and yet what I say, while it is not exactly dishonest, not deceptive in intention, is simply not true. It is a blurry, hastily sketched truth, but a failed sketch, a failed one. You must admit, that there is something a bit funny about all this proper and terribly formal dissertating we do—that we all do. I suppose I fall out of step once in a while, and see it from outside, as it were—like an animal? Suddenly the whole enterprise becomes ridiculous. Then I must remind myself again of what it is all about, what is at stake. That, since everyone in the world takes it seriously, I would be lost if I did not also. That, of course, considered quite independently from my own more personal interests. If we economists laugh when we see each other, then we are no better than the astrologers. As I say, I will promote your idea, your excellent, your pioneering theory of animal money, and I will see to your personal safety and the security of your economic standing in the group as well.”