Animal Money

by Michael Cisco

  He pauses, and the economists, after a little uncertainty, thank him.

  “You should realize that I will not be here much longer. Professor Quashie or Professor Levoyer are most likely to replace me. Professor Quashie, who teaches in Egypt, is pretty lukewarm about your ideas, and Professor Levoyer, who is currently working at the Economics Research Institute in Bern, thinks you’re shit. You need more friends in high places. Now, there are two things you can do. You can cultivate friends, and I can give you some recommendations, but there will not be that many who will listen to you or do much for you even if they do agree with you. The surer way, it seems to me, is to lower your profiles temporarily.

  “Well,—” he says abruptly, pressing his knees and rising, “—you make up your minds as you see fit and let me know what you decide, hm? The Surfeit is One.”

  A single short step takes him to a narrow closet door which pops open before him and snaps shut behind him like an eye blinking. The economists sit for a while, stirring, growing restless. After a while, they realize that the interview is actually over, leave the room in some uncertainty about what to do with themselves, and begin milling around outside. Arieto hails them, a stubby black pipe in the corner of her mouth, her image flickering and a little speedy, like a silent film. Dr. Oa is away on a call at the moment, but he is expected back soon. She’s asking them how their interview with Professor Simon went when the light outside flushes a lurid ruby red color. The light indoors is not affected, and the economists, standing stock still in a bubble of artificial light that is virtually colorless in comparison with that red, stare through the windows and skylights, bewildered. They still stand there when the red color deepens and lightens, changing and remaining the same, and turns blured. And it makes a sound: a hooning sigh that shivers in the fabric of the building.

  “It’s Assiyeh’s experiment,” Professor Aughbui says.

  “It must be,” Professor Crest says.

  “Well, I certainly don’t see how we could possibly know that. I feel that it’s true, and yet I can’t account for such feelings,” says Professor Budshah.

  “The stories we made up about her must have been ...” the remaining Professor Long says, without finishing.

  Arieto beckons them to a corner of a room filled with stacked cardboard boxes and a superannuated copying machine, where two steel doors stand at right angles to each other. Both doors are painted grey, but with different paints. One is darker and shinier, the other lighter and barely reflective at all.

  Arieto turns to the group.

  “All of you together. Choose one or the other.”

  “Where will they take us?” Professor Budshah says.

  “One will take you to safety, the other won’t.”

  “Which is which?”

  Arieto shrugs again.

  “You don’t know?”

  She shakes her head and puffs blue smoke. “Nope.”

  “This is not a good choice,” the remaining Professor Long says.

  “When you speak of ‘the other’,” Professor Crest asks, “Do you mean to say that the other door, the one that will not take us to safety, will take us to danger—to a positive danger? Or do you mean that it will only take us in a direction or to a location that is not as safe as the first?”

  Arieto rubs her chin and turns the question over. “If I follow you,” she says after a moment, “You’re asking me if—this is the lady and the tiger?”

  Arieto chuckles briefly, having surprised herself with that last allusion.

  “Do you mean to say that there is to your at least adequate knowledge or assurance a positive danger behind one of these doors?”

  “I’d say that’s right.”

  “Then you should say what you mean,” Professor Crest says brittly.

  “Thought I did.”

  “You did not.”

  “So, if we take the unsafe way, there is uncertain risk, but what is there to gain? Since the question of gain is the only reason for us to bother making this choice at all, and not just turning around right here and going home. There must be something we stand to gain by going through one or the other of these doors. There is what you are rather vaguely calling safety, and then there is some equally vague risk. Does the risk have a benefit attached to it, or not?”

  Arieto shrugs and is bored.

  “Look,” she says. “How about it?”

  The economists glance at each other. Only Professor Aughbui has any real interest in the choice.

  “The danger,” he says, “is virtually omnipresent, currently. It may express itself at any time, in any location, unexpectedly. To have safety and to know it, is preferable to having safety, unwittingly. Safety must include the awareness of being safe. A selection here will likely lead to confirmed safety. It is worth it to make the selection when the undesirable choice involves conditions that will prevail in any case. There is no meaningful difference between the state of risk behind the door leading in the unsafe direction, absent any positive danger, and the state of risk currently prevailing. Selecting a door affords the only possibility of gain, exclusively.”

  Impressed by this reasoning, the economists choose their door, and Arieto leads them through into a high, narrow hall, a grey cement floor between cinderblock walls painted yellowish white. The hall leads straight as a die to another door. Through that is a spacious concrete room a little like a loading bay. Across that and up a few steps to the doorless portal on top of a low platform, into a musty, humid cinderblock chute that veers to the right and conducts them into a very large storeroom with rows and rows of metal shelves twenty feet tall, laden with dusty boxes of papers, household goods, bundles of magazines, and so on.

  Sometimes the dust falls on them in big, powdery tufts that are faintly luminous, the spectres of fireflies or insects that flew into fires and burned up. There are rooms with gold sunset light slanting from windows, lighting the dust motes. There’s an incinerator room with a cold furnace. There are attics lined with pink foam insulation and ducts bound in silver paper. There are tiled, pillar-lined patios with galleries and balconies overhanging them, adorned with elaborate ironwork railings and ornaments, the walls cup a wobbling bubble of congealed blue and gold summer twilight. When the time for sleep finally comes, they choose a room with some rolled-up carpets against the walls, and a deer head mounted to face the window. The next morning, Arieto distributes packets of crackers and some coffee she makes by pouring a brown powder into a thermos of water. She gives the base of the thermos a twist, and in a few moments the contents are hot.

  Days pass. They traverse rooms, no two the same, always empty, never showing any trace of recent human activity. Their route seems to angle back around on itself, but there is a general tendency to climb. Not that there are staircases on staircases, or even one staircase, but the rooms are all pitched at a grade, or have some few steps somewhere. In a few cases it is necessary to exit through a hatch in the ceiling, reached by a fixed steel ladder. Arieto is able to provide for all their nutritional needs with boundless crackers, and there is something, too, about these rooms that emancipates them from hunger and thirst, as if the little food and drink they are taking stays with them. Movement is easy in these rooms. No one is surprised when, after several days, perhaps more than ten—as they cross another tiled atrium surrounded by pillars and equipped with a laughing fountain in its center—vivid stars in a scintillant field of absolute black appear beneath the arches, between the pillars ... stars that do not sparkle. Professor Aughbui walks carefully up to the arches, and, lowering his head, looks down and sees the blue span of the earth below, shining in its lip of air. Arieto leads them past the fountain and on toward a shadowy archway, and the economists follow her through.

  *

  The words came out of me, in the cafe, and they burst out elsewhere too, under a special pressure. There is a kind of guidance—or no, energy, just pressure, or urging, that demands an articulation take place even if there is no prior clarity to
express. The words cannot be prevented from rushing together. This is what is meant by censorship in that special sense—not oversight by an authority with something to hide, or a mind-control-for-its-own-sake agenda—this censoring involves holding the words back, or no, you let them surge together like that. The censoring takes place only after there is something to censor; the censoring involves excluding certain possible connections so that the words keep unfolding in the right direction and without getting tangled up and stopping. So, do we do the censoring? I don’t know who censors, but the censorship is necessary for travel, to keep the words rolling along.

  We did it ourselves, that was our side of the transaction, by introducing Assiyeh. She’s a kind of gradient. I attracted her to me, I guess, because, while I was attracted to her, and while such ideas elicit an inversion-reaction to block me, at the same time, I was always insisting on her not being real, so perhaps this was included as a factor in the inversion-reaction. I wish I could—no, I don’t wish I could tell, how much my thoughts influence matters, and where that necessary contact is.

  Imagine a sheet of flame spilling out in all directions, in the darkness and not really shedding any light, creeping like a puddle of flaming alcohol, low, through space. That is the way to visualize the fact that my thoughts influence events. You would think, with all the well-wishing and ill-wishing I’ve done, that the effects would be more obvious, but the routes are devious and there is a lot of interference and misunderstanding.

  VOICE: Wake up.

  Ah!

  VOICE: Awake now?

  ...

  VOICE: Ready to continue? You will begin by explaining how you were to go about using animal money to undermine the international economy of the world.

  Correct the international economy. That is what we were trying to do.

  VOICE: By writing a book?

  A book that would ruin minds for this bad reality, making them incompetent to function in it so they would be compelled by their own altered understanding to change it.

  VOICE: You will confine yourself to speaking in intelligible terms.

  ... Well ... I’ll explain ... but ... to do that, I’ll have to tell you about Assiyeh, and how, bent nearly double with age, Assiyeh hobbles into the lab. With the assistance of her father’s ghost, she climbs painfully into a rolling hospital bed. She’s an old woman, now. He looks into her eyes, and she grabs his face with one clawlike hand, squashing his felty shadow cheeks.

  “Now listen,” she says hoarsely, fixing his unblinking eyes with her own rheumy ones. “Five minutes. Understand? Do you understand?”

  She spreads her gnarled free hand as wide as it will go.

  “Five!”

  The lab is like a vast cave. There’s a gigantic glass bulb in the center of it, divided in two halves, top and bottom, with a hospital room set inside. Assiyeh’s bed is placed on rails and drawn into the bulb. It slides gently into position between the nightstand and a large window, which is blocked by a vertical shutter made of overlapping steel plates. A dusty, listless butterfly sits on the windowsill, without moving. It is very nearly dead of old age. A papery, browning rose droops in a green wine bottle standing on the floor in the near corner of the room.

  Assiyeh lies on her back, looking straight up, her fists clenched on her chest.

  “All right!” she calls.

  The ghost of her father stands at the controls. There’s a box with two buttons on it hanging from a heavy cable, and he now takes this and presses the lower button. The two halves of the bulb, currently about a foot apart, close together with a stony clap. Now the alcohol. There are two huge cylinders of gas connected to the bulb, one on either side. Massive hydraulic rams sink, stopping again after descending a few feet. There’s a hiss as the chamber pressurizes with vaporized alcohol. Once the experiment starts, these rams will automatically step up the pressure at diminishing intervals.

  As the pressure rises, the heavy shutter over the window lifts slightly, flooding the room with a warm, golden effulgence of summer sunshine. Assiyeh tosses restlessly. The withered rose stirs, its petals swell and stiffen, their color flushes up and deepens, the green of the leaves darkens and they stand up again. Like a timid erection, the head of the rose tremblingly lifts. The butterfly, standing directly in the stream of the sun, takes on a new vividness; its colors flush up and it supports its body with new readiness. It begins to flutter around the room, flapping up and down around the bed. The rams sink further, the pressure increases, the shutter rises further, the air becomes more syrupy and golden.

  After a few repetitions more, the flower stands at attention, a bold carmine hard-on defying all comers, the butterfly whirls around the room. Assiyeh convulsively seizes the handrails of the bed and pulls herself up, her head hanging back and rolling. The liverspots on her hands are twitching like little mouths, shrinking and expanding. The bulging blood vessels on the backs of her hands sink. A heavy greyness is being hammered somehow into her snow white hair and the olive of her complexion is being forced back into her suppling flesh. Assiyeh groans and flops back again onto the pillow, streaming with perspiration.

  The timer alarm barks, but so enraptured is her father’s ghost by the golden light, the gorgeous spectacle of rejuvenative life fields, that he doesn’t notice the alarm, the presses silently and implacably descend, and the shutter rises further, the cascade of brilliant summer becomes punishing, his fascination deepens. The rose trembles in the bottle, its stem tapping against the inside of the glass. Its petals have become too intensely to look at, and even as he tries to see them more distinctly, with a ripping sound a blinding spark of blue-white light cracks out from the blossom and jets into the air like a blowtorch. With a sharp pop! the test butterfly breaks the sound barrier. A fierce spark bursts from it and the room fills with a scribbled light trail. Assiyeh sits up wild-eyed and frantically whips the edge of her extended hand across her throat—shut it off! shut it off! she mouths, her voice not more than a muffled hum through thick glass. Tears of joy dribbling down his face, he raises his hand in an answering wave, then, beside himself, he is jumping up and down and waving both arms, transported with the success of the experiment.

  Heliosimulators bathe the room with mild summer sunlight so concentrated it’s punishing; a heavy golden jelly crushing and smothering her beneath perfume of roses, hyacinths, jasmine, old man’s beard, orange blossoms, lilac and wisteria. The rams fall with merciless slowness, and the pressure steadily increases. The floor of the hospital set crawls with blossoms shaped like alien flowers and piebald with insane color variations; the thorny vines scale the walls in fine threadlike arabesques. A hum swells from the buds and they bloom in dazzling lights. Midsummer afternoon condenses on the walls, and runs down in viscous streaks, dripping in threads from the ceiling to mingle with her sweat, until she is sopping in a golden mire of glory. Assiyeh pitches and heaves on the damp mattress, her skin taut, her hair cascades over her face in glossy jet black locks which are parted by a pair of spatulate antlers sprouting angrily from her temples, her whole body crackles and bursts, transforming her into a blazing, writhing figure of pink flame.

  As his daughter explodes, the ghost leaps back in surprise and alarm, suddenly remembering his instructions. He snatches the hanging box and presses the top button. The two halves of the bulb spring apart and the captive gas gushes from the opening as the presses retract upwards automatically. Volatile sun jelly splatters out the opening hatch, hits the floor, and rebounds in fragrant white heat.

  The rejuvenation procedure was supposed to be carried out in gentle stages, not all at once. It was also supposed to restore Assiyeh to a dignified 35- or 40-year-old self, not as a skinny, acne’d, antlered teenager.

  “You stupid asshole! You ruined everything! You always ruin everything! I hate you I hate you I hate you!” she screams.

  *

  I blunderstand my shituation pretty wellbadly, I’d say. I see posters of myself everywhere: UNWANTED, DEAD OR ALIVE. I see t
hem so reliably that I begin to think that for me seeing posters of myself and just seeing have gotten mixed up. For a while I would tear down every one I came across with the same indignant cry, that my face is mine, that’s my face, my name, my name, but there are so many posters and faces and names that I don’t bother any more. They aren’t really my face. I look around for someone to punch and there’s only the usual commuters. And why would I want to hit some salaried poster hanger for? Isn’t there anywhere in life for my anger to go? Why do I always have to burn it off in a game or in some bullshit? What’s preventing me from lowering the boom when and where it belongs? It’s because the time and place for it is always being yanked just out of reach. I can never pay off my rage debt. Still, I don’t think not being able to see myself in the hero’s role can be all bad. The evil wizards are scrying for me, trying to turn me into a poster or a statue. That’s why I have to not stop. If I stop, a pedestal is going to start pushing up under my feet. I want my feet on the ground, even if the ground is cracked and I keep falling on my face, and my knees and handheels are scuffy and scabby. Wherever I go, the ground looks the same; it looks exactly like the ground did the time I was shot in the USA and lay on the ground, watching the ground refusing to drink my unwanted blood. My blood just lay there. I wanted my blood, I knew that, even if the ground didn’t. The bullet went right through the meaty part of my right arm above the elbow. There’s not a lot of meat there to hit, so it was fate. I was seventeen. I got better, but when I pull my arm all the way in, it feels weak toward the end.

  “When the international monetary system went off the gold standard, the money game became infinite, and so did the potential for rigging that already-rigged game. Without the modest check of international gold prices, the cabals that had once set those prices were in a position simply to set the value of money directly. It wasn’t necessary to intervene in every variety of money because in the end everything was a dollar derivative anyway. Incognito dollars in brightly-colored holiday outfits adorned in their local color tourist t-shirts silk screened with the faces of royalty and endorsed celebrities and landmarks go off to clandestine siexual (sic) liasons under foreign skies with exotic and interesting strangers, for mantelpiece knick knack fuck snacks after snake fin soup and crackers.”