Animal Money

by Michael Cisco

  (Ndidi: Not quite correct. He was not living in his car. I first saw him, actually, as I was looking out the window of the elevated train going right past his apartment. I got off at the stop and followed the directions Lusita gave me and it gradually became clear to me that I was headed for the same building, then to the same floor, and finally to the same apartment that I had happened to look directly into from the train. It had caught my eye because it was so bright. It was bright because it was empty. He had nothing in there except for a card table that looked like he’d fished out of the trash. There wasn’t even a shade on the light in the middle of the ceiling. Going by in the train, I’d seen him, sitting right back in the corner of his apartment by the front door, facing the window, with the table in front of him. He had both hands spread out on the top, and both legs sticking out straight, his legs were like the walls and his spine was the corner. He held the table to himself, like pulling up a blanket, but it gave me the feeling he was trapped in his light box like the invisible man. Then I was really in that apartment, and he pulled the chair he’d been sitting in out from the corner and offered it to me. I took it without thinking, and almost right away regretted it, because I hadn’t realized he had only the one. He went over to the kitchen wall of the apartment and opened an empty refrigerator to look for something to offer me. One beer. He had a jar of water in there too. I don’t think there was anything else.)

  I’m only an average lover so she didn’t miss much, perhaps she intuited that. There’s for a long time been in me a certain voice that tells me you have to have sex it’s a duty of life, but for some reason we won’t go into here or indeed at all, you—just you, not everyone—you, SuperAesop, have no business enjoying it; you don’t have sex for pleasure but to please others, and drunk with hyperbolic sobriety you tell yourself it isn’t an exchange, you should feel as little pleasure as possible, remain neutral, while giving as much pleasure as possible, so I found a way to make fucking ascetic work toward the other person’s transcendence. She should go through the roof, forget her own name, and all the while I’m just keeping the bubble smack between the lines. Infallibility. Then again, I also used to tell myself that one day she was going to turn to me and say—“I wish you were smart. If you were smart, you would ask me to marry you.” As if her refusal was a matter of protocol, as if she really wanted me, but I hadn’t puzzled out her map yet. But I didn’t want to marry her, or I didn’t most of the time, and lacked means. I used to tell myself that I was choosing not to ask her to marry me because of my altruism, to spare her the travails of my dismonetized demon-demonstrator lifestyle, and that she belonged on a pedestal, but this was such patent bullshit that I couldn’t even fully pay attention to the thought. It was there in my mind like a jingle, not a swelling hymn of goodness. I never asked her about Africa and she never talked about it in any detail; she would advert to general practices or things that she recognized here from back home, but that was it. I was fascinated by her Africanness and bottled up every question I might have asked her. I said to myself that I didn’t want to be a nuisance, but I really didn’t want to admit that I had a collector’s yen to bed an African and collect my bragging rights. For years I thought I spent all that time with Ndidi like a frustrated satellite, that I was just a jerk looking for my sex angle, but then one day I woke up in my fucking car and saw the sunlight through the foul condensation and in a flash she was there, I was walking beside her in a crisp cold morning, and she was cold, but it was still fun for her, being that cold, and the thought of her walking unreachably next to me, talking warm to me in the raw cold, was like a warm hand shoving my chest down. Tears rolled down my face.

  “I loved her,” I thought. “I love her. I don’t believe it.”

  That worldless world, that is where I’m from—it isn’t formless, it adopts world masks, it improvises strict eternal regulations, but it isn’t a world, all the same it isn’t—

  *

  The dream was like a movie; he watched it. All the same, he did feel as if he were participating in the action, if only because he was unable not to watch it. Even as he dreamed it, he knew it was reminiscent of those horror sci-fi movies you see in snatches while you’re skipping channels, with experiments, a psychic or magic child on a rampage. The dream was fragmented and seamless at once, every moment slipping into the next, but carrying the previous moments along behind. A nine year old Afghan girl with a maroon scarf around her head is crossing a blasted landscape, smoking buildings in the background. Her face is divided down the middle by an irregular stripe of red, dried blood from a head injury. A huge truck rolls down what’s left of a street, helmeted heads in the back. One of them spots her, the helmeted head swivels, chinstrap flipping loose. The girl throws herself down and hides.

  She makes it to the next village. Gunfire jolts her awake and she scrambles beneath a table, trembling. Something slams into the house and nearly rips it open. The wall that had been so cool and solid and silent a moment before is now ripped in two and the roof is sliding off and stars are opening up above her. She is paralyzed for a moment, then, like a rabbit out of a trap she launches herself through the door, dropping onto the ground the moment she is outside. Tracers are stitched into the night air, pops and bangs on all sides. There’s a basement or shelter some yards away—can she get to it? She crawls that way on her stomach. Shots close by—hum over her head, spit in the dirt just missing her left hand. The night in chaos. Shooting. The girl looks up with cold composure and flips the truck firing from the street, lights it on fire, drags the nearest house down on top of uniformed men, silencing them under a blanket of rubble.

  Now it’s another night. The old night. She’s sleeping in some house. A man steps into the room with his gun raised, startling her awake. The girl recoils into the corner of the room, crying, exhausted with fear. The man hesitates. His nightmare wins as he points the gun at her. She vomits. He hesitates. Then he curses. She is watching him again. She lifts her fist and something like wind flashes across the small gap dividing them. His head jerks as if he’s been struck, and changes shape, abruptly narrower than it was. The man drops sideways onto his right hip, falls back, his head strikes the floor with a thud.

  The girl is learning. Standing on top of a hill, lit from below by flames of the military base, she pulls helicopters down and smashes them against the ground. The flames spread across the compound, and there are silhouetted figures flashing, sirens, shouts. Impassive, with hooded eyes and a grim smile, she flips the trucks with her fingers, spreads the fire around with her open palm like paint on paper, swats the aircraft like flies, pancakes the buildings, squeezes the people to pulp in her fists.

  Curses and shouts, a mountain camp, Afghan men with rifles. They have an inexhaustible fund of insulting names to call her. Let them call her those names now. The mountain is burning, explosives are going up, the men scatter, the hills fall on them, covering them, silencing their curses, stopping their mouths with dust and the pieces of their own shattered jaws.

  As the movie continues, we see the girl imperiously receiving suit-and-tie emissaries and representatives of this warlord or that militia leader. She listens to them with the same impassive smile. Her uncanny self-possession throws these influential men into confusion. Finally, in a climactic scene, she addresses them all.

  “I’ve heard all the talking from you that I need to. Now you will listen to me. I am the Queen of Afghanistan now, and you all will do as I say. I don’t need an army to kill you. I can kill you all by myself. I don’t care if I kill you all. I’m not going to accept any offer from you. Afghanistan will be run the way I say. You put together a government to run things, and I will watch. I will not stay in any one place. I won’t have a palace. I will go wherever I want, and you won’t know I’m watching you until I show you. I’m going to kill anyone I catch fighting. The foreigners will all leave, right now. If I see anyone hurting any girls or women, I will kill them. Girls are going to go to school. Nobody hurts anyone without my
permission. If I catch anyone hurting anyone without asking me first, they will be the ones who will be hurt. You can ask me just by talking out loud. I will hear. And if someone is beating you or trying to kill you, just ask me for my help. I will hear that. I will come back and talk to you again if I think of anything more to say.”

  She waves her hand and an American general drops dead, blood spurting from his face. The crowd gasps and recoils. She waves her hand again and a religious guerrilla leader drops dead, blood spurting from his face. The crowd recedes from the two crumpled bodies like an outrushing wave.

  “That’s what I think of America. That’s what I think of Taliban. There is only the Queen from now on.”

  Unusually complete dream. Her speech rings in his ears as he shaves his lean face, adjusts his expensive haircut, dons his Brooks Brothers suit in a tastefully neutral color, shining like a pliable metal integument. A solid red tie that gleams like metal. We are the knights of today, the great lords. He eats his breakfast watching the news on a huge television and pauses before he goes out to gaze judiciously through enormous windows at implacable Manhattan towers which bow to him. Then the briefcase, the loafers that cost as much as a luxury car, the elevator, the genuflection of the doorman, the waiting limo, the glide through the streets bouncing off the riff raff, then alighting in front of the stock exchange. Up the steps, in the front, wave him through. Numbers on screens, screens screens like black mouths of open hearths bristling with numbers. Like the black cavities of dead human beings bristling with maggots you mean. He follows the causeway off to one side and keys himself into a certain men’s room. In the rear toilet stall he presses a certain tile and the wall slides back to reveal a shadowy foyer lit by sullen vermillion lamps and thick with pungent incense. Women swathed in luminous veils divest him of his clothes, carefully folding them away, and gently strike his naked body with wands as his chest is anointed with lamb grease. He dons his robe and passes through the massy arras into the secret shrine whose vaulted ceiling is lost in gloom overhead, almost as if a topless shaft rose above them.

  The open floor is a fantastic mosaic of inlaid marbles and chalcedonies, heaped here and there with thick rugs of astounding intricacy, woven from the hair of garroted babies very rare, very expensive. Some hooded figures, early birds, are already there, conferring in low tones and guttural chortlings that do not quite mask the feeble groans and pleas for help arising from a cage of golden thorns standing half-muffled in crimson serge on the far side of the shrine. Those, of course, are the futures. Dominating all is a gargantuan idol squatting balefully on an onyx dais the size of a city block. The statue’s eyes are emeralds that blaze like ovens, two halves of a stone extracted from the heart of an asteroid. From its bloated trunk sprout numberless arms; coins glitter between its splayed fingers. Its penis is the size of a subway train and droops down from the dais, extending along the floor. The offerings are made in a great depression situated on top of the glans, which must be scaled using a rolling stairway of rhino horn. Already the flames have started up in the cauldrons lining the idol’s base, and the cries of the victims, rightly interpreting this as a sign of bad things to come, rise to augment the splendor of the scene.

  When the ritual unfolds, the same as it has from time immemorial, in all its awesome magnificence, there is nevertheless something lame about it. Not ignominy, which can be glorious, not even banality, although that is closer, hallowed by the the nullifying cancer of the Misled. It’s strange that a rite as time-honored as this should have an ineradicable lameness, and that, even with all these expensive and exotic accountrements, the dire consequences, the leaden hieratic gravity, it’s still as embarrassing as the suburban sabbath of a bunch of junior high school witches in polyvinyl chloride Halloween capes intoning spells out of a drugstore paperback.

  We pick up some light traffic on the outskirts of Etsimen. I don’t remark on this particularly, until, at last, our offramp comes into view. As I sigh with relief and angle over to take it, another car zips up out of nowhere and cruises on our right. I have to whip the wheel to avoid hitting him, and the offramp flashes past.

  “Aw, motherfucker.”

  There is a loop, though, so I can swing us around the town and come back to the sole offramp again. There’s nothing to see outside; the night is dark, and the few lights of Etsimen still seem very far away. Here comes the offramp. I swing into it and jerk back in virtually the same instant—there’s a car in the way again. Again the offramp flashes by. Looming behind us is big black mercedes and the single headlight squints directly into the back of shitty hatchback. That cyclops eye drops back behind us, and then, gone.

  It happens again, the third time. When I get aggressive and begin jabbing my way toward the exit with short rushes, another car is suddenly there, coming up the exit ramp. That car has only one light, too. They look new, these gleaming black mercedes, but both are missing one light. One on the left, one on the right—no, both on the right, the other one was coming toward me. We go back around again, and again the escorting cyclops car drops from sight at about the halfway mark. It’s an elevated highway, the whole loop, touching ground only on the part that actually belongs to the through highway, and that part is built up with no shoulder on a steep embankment with big rocks on the city side and dense brush on the desert side. Shitty would get stuck in that brush for sure, and its first taste of that embankment would probably rip the whole drive train loose if we didn’t roll, which is exactly what we would do. So we can’t stop without leaving the car in a lane. And every time we come around, those cyclops cars flock up like wolves. I have an insurmountable intuition that they would run us over if they could. OK so what, leave the car and run. But Carolina’s fucked up. She might try to reason with an oncoming car in the state she’s in.

  The fourth time, a truck sits right at the mouth of the exit ramp. No cars approach, but I can see four or five single right lights floating behind us up the road, just far enough away to be hard to see, just near enough to be able to run us down if we ditch. This time I stay on the highway, heading for the next exit along, but suddenly there’s a phalanx of those fucking black mercedes swinging in from nowhere on either side of me. It’s like looking up from your cute tropical fish to find yourself in an orca pod, it’s bad. I brake and fall back and sure enough they are following, herding me, and the only way to go is off onto the roundabout again. The next time I hit the highway stretch, the way past the turnoff is blocked by dumpsters and burning oil drums. I don’t even try to investigate further. I take the turnoff and lose my time fantasizing about rappelling down from these forty-foot concrete ramps.

  *

  It’s daylight. I’ve been circling Etsimen now for about two hours and there’s only about half an hour left in the tank, I think, at most. Carolina is docilely and regularly feeding herself acid, and is very quiet. My ability to think has quit me. We pull back onto the same stretch of highway again, and once again I scan for changes, for some as yet overlooked escape route, telling myself that the gathering daylight is going to show me what I need. Suddenly I realize that one of the black mercedes has drawn up on my left. The windows are all black, of course. The rear passenger window glides smoothly down; the car holds darkness within. The gloved hand that comes out the window isn’t pointing the pistol at me but only holding it up as if offering it for sale, teetering it this way and that just to let me know, but that kind of taunting bugs me and I snap the wheel and smash them. There’s a jolt and Carolina seems to wake up with a start jumping and turning in her seat to stare at me her back to the door and her head against the ceiling, her face blank with surprise and then the next second her mouth opens all the way and she bursts out laughing like this is the funniest thing she ever saw in her life. The other car nosed away in surprise and the window when I glance back is now closed again and they’re going to reply in kind, so I let them think that long enough to get them to commit then pump the brakes.

  They float out ahead and only just clip
our front, and they’re front wheel drive it looks like so the back end is only swinging with follow-through I guess, a rear-wheel drive might have knocked us harder. As it is since we don’t weigh anything to speak of that rap from them throws us into 1% of a skid and I am ridiculous, applying now the brake, now the accelerator, trying to add speed in one direction and take it away in the other, but I actually do know how to drive and I can make shitty hatchback flip like ballerinas so instead of wiping out I manage to stabilize our condition and come up right on asshole’s seven where I can control him. Right behind him he could brake abruptly and we’d fare worse in the collision, but if he tries that with me here at seven I can fade with him or nudge him over and push his ass out from behind him. His swerve in my direction took him all the way over to the right so he’s a bit stuck just now, all the same he decides to do something silly and swing out left anyway, inducing me to charge up forward without swerving and even he knows that’s a bad combination of forces and lunges back away to the right with a panicky oversteer that puts him right off the road. My darted backwards glances show me that car stuck on the slope, floundering in rocks and jumping around like a horse in a tight pen. Carolina has dropped back into her seat and is laughing musically into both her hands, swinging her head around to see.

  So there will be others, right? I pull in to the turnoff and stop, jump out, run around, try to get into the cab of the truck which is locked, get down, grab rock, get up, smash window, open door, get in cab, release the brake. Gravity helps me pull the truck aside and back it up to block the ramp above shitty hatchback. Out the passenger side. Not even looking. They could be firing whole cars at me from a slingshot for all I know. I drive shitty hatchback down the offramp wishing I’d been desperate enough to try that two hours earlier, and in four minutes we’re entering Etsimen.