Animal Money

by Michael Cisco

  ... Outside, as they go on talking, talking, talking, the light lances down with such a violent glare that the sky is polarized and all but impossible to see, appearing contracted around the star, and visible at most as a dull greyish exhalation of the planet that barely films the starry blackness beyond. Tightly-corseted by the presence of the sun, the sky gapes alarmingly the moment the sun sets, and becomes correspondingly vast from the perspective of the surface, so that it seems as if the horizon, so high overhead during the day, plummets below the feet at night, and it’s as if the observer were bulging out into space, surrounded by stars. The sky induces claustrophobia by day and agoraphobia by night. The behavior of the sky is far less marked in the city, which may explain in part why so few people venture out into the wilderness. The city consists of 221 soaring towers that cannot be clearly seen up close; in the glare of daylight they are just solid black geometries that disappear upwards into the rays of the star; at night they are luminous white squares in which tiny figures can be seen eating, working, gazing outside, or, as is surprisingly common considering how straight-laced people here are in public, having sex right up against the windows. Supplies and waste are conveyed to and fro through subterranean waterways that lave the deep foundations of the towers; most of the street-chasms are narrow causeways suspended on high arches above the dark water that flickers far below them. The plazas are like the bottoms of open pits, the more popular ones resembling craters, where the flatter surrounding buildings lean away from the open space and let in more sky. The streets further to the south, away from the water, are not suspended, and they terminate with striking exactness along a line as distinct as if the urbation had been rolled out like a sheet of wrapping paper and then cut with a razor along a ruler’s edge. There the streets all end in a joined brass rail, and beyond it there is open ground, dotted with shrubs and criss-crossed here and there with meandering trails shiny with occasional use, leading into the rolling hill country.

  ... When the interview is over, Assiyeh is released, and the meniscus recedes. What was that all about? She rubs her head, uncertainly. Trying to remember their interview is like trying to remember a physical movement made in sleep. The special has dissolved into a cloud of darkened office air, through which she catches glimpses of dim, desk-lined aisles, banks of file cabinets, institutional corridors. None of these really exist anywhere on the planet, as far as she knows. Those glimpses are only her mental articulation of more abstract impressions proper to the bureaucracy field itself. Presumably, an ancient Egyptian would have caught glimpses of heaped up scrolls, clay tablets, the smell of stale ink and bone dry store rooms. An ancient Mayan would have seen the calendar, heard the noises made by the official finery of the calculators. Someone from ancient China would have smelled the glue-like odor of lacquered cases, seen the piles of writing brushes, the carefully arranged and painstakingly copied annals.

  There are three things left behind when the special has gone. First, confirmation that she has been traced to Koskon Kanona and marked for retrieval or liquidation by terranist agents, and second, denial of a permit she requested for reclassification of certain premises currently under lease to her which would, by altering their zoning designation, allow her to use them as a lab for potentially apocalyptic experiments. Evidently she filed late. (The deadlines are highly variable because they are set by multiple interlocking calendars and it isn’t unusual for a due date to slip out from under.) She has until DATE DATE DATE NUMBER DATE NUMBER to reapply. Meanwhile, the grant for her dangerous experiments has come through. Contact Buzzati SII33.

  *

  Statistical analysis of the literature shows a strong bias of over four to one in favor of what is often erroneously described as an individualistic or heroic narrative structure. This description is erroneous because the definition of individual entailed by the category is generic; individual or heroic status is conveyed on an actor in such a narrative because he or she occupies that position as a substitute for a hypothetical audience member’s wish-fulfillment figure. The pseudo-individual character is a representative for a generic audience and is hence generic tout entiere.

  The genuinely individualistic narrative must, among other things, particularize an individual. The logic of what is known as the individualistic or heroic narrative is a “war is peace” or “fear is security” logic, ie, the individual is anybody; see figure one.

  Figure one: a video montage of human beings with more money raising their open palms to screen their faces from the camera, people in suits getting into or out of high priced cars, wearing high priced clothes, high priced hair styles, high priced jewelry, or uniforms of high rank.

  The description of the activities of a given individual will reflect this illusory individualism if this approach is taken, while a non-individual or even anti-individual approach will suffer from confusion between genuine individuality and its double. Therefore the indicated approach will analyze the individual by explicitly excluding the double or media-individual.

  As per request from the office of the Principal Censor, what follows will be a summary description of an individual preponderantly designated SuperAesop. Membership confirmed: The People’s Community Party, the Retrofit Socialist Party, the Green Marxist Party, the Daoist Communist Party, the Commnarchist Party, the Rent Is Too Damn High Party, the Intercontinental Unemployed Persons Party, the Lumpen Syndicalist Party. Activities rated above 3.0 on the Panicker Potential Social Efficacy Scale associated with SuperAesop beginning 3/39/00 consist mainly of type four and type five labor organizing with an average basic success rate of 20.2%, which is 4.1% greater than the general success rates for such activities. These include (US records only):

  a) an attempt to form a pizza delivery person’s union—FAILED.

  b) an attempt to form a motor pool for pizza delivery persons—FAILED.

  c) two attempts to require pizzerias to cover fuel expenses for pizza delivery persons—FAILED.

  d) an attempt to prevent the dismissal of a pizza delivery person who was murderously assaulted and hospitalized by a mentally disturbed customer—FAILED.

  e) an attempt to raise funds to cover medical costs of the injured pizza delivery person—partial success.

  f) aided in the escape of a sex worker responsible for the assassination of a U.S. senator, strangled in the course of erotic asphyxiation—partial success.

  g) an attempt to oppose the closure of the entire Philadelphia public school and public library systems—FAILED.

  h) an attempt to oppose the closure of the entire mass transit system in Philadelphia—FAILED.

  i) an attempt to oppose a 75% reduction in the Philadelphia fire department—FAILED.

  j) an attempt to oppose the elimination of all public funding for health care in Pennsylvania—FAILED.

  k) an attempt to end minimum wage discrimination against restaurant workers—FAILED.

  l) an attempt to legalize public nudity in Philadelphia—FAILED.

  m) an attempt to oppose the imposition of mandatory life insurance laws in Pennsylvania—partial success.

  n) an attempt to create a working class news and information service in Philadelphia—FAILED.

  o) an attempt to repeal “shoot on sight” laws passed after several weeks of protest and social upheaval in Philadelphia—FAILED.

  p) an attempt to evade prosecution for counterfeiting and numerous other implausible offenses relating to the propagation of alternative currencies—FAILED.

  q) an attempt to organize a prisoners’ union—FAILED.

  r) an attempt to escape from prison—FAILED.

  s) an attempt to create an ex-convicts’ union—partial success.

  t) one hundred and five attempts to find publisher for literary and critical book titled Notes from the Ground-Under—FAILED.

  *

  The surviving economists are retreating further and further from their point of entry into the structure. We must consider the question of this structure, because, the f
arther the economists go within that structure, the less coherent becomes the claim that it is a structure. Structures aren’t infinite, and they are distinct from all of space. What is needed here is a rule that will fix the point at which the extensiveness of the structure in space exceeds the necessity of the concept of structure. Any structure of greater size than that could no longer be designated a structure, where a structure is considered to be de facto at Absolute Rest.

  So then what would such a thing be?

  A dimension. Simple.

  The structure is both man-made and natural. While it is constructed of man-made material—made from natural products—its form is that of a particular dimension. The man-made structure is an artificial lining for a natural dimension. So this structure is like a natural cave formation that has been converted for human use. One might lay down cement or tile or wooden boards on the cave floor, put windows in any gaps in the cave wall, doors in the larger internal apertures, and so on. In this case, the cave is the natural cavern of space-time.

  The surviving economists are retreating further and further into a dimension X that relates to what we might call the common dimension, C, as an attic is related to the rest of the structure to which it belongs. From the point of view of those in C, the surviving economists are dwindling, as the recession of the economists is not perceived in spatial terms by those outside the dimension X, who cannot observe the spatial properties of X any more than a three dimensional figure can be perceived as such from the vantage point of the second dimension. This means that the economists in X can however survey C with the benefit of C+1 dimensional point of view, should they choose to do so.

  The third dimension is sheared off an object by second dimensional perception. It follows that a second dimensional figure, while it remains two dimensional, is nevertheless perceived by a three dimensional observer with the addition of a dimensional absence. This would be the “empty space” of the absent third dimension in the second dimensional figure: the surroundings that are unnoticed from the two dimensional point of view.

  With this idea clearly in view, we can proceed to define the problem. By receding into X, the surviving economists (SE) are preserving themselves from the hostility of those social actors in C who wish to suppress any challenge to their private dominion over the property and social power of C. This is an effective measure insofar as receding into X puts the surviving economists beyond the spatial reach of those social actors, their violence, their communication, their knowledge, their interrogatives. However as the recession of the SE into X increases, and correspondingly their safety from harm or detection, there is a proportionate decrease in their ability to intervene back in C, even though, from the point of view of C, they don’t appear to have gone anywhere. From the vantage point of C, the SE have merely decreased in size, until they have dwindled down to comically frantic little dolls scrambling through a dollhouse dimension. From the vantage point of the SE, C has simultaneously flattened and distended itself like a map, which can be consulted but only at a distance. When “distance” is invoked in this, necessarily imperfect, analogy, it must be understood to mean something more than a mere quantitative difference, having a tendency to increase, in the measurement of space between two points. While there is some element of this idea of distance, this “distance” is far more intensely a translation, just as the map is a translation and not identical to the landscape or even to the view of that landscape from a height. There is a dimensional difference between the map and the landscape that is not quantitative in the way that the theoretical distance from the earth’s surface to the imaginary point of view from which it appears as it does on the map is quantitative.

  Looking back at C from X, the SE will see a dimensional absence that becomes more obvious in proportion to the augmentation of the quantitative distance from the point of entry into the new dimension. This absence is like the perceived “flatness” of the two-dimensional figure as seen from the third dimension. The “flatness” of C grows in conspicuousness at a constant rate matching the rate of recession of SE in X. As the utility of the SE, which determines in effect the extent to which they are economists per se, is partially a function of perception, so their identities as economists will grow in density as their perspective on C increases, which is the consequence of their incessant flight deeper into X. However, the other aspect of the utility of the SE, namely, their interventions in the economic and social affairs of C, is correspondingly reduced; as their flight into X continues, there is a non-straightforward alteration in the value of SE.

  I still haven’t figured out whether or not the diminution of interventivity is equivalent to the augmentacity of perspicuousness, or in some other neat proportion, or what the fuck it is, but there is some kind of function there. Perhaps that function has a productive aspect anyway.

  *

  Etsimen really is just those three lights and they’re already getting to be like old friends because here I am driving past them again, three lights with nothing to illuminate but bare earth with the roads laid out and nothing else. Carolina is leaning out the car window and I’m massaging my elbow where there’s this buzzing feeling down in the meat that comes and goes, nerve trouble I guess.

  “Stop the car,” Carolina says.

  We get out in the silence and darkness, just outside the trapezoid of lit earth. The mountains fill half the sky in one direction and are only a little lower opposite. The air is warm and dry, and it smells like baked soil. Carolina walks along one side of the road, weaving as if she were avoiding pedestrians. Then she reaches out her hand to push open a door that isn’t there and vanishes inside an all-night drugstore with a dark, barred window and a vertical neon PHARMANAOS sign. A rush of air pulls over me as a car that I can’t see passes me. There is no sign of anyone the length of the street, down to the intersection diagonally half in shadow. And now Carolina’s gone, too. Isolation paralyzes me. I stand here, in this empty place with its three lights, seeing the dim rows of buildings, the intersection half in darkness. Two oxen round the corner and walk up the empty street in my direction, seeming to firm up the night like a clear fan around them, suddenly very deep and tall, full of a breathing held-breath feeling. The two oxen are the same, same size, same color, and their eyes are a vivid red. They walk close together and more or less in unison, but they are holding their heads up and still in a way that I don’t know is normal for oxen. They cross the street in front of me. I can smell them, distinctly. One of them noses open the door to the pharmacy and they both go inside, the neon light splashing them with blue across their broad backs. Carolina comes out a moment later, unwrapping a pack of cigarettes.

  Driving around, I can see people. Dense crowds in some places. The sound of a bustling town at night, but never more than those three lights. The other lights are not lights. I only think I see them. They’re there, but only for thought. My body feels so feathery now I wonder if the car is really here around me or if I’m just floating along. But I could never imagine anything as baroquely ugly as this car and its inexhaustible supply of little bits of junk and scraps of trash. Carolina points, and I pull up at some white plaster walls lit with multicolored lamps set in the earth among the aloes. Up comes a young person—I think it’s a boy but I can’t be sure—“he’s” carrying a lantern that throws all its light up onto his face, while the rest of him is a silhouette. He’s smiling at us with a mouth full of slightly crooked teeth and welcomes us in an uncertain voice to the hotel Adoniram, I think he says. We leave the car where it is and go inside, through an archway into a patio with identical low white buildings to our right and left. Opposite us, on the far side of the patio, is nothing, just an open expanse of black land and very dark blue sky. As he crosses before the phosphorescent white of the building beside me I see that this person is a boy, and stark naked. His lantern is gone. Now he is inviting us in through the sliding glass door of the building on the right.

  I recognize a lobby in the gloom. There is an even
light here, very dim, and coming from no particular place, although we all throw moonshadows on the walls. That wall off to the left has a fireplace and what is probably fake wood panelling, a living room set. Front desk, pigeonholes, an office, a hallway. The boy asks me for my clothes, watches me as I take them off. He puts them on the counter and then asks for Carolina’s. She undresses as he watches, smiling. He puts her clothes next to mine and goes behind the counter, then takes the clothes down and puts them under the counter, and produces a room key. With a wave of his hand, he gestures us to follow him down the hall.

  The room doors are made of thick glass. He unlocks one and gestures us inside, then says something that might be “Saluto!” and tosses me the key. It’s the kind that’s just a metal tab with concavities along its length, with a small round disk of some heavy, sandy material that I think is stone. The wall opposite the door is all glass, and the other walls are glass from about halfway up, the lower half is plaster. We’re at the end of the hall, so the half wall across from the bed overlooks the same vague blue-black expanse of desert, and the ceiling is either painted black or it’s clear too, although I can see no stars. Nothing but vivid, animated blackness. I can’t really see into the next room, either—only a murky blue-white bed and maybe a chair, maybe a moving figure, black and skeletal, just there vanishing into the transparent bathroom. I wash up and throw myself on the spacious bed, which has no covers, and which is just higher at the head of the bed, in lieu of pillows. Carolina lays herself on top of me. I want to tell her I’m too tired, but I don’t. She seems especially excited, as if we were being watched through the glass walls.