Animal Money

by Michael Cisco

  All the same, the NCBWU did get us talking more to each other and that did bring about non-trivial organizing. That was good. But when you wanted to take it to the next level, talk more seriously, especially talk to anyone with real clout, you ended up being fudged out to some accessory again. I wanted to leave, but I was seeing Gina back then and I couldn’t push too hard since she was counting on me to bring in some money. I never did learn whether or not she really was pregnant. So it was an IV drip of wait and see, let’s fight it out on TV instead of the street, let’s take it to court and not the street, and I’m never knowing why we don’t just stop making the fudge, keep the cars in the lot, or the dishes unwashed in the bushel bins or whatever it was we were doing, just put it on hold and zap them like the old days. I knew all kinds of heavy heavy people, big women who could backhand a manager right over the deep frier and surprise themselves, not just angry but indignant, by which I mean angry on behalf of other people you identify with and care about, who would have gone toe to toe with Godzilla and comported themselves creditably, people without a crumb of fudge left in them. The hungry eyes of their kids burned their fudge out and it’s long gone, and now they’re hot and mean. I watched with my own hungry eyes as the gates of the boredrooms swung wide and a lake of shuddering foam rolled out to quench the flames. The accessories were all redolent of the fumes of fudge that numb the nerves and dull the brain, dull the pain of the heart, of smarting pride, spreading a kind of calm rationality that is actually murky, not clear at all. You open your mouth to speak, to utter your grievance and make your claim and what comes out, instead of the laser, is:

  “Weeellllllll ....”

  Thin and quavering and sponging away the real writing. And from that welll-moment it’s gee you got to compromise and you know let’s check the weather and you know you can never do too much planning—yes you can—you can never spend too much time at the drawing board—yes you can—Jumping clarity sags, melts, dribbles away sheepishly down the drain. See we can all get along, right, get along back to the same neighborhoods.

  “Yeah, but you can’t go on strike against them,” I said to Gina, explaining. “You have to stick together or everything’s just wasted.”

  “Everything’s wasted now,” she said.

  “It’s a hard struggle,” I said. “You can’t do it by yourself, and those guys need to make money too.”

  “Well, how much money are you making? How much are they making off you?”

  “It takes time to build up to where you can make a difference,” I said.

  “Yeah, but are you building up, or are you just reinventing the wheel every generation? Are you working, doing all this, just to hold on?”

  Looking back on this conversation I am amazed to see those fudge patties dropping one by one out of my mouth.

  Now I’m remembering being in Gloominous’ room, with his paltry belongings. I’m at the window, looking down at a shitty hatchback parked in the street. I’m out there, loading the boxes. Big heap of junk by the curb. Not too big for non-union garbage pick up. The air is stale. I came over to the window to open it, let in the jasminy night air. On the windowsill, there’s a tiny brass incense burner overflowing with ashes. Twilight outside. Reflected behind me the two of us sit on the floor with splashes of light up the walls from lamps sitting on the floor, and there’s the boom box, and we’re leaning against the walls talking and breathing jasmine air from the open window, which slides from side to side. I know I should take something to remember him by and I know I’ll leave empty-handed, and empty-hearted too. I can’t seem to get mad. I’m punched out. Something important got punched out the center of me and now I can’t make the inner connection.

  Point is, I was alone before I heard the news, because I’ve been alone the whole time. And while I run run run and do do do, behind me there’s a tragic absence of footprints. Jesus won’t put me down. Carolina isn’t real. I look back and all I see is creamy undisruption, like sand the color of whatever, smoothed out where I’ve tried to roughen, glib and silly where I tried to make smashes. Not a speck. I didn’t connect. The wheels are still grinding away and my monkey wrench is pulverized in the grist along with the lives of the people I care about but can’t manage to find or help. How, how, how, how, how, how, how, how do I help?

  *

  Professor Budshah stretches out his neck twenty feet and plunges his head in through the aperture in the dripping stone wall. The other economists stand by and wait. Minute flashes of bluish and violet-hued sparks flicker and die in the soft opacity of their shadowy bodies. Eyes that are nothing more than glistenings swivel and shift from face to face.

  Where are we now? How did we get so far away from ...

  From ... what? Who? Was there someone else?

  Ar... Ariello? Was that it?

  She doesn’t seem to be accompanying us any more.

  But that’s not who we’re thinking of. We’re looking for colder ... colder with the cold of being forgotten.

  A cold spot?

  Marks where something has been forgotten.

  Someplace else?

  Some idea?

  Animal money?

  Yes, the project! Our project! We remember! We remember? But there was something else we used to think about, and that we have misplaced. Us? We have a strong feeling of being misplaced. That cold—the cold of being forgotten. That’s our cold now. We’ve all got it.

  *

  Assiyeh sits at the foot of my bed, one leg doubled under her and the other on the floor, and we talk.

  “Am I still on the Izallu Imeph?” she asks. “Or is this Koskon Kanona now?”

  “Neither,” I say. “You’re still on earth.”

  “Oh really?” She sounds unconvinced.

  “You never left,” I tell her.

  “You think so?”

  When I reach out to touch her naked body, she isn’t there. She was never there, never existed.

  Searing, interstellar loneliness—

  A silent, dreamless explosion in the empty bedroom.

  Through trash-strewn open lots and among the crumbling walls and shattered storefront windows I go tripping through the rubble on feet death has made light, and the wind slips easily through my dry corn husk body. I see nothing, I hear nothing, I feel nothing, I know nothing, I smell.

  We crashed into the sea on the way back from Achrizoguayla. The panic, the crowding, people dashing for the rafts, pushing them off from the plane only half full, wailing as the rafts swamped and sank. The plane bobs on the water, the doors are all open, sea air wafts through. I still sit with my seatbelt on. Or I did.

  Now I’m here, trash strewn lots and all that.

  I can see sometimes, after all. I can smell the ruin around me, I can smell the dry grey light, I can smell the radiant emptiness. The smell varies a great deal. It is never so strong that I can smell it without having to concentrate. I don’t inhale. The odors form lines that can be followed. I can smell my motion along them. It’s a dry, sour smell, like dust from a mummified lemon. It’s like seeing. The dry sour smell of my movements. I think it must be the particles of my own body. I can’t hear, and I can’t feel myself. I don’t feel my limbs move. They might not move. I think they move, but I don’t feel them move. They might move, but, in my dream I see myself floating along over the ground like a leaking helium balloon. I don’t see that, I see myself walking, from the inside, not as an observer. I look like a scarecrow. Shadows on my face, no matter what. Rags of shredded cinderblock poke holes in my wasp-nest feet. My ribs have flattened in toward my spine, irregularly. I’m wearing the formal suit and necktie of death, a plain black neck tie like none I ever owned. It isn’t plain. In the dream that reflects my present moment, I watch from my own left shoulder as I pick up the tie and examine it, working my head around a little to get a better look, my stiff, grave-touseled hair rattling like straw. The tie, clamped in a hand that looks like a twist of wire, is white, not black.

  It is black, but it h
as been blackened with writing, having originally been white. Thinking, putting words together like this, is a chore. I wonder why I do it. I wonder why I care what’s on my tie or where I am, when there is no one to talk to, no destination of any kind. I try to ask a question, but I can’t. Being able to ask questions must be a power that only the living have. Dead men don’t ask questions, the movie villain says. Without curiosity, I look at the writing that blackens my white necktie. It’s occult formulae. No it isn’t, it’s economic formulae. The writing is microscopic, but all in neat lines very close together. It is an extract from a treatise in technocratic economics, with a different pseudo-mathematical equation in every sentence.

  Pluto means rich. The lord of the underworld is rich not only because he lives within and rules the Earth, with its veins of gold and deposits of precious stones, but also because his is the kingdom of neverending growth. No end of death, no end of growth. No end to the impious sorrow of the Teeming. Looking directly down into the energy field I see it’s full of floating rays, like rays of sunlight in water. In the underworld of economists, where dead souls mutter hollow equations after the end of time, this necktie is a talisman that is going to get me into a place I don’t want to go, a colossal planned economy of little exchanges between me and the elements of decay. I don’t want to dissolve that way. There are no elements of decay. Decay is the evaporation of elements. There’s no exchange. It’s the opposite of animal money. Instead of doubling both sides of the equation, decay money doubles something with nothing, like paying money in the mirror. The mirror money is only your own money again, at the same time. When I see myself in the mirror, I see myself as nothing and say that’s me, so death is a mirror, the mirror of my dream. No it isn’t, my dream isn’t a mirror. I don’t watch my dream; my dream does the watching. My dream tells me what I’m smelling is light, or motion, or the necktie I rip from around my neck with fingers like wires and toss way up into the air. Maybe it will sail cinematically away across an overcast sky filled with white seams. In fact, it does fly away in the air, black against a grey sky. It flies like a snake, curving side to side. It flies like a battered, arthritic snake, with a permanent kink in its spine. Now it’s out of smelling range, hidden by what’s left of the flat rooftops. A linoleum of garbage trampled perfectly flat covers the streets. Everything of use is long scavenged. Even the shards of glass have all been pulled out of the windows. The street lamps have all been pulled down, and the signs. The cables are all gone, ripped down. The buildings have been burned and weathered and half ripped apart.

  This smells like a major intersection. There’s a huge parking lot on each corner, a big box store over there, looking stomped. Scorched wreckage of a gas station. Blasted shops and withered steel skeletal remains. No weeds in the cracks. Nothing grows here, not even mildew. I can’t smell a fly. It feels desolate here. It feels exactly the way this intersection always felt. Minus the fuss. And that’s a relief.

  I smell my way along lines of memory. My last day. I made coffee, was going to have pancakes. I wasn’t going to have pancakes, toast is what I was going to have. I had set out the butter to soften on the stove top. I’m not dreaming, not at all. What I’ve been thinking of as my dream is really my memory. Somehow I mistook remembering for dreaming. If I somehow ever recover my ability to ask questions, I should remember to ask why I have always been liable to make mistakes like that one. I mean, the kind of mistakes no one but me makes. This is livelier smelling than I expected. I fly down the street playing hooky from life. Something happened to me, a dream that came into my head so hard it broke my skull, pulped my brains, all while the butter softened on the stove. Hours passed, bugs haltingly crossed the floorboards by my feet. The window widened to fill the horizon. The butter softened.

  Now what I smell is linseed oil, the museum smell. The smell of my movement is changing. Maybe people have emerged from inside the Earth and they are putting me in their museum. Even dead I remain in education. What I smell, no, is not a museum, it’s fire. I must be burning. Maybe I moved too fast, and the friction of my corpse against the air caused my dry remains to catch fire.

  The fire lightens me. I get lighter and lighter, with alarming swiftness. It’s like being hauled up high into the sky. Hang there a moment. Then another long pull drawing me further and further up. Lighter and lighter, elongating toward the ... the top. Elongating up. Flying up. Sprinkling down, in crumbs of ash. The fire divides off pieces that fall away. Those pieces, I know, drop to the ground, even though I don’t. My hair is all spiralling flames now, my head is a torch. I’m a big, pale torch. I think.

  Now I am all burned up. My few remaining bones fall out of the sky. Those leaping flames are shyly retiring into my few remaining sections. They will gnaw at me with tiny orange teeth as long as there is anything there for them. I am in the fragments of bone, here on the ground, and the ash tossing all around, and in the smoke the air carries away, and in some other residues I don’t have a name for, spreading out in all directions, some of me moving and leaving while the other parts stand still and remain. I’m thinning out between them all.

  *

  Thafeefa sits there at the table smiling. She’s arranging flowers in a white vase, the “sun” sets alight her unblemished skin. She won’t start to show for another month, but the glow is there.

  “You will need a third parent,” the doctor told her, smiling pleasantly. He was a imperturbable man with an avuncular grin and thicker glasses than a doctor should have to wear, and his black hair kept slipping in sidelong locks across his brow. Thafeefa is an artificial person and much of her DNA is human incompatible, making her sterile under normal circumstances; impregnating her will require a considerable amount of supplemental DNA from a second human donor to produce a viable baby.

  “But this would be true for the first donor in any case,” the doctor went on offhandedly, turning back toward his office.

  “What do you mean?” Thafeefa asked innocently.

  The thought of being pregnant made Assiyeh “want to howl,” as she once put it, but the doctor’s tone suggested a somatic reason.

  The doctor turned and regarded Thafeefa pointedly.

  “She never told you she had a third parent?”

  He came over beside her and pointed to the results labelled A. MELACHALOS, where a number of genes were circled and underlined.

  “There. There. There.”

  He waved his hand.

  “All of them, from a third party.”

  The doctor shook his head.

  “This code would give anybody trouble because, you see, those genes there ... I’ve never seen anything like that. Whoever donated them was very strange. I mean, I couldn’t even tell you the species,” he said.

  “Perhaps some animal had exactly the genes they needed to complete her code.”

  “Animal or plant!”

  When the doctor slipped into his inner sanctum, Thafeefa searched her memory for any physical anomalies in Assiyeh and drew a blank. She was a terrible swimmer. Did that mean anything? She also searched their conversations for any anecdotal indications. No good. Everything was a clue and nothing was. Her mother’s aversion to cats could point one way or the opposite way. It is clear she never knowingly encountered her third parent, even when performing her necromantic titrations.

  Now Thafeefa is pregnant and glowing like a happy vanilla flame there with her flowers. The doctor found a posthumous donor from the neighboring arcology, referred by the Izallu Imeph fertility and population committee (IFAP). As rational as a flower herself, Thafeefa supervises gestation, braiding her programming into developing neurons, so that, even as she plays and smiles, happy and apparently as thoughtless as a toddler, she is composing thousands of tissue fugues in an eerie, unsettling key, because perfection is impossible for what is sui generis, and this child is being formed for maximum independence.

  *

  Today in the stark black and white street I saw a woman still reeking of Earth, clumsil
y making her way through the psychic rapids of Buzzatian pedestrian traffic, an obvious newcomer and equally obviously an agent. I evaded her easily this morning. Come on, my enemy!

  Calmly I survey my tossed apartment. Thafeefa’s leg lies severed on the floor, a gear protruding form the joint, wires trailing. They put her torso upright on the kitchen table and tucked flowers into her open throat, set her head across the room where it could watch. All right, pretty scary. But Thafeefa, my dears, is light years away, on board the Izallu Imeph, made of flesh and blood, not the gears and wires of this crude replica. She is probably arranging flowers right now, humming the Goldberg Variations under the skylight.

  Assiyeh books a trip to Qazkerl, a city on the far side of Koskon Kanona, boards the hovercraft, and disembarks at the last minute, engulfed in the lush hour rush. Assiyeh modifies her interferometer, trying to find a way to jam the spies. Today an agent travelled the length of her street, twice.

  *

  Why is it never more light here? The buildings are only black regularities specked with bright points. The streets are wan grey arteries that stream glowing bloodcells. My own arm, my own hand, are not my own, or not that I can tell. They are only shadows. We all loom over the city like witches over a cauldron. I watch as one of us looms in over the street, but the features absorb the street glare and remain invisibly dark. We recline on our sides like Roman patricians, the city a pit of embers. We reach out to adjust this or that part of the city every now and then. Our bodies lie among the mountains, and along the shores. We chirp information back and forth, monitoring and adjusting, and we take phone calls. We are constantly talking on the telephone to other economists, specialists, scientists, journalists ... people ... people we never see. We communicate with this city using a local radio call-in show. We chant in a steady dream monologue without inflection, and the words all turn into things and actions before our eyes. We monitor the city and yet it is never even partially under our control.