Animal Money

by Michael Cisco

  Is this still about animal money? How did we get here? Why do we go on and on without stopping, as if we were afraid to stop?

  When I was in my teens, I used to read fantasy books and project myself into them with a feeling that rivalled anything to be found in poetry. That is, it was a feeling that I could not analyze or name, but only rhapsodize about, unintelligibly. There was an upsweeping feeling of wild freedom expressed in terms of the opening of landscapes and of untrammeled movement in space. It resembled the surging of a tide, plains of tall grass, wind, launching into the air, the sight of distant mountains, the feeling of the weather. It felt like nakedness, sexual desire, a sexual desire to fly without dissolving into an eternally expanding landscape, and it also had something to do with music, especially music with a jewelled sound, if that makes sense. The sounds had a gleam at the higher pitches and a luster in the lower ones, and they struck me like vivid primary colors, contrasting without clashing. And there were precious metals in the sound as well, and glass or crystal sounds, very clear and pure but often with an exquisitely intolerable quality that was not beauty exactly, more like slicing. I associated that music with magic, and a magical liberty to unfold in an infinite planet consisting of superlatively beautiful natural vistas and intriguingly varied and strange human enclaves, all strictly isolated from each other, so that there was no place in the whole world that felt hemmed in and hopeless, inescapable, not bordering sharply on a territory belonging to everything that could be imagined.

  At the same time, there was a lacerating sadness that would well up in me around these fantasies, and that was no more comprehensible. Why did these fantasies all seem to spin into a terrible sense of loss even as they were at the apex of their existences? Why did they seem more real in the moment I first turned to them again, and seem to lose reality the further I went with them? How could I have such inchoate desires in the first place? It was not their unreality that depressed me, or that I ran from, but their reality rejected me. I was not real enough for them, or, even though I did manage, I can not explain how, to exist, I existed in some wrong way, not their way, not like them. The problem was, perhaps, that I had always to uphold that reality myself, and that not a single thing ever presented itself to me as objective in those fantasies. Like Atlas, I had to hold the whole thing up by my own unflagging effort, so nothing came to me except as a more or less disguised act of my own will. The world had none of the spontaneity, surprise, antipathy, that I consider the sine qua non of real experience. And yet, there are times when the imagination produces something without being asked, without being told, without any explanation, something so arbitrarily complete in itself and satisfying, so persuasive, that it can only be called objective.

  I confided something like this to a college friend, who was very taken with Freud at the time and found it entirely too easy to account for my fantasies. I had, of course, not asked him to account for them, had no desire for an account. I wanted them, not an account of them. Certainly the book covers were all very sexual, and my fantasies did not much avoid the erotic element. The celibacy of the economist did not balk me significantly because, once I discovered that the desires of women take no necessary interest in adventurous accomplishment, sexual satisfaction lost a surprising amount of its appeal, and began to seem a very perfunctory and mundane thing. It was not that I could imagine a more beautiful woman than I could find; on the contrary, my imaginary women, for all their often even stark concreteness, still fell far short of the inexpressibly astonishing variety of the women I met. It was the intensity of the circumstances of my fantasies, and the fierce energy with which they mirrored my own emotions, that was lacking. Instead of the explosion, there was more usually the hydraulic compression of a situation, growing ever more dense and solid, implacably determined and directed.

  Now this, this experience that is my existence now, is exactly the same. As we turn round and round the glittering carpet of the city, our dark arms reaching out to adjust this or that, we are not exploding, not swooping away into a yonder that grows wider and bluer. We are screwing ourselves deeper and deeper into a socket, and yet we have never been more hidden away or more worthy of the chaste mockery of the Teeming; we have never been farther away from from the city and its people than we are now.

  “Why do we go on and on without stopping, as if we were afraid to stop?” I ask aloud.

  “Because we are afraid to stop, obviously,” the voice belongs to the remaining Professor Long, I am sure.

  “What is the fearsome thing we believe will happen if we stop?” I ask.

  “That we will stop mattering,” the remaining Professor Long says.

  “We don’t matter,” Professor Budshah says sharply, and I hear his sudden resolution.

  I stand up and flinch, afraid of hitting the top of my head against the sky. I raise my arm and encounter nothing. Not so low? I twist my waist and look around at the planet curving away from me, and I see the silhouetted heads of the other economists, also standing, also looking around, like sleepers rousing themselves.

  *

  In her dream, the sun jumps to its next station in the sky just as they emerge from the barqot, just as if the sun had been waiting to salute them on their arrival. Assiyeh turns a full circle in methodical, even surveillance of the scene before she nods and, smiling, gestures to Thafeefa to step out. Thafeefa wears a billowing, ankle-length garment of green gauze. Jagged mountains rise before them, piebald with snow under powdery azure sky swept by a freshening wind. The ocean fills the world to the right. They watch the end of the barqot retreat and vanish around the campus, which consists of a half dozen buildings huddled like witches in a hollow; all projecting points at the corners and Mansard roofs and uplifted spikes like alerted ears. Assiyeh and Thafeefa walk hand in hand along a gravel drive into the campus.

  “Why are we here?” Assiyeh half-murmurs to herself. “Because Thafeefa was feeling cooped up. She wanted to come here.”

  Startled out of their daydreams, the buildings flash their windows indignantly as they enter the quad. Huge ancient trees with long corkscrewing arms grow from trembling grass skirts, sheltering the flagged paths. There’s no one in sight.

  “They must all be inside,” Assiyeh think-says.

  The air is cool and frisks around them, so that Thafeefa’s gown bellies out like a sail. She laughs as a rising gust nearly lifts it off her body, holding it down with the weight of her arms. Her warmth reaches out through the bracing wind and almost touches Assiyeh. Thafeefa pauses by a tree, lays her palm on it, smiles up into the chaotic spread of the branches above her, then turns to look at Assiyeh.

  “Wouldn’t you like to kiss me here?” she asks.

  Assiyeh kisses her. Thafeefa bends forward and embraces her tightly, keeping her stomach down out of the way, branch shadows wafting over the two of them. It’s so much the fulfillment of her desires that Assiyeh nearly wakes.

  Now they are out in the open again.

  “I like feeling the light,” Thafeefa says.

  Assiyeh is looking around for a sign. There’s a concert tonight, at the performing arts center. But the campus is deserted. Assiyeh steers Thafeefa up a short flight of stone steps and toward a spacious building with a mural on a plank wall.

  “Why did they paint the mural on those boards?” she asks. “They didn’t even take the irregularities into account. They could have incorporated it into the picture.”

  A deep archway opens on stunning view of the sea and the mountainous coast, a deep green lawn rolling down a slope to disappear in trees, then the shore.

  Inside the ceilings are low with heavy beams, the hall is wide, and the ponderous wooden doors are shaped like inverted shields. The place is open and filled with moving air, but no people. Assiyeh goes to the reception desk—nobody there. Facing the desk, a flight of stairs leading up the tower. A sign on the wall points to the theater.

  Thafeefa laughs. She is a bit down the hall already, pointing to a mosaic depictin
g a priapic faun lounging on the back of a jellyfish wearing eyeglasses. Thafeefa floats along a little further, like a green balloon receding in the half-light, looking back at Assiyeh, demurely laughing behind her fingers.

  Assiyeh catches her up and the two of them turn the corner and down the length of the hall to the closed double doors leading to the stage. The concert poster is tacked to the door with the word “cancelled” striking through the day’s listing. Thafeefa says she has to go to the bathroom.

  “I’ll come too,” Assiyeh says.

  Assiyeh opens the stall door in time to see the outer door to the women’s room just finishing its slow closing swing. She pauses to look under and then in the other stalls—empty. Thafeefa’s garment hangs from a hook inside one of the doors.

  Thafeefa calls her name in the hall, and her voice is terrifyingly remote. Sick with fear, Assiyeh snatches at the door handle, which keeps slipping out of her fingers, or is snatched away, her fingers pushing the handle away, so she flings the door open by its edge, hearing that ambiguous call repeated, dwindling, dying, coming from no particular place as if the building itself were calling to her—

  Something—the corner—and someone coming hastily down the hall beyond there’s someone

  “How did you get over there?” Thafeefa’s voice asks.

  Assiyeh’s voice is pushing into her chest instead of out her mouth, then the warning bursts from her, she reaches the corner and the terror in her voice rebounds back at her from the walls and ceiling as she confronts all that untenanted space.

  Try every door.

  Check outside and in.

  “Why did I take her here? I should never have let her talk me into coming here!”

  There never was a Thafeefa. You came here alone. You are insane.

  The sun lunges for the horizon and the shadows lurch, the air reddens, the waves redden, red shines back from the black slopes of the mountains.

  “Thafeefa!”

  “Thafeefa!”

  “Thafeefa!”

  *

  “You masters of earth’s transactions, now I set this exchange rate for you: one innocent equals one thousand of your richest men, plus one thousand of your richest women. Two thousand is the price I set on an innocent life.

  “I have no doubt you are familiar with the concept of interest. The present average annual rate is three percent, I believe. So, for every year it takes me to collect the lives you owe, lives which are community property once again, I will add another three lives for every hundred owed. Compounded annually, of course.

  “Nothing personal, you understand. The demand for growth is no respecter of persons, as you’re so fond of saying. I merely follow market forces, as you do.”

  That year, the G18 summit was meeting in Naples when Mount Vesuvius unexpectedly erupted in a cataclysmic explosion. The concussion alone shattered whole buildings and knocked aircraft out of the sky. An inverted tornado of lava spurted a full kilometer straight up from the rent summit and the mountain split like the House of Usher. The flanks of the mountain belched a cataract of red lava that tore across the landscape at nearly two hundred kilometers an hour; the the G18 summit was meeting in a villa situated directly in the path of what researchers would later call a historically enormous pyroclastic flow. World leaders and their rich friends scrambled for their helicopters, and yet they all perished, engulfed in a wave of lava that casually devoured them, their security guards, the wait staff and servants. Experts pored over every piece of surviving evidence they could find. By all accounts, there should have been ample time for the people who mattered to escape; they never go anywhere without an escape plan—that goes with the territory. It was as if some unaccountable force slowed them down, dragged their steps. Two video cameras that were livestreaming the event over scrambled frequencies, uploading it in real time to secret servers, caught footage of summit participants rushing for their helicopters in what seemed like slow motion, even as the clouds of smoke from the approaching lava wave went sailing by at normal speed in the sky above. As the heat from the lava hit them, before the lava itself was even visible on camera, their expensive clothes spontaneously burst into flame, and their distress, their battering at their flaming clothes, the horror of men and women who dress with understated elegance suddenly turned into fiery and conspicuous spectacles for vulgar people to gawk at, was all recorded, all in slow motion. You can actually watch as they realize, one by one, that they are going to die, in a moment that draws itself out relentlessly and yet almost seems to refuse to pass, drawing out the horrific confrontation with death, inhaling flame with every breath, before the people themselves burst alight and become flaming human caricatures dancing in slow motion, ensconced in regular-motion flames, like blazing monks doing Tai Chi.

  Here comes the lava—see how it covers everything on screen in less than two seconds, a surreally red, luminous blanket piebald with black. A colossal hologram of Nemesis towers out of the smoke high into the sky above them, raising in one hand the bridle of adamant that restrains mortal insolence, a great wheel of inversions beneath her feet, an umbrella over her head, her other hand sprinkling their wounds with black salt. She has a banner draped from one shoulder with a motto in English (the language of business):

  “When it rains it pours.”

  *

  Ashes bespatter my skeletal steel remains, damned among the brittle legions of the Misled. The smarting sweet salt of death is scattered all around us. We, the tenebrous minions of a nameless cabal, torture language and poetry alongside the writhings of our human victims. We are the nameless thralls in uniforms. The dire tolling of the nemesis bell awakened our unseen and unknown Misleaders to the next in an eternal litany of murderous crises, and so we are conjured once more from our sepulchral barracks, our hideous training camps, our pestilential bunkers and grim fortresses, once again to charge the frail barricades, to batter down the emaciated arms uplifted in feeble and bootless resistance, to squelch the doleful catechising of nightmare-haunted protestors, to erupt like hell’s mastiffs among the daring and rebellious few. We are the midwives who deliver them swaddled in chains to a new birth of horror and bondage in the underworld of bottomless prisons and torture chambers where mutilated figures wail and braid their forms in arabesques of torment and a subterranean hurricane of screams fans waves across a turgid ocean of putrescent cinders, drives abyssal turbines, and urges on the shapeless and incurable lasciviousness of the concupiscent. Thou shallt rise unrefreshed from slumber at five in the morning. Thou shallt be at thy slavedesk by nine. There the hour of nine in the night shall find thee yet in anguish toiling. And then the pit, and the stench of numberless corpses, the ravenous drone of swarming flies.

  Spontaneous brawls where the legions of the Misled clash with Black Metal Marxists. Bands with names like EXPROPRIATED and DOOMLEDGERS and LUMPEN. Their hardcoreness is expressed in abominable dryness and technicality. A typical album cover depicts combinations of guitar and labor tabulations rendered in unintelligibly convoluted, thorny black letter script on discolored, old-fashioned grids, early 1980s-era luminous spreadsheets green on black. The lyrics are drawn from nineteenth century factory inspector records, efficiency profiles, the second volume of Capital and Kafka’s insurance reports.

  Across the globe, very judiciously selected locations where the rich and powerful hide themselves are blanketed with a selectively focussed and filtered slowing field that retards the action of the human immune system in individuals possessing the physical attributes of wealth, power, and worthlessness. Certain politicians are brought up short in mid-speech their faces bubble and sag and slough off their bones. A slurry of decay gushes from government offices pouring down stairwells and slopping from windows. A frenzied scan through television channels is a stroboscopic nightmare of accelerated decomposition as lobbyists and journalists melt from underneath glorious hairstyles and ooze from expensive clothes and jewelry. Waiters table bussers cooks call girls and rent boys stampede out into the st
reet from toney restaurants, clawing their way out windows and up from the cellars to escape a reeking inundation of undifferentiated putrescence that bubbles icily up behind them, a glabrous slop of black and yellow and grey and brown and green and congealing with diamonds rolexes tie tacks platinum cufflinks star sapphire labial piercings green cigars chugging mechanical hearts and implants that convulse like landed fish. Seconds are enough to turn think tanks into septic tanks, university departments into charnel houses, news channels are plague pits swarming with flies like the static on a dead television, police military and security headquarters burst like leprous fistulas spraying a vile rain of bluish rot for miles, the ground beneath them subsides to form a sinkhole filled to the brim with reeking sludge, with here and there a prisoner, a maintenance man or window cleaner, a secretary struggling to reach the edge. Those who avoid the curse and clamber onto the brink are doubled over retching, but when they can manage it, they try to rescue the others who are still trapped in the slough, one even leaping back in to help.

  Who done it? Accusations, arrests, torture, killings; the arresting officers vanish, sometimes in the very act of carrying out their orders. Others, unable to believe they are being instructed to bring in a daffy old lady or a sulky fourteen year old, check back in for confirmation and can find no one on the other end of the line any more. No more agency. No more bureau. No more directorate. Your badge has gone blank. Your identification has turned into a cuneiform clay shard.

  Where the hell is Koskon Kanona anyway? You could ask an astronomer to tell you, of course, if you could find one, but nobody studies anything but business anymore. The astronomy departments all closed down years ago, along with all the other sciences. Students can take business with an astro-business concentration, but their teachers don’t know much more about space and stars than they do—they mainly study different brands of spacecraft and colonization equipment manufacturers. Amateur astronomers? Impoverished astronomers? No such thing. Who has time? Who can see anything through the haze and the junk-lights anyway? Everyone is too busy either working or trying to find work, trying to stay alive. And those weird effects, the “slow-down fields”? The physics-business concentrations in the business schools create nothing more than educated consumers of mass produced physics products. All the former physicists are broken down relics going slowly insane in unpensioned retirements, living in basements and ruined garages, their fine brains cracked by years of fighting tooth and nail kitchen knife and baseball bat with their neighbors over batteries, cans of expired cat food, pairs of torn sweat pants, a few capsules of random medication, a book of matches. The military R&D men are interested, of course, in figuring out how it was done, but the most important of them were likewise casualties of the same phenomena, and the survivors are suspicious of each other. An experiment gotten out of hand, perhaps? Was it you? Or you?