Animal Money

by Michael Cisco

  *

  Rats wearing bright orange vests crawl down the sidewalk in small groups and gather at the mouths of ratholes. One slips a tiny cigarette between its front teeth and lights it with an electric coil lighter it carries in a vest pouch. Minute wisps of bad tobacco smoke rise from the rats, punctuating their terse squeaks and unemphatic gestures. Ever since the latest batch of deep budget cuts, the city has made up for lack of personnel by training and hiring rats to perform electrical maintenance, to inspect plumbing and make minor repairs. Rats with live internet feeds have been trained to identify and follow suspicious persons, and rats now handle all the city’s garbage. Since another round of cuts is expected soon, cockroach recruitment and training has already started. Discussion of replacing the handful of remaining postal workers with pigeons was nixed: pigeon meat is too valuable—mail delivery would finally end altogether as people catch and eat their mail pigeons, and how are they supposed to get their summonses and huge internet bills without postal carriers?

  —Squirrels?

  Same problem, and besides, squirrels are still too independent. Like raccoons, they are better left to roam subject to stop and frisk; let them forage up the buried acorns and discarded food, then take it from them. It saves us having to budget food money for the police.

  And now there are bombings and explosions and fires, poison being sent through the mail, and significant shouting in the press, and the moment the unsettled feeling the most recent bit of news gives you begins to seat itself again and the butt of the soul re-nests itself here comes the next incomprehensible eruption, and history leaps out again in all directions going everywhere and nowhere, with a pat explanation about reichstag this and that, falling flat every time. This isn’t something all over again; we haven’t reached the point where we can say that yet. At present there really is no explaining the explanations. I can’t explain my blood back into my body again, I can only watch it leave, my brain more alive and awake than it has ever been, and totally, impossibly empty of thought. Although unavailable for analysis in the moment of its being inflicted, being violently struck over the head is a very interesting experience, but you aren’t exactly interested just at that moment, and there’s nothing in that future reflection that’s going to, here and now, displace me from the trajectory of that club or rock oriented to my head, no matter whether or not that head will go on to entertain this analysis or this right-now-whatever-this-is, not a repudiation of analysis, but maybe I want to know what analysis is for if I can’t use it to remove my head from the path of a violent blow. “Get me out of the goddamn way” is more the thought at hand, according to my analysis. Shit is blowing up.

  This just blew up. That just caught fire. Somebody is shooting up this town you never heard of. The chief of the Political Police just received a flaming hay bale in the mail and it nearly burned down his pile of confiscated flash drives. Here the cops have superefficiently corralled and captured a group of fascists in the advanced stages of a plan to anthrax a city. There the same cops have bunglingly massacred twenty five people at a swap meet in Downey CA on obviously fake evidence. Everything is so hypertrophied and elephantine and wildly careening that a swerve intended to spare one group of bystanders precipitates a collision with another. A woman who complains about sexism on the news is arrested and vanishes without a trace, although someone claims to have recognized her in a batch of prisoners delivered in dead of night to a foreign air force base and prison. At the same time, openly berserk fundamentalists of every variety apoplectically declare one holy war after another barking quotations, their mouths bigger and more and more square their cheeks and brows crushing like fists around their eyes. Muzak, a flyby over some lettering as the camera gazes numbly at well groomed, tranquil, collegial men and women blandly discussing the shrieking blood hurricane gobbling up the world around them even as an explosion blows away the backdrop and reveals the heavyset stage managers with headsets and tool belts running for cover, hands up around their heads, the coffee guy tossing the urn aside and climbing into the bottom of the trolley, propelling it to safety with his hands.

  It’s not that I don’t understand, and it’s not that I don’t even sympathize, and it shurashell isn’t that I weep for the the the the you know Genghis Khans of late capitalism watching their chickens come back, but what then? There’s a lot of bystanders getting wiped out. Who’s going to be left to pick up what pieces in what ripped up hands? Let’s say we do get our golden chance, however bloodily paid for, to remake the world, not from scratch, but from rip, from disembowel, from a scream of anguish so loud it actually stops most of it—what? Can you read and write using no punctuation but question marks? Sooner or later you will say something with a period or even an exclamation mark, even if it’s only NO! NO!

  *

  Well, so we’re phantoms. We’re great starry silhouettes, black as night and stippled with constellations that move behind our outlines. We’re just holes cut through to the starry cosmos. We have become dark economists. We met at a hotel in South America. We were all suffering from coincidental head injuries. There was a duel, as yet unresolved. We invented animal money, made some, let it loose. We became targets, we fled, further and further. We escaped. Now we are sharp-edged shadows, towering over San Toribio. We squat or recline beside the city combing its golden traffic streams, reaching out our void arms to make adjustments to a city like a luminous sand painting mixing in dully glowing ash and tiny vibrant embers. We aren’t controlling the city. We’re adjusting it. I reach out my hand to a light on a stalk, maybe an antenna, or an aircraft warning beacon, sprouting from a tall building. The light is a little crooked. I straighten it. That’s all. No control. I could lay may hand across the freeway and the cars would pass right through it. We act, and here I believe I can say I speak for us all, without thought of the future, without trying to realize any plan, but only like someone who reaches out to right a picture hanging askew on a wall. We’re forgetting which of us is which. That is to say, our plan has become our behavior.

  How are we doing?

  The question appears haphazardly in one of our minds, I guess mine. It would be easier to let the thought-current carry it off, but I hold it. With an effort I manage to open the thought. It’s like walking underwater. How are we doing means where are we going. Where we are going is to sleep. We are shutting down through our thinking. Our thinking is putting us under.

  There is general concurrence. We are agreed. As things are going for us at present, we will soon be asleep, with no one to wake us. We are resolved against becoming sleepers of Ephesus.

  We have to struggle against that mental drag, what must be the inert momentum of our own thinking habits. That means thinking against habit. Struggling to wake up from a dream, even a true dream, struggling toward a different dream, a waking dream, to live as dark economists. A dream of waking up. How do we do that?

  Trial and error, and then one of us comes up with an idea: try to visualize something at ground level.

  Visualize what?

  The image is of someone leaning way down until his nose is level with a rough wooden counter and he has placed one blue coin that isn’t metal or glass or porcelain but having qualities like all these, like a translucent wafer of blue conch shell, on the counter and his finger is still pressed down on the coin as if he wanted to keep it from jumping off the counter in a single bound and rolling out the door into the street, free money. This is happening in an old wild-west wood and glass shop, grainy, dim, creak and jostle of floorboards.

  The man, his tongue sticking out the corner of his mouth, all his concentration focussed, is sliding the coin away from himself across the counter. What is he buying? Is he buying something?

  It’s more like he’s just spending, but it’s also as though he were taking stock in a certain way, like accounting, but instead of adding up columns of figures he’s moving this one coin across the counter. He’s like a child counting his Halloween haul. There’s an idea that the coi
n will begin to unfold winglike tabs and become several coins, one screwing out of the shallow tray of the last—is he trying to prevent this or cause it, or postpone it till the proper time?

  Is it a counterfeit, and what would counterfeit animal money be? Not passing one animal off as another, chicken feathers glued all over a turtle with a strap on wattle, not ordinary money, but a nightmarish hybrid of animal and nothingness, malignantly ugly—it attacks by being seen, like Medusa (remember it wasn’t her gaze that did it to you, it was your own gaze, the pollution travelled up your eyebeam, not down hers).

  Wall Street would be the Grande Animal Brothel, but in addition to the animal money there would also be the buying and selling of the gods and goddesses of animal money culture, the very laws themselves are bought and sold, coming into and going out of effect, being revised then de-revised, porpoise money shimmers in the daylight, tossing with ringing metallic chimes before the bow of a scudding sailboat. A cacophony of grunts and bellows and chirps from pig money, cat money, ant money, moth money, owl money, cricket money.

  The sound of crickets is an open door and I step through onto soft grass, trees overhead, the lights of the city in the distance, the sky fading overhead. What are my hands, my feet? It’s me, Professor Budshah. In the sky above the city I can see the colossal transparencies of my associates—four of them. Four? Who is the fourth, now that I am down here again?

  I close my eyes and I see the golden lights spread out below my invisible hands, feel the mountain tops digging into my knee as I kneel on them, and the clouds of the night sky passing through my body cool and soft, the starlight passing through my body cool and soft. I am in both places at once, towering over the city, and standing here, on this slope, overlooking the town. The others are still in only one place—“up there.” I can barely see them, but there is a strange, tactile sense of them. They feel like heavy velvet dolls filled with fine, cool ash. One of them has a satellite, a little companion who also has a dark, smaller companion. And there is a fifth figure in there somewhere, like the zero after the decimal point. I think the fifth figure is conferring with the one with the satellite. Now that one, the one with the satellite, is pantomiming something for me. I can tell it is directed to me, somehow. The two eyes, like yoked stars, are constantly finding me in the dark. The figure is pointing to the way out, and making a gesture of reaching in and scooping up, pulling up. If I reach out my arm, I know I will be able to draw them out of that tall, taboo night, and back down here to the slope.

  I try it. Dark economics. I conjure the other economists—here comes Professor Crest, with his high kneeing marionette’s walk, his upraised pointing finger; here is the remaining Professor Long, ideas boiling like smoke, slithering and gliding and warping and shapeshifting as they float away to the hiding places they chose for themselves; farther away, I see Professor Aughbui with Smilebot and Smilebot with Boringbot, stepping from seam to seam between empty mirrors reflecting each other, and whose direction is impossible to guess; and in the farthest distance I can see a tall, lean silhouette, a wavering, flamelike, long-armed figure: the late Professor Long, standing out wasted against a darkness not quite as dark as he.

  There are only three of us here.

  Professor Aughbui remained behind, only the godlike shade.

  Now we are in two places at once, here on the ground again, and also hovering over the city in a night that doesn’t end, because, as I now understand, everything we do in that state happens faster than the eye of the day can follow. How long have we been away?

  “Without day and night, without the test book and the separation of beads ...”

  “You were not separating beads or completing your tests?” Professor Crest cries.

  “How could I do my tests without my book?”

  “We have all taken countless tests, and they are each more the same than different. Surely you could have made one up in your head. You could have separated the beads mentally. It is not necessary to have actual beads. I did it easily.”

  “But there was no morning or evening. We did not go to sleep or wake up. As I recall we never slept.”

  “Immaterial. It is only necessary to perform both acts at regular intervals. I timed mine to coincide with the illumination of offices in one of the high rise buildings that stood out from the rest. I would mentally separate my beads when the lights were all turned on, and test myself silently when the lights were turned off again. How could you simply drop the tests and the separation of beads like that?”

  “What’s the difference?” the remaining Professor Long asks.

  “It makes a tremendous difference! Taking the tests and separating the beads are essential aspects of being an economist, every bit as much as is reading Smith or following GDPs.”

  “We were in a different time-frame,” the remaining Professor Long says. “It might have been all one night, and you might have been performing many days’ worth of bead separation and testing without realizing ...”

  “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “It does no harm, but ...”

  “No, it does no harm.”

  The question now before us, which must be addressed without the slightest delay, here, on the dry, herbally fragrant hillside over looking the city in the valley below, with the sun below the horizon but still shining up into the sky and burning pink on the mountaintops, is what we are going to do with what we have learned. I am explaining that, with our new, ‘double vision,’ we have to move away from that dead end of godly oversight to find a worldly solution.

  Professor Crest raises his index finger. He’s so much the marionette it’s hard to keep a straight face as he disputes passionately with me, and I can’t say whether I want to give him an affectionate smile or laugh derisively at him. He says that the vision only appears double to us because our perspective is still too limited; we need to discover what he calls the singularity of the vision, and, as he puts it, incarnate that singularity.

  “To go back is retreat,” he says emphatically.

  “It’s just the opposite,” I explain. “There’s already quite of that ‘darkness,’ of that ‘night’ about us already. We have to come out of the dark into the no less hideous light.”

  Professor Crest is starting to color under his white economist’s mark. I can see how he must be looking at it, thinking that I am demanding he submit to me, summoning what he believes is righteous indignation.

  “I honestly fail to understand how you can be so blind,” he snaps.

  “I think I see well enough.”

  “Does that mean we must follow you?”

  “What is all this rubbish about leading and following? Did I ever demand anybody follow me?”

  “No, you—”

  “—In anything?”

  “No, you merely imply it every time you speak.”

  “Nonsense!”

  “You have a Messianic idea of yourself.”

  “I have no such thing, and that’s more than you can say.”

  “Turning it around now, are you?” He folds his arms.

  “I don’t accept Jesus Crest as my personal savior.”

  “No, you believe in the great king without luxury—”

  “—Oh, would you be referring to me, now, is that me?—”

  “—who is all the more superior to us mere mortals because he of his secret greatness and the austere purity of elective poverty.”

  “Don’t be an idiot, Professor Crest,” I say.

  “Do not,” Professor Crest says, lifting his index finger.

  The three of us are breaking up. There is more here now than this group of us can hold.

  “Do not be a monophysite, Professor Crest,” Professor Budshah says, unhappily.

  “I have no choice,” Professor Crest says. “What is right is right.”

  The remaining Professor Long is no longer beside us. I turn and see her dark head drifting away. I call to her. She turns back to look at us, and I realize that she isn’t going
to come back again. The distance between us now can only grow. This is her contribution to our argument, I can see at once, on her face, even from this far away, her face overlaid with a dimly glowing pink sunset mask. She waves her hand at us quickly.

  “The Surfeit is One.”

  She lowers her head and turns, resumes walking away.

  I turn to face Professor Crest again. He is watching her go. Then his eyes flick to me again.

  “Well,” he says.

  I raise my eyebrows.

  “Good luck, Ronald,” I say. He doesn’t seem inclined to shake my hand, so I don’t offer it to him.

  “I did not drive her away,” he says.

  “No,” I say.

  “I did not!” he says.

  “I’m not making any accusations, Ronald.”

  My voice sounds tired to me.