Animal Money

by Michael Cisco

  I used to think that pain and reasons went together. That’s logic. Pain means something is wrong. I must have fucked up somewhere without noticing it, or forgotten to do something. But I know the pain I feel right now isn’t caused by anything outside itself; it’s just there. As if the switch got frozen pointing to pain and everything feels like pain now. Or this is a pain that’s caused by everything at once, including pleasure, including even knowing that that pain will leave me one day, the pain of knowing I will lose this pain.

  *

  I wake up already out of bed. The beat of the floor against my bare feet helped to shake me from my dream. The sheet, heavy with sweat, hasn’t even had time to finish falling where I flung it off.

  Like so many times before, I dreamed that an animal was attacking me, and that I was cutting at its face with a small knife, horrified at what I do. Then I was back there in the darkness over the city, with the others. We were reaching out our long shadow arms to adjust this and manipulate that. I reached out and traced a line with my finger from the end of a half-constructed freeway overpass to the street beyond, and the cement causeway appeared behind my finger like magic. It connected to the street with a palpable click, and a thrill ran up my shadow arm as the traffic began to flow. It felt like the restoration of circulating blood to a sleeping limb. The radio transmissions of the people, so tiny with distance, tickled inside my fillings and kicked a spark up into my sinuses now and then.

  A stir of glarings out there, in the deeper night beyond the city’s gold haze. Pink and blue sprays of lightning, a palely luminous carpet of clouds is creeping toward us, undulating over the landscape like a living cape, a sting ray, sluicing in through a gap in the mountains and moving in on the city. Suddenly, it has arrived, throwing its darting lights all over the valley bowl beneath us. Looking up, I see Professor Crest’s face right across from me, and the others. The sight of the faces shocks me, rattles me badly. I see them steadily, not flashing with the lightning. Professor Crest, the remaining Professor Long, Professor Aughbui, naked bronze statue bodies, living, marked with their white economists’ marks like little splatters of pigeon droppings, and covered in blood, blood dripping from my own hand and dangling in tarry ribbons, not my own blood, it’s the blood of the city—we spill it every time we reach out our shadow hands to touch this or that. The city is a vivisected patient pinned open under our hands.

  “Oh no! No! God, no!”

  The sound still lingers in the room.

  I taste blood. I rub my mouth and chin, getting blood on my hand. My tongue hurts—I bit it in my sleep. I go to the window, which is tall and narrow in a bare concrete wall. Dorm window. Dorm room. I look out at the night motionless quad lined with huge primordial trees, banks of foliage full of lizards and enormous dragonflies. The campus is going back in time to prehistory. This room, a dorm room, could be a pueblo with air conditioning. I sit down, looking outside. I see one other room is lit up. It might be Professor Olendskaia—she’s been staying in one or another of the rooms over there lately. She looks as though she has trouble sleeping.

  Needing to be reassured, and to escape the miasma of the dream, I decide suddenly to throw on some clothes and go knock on her door. We will sit alone in the night, in a little globe of light from her desk lamp, and talk about the fate of the university.

  The concrete hallway, open to damp night air, tumbling insects.

  I knock.

  No response, unless perhaps there is a very faint scrape on the floor.

  “Professor Olendskaia? It’s Professor Budshah.”

  There’s a soft vocal sound, a woman’s voice, on the other side of the motionless door.

  “I saw your light from across the quad—I’m staying there, myself. Are you ill?”

  “I’m fine thank you,” the voice says. The voice is even and calm, as if it were the door that spoke.

  “Ah. Sorry to have bothered you,” I say, embarrassed. “The Surfeit is One.”

  The concrete hallway, open on one side, overlooking an atrium with tall tropical plants basking ominously in the warm, humid night air. Any moment now their eyes will open with a fibrous rending sound and there will be vegetable money to deal with.

  My feet don’t seem to be moving. Inside me, an impulse is rising, brushing away the gossamer impediments of my embarrassment.

  “Eh ... Professor?” I say, my voice rebounding from her door sounds queer. “... This is a little embarrassing, but I’ve just had a terrible dream and, a little conversation ...”

  I trail off. I learned that from the remaining Professor Long.

  The door unlatches and swings open. Professor Olendskaia is a tall woman in her fifties. There’s something elusively goose-like about her. She is wearing a rather crisp jumper and a floor-length skirt. Admitting me into the room with a quizzical smile, she offers me one of the two identical hard wooden chairs, and sits down herself. The air in her room is close, heavy with fragrance; she isn’t running her air conditioner. The overhead light is off; only a small desk lamp burns.

  I thank her with an assurance I won’t stay long.

  “Some tea?”

  “No, thank you.”

  The room is Spartan. Her books are arranged, on their sides, in the small bookcase. There is a bowl of fresh flowers on top of the bookcase and another on the windowsill. A photograph, probably her parents, stands on the desk. An enormous alembic full of frog eggs is brewing there beside it, forming a tableau of generation. The eggs wriggle from time to time. She must be using them for money, or hatching them into money.

  “What do you think is going to happen to the university?” I ask.

  Without being able to say why, I feel certain that, when I awoke just now, across the quad, she had been sitting just this way, not behind the desk but beside it, elbow propped and her head on her hand, brow pinched up in worry, looking out into the quad, as if that were the college. I hear a plop in the bathroom, a cold ceramic tank with a silent, palpitating mass of placental frogs in it.

  Before answering, she sighs deeply.

  “They’re going to close it,” she says. “Professor Boundas told me. Some time next month, they say.”

  “Do you want to start up a committee with me?” I ask.

  A pained expression flits across her face.

  “What good would it do? The decision’s been made.”

  “I don’t mean a committee to save the college, I mean a committee to run it.”

  “Run it ourselves?”

  “Right.”

  The hand comes down. She crosses her arms and leans back.

  “Wouldn’t they cordon it off? The campus?”

  “Who? The police?”

  This, it goes without saying, is no longer a cause for concern. The police are not going to want to bother with something like this, let alone reduce their already dwindling numbers by posting guards around the campus. They might raid it, or pounce on someone as they drive by, but they are too short-staffed to keep the whole place clear.

  The police are out in the night, standing in a rhombus of police lighting, defending their own headquarters and city hall. I glance around at the night, the lush green of the planters outside looking ready to up roots and start shuffling up the sides of the buildings, the concrete walls in here, like the inside of a parking garage, and very faintly crinkling with a moistening sound. We are already on our own.

  I imagine the police commissioner looking the board of directors square in the eye, incredulous, weary, fresh out of patience—“You mean to tell me you want us to bust people for trying to go to school?” A barricaded, empty campus is a magnet for all kinds of mischief ... If the place continued to be occupied by students and run as a school, wouldn’t that do a lot to ...?

  “But if they chain up the gates ...” Professor Olendskaia says.

  “A campus this size you can get onto any number of ways. And with buildings as big as these, it’s not hard to find a way in. So many doors, windows.”

 
; She thinks it over.

  “We would need students,” she says. “Would they stay?”

  “Well, I know there are some who don’t really have any way to get home, but even the rest, why shouldn’t they stay? We could make our own community here.”

  “The faculty might stay. They’ve stayed this long. But we have to have staff stay. If the staff doesn’t stay ... I don’t know.”

  “We should ask.”

  The lines of worry are fading from her face, which is growing more resolute, because there is work to be done.

  “All right,” she says. “I’ll talk to Andrew tomorrow. What else?”

  *

  There was no end of what else, but we have our committee, our students, and our staff. Classes are running. The groundskeepers and maintenance department personnel all have keys and, now that the spell of the paycheck is broken, they can do as they please with them. A few administrators defect to our side and there are roughly the same number on the other side. Two groups centered around the most vehement members as the remainder drifts away, feebly asserting that they aren’t really washing their hands of the whole thing when they very plainly are. No trouble with the police apart from a few official statements about order and demonstrations and drugs. The message is clear: don’t embarrass us, and we’ll leave you alone as long as we have bigger problems.

  *

  The world contracts in a thousand fascisms. Where possible, a wheezing, sclerotic nationalism is revived, but in most cases the fascism is more tribal than national, centered around ethnicities, anti-ethnicities, religious sects, anti-sects, schisms, anti-clades. Officially, the blame is universally transferred onto the Uhuyjhn cities, and the people who flocked to them are branded in unsurprising ways. Unable to send money back to their families as they once did, thanks to a blockade, the Uhuyjhn migrants entreat their relatives to come join them in Andanksis, in Eunjlis, in Nzulkum, in Chaglesis Chuseh. Since they don’t root in place, these cities tend to move out from within any cordon, and might be able even to dodge nuclear attack; infiltrators fall silent within hours; spying from the air is made impossible by the undefinable turbulence given off by the Uhuyjhn cities, which induces air to shimmer, knocks aircraft out of the sky, and lights up with radiant, polychromatic splashes that interfere with all forms of radiation. This is attributed to deliberate anti-aircraft measures, but it is apparent to anyone who bothers to check that no air activity is possible above an Uhuyjhn city, meaning this is something more basic, an intrinsic attribute of the vicinity of Uhuyjhn construction or possibly even Uhuyjhn metabolism. The Uhuyjhn themselves are approachable only within their cities, and communicate with human beings by means of telepathic devices that cannot be deceived. Information about the biology and culture of the Uhuyjhn is almost totally lacking. The Uhuyjhn cities are evidently untouchable, unreachable, except by a ground invasion. American military commanders bluntly reject war talk—no intelligence worth mentioning, no information at all about the offensive and defensive capabilities of the Uhuyjhn. The more stridently the politicians demand military action, the more stolidly negative are the answers, and now the generals are beginning to intimate that pressure on them to act could backfire. High ranking officers are all over the media, voicing their disgust at the impotence and ineptitude of the politicians, who return fire by accusing the military of anti-democratic, proto-fascist leanings, and so it goes on.

  A group of people create an international party called Planetary Science in coalition with other groups in Brazil, Turkey, Egypt, Japan, Australia, Argentina, Honduras, Venezuela, Mexico ... Planetary Science balloons wildly, threatening to come apart.

  While Planetary Science is outlawed, it has a political sister organization, the Institute for Rational Economics, that keeps its hands scrupulously clean and acts as a public voice for the party. Turn on the television, and there is the head of the Institute at the podium on screen, uplifting the pointing finger of a punctilious martinet drunk on the sadomasochism of little rules. When he first sees Professor Crest rebutting accusations and insisting that Planetary Science is not so naive as to expect any real protection under the so-called rule of law, and that the Institute is a demonstrably independent organization which shares no revenues or administrative ties to Planetary Science of any kind, Professor Budshah groans and drops his face into his hands. His fingers taffy-pull his features, and then his hands plop into his lap, incredulous. There’s an establishing shot of Professor Crest, crossing the campus of his Institute; no doubt about it—that’s him, the same needlessly hasty, fussy, acute-kneeing walk.

  A series of committees, rituals, and public comment sessions are convened, largely through the Institute. Professor Crest contacts Professor Aughbui through a medium. A new bureaucratic system is invented, and Planetary Science is completely restructured. Anyone interested in joining, in need of resources or with resources to make available, will now know exactly where to go and what to do. Planetary Science policies and agenda are clearly articulated and presented. There is a grievance process, an internal credit system and bank, an internal employment system, a necromantic process for consultation of reanimated experts, a health system, a matchmaking system, a self defense system, a legal representation system, an obloquies system, an obsequies system. Planetary Science mints its own money based on glass time chips, carefully gestated in life banks, where life and money are one.

  Planetary Science is interdicted and outlawed everywhere. Police, soldiers, spies, and paramilitants attack Planetary Science headquarters wherever they can be found. For the first six months or so, the results of these attacks are always uncertain; often the raided sites turn out to be, or seem, deserted or never used. On other occasions, the headquarters turn out to be Catholic missions, madrasas, NGO offices, private schools, medical clinics, and before the mistake can be recognized a great many innocents are killed maimed or brutally arrested. Then there’s a raid on a confirmed PS committee center in Winnipeg, during which every government agent participating was killed. Principled voices of anti-violence speak up and there is a great deal of back and forth about the deaths. News stories laying responsibility for atrocities on Planetary Science begin to pile up, but nobody believes reporters any more.

  So here I am hustling as fast as I can, which I have to say is fast, trying to stay on the wave. Looking out through the cracks, the streets are still as thronged with the legions of the unalive as they ever were, and you’d never know the cracks were there. I’m sorry there’s no virile sexual reportage lengthily appended to this gripping narrative but I have my modesty. A gentle man don’t tell where the kiss lands. The problem with writing about the current situation is that marketing propaganda has subtly warped even the most basic words. The “natural style”—that’s an oxymoron that a moron like me will go on using because it’s natural that we would want to have some style—is to use everyday language and hide the styling as if you were ashamed of yourself, like the billionaire on TV in a t-shirt, never mind that it was woven from baby hair by sobbing thalidomide mutants and can only be purchased with human souls. The transparent everyday style, I’m trying to explain, is a fucking mess, and you’re better off writing your plangent “who we are now” novel in death rock lyrics. So you use the “natural style” and everyday words because that is so obviously true on its lying ass face and no matter what you think you’re saying it all comes out tm-ized. To write that sort of language correctly, you have to write about everyday life as if it were a science fiction novel with a glossary in the back. A comparative glossary that sets the trademark version alongside the meaning you mean. Let’s look up the word “job,” shall we?

  JOB(tm)—[moral term]—Reason for being; the one and only possible justification of human existence.

  versus

  JOB—Form of living death; obstacle course between human being and necessities of life.

  Carolina steps outside into the blazing sun and takes off her clothes again. We get in shitty hatchback and aim the nose
dent for a plume of spores that twists into the sky on the far orange horizon, the punctuation mark advertising the presence of an Uhuyjhn city. We managed at last to convince the boy up front to keep an eye on our clinic for amnesiac quasi-presidents after our attempts to contact the electoral committee failed. There’s no news about the election yet. How’s Incienzoa doing? Oh wait, he bowed out, the new one is Varvariollo. National Federation. Nothing on the radio, either. New York has elected a cat governor and nobody knows what to do. Did they have the election here yet though? Carolina’s dosing herself and she passes me some and I take some for a change. No sign of cyclops cars. I don’t recognize this road; it isn’t the main highway, it’s a desert road and we should be choking in the dust but there was a heavy dew last night and the ground is still wet. Turn on the music instead, crash in prismatic celestial cliffs like a crystal cheese grater against my brain shredding out noodles and slivers of thought, the reasoning takes off and stops being a burden now my business is tight, I’m solving problems and avoiding mistakes, putting it all together—Carolina’s an agent from fairyland and the Uhuyjhns are illegal human aliens from another timeline and the dark economists are resurrectees coming back, and Assiyeh is real after all. We’re going to go to the Uhuyjhn city of Buzzati to find Tripi’s fugitive spirit and bring her back with us, put her in the body of her choice, and lead her to a triumphant return, and we’re going to win.

  From the sound of it, I would say the investigators are outside.

  I am sitting in my room.

  The investigators are not outside, they are investigating some other part of the house, they have finally stopped poking around in here.

  They’ve lifted the blinds in here.

  A blind, one blind, partially, to open a window, the lower half. I must smell.

  The air is very clean and active. It frisks around me like a barber brushing off. The daylight crosses from behind me, falls past me onto the bookcase and the wall in front of me, has a cool, clear, white transparency, it’s refreshing. I wouldn’t have thought of the light of the sun shining through space on my books, lighting each of the spines distinctly up.