Animal Money
Page 62
Here are some children, haggling.
“How much for this dollar?”
“One cent.”
“No this dollar’s special you got to pay more for this dollar.”
“One dollar one cent.”
“One dollar two cent.”
One of the bargainers is explaining.
“You gotta be good with your money, invest it, check prices, or you lose all the time. You have to keep ahead of everybody—” and here his voice takes on an especially knowing tone he must have picked up, along with the idea itself, from a parent or some other adult, “—or then they’ll just hand you over to the Latins.”
You can see the adult he’s going to turn into; big, cautious, cagey, with a long coffin chin and legal tender vice-gripped in thick fingers, keeping his savings in the fat of his body and the gold around his neck. If you got fat, you last longer when there’s no food. If you got gold, you can trade when the bank breaks and the credit card machines are offline. The skinny girl is bidding up her dollar.
“This a special dollar,” she says smiling. They all giggle because it’s still mostly a game. I don’t like to think what they may be giggling about as grown ups. What kind of kids know this much about haggling? Shouldn’t they know more about kickball or some other ancient children’s rite? The girl is actually pretty funny, her jokes are making me smile and I never smile. Maybe it’s just affection from a passing ghost dad; maybe being obsessed with money makes you funny. Something about the substitutions, the symbolism, the absurdity of price tags on everything. They have a pay to piss proto-scam in the works where they stake out a likely piece of wall near a bar or something and they charge you a penny a second to piss against it. You can piss on the ground for free, but if you want to hit the wall, if you want the sound-blur that pissing against an upright surface gives you, you pay by the second, and they watch you do it, too, counting off the seconds at the top of their piping voices, which might seem to defeat the purpose, but the urinators they target are fucked up enough to regard the shrieked out numbers as cover noise.
The enterprising coffin-jawed kid says: “Get them to pay first. Then they have to guess how long it’s gonna take, and if they don’t take that long you say ‘no refund’.”
THE END*
The pages can’t be left blank. They must be complete pages of text, in order to keep the right pace.
The reader begins by picking a point in time to begin. This choice will have been made already when the reader reads these words, because this piece begins as the reader reads the title, “Pages of No Narration.”
The reader must not at any point during this reading go back and reread anything. The text must be read thoroughly, slowly, all the way through, one way, without rereading, as if the reader were performing from a musical score with no repeat figures and in front of an audience.
There will be no elaboration of alternate possibilities. Readers may come and go, stop and start, as they please. It is only necessary to state that the intention of this composition is that the reader will begin it with the reading of the title and continue through all of the pages, without rereading. Interruptions are allowed for at designated times. The reader may reread the piece only after the reader has already read it. The reader picks the time to begin insofar as the reader has chosen to read this now, rather than at some other time.
The reader begins by noting that they are reading.
The reader fantasizes the reader reading.
The reader notes that there are traces of the reader’s personal past in the fantasizing.
By increasing attention, the reader notes that these traces show how the reader came to be reading at the moment picked.
The reader also notes memories of incidents which are somehow elicited by the reading.
The reader may recall other experiences of reading.
The reader notes the trace of the most recent event prior to beginning to read, and, so to speak, sights down its length in the direction of the immediate past.
At this point, there is an intervention by the writing, which instructs the reader to think back to the last experience of waking up. The reader is to go back to the last time the reader woke up and then recount in order the events leading from that moment up to the reading.
Having first reviewed these events in a single, rapid sweep, the reader must then go back over them again, until the reader is satisfied that nothing significant has been overlooked.
The reader should also not overlook nagging feelings that something significant has been overlooked.
Once the reader is satisfied that nothing that can be recovered has been neglected, the reader should fantasize the entire sequence of incidents, using an indistinctly visualized string of beads as an assisting metaphor. The beads are the incidents, and the unadorned string between beads is the vague sense of empty or insignificant time which has already lost its salience in the memory. The reader, fantasizing the entire sequence, will have a chance to take empty time into account as well as full time.
Now the reader must go over these incidents again. This time, these incidents must be recounted as if they were being described to someone else, a stranger who has no familiarity at all with the reader or the reader’s circumstances.
Descriptions will now have to be added by the reader. The reader should make the effort to describe the circumstances of waking up, with the particulars of time and place. Likewise all subsequent actions. The descriptions should not be too copious.
The reader should be sparing in explanation. It is taken for granted that the stranger is familiar with common objects and practices. Only what is more or less idiosyncratic to the reader should be explained, and that briefly.
Emphasis must remain on the incidents leading up to or directly connected with the present moment of reading.
As the incidents are presented, one after another and in order, omitting nothing without dwelling on trivial things, the reader should proceed all the way up to the reading of this page, and include that reading among the incidents recounted.
The reader is now recounting the experience of reading these words, as the foremost end of a sequence of incidents extending back to the reader’s last experience of waking. The entire period of that past sequence should be more and more distinct and present to the reader now.
The reader should note any effect that this is having on the reader.
The reader should fantasize the reader reading and fantasizing. The fantasizing should be effortless. The effect should be a doubling and redoubling of the reader’s action.
The reader should describe, again without being too copious, the current circumstances of reading, not overlooking sounds, odors, tastes, textures, or other sensations.
The reader should include as much as possible of the reader’s current circumstances in the reading.
This inclusion should be effortless. It isn’t necessary to make any laborious inventory of details. The circumstances should fill the reader’s fantasizing, without exhausting it or being exhausted by the fantasizing. There should be no exhaustion.
The reader should pause at this point and fix the fantasizing in the reader’s mind.
At this point, the reader is to set this reading aside and do something else.
*
The reader has now done something else and has returned to the reading.
The reader should now recover the fantasizing, without retreating or rereading.
The reader should now model the reader fantasizing the old reading.
The reader will not incorporate any of the intervening incidents between having been instructed to set the reading aside and resuming the reading after the break.
The reader will be lingeringly aware of those recent incidents, and will note whether or not they impinge at all on the fantasizing.
The reader will note whether or not those recent incidents are seeming to demand that they be included in the fantasizing.
If the effort of pre
venting inclusion of these incidents into the fantasizing is becoming a distraction, then the reader should include them. The reader will note what is the sensation when the reader stops making the effort to prevent inclusion.
If the effort of preventing inclusion is not distracting, then the reader will continue to prevent inclusion. If there is no effort, then the reader will continue.
The reader will now have a sense of the fantasizing of incidents experienced by the reader, which will include both the prior experience of reading, and the current one.
The reader will note that, just as there are traces of past incidents in the present fantasizing, there are also future possibilities.
These future possibilities are wishes.
The reader will note that some of these wishes are frightful.
In noting these wishes, the reader will not begin thinking of all the things the reader wants, or wants to avoid.
The reader will only note the presence of these wishes.
The reader should not imagine future incidents.
The attention of the reader must be fixed entirely on the present.
The reader should not be thinking about finishing this reading.
The reader should be fantasizing the reading, and seeing it as the latest in a series of incidents.
The reader should see the reader in the fantasizing. This means seeing what the reader wishes.
Now:
Does the reader want the incidents the reader fantasized?
Does the reader want to escape from the incidents the reader fantasized?
Does the reader want to have not lived those incidents?
Does the reader want to live incidents of an entirely different kind, without going into the details of the difference?
Does the reader want things to change or things to freeze?
Does the reader want to escape from these questions?
About the Author
Michael Cisco is the author of novels The Narrator (Lazy Fascist Press, 2015, Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2010), The Divinity Student (Buzzcity Press, 1999, winner of the International Horror Writers Guild award for best first novel of 1999), The Tyrant (Prime, 2004), The San Veneficio Canon (Prime, 2005), The Traitor (Prime, 2007), The Great Lover (Chomu Press, 2011), Celebrant (Chomu Press, 2012), and MEMBER (Chomu Press, 2013). His short story collection, Secret Hours, was published by Mythos Press in 2007.
His fiction has appeared in Leviathan III (Wildside, 2004) and Leviathan IV (Night Shade, 2005), The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases (Bantam, 2005), Cinnabar's Gnosis: A Tribute to Gustav Meyrink (Ex Occidente, 2009), Last Drink Bird Head (Ministry of Whimsy, 2009), Lovecraft Unbound (Dark Horse, 2009), Phantom (Prime, 2009), Black Wings I (PS Press, 2011), Blood and Other Cravings (Tor, 2011), The Master in the Cafe Morphine: A Homage to Mikhail Bulgakov (Ex Occidente Press, 2011), The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities (Harper Voyager, 2011), The Weird (Tor, 2012), and elsewhere. His scholarly work has appeared in Lovecraft Studies, The Weird Fiction Review, Iranian Studies and Lovecraft and Influence.
Michael Cisco lives and teaches in New York City.