Animal Money

by Michael Cisco

  The economist has to mathematicize intuition, intuitize math, formalize breakdowns. Animal money metabolism would be completely stable. It would not be completely stable, it would involve boom and bust, inflation, recession, like famines and epidemics in a population; the money might inbreed, and the various specie would vary in relation to each other, so that in the proximity of one specie another would physically diminish, either shrinking or losing tangible substance, becoming phantomlike. Being animal,—BUMP—animal money can be born, but by the same token animal money dies, and every now and then the horde turns up just stinking discolored scraps buzzing with virtually worthless scavenger currencies and melting into fiscal slime, while, at midnight, their ghosts haunt the treasuries with clinking of coins and rustling of bills, weird lights and shrieks a fight is breaking out and spreading that will prove to have exacerbated all our injuries tomorrow; a noisome ponytailed fat man nearly falls on me, his forearm across my lap and will have badly bruised my thighs, and a woman in white totters awkwardly by on her high heels and caroms somehow off of the first Professor Long, the dancers are tumbling down like sprawling dummies and the music is stuck on a droning bass note like a dense black wedge of sound that buzzes my teeth and trembles my viscera—can we get out? Can we get out, please?

  *

  Thank you. Once alone in my room, I had stripped in wild haste, thinking I was going to be violently ill. Our economist-garments must all be custom made, without ornament, in somber colors, and from fine yet durable materials, so it is not unusual for an economist to be unusually careful with his clothing. I would not know exactly how to get my clothing cleaned if I were to get sick on it, to bespatter it with vomit. Naked, I knelt before the toilet, but why describe that?

  I did not get sick, although I feel so badly unrehabilitated the next morning I wish I had been. I stared at myself in the mirror as if I expected to learn something. My economist-mark, a white oval injected over my features, makes my face look smaller than it is. The eye can not make up its mind to see the actual outline or the oval as its edge. As I examine myself, an expression of fear comes over the face I see. The feeling might almost have begun in the image, rather than in me. Did I forget to do my test last night?

  I turn anxiously to the night stand. My test book lies open, shamelessly tossed aside. It is open to the test for yesterday. The blanks and open spaces are filled in, albeit in a hand less neat than I would like. I look more closely. Yes, correct, the test is filled out completely. Self-esteem washes through me like balm.

  Crest! Even in your condition, even in a delirium, you do not fail, you omit nothing. Piety and training. Discipline. Self-restraint. I am so restrained that even my restraint is restrained. Abandon this admiration of self and turn your thoughts back to your duties. Now is the time for the separation of beads.

  When I have finished the separation of beads, I sit back for a moment, trying to decide what to do next. My test book still lies open on the night stand. Quickly, I shut it, and put it back in the drawer where it belongs. When I stay in hotels, I never allow the maids to tamper with my room. No one ever comes into my room until I have checked out. But it is better, safer, to rely on training than on discretion. Test books are personal and private. It is traditional to keep them out of sight.

  I remember the nightmare now. As is usually true in my dreams, I am watching a film from the inside. We have taken shelter inside a house, myself and some unfamiliar people. One of them is going to “let in” the BLACK SMOKE ...

  “You’re crazy! That’s the black smoke!”

  “I know it is.”

  “But it’ll kill everyone!”

  “That’s right.”

  “But it’ll kill you too!”

  “I don’t care.”

  He calmly walked to the corner and unblocked the opening. A wild plume of black smoke comes ravaging into the room. The other speaker grabs a lamp off the table to defend himself and the black smoke is on him, forcing its way into screaming him.

  I can not sleep, I can not wake up. My stylus is unable to settle in my groove. Read, test, sleep, beads, note, shave, test, sleep. I do not know who am I here. I do not know how to answer that. All right, I say back a moment later, but do not let not knowing be an excuse for ceasing to think about it. Thinking thinking thinking—for what? What does it fix? Well, one must have faith in thinking, and that is all. I set about putting in order the clothing I had hastily thrown off the night before, and there, in the breast pocket of my shirt, I feel a square. A note, typed, folded, and thrust, unnoticed by me, into my pocket the previous night. It reads:

  “I couldn’t help overhearing your intriguing conversation last night. If you will meet me outside the ladies’ room in the hotel lobby at one, I will show you the zoo. My name is Dr. Ventaltia. (From the University.)”

  I assemble the other wounded economists, who gamely turn out even though the violence of last night has undone much of our recuperation. The dizziness of the second Professor Long has increased again, so that he is forced to use a wheelchair, generously provided by the hotel. The staff are mortified about the fracas in the lounge, which is closed for repairs and cleaning today anyway, and offensively redolent, I might add, of aromatic cocktail vomit, and they lavish apologies and complimentary services on us until we are too embarrassed to look them in the face.

  Professor Aughbui has a small, mechanical companion he built himself, named “Smilebot.” It literally goes everywhere with him, a petite mechanical man a little more than a foot tall. It does not do much of anything that I can see; it only accompanies him, coming up behind him on eerily silent feet. It is entirely mute, thank goodness. Whenever I see them together, the sight is so unreal I can not persuade myself that I am not hallucinating. I think Professor Aughbui is sensitive about Smilebot; I have never seen him pay it any direct attention, and he never mentions it or adverts to it in any way, but now and then I notice him hastily casting sidelong glances at it, almost as if he were worried Smilebot might be forming a poor opinion of him. However, he must have spoken openly about it at some point to us, or at least to me, though, otherwise how could I know what it is named?

  Dr. Ventaltia emerges from the ladies-room in the lobby. Her large, expressive face, is too copious to be easily read. I am unable to determine whether or not she is surprised to see all five of us. It had occurred to me that, since the invitation was given only to me, that I would be the only one she expected to see today. I will not be drawn into any sordidity. If her intentions are respectably collegial, then there should be no reason to exclude the others. If they are not, and she balks, then I lose nothing of value in refusing to divide myself from this group. Even though, as I cast my eye over them, I see only four bent, heavily-bandaged figures, gingerly holding themselves together, I nevertheless draw strength from the group.

  Dr. Ventaltia comes directly over to us with a reassuring smile, incomprehensibly well-rested and at ease in contrast with ourselves.

  “Are you Dr. Ventaltia?”

  “That’s right.”

  Introductions then follow.

  “Hi,” she says, eyes switching from face to face. “Is everyone coming?”

  She waits, smiling pleasantly, until we give her a definite answer.

  “Good,” she says. “Are you all ready to go?”

  “The bank is there to save and lend.”

  She is already walking toward the exit, and half turns to us smiling, still walking.

  “Workers work and customers spend.”

  Again, she waits to hear from all of us. I find it refreshing that she trusts me to have conveyed the content of her note to the others, that she trusts all of us to understand, not to need to have anything repeated, and that she does not seem at all hurried or distracted, that she does not ask questions without listening for answers.

  Our nurse is crossing the lobby and stops to stare at us, surprised.

  “You’re going out?” she asks.

  “Yes,” I say. “We�
��ll be back some time this evening. The Surfeit is One.”

  Dr. Ventaltia leads us out into suffocating tropical heat, to a waiting white minivan, climbing in on the passenger side. The driver cranes his head this way and that to see us and grins, showing all his teeth. There is even a lift for the wheelchair the second Professor Long is using. It takes fifteen minutes to get us all into the van, and we are all quickly drenched in perspiration. Then the door slides shut and we pull out, eventually merging onto Trin Piurnes.

  “This country has many transvestites,” Professor Aughbui says flatly, looking out the window at a knot of what I would have taken for unusually solidly-built women. Smilebot sits beside him with its feet up and head turned toward the window in mute imitation of Professor Aughbui, although it is not tall enough to see outside.

  Dr. Ventaltia makes no small talk. I ask her what department she belongs to.

  “I belong to the Naturalism department,” she says.

  I realize right away that the silence that follows means she will probably not launch into any unprompted explanations.

  “Could you speak for a few minutes about your job?” I ask.

  “You specialized in ...?” the first Professor Long asks.

  “I’ve spent the last eighteen months studying black albinos. They are found only among certain species, dickcissel, vireo, rhinoceros, horseshoe bat, flying squirrel, among others.”

  “A black albino?” Professor Budshah asks. “What’s that?”

  This kind of blunt, direct question, and the level tone he uses, is typical of him.

  “Black albinos are animals that alternate between being entirely white and entirely black, often within a matter of hours.”

  “Hm!”

  “I’ve seen it happen all at once. Swish! There’s no explanation for it as yet. Skin, hair, plumage, eyes, the inside of the mouth and the tongue, even the teeth or the beak, the horn on the rhino. Even the interior organs change color. The most interesting phenomena, though, is the intermediate state, when it is at all prolonged. The animal becomes invisible at the precise midpoint of the change.”

  “Remarkable!”

  “Extraordinary!”

  “Yes,” she says. She speaks in a blithe sort of way, half turned around in her seat, and completely untroubled by the jolts as the van crashes over deep potholes and ruts and veers around traffic into the shoulder over the curb, right up against the roadside brush that rakes and slaps the sides of the van.

  The second Professor Long is turning green.

  “Oh boy ... Oh boy ...” he says, in between little burps. His face is now entirely green, except for his nose. His nose is always gleaming red, like polished terra cotta.

  “Careful!” Professor Aughbui cries.

  “They become more and more silver, anxious, and satiny, and then they shimmer, and then you just can’t see them, at all. They reappear a moment later, and the skittishness fades as the color becomes more distinct. It’s when they change suddenly, though, without warning ... that really drives them nuts.”

  The van jostles between two stone posts and we are on the campus, although there are no buildings in sight apart from some evidently very large ones about a mile away from this disproportionately small gate. There is no wall for the gate to open, for that matter. The intervening space between the gate and those distant buildings is all open, thickly covered in dead blonde grass, and criss-crossed with low chain-link fences in what is almost a maze. There is not a soul in sight anywhere, no trees, no shade. The road that takes us toward the buildings is arbitrarily kinked around empty, fenced lots. The scene reminds me of a suburban building development, when the ground is prepared but before construction begins; it also reminds me of an archaeological site before the digging commences.

  “How are you all feeling?” Dr. Ventaltia asks.

  We have been thrown around so much by now that we are all heaped up against one side of the van. The second Professor Long lunges towards the back and vomits noisily. The van is suffused at once with the odor of bile.

  The driver slams on the brakes snarling and cursing, leaps out of the van and goes around to open its two besplattered back doors. He seems to have wanted to pull the rake from its brackets on the inner wall of the van, to rake the mess out, but there is vomit on the handle of the rake too. Nonplussed by this, he waves his hand and disappears from the square of daylight in the back of the van. I can hear his sun-browned, cursing voice going around on the left side, and now he appears out in front. We can see him through the windshield, walking toward the university buildings in the distance with a swaying step, gesturing every now and then as he continues, apparently, to curse and complain to the air and the dead grass and the remote university buildings hazed over with dust and sunlight and heat-shuddered air.

  “Are you all right now?” Dr. Ventaltia asks presently, unfazed.

  Groans, murmurs. None of us want to move, expecting the return of the driver.

  “I don’t understand. If you’re so uncomfortable,” she says, “why don’t you get back into your seats?”

  We can not answer, but I think we are unwilling to move because we expect the driver to come back any moment, even though I for one can still see him, a little dot now, walking toward the university buildings. Apparently we believe we will just end up being tossed back into these postures once the van gets moving again, so we might as well stay where we are. We might also imagine that bad luck is hovering over the van, and not want to attract its attention by making movements. Dr. Ventaltia stays right where she is, watching us impassively.

  After about an hour it becomes impossible to avoid the conclusion that the driver has abandoned us in disgust. Groaning and seconds away from heatstroke at least, we disentangle ourselves from each other surprisingly easily, and we also leave the van as though it were nothing in particular to us either. We walk to the university buildings, cutting across the dead fields, using gates built into the fences. The gates have rough zinc flanges. The brittle blades of dead grass jab into my stocking feet—I still have not managed to replace my stolen shoes. The hotel store sells shoes, I know, but I did not like any of them, and we economists are not free to wear just anything. Our shoes may be brown, grey, or black; they may be of cloth, leather, or rubber, but must not contain more than 15% plastic and must be plain in design, without colorful lozenges or stripes or bulbs or tassels or points or tabs or springs or unusual vents or indentations. We are completely exposed to the sky here, standing like a vast, shapeless phantom. A uniform haze covers two thirds of it, exposing the blue only behind us, and the sun, behind that haze, is a streak too brilliant to look at directly. The light is intense, so that my face aches with squinting through it, and some indiscernible cause is putting irregularities into the heat pattern. Some of the fenced lots are ablaze with solar heat, and others are traversed by a dry, cooling breeze that slides like silk along my face and hands. To generalize, it is hot, far hotter than is seasonal here. In fact, we arrived in the middle of a record heatwave. The locals are no better equipped to deal with it than we are, which might account for the eerie desertion everywhere we go.

  The University was removed to this spatial quarantine after student protests impressed on the Archizoguaylan governors the folly of “cultivating rebellion,” as they put it, in the “heart” of the capital. Originally, however, there was no University, but only a college, housed in a single, inadequately small building originally constructed by the YMCA. This was located actually in the center of San Toribio, but this could be considered the “heart” of the city only in a literal sense. All the important government offices were situated at the periphery, at the ends of two of the radiating legs of San Toribio. Some time after the construction of the University, which was erected between the legs and is therefore actually closer to both administrative centers than the original college was, and which is so much larger than the original college that it now enrolls fifteen times more students every semester, and which now makes available
to these students an enormous independent library and research laboratories on an exceedingly spacious campus, it dawned on the powers that be in Archizoguayla that the student protests had actually been fantastically effective in an entirely unforeseen direction. However, by that time, they were no longer in a position to do anything about it.

  Cutting through the fenced lots reduces the distance so drastically that we arrive at the buildings well before the driver, who is now a distant speck on the road behind us and scarcely bigger than the van itself, although he might have turned back once he saw we were going to beat him here. From where we are standing, his figure is like the unstable shadow of a small fire, and it is not so easy to tell whether he is walking toward us or away from us.

  Dr. Ventaltia leads us through the silent, lightless university buildings and behind them, where a curving road swings us around a vast paved empty plaza with white concrete slab benches that blaze like snowbanks in the sun and dance in pink afterimages whenever we blink, and at last we are at the zoo.

  (Crazy zigzag sun piercing in our eyes, broken in trees, flickering in confusion. Empty blacktop pathways with garbage cans, little pavilions, concrete and plaster rocks everywhere like a movie set, barnyard smell. Now and then a squawk or a gutty rumble. Chickens clucking. A snake hisses. A lion roars. A jaguar roars. An elephant trumpets. A horse whinnies. A cow lows. Signed, the second Professor Long.)

  Dr. Ventaltia leads us through a passageway of fake rocks and through a black steel door marked ERE INTERDICTUL PENETRULAP. Total blackness on the other side, massive black dropcloths hang all around us. Dr. Ventaltia pauses to pick up a flashlight that looks like a lunchbox and then goes on. The fluctuating disk of light looks like a disembodied eye, slipping over the coarse fabric as she kneads the curtains this way and that.