Animal Money

by Michael Cisco

  “What are these ...?” the first Professor Long asks, her voice muffled by the curtains.

  Dr. Ventaltia stops abruptly and turns, shining the flashlight up onto her face.

  “We do a great deal of research involving flying insects.”

  Now down a corridor we pass lab after lab and a few crossings, coming at last to another black steel door, this one with an arrow slit window in it and a label that reads SECRETE SPECIAL, and VUELTADMONIDUELES! PIRXONAS INAUCTORIZADUL ALIU NONLICENZUE ULTRAN HIS CUZPI SAUN. The language spoken in Achrizoguayla has never been codified, and does not even have a fixed name. “Spantuguese” or “Labasporspan” are two of the more common terms for it. Hundreds of Achrizoguaylan phrase and guide books exist, and all of them purport to have the key to achieving some facility with the language, but even the name of the country is still in an unstable condition, being sometimes spelled Axri Zoguayla, for example, while its eastern citizens insist the nation is Euskal Berria, which I believe means something like New Basque Country.

  A peal of thunder bursts overhead as we enter, answered by inhuman shrieks that resound against tile and concrete.

  We pass through a meat-locker door into the rear of an enclosure. There is a dividing wall with a window, beyond that an area with a dirt floor that recedes beneath a bank of dense tropical foliage. There is a chain link barrier, she explains, hidden among the plants, and the animals—in this case, a species of small Achrizoguaylan wild cat called a jipipe—are on the other side. A buzzer opens the barrier, and, in a moment, a few of these tiny cats, no bigger than an ordinary housecat, come trustingly out onto the dirt and begin milling to and fro along the edges of the planted area. The cats are rust and black colored, with brown eyes and small, naked ears, which protrude from the fur of their heads like pale leaves.

  This is the secret zoo within the zoo. More labs, and many observation galleries or monitoring labs with sunken floors, a dull black fabric covering everything, low cushioned seats, rows of consoles, and enormous tinted one-way windows overlooking different enclosures. These galleries remind me of the dens people used to build in suburban homes.

  Dr. Ventaltia shows us into one of these, a smaller room with a black window. We can see ourselves reflected in the glass like a row of six ghosts. Dr. Ventaltia is a sizeable woman with sloping shoulders, a pale face, dark hair; sagging all over, like an old sofa, but a lively old sofa. There I am, looking at the others. Professor Budshah is beside me, smelling strongly of hotel soap. He looms over me, distinguished, with skin the color of scorched chocolate, the oldest among us, with an air that I am sure he would consider resolute. Then Professor Aughbui, who only appears to be the oldest of us, as he is bald, with tufts of hair over his ears, a prominent, aquiline nose, circular spectacles. The first Professor Long is vivacious, compact, abrupt, self-sufficient, missing nothing. At the other end is the second Professor Long, passive, vague, pliable, handsome, ill-shaven.

  Dr. Ventaltia snaps a switch, and a man-made cave appears in the window, suffused with dim blue light. The dark air flickers with motion from time to time.

  “A species of horseshoe bats,” she explains.

  The thunder does not seem to disturb them. They throng the walls in quivering assemblies. Dr. Ventaltia directs our attention to one of the upper corners of the cave by putting a filter on her flashlight. There we can plainly see a few bats lying on a rock shelf with a shifting heap of insects behind them. Other bats fly over and land in front of these few, and apparently exchange crumbs of some material for insects in what is plainly a mercantile transaction.

  “For money, they ...?” the first Professor Long asks.

  “Those are bits of plastic from the panelling,” Dr. Ventaltia answers, pointing to several scarred patches on the walls of the cave. “They chew it loose. We have some of it here.”

  A glass dish covered with odd-shaped bits of plastic, all about the same size, all different, bright colors.

  “Do they color code for denomination?” the first Professor Long asks.

  “I don’t know, I hadn’t thought of that. Huh!” Dr. Ventaltia says.

  “The ratio of white to blue is roughly one to four,” Professor Aughbui says. “Yellow to blue two to four, roughly.”

  “That would have to mean they were counting,” the first Professor Long says.

  “Well, it might be that there is four times as much white plastic exposed as there is blue,” Dr. Ventaltia says.

  “Four times as much blue,” Professor Aughbui corrects, without looking away from the bats.

  “Yes,” Dr. Ventaltia says. “So the ratios may be determined by availability rather than by scheme of the bats.”

  “When did ... When was this behavior ... first ...?” the second Professor Long says, his hand to his head.

  Dr. Ventaltia gives him a chair and begins a protracted narrative by way of answer. Professor Aughbui has taken the flashlight and is peering through the glass. Professor Budshah is examining an open loose leaf folder that lies open on a black desk, full of columns and ranks, with a judicious, skeptical air, hands behind his back.

  (The first Professor Long is sitting down and to one side, feeling suddenly paltry and worn out. The thought of the twenty empty, chaste years of future life, stretching on toward sixty, sweeps through her, sapping her strength, and with alarm she realizes she’s close to tears. She couldn’t be less in the right frame of mind to observe this phenomenon of the bats; it’s part of something that could make her fortune, perhaps a whole new interdiscipline of zoolconomics, no vowels but o’s, wait, there’s an i in there too, but she’s like an empty tin can that’s been tossed out of a boat, or a hot-air balloon, into the ocean, sinking down in dark water combed with dwindling stalks of sunlight. Colder, heavier, darker, and down. To the nightmare domain of hideous, demonic animals, opaque as ice, studded with ice lights and icicle fangs of tough plastic, silent, mindless, enormous. Like extracted, locomoting, diaphanized organs. When gravity has pulled the Long-can all the way down to the bottom of the ocean, she lands with a thump and a viscously retarded flurry of colorless silt, the lunar lander. She climbs out of the can, wearing a miniature space suit, making her way cautiously down the ladder from the top of the can. Then a slow balloon drop on both feet. She takes out a stick. She plants it on the lightless expanse of mud and unfolds its tiny, pornographic flag. No, the flag of her country, which shows, on a field of overcast grey, the midwinter silhouette of a flock of birds roosting in a naked tree ...)

  Again and again, everywhere in the secret zoo, we see animals using money.

  Here are flying squirrels who exchange dried flower petals for familial relations, actually buying and selling grandparents. Here are dickcissels contracting to build nests for each other, paying in eggshell fragments that have been bitten into neat triangles. Data is still being collated; no one can say if it happened across the board at the same time, or if the practice developed in one population, one species, and moved to others in some traceable way. A money mutation. Did they learn this behavior from human beings? Is money an aspect of biological development analogous to the development of air breathing lungs or the sense of smell?

  In one of the galleries we encounter several other zoologists in white coats, who greet Dr. Ventaltia and, once we have been introduced and our presence explained, greet us as well. They want to talk about money, but we are all watching the man, haggard, filthy, and naked, inside the enclosure. He is kneeling just before the window, his palms and elbows pressed against the shatterproof glass, with a hopeless, imploring look on his face. Suddenly a male chimpanzee comes tumbling into view. The man starts, cringing. The chimpanzee encircles his waist with one arm, throws him to the ground and fucks him violently. His cries are silenced by the glass. Other males are appearing now, hurrying in eagerly. When the first is done with the man, he confronts the others, who wave bits of green leaf at him, glossy leaves torn or gnawed into rectangles. Others are proffering wood chips that seem to have been fa
shioned from round tree branches. The first male approaches the one waving the most green, takes it all from him, and indicates the cowering, sobbing man. The second chimp leaps on him furiously, punching his head, then starts fucking him even more viciously than the first.

  “He surely did not volunteer for that!” I say.

  “No,” one of the other zoologists tells me, after a casual glance through the window. “But he needed taking down a peg.”

  “Get him out of there at once!” Professor Budshah commands.

  “Yeah, Jesus, I mean ...” the second Professor Long says, trailing off into an inarticulate hiss of incredulity and disapproval—“ssshhhhhhhh ...”

  Professor Aughbui says nothing. He appears to be in shock.

  “This is an abomination,” the first Professor Long says very distinctly, emphasizing each syllable with a nod of her head.

  The zoologists all begin speaking at once. They are all completely calm, but their voices grow steadily louder. As they speak, they draw all the breathable air into themselves, forcing us out into the scarcely better air of the external corridor. This separates us momentarily from Dr. Ventaltia as well, who began speaking when the others did. We are alone. An idea. The completion, I should say, of an inchoate idea that is already several days old. Instantly recognizing our opportunity, we seize it without a word, or even a facial expression, for each other.

  There is no sign of thunderclouds when we finally re-emerge from the zoo. Look out again at the de Chirico landscape of bottle green twilight and wrong shadows under, the mountain out there like a longhaired head only just emerging from the water and the hair still spreading, floating around the head. These are not the kind of thoughts I would normally have, but the climate here, the estrangement of being in a different time zone, of being south of the equator for the first time, the confusing events and brash novelty of the last few days, and, I regret I cannot overlook it, my head injury, are all putting their particular stresses on my carefully articulated and preserved normal self.

  Jurgel, the driver, will bring us to the hotel in the back of his pickup truck. By the time we reach the street, though, we are so giddy, nauseous, and battered from the ride that we recruit the first Professor Long to bang on the back window, telling him that we want to stop and get a cab instead.

  We have no sooner found a comfortable arrangement for our various leaning bodies when a cab appears, and we flinchfully climb into the back. The driver explains that he has to pick up another fare, his cousin, and is that all right? We are gliding into light, late-afternoon traffic, the mountain behind us, the low and curlicued city skyline before us ...

  Labor is quantified according to the amount of time spent working, irrespective of the quality of the work. An incompetent worker can spend hours doing what a skilled one can finish in no time, and yet the incompetent will be paid better if time alone determines. This, of course, does not happen. Skilled workers are paid on a higher scale, their skill is translated into a greater number of money units per unit of work time. This is all very elementary, but that does not mean we can answer this one: what if the skilled worker is skilled in being paid? Certainly, the best paid of all who are paid are those who do nothing, the administrators and shareholders for whom a busy day is a matter of conversations, meals, casually reviewing deals over rounds of golf. Animal money could re-qualitize time by not representing individual time units the way a wage rate does.

  The driver pulls over at a corner. A tall, scrawny man tosses aside his cigarette and climbs in, greeting the driver and nodding at us with the merest acknowledgment. At once he begins a long tirade in what sounds like Serbian. The two men could not be more unalike; the driver is a round, sturdy, copper man, while the passenger is boney, purple, with a lean face and knuckly hands.

  Non-animal money, what should we call it? Conventional money? Why not archaic money? Why not temporally crumbled money?

  The passenger is shouting extremely vulgar imprecations at the car alongside us, swinging his arm out the window. He is more animatedly abusive by the moment. The driver of the other car has lost patience and is responding in kind, his face tensed, stern, swivelling between the road and the passenger with a bobbin-like regular motion. The passenger is screaming at him like a madman, gesticulating furiously through the window, nearly half out of it now.

  He recoils back like a frightened snake and onto the driver as the other car swings into us broadside in retaliation. The passenger ripostes by trying to dive through the window but the cab swerves to the right to avoid a frantic pedestrian causing the passenger to fall short. He continues bellowing at the other driver who lunges his car at us again, pulling away just in time to avoid hitting a post that slices between the two cars. Professor Budshah starts pounding the back of the passenger’s head with a rolled-up newspaper.

  “Cuidado pendejo!” a voice screams, and my hand points as a garbage truck swings heedlessly into traffic right ahead of us. The driver yanks on the wheel and the car swerves toward a too-narrow margin between the truck and the walled shoulder; the cab keels over up onto two wheels through a flock of chickens and shoots past the truck, falling back onto all fours as it clears the gap. The rear end skids and the car pivots, coming to a stop blocking the lane in front of the truck. The passenger is already climbing onto the hood of the truck—I had not even seen him get out of the taxi—and now, incoherent and choked with rage, he is pounding cracks into the windscreen. The cab driver gets out of the taxi and calls to his cousin in a reasoning tone, his cap in hand. The first Professor Long gets out of the cab as well, slides in again through the passenger side door into position behind the wheel, backs the taxi up, curls us away from the truck, then out into traffic with two oncoming cars hurtling directly at us which she avoids by plunging us over an unrailed embankment and down a rutted slope dotted with brush and stones. Jolting and bucking, we roll out across the more level lot below, arriving with a bound that throws me up against the roof, which crashes against my skull. I see white, and then nothing.

  Later, when I come around again, I am gazing, numbly at first, and then with growing wonder, at a luminous field of vague colored shapes, blue, green, dun, that shift and dance, rise and fall, without losing their relationship to each other. I am looking, now I realize it, out the windscreen of the taxi. Perspiration has pooled around me on the plastic seat cover. The first Professor Long is driving us through the fields, jostling and rocking, the second Professor Long groaning in agony, and she clutching the wheel like a lashed sea captain, big drops of sweat tumbling down her face.

  “Stop! Stop!” Professor Aughbui cries in torment.

  The first Professor Long stops the car, braking so abruptly it is as if we had hit some invisible obstacle. She sits without looking back at us. Silence. Directly ahead of us, rising above the dense trees that fringe the silent field, incredibly, is the hotel.

  *

  Taking as a pretext, albeit a necessary one, my pressing need for shoes, I am able to pursue somewhat my investigation into the facts informing yesterday’s occurrences. When I ask in the lobby, in the bar, at the restaurant, in the little convenience store on the ground floor of the hotel, in the laundry room, at the shoe store at last, and around, no one is even aware that there is a zoo at the University. I am making myself ridiculous with my story of a secret zoo within a zoo and a man enslaved by sexually deviant chimpanzees.

  That night, of course, we are all of us entirely too busy with our experiment to do any further clue-hunting.

  The following afternoon I spend nailed to my bed by a splitting headache. An insistent reporter keeps telephoning me in my room, and the telephone bell—an actual bell—resounds with such abrupt and violent noise I feel as though it will cause my skull to blast apart. This reporter demands more information about the secret zoo, or “zoo within the zoo” as he calls it. The nurse advises me that his paper, Cuidadoel!, is the “trashiest tabloid around.” I detach the cord of the handset and place it in the drawer.


  When the ferocity of my headache fades, I get up with a peculiar sensation of lightness or buoyancy, as if I no longer had any mass. A thick, green twilight is congealing outside. My head is clear, but only because it is empty. An unoppressive, narcotical distance sets me at one end of a medium-length hallway, with the rest of the world at the far end. My companions are nowhere to be found. That might have been the first Professor Long in the hotel bar—I saw a flash of white wrapped around a head, an awkward quiff of black hair, but ...? Well, the hotel bar is a rather unexpectedly rowdy sort of place, people get hustled out of there with their arms over the shoulders of their chums every night. I do not imagine it would appeal to the first Professor Long. In any case, we are all rather drained from the experiment last night, and nervous about the security of our equipment, and above all, with respect to outcomes. If we fail, that will be disappointing of course, but the drawing board will remain so to speak. If we succeed, however—what then?

  The next day a delegate from the conference approaches us in the lounge, which is still bedecked with dangling streamers and confetti. Evidently, the other economists all felt sorry for us yesterday and took up a collection to send us to the Los Angeles beach today; an official IEI car will be coming for us in an hour. I do not think they realized that the Los Angeles beach is a nude beach any more than we did when we set out to go there.

  The journey takes us along the boundary of one of the radiating legs of San Toribio. To one side, the blonde desert, and to the other, slum areas under renovation. Before the revolution here, these slums were ruled by gangs that, at the peak of their power, often came equipped with helicopters and armored vehicles. The civilian inhabitants of the slums were their living insulation against the government, which chose to pursue a policy of containment. San Toribio was a monstrously violent city then.