Animal Money

by Michael Cisco

  The second Professor Long is the first to stir. He extricates himself from the cab and we, with a mindless obedience born of confusion and weariness, follow him. I can not deny that it is good to stand, to unbend, to breathe fresher air. Why should the air be fresher here, at the edge of the swamp, than it was in town?

  The passenger is chortling at us, as if the sight of five bandaged invalids clambering gingerly out of a cab were inexpressibly droll. However, he never seems to be mocking us exactly. Waving his thick paw, he urges us to follow him inside. I wonder how they will react to his garish dress, to his white slacks and gleaming cheap white loafers, to the white slacks and white cap of the cab driver, to us. We climb the stone steps to the veranda and enter through a capacitous and heavy front door. The interior is so dark I am not able to make out the reception room.

  “Siettu,” I hear the big man quickly say to someone.

  “Sertu,” comes the prompt rejoinder, and we are conveyed into a cool, felty darkness. I have a clarifying impression of nineteenth century elegance, heavy draperies, wooden appointments. The large man is speaking quietly to somebody, and the voice of a young woman reaches me:

  “This place is called O Morguo.”

  It hardly seems likely that this place, so subdued, even sombre, would hold any appeal for such a raucous man as our new companion, and it is as if he somehow detects this sense of incongruity in me, because he explains himself, his booming voice gone completely flat.

  “I am Mateo Morguo,” he says, turning to us, all trace of his former jovial boisterousness gone, his face blank and cold.

  “This is my club.”

  They all have that cold look here. The patrons sit nearly motionless, half hidden by the incessant criss-cross of servers carrying mate on black lacquered serving boards. Their eyes blink slowly, their cold pupils fixed in livid eyewhites while the smoke elongates from their cigarettes turning the room into a collection of gossamer cages. Their heads are like security cameras and there is no smiling, no laughter. I have to admit I find it rather inviting. Those cigarettes ... clouded by ashes, the embers are white, not orange. There is almost no color. The walls, ceiling, and the floor are black and invisible, the people hang in space. But the entire back wall is one massive window with a view of starlit waters which I had not thought were so near. There is no smell of alcohol, but an odor of natron and a faint spiciness. People sip mate or a brew made from nuts and peppercorns, a potation Mateo Morguo informs us is called simply “white drink.”

  I glance again out the window at silent black peaks fluttering in the black like the low hubbub of voices. Some patrons sit on the floor, cross legged, or leaning forlornly against the walls. We, however, are steered toward seats—the high table, adorned in black satin. I realize that the ubiquitous cigarette smoke produces no smell. Mateo Morguo sits in what must be his customary seat, with his back in a cushioned corner. We take a bit longer to settle ourselves, and struggle to keep our balance as we maneuver into our seats. I sense rather than see a waiter appear, and Mateo Morguo waves his hand.

  “Blanthe,” he says, which means “white drink.”

  Then his hand returns to his lap and he sits like a stone buddha. I have the feeling we are all holding our breath. I make a vehement effort to part my lips and speak, but some force, social, not somatic, if that is an applicable distinction here, prevents me. Very soon there is a smoking mug of white drink before me.

  “The darkness and light of human vision?” Mateo Morguo asks.

  “How do you know about ...?”

  The words burst out, not from me, although I intended to ask him the same question, but from the first Professor Long.

  “I am with the press here. We follow good stories.”

  Mateo Morguo speaks with the least possible motion of the face and no movement in his body. It is bizarre to see such an obviously jovial extrovert transformed into this sinister cataleptic.

  “Spying on us?” Professor Budshah asks, unable to infuse any real indignation into his voice.

  Mateo Morguo finally adopts a facial expression, his features grinding into a new configuration with what seems like great effort.

  “I bring you here,” he says, almost whining, “and you ask me these ridiculous questions. I thought you wanted to talk about the voice.”

  “What do you know about that voice?” I ask at once, to keep my hand in, and before anyone can beat me to it. I glance, also, at the second Professor Long, who is staring at Mateo Morguo with what I can describe only as a look of horror, of stunned horror.

  “I will only say this,” Mateo Morguo says, turning toward me a huge face like a wad of melting taffy. “You have received an Uhuyjhn transmission. Don’t ask me to repeat that word, or to explain. That was a message that only someone with a certain neural configuration could receive. That configuration requires technical knowledge of money. It requires that certain ideas be present as electrical and chemical signatures. Among other things, probably. It requires a great deal of money. Of special money.”

  “Which side do you belong to?” Professor Budshah asks.

  “The opposition.”

  “To Tripism?”

  “Yes. I don’t work for one party or another, I work for whoever pays me. That puts me in opposition to those who do not work for pay. They are interested in your work. You know, getting the message in that restaurant—that was the wrong place. You should have gotten it here. You—”

  He raises a finger from the loop of his mug to point at the second Professor Long, the hint of an unfriendly smile on his face.

  “—you’re a joker, aren’t you? You’re always too early or too late, right?”

  He raises his mug to his lips and takes a long, silent pull at it. The white drink has a piquant sweet, milky aroma that I find interesting but not at all tempting. The trancelike rigidity that came over him as he entered the club seems to be subsiding.

  “Who are Uhuyjhn?” the second Professor Long asks, glassy-eyed. He repeats this peculiar word as if he had heard it before.

  At once the masklike stiffness returns to the face of Mateo Morguo.

  “Communists,” he says shortly, unblinkingly. “Communist aliens. You should beware of them.”

  We return to the hotel. In the back of the cab we are quiet, very tired. The second Professor Long is haggard, sheepish, and he has an air of inward vigilance, I presume because he does not trust himself not to make another outburst. Not wanting to compound his painful self-consciousness by watching him myself, I look instead at my own face in the window. There I see the lineaments wanly outlined, grey, shadowy, and tenuous; old, ashamed. Emerging from the cab I am struck by the evil tenacity of this damp heat, even at night. We hobble across the lobby toward the elevator like accident victims crawling to an aid station. Professor Aughbui tactfully accompanies the second Professor Long up to his room, and Professor Budshah pointedly leaves us at the same time, to let the second Professor Long know that we are not keeping together to talk about him in his absence. The first Professor Long looks at me meaningfully, though; she wants to ask me something.

  “The dark economists ...?”

  “I had not thought of that,” I say. Her words conjure up in me a long-unvisited memory that takes me by surprise. Years ago, in Albuquerque, at a colloquium for the Domestic Economic And Taphonomic Historical Association, two of them had been pointed out to me by Professor Alenteus. One or the other of them belonged to the University faculty and I remember a vivid presentiment of his office, although, of course, I never actually saw it; the dark economists study with ancient masters whose twisted mummies are preserved in their departmental offices, spicing the air, I assume, with a corrupt incense. Natron, if I am not mistaken. Their methods are concealed and their dire pronouncements are littered with occult economic formulae that only they fully understand. When they wish to read their grimoires of necronomic formulae, longhand and unpublished, they turn off the lights and study in the dark; and they write in the dark, to
o. I have no idea how. A persecuted sect and a jealous one. In my graduate school days, I had once seriously considered taking a seminar offered by a Professor commonly rumored to be disnumbered among them, but I demurred at the last minute. I have since regretted the decision. Is it really possible—a solecism, how can possibility, which is categorical, be intensified? Say, is it possible some hidden malice is aimed at us?

  Alone at last, I sit up in my room in a colloquy with my inner corpse, thinking about the strained greeting I gave the other economists in the lobby, many of whom were much younger and better respected than any of us. There is that familiar cracking of enthusiasm that is the beginning of the suspicion that you have been playing the fool again. I ruefully page through the conference program ... Ah, there it is! My angle of condescension! I am safe.

  Here is where my presentation would have been. On the Remonetization of Real Estate and Housing Finance Markets. (The loud crashing of doors in public buildings at closing time, when all you hear ... not dinning voices but just rustling keys, and the thud of trash bins as surly custodians make their rounds.) Instead of honest pain, there is just a sour feeling of satisfaction as the usual suspicions are confirmed, and how very nice it is to be right. Just hold something open, wounded and human in your face, I tell myself. No more authority, just listen. Do not look skeptically at love, do not insist on choosing between irony and love, you are fatigued, you are not yourself, take your test, set the alarm if you have already forgotten to do so, and go to sleep.

  *

  A dream about getting lost in the shower, a cramped labyrinth of close, white tile passages, soap dishes at intervals, hot water spraying. My hands turn to raisins. What if the water suddenly turns ice cold? Keep to the right. But was I keeping to the right before, is that my left? Searching, getting cleaner and cleaner, cleanness piling up on my skin like a negative envelope.

  I record this one in the back of my test book with the other dreams. The book is filling up. I may have to send it in before I finish all the tests. With this one, if you fill out the dream pages, you just add the extras in the pocket provided.

  After the separation-of-beads I make my way downstairs and locate Professor Aughbui and Professor Budshah. A moment after I join them, the first Professor Long appears, puffy and ill-rested. The General Assembly is being held today. Where is the second Professor Long? We have to leave early, we move slowly. Since, of us all, I am the least worse-for-wear, I am recruited to go hunt him up. The housekeeping cart is parked in front of his door, which is open; a man is tidying the room, shrugs and gestures to the four walls in response to my question. Momentarily at a loss, I stupidly look around the room—is it that I think I will see the second Professor Long peeking mischievously at me out from under the bed? No, but there is a real possibility I might find some clue to his whereabouts, and therefore that is why I continue to search.

  He has left very little sign of his presence in the room. Nothing really, except for the tip of a shirt tail caught in the bureau drawer and a big, limp black notebook on the table.

  With a shock, I realize this is his test book and turn away reflexively, as if he could somehow sense this intrusion despite his absence. But that is something—he must have known that someone would be in here to do up the room. Why would he have left his test book out in plain view? A bad night, confusion, sloppiness ... or haste ... maybe he stepped out as he thought for a moment but then had another attack, or his injury acted up, and he is lying somewhere unconscious or in convulsions.

  When the time comes to leave, there is still no sign of the second Professor Long.

  Another careering drive. The auditorium is far away from other conference venues but it is the only place with the requisite arena seating. I thought we would be walking everywhere; San Toribio is not such a big city. Then again, no one could have predicted this implacable, stultifying heat.

  Seen from the air, San Toribio looks bleached and calcified. It is a modern city surrounded by mountains and flat plains of sterile brown ash that refuses to keep a road, dotted with villages like boats stranded far inland after a tidal wave. Archizoguayla is virtually all beach; the beach extends almost 150 kilometers inland. The total population is somewhere around 400,000, much of that is in the city, distributed in the two embracing suburban arms that join with no body, directly to each other, while the rebuilt old city, buried over a century ago in Cloticuean lava, sits on a granite bed off to one side, like a triskelion. The old city has a compact plan and is ideal for foot exploration, assuming you do not have a crippling head injury.

  Overpasses whisk by. We follow a canal for a while, then dive down a ramp and into a thicket of streets so narrow that people have to flatten themselves against the steep, wide facades or retreat back into doorway to let us by, dragging bicycles and dogs with them. The auditorium hoves into view before us, visible as a brilliant wall rising at the summit of a corridor street like a vast apparition, blazing black as milk. There is a spacious plaza with elaborate wrought iron gates, broad circular platforms stacked in shallow steps up to the bronze doors.

  A smoky green thunderstorm has gathered overhead, and the thunder rebounds back to us from the mountain slopes as the lightning approaches up the valley. The thunder merges too with the far off sound of the surf; the roar of the ocean here, I notice, unpredictably increases or diminishes in audibility. As the hum in the air builds, my symptoms build. My mouth is dry, and there is a tingling metallic taste on my tongue. An unpleasant if not painful lightheadedness hovers like a ray of light focussed just to the left of the crown, a fading loop of pain manifests itself above the left ear. I experience an oppressive restlessness in the body. People hasten to get into these shops and those little coffee places, and snatch up bits of cardboard for use as umbrellas.

  Some of the other economists help us up the steps and into the auditorium. No, they have not seen the second Professor Long. Our worry spreads to their faces. No one misses a General Assembly! Even we, despite our debilitated condition, have not failed to attend.

  We gather in the atrium, and then, after a few announcements by the conference organizers, file silently into the arena and take our places ...

  That night, after dinner, I at last catch sight of the second Professor Long, at the hotel swimming pool. Climbing nimbly out of the pool, streaming with water, he rubs his face in both hands and then happens to glance up at me, smiles and waves, one palm wide, before hurrying, with short rapid strides, over to snatch up his towel from the back of a deck chair. His bandages are sopping wet, and his choice of swimwear is indecently minimal.

  My new shoes are too tight. At first, I thought they were just stiff, and would loosen up with wear. Now I am not so sure. This hampers me a little and I am particularly disaccommodated when going down stairs. By the time I can get down to him, he has got the towel around his shoulders and he is patting his bandages dry. The dressing seems hopelessly spoiled to me; his head might have been toilet-papered by teenaged pranksters.

  Smiling, cordial, and somehow shy, he puts me off when I demand to know where he has been.

  “How could you miss a General Assembly?!” I cry indignantly.

  “OK, OK,” he says, smiling, not meeting my eyes. “I’ll explain.”

  “Whatever you do will be taken as a reflection on all of us, you know,” I go on.

  Now he looks at me directly.

  “I won’t explain ...”

  He begins walking away, then pauses and turns toward me again before I can select the right riposte.

  “I’ll tell everyone all at once, tomorrow. All right? The Surfeit is One.”

  *

  That night I dreamt I was in a secondhand bookstore, searching for a neglected economic treatise by someone named Dr. Toilet, convinced that I would be doing the world a favor, and making a name for myself, if I could get it back into print. The store was in a converted old Victorian house my imagination conjured for me, and I was on the second floor. The floorboards were uneven; th
ey flexed beneath my weight, and the mismatched bookcases, arranged at all angles according to dream code, teetered to and fro as I moved around the room. Since there was no specific economics or social studies section, I had to go over the whole store. I surveyed carefully the contents of a set of shelves labelled with the word CEMETERY written in marker on a tacked-up index card:

  In Graves of Lost Time

  Gravity’s Grave

  The Graving

  Graves in the Attic

  Uncle Tom’s Grave

  A Clockwork Grave

  Wuthering Graves

  Graves and Peace

  Inherit the Grave

  Grave in August

  The Catcher in the Grave

  Grave of the Flies

  Portrait of the Grave as a Young Artist

  The Grave of Young Werther

  Our Mutual Grave

  A Grave of Two Cities

  Brave Old Grave

  Graves Fall Apart

  We Have Always Lived in the Grave

  What will it take to save the world from this economy?

  Opening graves ... opening graves ...

  *

  Processes processes processes all night, long.

  Thinking with pierced arrows.

  I went straight downstairs that morning.

  I didn’t go straight downstairs, I laid out my beads in dotted white and black lines, I showered, I then went straight downstairs. I often forget to do my beads, but this, that, morning, I believe I remembered.

  Back to the Comedy.

  Yellow sky. Purple sun, like a smoke mass. Spread all over the sky, leaving only one coin-shaped yellow spot exposed. I am partially melted into the air, which is like a hot bath even before nine.

  Wings, controls, hangliders up there, pivoting. Lurking in the wings, seek out the wise whores of the Teeming. In the lobby I ran into Dorothy Bright, an old friend of mine. She’s a historian, not an economist. That’s why she isn’t invited into our circle, or to the General Assembly. Ronald Crest, Sulekh Budshah, they wouldn’t stand for it. Ronald Crest wouldn’t. Long Min-Yin probably wouldn’t mind. Warren Aughbui would probably be alarmed by it.