Animal Money

by Michael Cisco

  “Bon” the reply.

  Professor Budshah loftily brushes aside the remonstrances of concerned officials. Professor Delatour won’t back down either.

  “The challenge came from them, not me,” he says. “Am I not supposed to answer?”

  It is the morning of the duel. The economists prepare themselves separately, meet, and put themselves somberly in array. They wear the traditional white clothing reserved for such occasions, purchased locally of course, and arrange their bandages and therapeutic appliances. These duels are nowhere near as common as they once were; most modern economists have never seen an actual duel, even if they all have to demonstrate duelling ability to qualify for their degree.

  A small plaza within walking distance of the hotel was selected by mutual assent of both parties. The economists make their way there now. The day is overcast and dim, but the punishing heat has not let up. Their white garments hum in the gloom. Professor Budshah, the Great King, regal, detached, speaking in Latin. The martinet, who is too formal for contractions and too punctilious for apostrophes. The politic first Professor Long, whose every sentence trails off into points, plunging out of language beneath an invisible wave. Professor Aughbui, who never says I. The second Professor Long, who takes back everything he says.

  The immanence of the contest sharpens their senses, making every detail of their surroundings acute and significant. Going about their daily business, the people of San Toribio pass them on both sides; the economists, preoccupied with other things, are only, like ghosts, vaguely aware of the stirring of quotidian life around them. The San Toribians are meanwhile concerned with avoiding the heat of the sun, sighing resignedly at the thought of all they’re missing: daredevil displays of aeronautics, the annual flower show banished to cramped quarters indoors, the outdoor concerts drooping, the horse races wilting away, the colorful transvestites streaked with melting cosmetics.

  The square is a shallow white dish, half covered by the outspread branches of a huge olive tree, and supplely paved with cobblestones like snake scales. Some other economists have already arrived and are milling around the edges of the square or seated on the bench that collars the tree. One of the conference organizers confers briefly with Professor Budshah. She invites him to withdraw, receives the refusal she expected, and retires. A moment later, she returns with Professor Tourbiere, an elderly man who once duelled Professor Heigenbeck. As the only economist present with any experience of an actual duel, he will preside over this one. He and Professor Budshah confer together in subdued tones. Citizens of San Toribio stand along the sidelines and watch curiously. Here and there, in the shadows, indistinct shapes stir in the dark—economists?

  Professor Delatour, all dressed in white, strolls coolly into the square with his seconds. He takes up a position on the far side, waiting for Professor Tourbiere to approach him, a paragon of the supercilious Gallic faultfinder. Professor Delatour has hard lines by his mouth, a blue jaw shaved ruthlessly every day, a square, dark face and high, perfectly arched eyebrows. His economist’s mark is a white curl around his left nostril. Smoke jets from his nose as he listens, head down, to Professor Tourbiere’s instructions, nodding.

  Professor Tourbiere now steps to the center of the square, glances around once to gather the attention of the economists, and then waves his hand. A youth, selected for his exceptional beauty of face and elegant slimness, minces briskly to the professor’s side, carrying the bundled rods wrapped in a sack of red velvet (with bald patches) fringed with yellow feathers.

  “Seconds, please, to the front.”

  The seconds unwrap and assemble the rods, screwing them end to end to form a long pole like a pool cue. When they’ve finished, Professor Tourbiere lifts the rod, which is nearly twenty feet long, setting one end into a rubber brace the youth positions on the ground, just where the professor indicates with a tap of his right toe. The seconds stand to either side of the pole, holding it upright with both hands, facing each other, sweating. Professor Tourbiere takes a few steps away and stares open mouthed and blinking at the sight. Then a thought flashes across his face and he instructs the seconds to reverse positions; they must stand on the opposite sides, each closer to the other side than to his own.

  No, on second thought, standing closer to the other side means facing one’s own side. The seconds should go back to standing the way they did at first. The seconds are supposed to be kept away from their own side to prevent the transfer of any items or instructions, one or another kind of contraband, being slipped to them. But, if they are facing their own sides, they might be receiving wordless visual cues. What these cues or items might be, how they might interfere with the duel, is more than he can really clearly recall. The seconds are looking at him, waiting to see if he has anything further to add. Professor Tourbiere strokes his chin, mouth open, face vacant.

  “Well,” he says, flourishing his hand away from his chin impatiently, “this is nonsense, we’ll just have to do what makes sense. You two, turn forty five degrees around the circle.”

  He makes a steering motion with both hands, then lets them drop slackly.

  The two seconds turn until they are both on the imaginary line dividing the square into the two camps.

  “That will have to do,” Professor Tourbiere says.

  He reaches out his crabbed hands and makes a stirring gesture more or less at arms length.

  “Horns ... horn players ...” he says, looking this way and that.

  An economist named Myrons strides out of a neutral corner carrying a trumpet under her arm. She’s also all dressed in white, a white cardigan with a bit of color on the V of the neck, a rumpled white canvas hat with a brim, a face like a female Walt Disney.

  Professor Tourbiere turns and turns again, taking short steps, uncertainly probing the square, until he settles on a good place for the horn player to stand. She will be about twenty feet away from the pole. If the olive tree is at twelve o’clock, she is standing at around eight o’clock. Professor Tourbiere make his way gratefully to the uncomfortable looking iron lacework chair, borrowed from a cafe on the square, set down for him just within the shade of the olive tree. He turns and drops into the seat, pinching up the fabric at his knees, mops his brow with a napkin someone hands him, then throws a nod and a wave at the horn player.

  Professor Myrons adjusts the horn a bit, working the valves, then raises it to her mouth and, softly, blows a series of tones. There is no melody, only a searching among notes. At this cue, the two contestants must approach the pole. Professor Delatour tosses aside his cigarette and crosses to the pole with his hands behind his back. The champion for the animal money school is the first Professor Long.

  The formal economic debate is resolved when both contestants leap into the air. They have to keep on bounding up again and again, flinging their bodies as high as they can. The trumpet player is obliged to play and hold a note, always the same note, whenever either of the two are aloft. Professor Delatour hops up and down rigidly in place at first, happily having removed all the change from his pockets. Then, when he finds he isn’t getting much loft that way, he remembers his gymnasium training and drops into a crouch, then uncoils in a much more effective upward lunge. The first Professor Long, however, seems to pop up into the air almost without effort; the snap-action of her legs is too quick to see, and her bandaged head reaches new heights with each ascent.

  Professor Tourbiere follows the contest like a dog watching a vertical tennis match, leaning forward nearly out of his seat, squinting, measuring each leap against the pole.

  The contestants are panting and sheened with perspiration. Professor Delatour launches himself with escalating force, but he lands heavily, off balance, stumbling every now and then. The first Professor Long tosses herself up again and again with stoic abandon, her short hair thrashing around her head, as she flies up leading with the top of her skull, fists balled at her sides. She lands on bent knees, takes a short bounce, then pops up again, drawing on years of scho
olyard experience jumping rope. Professor Delatour gathers all his force into each attempt, to deliver the unbeatable master stroke. The first Professor Long’s strategy depends on quantity and endurance. Go and go and go again, racking up leaps, with the assurance that at least one of them will be the highest.

  The economists watch in painful anticipation at first, but, as the minutes draw on, and as neither of the two leapers seems to be getting the better of the other—both of them rising about as high as the bottom of the fourth rod—their attention wanders. Small knots of conversation form. Refreshments go around and fans are improvised. It’s not clear that Professor Tourbiere really remembers how the contest is supposed to end. The duel becomes more like a protracted sporting event. The uninitiated citizens watch with bemused and incredulous expressions, pointing, murmuring, smiling. There are some rascally types who seem to want to interfere, but perhaps they are cowed by the presence of officious looking economists, and the tediously regular note of the trumpet, and the dead, still air, saturated with heat and dampness. Professor Myrons is sweating under her hat and there’s a muddiness creeping into her tone. Professor Aughbui watches attentively. Professor Budshah gazes on poker faced. The eyes of the second Professor Long wander at random. Professor Crest glares at Professor Delatour with a fanatical antagonism in the whites—not the pupils or irises—of his eyes.

  After six minutes of jumping, Professor Delatour is the first to give out. His last two or three leaps were faltering and low. He bows out, and the first Professor Long stops, panting, strands of hair sticking to her cheeks. She looks to Professor Tourbiere, who nods and waves them away from the pole. Professor Myrons doesn’t need to be told to stop playing. She plays the final note, indicating the end of the duel, and then drops the horn from livid red lips and sleepwalks over to the kiosk in the shade of the tree, to buy a cold drink. Professor Tourbiere rises and holds out his hand to Professor Myrons, and there is a ripple of applause she does not seem to notice. The pole is disassembled by the seconds and the preparatory steps of the duel are reversed.

  “Thank you all. The Surfeit is One.”

  Having officially witnessed the duel, it is now Professor Tourbiere’s responsibility to file a report to the Duelling Committee of the IEI, which will make a finding for one or the other combatant after a complete review.

  *

  La Lucha is trying to trap us. Their presentation of the interview with us was obviously a kind of hit piece. And there are others, too; I’m sure of that. I’m not sure of that, but I feel the likelihood so strongly it’s virtually knowing, anyway. We told the La Lucha guys that yarn about Assiyeh and the flying head to put them off, and it’s my feeling we should go on telling stories about her. A physicist, and in particular as a maverick physicist with bizarre ambitions, a daring experimenter—we could say anything about her, and it might as well be true. We could claim to be working in some sort of coordination with her and shift the story over onto her shoulders while we slip out of their snares and labels. And as my hallucination, she has nothing to worry about. Imaginary people can’t be harassed and arrested. She wasn’t there that morning, when the woman lost her baby. She was never there. Or, no more there than anywhere else.

  That night, I go back to the pool by myself for a swim. They don’t close the pool at night; it’s never closed. I drag a shower cap over my bandages. There I am, reflected in the darkened window of the lifeguard’s little office, a lean man in speedos with a head like shattered hailstone. Basta. I get in the water and swim. When I raise my head and my ears empty of water, I hear a voice speaking quietly nearby. But there is no one else here. There should be a lifeguard at least, but no one is here. No one even passes by. By elimination, that makes it my voice. I must have forgotten to take it with me when I got into the water. Just now I hear it again.

  “I can never ...” the voice says.

  Never what?

  *

  This part will concern itself with Professor Aughbui, but he won’t narrate it in the first person. His idea of going to sleep is to throw himself down on the bed and rock himself anxiously to and fro in a frenzy of thinking; he does most of his best thinking while he “goes to sleep,” which means thrashing to and fro, and getting up now and again to jot down a note in his notebook on the desk across the room. Anxiously, hurrying, so he won’t forget. Forgetting periodically flings him from his bed all night. Getting up, putting on his spectacles, putting on his bathrobe, tying the belt, putting on slippers, pausing to wonder if he should take out his earplugs, deciding to leave them in, adjusting the orthotic booth on his head like an ill-seated wig, crossing to the desk, making the note if he still remembers his thought, then reversing the entire procedure and getting back into bed and resuming his rocking until some other idea occurs to him. Putting his notebook on the nightstand would obviously make things considerably easier for him, and putting the notebook beside him in the bed, easier still, but he is helpless before the even more pressingly obvious axiom that, if a room has a desk in it, then that desk is the only place in that room where a notebook has any business to be, and whether the fitness of that locality is of greater or lesser convenience to the owner of the notebook is of no importance.

  There is something important to mention. The preceding morning, before the interview with the reporters from La Lucha happened, but after the success of the secret experiment of the economists—an experiment dubbed X13 for reasons not appreciated by Professor Aughbui—the second Professor Long had encountered his friend Dorothy Bright in the hotel lobby. While socializing with her and the various acquaintances and friends attracted by her in public, it was learned by the second Professor Long that Assiyeh Nemekeseyah had received word of a family emergency the night before last, and immediately set out. This news was tendered to him at her specific insistence, he averred, and this intelligence he did not hesitate to share with the other economists. When the reporters from La Lucha were told the story of Assiyeh and the penanggalan, the economists therefore all knew already that she had left the country, so they cannot be accused of throwing her to the wolves to save themselves. It should also be noted here that, according to the second Professor Long, “Nemekeseyah” is not the genuine family name of this person, or not the only name by which this person is identified. The second Professor Long is to be acknowledged and thanked for providing information about this person, as none of the others have ever so much as seen her.

  It is now the morning of the following day. The beads are separated as usual. The elevator is taken down to the third floor by Professor Aughbui and Smilebot, joined en route by Professor Budshah. The group has adopted a new policy of collecting in the first Professor Long’s room, because notoriety is gaining. The enormous flat television is abnormally on, muted, and she is watching it intently. When she sees what she’s been waiting for, she waves her hand and demutes.

  Professor Budshah enters.

  “Lend.”

  “Spend.”

  “I can’t tell if this show is supposed to be ...” the first Professor Long says.

  A news report, or a parody news report, is beginning. A bizarre crisis at a chicken factory—chickens! what do you know? The chickens have escaped their cages, gathered together in an inaccessible corner and covered their beaks with some unknown biological agent. Whenever they are approached, they aim their beaks at each other, evidently threatening to contaminate themselves, until the factory workers retreat. The chickens are sleeping in shifts within a perimeter. Baffling marks have been found scratched into the filth on the floor. These marks are not baffling to us, or at least, Professor Aughbui is not baffled by them; they are written demands. The chickens are on strike. Blinking in the bright sun, the factory owner removes a small cigar and explains that they will probably have to dump the whole flock and replace them with all new country chickens, but first they will send in some fighting cocks to see if they can break them up or panic them. The chickens onscreen could be doing anything, although the footage all co
mes from the same factory. There are a few close ups. Here’s one now.

  “That chicken does look strange,” Professor Aughbui says.

  None of the economists present can assign any clear meaning to this event, which seems so tantalizingly near in time and place to the conception of animal money that it is difficult, even though the thought process is so obviously superstitious, not to believe they are connected. The program could be a parody, and the writers may have seen and been inspired by their interview. Or was the spirit of this moment in time broadcasting an animal money thought-wave, affecting either chickens or parodists? The following news story, further detailing the turmoil surrounding the disappearance of Tripi, seems entirely serious.

  There is a summary profile of the two major party candidates. Ahead in the polls by a narrow and wavering margin, the National Federation Party is represented by Joan Incienzoa, a large man with a still larger head, wan and aristocratic, who speaks as though he were driving each word down into the microphone. The Achrizoguaylan Unitarian Party, behind in the polls but closing the gap in unpredictable forward bounds, is running Matild Onofreio-Atuan, Professor Emeritus of Chemistry at Achrizoguayla University. She is presented in a brief clip, a wan, aristocratic-looking woman speaking before a crowd gathered in a square in San Toribio, swivelling this way and that while laying out her points with undulating gestures of her left arm, her cultivated voice sounding raucous in the speakers. The only word she utters that is not drowned out by the news reader is “lies.” The image changes to a rally not significantly different from the first, and to a woman identified as Tila Gomanhelfas, important campaign advisor to Professor Onofreio-Atuan.