Animal Money

by Michael Cisco

  The first Professor Long explains to the nurse that we economists, being celibate, are prone to attacks of sexual dementia from time to time, that, when he is compos mentis, Professor Aughbui is a model of propriety, even to a fault, and that compassion, or pity failing that, is what he deserves. In her place, I would have added that, whatever his deserts, he is contractually entitled to the discretion of the nurse in any event.

  The nurse is called away. Another patient, somewhere in this vast, modernistic, and impressively well-run hospital urgently needs her, and she rushes to the aid of that person with beautiful elan. A few minutes later her replacement has already arrived.

  “The bank is there to save and lend.”

  “Workers work and customers spend.”

  How are you feeling today?

  Are you having any dizziness?

  Nausea?

  Headache, any pain in the head?

  Any strange dreams?

  Have you heard voices?

  What did they tell you?

  They enveloped him in the cryptic fame of the Teeming.

  Professor Aughbui lies in his bed, with his face half hidden by his bandages, his head rolling slightly from side to side, and sometimes lifting his shoulder, as if he wanted to turn or to rock himself. He begins to pant through his mouth, and to growl.

  —She is going into her laboratory now. Assiyeh’s experiment has no place in any extant or historical canon of physics. By all accounts, it is a hopeless waste of time. The equipment she has laboriously collected, constructed, assembled, purchased, installed here, entirely by herself, is really a supercollider, with which she orchestrates crashes of her desire and an intransigent possibility.

  The laboratory is a spacious, low-ceilinged room at the the University of Achrizoguayla. The experiment requires unbelievably high voltages. Many of the machines are old; Assiyeh has repaired or modified them, but they are prone to sudden failures. She impatiently seizes up a pen and clipboard to make note of something, slams them down as she turns to attend to something else and the pen slips to the floor, at the sound she pivots, snatches up the pen, and bashes it down on the clipboard. She holds her hand over it a moment, as a warning, before turning away.

  The focal point of the experiment is a large black cube of inert material. Bolted to the top of it is a powerful lamp that projects a beam of light about two inches in diameter into a receiver. Machines the size of refrigerators ring the cube, connected by pipes to a wedge-shaped arch over the cube. Assiyeh controls the experiment from a computer on a workbench that braces against the ceiling as well as the floor.

  At absolute zero, all particles constituting an object stop moving altogether. However, an object at absolute zero continues to move normally relative to all other objects, irrespective of its internal immobility. A block of ice at absolute zero has no internal motion, but continues to move through space with the rotation and revolution of the earth, the galactic rotation, the galactic motion, and who knows what yet greater motion. What Assiyeh proposes to do is to reduce to absolute zero not the inner motion, or temperature, of an object, but rather its relative or outward motion. The particles constituting that object would continue to move relative to each other—and she is not oblivious to the challenges involved in determining where an object begins and ends—but the object qua object, relative to all other objects in the universe, would cease to move. This state she calls “absolute rest.”

  Assiyeh switches on the lamp, then lowers the arch above the light beam. She knows the ordinal number of this experiment. Assiyeh has conducted this experiment nearly a hundred times, trying again and again for as long as she can maintain the high voltage. Then the equipment breaks down, and her failure is compounded by a protracted hiatus as she tries to get new parts or to raise money for yet another, even more powerful generator. She meets every setback with incandescent insouciance. She zooms up and down University hallways, this way and that, silent, intent, as though she were on her way to confront someone, and she never insults anyone.

  She watches from her chair. Because the arc is made from fucking scavenged components it has to work its way up to full voltage gradually, never far from overheating. Assiyeh doesn’t care about the heat, the danger, publishing, sharing knowledge, or about developing applications; what she wants is to force nature to change. Light has already been slowed and even arrested in other experiments, but Assiyeh isn’t interested in making arrests; arrested light is only relatively immobile—that is not absolute rest!

  She watches the beam, which seems to lie there across the block. Her attention never wavers. She watches the beam.

  The beam buckles without a sound. Suddenly. The beam is curving upward near the middle.

  Assiyeh springs to her feet, leaning forward across the table and grabs the far edge.

  The angle in the beam lifts heavily, following the rising arch as if it were a crane lifting a great soft pipe. The very fixity of her stare makes the image swim in Assiyeh’s eyes, but she does not take them from the beam. She bares her teeth and breathes around them; her body trembles and fiercely stiffens. Immeasurable compression crushes space locked and twisting around the beam. Assiyeh barely registers in her suddenly limitless mind the lucid observation, made without preliminary inductions or effort, that the arc is having only a partial effect on the beam, so only some of the light, mainly toward the beam’s “underside,” is slowing, while the other parts of the beam are moving at or near their usual speed, and it is this irregularity that causes the beam to bend, to eddy around the slower portion.

  Now the bend is turning into a elbow, rising more than a foot above the former level. Assiyeh gasps out a breath she had been unaware she was holding and her teeth chatter as she sucks wind back through them and the bend twists around itself with that same impression of incalculable mass being molded by implacable, silent force. The light is forming an inverted noose, twisting around itself without touching itself. The alarm is going off—how long?

  “Shut off the experiment!” the alarm cries. “The equipment is overheating!”

  With a walloping clap, one of the machines, probably a generator, breaks, sighing, spinning down.

  The beam winks flat. Assiyeh sinks backward onto the floor, breathing through her mouth, numbly registering the series of clunks as the generators shut down one by one, blinking, seeing only afterimages of an elbow of light. Was it a success?

  *

  As I have pressing tasks to attend to back at the hotel, I take leave of the others and hail a taxi.

  We pull out into one of San Toribio’s many spacious, palm-bordered boulevards, and the moon is full. The sky always looks cool, doesn’t it? And yet here we are, at the level of the ground, sweltering even though the sun set over an hour ago and all of its light has now utterly vanished. As someone perceived by others to be Indian, I am supposed to be immune to heat’s ill effects. If I utter a word of complaint, I at once stigmatize myself as a feeble specimen, a poor sample of type. But Kashmir is no steaming jungle. Its winter is under no illusion—it comes. The mountains are tightly jacketed in snow long after winter is over. What’s more, this heat has been so unseasonably fierce that even the San Toribians are complaining. The weatherwoman on the national news broadcast waves a spangled arm over the map: 40C—MEPHITIOSO. To refuse to complain would be to lose one of the chief topics of casual conversation, so important in the establishment of superficially cordial relations with my hosts.

  Professor Crest is convinced we are inside the pentacle of the dark economists. He has managed the paperwork associated with Professor Aughbui’s hospitalization magnificently. This is no surprise. Professor Crest is saturated with bureaucracy as a kind of erotics, a displacement of masochistic hedonicity. It was, however, the first Professor Long who convinced the hospital to open one of their reserve beds for Professor Aughbui.

  Am I wrong to be uncomfortable, when my head is immobilized, my chin fixed in the air? Time out of mind I have been noted for my habit
of holding down my head, and now I am paying for it. It reminds me of those demonic trusses the Prussians invented to straighten the spines of their hapless children. A persistent impression that the moon is off to my right, and not too far above the horizon, is repeatedly belied when I glance to my left and see it there, high and enormous. Being unable to turn my head, I am plagued by phantoms in my peripheral vision. What I see can only be a small, second moon opposite the real one. Craning my head back and twisting my waist, I can manage to get a glimpse of something there in the sky, when the car’s canopy is not blocking my view. What I think I see is, I estimate, an object a quarter of the size of the moon, a soft globe, palely glowing, a bit like a snowball. What is that? It is plainly not some fault in my eye, a bit of plaster clinging to my eyelash, but it doesn’t seem to be a celestial object, a star or planet, nor an aircraft. Perhaps a meteor? It has none of the glare of a brilliantly radiant thing; it glows. An extraterrestrial spacecraft? The Virgin?

  The cab driver turns a corner and we travel down a side street that is as narrow as the boulevards are wide. The buildings we pass are gaunt, three storey stucco houses adorned with palm trees and ferns, and separated by narrow gulfs. Through these intramural crevasses the snowball glows at me, from exactly the same position relative to myself. Our turn was a ninety-degree turn, though, and this street is as crooked as a die, so the light should be behind us. Another turn takes us onto a wide dirt roadway, which connects this neighborhood of narrow streets to a more developed area where the hotel is located; the little globe remains just beyond the peripheral reach of my right eye, as before. Whenever I can manage to train my gaze on it for more than an instant, I see it has the hazy indistinctness of something very far away, and that it is not stable. I imagine that a disturbance produced by a fault in my eye or in my optic nerve—or in both at once—would, like a scrape in the cornea or the scintillations brought on by a migraine, remain steadily in the same region of my field of vision. Stupidly I think of drones, which are not so uncommon, not so expensive, and not difficult to operate.

  After paying the driver, I escape (I hope), inside the hotel and hasten to the apparent safety of my room. I hesitate before approaching the window, and I leave the lights off. My room overlooks a spacious atrium, grim and bare, and, while I cannot find the right direction, the hotel’s other wings appear to shield me from any aerial surveillance. I don’t believe there are any suspicious lights in the rectangle of sky above, but it is difficult to be sure, as I cannot raise my head to look. I draw the blind. A curious light in the sky is only suggestive; I was too disgracefully nervous to think to ask the driver if he saw it as well. If I hallucinate, that is neither here nor there. There are worse things, I suppose, than hallucinations. If I am not, however, seeing things, then this mysterious light could nevertheless be any one of a number of things. If I am, however, actually being watched by someone or something in the sky, and if my colleagues are being watched as well, then for the moment the best course of action is to go on as usual, giving no sign of having noticed anything out of the ordinary.

  As we stood by Professor Aughbui’s bedside, it had occurred to the first Professor Long to examine his camera, which lay jumbled in with his other effects on the nightstand, for clues as to what had happened to him. She flipped through the most recent photographs, and Professor Crest crowded in right next to her, plainly miffed at not having thought to try this himself.

  When the first Professor Long showed me the picture Professor Aughbui had taken of the street sign, I admit I made an incoherent noise and drew the phone nearer to me. The man there, crossing behind the sign and half obscured by some shadow, was familiar; I knew I had seen him before somewhere, and not too long ago. The photo of the schoolchildren establishes Professor Aughbui’s location and what he was doing at the time of his attack. The last picture, though, was a picture of Professor Aughbui himself, lying on his back in the street, one hand draped limply over his chest. There is a shadow across a patch of light beside him on the cobblestones, a lean transverse shadow, like that of a forearm. The time signature on the image is 2:22—ominous, somehow—and this means the last photo was taken fourteen minutes after the preceding one (that is, of the schoolchildren). Perhaps the last photo was taken by the people who called the ambulance, or by the ambulance attendants themselves, as evidence for some legal purpose. But would they have used the patient’s own camera, instead of one of their own? This photograph would not be adequate evidence, it seems to me, since it does not show the disposition of Professor Aughbui’s entire body, the legs not being shown, and the angle, too is almost perverse. An unsettling, inchoate idea breathes in that photo. It struck me as the kind of picture someone might take if they wanted a trophy, to prove they had assaulted someone. Did some person want to gloat over the mere misfortune of Professor Aughbui? Did someone—chimerical thought—induce his fit by some method?

  I have never cared much for television, but I turn it on now and watch avidly looking for some clue, as if I had reason to expect one; here is a news item, or a skillful counterfeit, about horses refusing to run at one of the famous San Toribio racetracks. The starting gate shrills and crashes open, but the horses, far from exploding from their berths, remain standing with dignity just as they are. The jockeys wag their legs, batting the rumps of their mounts with their crops, but the horses do not so much as blink. They swing long heads adorned with colorful masks that expose only the eyes and mouth, like balaclavas, and trade glances as if lending each other moral support to withstand the ever more insistent urgings of their riders. The camera sweeps over stands half filled with people waving their arms, vying to get themselves through the lens; this could be any crowd, any set of stands. The jockeys, we are told, struggled to produce their horses—the reporter called it “producing”—for well over an hour before giving up. Now we visit the stables and various persons are interviewed. I watch as, behind the back of a woman with a squinting look of perplexity on her face, one horse drapes something, a blue rag or bit of fabric, over the side of its stall; the horse in the adjoining stall takes the rag away in its teeth and, a moment later, delicately lays a cube of sugar, held in its lips, on the top of the barrier. The first horse takes the sugar and eats it. Are the horses on strike? Or did they simply balk at the heat? Did that horse just buy a sugar cube from his neighbor, using blue cloth horse money?

  What does this mean? Is it a consequence of our experiment? Already?

  Perhaps our idea of animal money, which has been profiled in two national papers, is now a meme. Memes, like money, are designed to circulate; they are symbols without content that exist only to be recognized, and they seem to parallel capital in the sense that their circulation is also the mechanism by which they are created. Every time a meme changes hands, so to speak, there is at least a chance that a modified version or something entirely new, will be created. The creation of a meme may or may not be undertaken deliberately, but what fails to circulate will not be a meme. So the created meme is only new in a certain sense; actually it is, in substance, a moment in a single gesture. Some memes are also monetized. What does it mean, this parallel with capital—if it is one? Is it only an artifact of my own point of view, or is there some cause for this association beyond my own essentially professional need to discover such associations? I turn off the television and roll a cigarette of hashish and tobacco by window light, set fire to it, and blow the smoke out through the narrow aperture, so as not to impart its aroma to the room and so give the maids something to snicker about. I savor my smoking and the secrecy.

  Down below, in the courtyard, two men are walking rather purposefully for this time of night; the two La Lucha reporters. I hope they do not notice my ember.

  No—not the La Lucha reporters, though very like them. They aren’t dressed in any particular way, but they have an ineffable air of police authority.

  *

  Asleep in his room, Professor Crest dreams.

  “Oh books books ... am I seeking
some false thing?”

  The bookcase standing against the wall suddenly seems like a person, looking back at him.

  Out the window there are Mediterranean hills; a familiar place, although really not, not at all familiar. There is an old castle being built there, jutting out into space from the edge of a precipice. The castle is being built old, not new.

  I visit. The proprietor looks like an El Greco Christopher Lee with a cultivated Spanish accent. The second Professor Long is over there in the garden, walking with Assiyeh Nemekeseyah, although that is not entirely her real name; I see them together coming out from beneath the dusty shade of a cypress row to stop and kiss. The proprietor has secretly constructed a free-standing hallway next to the looming main building, a narrow lane lined with cobblestones like loaves of bread crooking between them. The hall looks like a stable. I go around to the open end. The door shows a black passageway, telescoping with lintels at intervals and with wafting cobwebs. The real secret is that this hallway is a time machine; walking down that hall into the darkness will conduct you into the past. There is a toy lying by the door. It is a telescoping hall you can stretch and compress like an accordion, and inside there are turnstile gates each labelled with the name of a different language. All this is too sophomoric for one of the other guests. I do not know anybody here and remain silent.

  Apparently one is supposed to retrieve at least two sodden, dimpled, doughy white corpses from glass coffins full of preservative chemicals in order to revive them by carrying them back into the past, down the hall.