Animal Money

by Michael Cisco

  “This was my idea, by the way,” he says, turning to look back at us and throwing a thumb over his shoulder. “They would have just sent the letters.”

  He gets into the truck and waves to us once more from the running board.

  “Good luck!” he cries.

  Answer!

  It’s night. The pure thing. Night time. Ominous. Haunted with its own life, life at its best, black, black. No not black like me, not quite, that’s a nice pat on the back but I have to give it back because no one owns that night life as I listen out into it all alive with the hum, whisper, dusk deepening its kiss into night, all night, the lightless light of the stars so far away they are only there to show how much not here they are and all the unlimited ghost tumescent not-here between. Look at all that magic negritude out there, what do you think about it? It could be anything. “Why” stands there written in letters too big or too close to read and going all the way back to the rim of the universe, why here, why me, why is this big question sounding so small? There’s this blue-grey no-color grass down here, growing out of the (only relatively) dark ground, and there’s a crust of cement that might or might not be a sidewalk, that is, it is, but I am going only on what I see.

  Right here, you have my closed hand. Next trick—there. The pointer. Keeping this hand like this, like wood, I bring it up and turn and swing my hand around and down to the end of my uplifted arm, and where I point, a building appears like a honeycomb in the night with a flick of the lights. Mmmmmturn now and point in the other direction and flick on another building. Looks like a skull with those deep shadows under the white eaves and the boney columns in front like the building was jailing itself. Turn in this intoxicatingly fresh and light night air and wave on another building, light them up one by one and draw my finger across space leaving a dotted line of walkway lights you can follow to turn the night on, put your hands right down into the cool lightless flames of it and stroke the clitoris glowing in petals and feathers, answering your touch, the whole night, with one whisper, come out and live, crawl out with the bugs, get rid of those clothes and do night, I conjure. It conjures me.

  *

  Where did animal money come from?

  We wrote it—are writing it.

  Who thought of it? The name.

  We did. All of us.

  Someone mentioned it before anyone else. Which one?

  I’ve forgotten. The idea, you must understand, just happened. These things occur from time to time.

  That isn’t important.

  But I’m explaining—if you imagine walking in the park—

  No “walking in the park.” The origin of animal money.

  I am explaining—you walk in the park and you become aware that people around you are stirring, beginning to stir, you see, and moving away, gather their things.

  Which one of you—

  AND THEN you feel the first drop of rain, and then another, and you realize that others were responding to this objective fact of the rain, that it is something that moves you all. Let me illustrate what I mean with a story:

  Instead of going directly back home from San Toribio, Assiyeh stopped in Los Angeles for a few days to visit some colleagues at Cal Tech, and it was during this visit that she decided to resurrect her parents.

  A spell was the only way forward. A spell is always the only way to do whatever it is that it does. Because this was magic, her scientific knowledge would have to be subordinated. There’s no use trying to harmonize them; you just end up turning one into the other.

  The desert airport was entirely new. Going inside it was like visiting a computer’s mind. Everything uniform, luminous white, with no shadows. Assiyeh’s flight had been scheduled for eight thirty, but it was delayed an hour. Only a few passengers were scattered throughout the terminal, and custodians unhurriedly passing up and down the vast central aisle emptying trash cans or making the rounds of the many bathrooms.

  The night outside the windows was as limpidly black as the interior was white; nothing outside the building was visible apart from a few lights of various colors and with no discernible arrangement. Some were so high up they must have been signal lights on the distant mountain tops. There were no stars.

  The authorities had given her dirty looks, insisting on going through her bags, patting her down. Assiyeh tolerated these indignities with flared nostrils and a pursed mouth. The transit guard glared at her and snapped the rubber gloves menacingly as she put them on.

  The shops are shuttered along the terminal aisle; the whole place has the feeling of a dormitory at night. Faint music from the bar at the opposite end, the televisions yammer.

  It begins with a wave of drowsiness. Normally, Assiyeh gets into bed and goes to sleep at once, then wakes up and gets back out of bed, awake at once. She doesn’t dilly dally in transitional states. Now, however, her head dips, and her life force recedes into her like a collapsing sand dune. The sounds of the terminal, the robot voice warning her to watch her property, the televisions, the faint music, the less distinct sounds, fade. At the same instant as this fading begins she dimly registers a dry, chattering laugh from the empty seat next to her. A lead yoke of dreamy hypnosis keeps her head lowered. Someone she can’t see is sitting in the seat next to her. Now that person has gotten up and is going away. Now that person is gone.

  Lifting her eyes with effort she sees the silent, white terminal; the vindictively black windows, deep and opaque where an inimical night presses against the interior. Without actually looking different, the people all strike her as peculiarly small, as if she were seeing them from a point set well back from her eyes. When she feels the drone billow around her, she knows she is in the spell. It’s like being deaf in front of a choir; it’s the thrum of many voices, drawing breath in staggered order so that the tone never stops but undulates as this voice pauses and that voice comes in, and now that voice pauses and this voice comes in. Her body could be immensely heavy or have no mass; it could be any volume and any density. She knows that she is sitting in one of the terminal chairs by way of memory and imagination, not by any sound physical impression.

  Assiyeh lowers her gaze to her bag in front of her, with a bizarrely elongated exhalation. Her escaping breath sounds like the wind in a cavern deep below. The impulse to move her hand has to travel through intervening space, not down her arm. The impulse has to travel through the whole terminal first, entering through the door, walking all the way to where she is, then she can reach down with her hand, which pulls the weightless mobile of her body after it, open her bag, and pull out what she finds in it. Her hands close on a book that wasn’t there when the guards pawed through her few things; she pulls it out and it floats up in front of her face, resting on her palms. It’s a loose leaf notebook made of transparent, stiff material. The three-hole punched pages are thick, clear slabs, and every inch of the surface is covered in creased writing thick as silk. Assiyeh shifts the book to one hand, cradling it along its broad spine, and draws the tip of her index finger down the first page. Her fingertip burns and leaves a glowing red stripe as it travels. The stripe spreads within the page, losing vividness, until it the whole page is a wan pink; then the glow disappears and the page is transparent again.

  Stand.

  Assiyeh stands. Between her head and her waist, her body is like a collection of weird artifacts on strings, swaying and jangling.

  It takes a moment or two for the next step to arrive. She should stripe the next page a bit more slowly or maybe more firmly, if she wants to follow along clearly. A knotted remnant of her mundane self tells her not to stripe the first page again; that repetition may be a bad idea for reasons of its own, but in any case she shouldn’t squander precious stamina.

  Holding the book out in front of her, Assiyeh begins making a circuit, methodical and slow, around the chairs. Her movement in space is keyed to her movement in skimming the book. The drone is rising to join palpability with audibility in far-off, inhuman singing. A mutter comes over the PA sys
tem; the voice could be either male or female. Following the circuit, reading as she goes, she is writing the incantation into the scene; when she turns she catches sight of herself sitting in place, head dipped forward as if she were half asleep, bizarrely flat and outlined with exaggerated crispness like a life-sized glass slide of herself. That’s what the people in the mundane terminal see. The longer she stares at herself, the more inchoate and uncontrollable her shape feels.

  Stop looking at yourself.

  Assiyeh brings herself up short; it’s as if she’d been walking along casually and then, happening to glance down, noticed a sheer drop directly at her feet. With a jolt of fright, an inward repulsion that could fly her to pieces, she pins her attention on the book again, turns the heavy page with a muffled clack, and draws her finger down its reverse side firmly. The page glows orange, and the color fades more slowly. A lingering peach-ember glow forms a shrinking ellipse in the center of the sheet.

  The drone builds again, and the muttering over the PA system is now fleetingly articulate.

  “... she asked them to de-[garble] the human’s origins ...” it says.

  Assiyeh’s circuits and reading cause inscribed gold circles to line the inner surfaces of the terminal, before stacking them and forming them into spheres that coalesce to form invisible golden lacework commingling geometric figures and verses. The drone buoys up her weird spell form.

  “...that magic Only, that performance larger ...”

  An airplane is landing.

  Assiyeh is certain. Without having to go to the windows, she can see it descend against the nearly full moon, which has emerged through a rent in the clouds. The wing falls past it, warping in a trembling plume of tumultuously disturbed air. The moon swims behind that disruption; its surface seems to boil and its outline loses its shape. The clouds close over it again and there is nothing to see in the air but a few lights descending toward the airfield. The plane wiped the moon from the sky.

  Assiyeh can feel the titan bulk of the airplane swoop past the terminal, following the runway. Its voluminous cape of air dashes over the terminal, buffeting the heavy windows, and making all the outer lights flicker like candles. They go on flickering. The plane hurtles down with a roar that blends with the drone and even with the muttering on the PA, and when the wheels touch down with a burst of smoke and a bark of pain there is a piercing scream that dies away instantly.

  It’s taxiing now, out there.

  The plane veers back toward the terminal like a shark. She sees the lights approaching smoothly, the plane pulls up to the terminal, turning its colossal snake head. The interior of the plane is dark. The jetway lunges, planting its lamprey mouth over the hatch.

  Assiyeh walks over to the gate. The door is locked. She turns the page of the book and skims it with her finger, firmly. The page glows yellow. Assiyeh pulls the door open and stands in it. The jetway is a lightless passage. Assiyeh calls into it, the unwords coming out of her unvoice backwards and sideways and upside down. As she finishes the incantation, the drone swells in a steady, measured surge, then crests and, parting, subsides to its former level after a moment of division. All of a sudden, Assiyeh is exhausted.

  Don’t look.

  She drags herself around with a desperate effort.

  Get away.

  Heavy, ponderous, Assiyeh begins walking away from the open gate. There is motion in the lightless jetway behind her. The passengers are coming off the plane, up the jetway. Death is coming up the jetway behind her. Assiyeh is shocked to discover she has, after an endlessly sustained effort, taken only a single step away from the gate. The droning has died down to a breathless hum, the muttering in the PA system is loud and abrasive but impossible to understand, yakking at her, slapping her. There is an implacable approach behind her up the black jetway. Assiyeh turns the page. There is only one page remaining. Without any strength left she raises a hand as heavy as stone. Her terror is becoming despair. A caustic burn like acid breath is bathing her shoulders, coming up behind her neither hot nor cold. In agonizing slowness she draws her finger down the last page and watches as a deep indigo luminescence spreads through the transparency. Golden light, mixed with pinks, ochres, and reds. Looking up from the book, she sees the setting sun through the windowpane directly in front of her, while all the other windows still show crystal black. She is standing on the white tile of the main terminal corridor, just a step past the carpeted border of the gate area. All the ponderous weightiness evaporates and she is weightless. In one moment she is aware of someone she can’t see standing next to her, a dry chattering laugh, and behind her, without turning to look, she knows there are two figures standing as always side by side, a single step into the terminal out from the gate.

  That’s it. That’s the spell, she thinks, more wanting to cause it to be true than trusting it to be true. She looks down at her empty hands, which rest in her lap—her lap, because she is sitting in the terminal, at an empty gate. Her flight will probably begin boarding soon, the bag at her feet is open.

  *

  Now we are all together again in the first Professor Long’s hotel room. It is not a little shocking to think that we have not published anything on animal money, and already—it seems impossible—based on mere rumor, we are all summarily dismissed from our positions without explanation and yet, without doubt, on the ground of the economic heterodoxy of our theory of animal money. The first Professor Long has been on the telephone for hours, demanding further details of this outrage not only from her own, but from all our colleges. It is plain that we, for our part, have ground of our own on which to stand if we wish to contest these decisions, but taking up the cudgels to do battle with five reputable universities is a daunting prospect and our morale has fallen accordingly. Professor Crest alone seems fully prepared to invoke his rights. The first Professor Long believes reinstatement is possible, but will entail a great deal of effort.

  “First, you ask for an official statement detailing the reasons for dismissal, then you challenge that with the help of an attorney, then, failing this, you appeal the decision, and there are usually multiple appeals. After that, a union member will file a grievance, and non-union members will have to resort to a lawsuit. In my case it is even more complicated.”

  While it is somewhat alarming, Professor Crest’s silent, perfectly contained indignation is also a support to the rest of us, I’m sure. He is in his element. The second Professor Long, on the other hand, received the news with surprising sang-froid; there is a diaphanous fatalism about him at times, by which I mean he is a pessimist without rancor and only a small portion of bitterness, as far as I can tell, subject generally to ataraxia. Professor Aughbui’s mood is impossible to gauge. To speak candidly, I have the terrible feeling I have swivelled in the canoe to discover that it is adrift, far out already, receding into impenetrable mists in a dead calm. Worse than that, there are dim figures on the pier, within call, but mightn’t it be they who stealthily slipped off my lines, and perhaps gave the boat a shove?

  This is the heart of the matter, giving pause even to Professor Crest, for all his incandescent officiousness. We five have all been simultaneously dismissed from five different universities in five different countries, and even were we able to recover our positions through legal wrangling or personal appeals, how could we possibly trust those universities again, and how the world? We can only afford to assume that this coordination of universities was no coincidence, but only a part, albeit the greater part, of a still more ominous message addressed to the five of us. Something far larger than department politics has marked us out for removal; an international organization which can influence universities and which is also plainly spying on us. For, when we are all given the boot at once, with no other intelligible cause apart from the heterodoxy of an unpublished, and as yet only potentially controversial, group project, isn’t it reasonable—at least—to assume we are being watched already? Professor Crest has already voiced aloud a thought that must have occurr
ed to us all—a mishap, a plane crash, an accident, a rapidly developing illness ...

  “It comes down to this,” he says dramatically. “Can we trust the Institute?”

  This dire possibility gives us pause, and we each retreat to our inner sanctuaries to consider it, sitting together apart and buried in gloom that a knock on the door is barely sufficient to disrupt.

  We are all staring at the door, dreading more bad news.

  “I’ll answer,” I say hoarsely, and Professor Crest rises with me. He seems intent on meeting whatever fresh catastrophe this may be on his feet.

  “Who is it?” I ask.

  “I’m looking for Professors Aughbui, Budshah, Crest, Long, and Long.”

  The voice is familiar.

  “What for?”

  “I have a message for them.”

  With a glance back at the group, I reach for the knob.

  Opening the door, I see before me the man, Oscar, who fired us, mockingly dressed as a fireman. He is wearing what I presume is his ordinary street costume now, and carrying a brown paper bag with cord handles. I study his face. He avoids my gaze, and is suppressing a grin.

  “May I come in?” he asks.

  “Tell me your news,” I say. “I will pass it on to the others.”

  “I’d rather speak to you all, since you’re together,” he says.

  “Shut the door on him,” Professor Crest says behind me.

  I turn to him. He is standing halfway between me and the others.

  The man reaches into the bag and pulls out another fan of sealed envelopes. Then, grinning wryly, he upends the bag, demonstrating for us that it is now empty and our suspicions are absurd, then tosses it aside.

  I bid him come in, with a gesture. Professor Crest remains where he is, rigid, erect, braced for combat, glaring at Oscar, who smilingly edges past him, raising his hands with a bemused expression, as if he were trying to placate a bellicose little dog. Then he turns to face us all, and, for a moment, his confidence wavers. He bites his lower lip.