Animal Money

by Michael Cisco

  My response to this theory is as follows: if each participant in an animal money exchange is doubled by the exchange, then that could explain the escape of the values to an extent, but in the longer view this explanation only begs the more urgent question, which is: what exactly is the status of the missing value? This status is the most important aspect of the entire model, in my opinion, as the state the missing value is the manner or condition by which it will reappear in circulation. If the value is not destroyed, then it must return. The second Professor Long asserts the return, but does not account for the mechanism of that return. Or, if he does, he accounts for it in unacceptable, occult terms.

  I am convinced that inimical actors are aware of the project and are taking it at least as seriously as we are. My opinion, it gratifies me to say, albeit it is a bitter gratification, is taking on strength among the others as well. A foreboding and a sense of being under surveillance is clasping us all. Completion and publication are consequently all that much more urgent.

  *

  “Sevrules si Sevralas, l’capuldo illustruila ala vestiga d’obfir surcingului de chaiseadul. Prefivame cinqtureqte voldrez surcingului de chaiseadul si subsithoz a voldrez chaisea. Gradathe.”

  Incessant to-ing and fro-ing around the toilet. A flush, the door opens, someone else squeezes by before the former user has even fully emerged yet, door shut, a flush almost right away, repeat, and mirror, since it happens on the other side of the aisle as well. People clambering around and over each other in the doorways of the two toilets, the dull scent of human waste, brown liquid trickling down the aisles. The air conditioning is so aggressive that people are erecting makeshift tents around their seats, breath steaming, using their blankets, their luggage. They rip open plastic bags and join them together somehow to form patchwork tarps. There’s a peculiarly glamorous woman who keeps coming back here from the front of the plane, evidently to chat with a friend who has been sound asleep since we left Achrizoguayla. She hasn’t been asleep since we left Achrizoguayla; she fell asleep about an hour after takeoff. The man next to me is out cold, too, and steam plumes from his slack mouth. The man next to him is awake and plainly married to the woman across the aisle from him. They must be talking, but I only ever catch the moments in between, or maybe they’re telepathic. He holds his lips as if he’d taken a vow of silence. Or no, he holds his lips as if he thought talking was vulgar.

  Outside there is the cold blue through white, my vision telescopes at random across the incandescent cottons, crumbling mist panels, clouds that are highly defined in one part and smears in another. Just there, two mushroom clouds with foggy sides, articulate crowns, shedding flat, dissolving scarfations and darker pennants.

  The fleshless ass of the man in the aisle rummaging in an overhead bin. The banded slits of his two back pockets slope downwards like drooping eyes in a grey face. His children are elephants. The two women behind me are really loud, but I don’t register it. I must register it, because, when they notice I am not annoyed enough, they lean over the back of my seat to jabber directly into my ears. I sit unperturbed. I am perturbed, but I appear unperturbed. I don’t need to pick at a wrapper for twenty minutes when I want to eat something. At last reason pours out its balm reason reason reason.

  “While they cause these effects, they can’t possibly intend the effects they cause because they can’t know how these things will affect you,” reason explains. “They most likely don’t think of the effects their actions have. You do not want to conform; you are frustrated because you are continually giving way to others, and at times you do not adequately distinguish between conforming and giving way to the needs of others.”

  “The needs of others”—see what I mean chum? Reason; that little extra effort, a la Ronald Crest, putting it like that instead of clumsy “others’s’ needs.” Others’s’. Uneuphonious.

  “No one seems to give way to you, unfair, thus anger. Since they cannot grasp what it means to you, they don’t know what they are asking and don’t have enough goodwill to make the effort to understand. Good will they have, but not enough. From their point of view, this is a banal problem.”

  Great. Keep it coming.

  “The purpose of these reflections—”

  Oh yeah.

  “—is not to persuade you to be more compliant; the purpose of these reflections is to stop you from exaggerating the problems in your own mind and so to reduce your sense of being attacked.”

  The engine noise is changing. We are shedding our altitude now, fast, coming down toward the earth again. The sun hisses at me.

  Thanks, Reason. Come by any time. Stay as long as you can take it. Take me, I mean.

  The image now: gliding along from left to right, black lightless ridges like heaps of crumbling lava, parallel to me, layered against the distance, lit with gold light from the valley floors below, so the hills are carbonized logs laced with gold flame threads.

  *

  It’s been almost four days and no word from the second Professor Long. He isn’t answering email; he doesn’t pick up the phone. After nearly ninety-six hours, the first Professor Long decides that a half-unconsciously imposed waiting period has expired and calls the second Professor Long’s college.

  A raucous voice erupts out of the third ring “—Yeah?”

  Loud music and shouting voices, laughter, joyous cries. The first Professor Long starts and holds the phone away from her ear.

  “They must be having a faculty party,” she thinks.

  “What you want?” the voice barks.

  “Lend. I am trying to reach Professor Long.”

  “Hah?”

  “I am trying to reach Professor Long!”

  “Which one?”

  “The second one—Vincent—Vincent Long,” she says.

  She can hear the hollow clunk as the phone is set down, probably on the desk, and a voice calling over and through the racket—it sounds like a bar on a Saturday night. With a rattle the phone is picked up again.

  “Not in, lady.”

  “This is the department of social studies?”

  “Yes this is the department of social studies,” the voice sneers at her.

  “Give me the extension for Professor Long, please.”

  “He hasn’t got any.”

  “No extension?”

  “No extension.”

  “Then how is anyone supposed to reach him?”

  “Not by phone!” the voice says, brisk and irresponsible.

  “I have been emailing him for some time—”

  “Look—”

  “Nevermind,” the first Professor Long interrupts him, having detected the impulse to hang up on the far end. “I want ...”

  “Well? What do you want?”

  “I want to leave a message for him.”

  No response. Nothing but the noise. The first Professor Long wonders if she somehow managed to offend the metal creature she imagines on the other end.

  “... I’ll bet you do,” the other voice says then, pensively.

  That’s a bad answer. That answer means conspiring. Is this telephone call being recorded? Overheard? It must be—it’s an American university.

  “Tell him to call Professor Long ...” she says. “Min-Yin. Emm eye enn hyphen why eye enn. At the University number ... Right away.”

  She listens to the silence oddly huddled in the midst of the hilarity on the other end of the line.

  “Should I repeat that?” she asks the noise. “Tell him that I need to speak with him as soon as possible, any time, day or night.”

  “He’s dead, my dear,” the voice says. “He will never speak with you again.”

  Everything inside the first Professor Long rotates to a halt.

  “Should I repeat that!?” the voice screeches, so loud that the phone trembles in her hand.

  “How?” the first Professor Long asks, her voice flat.

  “How how?” the voice says, vicious and silly.

  “How did he die? And w
hen?” she asks, flat.

  “Look it up,” the voice says nastily, sounding more and more like a teasing child. “Look it up in a book.” It spits the word at her with an audible sneer.

  “How did Professor Long die, and when?”

  “I will tell you when and why Professor Bozo died beep boop,” the voice says in a robotic monotone. “I’m Professor Ching-Chong Long and my precision in speech is fucking onerous.”

  “Are you going to answer me, or do I have to come to your department personally?” the first Professor Long says.

  “Just try it,” the voice says blandly.

  “Very well, I—”

  The voice cuts him off.

  “Suicide,” it hisses. “Soo—iiih—siiide.”

  The first Professor Long’s irritation gives way to stark fear, like a cold edge stroking the back of her neck.

  “How?”

  “Blew out his brains,” the voice drawls, seeming to relish the words.

  “When?”

  Her mind races but even as ice crashes down her back her voice stays even. Do not allow the mockery deflect you: get what you need.

  “Last Saturday,” the voice says. Starting to get bored, maybe losing interest.

  The date is consistent with the last communication from the second Professor Long.

  “When is the funeral?” the first Professor Long asks.

  “The what?” the voice asks, sounding disgusted.

  “The funeral,” the first Professor Long says.

  The party noises surge. It sounds as though everyone were greeting a popular guest, cheering.

  “You want to leave a message for Professor Long? Get a ouija board asshole.”

  Click. The first Professor Long immediately redials the number and gets a busy signal, tries again and the phone rings and rings, tries again and a woman answers, identifying the number as that of the social studies department and claiming to have no idea what has become of Professor Long, who hasn’t been on campus all week and yes of course she will leave a message and actually she will pass word on to Professor Clark, who knows Professor Long personally, and the background is silent.

  *

  The late Professor Long was found holding a business card in his left hand. On it was printed the word: JOKE. The card had been his. After the third or fourth time one of his witticisms went horribly wrong, he made this card and would lift it into plain view when making a joke, to avoid misunderstandings.

  His right hand was empty now. The gun had apparently been retained in his grip for a while, but by the time he was discovered, it had fallen to the floor, and lay next to the wheels of the desk chair he was slumped in.

  Malthus’ Essay on the Principle of Population stopped the red bullet. Perhaps some of the late Professor Long’s brain, clinging to it, had gotten lodged there as well; a sort of micro-hell for it.

  There were powder burns around the wound. His bandages had been torn off and flung into a corner.

  Professor Clark takes charge of arranging the late Professor Long’s affairs. Apparently, there was something between them not consistent with the Third Oath. She finds a scribbled will in a heap of papers, dated a few years ago and indicating that he wished to be cremated. Professor Clark finds the Animal Money files on the late Professor Long’s computer in a folder called LAMINA.

  “I name it backwards so the devil can’t find it,” the late Professor Long had said to her once, holding up his JOKE card. Almost all his files had reversed names. IBALLYS. STUODNAH.

  Professor Clark emails the contents of the folder to the group, along with several other documents the late Professor Long was working on recently.

  “He always had this tendency or need to disappear, to withdraw, to escape,” she says. “It was difficult, impossible to have a relationship, an affair with him. He was never there. He was never completely there. There always was a part of him missing.”

  The remaining Professor Long is looking at Professor Clark’s faculty photograph on the department website. She shudders as, scrolling down, she sees the late Professor Long’s face, one of the few candid photos in the column, and caught in the act of turning away from the camera. Of course, he might just as probably be turning toward the camera, but she can’t help but see him turning to go, in silence.

  “He didn’t seem unhappy,” Professor Clark is saying. “Depressed. He was always somewhat melancholy, a little morose. He got chapfallen easily. He was so sensitive, labile, vulnerable.”

  Professor Clark abruptly stops.

  “He was remote,” the remaining Professor Long says finally. “I thought nothing affected him ...”

  “Oh no, no,” Professor Clark says sorrowfully. “No, everything affected him. He just couldn’t reach back, or he wouldn’t.”

  The remaining Professor Long refuses to leave her apartment in the faculty housing facility. Professor Aughbui plunges into research, spending as much time as possible in the university libraries and churning out page after page of documentation and charts, determined to finish his section of the book. Professor Crest pursues one fruitless line of investigation after another, trying to determine with whom she had been speaking during that obnoxious phone call, grilling Professor Clark and the late Professor Long’s various acquaintances, even his doctor—perhaps he had killed himself to escape the debilitating effects of a fatal, incurable disease. Only Professor Budshah carries on more or less as normal.

  “He always struck me as having an air of the sacrificial lamb about him,” he thinks, moments after he is first told the news. Saddened, but not surprised, he somberly answers Professor Aughbui’s incessant stream of emails, all heavily laden with data and charts and containing no personal touch of any kind. Professor Budshah’s bitter unflappability has a calming effect on the other survivors. He reports grimly to his editor that the book is coming along steadily, that the manuscript will be completed more or less on time, that the late Professor Long’s contributions were already almost fully incorporated into the project—although his writing was as pithy as a sequence of aphorisms.

  “The book is to be dedicated to Professor Vincent Long, indispensable colleague and treasured friend.”

  Glancing away from his computer screen a moment, out of the corner of his left eye he sees it again, the snowy point of light out there in space, peering through his window. His inner start of alarm is quelled before it can ruffle his surface. Setting his teeth, he types a few more lines, then gets up to go to the bathroom, which has no windows. He stands at the center of the bathroom floor with folded arms, head lowered on his breast, thinking it over.

  Whether or not the experiment is producing or is in some other way related to events currently shaking the foundations of capitalism is still impossible to say. The global economy is destroying the world; steal it all and then charge your victims for the service, abandon humanity and save the financial institutions. However, if some well-heeled capitalists, the lords of the Replicate, had somehow found out about the experiment, and understood it, might they have sent their killers to stop us doing anything like that again? Could we do it again now, without the late Professor Long?

  Of course, we can repeat it, Professor Budshah tells himself. The late Professor Long was difficult to understand, and frankly unclear at times—even radically so—but his contribution was and remains concrete enough. If he did die as a consequence of his involvement with experiment X13, then let it not be for nothing. Let’s hope that what we see unfolding is in some measure a consequence of what we created in the biology lab that night.

  Unaware of his death, Assiyeh interprets the late Professor Long’s silence for loss of interest.

  She walks on, a few dozen paces away from the spot where this realization fell on her, crossing the dark, slowing once she has found cover among the perfectly black dimensional flakes that hang here like huge wind chimes. She is not aware of being watched or even seen, but she takes no chances. Now she turns to the dark pond, shimmering with motes of blacknes
s through the thick flakes, the gently flexing tracheae and the vast tattered tarps of deeper darkness.

  She waves her right hand.

  “Hel-lo,” she calls softly.

  She drops her right hand and waves her left hand.

  “Bye Bye.”

  ...

  “Hel-lo ...”

  “Bye Bye ...”

  *

  The late Professor Long is dead. Dust off “he was always” and “there seemed to be something [blank] about him.” Talk about it. Don’t talk about it. Talk without saying. Dead is no word. The late Professor Long now designates a fixed image with a closed history ending in a period: the hole in his head. Draw an analogy between bullet holes and punctuation marks. If no one examines it too closely—and who wants to?—the neatness of the analogy can be passed off as finalness, and everyone can bear off that neat bit of mental legerdemain like a pretended answer.

  “He always was a little elusive. He didn’t hang around. He retired a lot. You would see him just sort of go by in a flash. And even when he was there, there was still a part of him that wasn’t. I mean you could tell he was kind of listening into his interior all the time.”

  “Like he was under remote control.”

  “Just so, remote control from another dimension. There was something not-of-this-Earth around him.”

  “He was making forays, short forays into this one.”

  “As if he could only remain with us for short times.”

  “Yes! Before the tether drew him back.”

  It’s like a game; who can hit on the best impression of the late Professor Long?

  “So,” Professor Budshah says, separating his palms and bringing them back together again with a soft clap, “Perhaps all this shuttling back and forth was getting to him.”

  It’s clear that he finds the whole topic distastefully intrusive.

  “He was impulsive,” Professor Aughbui says. “That was his trouble.”