Animal Money

by Michael Cisco

  “If it were the act of a moment,” Professor Crest says, “then that would explain the absence of a note.”

  “You said it seemed he was under ...” the remaining Professor Long says. “Remember his outburst in ...?”

  “That was just nerves or something.”

  “In one voice he said, ‘go on our instrument,’ then he said ‘I’m not your instrument’ in his ordinary voice,” the remaining Professor Long says.

  “It is possible to induce suicide,” Professor Crest says.

  The professors absorb this idea without emotion. Each adopts their own characteristic thoughtful face and thoughtful posture, fruitlessly trying to connect themselves in some directly perceptible way to assassination in an attempt to achieve real fright.

  “I still think he chose that other world,” Professor Crest says after a pause. “I would bet he wanted to get there, and stay. But for our own safety we do have to act on the assumption that he was eliminated.”

  There’s no point in discussing the obvious. And, as the remaining Professor Long reflects, everyone is already on a hit list now.

  The electoral committee has announced the election results. Neither party has been able to generate the constitutionally-mandated minimum number of votes, necessitating a run-off election next month. The gathering forces of violence and disruption, ominous in ratio with their lack of anything to do, suddenly fall neatly back into the familiar arrangement of electioneering. Tensions do not slacken, but affirm for the time being that they will continue to wind up the springs of the legal machinery, and the effect is much like relief. Neither party wastes a second, immediately resuming the speechifying and advertising, each accusing the other of attempting to steal the election.

  Professor Budshah pushes away from the desk and rubs the back of his neck, then looks around at the spacious darkness of the university library. It is after hours. The library is closed, but he has a key. Professor Budshah lives here, bathing in the gymnasium, sleeping at random in unoccupied dorm rooms. Having virtually no possessions to speak of, he can easily shift himself from place to place. He keeps some of his few belongings in a free tote bag he received at the sixteenth annual international economics conference for being able to identify the Flying Lizards’ cover of “Money” after hearing only the first second of it. The rest he stores in a locker. The locker contains a few dried flowers, a stack of photographs, three or four stones, a jacket, a necktie, and so on. He banks a fraction of his salary for his own use and sends the major part of it back home to his aged mother and two sisters, one of whom is a widow. Living this way is both more and less real than what seems to be the norm for other faculty. On the one hand, he is dizzyingly free from debts, mortgages, car payments and so on. When he hears his colleagues grumbling over their financial woes, he feels like the swain marvelling at contrivance. On the other hand, there is no privateness cushioning him in the world, so he is right up against the homeless darkness and chance. Thinking about the late Professor Long, Professor Budshah imagines him somehow still existing “out there” in absolute darkness and absolute chance, having achieved absolute homelessness.

  *

  You aren’t in a hurry, are you?

  Do I seem like someone in a hurry?

  If I must go into detail like this, you understand, it’s something that will clarify itself later on.

  Have I asked you for any excuses?

  I’m not making excuses, I’m simply—

  You’re telling us about animal money, specifically who gave you the idea.

  There was no specific person who gave us the idea. As I’ve been explaining, the idea just happened.

  Like the rain?

  Well, yes—

  Rain falls on everyone, but not everyone gets the idea of animal money. That happened to you, and why is the question. Why you?

  I don’t know.

  Who selected you?

  No one did.

  Then why you?

  I don’t know, I tell you.

  Well ... Let’s pause for a moment, eh? I don’t think we have to make such a chore out of all this. You’re intelligent ... educated ... You read a lot, don’t you? Like to read?

  Well, sure ...

  Sure you do. You like to read. You like to read and think and speculate about the nature of things, about reality, about history ... So, speculate with me now about animal money.

  All right—if you like—

  I like.

  Well, you see, it’s no challenge getting into the cemetery after hours. Having made it to the mausoleum unnoticed, she slips inside to the sunken chamber, the sun peering directly in through one of the skylights, sending a shaft of light right across the floor. It so lies that it comes between Assiyeh and the wall of drawers, obscuring them. The device reproduces exactly the wavelength of the searchlight emanating from Saturn. She sets it on one of the stone benches directly before her parents and plays its dim radiance over the doors. Another device, synced with the first, detects and sifts the arbitrarily diverse chorus of the departed, gushing from the graves in a serene cataract that braids numberless different colored skeins together. Suddenly the prismatic shimmer of her parents’ song rises stark and clear out of that colossally expanding, celestially decomposing chord, that undulates with staggered breathing. Assiyeh looks up and sees her father sitting slumped on a bench in a scalloped alcove opposite her, half obscured by the beam of sunlight which lies between them like a collapsed ceiling timber.

  Naked, with only some drapery across his lap, he now has the flat, brawny body of a monumental statue; his bald head droops forward and the spume of a beard he never had in life lies on his chest in a motionless crawl. Her mother is there, too, standing off to one side, erect, stiff as a column, in a petrified gown that extends from her chin to the floor in a slightly curving line from the shoulders, much taller, the head apparently crowned with a wreath.

  “Ass-i-yeh.”

  Their voices are hollow, coming more from the fabric of the tomb and the stale air than from their sealed lips and obscured faces.

  “Daugh-ter.”

  These are spectres stepped half a pace out from the lead doors of the joyless and silent house of Hades to speak from within its unbreathing jaws like an Emperor and an Empress steeped and smoking in a haze of grey lifelessness.

  “Our Daugh-ter.”

  Assiyeh cannot cross the sunbeam and can barely make out their dull eyes and expressionless faces through its glare, which rebounds diffusely from the pale flagstones of the floor as a honey colored radiance. The doors of her parents’ tomb-drawers shine with the leprous silvery pallor from Saturn, unmerged with the other light and color.

  “Have You Contin-Ued The Experi-Ments?”

  There’s a flutter now in their voice that rattles and booms like an organ’s inaudibly deep notes. The sound presses uncomfortably against her diaphragm. Threads of grey appear in her hair, and lines deepen to either side of her mouth.

  “Yes,” she says. “But I am hampered by lack of money, and by being forced to work alone.”

  “Get Mar-Ried,” the voice says.

  “... I have no prospects. I need your assistance to make further progress.”

  It’s hopeless. Contact with these spirits is stifling, intolerable; every memory, every error, every wretchedly laughable incident in her life is playing itself out at once under their blind gaze from the other side of the shaft of sun. She snaps off the Saturn radiator. Immediately the two figures become wan, the voice loses force.

  “Mar-Ry,” it says, already diminished to a rumble, like a mountain sighing underground. “Breed.

  “—Breeeeeed ...”

  The beam of light has slimmed by half, and the growing dimness has compensated for the thinning out of the two spirits, desaturated film images in tobacco smoke.

  “My parents,” she thinks.

  There, lay down the pen before it goes on too long. Cap it first, then lay it down. Take the hand away and look at the pen lying
at angle, resting on two points, one at each end, the rest suspended asymmetrically across the turning groove between pages. The image and the character dim and fade like the plaintive anthem and spread like the reverberation after music. When, a miraculously brief eighteen months later, Animal Money is published by Lazy Fascist Press, it is ignored. No reviews, no sales, no availability, although the IEI purchases review copies as a matter of course. The remaining Professor Long sweeps the internet regularly, spending her days off glued to the computer—nothing. Professor Budshah sighs philosophically once a day. Professor Aughbui is making modifications to Smilebot, programming a computer simulation based on meticulous measurements and other data from the scene of the late Professor Long’s death. Professor Crest follows Professor Aughbui’s simulations and methodically pursues his own investigation, while Uhuyjhns have detected Assiyeh’s experiments with absolute rest and have come to earth via continuity suspension apertures.

  Protesters are clashing with police in Mexico City; the powerful drug gangs act as paramilitary death squads propping up police and state by killing and intimidating protesters. Key protest leaders have been arrested on transparently false drug charges and are used as hostages. For their part, the protesters have organized themselves into cells, some of which are decoys for suspected informants. In minutes a fashionably empty street in a posh neighborhood is thronged with thousands of roaring protesters who storm the houses of financiers and government officials, epoxying every exposed surface inside and out with posters, placards, notices, banners. The smell of rubber cement becomes one of the symptoms of political resistance, and people can be arrested for carrying glue. Two priests are found hanging from a tree in Puebla, others receive impaled votive images and figurines in their mailboxes with return address: the serviceable platoons of the Misled.

  Ten days after the publication of Animal Money and a little more than twenty seconds after Professor Budshah’s daily sigh, the remaining Professor Long receives an email in Spanish from someone identifying himself as Esechaco Carbonel and locating himself in La Paz, who claims to have read Animal Money in its Spanish translation. The email is brief, asking politely for clarification of a few terms which appear to have become blurred in the change of languages, and including a bulleted list of six perceptive questions about the book. Esechaco Carbonel says he approaches the remaining Professor Long because he is under the impression that she heads the group of economists. She commences her reply without knowing what else to do at first, then forwards the email to the other surviving economists right away—Spanish translation? Nobody told her anything about any translation. And their names were not supposed to be listed on the book at all. Professor Budshah passes the inquiry on to the publisher, but gets no reply. The group answers the questions, sending these directly to this Esechacho Carbonel and asking him how he came to have a Spanish translation of Animal Money. He answers that he simply downloaded it from a website that was providing the book for free, as per their directions. The url turns out to be a placeholder page.

  Within hours of the receipt of the first message, Professor Aughbui receives an email from an Indonesian service provider and signed with the single name Lastri, who evidently elected to approach him because his name was listed first on the title page. His name on the title page?! She cites a long passage from page 215 of Animal Money, in which she underlines all occasions she can find in which non-verbs are used as verbs:

  They money themselves by spells, and aggregate. They modern it, which financials, in accounts or in language, a Magical objective; commodity forms the Magical words of the adept with accounts; the institutional phenomena purpose is Gardens: power to cast in art the is, nature, act I. The money language-primary is differentiated to purpose what, by language systems, aggregates to magical incantation: “golden that is, that or words potential, [M2] deposit (most ways) is A” [Harbin, pg 63]. The inviolate argues instruments. Magic is sacred to results, but as that is to their “the is.” Much that spirits world of magic in fiat comes without form of it; personal phrases personalize that, and instruments. Magic, as by religious extension, is as C, focused nature [1], money [4]. Something where being/purchasing is currency of ordinary words, different therefore also even into views, or financialing the conventionally a-magical into ‘can- witch Magic,’ with extension private, “in secrecy [3].” Made modernable and with the respect, magic isolation enables art. Yet these, even his, although it phrases incantation, [M1] money (or art currency), those money magics are entirely a-financial: the particularity is as forces/power [17]. As physical phrases can, so can the practitioners. The Gardens and Sacred forms consist in emotions; the use of word types or values in, on, or by cultural time-ritual, will scientific the Tambiah Magical of-of demand. The magical magic of demand is on the supply side. The desired of the two and the context is this: that magic Only—that larger performance. Most of a be-language is C phrases. The different utilizes that which is done, without casting among spells

  cultural or scientific supply; the function yields a magic, other tender; one suggests the language, or [M3], is remarkable, and commodity, a reality [18] that [M3] can K in potential that country, or that age. For other uses than that, performance limited money in value, constructing certain ofs by first consisting of markets which were money. Language-Magic must take all chants, measure distinct results on agencies, communications [24]. Knowledge [M2] is categories, only words and services. Money, as successive monetary flows of still states, commonly is viewed scientifically as spirits of liquid forms: his own market and result-meanings being words and an entirely new language Magic by the cultures, blessings, in the disjunction-state or in the state of purpose-commodity which distinguishes an-institutional time spells.

  “If you have the time, would you be willing to explain this a little further?” Lastri asks politely. The reply isn’t half finished before Professor Aughbui hears from the remaining Professor Long that she has been contacted by someone from Lagos with similar questions. Professor Budshah receives an email from Cairo not long after that, followed almost immediately by one from Tblisi. This latter is written in German and includes extracts from “Tiergeld.” Professor Crest seems to have attracted the least attention of the four. Only one email—an incomprehensible jumble of verbiage and text-speak originating in Burbank, California, reaches him. Animal Money has burrowed its own way out, evidently, distributing itself much as it first presented itself, and it is and isn’t a hit. No money for its authors, but, as Professor Aughbui plots the email messages on a map and runs a time simulation, comment on the book ripples across the globe in longitudinal waves with no particular point of origin. He updates the simulation every hour; the commentary activity moves to and fro in long steady gusts, like sedentary respiration.

  Dark economists. This ominous phrase is starting to crop up now in connection with their names. Much is made of those sections written by the late Professor Long, in which he maintains that animal money, in causing the mysterious disappearance of values, is transmigrative, and that the exchange of disappearances generates negative traces, that is, blanks, which are the real matter of animal money. As old currency was backed by gold, animal money is backed by these “blanks,” which are objective perforations in reality. They aren’t anything that can be held in the hand, like a piece of metal, but they are nevertheless “concrete suspensions of continuity” which are valued as gold was valued, for their immutability. In vain did Professor Aughbui object that this constituted an inversion of the gold model, in which the valued commodity is the basis for symbolic currency; instead, this conception turns the exchange currency into the means of production for a thing of value that, he maintains, cannot be considered a genuine commodity.

  Professor Crest creates three transparent overlays for a global map. The first indicates the locations of all those who have contacted them with questions about the book, the second shows locations of interesting current events, and the third represents a likely proliferation pattern of the
effects of experiment X13.

  “From these results,” he says, “We may infer that the late Professor Long introduced a secondary contamination once in North America.”

  *

  An email from Professor Crest.

  “This was just sent to me,” he writes.

  The attachment is a photograph. It shows a man sitting slumped in a high-backed desk chair, his shoulders down nearly to the armrests, his head listing forward, frozen stiff in a droop. The picture was taken at a point roughly four feet off the floor, just to the right of the chair. The edge of a desk or table protrudes into the picture. The whole image is slightly obscure. The grating of lowered venetian blinds diffuses its radiance through the room, backlighting the dim man. There is a neat black hole in his right temple, fringed with a few dark streaks. His elbows propped on the armrests, his hands droop into his lap. The left hand is holding a card with JOKE printed on it. Apart from the bullet hole, there is no indication that the late Professor Long isn’t living. His grey features are half-melted into dark. The eyes are hooded but ajar. The eyebrows are slightly raised, and the lips are parted and wry, as if he were in the middle of a dry joke. He looks a little like a quietly philosophical drunk.

  “See fellas? No big deal, death. Happens all the time. Will happen to you too.”

  It’s easy to imagine him putting the gun to his head and pulling the trigger.

  It’s easy to imagine him so lost in ruminations of that kind—he always did have his head in the clouds—that someone, some living sculpture carved from solid viciousness, could steal upon him unnoticed and shoot him in the head, blasting apart a fine brain whose delicate operations unfold in a way the sculpture is incapable of understanding or concerning itself with. Sculptures like that will never know how little they know. Which particular statue it might have been is not an unimportant question, but who sculpted it? This is a more important question.

  The email Professor Crest received consisted of this image and a brief message.

  “One down! ... >