Animal Money

by Michael Cisco

  *

  INTERVIEWER: Now, you’ve recently gotten interested in animal money.

  Right.

  INTERVIEWER: ... What the hell is animal money?

  (audience laughter 0.4)

  Well, yeah, it’s a little tricky to explain. Suppose an earthquake splits the sea bottom beneath a drilling platform. The platform explodes. Oil floods the ocean. A tidal wave of water and oil inundates the Gulf of Mexico just ahead of a colossal hurricane that seeds tornadoes as far as the Pacific. Owing to the end of conscription and a chronic shortage of soldiers, the military will take anyone. Weapons disappear from bases and depots and turn up in the hands of militias and gangs, made up increasingly of trained veterans. Government censors work around the clock, conscientiously deleting from one website after another all the images of smirking soldiers standing over corpses, hands raised in the Hitler salute. Elaborate precautions are taken against the phantom indignation of the Teeming. Now the military are called in to deal with the disaster while photogenic soldiers swim in television from the shore to a rapidly sinking boat, ferrying half-drowned victims back. The cameras capture not only the action on shore but in the water as well, and one soldier actually rescues his estranged wife on camera. The dialogue is especially good today and the lighting couldn’t have been better.

  —And animal money?

  Yes, I’m getting to that. You see, Assiyeh deduces that the deceleration force of her experiment attracted the Uhuyjhn, which is what she calls a “rest-organism.” I still haven’t figured out what she meant by that—I think she meant that the principles of rest she was researching were somehow metabolically embodied in them.

  So, she tries again, right? Tries to bring her parents’ vital spirits back. Everything goes wrong. In her brief absence, the hotel management has welded the skylights so she can’t get a sight line to the sky; there’s a school group staying on the same side of the hotel and they complain about the generator noise to management; the tomb camera keeps losing signal; she can’t find the controller for the Saturn machine so she has to detach the console, strip the wires, and make the contacts by hand, kneeling in front of the machine like a geisha playing the koto. Finally, Assiyeh manages to generate a weak rest field. The room is dark, as is the night sky outside. Kneeling on that clear floor—remember, this is above an apparently bottomless pit—she seems to hover in outer space, along with her half-shredded equipment and the incongruously quotidian furnishings of the room, all mysteriously suspended at exactly the same level. The field is murkier than the surrounding air, and laced with almost invisible hairline streaks: these are particles, some from outer space, caught and gently slowed by the field, forming long ethereal cage bars. Every now and then, when she can spare her hands, Assiyeh picks up pad and pen and starts writing, deliberately making the sort of elementary mistakes that her parents could never resist the impulse to correct. At times, it had seemed to her, growing up, that her parents had a sixth sense for her mistakes and appeared as if by magic whenever she did anything requiring their corrections; so, now she is trying to summon them by screwing up on purpose. Assiyeh’s hands keep slipping as she manipulates the wires and she loses patience and smashes the machine. The Saturn machine fizzles and she can smell smouldering insulation, but now a corona of wan lights that throb and dim scintillates in the air. They are different colors and each color is associated with a far-off, fluting pitch. The hotel room is suddenly alive with ethereal fragments of human bodies settling like marine snow, afterimages in many dimensions, and the hollow murmurs of strangely incomplete human voices, half-voices speaking isolated phrases. At least, that’s how they sound—the words are loud enough, in fact, there are shouts and sudden, deafening pronouncements, but the voices are as muffled as if she were hearing them through a thick wall.

  “Aren’t we all?” someone says. A woman’s voice—her own voice.

  A voice says something. Assiyeh hears: “The censor travels by exorcism.”

  A pair of glasses, just there, like two icy discs of vitriated moonlight. The halting field vibrates apart and the lights flare, flooding the room for one instant with bizarre multicolored incandescence that reveals two blurred and leaping figures. The next moment there is a whoosh of air and a flutter in her ears that sounds like crazed laughter, and at the same time a horrible settling feeling drops massively down on her, a kind of despair, as if she were witnessing the domestication of the last of some noble species of wild animal. She does not notice the blackening and shrinking at her right temple; the flesh vanishes, exposing bones that darken, charred by invisible flames. Then just as quickly the right temple is as it was.

  Her father’s ghost stands between her and the window. Assiyeh turns on the bedstand light. It is a human shadow, a black void with white teeth exposed in the lipless mouth, and lidless, astonished, glaring eyes that Assiyeh recognizes even without moon-lensed glasses.

  *

  They caught Professor Aughbui in the toilet stall of a public bathroom. Big men, two of them, bigger in their down jackets. Professor Aughbui’s lunch had disagreed with him and he was vomiting over the bowl, trying with all his might to resist the temptation to kneel and soil the knees of his pants.

  Panting, he hangs onto the top of the stall partition, then lists to one side and leans against the bathroom wall. Two men explode into the bathroom with quick heavy steps and the next moment the stall door is torn open and there they are. Professor Aughbui starts back and nearly falls, sliding along the wall.

  “Occupied?” the man in the door says. He’s got a shaved head. Professor Aughbui can’t see the other one’s face. Shaved head notes the toilet full of vomit and smiles nastily.

  “Looks like he’s not feeling too good.”

  All their haste is gone. Shaved head reaches in casually, grabs Professor Aughbui’s left arm and hauls him out of the stall. The other one has a full head of salty black hair and a bushy greying moustache, pouches under his eyes. He punches Professor Aughbui in the aching stomach. Professor Aughbui makes a humiliating sound, “ooooh!”—he contracts around the fist and his glasses fly off and skid across the floor. Moustache spins him around to face the wall and pins his arms, holding his wrists and dragging them up his body, forcing his knee into Professor Aughbui’s back and bending his body so that his convulsing abdomen is painfully stretched. A fistfull of toilet paper is roughly wiped across his face, dabbing the strands of puke, the nose runnings and tears. He is wheeled around to face shaved head, who replaces his glasses with brutal delicacy.

  “All better?” he asks.

  He studies Professor Aughbui insolently for a moment, then swaggers to the door and looks out. He stays there for a minute or two.

  “OK,” he says, moving immediately into place.

  Professor Aughbui is pushed along between them, the shaved headed one out in front acting as cover. The bathroom opens out onto a narrow side street with a few small shops, all closed. Nobody in sight, or nobody near. The two men lead him to a small blue car and moustache drags him down and into the back seat, shoving him across to the other side while he gets in behind him. The car stinks of rancid cigarette smoke.

  Shaved head gets in the driver’s seat. The car starts with a cough and they swing out. Moustache has released his wrists.

  “Sit on your hands,” he says sootily.

  Professor Aughbui sits on his hands. The smooth plastic upholstery of the seat is ice cold so that his hands form two warm spots under his thighs. Fast as thought, moustache lights a cigarette. It hangs from his lip dribbling ash from time to time and he sits leaning right on him with his right elbow boring into Professor Aughbui’s ribs and the bare knife obscenely there in his left hand, resting on his lap.

  “Shut up,” he says.

  Professor Aughbui hasn’t said a word, nor made any sound since they slugged him.

  The other man is staring him in the eye, streets kaleidoscoping all around his face.

  “You shut up,” the man says again. Prof
essor Aughbui feels the stale cigarette mouth words spatting like raindrops against his cheek and across his lips.

  After a few glances forward and out the window, the smoker pulls something out of his jacket pocket with his left hand and flips it at Professor Aughbui.

  “Put it over your head.”

  The elbow crushes into him and Professor Aughbui cries.

  “Put it over your head.”

  Professor Aughbui puts the sack over his head. He can still see light through the coarse weave, but it’s all disassociated pointilism to him. The elbow stays where it is, compressing his lungs, half choking him.

  Somehow, Professor Aughbui manages a lucid thought: “It was a mistake to go out without Smilebot.”

  The men exchange a few terse sentences in a language he doesn’t recognize.

  Now—how long?—the car jerks to a halt.

  “Out.”

  A painful jab in the ribs.

  He gets out and is spun around at once, face to the car, a hand roughly shoving his face down as his hands are wrenched behind his back and bound at the wrist with what feels like a plastic strip. The strip is drawn taut, Professor Aughbui cries again, receives a petulant slap over the head. The strip bites, his bones grate.

  “Move.”

  He is driven forward, one in front and one behind. A dark space, refracted by the weave, zooms unevenly up to him. Their footsteps are now sounding against concrete walls. Scrape of feet on concrete stairs and the clang of a hand, maybe a ring on a finger, against the metal rail. He stumbles up the stairs, pushed from behind and dragged from in front by a fist twisted inside his clothes to get a better purchase.

  Up at least four flights and through a door, a metal fire door by the sound of it. Walking on carpet. A turn. The men seem furtive and hasty again. Rattle of keys in a door, then through into a room. He is hauled more roughly now, the furtiveness gone again, thrown into a cold chair and his arms strappadoed over the back so the chair digs into his armpits.

  The door closes and locks snap. Sour old cigarette smell, musty carpet smell. Moustache’s voice in the next room, level, unintelligible words ... Beep of a cell phone being hung up. Footsteps across the room, shaking the floor, coming toward him.

  Shaved head comes up on him and rests one foot on Professor Aughbui’s thigh, leaning in with his crotch in Professor Aughbui’s face. Moustache strolls around to a battered desk against the wall and sits on its edge.

  “All right, who told you?”

  He’s going to strike, Professor Aughbui thinks, no matter what.

  The foot on his leg begins to grind into the flesh. Shaved head angles the toe of his boot around and rests it on Professor Aughbui’s groin.

  “Who told you?”

  “What do you mean?” Professor Aughbui says. His voice is unrecognizeable; tremulous, barely audible.

  The foot lifts and drops back suddenly. There’s a blast of pain and Professor Aughbui cries out. Shaved head gently lowers his hand onto the top of Professor Aughbui’s head.

  “You don’t shout,” he says, tilting Professor Aughbui’s head up. “Talk, don’t shout. If you shout ...”

  He pats his crotch.

  “I got something big for your mouth.”

  “Who told you?” Moustache asks.

  “What do you mean?” Professor Aughbui asks.

  It takes some time before he understands.

  “It came to the group at the same time,” he says finally, his face streaming.

  “How?”

  “When the group were all talking together.”

  “Was there a different voice?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Was there a voice that you didn’t recognize when you were all talking together?”

  Professor Aughbui tries to remember.

  The foot begins to grind, the toe digs into his groin.

  “Please stop!” he calls, “It is difficult to remember!”

  Moustache says something and shaved head lets up.

  “Remember fast,” he says.

  “It ...” Professor Aughbui’s voice catches. There’s a spasm of pain in his aching groin and across his leg, and his hands are going numb. Tears spill out of his eyes.

  Shaved head plucks off his glasses with a sneer and, lifting his foot, goes across the room to put them on a bricked up mantle. Then he comes back. He picks his moment to settle his foot heavily back exactly in place. Professor Aughbui groans.

  “Remember now,” Moustache orders.

  “It was a different voice,” Professor Aughbui says.

  “Who did it come from?”

  A phone shrills from the next room. Moustache starts at the sound and looks meaningfully at shaved head. The phone shrills again.

  Moustache gets up. Into the next room. Shaved head watches him go, looking a little uncertain, but he has his obscene, bully smile back when he lowers his gaze to Professor Aughbui again. Professor Aughbui looks down, trying to look past the leg, the groin, at the nondescript, paper-thin carpet, the abstract line where the wall meets the floor, the big square power plug of the floor lamp. From the next room come barked interrogatives in an uncertain voice. Whoever it was hung up on Moustache. He quietly calls the other one into the next room; the muted sound of their voices stirs an incongruous childhood memory in Professor Aughbui, hearing the grownups talking after he went to bed. He sits there rigid, afraid to relax, yearning to.

  A question, series of questions, short, baffled-sounding replies from the second one. Something is wrong. Long pauses. Questions from the second one, tersely and impatiently answered by the first, who is thinking as fast as he can. Finally a decisive tone, a heavy footfall, the whisper of down jacket. A comment in a low voice, two comments, from the first one. What to do with Professor Aughbui. The hall door opens and shuts, footsteps receding in the interval before it closes and dulls the sound. Snick of a lighter. Fresh cigarette smoke.

  Steps toward him. From behind him, a wisp of smoke goes sailing by over his head. Professor Aughbui can feel the man a foot or two in back of him. The uneven draw of his own breath as he begins to breathe through his mouth. He can feel what he guesses is an appraising look, battened on him.

  Sharp knocking at the door makes him stiffen, take his breath in and hold it. The man behind him turns and goes to it at once. Unable to control himself, Professor Aughbui turns his head and looks. There’s a brief passage, through it he sees the man opening the hall door, then step out into the hall, evidently unable to see who knocked.

  He screams and flies backwards through the door, crashing against the jam and tumbling to the ground, his limbs contorted, his whole body wracked with convulsive tension, his scream cut short and toned to a snarling groan. After what could only have been a few seconds, the body goes slack. Smilebot trots into the room and removes its contacts from the man’s leg, where they penetrated his jeans. The contacts and wires retract into an opening in its body cavity.

  Smilebot trots over to Professor Aughbui and looks up at him.

  “Break this, Smilebot,” Professor Aughbui says.

  Smilebot trots up behind Professor Aughbui and cuts the tough plastic tie with his scissor attachment. Unpinioned, Professor Aughbui’s arms whip about in front of him, nearly throwing him forward out of the chair. He gets up, rubbing his wrists and panting. He retrieves his glasses, snatches up Smilebot in his arms, and hurries to the hall door. He’s about to run out, but then he thinks twice, sets Smilebot back down.

  “Is it safe?”

  Smilebot trots to the doorway and peeks around the edge. Then it turns and nods from the waist. Again Professor Aughbui picks up Smilebot and goes out into the hall.

  “Do you know where the stairs are?”

  Smilebot points.

  “Did he take the stairs?”

  Smilebot bends at the waist, yes.

  Swallowing with difficulty, Professor Aughbui sets off for the elevators. He can’t be seen waiting there, watching the numbers climb, then st
op, then climb, then stop again, from the stairway door, but he should have shut the door to the room, that was a tip off, shutting it would have bought him some time but now it’s too late to go back, and, having come from the only stairway, and not having seen him coming down, and it not having been so much time, this would be the natural place to look, to corner him, the elevator is here, there’s a man in it, an older man in a battered suit, looking half dead. Professor Aughbui boards the elevator and they go up three floors, the older man gazing incredulously at Smilebot, which returns his gaze.

  The elevator stops again on its way down—on that floor. There’s nobody waiting—he must have hit the button wrong—there’s some kind of commotion coming from the direction of the room. Professor Aughbui leans on the button. The doors sweep languidly closed. With a leisurely slipping loose, the elevator descends toward the lobby. Professor Aughbui steps out. He can see the white glare of the street about forty feet away to his right, past a dingy front desk, across a faded carpet with a generic floral print pattern and a shiny fake leather sofa and a painting of a landscape with a shepherd in it. There are two elevators and the other one is coming down and a man could scamper down those stairs in time and if the desk clerk or the staff are in with them, the desk clerk has just picked up his phone, and if there’s someone outside—no other exit. He could go back up but his elevator is already gone.

  The carpet muffles his footsteps. He is braced for the sound of the desk clerk’s cry to dash over him like icewater, eyes riveted on the floor in front of his feet but he throws a glance at the desk anyway and the clerk isn’t facing his direction, is talking casually with one hand resting on the counter.