Animal Money

by Michael Cisco

  The white glare of the street has resolved into a field of vivid reliefs and tints. There’s a man in a heavy down jacket by the front door, off to the right, smoking, hands in his jeans. The street outside is narrow, no traffic, lined with colorful little cars. Professor Aughbui hears the tinny chime of the elevator arriving in the lobby behind him as he crosses the threshold and onto the sidewalk, turning his back at once in a hard left turn away from the smoking loiterer there and hurrying to the end of the block, breaking into a scurrying run, clutching Smilebot.

  *

  In the dream, the late Professor Long has taken a special interest in a student, Lucy—did he ever have a student named Lucy? Lucy is frail after a hellish life. This isn’t romance. She’s gradually drawn herself, step by step, back from the brink of self destruction. At untold cost, she has won a new life. And he helped her, meaningfully. He does love her. He adores her. He wouldn’t touch her. But he aches to see her cured.

  Lucy has come by his house—a house he’s never seen before, never been in—to show him one of her economics papers; the pages are collected in sheaves weirdly cut up with scalloped edges, like windflapped awnings. As he goes through these pages, Lucy drifts through the room, looking at posters on the wall, picking up and examining the many little gimcracks and tiny statuettes, a Russian doll, a Swedish horse. She wanders off, idly exploring. Now he is wandering through the house. He spends a long time trying to prop open a door with a dishrag, and, when that doesn’t work, with a towel.

  He finds her at last, in a maid’s outfit looking at herself in the mantelpiece mirror, and caressing a caulk gun that lies there on the shelf. She picks it up, reverses it, puts the nozzle in her teeth, and, grinning like a maniac, begins to fill her mouth with caulk. Her cheeks steadily bulge. Starting from her head, her eyes are glassy, diseased, possessed, her poisoned face is turning grey green and the leering mouth stretches obscenely. Paralyzed with horror, he can only stare at her. The rescue, all the agonizing effort, the joy of watching the fragile bonds and roots of life restored and slowly growing firm, all being violated. Lucy, with wide, dead eyes, turns to him and suddenly blows out her cheeks like balloons and a segmented stalk of cement bursts from her mouth, stiff, grotesque, and a tiny palpitating hand, like a baby’s, protrudes from the very end of it.

  The music is all seven by ten. There’s a phone ringing somewhere in the department and he answers it. Someone starts speaking. The speaker is mistaking him for some other Professor. Numbly, the late Professor Long goes on listening, not answering. It’s already too late to correct the mistake. The faint voice at the line’s other end is rasping, and sometimes it warbles. It is rapidly reciting instructions, addressed to that other professor, who is not named but only called Twentyfive.

  Twentyfive is to ...

  When this is done, Twentyfive will ...

  Under no circumstances will Twentyfive ...

  The late Professor Long infers from these instructions that this Twentyfive has been programming students and faculty by hypnosis. The line clicks off. He’s gripped by sudden fright—did that voice realize it wasn’t talking to Twentyfive? Is someone coming to get him now? What if he really is Twentyfive after all, and only a carrier for the hypnotic spell that binds him too? What if there is no real Professor Long?

  He sits back down in his chair, swiveling his back to the venetian blinds. And when he wants to move again, he can’t. He is paralyzed, completely. Slumped in the chair. A horribly cold feeling bores into his right temple, spreading. A sickening, cold softness covers nearly all of his skull’s left side.

  Sadness and horror triumph over all. They soar, darkly exulting, overhead, like fireworks that suck color and light out of the sky, and burst in silent grey cascades of nothingness.

  *

  Professor Aughbui had programmed Smilebot to come and find him should they ever be separated for more than fifteen minutes. It was to that one flash of foresight that he owed his narrow escape. Smilebot tracked him by homing in on a chip in his glasses.

  The police. Professor Aughbui had flagged down a cop within a few blocks of the hotel and had led him insistently back; the men were long gone, the door to the room was ajar and they found the plastic hand tie that had been used to bind Professor Aughbui in the bedroom. The desk clerk said the room was vacant. Professor Aughbui couldn’t be sure, but he suspected the clerk was not the same one he’d passed on his way out. The police invited him to the station, where he could describe the men and make a report. Not knowing what they would make of the taser, Professor Aughbui did not go into Smilebot’s role in his escape.

  The press reports and moves on to the riots, the protests, in New York, in Sao Paolo.

  “What is most significant,” the remaining Professor Long says, “is that they asked you about the source.”

  “They knew about the voices,” Professor Aughbui says.

  “Conspirators always see conspiracies,” the remaining Professor Long says. “Whoever sent those men to get you was assuming we had been put up to the publication of the book by ...”

  “You have to report this to the Integrity Committee,” Professor Crest says fiercely.

  “What shall you do?” Professor Budshah asks.

  It all depends on the resources and abilities of whoever sent those two men. Professor Aughbui’s address is no secret; he can be watched and followed, his transactions might be monitored. Move to a hotel? Some cheap lodgings in the country? Pay for everything with cash money? Try to raise up a scandal in the press and take refuge in the spotlight? Go to stay with one of the other economists? Vanish? Staying with relatives is out of the question—he wouldn’t want to put them in harm’s way, but then again, all their relations are potentially in harm’s way. In the end, Professor Aughbui decides to continue in his usual way of life, devoting himself to strength training and to further improvements in Smilebot. At repeated urgings from Professor Crest, he acquires the necessary forms from the Integrity Committee and begins the laborious process of filling them out. The other three economists likewise increase their vigilance; Professor Budshah spends less time roving freely around the campus and does not sleep in the same dorm room on consecutive nights. The remaining Professor Long shifts to another apartment. Professor Crest insists on remaining where he is. The idea has taken hold that Animal Money is an extravagant fantasy, the whimsical jeu d’esprit of a group of accident-addled economists, and not really a serious book. Whenever Professor Crest, or any of the others, for that matter, try to discuss it seriously, they meet with an impenetrable barrier of qualified disinterest adorned with light praise.

  Professor Budshah figured it out.

  “They are using the duel as a pretext,” he says. “They can point at it and say that there is as yet no verdict on the question, and leave things there as long as they wish.”

  Clashes in the US between militia groups and police are becoming more serious. Wilmington is shattered by three days of arson and violence, brought on in part by an influx of refugees from the hurricane. Actual coverage is scanty and percolates only with difficulty and sporadic success through the thicket of bullshit. Most television news programming is devoted to the loving documentation of a regional cooking contest and the Oscars. A Senator from Delaware isn’t even aware of the turmoil in Wilmington when questioned by a rookie reporter, who was later reprimanded and sent down from D.C.

  *

  Your remarks on Uhuyjhns interest us. Some aspects are more interesting to us than others, of course. We would appreciate it, naturally, if you would confine yourself to those aspects ... The sooner, you understand, that you do, the sooner this will be over. You’re very busy—of course, we know that. You must be very eager to go on about your business ... So, be succinct—these Uhuyjhns, then, are what we might say are the messengers?

  There is only the one, as far as I know.

  Really? ... Well, you can understand how I would get the wrong idea. You say here ... let me find it ... “the Uhuyjhn must b
e a sort of creature that has evolved to live so slowly ...”

  Ah.

  Yes, you see—

  “Sort.”

  “Sort,” exactly.

  But only one is mentioned.

  Yes, only one. But, living things, you know ...

  Living things?

  Uhuyjhns live, don’t they?

  I’m not sure.

  Come now, surely there can’t be any confusion there.

  One may live, I suppose.

  Living things come in species, not individuals.

  But what we take for a single Uhuyjhn could be the entire species, could consist of many.

  How many?

  How many what? Species?

  How many make up a single Uhuyjhn?

  ... I don’t know what to tell you. This is only a speculation.

  Well, two, three?

  Two, three?

  Is it a matter of twos and threes, or is it a matter of thousands, or what?

  You mean, classify the number by order of magnitude?

  Is a single Uhuyjhn a great many or not a great many?

  A great many of what?

  ... The Uhuyjhn was discovered how?

  Well, you see, the experiment had been a qualified success. According to her ultra-high-speed camera and other recording instruments the wild spirits of both her parents were conjured and stabilized successfully using pacebrot energy, but of the two, only her father’s ghost was actually captured. Her mother’s ghost had leapt from the window at once, emitting that weird windy laughter that Assiyeh heard. She is presumably still at large, and there’s no telling what mischief she will get into out there.

  The wild ghost of Assiyeh’s father is nothing like him physically, being taller and acting much younger, like a child at times. He follows her with doglike devotion, even into the bathroom. He can do complicated mathematics and follow elaborate directions, although he does tend to get carried away at times. Every now and then he has a kind of seizure or fit that sends him careening around like a maniac, jumping up onto the furniture, on the ceiling, and throwing himself at the walls and floor with frenzied abandon so that he often disappears into solid objects. When he is unable to find his way back out of an object, Assiyeh has to set up the Saturn beacon to guide him. This is always followed by a stern lecture from Assiyeh, her father’s ghost staring sheepishly at the floor with his naked eyes and teeth. Assiyeh employs him as a laboratory assistant anyway, calling him “Dumb-Dumb.” Not knowing any better, he answers to it.

  In his spare time, he likes to perch on a chair with his knees drawn up, keenly watching horror movies one after another. He watches Dr. Circus’ Coffin of Living Blood, then The Torture Funeral of Baron Schizosis, then Escape of the Atomic Wendigos ... Beware! The Brain Laboratory of Dr. Strappado ... The Amazing Swamp Robots ... Casino of the Werewolves ... Actresses screech like chimpanzees, orchestral groans, castle thunder, explosions, melodramatic laughter, overwrought soliloquies, a name called over and over.

  Her mother was always pretty buttoned up. What is she doing out there? Ambushing children? Could she hurt anyone, or be hurt herself? Does Assiyeh really care?

  Her father’s spirit can’t talk, but the two of them can transmit simple ideas by flashing their eyes at each other; Assiyeh blinking, her father’s spirit flipping his hands over his lidless eyes like shutters on a signal lamp. While he is still capable of written communication, the act of writing drives him wild, ripping paper to shreds and grinding the pen or pencil into the table, pounding keyboards so that they bounce under his shadow hands, spitting keys like broken teeth. Assiyeh has better success with chalk and a slate, and still better with a wax tablet and a bone stylus.

  “... holy celestial solitude of a cloud of giant somnambulists ... houses form from military decorations ... the blue-white hellparadise of celestial altitude ... allow a mysticism to form itself through one ... I didn’t understand what I was of carrion, and rumbles of the divine discovered my own ability to change ... the magic word is censored ...”

  Terms like “the blue-white hellparadise” recur nearly every time he writes, and he keeps coming back to “magic word” and censoring. Without being able to distinguish by what definite steps she came to this idea, she realizes he’s trying to tell her that the censorship of magic words is not just secrecy; it’s part of the magic, in fact, the magical effect is the censorship. But what does that mean? Whenever she asks him that, she gets back, amid the smudges, something about the riotous ecstasy of the elastic censors or the elastic ecstasy of the riotous censors or the elastic riot of the ecstatic censors and she can’t be sure that he isn’t getting “elastic” and “ecstatic” mixed up. Those portents never work out, she thinks, I wonder why I still pay them any attention.

  *

  The remaining Professor Long receives an invitation by email to address a group of delegates from the IEI on the topic of animal money. She accepts, disquieted by mention in the inviting email of previous attempts to get in touch with her; she hasn’t been getting them, and suspects that she only managed to get this one because it arrived in her inbox right before her eyes.

  Fear is getting the better of her. Should she buy another cigar? The tide of willpower starts rolling back in about halfway down the block, and the remaining Professor Long hesitates as it gains strength. She waffles between the impulse to go through with it and an aversion that comes on palpably like the soft repellance of a magnetic field. Unsure of the outcome, and wanting to give the advantage to the counterforce, no matter how onerous it is for her to go back on even a bad decision, she leaves the path to the store and deviates at random, coming to rest on a bench in a little open space paved with hexagonal stone tiles, blonde with the dust of San Toribio. This is desert dust, and the air here is always so bright and clear it’s hard to tell how that dust manages to infiltrate the city. The dust coats the almost black green leaves of the trees, giving off its characteristic medicinal smell. Lizards scuttle in the planters, and huge dragonflies dart in and out like black needles. The people of San Toribio go floating by in their loose, heat-adapted attire. They murmur greetings to each other as they pass, and to her as well. She sits holding the tops of her thighs and gazing at the ground. Her inner wrangling isn’t going on without her, though, as she hoped it would. Everything has gone into an awkward, uncomfortable suspense. She may have to go all the way to the store and actually confront a pack of cigarettes.

  Sun Mu-Kai is coming along the pathway toward her when she looks up. He waves to her with his left hand, a AAA battery loose between his index and middle fingers. His whole body is loose, like a marionette. Lean, slight, his clothes a little too big for him, fringe of hair hanging down nearly to his eyebrows, sunken cheeks, chin wide and prominent, rings under his eyes.

  “Lend.”

  “Spend.”

  “You OK?” he asks.

  She tells him she’s OK—but what is he doing here?

  Sun Mu-Kai used to teach in the mathematics department at her former University, but he was put on stress leave a couple of years ago. Everyone knew he was a little unbalanced, mentally, but he’d never hurt anyone or been responsible for any scandal.

  His affect as flat and factual as ever, he tells her he’s been working on his monograph. This proverbial monograph on the Yang-Mills existence and mass gap has been pending for nearly ten years. Nobody believes Sun will ever finish it; they shake their heads, some with real regret, because it seemed at one time that Sun actually could have solved the problem. A few hold out hopes that he will come through, win a Fields Prize and redeem himself. As he describes the excellent progress he’s been making now that he is free to concentrate on the project, having been invited to Archizoguayla University to do his research and to study the papers of a dead mathematician named Nilsson which had been donated to the University library here. From time to time he raises the copper end of the battery to his mouth and sips at it like a cigarette, pressing the other end with the tip of his index f
inger.

  “I’ve got a contact here,” he hoists his lip and points to what could be any of three ordinary looking front upper teeth, “—and here.” He shows her the tip of his index finger, where there’s a hard white spot like a ceramic dot. Whenever he takes a drag from the battery, the corner of his right eye quivers slightly.

  “Everybody’s talking about your book,” he says. “I think the mathematical aspect is intriguing.”

  “That was mostly Professor Aughbui’s work,” she tells him.

  “Aughbui?” he says, blowing air out of his mouth in a stream and jerking his head aside as if a troublesome plume of smoke were getting in his eyes. “I don’t know him.”

  The remaining Professor Long is suffused with a lack of ambition to tell him any more about it. What she’d really like to do is get laid, Third Oath or no. Not with this half-crazy plucked chicken, either. A hit and run with a total stranger would do it. Watching him play smoking is doing her some good; her own impulse to smoke is fading. A stranger to fuck then fade like smoke. One of these men going by, the younger ones, who are so lean and playful.

  Sun shimmies his knees from time to time, as if he had trouble keeping them locked.

  “The difficulty lies in expressing a qualitative problem in a quantitative way. The way the problem is expressed will make any solution impossible if that way is basically quantitative in nature.”

  “We were thinking ...,” the remaining Professor Long says, with a transient stirring of interest, “We thought to get some understanding of problems as part of nature. Some problems may be quantitative, but being a problem, any kind of problem, is a quality. It has a quality of ...”

  He takes another toke from his battery, then throws himself down beside her on the bench.

  “There is still a quantitative aspect to your theory,” he says. “I mean, when you say that it is possible to set up exchanges that double quantity on both sides of the exchange.”

  “It depends,” she says. “Not all doubling is quantitative. A mirror, for example. And the whole point of our theory was to conceive of a viable economic system based around an augmenting model of exchange rather than a substituting or equivalency based model. We thought ....”