Animal Money

by Michael Cisco

  *

  They are being watched, from the shadows. No, by the shadows. By a shadow, a formerly human someone who goes back and forth. I have seen? Seen that? No, I only sensed it, with these other, dimmer senses. The impressions they generate I have to commute into the familiar kinds, often with serious deformities. The shadow-someone that I sense way over there is a kind of lavish dummy, a lavishly ... a lavish ornamentation. Lavish ...

  The eyes glitter. They glitter violently. There is long hair, long dry and stiff, past the shoulders. There is toothiness, a grimace or a fixed leer, that glistens, and rigid, sparkling hands that go before, open, the way hands look when they are about to take someone by the shoulders. Or by the throat. There are big rings on the colorless fingers, on each one, and a drooping, broad cuff of gold hanging down. A cuff of cloth. A cloth cuff. Embroidered with gold. Richly. Stately, like a million year Emperor as emblematic of torture and despair as a porcelain idol in his palace that becomes more golden the more it rots, decomposing into jade brocades and teak silver and marble and platinum salvers and piebald mirrors that only reflect the faint light of crystal decanters and opalescent chaplets that dangle from the withered necks of crone countessas and the grey ophidian garments of sumptuous ministers and the sanguinary regalia of breastplates, plumed helmets, holy candles, lacquered urine, baleful lenses of parchment bishops, ugly cherubs, cobweb wine and appliqué chamberpots cradling ivory turds, evaporated deans, and mirrors reflecting also the weird noon dusk that holds its breath over a hedge maze and the death garden and the leaden pool still and inscrutable as a slab, a park where what looks green is actually black and the vines and branches are hatetwisted in cacographic ciphers of loathing and the slyly malignant flowers smell like stale motionless incense shitting dust on the floor and feeding on itself ever since the last time, the previous demise which waits to be repeated on these chill flags or lurid rugs, under the savage decorum and within the sinister outlines from the place where everything rots into opulence ...

  Now Lavish reaches. The pupils are violently contracted down to twinkling points in eyes that throw off glints like welding sparks. It puts its jewelled hands through the dark water screen. It can see through the screen. Or not. I can’t. I don’t know what it’s doing. The screen is rippling. It isn’t rippling, it’s motionless, it only looks like it’s rippling because of the coruscations coming from Lavish, which bob and flutter across the surface. I don’t want to inspect any nearer, or get any closer. I want to keep to my own decay and not shimmer like that.

  “Watch out!” I think. “Watch out you ...”

  Who?

  Some people need to watch out. The reason is the same.

  Same as what?

  It isn’t the same ... or ... ?

  Why can’t I remember the end?

  The end of what?

  If the moment I died is what I mean by the end, then I must be wrong, I’m not dead, or no, I died, but I’m not at the end yet, something changed when I went back, sat down, venetian blinds, the desk, the room, the familiarities, and this has a very intense atmosphere of significance, so why can’t I remember whether it was suicide or murder? It’s inexplicable. Nothing is inexplicable. The explanation is obvious—I can’t remember being shot because at the time it happened I was being shot. I don’t like these thoughts. They’re too lucid. They may firm me up enough to die, or no, but to think so ... so hard, and solidly, so hard and solid, makes me feel I start to transform into what is more concrete and I don’t want that, I want to be ... less concrete. I want to be filmy. Not a thinker statue. I don’t want that intensity, it makes me solid, like a statue, but it’s painful, or not painful it’s exhausting, slow, too heavy. Watch out, I think, or say. Watch out you ... other, others. Watch out. Everybody watches out, what am I saying? I mean, can I say this without getting heavy? Lightly, I tell you, watch out for that, for Lavish. It is doing things. Down to something. It is always carried away with morbid glee, it can’t stop. Lavish wants to keep rolling over everything and it is a master, I mean it has obeyers over on your side, but there are signs, associateds. Recognize the signs from the near miss you managed to survive, and then beware, it’s an old fashioned word but it’s one that has a special meaning for a ghost, ghosts like me, beware and watch for insane signs that are outside signs not rational signs. I keep wanting to call them sings. Who am I talking to? I’m not talking, though.

  *

  Professor Clark seems to have quite a light schedule. I, unlike other tenured professors, continue to teach undergraduates, on principle. I can not say I enjoy it. The demands that students place on us are often unbelievably exorbitant. I frequently stay after class, often for several hours, to advise students, explaining assignments to them again and again. In every class, there is always at least one student who meets even the simplest instructions with a blank stare of alarm and incomprehension, who seems incapable of absorbing information. For these students, I must transform myself into a kind of modernist writer, driven to express the same idea in every conceivable way. And yet these students receive each careful rephrasing of the same instructions as if they were completely new, as if I were giving them a task with infinite dimensions, as if my explanations were driving them away from understanding. I have repeated lectures to housebound students over the telephone. I have personally delivered classroom handouts to students at their places of work, at unavoidable family gatherings, at funerals, in the hospital, in mental institutions, to students caught in traffic jams (I reach them on my bicycle), students on vacation or visiting their native countries, student soldiers conducting military maneuvers or on the battlefield, students trapped in burning buildings or beneath overturned cars, students fleeing from tsunamis or forest fires, students in the act of taking their own lives.

  I had a student whose cousin worked as an exotic dancer. One day, she came to me and explained that her cousin’s ex-husband was suing for custody of their infant daughter. The court had set a date for the hearing, and, if her cousin missed it, her baby would be summarily taken from her by the authorities. The child would then be handed over to her ex-husband, who was an alcoholic, unemployed, subject to blackouts, who had a record of multiple arrests for assault, and one for attempted robbery of a pharmacy. However, her cousin was scheduled to work on the date set by the court, and the club manager was a stickler for attendance.

  “He’s a demon,” she said. “There was a girl, she missed one time, because her brother had been hit by a car and she was the only one who could go with him to hospital, and he fired her. ‘No excuses,’ he says. ‘No excuses. Girls like you are lined up around the block to get a job here. An empty spot in the rotation is money out of my pocket. You can’t make it up? You get out. There are plenty more where you came from.’”

  Consequently, a Hobson’s choice: lose her job, or lose her child. Losing her job will mean she will almost certainly no longer be able to support the child in any case. There are very few alternative paying jobs available. If I would agree to substitute for her cousin at work while she attends this one court date, I would not only be helping a struggling single mother, but I would be emancipating her niece from a future of educational and economic privation. I point out that I am a man, but she says this would not be an insurmountable obstacle to my helping her.

  “She says they all wear wigs anyway,” she said. “I’ve seen her routine, and it isn’t hard, only working the pole—that’s the only tricky part, that and the splits, but she isn’t on for that long at a time. You’re a Professor, you’re a smart man, you could pick it up in a few minutes.”

  She snaps her fingers. I point out that, since she is a woman and resembles her cousin far more than I do, perhaps she might be the better substitute.

  “I have to work, though!” she says. “And you gave us a ten page research paper! When am I supposed to do that? Look, the day she’s going to miss is a week day, during the day. Nobody will be there. Meaning that in full respect you are not much bigger than s
he is, her stuff could fit you, and even if it didn’t, there are some heavier girls working there who could lend you a thong or something.”

  The experience was extremely edifying. I did not perform, as the manager did not consider me an acceptable replacement, even if I chose to dance as myself and not as a counterfeit female. He was, however, so moved by the lengths to which I was prepared to go for the benefit of my student’s cousin, that he did not fire her for her absence, but only docked her salary for the next two months. Unfortunately, the cousin of my student did not attend court that day after all, because the subway system shut down for seven hours, trapping her in the tunnels. Her husband received custody of her daughter, and, within a week, he had evidently left the baby behind in a public park. He simply forgot all about her. When he remembered and rushed back, hours later, distraught, the baby was gone. As far as I know, nothing has since been heard of the child. My student stopped attending my classes and, despite some very promising early paper assignments, she failed the course. I never saw her again. Very few people take such responsibilities as these into account when they consider the demands of the teaching profession.

  *

  I’m always squinting through a smog of unexpressed thoughts and unacknowledged feelings, and hemmed in by unconscious fears and unintelligent aversions. My brain is choked with too much un. Growing up, my brain never got entirely solid; it still has soft spots, which is why I’m forgetful and emotional, a good mimic, quick with languages, still an Aesopian.

  I met ________ on a certain street to discuss the next action. We passed a storefront full of morning shows on television screens. Everybody watches these programs, they say, and I say I don’t and I wouldn’t like meeting Everybody if they are a reflection of Everybody’s taste. They have something for everynobody on this thing. The people on screen sit there and jive over their coffee around a table, by extension your coffee, your table, your airtime filling up with their drivel so you can’t think how much better life could be if you, for example, led a strike at your place of work. These friends of yours, like your movie star friends and your pop star friends, who won’t talk to you in the street and silently roll up their mercedes windows when you appear, just like real friends, who won’t talk to you unless it’s under controlled conditions where they are getting paid or some kind of publicity out of it and they always know exactly where the security guards are at all times. I’d call them ghouls but I like ghouls too much, friendly carrion eaters living in the graveyard and eating corpses because they can’t afford rent and groceries, I think the name of the monster is “TV personality” in your closet or under your bed ready to snatch you up and freeze you in an interview trap forever—the blandits.

  Watching for a moment ... there it is again ... that sick off-kilter sour drunken no-key melody, sick behind the happy ads and the normal images, telling you that something is fundamentally wrong, intuiting to you the howling cities and the screaming country and the groaning suburbs.

  *

  Professor Clark spots Professor Crest coming up the walkway ten minutes before their one o’clock appointment. He looks like Pinocchio, all grown up and transformed into a perfect prig, scrutinizing his watch, like a living piece of 1950’s clip art but with something uncertainly off. Moving in straight lines, he goes directly into the building. The knock on her office door coincides exactly with the first note of the campanile ringing out one o’clock, and in he comes. He holds out his left hand and she recognizes the off note at once—left handed. The watch had been on his right wrist, the briefcase in his left.

  “Professor Clark? Ronald Crest.”

  “Of course you are,” she says too hastily and winces. “Pleased to meet you,” she adds a little hastily and a bit louder than necessary. “Please come in.”

  He thanks her and crosses to the indicated desk chair, flipping up his briefcase already in anticipation of setting it deftly across his knees, perching erect on the edge of the seat.

  “Thank you so much for coming,” she says.

  He raises his right hand as if he were holding a dinner tray.

  “The bank is there to save and lend.”

  “Workers work and customers spend.”

  His white oval economist’s mark makes his face seem smaller than it is, like a doll’s face. The color is just a shimmer of white that doesn’t obscure the skin or the features; on him, it’s almost like a veil, barely visible. Minutes after meeting him, it melts directly into his face and she ceases to be aware of it, only noticing it again when she happens to look away and back.

  She recounts for him the same shopworn story of the last few weeks of Vincent Long’s life. He’d been more of a phantom than ever, no one had seen much of him, no one knew much about him, most people had not even been aware he’d been sacked, no one cared much. Her answers are recorded on a little device, and he is also making notes on a yellow pad that is nearly filled with columns of meticulous, microscopic handwriting.

  “You write so small!”

  “Yes,” he says drily. “Did you have a sexual relationship with Professor Long?”

  “Yes,” she says.

  For all his punctilio, she doesn’t sense any disapproval. He receives her answer as impassively as he had the other information she’d provided, recording it diligently. He has the whitest eye-whites she’s ever seen.

  “When did you last speak with him?”

  She answers promptly. That is a piece of information she has recycled so often lately that it isn’t necessary to think about it anymore.

  “Did you quarrel?”

  “No.”

  “Did you break up?”

  “No. We weren’t really together like that, it was more casual than that. We just saw each other now and then. I’ve been seeing someone else, too.”

  “At the same time?”

  “Yes.”

  She is getting nothing from him, no emotional response. He makes a note.

  “He knew,” she adds.

  The head nods without looking up. Another note is made.

  “Are you still seeing this other man?”

  “Not any more,” she says. “And it wasn’t a man.”

  “Her name?”

  “Lorraine. Whitehead.”

  “Does she work at the college?”

  “No, she’s not working.”

  “Where does she live?”

  “Ratsberg.”

  “Where is that? Roughly.”

  “Downtown, by the river.”

  “What did she look like?”

  Professor Clark looks down unhappily.

  “I don’t see ...”

  He waits.

  “... what that has to do with ...”

  “Have the police asked you about this?”

  “No.”

  “There might be a lead there they have not examined.”

  He’s just being thorough; that’s obviously his nature, she thinks. She studies him. The sort of man who eats all his vegetables, never uses contractions, and budgets every penny.

  “I don’t see the point,” she says. “She wasn’t a jealous lover gunning him down to have me all to herself.”

  A derisive laugh slips in underneath that last sentence.

  “Perhaps,” he says right away, “she was unable to find you on some occasion and went looking for you at his house. Perhaps she might have seen something there. That she would have witnessed what happened, I would not go so far as to say, but if she had seen him in the company of someone else, that might be very important.”

  If she weren’t watching his face as he spoke, she would have missed the little delicacy as he says “what happened.” That is plainly as much for his own benefit as for hers; he doesn’t like to say anything more explicit, because he doesn’t want to bring the image too vividly to life in his mind’s eye.

  “It’s possible. She did know where he lived.”

  He nods twice.

  “Well, she’s about in her mid thirties, black hair wor
n pretty long, about my height, slimmer. Very fit, athletic.”

  She clears her throat.

  “Pretty.”

  “Have you heard from her recently?”

  “No. She just went away.”

  “When did you meet her?”

  “About six months ago.”

  “May I have her phone number, please?”

  She recites it from memory.

  He asks her a number of other questions, then gets up to leave with very precise and clear expressions of gratitude.

  “She has a scar,” she adds. “Above her left eye, half hidden in the eyebrow.”

  In the interval as he once again extracts his pad and makes his notation, she anticipates with a pang of alarm the terrible solitude that will close around her once he is gone and the door is shut.

  “What am I thinking,” she asks herself aloud. “I can send you her picture if you want.”

  “Please do,” he says.

  “‘Please do!’ Too much.”

  “The Surfeit is One.”

  “Oh, before you go ... I ... Would you ...?”

  Bashfully, she holds her wallet out for him to bless.

  “Of course,” he answers.

  The blessing is done by pinching thumb and the first two fingers of one hand together and then making a dipping motion above the wallet, as if inserting a coin.

  *

  “I don’t want to talk to you,” the building superintendent says. Not polite, but at least he is clear.