Animal Money

by Michael Cisco

  This is the address. While it is not a luxury building, it is well maintained. The rent is not low. Therefore, Lorraine Whitehead either has money or some employment she chose not to reveal to Professor Clark. It is possible she was simply dissipating her savings during her time here, but that is not typical behavior, unless she were also intending to commit suicide.

  Her affair with Professor Clark began a few days after we first began to discuss our theory in San Toribio, and ended shortly before the death of the late Professor Long. In fact, Professor Clark last saw Lorraine Whitehead the day after the late Professor Long returned to Canada.

  She might have killed herself. But, if this were something she had arranged with the late Professor Long, why not die with him? Was it a loss of nerve? Or was she his assassin?

  Are the rest of us being stalked by our own assassins, now?

  In my daily bulletin to the others, I advise them to look closely at their friends and associates, and to pay close attention to any newcomers. Obvious precautions. However, since we are all new to San Toribio, it is impossible not to make new acquaintances.

  That night, a dream of train travel.

  I gaze down into a blue, nocturnal welter of glistening tracks and silently rolling cars, their windows glowing scarlet and lamps throwing distinct gleams out into space, down below. It somehow makes me think of a pit of snakes.

  The train carries me through valleys surrounded by sharply triangular, snowless mountains under a completely overcast sky. The daylight vanishes all at once. Starless blackness, even inside the train, only the sense of motion in the dark. Flashes of lightning illuminate the landscape. We descend into the horizontal forest. I can see huge gemlike stars with imperfect, uneven, different-colored light, through the huge trunks. The forest grows sideways from a rock face that plunges from a middling elevation into a gigantic crevasse whose bottom has never been found. The train travels along one of the massive, petrified trunks which span the ravine like a bridge. Then it passes into the opposite rock face, the sheer wall of steely rock; the interior is honeycombed with tunnels dimly illuminated with electrical sparks in copper baskets. In fact, with my slightest movement, static electricity flourishes over my clothes.

  With an alarming rush, the train emerges from the ground and begins immediately to curve widely to the north, giving me a distinct view of the precipices and the scored, blackened metal walls of the town, my destination. Raked by incessant lightning, the walls are a necessary protection, to keep the town and its inhabitants from being blasted to smithereens, but the walls are also, very practically, wired up. They store the electricity from the lightning so that it can be used in more manageable doses by the town dwellers.

  The name is something like Mavelin, or Meurival. The town has many entrances, as many as any other town, and a formula is required to pass through. The train must have let me out at a depot outside town, or maybe it was only an open crossing. If I brought any baggage along, it is abandoned on the train now. I am unsure if I have the right money to buy any new clothes or other necessities here, if they use money, if they sell anything. I might have to borrow clothes from someone. Ill fitting, unwashed clothes infested with lice. The entrance before me has a box on a stone post. I come up to the box and look inside. The dark interior of the box starts to glow with a bluish, flaming mist; a face appears and speaks three sentences. It could be cautioning me about something, or it could simply be a local catechism. I go up to the entrance, which has an attendant. As I come up to him, getting ready to repeat the phrase phonetically, he deliberately turns his face to mine and I see the ghost of that other face appear over his own features like an enamelled mask, the mouth repeating the sentences in the same hollow tone. The face disappears from him and now I think I have it over my own face. I hear the sentences repeated, and I think I am the one repeating it, in the same voice.

  The attendant stands there for a moment longer, and I wonder if he expects money from me. Then he waves me inside impatiently, and I realize he was simply waiting for me to enter. Another attendant stands by the door, and as I come inside I turn to repeat the procedure with him, feeling some unhappiness about the prospect of so much of the same thing, but he waves me away with a look on his face that says I have it all wrong, that he is the exit repeater, not the entrance repeater. Then again, walking away, it occurs to me he might be simply shirking his duty, not wanting to bother with an impotent tyro like me, and I wonder if I should go back and insist, as my not having fulfilled all the proper forms might leave me vulnerable to invalidation later on.

  The town is laid out in trenches that scale the slope in narrow terraces between steep walls. I can reach out and almost span the lane with my arms. The houses are semidetached boxes with doors opening directly on the street and people dressed in silk sprawl on thresholds fanning themselves and blinking at me impassively as I go by. The air smells like nothing. I see no animals, nothing alive but the people. Up a flight of steps and through the arched portal leading to the next trench up, steadily climbing until I reach the monastery or campus that is both highest up and furthest back, set under a projecting canopy of rock fringed with gold and silver streamers which undulate impressively, like seaweed. Now I notice some horned animals perched on the slopes above, although I see nothing they might live on.

  In this monastery I will see for myself living examples of Old Believer economists, who refused to change with the times and preserve the archaic practices. Coming into the open courtyard I see no one stirring except a woman in a room off to one side; it is a stone room with a heavy, very carefully assembled table. The Old Believers are famous for their furniture. The woman is sitting on a stool at one corner of the table, doing the crossword in a newspaper. She is built like a weight lifter, stocky and powerful, dressed entirely in lustreless black duck. Work shoes or boots, trousers, an apron, a smock, and a brimless black cap, just like a bottle top, pulled down nearly to her eyebrows. Her hands are broad and pink; her face is too, and spattered across the nose and cheeks with soot that makes the whites of her eyes and the edges of her eyelids seem the more noticeably pale. In her free hand she holds a phosphorescent white coffee mug full of inky black coffee, and a stubby black pipe between her index and middle finger. Noticing me, she smiles, putting down her pen and nodding. I get the idea we are meant to remain silent; there was something in the old writings about caution in speech and speech out of season. She takes a final swig from her mug, deftly transferring the pipe to the corner of her mouth. Then she produces a round metal matchbox with a screw-off lid, pulls out a match, slides her backside out a little and strikes it on her hip, lights the pipe, tosses the match insouciantly over her shoulder, and, tamping the pipe speculatively with her thumb, she recaps the match cylinder and puts it away, then gets up and comes over to me with her right hand out for me to shake. She takes my hand with the peculiarly gentle grip of someone who is not only very strong but very skillful and deliberate in the use of strength. What I took for the soot on her face is a galaxy map of black stars.

  Pausing first to nod acknowledgment to a bearded man dressed in exactly the same way, the butt of a cigar in his mouth, who has begun scraping the courtyard with a rubber spatula, she magnanimously shows me around, taking me to a scriptorium with a double row of high desks, for hand copying of economics textbooks, lining the walls of a narrow hall with a high ceiling of thick dark beams and bright windows of unstained glass, where images are delineated in lead outlines but not colored. I marvel at the beautifully rendered treatises she opens for me, with perfect charts and tables, magnificently illuminated formulae, all neat and clean, black and white, the lettering so exact it can barely be told apart from typing. There is also a dormitory reserved for economists in hallucinatory trances induced by the ritual use of a special fungus found only in certain remote valleys where the land becomes uncharacteristically boggy. The fungus is cultivated on the skin, and causes visions whenever it fruits, covering the affected area with a feathery patch
of white down or fur that sheds and tends to wind around the host, so many of the economists I see are partially wrapped up in cottony webs, and a few are completely cocooned in the stuff. They squirm from time to time and give feeble cries. Attendants shuffle along the aisles giving them water; they are not able to keep food down during these trances, which can go on for days. Against the far wall are economists sleeping off the effects of mathematics intoxication brought on by certain varieties of calculus forgotten now in the outer world. I am also shown the domed garden of the indicator, all forbidding stone on this side, the far side, all clear windows, facing out over the void and illuminated by special arc lights to foster the growth of plants. As a participant in the “modern heresy” I am not permitted entry to this holy place, but, since I do wear the mark and abide by the Oaths, and since I regularly complete my test before going to bed every night, and separate the beads every morning without fail, I am allowed to stand a little before the threshold and to look in through the open door of bronze with a golden lintel. Inside there is a fabulous profusion of incredible plants, and the Indice enthroned near the curved wall of glass on her golden throne; her completely wild cries of ecstasy are the first vocal sounds I have heard up here, apart from the murmurs of the hallucinators. The Indice, tiny from this distance, is naked except for a tiara and other ritual jewelry. Among other qualifications, the Indice is selected above all for her skill or ability in reaching multiple orgasms: every week, she is required to have exactly one thousand orgasms. As the thousandth approaches, her howls of bliss begin to fracture into succinct prophecies about market behavior, currency fluctuations, and the less obvious influences that are likely to affect the economy in coming months. Indices are retired after one hundred thousand orgasms, as I recall, going “up the mountain.”

  A bell sounds from the back of the campus, and, with a gesture, my guide silently instructs me to wait where I am, then hurries off. I look up at the stone roof a hundred feet above me, then down at the grid of stone. They will fill your shoes with the distilled essence of forgetting or barely recalling your first love, blue and gold, stuff your feet in and squash it between your toes. A well, like a wishing well from a greeting card, stands near me. The late Professor Long is inside. He stands at the far end of the long well, with the black sheen of the water sideways underneath him, with his hands in his pockets and his profile turned toward me. I am unable to see whether his lips are moving. The uninjured side of his face is turned toward me. His words are only intermittently intelligible.

  “United States CONGAMPHLGH at 1⁄10 ransembloh cases. Polsagal-maxnah currency can declare executive China, smaller currency rate, the pound into individual currency, the quisben issuing lunsem-neph same ransembloh.”

  In a flash I see them together. The image is gone but does not fade, and seems to gather a secondary intensity, phosphorescing invert colors like an afterimage in the eye. She on top of him. Obscene frenzy. Timed fiendishly to begin at the instant of plunging in. The lower portion of the body rocks violently while the upper part sways. The face is turned away. The head flung back. Rising and slowing with the rise.

  “Same authority as iraimbilanja. Different authority by the zoraston degree, zugeh by dollar, the note any 5 plig in Federales. Nubrod supported for uomplina nohahal; either currencies quamsa fixed huadrongunda rates, bank for Icelandic burise-dollar, lunsemneph currencies over chramsa divisions.”

  I know the face but not the name. San Toribio hotel room. Her body is darker against his paler one. I remember the photograph of them together, with the devilish inscription. Blind and groping. A second flash.

  “Purblox prices quisben inflation. One has either re-stamped currency services for fractional distinct dollars, the Tardemah distinct. One creates institutions, Canada ransembloh so khoums units reduced in Reserve of autonomy in control government, historic united credit non-decimal huadrongunda notes forgiven. Currencies over monetary. The fallen lunsanfah Euro as Spanish prices divided coxech control Francs, and area noxochamarh coins exercised where 1 achna is 1 plig centime if lunzapha is valued at 1 Franc.”

  “Professor Long—who shot you? Did you shoot yourself, Professor Long? If someone shot you, you have a responsibility to let us know.”

  Clear now that I could not see the wound in his head because I am looking directly into the hole. Lakes of sewage. Smoking with flies. Dark brown sky. I shoot down fuming pathways lined with packing crate and pallet shacks roofed with plastic sheets, like a racing ghost. The people are hungry sick and naked. Undulating slums built on the thick rind of buoyant trash scabbing over the oceans and lakes. Not one inch untenanted. There is a city of gleaming banks and chain stores, their bright facades already dingy, faded and scratched. An overloaded tram staggers off its tracks and slumps to the curb, spilling passengers from the roof and clinging to the sides. The ruddy-faced men with carefully coiffed silver hair and the busty girls sitting with them do not even glance out the windows of the restaurant. The lights go out. The streetlights droop and fold up like pillbug-legs under a blanket of listless nothingness. The glass flops out of the restaurant windows, runs down the walls, oozes bubbling in the street, sour brown air pours in on the patrons strangling and melting them. Pink slime dotted with silver hairpieces and breast implants pools in the grates and potholes, slums are flattened under an invisible planetary rolling pin. Everyone is turning to mush, their soggy flesh curdles and sloughs off green skeletons. Bloated seagulls without wings or feathers strut from cadaver to corpse. Then no movement. No vermin. No wind. No clouds. No sounds. The dead sun stands at the zenith forever.

  “The ouguiya rate in United is 100 names in the system. Use Canada or its VAN-CORHG ariary at 1. The Subliga sample, facilitate of huadrongunda circulation words in ransembloh, at promina-bamigah historic rate. Classified picalodox sponsoring policy. In Australia, currently over coins as case, silver ratrugem cosneth can non-decimal asemission for currency ...”

  He tears himself free of the dream, gets out of his hotel bed and glides dizzily into the bathroom, peeling off his sopping night costume, splashes water onto his face, unable to get his bearings in a weird medium of vacuum and light. Stepping back to look at his dripping face, his enormous penis feels the light and goes off painfully spurting semen onto the counter, his knees keep collapsing under him, hyphens draw and erase themselves in his eyes and he drops suddenly onto the toilet seat. He sits there in a bizarre confusion and misery, letting his head flop back against the wall and then swing forward between his hands, unable to find a bearable posture, unable to wake up, to think. He creeps forward onto the floor, dragging down a towel to collapse on, and curls there, looking up past the counter at the white globes of the lights set in a box above the mirror. In San Toribio they are voting. Heaps of votes are uncrated and counted aloud in front of the polling site before being sealed in ballot boxes and sent to the electoral committee headquarters; there are rumors that ballot boxes are being stolen or tampered with, but the police repeat that no boxes are unaccounted for. The AUP seems to be leading, but every time their margin grows toward the tipping point, mysterious spurts bring the NFP back into a dead heat.

  I see Professor Crest when he comes to the wellmouth. I had a feeling he was going to the monastery. Assiyeh will go there next, but not for some time. This understanding is all of a piece with the sort of quasi-knowledge I now have, in my new situation. Which is not a new situation. What has happened is, I am now no longer in my own way. I am still in the way, but I have become transparent, mostly. Largely. More transparent than not, and much more than I was. The result of this change is that I have quasi-knowledge of the formation of the concept of animal money, which was the effect of an intervention in the conversation of we five economists in San Toribio by an unknown something. It isn’t unknown. I know what it is. Describing it is a chore, though.

  It is not unique, or at least I see no reason why it should be, no essential attribute that requires it to be. It’s a process elemental. I don’t li
ke this term, but it’s the best one I have been able to come up with so far. An elemental is an element acting as an agent, having agency, which means an element with a will of its own. Not the whole element, though. A part of the element has will. The whole element has will, but in an elemental, the element’s will is concentrated. It is not concentrated, will isn’t light, it can’t be focussed. What it is, is the elemental is a part of, is some of an element, a pure sample, the will of which has become an active agent; that’s wrong too. The will can only be active, so it’s redundant to think of it that way. The point is that the element’s will becomes an active agent among human beings. In this case, the element is language, or maybe economics. Economics is an element. This was an economics elemental, which would be a subvariety, why sub?, OK OK a variety of process elemental. I’m not just a corpse spinning metaphors; I can see this. I can’t see the elemental, but I see the wind it kicks up, and dust, and I can hear it whir like a storm yelling in the distance. The image of a windmill keeps coming into my head, or a turbine, something like that, but I can’t say whether or not that means anything, but when I look at them, the living ones who survived me, Crest and the others, the elemental is frisking around them and going in and out of their eyes and nostrils and ears and mouths and off their fingers like spectral plumbing connecting them together.

  The elemental wants to articulate itself, basically. It wants that the way an animal wants to reproduce. Except it doesn’t want that, it doesn’t reproduce, it just wants to grow, so it’s more like wanting to grow larger. Fatten itself up maybe. Against some future event that will reduce it, so get bigger in anticipation of being reduced to make sure there will be something left. The process elemental isn’t conscious; it has to do with consciousness but it isn’t aware, or maybe it is a little, but like a plant or a microbe might be, maybe. I can only judge by behavior. It must be internally self-operated because I don’t see any external control, and it moves in an impulsive, galvanic manner, underwater snail motion, sleepwalking, groping, that doesn’t strike me as entirely self-aware. To grow, it has to enter into human thinking, that’s its habitat, or growth medium. It cultures in human thoughts and then diversifies itself from human to human, using books and so on as charging stations or capacitors to regenerate, heal itself, inoculate itself against counter-arguments maybe, like a vaccine. It is fed—not fed, fanned, like a fire, by the current climatic conditions of thinking, and it needed the right conditions to grow in, like a seed flying through the air until it finds the right kind of soil, the right moisture, and so on. We were the right conditions and it grew in us. As it grows, it also generates more of the same kind of good conditions, like a tree whose overhanging branches might protect its own saplings, except that it isn’t reproducing, it’s just growing as, not a continuous single organism, and not as a bunch of independent organisms, so the elemental must be a kind of colony animal, or a chimera maybe, cobbled together out of different words, by which I mean not only words in the usual sense but also numbers and charts, any portable, adequately distinct unit that could connect one consciousness to another. When all this connection is going on and gets intense, the process elementals get attracted because this is to them what a plankton bloom is to whales, no it isn’t, it’s like an updraft that draws the clouds in laterally and then pushes them up once they enter the column of rising air. We generate the hot air and the elementals are drawn in, but not as passively as clouds. Less passive than clouds, but more active than air, so that they respond in a way that at least mimics consciousness or choice. Or preference. The elemental didn’t want us to have animal money. It didn’t have animal money to give us. Or it did, but not in the way you have a dollar in your wallet. It had animal money to give us in the sense that what it gave us doubled itself and doubled us, so that there was no exchange but a mutual augmentation. It may be that this function, which is manifested in its own transmission, was all we received from the elemental. Or the elemental just gave us itself, entire.