Animal Money

by Michael Cisco

  Point of information: we are all broke, permanently. So, it is moved that we are going to make our own money. Right away, it must be laid down that we are not talking about counterfeiting. We are not going to be counterfeiting. The people who make the money we have been using up to now are the ones who have been doing the counterfeiting. They counterfeit us. By fashioning our own money, we are going to bring this dastardly counterfeiting scheme to a close at last because from now on we are going to be the ones who make the value we have always actually already made all along.

  The plan will have two phases, Carolina: incubation, followed by cosmic cubism. In the incubation phase we’ll circulate the money hermetically among a select, elite cadre consisting exclusively of absolutely anybody and everybody whatwhoever who might want it, giving that money a chance to build up to viable infectionary level. Then we give Virgin Dollars (VD) to the financial markets and bond markets and banks and investors and embrokeners and slick up the members of the board with them until they’re all stricken with Human Interest Value (HIV), the virus that causes AIDS (that stands for Anti-Investor-Driven Society).

  We gather together in groups, some in this room, some in another, and, when the maestro opens up his pants and waves the magic wand over the magic hat, we all lean in and get down to money making. The coins and bills begin to pile up; they skid along the floor, heaps crashing quietly into heaps. They spin, frisk, and dance with a kind of monetary life. Tiny black panthers, mountain lions padding on the desk, on the floor, they are animal money. The old woman gathers broken glass from the floor and holds it out to me loose in her fist. The car crasher is part of the crowd, being pushed aside like clothes hanging in a closet, slips to the floor and shoots vanilla clear in his arm. Turn me up a corpse with eyes bright as a baby’s, feeling each soft red word thud in my head. Breathe out a long cool cloud of vanilla vapor, cool pale vanilla money unfolding in your palm, vanilla coins soft and cool as fluffy snowflakes trickle from mint fingertips. Tallying up a number that can never be counted, that eludes you with the languidly emancipated mood of a long, sexy dream. That one you, smitten, are looking for, in beautiful places, is the number.

  You take bites of water. The smooth, lunar feeling sighs and the elongated desert night party, the pool, the fresh perfumes on the women guests, a druggy delirium that is more lucid than sobriety. Coming off the old standard is risky, even before we begin talking about law and order. It’s so fantastic that actually doing it, going through with it, might send you languorously spinning out into the upholstered lotus fantasy jungle that’s easy to enter and hard to leave. The belt around the chest suddenly snaps and you can take a deep breath for the first time in longer than you can remember. Gravity stops dragging you down, but you need ground under your feet to get anywhere. You can make your own money in your own heart and settle down into a deep spiritual tradition that reconciles you not only to your own suffering but to everyone else’s, including the parts that you yourself are causing. That solo money is costly to get and even costlier to use, especially for everybody else. What we are smooshing together here is money that someone besides you can see and use, money for trade and commerce, sex money, teaching money, animal money, story money.

  We got it in heaps, dripping from our fingers now like precious lead. Like cowrie shells and candy coins. We’re starting to feed it into the vending machines, the subway pass machinery, the tip jars, the bodegas ... We’re getting it into those banks, right under the walls of the fortresses, badly built, badly maintained, guarded by thieves. The counterfeiting machinery they keep hidden away behind those crumbling, ivy-covered walls is jamming up.

  “Where the fuck are all these fucking cowrie shells fucking coming fucking from?” “How the fuck should I fucking know?” “Well fucking get them the fuck out of that fucking shit!” “Fucking fuck fucking fuck fucking fuck!” “Fuck you!” “Fuck you!” Biff! Bap!

  Keep those cowries coming. Grind them fine and spread the paste evenly across every credit card. Replace your card number with your cowrie number and shove it up a money machine’s ass. The machine is supposed to barf and retch, but instead it coos and wiggles at this unexpected pleasure. Pay with an edit card and give yourself a raise. Our bankers have all been fired.

  *

  It should be noted that, with the exception of a), p), and t) in no case did SuperAesop work alone. The overall pattern clearly shows a persistently repeated effort to establish extended connections of social efficacy, almost invariably with disappointing results. The data necessary to determine the causes for these disappointments was not included in the dossier on this question and must be the topic of a different report.

  I compiled this data over several weeks and, during that time, I began to collate other historical information touching the subject. As I was personally responsible for the alteration in the Earth’s chromosphere, colloquially known as the Color Shift, I was interested to know if the change affected the subject. He first refers to it in a journal entry dated the day of the change, speculating that it might have been caused by an operation or experiment carried out by a private military force. Thereafter, the ramifications of the change take more of his attention, and, as more accurate information becomes available through unofficial and improvised communications networks, the subject’s attitude toward the change becomes less and less guarded. My name occurs several times in what I may say simply are affirmative terms.

  The subject’s journal entry for 7/21/26 describes an encounter with a man made entirely out of glass, encountered by the subject in a laundromat. The subject uses the restroom at the laundromat, which is situated in the rear, and notes in passing that the back door is padlocked and barricaded behind stacks of boxes. However, only moments after having left the restroom, the subject observes the glass man emerging from it himself, and is confused both by the man’s obvious inhumanity and by his sudden appearance from an empty room in which he could not possibly have concealed himself, etc. The subject reports that the glass man attaches himself to him, follows him, will not be rebuffed, and answers all queries and expostulations with articulate but unintelligible gurgling sounds. Unable to get free of the glass man, the subject resigns himself to his company.

  Later that day, the glass man physically prevents the subject from entering a certain building in which the subject has an appointment. The glass man restrains the subject by main force and drags him to an adjacent building, preventing him from crying out or otherwise seeking assistance. The subject then says that he witnessed, from a safe distance, the arrival of two cars in front of the building he had been prevented from entering. He identifies them as unmarked police vehicles, the drivers and passengers as “detective types.” Shortly thereafter, he saw his supposed contact emerge from the building and consult with the men in the parked cars, looking up and down the street. By this time, the subject had cottoned to the fact that the appointment was a pretext for an arrest, which the glass man’s intervention permitted him to escape.

  There is further information about the glass man that need not be detailed here. I bring up this material to explain my own actions. It became at once clear to me that I had myself sent the glass man back in time to assist the subject. A moment’s further reflection and I realized that there was an underlying purpose in sending the glass man back in time which utterly dwarfs the significance of preventing the subject’s arrest—namely, that sending the glass man back in time was a way to establish a link connecting this future with the subject’s present, and thus insuring that the one will be realized in the other.

  The idea drove every other from my head. I was aflame with the intensest desire to be that future self who brought about this change.

  The means were obvious: I would slow my glass man into the past. The difficulty lay in the fact that he would have to return to the Earth from Koskon Kanona. The voyage back, while steadily reducing the intervening distance to zero, unfortunately would not also reduce the intervening time to zero; in fact, the o
pposite would occur, and the intervening time would actually double.

  I have long been interested in the Stockum Solution to the puzzle of time travel: namely, that time travel would be possible if the universe were a spinning cylinder of infinite length. The difficulty with this solution is that observation has demonstrated the universe to be neither cylindrical nor spinning. So, to achieve time travel, it would be necessary to set the universe spinning in such a way as to give it a cylindrical shape, which could be done with the application of my slowing rays according to the plan I submitted to the Koskon Kanonan Science Intendant.

  The experiment was conducted on 13/13/7007, using an array of 635,000 slow generators situated at the points in space indicated. By 65/07/7007, confirmation was received that the universe had developed spin. The precise moment of spin initiation was marked by spontaneous nosebleeds, reported by all known persons. Omnicylindrification took effect as of 143/17/7007, marked by spontaneous dancing and orgiastic delirium. I took action the moment I recovered, and sent the glass man to the restroom in the laundromat on Earth by slowing him against the cosmic rotary motion, and angling him with extreme precision. The calculations required for this were greatly more complex and time-consuming to resolve than were the ones necessary to spin and cylindrify the universe. It was necessary to angle the glass man through space so that he would achieve maximum density only at that particular point in space, the restroom in the laundromat, and only at the moment immediately after the departure of SuperAesop from that spot. I am pleased to add that this experiment was awarded the blue ribbon at this year’s Koskon Kanonan science fair. At present, I am embroiled in a debate with numerous citizens and officials about whether or not I should restore the universe to its previous, non-spinning condition or leave it as it now is.

  Assiyeh stops writing and turns to look out the window, because the ceiling of clouds has just leapt out of sight, suddenly unveiling an entire night sky filled with unfamiliar constellations. SuperAesop has pulled over, come what may. Nature calls. No cyclops lights, but they could be hiding in the night out there. No sound, though. They haven’t sighted another car except for their unwanted escorts since they reached the Etismen roundabout. Another moment and the stars are gone again, hidden by instantaneous overcast.

  Assiyeh turns away from the clouds and SuperAesop turns towards them, watching them part and shift, Orion’s belt coming and going through the gaps. Carolina stands beside him on the main drag of Etsimen, takes his arm, tugging him gently in the direction of the drugstore. Her grip stabilizes him. He had to get out of the car and walk around a little in place, stamping his feet trying to pound out the shakiness that took him over when he unblocked the offramp. Etsimen is just three lights, this empty street, this silence. He looks back up at Orion’s belt. Suddenly two huge oxen round the corner and lumber toward them, passing them, down the middle of the street. Oxen with shaggy, mud-caked pelts, buzzing with flies, ponderous horns, scarlet irises; these massive beasts blast them with intense barnyard funk and something else, fresh cut grass. The smell of the stars. Some stars. Carolina is still tugging.

  “All right, OK,” he says.

  They go around shitty hatchback, pinging and wheezing to itself, and into the drugstore. That’s a weird transition for a nose to make, from barnyard to drugstore. What does it smell like in here? Scented candles, floorwax, candy and air conditioning. The storefront is no more than twenty feet across but the aisles plunge into the distance like runways lined with perforated white enamel shelves, lit with an even spectral light from the excessively low ceiling. He can reach right up and brush the powder dry ceiling tiles without having to straighten his arm all the way. The shelves started within a couple of feet of the front of the store, just far enough back so that the door could swing open without hitting anything. There was no register up front, nowhere to pay. Carolina leads him toward the back, where the pharmacy counter should be. She’s going to buy blue liquid glass crystal perfume drugs, blue phosphorus, luminescent blue liquid glass crystal perfume mathematic graph time drugs in tiny rare decanters or neat geometric packets in wooden caskets, the paper wrapping carefully pressed with the seal of outer space. After walking down an aisle for about fifteen minutes I pause in the tobacco department, staring at a death window set in among the other goods and, like them, hanging from a metal rod that hooks into the backboard. It’s a black pane that I think I could stick my whole arm inside, but it would be like thrusting my arm into outer space, my arm would freeze and split. I bend forward to peer into it and it instantly fills my field of vision, my body goes numb, I can see tiny figures dressed like economists nestling in among the stars, see their livid whiteface markings, their drab attire, their long, pensive faces lost in thought and floating among the stars like dead leaves on a black stream of sluggish, chill waters. What are they thinking about? It’s weird to see this earnest purposeful thinking on faces just drifting ... they’re dreaming with their eyes half open and it’s pushing them out among the stars like a star drive.

  *

  It happened most often when I would throw a glance at him sidelong—the light flashing across his surface would reveal for an instant another city of yawning white squares as vast as canyons striped with stark shadows of hard-edged black. Tiny windows like arrow slits in blank, furnace-white walls. Silent, coordinated action of people, machines, and animals, seen from a distance. A naked pair copulating in the center of an empty white quad a mile wide, coming together in the great white space under black sky, the luminous erection of the Teeming. A narrow handcart with stacked jars of human brains sloshing in formaldehyde, all sandwiched between sheets of thick glass. A dancing figure with balls of bright blue flame between his fingers, playing them across his fingers so they gamble and skip over the scorched, puckering skin like frisking little animals, the dancer seems at first to be a silhouette and then you notice he’s scorched black all over.

  Then into a vast chamber illuminated by a faceted red bolt of sunset that leans across the void like a dim chevron. In its footprint are carpets that absorb and glow hotly with the light, and mosaic inlays coolly sparkling. The sun crimsons its red right in the center of the single colossal window, high atop a great cascade of crescent stairs with one spacious landing halfway up, on which there stands a monumental fountain of some clear material. The place is filled with people attired in a carnival profusion of ceremonial finery—masks, feathers, robes, scapulars, stoles, winged hats, girdles, anklets, skirts, albs, paint, and so on.

  Smoke rises from the censers, people walk in labyrinth patterns, and sourceless music cries and shouts like an incessant chord, countless voices and timbres swaying through the minutes like sunbeams swaying underwater, going in and out of a wandering, urgent harmony. Dancers spill down from the landing, one central dancer with a red headdress and the rest of them in white and carrying swords that slice off their long braids as they spin. Mist bubbles from the fountain, water acts like smoke, rising in webs and coils up into the air, smoke acts like water, tossed in heavy globules and splashing in the clear basin. The people waiting to receive the dancers as they elaborate their way down the stairs are also dancing in brief repeated gestures. Some form lines and bow, raising and lowering their heads like pistons, others drop down into a sort of a curtsey and then up again, others frolic arm in arm, leaping high. When the dancers have arrived, everyone turns and goes out through a pair of double doors that swing gigantically open to reveal a sunset garden park with flowerbeds and charcoal-smudge trees and all kinds of wild animals.

  The people enjoy the garden park. They nod like flowers, wave their hands up and down like tree branches, start and stare like wild animals, glint in the fading sunlight like the windows of the shrine with red sunlight pouring out through its green door. The trees are like the breathing fringe of the twilit sky, reflecting timelessly melancholy thin sweetness in the softening shadows while the promenaders are half melted into living smoke creatures by the gloom. Then the sun drops below the
horizon and the moon jumps up over the trees, engraving all of us with dark vividness against the indigo dusk, everything swinging from red to blue just like that. The promenaders stop where they are and gaze up at a moon that fills nearly all the sky, throwing dimly clear shadows behind the trees, breaking up their smeared huddle so each one stands distinct again.

  The events of the day unfold shapelessly; people are getting up and going to bed, working, relaxing, all the time. There are no frenzied commuter hours and there is no diminuendo after a certain time at night. Activity is constant, but less intense. Assiyeh sleeps for about half the day, her small bedroom is almost a closet, filled with the oven-like glow of baffled sunlight.

  A knock on the door. The glass man sticks his head in and gurgles, time to get up. Assiyeh stirs and rises, washes up and eats a typically flavorless Buzzatin breakfast, porridge and hot caffeine water, while reading the newspaper. She checks her money pipe; Buzzatian money consists of living jellies, like violet-tinted bubbles that are slick and cool to the touch but leave no trace on the fingers. The pipe has phosphorescent grooves on its interior, numbered from one to twelve, with one being nearest the bottom, to tell you how much you have left. 4, in this case. She smokes a cigarette in the dark room, looking out the window at overcast day, the looming white topless towers and cliff-like black gulfs between them, criss-crossed by threadlike little skyways. Plumes of steam float by, carried off toward the sea. The glass man enters the room and gurgles again. She remains where she is, and he approaches her.