Animal Money

by Michael Cisco

  Well, but she’s made it. She doesn’t notice, but the ground under her feet is different, the sparks aren’t coming up when she steps any more, and the tumblers are all behind her. I want to yell out to her that’s she can stop, but she’s still in mush mode. There she is, crawling up a slope of loose rocks to take her place at the back of the line. Everybody on the line is sitting down, some still wear their canvas outfits, others have chucked them and stand or sit there in sweat-soaked clothes or stark naked. Just waiting. No conversation. They’re all wiped out, they all look like hell, scraping filings off their tongues with their fingernails. The line must have at least a hundred people in it, and it moves irregularly. Assiyeh got in line without any discernible moment of realization, still a zombie. Motionless for what seems like hours, and then shuffling right along. The line starts somewhere up around the bend. Who knows how long it is? There’s also something white up there, standing by the front of the line. Assiyeh thinks it must be a lonely guidepost or like a roadside shrine, until a flash of something transparent awakens in her the obvious fantasy that it might be a water cooler. I can see the awareness of her thirst hit her again, and she goes crazy, rips off the steaming canvas outfit and throws the spear into the rocks. Her clothes are wringing wet. After a while, another petitioner, an older man with silver hair and a face the color of boiled lobster, panting, coughing, staggers up the slope and drags himself into place behind Assiyeh in line.

  It turns out the white thing is a water cooler, with an elaborately-ornamented porcelain tank. The cup dispenser is long empty, so Assiyeh has to turn her head as far around as it will go and shove it under the tap. She drinks the tepid, slightly stale water in a frenzy, letting it run all over her face.

  “Hey!” the older man behind her calls hoarsely. “Hey! Don’t waste that!”

  By now there are other people behind him too, and they all add their voices feebly to his. But a man in a crisp white outfit is already refilling the tank, whistling a little ditty as water from nowhere pours out from between his uplifted hands. Assiyeh turns the corner. The front of the line is only a dozen or so patrons away. A steel enamel frame has been built into a cleft, and there’s a heavy brown curtain there. A yellow hand droops nervelessly between the labia, stirring once in a while to feel the material of the curtains. The first in line watches this hand with a hypnotically fixed eye. When the hand suddenly points at someone, that one is allowed to go in through the curtains.

  When Assiyeh’s turn finally comes, she pushes through the curtains without being able to see who the hand belongs to, and begins climbing an interminable flight of iron steps that ascends the mountain. She knows she’s supposed to get the form at the bottom of the mountain, but there was no place to get any form. Just the stairs. As she climbs, her legs aching unbelievably, her endurance already utterly spent, she is tortured by the idea that she might be turned away at the top for not having the form. She must be thinking that maybe the form was abolished or things have changed so that now you get the form at the peak and maybe submit it at the bottom when you get back down again, or maybe you have to go to some other fucking mountain.

  A gap opens in the clouds and the constellations wheel in the opening. Assiyeh is so taken aback by the sight of space, the night sky, untwinkling stars, that she stops where she is. This stairway has no landings, you have to hold on where you are, clutching the framework of the cage, which is made of metal so thin you’ll cut yourself if you clutch it. Assiyeh gets a weird look on her face, and she reaches out to the stars in a way that makes me think she’s lost it and she’s going to try to hug the sky and end up falling through the cage. Instead, her outstretched arms are laved in glowing sky sperm that resolves into a little shower of red bugs, maybe ants, and a sheet of wasp paper—it’s the form!

  *

  Meanwhile—what’s going on out there? The sirens wailing in chasmic streets have become caressing croons, the cops are billowy and roly-poly as balloons, their faces are sleeping and rumpled, their hands are floating like bundles of inflatable hot dogs drawing their slack boneless arms up in snaky belly-dance gestures as they walk down the street leaning half backwards—

  Meanwhile on screen a full-on pantomime commulistic upsurging has broken out across the US, everybody’s dressing freaky and quoting Marx—suddenly the impoverished urbanic, suburran, and rurative are clasped in solidarity and the cops and soldiers are going over—next thing you know bombs are going off everywhere and a clatter of AK-47s, not among the protestors, instead coming from mysterious persons who are alternately attacking them and posing among them, yesterday’s terrorists paid by the US to pose as revolutionaries, splitting their earnings to pay for a new form of female circumcision that removes the brain as well as the clitoris and the other half they take to Vegas where suspiciously prescient tycoon types with generic names have already set up halal casinos on a segregated strip built in hours by Chinese companies complete with 24 hour mosques, brothels stocked with wall to wall blondes, and an exact reproduction of the Burger King they demolished Mohammed’s house in Mecca to build. Who’s story is it? Or which one? I want to walk out of the theater, turn to go, walk right into a screen and look through it to see, on the far side, another darkened theater and the dim flicker over the faces turned toward me, watching me but as an image only, and there’s a screen behind those faces and through that the darkened theater and dim flicker over those faces, and to one side and another and in me I see the screens and the faces through the screens.

  *

  Back to the story.

  I’m driving Carolina to see one of the Uhuyjhn cities, and she won’t make small talk or flirt back or anything. She takes mescaline and asks me to go back to the story and fill in what happens next.

  OK so Assiyeh just found the form, and she looks up, and she sees that there are offices in the sky spreading out like an infinite graph that intersects with the vertex of the mountain peak at a single tingling spark that she can fit through. They’re like pueblos quarried into the sky, and they’re like opera boxes.

  It’s that dark corridor with illuminated doors and no walls again, and Assiyeh is going somewhere flanked by the two dandruff giants again. She’s like a little girl on an official business call with her father and his twin brother. Their faces are up too high, so she knows them by their dragging heavy hands, their breadloaf fingers curling up into the palms, half covered by stiff white cufflinked cuffs and hanging straight at their sides. Coarse hairs on the backs of the hands. Look up into cavernous, hairy nostrils.

  A succession of colorless images flashes on her. The inexplicable movement from one to the other is tied to her steps. Each one ends in a still photo.

  A woman, seen from a low angle, in a stone doorway, speaking and twirling a white tablecloth or towel. Stop.

  Boys in swim trunks flashing in silhouette past a bright open doorway waving thin arms, one stops framed in the door way to look up at the camera. Stop.

  A reclining, supercilious-looking man with a prominent nose talking, cigarette held up near his face, elbow resting on something, then swings it down to ash, lowering heavy-lidded eyes and saying something to himself with a mouth that warps and facets itself. Stop.

  Three men rounding a corner post and heading under a dark canopy of stone, the middle man in a pale suit and a snap brim hat and the other two in dark suits with swing ties and bare heads. Stop.

  A young girl with a stricken look on her face numbly descending a short flight of stone steps. Stop.

  An old woman stands up and begins to harangue someone, her old eyes furious, waving a relentless finger. Stop.

  A man, viewed from behind, sitting in a chair with his feet up, waves wash the shore down below, and he’s in the grip of a vivid fantasy. Now it lapses, and there’s a barely perceptible change; the body slackens, the blood settles and the pressure dome around the head shrinks back down into the brain. Stop.

  A boy, starting up out of a nightmare still with his mask of fear, outrage
. Betrayed by sleep. Stop.

  A woman on a bench, engrossed in reading, circling her thumb against her index finger abstractedly. Stop.

  Her own head, hair swinging like a cape, framed against the white arch, under the cloister. Stop.

  Assiyeh has arrived at the Censors. She is conducted past holding galleries where witches are put to the question. The galleries are light and airy, with tables of fruit, wine bottles standing ready, beer kegs, loaves of bread and blocks of cheese, platters of meat. Beautiful, elflike people flit to and fro to provide the witches with whatever they please. Many of the witches are bobbing in hot tubs or frolicking in fountains, or lounging themselves on curtained couches. These witches are caught and dragged forth from sordid covens where they torture and interrogate each other endlessly, brought here to have confessions extracted from them by high living.

  The Censors is a handsome English manor house, not really large, standing out abrupt as a cork in the landscape, surrounded by sweetly unassuming flower beds and vegetable plots, lush trees sparsely scattered with ample room between for bocci ball and badminton and bumbaclotti ball or whatever rich people games they play. Over the door there is a stone head, a lean ascetic face with hawk nose and little round glasses, and pinched lips, flanked by stylized depictions of rejection stamps, pairs of scissors, strikeout grease pencils, airbrushes. Engraved on a banner beneath the face there is a motto that has been censored.

  Creak inside; there’s a white hall with the floral runner, a grandfather clock and flowers in the brass bowl on marble counter below a mirror that brushes the ceiling below the landing below the skylight below the tall skinny chimneys. The house trembles with people, stepping from room to room with paper sheaves, calling to each other, answering old school phones, tuning an old school radio to a softly singing woman’s voice like a crooning cloud, carrying trays of refreshments, and there’s a stout man with a white moustache and a straw hat standing outside smoking a battered battle-pipe, visible through one of the wavy windows as he takes a pace this way and then back, scanning the horizon like a retired sea captain. It’s fucking quaint let me tell you, like the American Cancellate in Shambleshire. Assiyeh’s old man escort peels off like a pair of sidecarred motorcycles and she is instantly transferred to the care of a woman in green tights and a green skirt and green blouse and green cardigan and green earrings with big green leaves in her hair. She conducts Assiyeh into a room full of tables and now they have to walk from one table to another—I think that if they touch the floor they will have to go back to the door and start over.

  Their goal seems to be a desk in the corner with a woman sitting at it. She’s smoking, reading a newspaper spread on the blotter in front of her. She has a thick mane of white hair and seems to be wearing nothing but a negligently belted kimono, hanging open. It turns out the form Assiyeh retrieved is only the form for getting the right form, which she receives from the woman with the white hair. Rather than go back over the desks, Assiyeh climbs out the window and lets herself down into the garden. Garden of prepositions. The with to the at. Down the above when. She perches on the rim of the cement birdbath and fills the form out on the low-slung backside of a marble nymph, then goes back to the house and calls up to one of the windows. A man’s hand, a very fine, manicured, bejewelled hand, but plainly a man’s, unfurls out the window like the arm of a sea anemone and takes the form very elegantly between the last knuckles of two fingers. After a moment, a woman’s hand, brown calloused and square, but a woman’s, with big baubles around the wrist, emerges from the same window with a ticket. Assiyeh takes the ticket, which reads FORM RECEIVED.

  *

  She looks up at you, half oranged in late afternoon light, looking almost through her eyebrows, smiling already, that is, raising her smile to show it, lips parted, a whitish cloud in her mouth. A wisp escapes around her lip and slithers up her cheek, spreading a little as it goes. She looks for a moment, then, without moving, breaks out laughing at you. Her laughter is a rough, staccato whisper. With a sinking feeling, you see the cloud of smoke unperturbed in her mouth despite the laughter that should plainly be driving it out in gusts, and realize that this is the dry, joyless, demon titter of the late afternoon. It means, “Now you are lost, too.”

  *

  As a boy I was always head over heels in love with some girl.

  Every September, I got the new grade started right by identifying my obsession-girl for that year. Which of these girls will have the unwanted privilege of being bugged by me?

  Half of them probably never knew. None of them could have known the images I fashioned of them. I had a whole icon wall, like a church, somehow dedicated to all and to only one. It’s tempting now to think I used to latch on to one to exorcise the others, or at least demote them to handmaidens for the true Empress. There was a pedestal and a golden nimbus. There were heroic rescues and pledges of devotion, riotously delirious hopes and dedicated love songs, unheard, unvoiced, unknown. The other half either deduced my feelings or worse, ambushed by me with my courage hiked up inviting them to join me on the grand adventure that would probably have already started by then if it were ever going to happen.

  I never got anywhere, but my approach was not really designed to succeed. And actually I did go places, but never with the girls I hoisted into paradise; it was always with girls who just happened.

  But when I was a boy I used to love girls, other boys, adults, places, the weather, trees, travelling, looking around, trespassing, shoplifting, places I hated. I flirted with girls, but then I flirted with the sun and moon. It was all flirting back then. In hindsight I must have been overbrimming with everything, and now that I’m a grown man, and I hate what I love and everything else too down here in the festering automatism of the Misled, now that I am a groan-up ... what? For what? Groan over what? Which is my loss? Which debt?

  There’s nothing I want more than to breathe in that old childhood love again and feel it now, as a full-groaning man, and I don’t think there’s anything farther out of reach for me than that. I don’t think it’s possible. I look at Carolina, whose hair is flying in the wind from the car window, giving her this wildly dashing, everchanging outline, throwing her fragrance all around, and what I feel inside me is corridors, corners, turns, knots, darkness. I try to remember what it used to feel like, opening, and what comes to mind is the beautiful sun outside and a pressure of light inside.

  “But,” I say, speaking for the first time in two and a half hours, “what makes memories memories is that you never live them. You live, and then you have memories, but you don’t live the memory. Even reliving a memory still involves this barrier between now and then because ... you remember now.

  “If that bullshit is true, then I might as well remember anything, if I never lived any of my memories. If I never lived any of my memories, then how are they mine? There’s just memories, but they don’t belong to anyone except the way you might say a country belongs to you. The country doesn’t care. The memories don’t care. The inflexibly one-way street moments follow does not prevent me from remembering whatever, in fact, it allows it.”

  Shit, Carolina is looking at me, that means she’s probably paying attention, and I can’t just ramble on, I have to make it good or she’ll think I’m an idiot, and even in her stoned-godlike point of view she already thinks I’m an idiot.

  “If you want to know what I mean, here’s what I mean. You don’t find reality by divesting yourself of fantasies, and that’s not because that’s a fantasy too—a divestment-of-fantasy fantasy ... it’s because the fantasies are street level. A one way street. You can’t have just fantasy. It’s not ‘the ghoulish mirror,’ it all begins under the street and goes all the way up to heaven like Roman title deeds. There’s a reason that money/power world is so grey and boring and replete with repellencies, because it’s advantageous to fantasizers of a certain class to promulgate that idea that there is a Walter Mitty gulf between that money world and the fantasy world. That money isn’t fant
asy. Fantasy is over there, not here. Never here. Take that barrier out, and you see the magic in the money, the astrological, qabbalistic haruspicery of runes and hexagrams; yeah I can talk like a book sometimes—you see that ... that the code of the economist is a poetics, and they are singing the world like Vainamoinen except that instead of trying to make that song as beautiful and noble as possible, those fucking bet-hedger ... knuckleshits are singing this fucking lying song of deception and just stupidly blind thinking that says ... that says there’s a magic world but you can’t ever have it unless you buy a shee shee expensive approximation of it for your estate from participating retailers and if you can’t manage to wangle that you’re just stuck with the bad world where all the failures live, kind of. You’re a bad person. Their fantasy world song, they camouflage it treacherously, as the dullest, most boring fantasy of doldrum-doldrumland TV news, so ... people won’t recognize it for what it is—a song—a lousy song—and start singing for themselves, sing a world for them. Because any asshole can sing. Singing starts from right here, there is no other singing. Training or no, you just sing. Being a human being means—not even that, not even that—being alive, just living, means you can sing right now, already. But people get trained somehow to sing this one song only, or this one way, that goes like ‘Oooohhhh, in some other world ...’ Or sometimes ‘Ooooohhhh, a long long time ago ...’ So nowhere and never do you get what you want, and every street is just more trudging-through-the-yuck, clutching a beautiful dream that never gets any closer, because it’s designed not to, and isn’t even theirs and is what’s really propping up the yuck. You marry the idea that nobody ever can get what they want in this world, so might as well go ahead in the fake stuff and nothing happens. But when the hard-nosed types tell you to stop dreaming and face reality they just mess you up a different way, because you don’t find reality by divesting yourself of fantasies like I said. When they say, boy you better wake up and face your responsibilities and get real, what they mean is, get with the fantasy lifestyle. They actually don’t make your fantasies for you, they just provide ingredients, but the main point is that, it’s like lunch, you have to have lunch, this thing called LUNCH, but you can have whatever you want as long as it only takes thirty minutes and then you do it in fifteen. But if you want to eat lunch in the morning and have a five hour breakfast starting at noon, suddenly that’s fantasy. Lunch isn’t a fantasy, but that midday superbreakfast is. You don’t get real by ‘getting real’ you have to find what’s real. To find that by working with it, by being real and making it, and you don’t work with reality for no reason; you have to want something you can get, and people want more than food and shelter and those things. Or what I mean is, when people want food and shelter, they want something other than that phantasm of government rations and barracks, slums and slop. People want beautiful food and beautiful shelter.”