Animal Money

by Michael Cisco

  Her mind was just an ember and all her political concerns, everything she was normally preoccupied with as President of Achrizoguayla, had become unreal to her now completely immediate perspective. She was dimly aware of the vast, strangely untenanted space in her mind, of the unwonted stillness and suspense there. A President alone in the desert is just another creature. How do you relate the two?

  She had been walking for hours in an intermittent misting rain when she glanced up, woke up, and froze, staring at that child, who was looking at her through the branches. The branches, the posture, the hands, the streak of dirt, their relative positions, all was exactly as it had been the first time, except for her, and the sight startles her into unplanned speech.

  “Why did I follow you?” she croaks.

  Is that the same child? The child turns and steps out of sight in the plant screen. Tripi continues down the path. Was she hallucinating? Was that child following her this whole while? Or did it haunt a particular spot, meaning she might be near to the place where she’d first lost her way? The air is not clear, but she seems to be too far out from the slopes of the hills for that. Perfect isolation, perfect stillness, perfect freedom. She could throw off her clothes and decide this is home. She continues along the path, and as she moves through the drizzle it wafts in her face like cool linen. The desert smells all become more distinct in the wet, now that all the dust is flushed out of the air.

  The child steps out onto the path ahead, about a dozen meters away, into the center of her field of vision plain and clear for the first time. Tripi knows now that this is no human child, even though there is nothing weird about its appearance, no hooves, no tail, no wings. The child stands nearly in profile, paused in midstep as though it were about to reach out and snatch a bird, hands ready, one leg flexed, like a photograph, but it feels, irrespective of how it looks, it feels as if there’s no one there, as if Tripi were all alone. There’s none of that indefinite physical sensation of the presence of another. But the figure is if anything too clear and distinct, too solidly dark, to be a phantom. What is a phantom? she wonders.

  No, too clear, far too clear. That motionless, dark figure, almost a silhouette whose every feature and detail is nevertheless only becoming more and more sharp with a painfully sharp distinctness from the white crescents of its fingernail ends to the tiny triangle of reddish flesh at the corner of the eye standing out now with an implacably augmenting and painful clarity. Tripi is caught, staring with an anguish racing toward excruciating pain, and something flashes from the motionless child, like a transparency of its outline darting across the intervening space it slams the center of her forehead like the slap of a powerful but disembodied wave, sending a shock through her whole body but landing in her mind. She drops to her knees clasping her head in her hands and unable to tear her eyes away from the child as the sky and landscape wink out behind it in pure blackness and agony and and silence, and blinding glares zoom across space crashing into her like mortars, she sees the landscape again, surmounted by a huge block of light, and three sheets of light beneath it.

  “They’re trying to communicate.”

  She blinks, and when she opens her eyes again she sees the sun float in space like a monster swinging the earth out of the stars and raising it up over her like a hammer, and all of space alive with movement, intelligent movement, and great cords of reason tying huge objects together across vast distances, and children made of reason.

  *

  The right side of her face is bandaged. Is it really Tripi? She should have a small mole or birthmark on her right cheek, but the bandage covers it, and the skin is damaged. The mark might have torn off. Or it might never have been there.

  Is this Tripi?

  the perennial airplane, the neverending flight

  the wing is like a hallway

  man in the aisle—

  —“get out” he blurted under his cough

  —and I turned my head to look at him, a mistake, he noticed me, now he knows I can hear his normally subliminal interventions and I can’t put him off with my JOKE card because I

  seem to have lost it somewhere

  the apparition of a phantom person in the hallway, the wing

  the big dipper looking like a projection on a screen only a couple of dozen feet away

  my blurred shadow on the wing below the window, a white patch with an arrow painted on it

  where are we going, where are we going, where are we going—I don’t know.

  I do know, but I keep forgetting.

  the mountains as blue as the sea—flint spear heads, cocoa and flour, mottlings, and dull lightenings, and pleached folds like waterpruned fingertips, grey brown blue and purple, livid rouges, puckered ridge lines, lake of flattened blue lightning, embossed and shieldlike plateaus, callouses, mazelike rectangles contrast circuitboarded regularity with their arbitrary imposition on a color of cooked lobster, now withered like parchment, wrinkled land, white over pink over blue chasms, pink of raw flesh and white snow floored canyons, the snow looks flat plastic and smooth like dried slicks of white glue, glaze, pale terracotta, opaque and mottled glass, now the upper plateaus are delineated in snow stippled with black like stubble poking through shaving cream, broken biscuit, pulverized brick, Mars, now a flatland of long east to west streaks of red and just here a vivid tracery of white, the red is curdling around the Blake engraving lighting water carved, here the relief lines draw themselves, low hills here like battered metal, print of a colossal horseshoe, great flattened fern plumes, blue ridge shadow like a stationary wave, splayed toes and a knotty foot of mountains—

  lichtenberg/stein/berg figures—snow on the peaks here is grey, snow sketched in rows down the slopes makes them seem blured—puffy tire tread ranges in sinuous rows, trees seem to grow only along the brinks of the river cuts, the lower brown slopes throw blue lozenge shadows, wildfires like two comets streaming in the foothills, maroon haze at sunset—still flying—the hours stand still—

  *

  Back over to me with the headlines—not so much The Revelation Deluxe as it is that backwards tug that reminds you of something.

  Back in the tunnels and stations—turning halfway around to try to see that woman’s face again, never saw her before, never will any more, double checking anyway to make sure she actually is so beautiful, a very ongoing woman!

  “There-RIS / an / uptown / 65837 / train / approaching the station / please jump off the platform edge.”

  Headphones snatch victims in a one-second snare like venus flytraps and hold them while the train is being held momentarily by lack of resources please stop bombarding us with complaints about our venus flytraps.

  Station stop. Someone gets up to go and the doors are shut before I notice the glove lying there beneath the seat, and that reminds me of this morning, someone who left a clumsy-looking ball point pen behind on a subway seat, rolling in the butt dip; in fact, everyone is shedding discards wherever I look—batteries and pens and all the sorts of things you find among your personal property without knowing how it got there rain down from pockets and bags covering the floor in a slippery layer of forgotten unwanted pens advertising antidepression, cement company stationery folded up in my pocket with unlabelled, no-area-code phone numbers scrawled on it in someone else’s handwriting, and I can’t remember if someone gave that to me, if I have someone waiting on a call from me, or if I snatched up this paper somehow to write something else on and then pocketed it, maybe without being able to write anything because I didn’t have a crapped-out pen from an auto muffler manufacturer or a laxative dealership. Everywhere you look, there are complete, next-to-nothing fragments of whatever, making some kind of a gesture about a defunct or doomed business, or basically bad idea. Thinking about all those things, they add up to give me an impression of desperation arising out of fundamental, abject cluelessness. This causes me to feel pity. Sadness and pity, that I can’t tell if it’s right or wrong, some kind of reactionary sentimentality or maybe I�
�m seeing something real, I can’t tell. I can tell I can’t tell.

  “Slavies and bondlesmen, this is an unimportant commandment from the private ownership police department. Property is more important than people at all times. Be suspicious. Clutch your shit. If you accidentally make eye contact with a human being, keep it to yourself. Rat out your parents, Ceaucescu your friends, trust the authorities and don’t trust each other. Giving money to homeless people is illegal. Backpacks and other large containers of subjects are subject to be burglarized by sneering police.”

  There’s a story I could tell, about a man who carried so many guns all the time he looked crippled. He had to use crutches to get around; his legs wouldn’t bend because they were covered with guns, so he had to walk bow-legged to keep the guns in his groin from crushing his balls but they already had and he carried so many guns for self protection, ever since he’d witnessed a mugging in a movie. He couldn’t stop thinking about it. That movie mugging had been so scary and humiliating and black-people-involving and class-war, anything but that! He wasn’t afraid of being run down by a car (because if that were illegal he couldn’t do it to other people). The prospect of being burned alive in a house fire didn’t phase him. But the shame of being mugged in a movie with everybody watching was too much, so he went out right away and bought a carton of gun at the bodega and strapped them all on every time he went out and kept piles of them all over his shitty apartment.

  Naturally everyone could tell he was heavily armed and that made everyone to say the least wary. He didn’t want to give rise to a lot of causeless alarm, so, whenever he was in a social situation—and usually this happened only when the other person found him or herself trapped with him on the subway or in an elevator or in line at the DMV or the bank—he would calmly explain that he wasn’t planning on shooting anyone, and that a small fiduciary consideration would go a long way toward firming up a guarantee that he wouldn’t somehow shoot you in particular. So, by dint of his intelligent fear and friendly predatoriability, he became not only a safer, but a richer, man, and that’s SuperAesop’s moral, boys and boys—“the wise man shoots and robs everybody”—the end.

  *

  “Political?”

  “No,” she says. “She ran off with a hundred thousand.”

  Mateo shakes his head, almost a shiver, and scrunches up his face.

  “Ech, this is the whole job you give me? This isn’t important enough for me.”

  “She’s American.”

  “American? It’s political if she’s American.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “... When by?”

  “As soon as possible. She could leave the country any time.”

  “Why hasn’t she already left?”

  “She knows we watch the airport. She did an airport job. ... Look, she’s done this before. She tried to run with fifteen kilos, nearly fifteen kilos.”

  “And you trusted her with a hundred thousand?”

  “I didn’t trust her with anything!” she says, pushing her index finger into her own chest. “I said ‘no more.’ Luitu was the one who was spellbound by her citizenship and all the easy ways she was going to get things into America for him. He said, the fact that she decided not to run—run with the fifteen kilos—shows that she could be trusted. ‘Everybody thinks about it,’ he said. I tried to tell him. I told him, ‘Not everybody can run away to the United States.’ No good. Now this.”

  “Now he sees it your way?”

  “He told me to come see you.”

  Mateo drums his fingers on the table, looking down.

  “She’s near?”

  “Still in town ... So, you will try it?”

  He doesn’t lift his eyes or stop drumming.

  “If I try I succeed,” he says flatly.

  More thinking, more drumming, with both hands.

  “And don’t say anything about the money. I don’t talk about the money.”

  “He told me.”

  Mateo stops drumming and spreads his fingers with a smile.

  “So, all right.”

  The woman nods with a tight little grin that pinches up folds beside her mouth. She’s thin as a gazelle, with a gazelle’s narrow face.

  “He says only kill,” she says.

  Mateo looks at her for a moment, and his smile widens.

  “Women make too many sounds.”

  The girl is hiding in a friend’s apartment and she never leaves. Mateo has the place watched round the clock. The girl runs out one night, very late, after four AM, and gets into a cab. Another cab pulls alongside and the two drivers wave to each other. The driver of the other cab makes a curious gesture. The first cabby nods and pulls over. The girl is staring at him, asking him questions nonstop. He explains that he is having some trouble with the motor, but it’s all right, she can continue on in his friend’s cab, which sits idling right behind them. The street is deserted, a strip of black between empty blue fields.

  “Can’t I just wait?”

  “I have to call a truck,” the driver says. “It will be daylight before it comes.”

  He waves away her money.

  “It’s OK,” he says.

  The girl gets into the other cab. The other driver is a man a little past middle age, not all that large, looking grandfatherly and harmless in bright yellow shirt, white cap and white slacks, aftershave, a gold chain around his wrist.

  She names an unremarkable small town close to the border. He nods and they are on their way.

  “I was on my way to pick up another fare,” he explains after about fifteen minutes. “But he’s going the same way you are, so it should be OK.”

  “I’ll pay extra if you just go straight there,” the girl says. “I’m in a hurry. It’s an emergency.”

  “Well, but he’s right there, he sees us.”

  The driver points without taking his hand off the wheel, which is already steering the car over to the curb. The cab rocks as a huge man clambers into the passenger seat and greets the driver familiarly. The car takes off again, having picked the man up so quickly that it didn’t even come to a full stop. The big man looks back at her with a friendly smile and a wave.

  “Hello,” he says.

  The driver and the passenger exchange pleasantries and are soon laughing happily with each other, talking about baseball mostly. The sun is starting to come up over the mountains, making the bare earth on all sides look smoky. They are in the middle of nowhere. When is that big guy getting off? The road is completely empty except for one other car approaching swiftly behind them. When she looks forward again the big man, his face blank, is climbing over the front seat with surprising agility. She squeals and tries to disappear into the back seat, the driver does something under the dash and a sudden wind gushes over the back of her head, lifting her hair. A huge hand grabs her by the throat, squeezes her windpipe shut, and she is being forced back now up and over the back seat. She claws at the ceiling, the top of the seat, but there is nowhere to get a purchase and flinging her arms crazily out, her bottom leaves the seat, she is bent backwards the wind whipping at her hair, her wild kicking is only propelling her out the back, even turning her head to look at the big black car with one headlight tailgating the cab seems to lessen her purchase and with a sickening freedom she feels herself for an instant supported by nothing, floating in hurtling air, before the searing shock of the ground, and then the impossible weight of the wheels.

  Mateo swivels and drops into her seat, then shoves over, because he doesn’t like feeling the warm spot she left. Behind them, the black car is slowing to a stop, turning back on its prey.

  *

  the city from up here is a livid splatter of bottle green light, luminous gold wire

  luminous gold petals

  coins

  and as the mountains slide away beneath us and the city unfolds, I see dark giants, human silhouettes, lying on their sides along the city, propped on an elbow, looking at it—a giant crawls past another g
iant and reaches out a shadow arm across the city to adjust one of the lights—the giants are powdery shadows, distinct and black, genderless, slim figures—with long fingered hands, long arms, touching the city here and there, making adjustments—opening a way just here, releasing a flow of luminous golden mites, cars and trucks, in an illuminated cement artery—it’s like watching silhouettes play a phosphorescent board game spread out on a dark floor—the glow rising from the city dimly plays over their contours without revealing anything—no, revealing a uniform fabric, generic contours—they are like mimes in full body stockings—shadow hands of colossal ghosts wave over the calligraphic embers of the city—

  *

  It’s like that all over Etsimen. It’s only been a few days since we met the first, and now we have something like a dozen Tripis crammed into two beds two cots and a bathtub back at Hotel Adoniram, leaving us to sleep in the car. I’ll stare at one, getting more and more sure every moment of the resemblance, and then another will cough, or wake up with a little cry, grab my attention, and she’ll be the one I recognize immediately. The recognition never lasts, though. Then, as I go on peering at that one, the less convincing features undo the impression of familiarity. They all have busted, bandaged heads. All they can do is lie around, recovering. This one has a concussion, that one has a laceration, another one has a fever and a drained abscess that has to be kept covered until it closes; no two injuries alike, and no one face all exposed. None of them claims to be Tripi, but then none of them can really talk. They cry softly, or moan, and sigh, cough, sneeze, murmur, whisper when they need the bathroom. I remember one clearly saying the word “farmaxak” meaning pharmacy I guess, although that’s not the usual word. It looks like they all need medicine, all different kinds, but we can’t figure out what to get them. Carolina’s been giving them LSD. How can she have so much?

  They can’t all fit in shitty hatchback, but I could get a trailer. Cram them all in. Drive them back to San Toribio and pour them out on the steps of La Censura. Maybe they all have amnesia. I keep trying to make myself believe that one of them is Tripi, any one of them, but I can’t. It’s more like we’re waiting. Waiting, I think, to see if any of them just turns into her.