Animal Money

by Michael Cisco

  She asks me what I think of all this, looking at me with disarming directness, and I tell her I want to go to an Uhuyjhn city, I want to escape.

  “Everybody wants to escape,” she says.

  “Then there’s probably an excellent reason,” I say. “And everybody does want to escape. That’s not a problem. The so-called ‘winners’ want to accuse the so-called ‘losers’ of retreating into a fantasy world because they can’t ‘make it’ (whatever that means) in this so-called ‘world’ that they made and rigged for themselves. The so-called ‘escapists’ would do well to reply that the so-called ‘winners’ are the real, not-just-so-called escapists. They are the ultra-escapist superstars escaping from paying, escaping into fantasy sales in the future, escaping from collapses by uncaging them from a particular place and time and dispatching them into the blue yonder like the flying monkeys to drop uninvited havoc on some other country or neighborhood. They run the blame around too, until it lands on the patsy who is helpless to avoid it. The young sword hero can charge the evil fortress and single-handedly beat down legions of police and soldiers and security monsters, but he’s never going to find the central lair because there isn’t one, and he’s never going to find the master villain and bring him to justice because he melted into tear gas and oozed out through the chimney to make another massive fortune building a new improved rampage somewhere else.

  “The impulse to escape is pure, but, starve it of new values, and it gives out too soon and falls back into the mesh again. Take a look at economics. When you really study it, you realize there’s a whole ghoulish domain of wizardry and phantasmagoria in back of all the grey mush at the surface. It’s actually the twisted magic forest of witches and goblins and giant demons with fifty televisions for heads and African bush stuff and outback stuff and and Amazon stuff and garudas and griffins. I call it shit-ism. Where you have shitism, realism is a fantasy and fantasy is real, the realists are the escapists, and the real realists are trying not to let them. The real problem is that people aren’t alienated enough and they don’t keep pace with the runaway weirdness of life. It’s like, they want to say ‘Oh he’s just you know “the magic negro” or whatever,’ as if nobody were ever really magic but everybody is magic, you, me, everybody, and that’s always been true, and that’s not the point. The point is why—if everybody actually already is magic—why—how come—- is the world dead? How is it such a fucked up chunk of shit if everybody is magic?”

  Carolina tells me about an Uhuyjhn named Yama-aachen. The body is a sort of polyp twenty five meters across and about ten high with a girdle of countless spines midway between its thick middle and the dimple at the top. The body is all dark crust like dried black mud, and warty; the spines have a corroded metal look. The top is lined with double-jointed bony fingers around one enormous molar in the middle, and there are dollops of globular photophores asymmetrically embedded among the fingers. I can’t picture it. These luminous glands alternately fade and intensify their glare at random, and as they come in a variety of colors, this means that a rippling multicoloredness sits on top of the thing as it flies through the air using a gravity-manipulating organ deep inside its carapace. There are mummified human remains impaled on various of its spikes, but they’re volunteers, not victims. Around here, when someone thinks death is near, they sometimes ask to be impaled. That kills them, but in such a way that they almost immediately find themselves restored in an inexplicable dream that will last for as long as Yama-aachen lives. Since the lives of Uhuyjhn seem to have no set term, it’s likely this means a dream longer than the life that came before it. What the Uhuyjhn gets out of it is unknown. It may be the mummy’s dream is Yama-aachen’s dream as well, and that their involvement deepens its dream, or, as the mathetes who seem to go between the Uhuyjhn and mankind, it may only be an altruistic gesture. These beings, of whom Yama-aachen is one, first began turning up in the last few days bringing a vast antiquity of tradition with them so that they appear to have been here with us forever, and the new practices that spring up around them are born archaic.

  They came around the same time as the Color Shift and communicate with human beings by telepathy manifested visually by a transparent basin of grainy white light in the air above the Uhuyjhn. Each “word” is accompanied by a pseudo-palpable sensation just above a little behind the base of the nose, described by some as a tapping, others as a throbbing, others as a tickling, an itching, a spasm. This communication is almost certainly very flawed; the same utterance, received simultaneously by three humans ABC, will register to A as a flatly factual proposition, to B as a gentle interrogative, and to C as an imperious command. Confusion is best minimized by restricting communication with Uhuyjhn to a one-to-one basis, although it is not clear that the Uhuyjhn don’t all speak in unison. Yama-aachen’s importance derives from a probable mental commingling with the dreaming minds of its mummified human parasites; that would be the only discernible reason for its greater volubility and intelligibility.

  Carolina encountered Yama-aachen by chance. She had gone to meet with someone—I’m pretty sure she means her connection—and she saw it cruising the low hills and treetops by the street. It made a beeline right for her, alarmingly, but stopped and hovered a few dozen meters away only five or six meters off the ground, looking, with its grisly adornment of mummies, like a nightmarishly animated torture device. There was no distinct odor or sound except for an irregular and copious exhalation, sharp and surprising, halfway between an elephant clearing its trunk and the gasp of air brakes. As it drew near, she saw tiny dark hyphen-like streaks pop across her field of vision, a neuronic distortion that other people have also experienced when in close proximity to Yama-aachen. Even though it isn’t at all bright, even if you don’t see its lights, you still find yourself blinking away unusually vivid and tenacious after-images of it, so that it becomes harder and harder to look at. You actually see it better in vision capture than with your own two eyes, because the distortions don’t affect cameras. She insists Yama-aachen just hung there for a few seconds and then floated gigantically away again, and she was let down once she got over the shock.

  It lives in the clouds, she explains, or way up in the atmosphere, without straying too far from the environs of the new city. When the mathetes receive another dying applicant for the dream of Yama-aachen, they attract its attention with a pattern of lights and a chant. The chant probably doesn’t do anything except reassure the mathetes that they have some special rapport with Yama-aachen.

  Yama-aachen excretes all kinds of living animals, snakes, foxes, frogs, cockroaches, and weird animals no one’s ever seen before, whenever it picks up a mummy; it also leaves behind a pile of animal money left behind as well. Maybe animal money is alien shit. Maybe it’s how they reproduce.

  “Maybe it’s how they sweat,” I say.

  *

  Urtruvel ...

  He had been freelancing a bit on the side, relentlessly drilling down on animal money, or at least that’s how it seems to him. With the wise counsel of his new parasitic tongue and the insights it whispers into his bloodstream every night to direct him, he masters news-screw-mancy. There’s a Latin American leftist writer, a fellow Argentine, who is getting to be too popular and effective. Certain quarters, some of them with dot gov email addresses, are recruiting warlocks and Urtruvel is ape to prove he can do it. He whammies his target up to boogie like he has on the red shoes, racing this way and that in a mounting panic trying to put out a fire over here and then a fire over there. Urtruvel’s accusations and bullshit are so outrageous they demand a reply, and from then on it’s Urtruvel who calls the tune, folding that writer up neatly into a human asterisk.

  Now SuperAesop’s name is in his sinbox ...

  Hurrying now through dark streets, the lights are all out even though the power is still on and the trains are still running, packed with soft, silent people in the dark. Standing near the door, squeezed in between two big shadows, I watch as the aspects and contrasts of
the poster directly in front of me begin to stir. They sink into a crumbling darkness that swarms with avid, intelligent life, and Urtruvel’s face coagulates there, his figure seething with vibrating black mist, the poster yawning on plummeting depths like a cataract of roaring, thirsty hollowness. Urtruvel has taken the model’s place, the sunwashed front yard, the white picket fence, the wooden recliner chair, the overhanging tree, the pitcher of lemonade, the white cardigan and jeans, the quaint outline of a peaked roof against a deep blue sky, is all greyed over with an ominous electric gloom. Urtruvel sits in the chair with his feet up in white loafers, crossed at the ankle. He holds up an ice cream cone, opening his mouth. The louse inside lunges out, scrabbling at the ice cream, gouges at it with its many legs, buries its face in the ice cream, gobbling it, while Urtruvel glares at me with eyes like baleful lamps.

  Do you have unpopular political opinions?

  How do you propose to compensate for your lack of experience?

  The train decelerates and I fall against another passenger. I feel cuffs and blows at my back as I pull myself up, but now that I can see around me in the dimness, the train has come up above ground, no one seems to have moved. It’s like being in a crowd of sleepwalkers.

  Why did you leave your last job?—The poster sneers. When will you be leaving this one?

  Do you know what this organization does?

  The train is inching into the station. I’m standing right in front of the door watching the rail trickle by, fighting panic. I can’t see him but I can hear him. The cuffs and blows drop against my back like snowballs that burst and vanish, disembodied and almost forceless blows of blind unacknowledged and unreasoning hate that leave a caustic smear behind soaking into my back but if I turn around—if I turn around that is it.

  What will you miss about your current or last job?

  The train parks and a low voice murmurs something over the PA. By agonizingly slow degrees the intensity of that murmur mounts without growing louder; an idiotic yammer going on and on, a low buzzing chant that gets fiercer and fiercer never louder just more venomous more venomous inside the motionless dark train filled with motionless people, like the voice of my own panic, of a mindlessness that’s going to eat my mind.

  What is your greatest failure?—The poster inquires, probingly. Mouth parts gobble ice cream.

  What is your greatest fear?

  My hands are shaking and my throat closes every time I try to swallow and the drone goes on and on and on, my back is on fire and the drone goes on and on and on. My mouth is wet. I taste blood—shit, my nose is bleeding—

  Describe a time when you had to deal with conflicting demands.

  Am I going to try shoving my hands into the rubber lips of the door and dragging them apart, or am I going to plunge backward into the vile mass behind me and fight my way to the door between cars? The air is stale and spent, full of dead halitosis and I don’t dare look over my shoulder at the people behind me they are a disgusting plastic mass of clothes and shoes and hair and mucus, the mucus of that droning voice.

  The train glides ominously forward. The voice stops, as if to deny me the relief of breaking from it when the doors open and I jump out onto a dark platform, elevated line, no announcement, no ding dong of the doors. The train stays where it is, the cars filled with dark shapes, doors all standing open, dead silence. No one moves. Twilight Zone. He’s right in front of me, holding a gun on me from a movie poster.

  Why did you leave your last job?

  Can you describe a time when your work was criticized and how did you handle it?

  I get moving along the platform, passing open car doors filled with passengers like open closets filled with heavy coats and hats and I feel stared at by all of them, even the ones buried deep inside the cars. A voice comes over the station PA, a voice I recognize, that toneless, insipid jabber, starting up again, the voice takes sudden, deep breaths to keep boring its way to reach my brain where it will lay eggs that will hatch and eat and shit jabber through my mouth. I run down the platform along the endless train passing open doors like open hearths striping me with insane malice as I pass them, them and those posters where Urtruvel leers out at me, rippling with muscles on a sunswept beach, a woman in a bikini on his arm.

  When will you lose your final job?

  Describe one time you ever resolved a conflict.

  I blunder up the stairs in the dark, slipping and nearly falling backward. The drone recedes behind me. The station above is in total darkness and I rush into it waving my hands around in front of me, turning this way and that I can’t see the stairway I just came from and I don’t know if I’m about to drop back down it again, and no other glimmer of light. The drone swells up on all sides of me coming from every direction a low gibbering voice artificially amplified, something you would expect to hear coming out of a mental patient, an incessant vocalization like the tinnitus of an exploded brain, coming to get me. I got good eyes though, I see a glimmer up there, where there’s a grating, and I head for it, find the stairway and get up to the lightless street.

  Overcast purple sky. People float down the street, shadows, now and then a disc or flutter of light as someone passes with a flashlight or lights a cigarette. The air is motionless. This isn’t over for me. Urtruvel is there on the magazine cover in the bodega window, holding a cigar, sitting at a desk.

  Have you ever been convicted of a crime?

  I walk, but I don’t feel myself escaping. I’m only handing myself down the line from one window full of Urtruvel magazine to another window with Urtruvel poster and Urtruvel behind the wheel of a shining SUV in the billboard at the intersection—

  Have you ever read Our Mutual Grave?

  Are you now or have you ever been insane?

  What would you say your greatest weakness is?

  Urtruvel at my back and Urtruvel coming up before me on a poster over another subway entrance, and with a pang of terror at the idea I might go down there I throw myself back from the chute of the subway stairs—that yammering climbs the steps toward me, it’s a toothless tar mouth. It doesn’t want to chew me up, it wants to suck on me like a hard candy that dwindles and dwindles down to nothing forever, a little remnant you can shatter and swallow with no trouble.

  Escaping, the dark traffic trying to hit me, someone is coming around every corner just as I reach it someone steps out from between every tall parked car every mailbox all directly into my path I have to veer and swivel and stumble, these someones, all these someones are murmuring that same murmur, featureless nameless shadows blocking my way, herding me along like a panicked rat toward the jaws but those jaws aren’t going to snap shut and crush me, they’re going to mumble me inside that slopping mouth with that louse’s fangs buried in me, idly slurping my blood but not so fast it won’t replenish itself, and me withered and helpless and puckered and smothered under a blanket of saliva.

  I need a break break break break break break break—

  There’s Urtruvel on a flatscreen TV above shadows standing motionless on motionless treadmills and seated motionless on stationary bicycles in a fitness club. He’s talking seriously in a set of switching headshots with someone else, someone else who is also him, arguing, demolishing, that louse flapping in his mouth, legs wriggling, while the moderator acts as his spotter, homing his word bullets in on a hapless cartoon version of me, just like at the zoo, just like at the zoo. Me sitting there, the camera up a little to make me look small at the bottom of the screen, my screen make up is the wrong color and there’s a crumb or something on one side of my mouth, and I have a black eye and my nose is bleeding and my collar is half inside out somehow and my tie is on backwards. I want to lash out and smash the thick window of the fitness club, roll one of these parked SUVs through the glass. Did I never leave and has all this been hallucination? I’m not falling for it. I grab a passing bus and find myself face to face with Urtruvel, this time in a poster advertising his latest book, the face frozen in an Official Author Photo, b
lack and white, not looking at the camera but off into Importantness you fucker—the photo changes and now it’s the officially unposed pose, like a driver’s license photo, but the blue-bottle tinged contrast gives it away, the affectation of frank openness, of seeing someone as they really are in a stark blank and bare posture is bullshit too, extra bullshit, and I whip out my marker and give him the Hitler moustache he deserves, a lobotomy scar, slobber running from fangs that stick out over his lower lip, a goatee, Satan horns, pointed ears, a pointed tail sticking up from behind him, a Nazi armband, disgusting bags under his eyes and 666 in between them. I feel that murmur hum up along the bus aisle toward me but the door is opening and I get off too fast for you fucker. I’m SuperAesop, fool. I can feel you trying to fold me into your asterisk. Stick your lousy tongue out at me again, I got long shears. I’m too fast, too fast, too fast for you. I keep moving, that mutter avalanching at my back, just a step away, just a stumble away, just a pause for traffic at a corner away, just a beat too long getting around this shadow woman with her shadow baby carriage full of huge gelatinous worms mouthing the air with a crinkling sound, worms in the trees wrapped around shadow branches and raising their mouthed ends to join the murmuring chorus. Everything around me is deliberate, significant, aiming at me. I’m not turning to confront it, won’t fall for that. I can keep running, run a long long time. The rest of my life, one way or the other.

  *

  It’s not uncommon to find on other planets monuments to Terran heroes whose names are unsung on Earth; for example, this huge crystal chorten outside the hotel where the conference is wrapping up is dedicated to an all-purpose rebel who changed his name sometimes to SuperAesop and whose official biography begins well after his escape from the chimpanzee enclosure in a Latin American zoo, his vindictive return being likewise omitted. I wonder how I would know about it myself. The chorten rests on a platform of compacted car tires with a corrugated tin ramp leading up to it, and a line from one of his poems is engraved in each tin concavity, adding up to this: