Animal Money

by Michael Cisco

  some words don’t rub off,

  they grind them into our organs;

  Those happy ones,

  they’ve been busy scribbling;

  by the end of one day

  one has been by their words overscribbled:

  Two Ways to Strip—

  scrub their words away with

  words of my own or with

  silence

  some words carry

  silence,

  winding, alive,

  the hush of them

  carries

  like spoken evening

  The chorten is a compromise between a traditional structure and a modern sculpture depicting a burned out lightbulb with a skirt of dead insects.

  Thafeefa is sending me mental images of playing cards; that tells me she’s all right. I’m alone. The air is fresh and light. For a moment I slough my sleeve of fear. Spectres of Earth, trying to catch me in their focal points, and transient specials going about their business, refracted through the weird temporal echo chamber of the Koskon Kanona bureaucracy. Now sky patterns fracture the light into scintillant flakes schooling down over us in curls and cladding the skyscrapers in shimmering jackets of mail.

  “So, animal money is like knowledge, or language, or art, or cultural artifacts of a durable, interpersonal kind.”

  “Or sex,” the first Professor Long says.

  “Right. We’ll put that at the top of the list.”

  “And the bottom too,” the second Professor Long says, holding up his JOKE card.

  I feel his whisper at the back of my neck and spin—nothing there. A new nothing, adding to and intensifying the nothing that shines around this monument. Was that a woman, was that Tripi, I just saw, rounding the corner and disappearing, and were there two big bodyguards, or perhaps simply guards, flanking her? It isn’t death, it isn’t any thing at all. It is the realization in me of the fact that the wave hits the beach, the breath stops, that we are living in and through life. I’m going to have a child without being a parent. This child will have my DNA, grow up knowing me through an ever-widening gulf of interstellar space. “Your other mother,” Thafeefa will say. I don’t write poetry. I don’t mumble over morbid feelings. I write my poems in physics experiments, in bent light, in the reduction of all motion to a perfect stillness without tension, without pressure, the absolute stillness of a feather balanced on its edge, the immaculate stillness of least resistance that is not defying movement, but on the contrary that invites all possible movements with a demureness that works like an irresistible summons. I don’t write poetry but I will give my child a cosmos that he or she can stop on a dime, turn this way and that with a divinely offhanded haughteur.

  —With a cold flash it suddenly dawns on me there is no reason that he, he of the JOKE card, might not be the posthumous sperm donor, and will I some day see that strange look, the downcast look that nevertheless took in everything, saw everything, translated everything into a completely private and personal inner language of primary colors in smooth nameless shapes, on the face of my child? I look at the bulging crystal base of the chorten. My face lies pancaked and stretched out there, the eyes bunched at the top. Is that the goblin face of my third parent I see? It smiles at me. That third parent is a zipper I can unzip. I can wriggle out from under any boot. I can slip any snare. I can move in any way.

  That stain there on the ground isn’t where I thought it was: I think I’ve had an episode, a slip in time, speak of the devil here they come, using time fuses to join moments out of order and nab me in an overclocked ambush. What can I do—here’s a monument, a posthumous citation, and maybe this is my child’s secret parent—an idea worth considering in due time, I can come back to it in my cell or my grave or anywhere I end up, as long as I remember to remember it—meanwhile I know without having to look that there are two, at least two, men in track suits stinking of earth and trick-tracking in, homing on the chorten and on me. I pause to consult a moment with my inner Rascal Committee and almost at once I have the black file in my hand. Black pages with letters of clotted moonlight, dotted lines and boxed off areas for official use only.

  Track suits one and two come stomping loudly up the poem to the chorten platform, one heading in directly while the other dashes around to the far side both of them contemporary bohemian types and zoom in a pincer movement to meet in the middle and spin around the chorten and when one is at nine o’clock and the other at three they come face to face with a naked shadow, with staring eyeballs and two neat rows of white teeth all bare and fresh from the black file, the eyes farther and farther apart and the jaws farther and farther apart, blackness opaque and riotous as a howling well banging with ocean tides down below roiling churning rending tearing swallowing mouthing frothing—

  As Assiyeh steps from a watch store on one corner of the square a decorated sanitation officer is pertly trundling her cart up the ramp to the chorten to perform the day’s upkeep. Clucking her tongue in disapproval, she bins first one and then another of two empty track suits, holding them up for inspection a moment each.

  *

  I want the time to pass so I skip to the end of the song, thinking that will move the time up too. I was so lost in my thoughts just then that I almost failed to notice my train had come in, and then left, and I took this for a good sign, an indication that my powers of distraction are still strong.

  I hear a voice saying, “I only get lonely for fantasies.”

  ... but who are you, how do you talk?

  The city has disappeared except for the advertising. I’m issuing you a citation for trespassing in my mind, advertisers. What’s more “private property” than my own mind? Naked women who all look like Kodak Shirley somehow are sitting on chilly-looking folding chairs holding up advertising posters for things like “Ham on Air.” I skip down a side street, which is nothing but the friable edges of where the buildings and curbs might be, like glass overlaid on glass, check for cops, give the password and duck into a secret loan salon.

  “I want ten at two.”

  “I can give you seven at four.”

  “What the fuck four? ... That’s shit, man.”

  “Take it or leave it.”

  “The banks are offering seven at four.”

  “Yeah, but the banks can dial you halfway up to five if the bond market issues a bull. With me, you take it four it stay four.”

  No two sharks look alike. One is an old Hispanic man with daily moisturizer complexion, hair plugs and coarse black dye, another is a gawky teenaged girl with legs up to her neck and braces. The only tell is a hooded, ecclesiastical look that comes over them when they produce the cash. They keep their money in “sky purses,” tiny, portable pocket dimensions that follow them around like helium balloons, and when two or more meet in these floating salons they have to walk carefully in crescents around each other to avoid tangling their sky purse tethers.

  Outside, the city is all used up and gone. The last few buildings are being sucked into the earth. The mayor hasn’t been heard from in years. The highest level official anyone can still manage to locate is the postmaster, who holds up his hands impotently, an expression of innocent bafflement on his face. The leavings of a constipatiratorial constipiracy abate us to the subtle extravagances of life ... this is dedicated to the two women on the train, one black, the other white, talking together, nodding sagely, advising each other, these two wise solid goddesses conferring. I choose them, they can judge my fate.

  Since everything is now recorded, everything has to be more and more like television; this makes television even more controlling, and television isn’t just television anymore, now everything is already television—the point isn’t that you have to have perfect hair or anything like that, the point is that your every fart is recorded and judged by others—to be recorded by others is to be judged by others. So when you drive down a freeway that’s more pothole than freeway and pay twenty dollars to cross a bridge and your neighborhood has no schools or busin
esses except a few bad chain stores with a waiting list for job interviews, and you go bankrupt the minute you get sick, and there’s nowhere to go and nothing to care about and nothing to do but sit in your postage stamp 80000 a month apartment and peck at the internet since everything is online only now so they don’t have to hire people to talk to you, you know that wealth strikes again, flyover private helicopters that don’t have to see you, slave doctors and slave police and slave schools and museums and orchestras. Aesop is my name and I only say obvious things.

  I plan out a bureaucracy of explosions. Blow up all the information. You go into the DED, the Department of Exploding Documents, stand in line and fill out a form that goes poof! the moment you sign it. Your form has been received, sir/ma’am. Then, after the hermetically determined interval, your criminal record, your credit report, your pre-nuptial agreement, your student loan—BLAM!

  *

  Meanwhile, the hedge fund leaders and other executives bask in their heedless billions and fortify in bastions like Prince Prospero welding out the Red Death. A heavyweight fund called Probity and Wytt where dead silence prevails in the plush corridors and conference rooms. An awed, reverent hush billows out from the hems of suit jackets and descends like ribbons of freezing air from silver heads to squirm away across the floor in venomous serpents of icy mist that bite and paralyze everyone susceptible. No one dare say a word. It’s as whispery as a monastery in there.

  “We hold our silence,” the boss says in a booming, yet muted voice, a voice that goes right through you, “so that the money itself may be heard.”

  There’s that feeling, as if “the money” were pulsing in the fabric of the building, circulating through us all like the air we breathe, the great inhale-exhale of the market, the ineffable and cryptic wisdom of the diaphragm. We must be ready like the Delphic oracle to blank our minds and hearts and let that deathwisdom murmur through us. The Wasp King sits behind a desk like a black ice floe against a blank white marble wall in a windowless office, the cell of a billionaire monk. Like a living monument to himself, he sits majestically pondering the latest Sibylline enigma of money, and inwardly saluting again the Great Mystery of finance, the most profound and cosmic of all the mysteries he can know. His acolytes have a feverish, inspired air about them. They look like they don’t get enough sleep. They look like they don’t get enough to think. On joining the firm, each one of them was presented with a parchment contract written in their own blood—

  “And sopersuant, blood to blood, I the undersigned bind unto thee ...” the contract ends.

  Their yearly bonuses are hand distributed by the chief himself, the recipients stagger away with each bonus a scroll the size of a rolled-up carpet and closed with a massy seal of funereally crimson wax the size of a manhole cover.

  Across the street at Smith and Smith the scene is fashionably pornographic and all the brokers there are lathered in ghoulish sleaze. The males have rancid moustaches and the females are friably bronzed and blonded. The place is run by Tinker and Hatter, the Smith Brothers, that’s with a capital B yuk yuk. Their sister Fletcher sits on the Senate Banking Committee. They all have icy blue eyes that seem painted on, flat. Eyes that trickle white ink. Their wantonly expensive trinketry and decor reproduces at huge costs a kind of discount bacchanalia from an all-purpose zero-history fantasy ghetto. The millionaires call each other “my nigga.” They revel in hideous jewelry, solid gold anchor chains looped around their necks and dragging on the floor between their legs, diamond cotton swabs, mink kleenex. Hatter drags into Tinker’s office throwing himself down on a snow white raw silk sofa that will be burned at the end of the day and replaced with a new one before the office opens again tomorrow, reaches out a hand ensconced in a boxing glove of rings and bangles to pick up a fig, one of only twelve brought laboriously overland by yak caravan from Samarkand by way of Anchorage, takes one bite and chucks the rest over his shoulder onto a rug that once adorned the throne room of Rajablahblahblah, lights a joint and asks his “nigga” about this latest Monsanto account, but his brother, who sits below a lucite canopy that shields him from a waterfall of gold dust continuously showering his solid platinum combination desk-throne and toilet, can’t hear him over the opulence of the torrent. The other richies try to avoid the Smiths, especially not to be photographed with them, but they are so rich they are inevitable, and everyone admits, however bitterly, that their orgies are the cream of the crop.

  Spin—nothing there. A new nothing. It isn’t new, it’s the old nothing, this time. The plane is not coming in for a landing, but turning back again. I shove myself back into my seat, going rigid, suddenly unable to breathe, knowing that the knot of resistance inside me will be cut and I will accept this too, resign myself to going back across the country again, and again, never landing. I can feel the pressure, the blade of the shituation cutting into me and I know any moment I will slump submissively into myself, into a four-color two-dimensional dead image—

  Suddenly my weight disappears. Things around me, cups and plastic flatware, napkins and magazines, are rising in the air, the hard line of the ocean horizon floats weirdly into the window, at an angle—at a steep angle. My weight, such as it is, has pooled somewhere above my left hip, as if I were half leaning out of this seat I sit straight in, and that, I see, is because we’re going down.

  There’s a thump and sway and the bottom drops out. The toilets are backing up into the aisles, running down the carpet in brown runners and white furbelows of toilet paper and all the blood is gone from my empty pinata of a head, drained out through the hole in my skull, and pouring down onto the runners in a stream of brown old blood, my life—I don’t hear the screams, but there are gaping mouths all around me, staring eyes, there’s a shuddering sensation in my dead ears that tells me they are screaming, and jellyfish dangle and bounce in our faces.

  Out the window I can see individual waves.

  The plane bellyflops into the ocean.

  Thafeefa, her father’s wild ghost, the glass man, no one. None of them were real people. Why aren’t any of the people surrounding Assiyeh real?

  Vincent Long was the last real human being I touched, she thinks.

  Thafeefa was real, she tells herself, bitterly.

  Was she?

  Yes—she was an artificial intelligence but her body was real, she was all real. Do I have to go on saying that forever? Don’t I believe it?

  Thafeefa’s smile is permanently in front of Assiyeh’s eyes. Smile. Smile. Smile. Smile down at the page. Smile at the words. Smile into your own fucking face. Again and again that smile spreads before her, not fixed, but always just as it begins and spreads.

  Thafeefa smiled at me.

  But why no human beings?

  They won’t have me. Or won’t I have them? Is it my fault they aren’t good enough? What a give away that question is! That peevish “is it my fault.” Ugh.

  Nestled in Thafeefa’s fragrant breasts. That’s where I want to be.

  But isn’t that because you—I—have to have my having myself, have to be alone, have all of me to me—where is everybody—what happened—what planet is this—

  None of the people around you are real because you aren’t real, Assiyeh. They made you up, those economists, to cover their asses, to distract pushy interviewers, to escape the categorization that would kill their message and silence their voices. You’re just a decoy. You’re just science fiction.

  *

  It was 1997 ... the union decided it was time to get workers. All of a sudden there were cameras, lawyers. I can’t remember whether it was Chicago or San Francisco. It might have been dishwashers. Or it might have been the cab drivers. Point is, the employer was stealing the wages, and the authorities had already stopped enforcing labor laws.

  My friend Gloominous died in prison choking on his own vomit. Someone made a mistake when they doled out the prescription medications. These mistakes happen all the time. Gloominous is a number now. Mistake number whatever. Somewhere t
here’s a form with a signature absolving everybody in advance for this anyway.

  So we received a call from some human accessory from the National Carriage and Barrel Workers Union and next thing you know there are cameras and lawyers, a lawsuit, really short protests for the cameras and then back to work. They said they were there to help us organize and get better wages so naturally we listened, but in hindsight you can tell they were looking out for NCBWU. There was a poorly-attended poorly-presented workshop, once, about organizing on the job, but it was an afterthought.

  “Well, that’s up to you,” the accessory said, meaning the organizing. “I mean, we can’t tell you, we don’t want to dictate to you, how you organize, right? You tell us, you set up a structure (hand gesture), and we give guidance.”

  She was a vague, billowy sort of person, very short, like a heap of cushions. She was so nebulous you could tell she would go far. I bet she runs the Fudge Machine now. That sort of person always ends up in charge; committedly noncommittal in the committees and placating and respecting everybody right out of this world. Behind a facade of dull whiteboard meeting rooms there are sacred vaults that contain the Fudge Machine, a pile of cushions interconnected with hoses, hanging bladders, surrounded by curing meat and cheese like a delicatessen, a blue mold crust on everything and in the middle there’s a trench cut neat and narrow into the stone floor, and the fudge pours into this trench from a concatenation of translucent bladders that look like a sea anemone. The fudge is a creamy confection of tan rubber tepidity, made from the mucus residue left behind by the collision of human energies with the softly ablative baffles that are the basic substance of the organization. In an adjoining chamber, the fudge is sliced into marvellously uniform rectangular tiles and doled out, still sort of warm, neatly wrapped in wax paper pages to be gobbled up, paper and all, by the accessories. The vaults smell like a candy store and there are candy dishes full of sticky, bland grandma candies, jordan almonds, butterscotches, virtually flavorless peppermints in both barber pole and chalk hunk versions, drab pastel jellybeans with no black ones of course.