Animal Money

by Michael Cisco

  “Good luck,” I say again. “The Surfeit is One.”

  I turn and go. For a moment, I wonder if I should follow the second Professor Long, or try to catch up to her, but there wouldn’t be any point.

  “Professor Budshah!”

  The distance that has opened up between all three of us can’t be reduced that way. There is a tangle of dirt tracks up here, and she took one—I can see some of the cup-like indentations her heels left. I take a route that will curve around the other way. At my back, I can feel, like the embers of a doused campfire, the ebbing out of our smouldering fellowship, the fading of its warmth. Then I stop and think, looking up.

  Professor Aughbui is still ‘up there.’ I try to throw a message to him, far up into the forbidden nocturnal dimension he preferred. It’s not unlike throwing a rock down a well and listening for a splash or a clack. And I do seem to ‘detect’ something, although I can’t say whether it is a sound or a feeling. It could be the brief echo of a hum. He is still there, I take it. Insofar as he was ever anywhere, it might not make that much of a difference to him, except perhaps that it might be easier for him to remain behind.

  After a few minutes more, a movement catches my eye by its corner. It’s Professor Crest, who has I see, chosen the steep way, of course, straight down the side of the hill. He will reach the valley floor first, probably congratulating himself on having come down by the most difficult way. And what then? He will do what each of us will do whenever we find our way, all the way, down; he will pick a street and follow it.

  *

  The titans of finance convene a gigantic black mass after the destruction of the G18 leaders. Silverbacks of the world in designer robes and cowls and glittering diamond-encrusted fetishes drone incantations and sprinkle blood over writhing whores and catamites. The mass is conducted in the basement of a decommissioned church and there are windows at street level lined with intrigued onlookers who point and nudge each other, hold up their phones to take pictures and video. These masses become regular affairs and the street vendors outside do a hot business on pagan holidays.

  Their incantations don’t seem to be doing them much good. Regular money is bottled up, governments are out of assets and nobody will lend to them, people are out in the streets raving, people are running for their useless survival bunkers and coming back two weeks later out of supplies and half dead from rebreathing their own air. Governments are shredding to pieces and wherever that happens the military steps in to “take command,” whatever that means. Generals don’t know economics any better than politicians know war and “regular people” are taking a double hit from exploding economies and martial law.

  Here in Achrizoguayla the re-re-election is coming up in a few days and there are placards all over the television, people in the streets of Etsimen bellowing at each other. I know Urtruvel is still sniffing for my scent. That shapeless gobbling media-bloated face of his is going to float to the surface of just about every advertisement and magazine cover, his eyes gushing adhesive slime all over my feet, gluing me down for arrest. This is the kind of thing that happens to people who know too much, but what do I know that’s so damn important? It’s like they’re going through the motions. They’re supposed to be the THEM that everybody talks about, so they just go ahead and do what everybody expects them to do, which is bad impersonations of movie villains, apparently. The equipment is all there, so they use it, as if using it will create a rationale for using it. The equipment just happens. Nobody ordered it. There’s no plan it fits into. It goes after me because I’m not on their side, that’s all. I am an unknown animal. I don’t happen to know any other animals of my own species, but I seem dimly to recollect others like me. I wish I could, but I can’t, say how they were like me, or what I am like. There doesn’t seem to be a name for me as an individual or as a species. That’s the problem. What they know doesn’t matter, even to them. Their “knowledge” of me is meaningless. But they have to know everything, just because they can’t allow anything to be beyond their reach in any way, even if it’s worthless, even if no one looks at it, even if having it is worse than not having it.

  Are they after me because we actually do have the real Tripi here, bedded down with chattering teeth and fever in our overcrowded motel room? In the last five days, two more have turned up of their own accord on our doorstep. Taking care of them all is a full-time job. They all seem to be delirious, almost too feeble to move, with a boundless capacity for absorbing soup, which is why I’m back on bucket duty today, heading out to the corner for more.

  Man on the street: “Kill them all! Kill them all!”

  Me: But why stop there? Why not kill everybody? The button still works!

  Man: “Fine by me! Great! I’ll be in heaven and—”

  Me:—It’s win-win!

  Man: “—I’ll be in heaven while you burn in hell!”

  Me: Right on man we can share the ticket communistically, your heaven is my hell!

  ... All right you’re not going to impress anybody with your revelation pop song lyrics. “Thought-provoking.”

  “Impassioned.” “Bullshit.”

  The Earth is currently on fire, and somehow I can sit here just watching it, over the ocean, see the orange sky, the silver level, the shadow birds streaking right along the surface so fast and heavy, and breathe in the calm that is breathed over me. People used to wail over the cruel impassiveness of nature when selfs are ground into hamburger, and now we stare incredulously at the selfless impassiveness of nature as human selfs destroy it once and for all.

  The world is on fire, and yet one glance over there shows me Homer’s waves. The sight slackens me so that my thoughts run on and on like children playing rather than like the heavy footfalls of important ideas. Leave those to the economists for now, or no, hope that they pick up the pace. Too much whipslamming and blamming going on, the streets, the boulevards, the avenues, are all jammed like subway cars with wall to wall people stuffed together like heaps of laundry bags. I’ve just run into Carolina again and we’re trying to fill each other in on the shituation with some of our colleagues—who is under arrest, who has to stay out of sight. Talking and the woman eating next to me mistakes my mouth for hers stuffs a big bread roll into my mouth by accident. The guy smoking next to Carolina turns his head suddenly to see where the noise is coming from and the lit end goes right into her ear. Carolina spraying sealant on her ear, and the blood hasn’t even coagulated so the whole thing is turning into a white and gelatinous and bloody swirl like a molten peppermint there in his eye. “I hear that Urtruvel is coming back from Paraguay,” she says, then pivots to drive her taser into the smoker’s kidney with a solid chunk. The smoker groans and stiffens. There’s a big fat man behind us masturbating. “Uh,” he says. “Uh,” he says more urgently. The big masturbating man turns his head and belches garlic. Bloated cops shove their way through the crowd casually macing and beating anyone in reach. I get a drizzle of mace that slams my eyes shut, burning them like hot coals, my lungs grabbed with rough wool fingers. I can hear the melony sound of the clubs hitting heads, the soft grunts and moans, the gradually diminishing wail of the smoker. An explosion goes off somewhere in the distance. The cops flinch and then go on chewing their gum. A kinetic surge billows through us lurching me off my feet and weightlessing the buildings which swim up and by as the crowd shifts, recoiling from the blast, from people pressed in too tight to get away and burning, the fire spreads to people eating bag snacks and twiddling their melting, dripping phones with stripped bone and tendon fingers.

  *

  I cross the lobby, messy after my long walk and yearning for relief from the crowds. The lobby is teeming with people.

  A woman is coming from the other direction; with her head flung back, mouth open, she waddles forward like an advancing walrus. I raise my elbow to fend off a collision. She clips me as she passes, without a word; the concussion, evidently, could not penetrate her numbness. I imagine she gets around seat to seat. Desp
ite her weak legs, she manages to keep her bulk in motion by tunnelling through space in a headlong rush, and evading obstacles must be a bit beyond her. This is one type.

  Now I see I am about to be compelled to deviate around a thick column to avoid a tall, lean, man mincing forward with small steps, staring vacantly at something in his hand.

  “Excuse me!” I bark, without slowing, and I brush by him. I feel the murmur of indignation at my back, but coma will close over him again, I think, and the anger in his mind will dim. As I mentally condescend to the people around me, an evil smile wreathes my lips.

  *

  A vision of Nemesis roams the sky all over the world, half shrouded in trailing clouds, riding on a huge indigo wheel, calling Greek words in an earsplitting voice. If only ... if only ...

  From time to time the figure reaches into the cloud, pulls out a bow, and shoots an arrow at the ground or ocean. The arrow vanishes before it can strike, and cities sprout from its shadow, burgeoning up instantly and spreading cities of fungus and fire, sprouting up like the plumes of nuclear explosions and freezing to form great canopies and radiant puffballs like molten orange candy shells, huge translucent horns made of chitin rising up all the way to the top of the atmosphere, with legions of slow Uhuyjhns whirling around it, entering and leaving it through its oval portals like vast needle eyes. Where these cities sprout, they roll aside all human contrivances with a cold, unhurried, hydraulic displacement; the city foundation on a massive elastic pad whose edges crimp in rounded fingers. The towers emanate a cascade of superiority waves that batter apart puny human minds, the pink and pastel colored fungus cities are lit day and night by multicolored fires, and spindles soaring high into the sky stream out dense spore plumes like smokestacks. So now, on top of purely domestic problems, the human race has to contend with an infestation of Uhuyjhns, whose burning mycelial cities are hiring, are paying better wages, offering better benefits. Positions are advertised on parchment-like membrane scraps that explode from puffballs. New hires will find themselves completely covered in thin, flexible sporotic integuement within a few days. The fungus sprouts and falls off, but the worker is unharmed and unparasitized. Humans are provided with netlike filtration material to fit into the mouth and nostrils, to prevent spores entering the lungs. Other orifices are safe enough.

  The Nemesis vision is a conspiracy, it’s a hologram, it’s a bizarre psychological weapon of the Uhuyjhn invaders. Her voice shatters windows and blasts apart frailer structures, scatters clouds abruptly curtailing rainstorms, sets off all the car alarms in town. The mountains shout the words back again and avalanches hurtle down their sides. What is she saying? People want to know.

  “For Christ’s sake, give the bitch whatever she fucking wants!”

  *

  The time traveller’s error, Assiyeh decides, is that they take the direct approach. That’s the route to contradiction. If I go back to that day and try to prevent—

  Click!

  ... See? It doesn’t work.

  Assiyeh is chain smoking, taking puffs between bites of her lunch. Thunder and lightning outside. Kanonan storms come from nowhere and snap into place, turning the day brown, but thunder and lightning are the same here as anywhere.

  BAM!

  Light another one, although the first one is still going across the room.

  If any given section of causality will be necessarily cone shaped, for the same reason that a slight deflection early in the trajectory of a moving object will cause it to diverge in an ever-expanding arc, then it should be possible to affect a whole swath of present events by making a minor change in past events, provided they are sufficiently far back in time.

  CRACK!

  How far back is far enough? What should she change? To know that, she would have to reconstruct that entire epoch in as much detail as possible, tracing out the finest meanderings of the web of causality, calculating the variations that might be introduced by this or that minor alteration. Even with the desired outcome to lariat the possibilities, the whole thing is too finical and risky. So that approach would take too long, unless she used time travel again to shorten it. If she can’t find a solution in ten years of cause-mapping the period in question, go back let’s say ten years in time, then come back to now with the results of those ten years and tell her present self—here’s the map so far, here’s the dead ends. Then another ten years, or rather the same again, but following up the map differently, and repeat this until an answer is calculated. Then take that answer back to now and use it immediately. Obviously she will not choose to do this, because if she had she would already have the answer from the by now. Her past self would have already told her.

  CRASH!

  Lightning strikes the building. The whole place jumps. Assiyeh’s cigarette bounces out of her fingers and lands on the tile. The ember is knocked out and lies there, dying quickly on the floor. Assiyeh produces another and lights it with her pistol lighter.

  Maybe the endlessly supercopious causality map can be dismissed in favor of something more approachable and hands-on. That’s what Assiyeh likes; enough theory to keep it interesting, but in the end you want a piece of equipment that mysteriously starts working again when you whack the sweet spot. She remembers a Nigerian colleague who was waxing nostalgic over a few drinks, telling them all that Ireland was importing Guinness from Nigeria and regaling the party with anecdotes detailing the inventive wizardry of Nigerian auto mechanics. A man brings in his car and the brakes are completely gone. A mortal mechanic would send for new brakes, but the wily Nigerian simply pours some ball bearings in there somehow and good as new. In ball-bearing this problem, the answer is to stop pretending there’s no such thing as chance.

  RUMBLE.

  You pick your odds. Somewhere in that stretch of time, go. Tinkering with the so-called web of cause and effect would be impossible, because that web is infinite in cross-section. That is, it sets up an infinite number of variables, and an infinite number is here really only the vitiation of any concept of number applied to this problem. The possible model, the only one that would work if any could, would be one that understands the task like this: you go back and insert a new cause into the scheme, like adding another car to the grand prix, or putting wings on the horses. So go back at random into that selected patch of time, no later than this, no sooner than that, and inaugurate a completely new project. Uhuyjhn cities, for example. They had an ad on Kanona’s List lately.

  Now the only difficulty is that she can’t go herself. The process is too dangerous for biologics. Grudgingly she resigns herself to the necessity of building yet another minion.

  BLAM!

  *

  There’s nothing quite so restoring after a long day of organizing fast food workers than sitting down to a hearty bowl of hot water followed by a deeply relaxing sixteen minutes of jackhammer sleep and having to get up again. This sure is the life.

  So as I sit here in my luxurious tumbleover towers taking stock, I find disjointed fragments of homeless wisdom ricocheting across my mind searching high and low for bullseyes they are not very likely ever to find. I can do do do but do I really intervene? Eventually they bring out the bag of weed and everyone goes limp, because you can’t live life like piano wire. So you have this bunch who want legal weed and this bunch and so on, and if you ask anybody I ever meet, they pretty much will all tell you yes they want that and no to white supremacy (and they aren’t just saying that in front of me, I can tell), and no to male supremacy and no to heterosex supremacy. They all do and they all mean it. It looks meaningful at first, then meaningless, but, if you don’t quit, if you’re a donkey like me and for some reason you don’t wander away into less contested plots, then you notice that it does mean something to have that many people say these things.

  Because why. I feel it’s true but now I have to prove it to myself.

  Because why. Because you get the idea that what everyone glibly calls the system is like an actual brick and mortar labyrinth st
anding out in the rain, defying the sun and frost, humans sluicing through it forever, wearing down the paving stones and tagging the walls with graffiti or sometimes desperately attacking them with improvised tools or explosives or their foreheads, but that brick jail is no stronger than the opinions that keep its doors closed and locked. Not that much stronger. No wall can keep you in if there’s an unlocked door in it. Unless you can’t see the wall. Without the social practices that put people in them, those jails would be just ugly buildings no different from shopping malls and motels. The walls are real and physical, and it’s not like one person making one decision is global liberation, but then if everybody really wanted that prison?

  I can’t remember why I wanted to think about this. Figure out what to do. What if there’s no door in the wall? You can try to dig your way through or under, but if you have enough people with the right tools, you can just set a door in there, or is my metaphor dictating to my idea now?

  Back outside, rain on my hood, no ode to street romance happening in my mind yet, maybe never. Don’t steal my problems. My problems are useful. That’s how you neutralize someone—“help” him right out of his problems, put him in neutral. Don’t let me disconnect from my problems. I want a better fucking apartment, but let me get it from my problems, not in exchange for my problems. My problem is my currency, I pay my problems out and keep them anyway. That works because we have our problem. We are our problems. The key to that one is to see, no to establish, a clear, a really astutely clear distinction between problems and trouble. End the trouble. The trouble keeps getting between me and my problems.

  I stop. I need to think. I hop up and sit on the trunk of a parked car and set off the alarm, sit there in the rain and alarm and think about reversing. Turned around, don’t steal the money—it’ll just end up back in the same swim again—steal problems, make trouble. Am I saying anything really? There’s a glimmer there that could either be hope or another milestone along another endless way, but my mind keeps going blank when I try to follow it.