Animal Money

by Michael Cisco

  Exchange problems, right, and steal the enemy’s problems. Steal their problem. Their problem is ruling us, so steal that equals self rule. That seems too easy. That seems a) too easy and b) too much like what everyone has always been saying to be commensurate with the newness of the idea as it occurs to me. I tremble (with disgust) for any civilization that makes a liability out of having a mind of your own, aka all of them. I get off the car. You have to do everything yourself. Sometimes it seems like we’re pale imitators. None of that matters. Ruling us is not really their problem so much as it is a part of their problem, or a symptom, somehow one step down from the top, the real problem. Because when I say problem, I mean—

  Nearly bumped into someone, sorry.

  —ruling us is possible because they have the means, and they have those means because they rule. It’s a closed loop. Right, fine, so—

  She had her umbrella down, almost didn’t see me in time. I sidestep into a puddle. Uh-huh. Squelch along now. The way to get through a crowd is to blunder along, that’s what gets results, not all my tapdance. I know it but I don’t do it.

  Closed loop. Break the loop. Why doesn’t that thought satisfy me? It isn’t new enough for the feeling of having an insight that wants to convince me I’m a genius this disgusting morning. Those are some pastries. Anyway, my thesis statement is the private ownership class keeps uncoupling the rest of us from our own problems in a variety of ways, and we have to really stay on top of things to prevent that or to link back up again, which means we’re always following them. If we’re going to disconnect them from their own problems we have to take the lead and get them chasing after and reacting to us. That’s a fine, purely abstract and general statement of nothing whatsoever, and just now it seems my whole mind has gone dirty out of my head. I feel like shit and now I’m fucking preaching. I can’t be bothered to decide where the shit I’m swimming in ends and I begin. I feel like shit. I’m so angry it hurts. So much I wish I were dead. I want to drop my weary headaching stomachaching self down in the gutter and sluice away like a diarrhea pile. What happened to me? What happened to Carolina? What happened to Etsimen?

  *

  Kanonan cities invade the earth. Overnight the towers of Buzzati appear like the bowsprit of a colossal new island in the Pacific. An invisible time bubble surrounds the Kanonan projections. Investigators explore the streets of these entirely cinematic cities projected in three dimensions onto the Earth from a remote point in space, passing unseen through intangible images of buildings and people light years away, their phantom gestures, their distorted voices wail and croon indecipherable languages. Waves of interference burn through the projection at random intervals, like huge roving blots of billowing nothingness that damp out the scene and all light and sound, negative projections of darkness and silence that snuff out the will.

  Uhuyjhn metropoli appear in nuclear explosions that transform blasted wastelands into thriving cities. Sporestacks gush into the sky like black smokers, the sky above these cities wavers and undulates in a long plume of turbulent air. The Uhuyjhn bob from tower to tower, nodding benignantly down at teeming multitudes of humans and other terran species engaged in eager commerce.

  Watch—

  You’ll see—

  The world is filled with wise human beings who are being mentally destroyed because there’s something fundamentally wrong, and they can see what’s wrong, can articulate clearly to others what’s wrong, agree about what’s wrong, can fix what’s wrong. Engulfed in thick shadows and buried under heavy slabs of noise, they know, and, if asked, will patiently explain, what to do. And they are jammed, jammed, jammed. The Replicate will go to any lengths to keep them from fixing anything. Again and again, idiocy stays the intervention of intelligence, and sages watch from another dimension in impotent despair, in an enforced ataraxia they never chose, wondering if it matters that they aren’t to blame.

  Watch—

  The Prison Roads: to deal with the self-renewing problem of an ever growing number of American prisoners, an enterprising lawyer gets federal funding to create the first Prison Road in Texas. Instead of being crammed into cells, convicts are set to work building highways in the middle of nowhere. When they aren’t working, they are confined to barbed-wire pens along the roads. The Prison Roads feature an enclosed concrete structure that divides the two directions of the highway. This structure contains the cells, so as you drive to work or to school, you pass along an endless cell block, knowing that the prisoners are watching you pass through the holes they make in the thin strip of window filter. The filtration windows are translucent webs designed to strain out exhaust fumes so the prisoners don’t suffocate, but you can’t see out through them, so the prisoners usually bore holes in the crumbly stuff somehow and peep out. It’s a special treat when there’s heavy traffic and the prisoners can get a long masturbatory look at the women creeping by.

  The Prison Road program is a big hit and existing highways get the treatment, too; closing schools and VA hospitals to maintain the ranks of the workers. Soon every great American highway is lined with captives who will never move an inch. More highways are planned. In some cases, the convicts, having built the road, will be required to walk its length forever, up and down in a subterranean concrete chute, performing maintenance. When one of them drops dead, a guard pulls up on the covered causeway, bags the body and hauls the corpse into the box on the back of his weird little guard buggy, put-puts away again dragging a tail of sour gas fumes.

  *

  The black cloister and the luminous archways and me, tumbling along the ground like a dried leaf.

  Now there’s something interesting.

  Just here there are clouds, white clouds, inside, dimly luminous, cold, oozing along.

  If I watch these semeny-looking clouds they stop. When I transfer my attention to something else, they start moving again. Now, if I rivet my attention on one frond there. Keep on. And indeed, something is happening to it. It’s condensing, and as it condenses it drops toward the ground. It has condensed into a crook shape. Just detached now, from the cloud that extruded it. Still sinking. It’s tilting upwards, and the thing is, I was imagining this happening as it happened. Either I imagined it simultaneously to its happening, or it happened as a further exhibition of the power of my—

  I don’t want to lay claim to anything like will.

  Something to do with me, though.

  Now, I’ll try this. Let me try getting that crook under the edge of the wall.

  No ...

  No ...

  Almost ...

  No. It keeps bumping up against the wall and flattening against it.

  Swing it way back like a kicking foot and then down and under, scoop up the wall’s hem.

  Got it ...

  Now lift gingerly up. My arms are useless twigs tangled up in my ribs or something. But this surprise gift, a manipulatable floating hook of steam, can pull up the wall and tip ... iiiit ...

  Splat!

  The wall collapsed like a curtain of tar.

  I pull up all the walls.

  *

  I pick out a can of cat food.

  “How much?”

  “Six rats.”

  “Six rats?!”

  She shrugs.

  Shaking my head, I pull out my squirming bag of rats and peer down into it. Hand it to her.

  “That’s eight.”

  She turns to one of the rat cages and upends the bag into it, kneading out the rats. They drop flailing into the cages and start trying to scamper up the sides almost before they touch down. She hands me back the now much deflated bag with my two rats change, and the cat food can.

  There are guys who stalk people leaving food stores. It’s safest to eat in the store, but the owners don’t like that. Some provide a safety zone in a corner or in another room, but even then you get brawls sometimes in the store, or big intimidating guys hanging around in the zone, ready to pull your food right out of your hands. You have to plan ahead.
I tuck the can into my waistband and the rats into my backpack and wait. There’s a big guy vagranting across the street, a few steps up, a few steps back, glancing up at the building as if he’s waiting for someone. Presently he leaves, rubbing the back of his head. I’d wait to see if he’s only just gone off a little way, to lure me out, but the owner says she’s closing up. My flightpath is clear anyway. Out, down the block, quick around a corner and run the side street to the plaza and get lost in the crowd, my jacket closed, the can right against my stomach where I can feel it all the time. Big rips in capitalism now, big opportunities. The left is a pile of barf and the right fringe is jumping the gap unopposed. You see them squaring off, the berserk Southern Father vs. the robot Northern Father. And me cool and sarcastic and impotent dangling off to one side pretending, hiding out in a men’s room stall scarfing air and cat food. Nobody’s around. I can’t find a soul from the old days. God damn it now I am going to have make myself a minion.

  *

  A darkened bedroom. Daylight outside stops at the glass of the window, not coming in. I put myself in bed, a small doll, then stand back and regard my work with neither satisfaction nor displeasure, a smooth easy feeling of neutral neutral neutral. Economic slide show at the side show. It will cost you all you have. Each scene is a transaction.

  What I experience now is like vision again, as if my faculty of sense were roving from one sense to another. It had been smell, now it’s vision. It isn’t vision. It’s imagination. I’m imagining things as they are, and this seems close enough to vision. What is presenting itself to me in images is a dark passage. It’s not a passageway, it’s more like a deep arcade. There are arched openings to an outdoors pale sunlight is incessantly washing away. It reminds me of being under a freeway. An abandoned freeway. Through open country. I can’t see any landscape. Now it’s more like I’m passing down the length of one boxcar after another, with gaping open doors, but it’s too broad for a boxcar, maybe it’s a lot. All this describing is not only not getting me anywhere, it’s sapping the meager reserves I’ve got left. It’s what appears in the luminous openings to the outside that matters. I must be in the backstage area that ghosts use between appearances, to get around. I’m in a position to narrate events because I’m dead and unable to intervene. I can meander up and down all of time and space, sticking my head now into this scene, now that.

  Like this one:

  An apartment in a big city. Someone moving. The remaining Professor Long, my namesake. She passes a pair of thick drapes with a little gap in between and the warm, heavy light of the afternoon glows over her face for a moment. She’s not the remaining Professor Long. She might be her daughter, if she had one. She is the remaining Professor Long, much younger, about twenty. So this must be the past. She’s straightening things all around the apartment. She looks at herself in the mirror. She notices a newspaper behind the sofa. Perhaps someone set it down on the sofa back and it fell down. Quickly, she pulls it out and, carrying it in both hands, hurries with it into the kitchen, throws it in the trash. Photo in the paper: two thousand pig carcasses hauled out of the river, no explanation. Now she draws a glass of water for herself and puts it down untouched. Back into the living room. Look at each piece of furniture. Go over to the window, look at the sky. Turn to face the room and scan it again, from this new angle.

  She rushes to answer the door. The two of them look at each other for a moment, smiling, making and breaking eye contact, taking each other in a moment before she turns aside to admit him. He notices the pin on the lapel of her new pink sweater; he gave her that pin a year ago, before he went away to study in the U.S. He looks the same as he did when he left. Perhaps a bit meatier. His hair is a bit shorter than she remembers. Perhaps he’s only just had it cut?

  “Did you just come from the barber?” she asks him playfully, pointing to his hair.

  He doesn’t seem to understand. He rubs his hand over his short hair for a moment, smiling and shaking his head.

  They sit down together in the main room of the apartment. The curtains are half open on a golden-brown afternoon, hazy, but with the wind picking up now, an unseasonable wind.

  “What would you like?” she asks.

  “Nothing for me,” he says. “I’ve just eaten.”

  Perhaps her expression strikes him as a little disappointed, because he apologizes right away.

  “We were working all morning, and then everybody wanted to go eat together.”

  She sits down.

  “That’s all right,” she says.

  Construction noises blend in and out of the sounds of traffic and helicopters. The apartment is not that high up, but it’s situated on a side street away from the main avenue, so that mutes the din a little.

  “Have something yourself,” he says.

  “Ah ...”

  They are both sitting down, rather heavily in their seats; he in a chair, and she on one end of the small, deflated-looking sofa, near to him. She notices that he did not choose to sit on the sofa.

  “You haven’t changed,” she says, still glancing around the room for imperfections to fix.

  He shrugs and shakes his head, smiling affably. His eyes flick from one thing to another, one thing to another. He doesn’t seem to be that different at all. The time that had passed since she last saw him had passed for her, but for him it had been no time.

  “Tell me about America!” she says, shoving his arm playfully.

  He sputters a little, smiling.

  “When did you get back?” she asks.

  “Six days ago.”

  “Already six!”

  He nods with a lot of motion in the neck, emphatically.

  “How is your family?” she asks.

  “My father’s a little worse,” he says. “Otherwise the same. Like I never left.”

  He is still looking around the room. She is now alternately watching him attentively or averting her gaze.

  “How about your family?” he asks. He smiles as the words come out of his mouth, and she thinks he is relieved at having come up with something to say, a question that will enable him to be silent and listen.

  “Fine, same as usual,” she answers with a microvengeful impulse to be short, block his escape, put the onus to speak back on him.

  “Has your sister started college yet?”

  “Yes,” she says. “She’s working hard. I barely see her.”

  “You’re looking well,” he says.

  She contracts expectantly.

  “Where did you get that pin?” he asks.

  She allows the witticism to register and smiles.

  “I don’t remember,” she says.

  “Ah,” he says, with mock exasperation, but it’s only a dim echo of the much louder sound he would have made before.

  The wind is coming up outside, sweeping the clouds away. It’s late enough in the day that this clearing up doesn’t add much more light to the air, but only unveils an impossibly deep and infinitely layered blue sky. Unusual to see blue out the window, such deep blue. There’s construction noise from several different locations nearby, and all seems to revive together in an impersonal sort of shout, as if they were straining to make themselves understood to each other through the racket. He seems to be listening to the noise as much as to her.

  Actually, they can still hear each other fine, even at a conversational tone. He is telling her his plans; he’s found a place he will be sharing with two other men, and they’re all going to pool their resources and work like maniacs to get good enough connections to go into serious construction. As he discusses his ambitions he becomes handsomer and more appealing and animated, the old features that she found so attractive, but he’s not really seeing her there. The image of his life that he is painting for her seems very complete in itself, and suddenly she feels entirely small and localized in the room. Complete, and without her. This room is off on the margins. He didn’t miss her, he doesn’t need her. A horrible feeling of futility sweeps away her will
to speak, but then it returns.

  She wants to ask him where she fits in his scheme.

  “Then, in maybe five or six years, I can afford my own place ...” he says.

  All right, maybe this is the spot. Maybe he thinks I need to be persuaded. Maybe he thinks I am skeptical.

  “But what I really want is to live in a building I designed.”

  The wind drops out of his sails here. The construction noise revives a little, or so it seems. He picks at a flower printed on the arm of the chair. She sits with her hands in her lap, feeling as if her bottom were sinking steadily lower and lower into the cushions, as if her knees were coming up level with her chest.

  “Do you still want red tiles?”

  Let’s see how that goes, she thinks. She feels like she could go straight to sleep, maybe a little nap, it might clear away this shadowiness that is floating its tendrils around her. Just at the moment almost not caring, she listens indifferently for his answer.

  Before, when they used to walk together in the afternoon or early evening, there was a particular house they used to pass, with a red tile roof, and he was always remarking on this or that pleasing feature of the house and speculating about either living there or in a similar house. Back then, especially when dusk was falling and the light of the city and sky grew weird, life together seemed possible, when they were most in harmony. Now something momentous is killing the spirit of play that used to embrace and hold them together so easily. The sun drops in the sky and accents the deepening gloom with vague bitterness.

  If I could be anywhere but here and now ... she thinks. She misses the moments before he arrived, when she was still hopeful, nervous, and active.

  Little traces of emotion, uncertainty in pronunciations, small talk. It keeps seeming like it’s about to become play again, the way it ought to be, but the impulse never lasts long enough to get going.

  “What do you mean?” she hears herself ask, her voice sounding strange. She’s misheard everything he’s been saying, as if he were speaking another language.