Animal Money

by Michael Cisco

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  Her contact takes the remaining Professor Long by the arm and steers her to a dark room with shag carpeting, a bed and a round window hidden behind thick cream colored drapes, and that’s where the dreams really hit her, wringing and twisting her like a human washcloth.

  She doesn’t remember clearly afterwards what she dreamt. She lay on her back staring at the ceiling. At times it seemed to her that the inside of her head was in contact with the lower apex of a flat black diamond whose edges went through her eyes and met in her brain, and her mind, or at least her point of view, spilled out along that vertical surface, spreading out and upwards for light years, relentlessly telescoping. She was looking at enormous still images of human faces, sailing over them like landscapes. Updrafts of invisible force perturbed her as she passed over eyes, mouths, expressions. Interstellar space. There were people in it. No planet, no space station. She sees the leaves of interstellar space. Shaped like flame. There are human beings in among those leaves. There is rational motion. They are hunting. All of them. Young and old, children, the blind, stalking. They are all deliberate. They move skillfully. Negative people in a void forest of clear black tree trunks and leaves all limned in dubious light, growing out of no ground, as if something were being translated into the kind of sensory information that she would find intelligible. She feels angry.

  “Let me see!” she cries.

  Did she see, finally? She can’t say. There was in that hunting group of people a feeling like this was it, this was a clue or an answer, but that idea might only be a registration of the fact that hunting involves seeking, following clues.

  When she finally came out of it, she was exhausted, parched, hungry. Someone she doesn’t know, a middle aged African woman, noticed she was awake, and called in her contact. Her contact appears soon, and then an older man bringing in some soup. The remaining Professor Long eats it feebly and falls into normal sleep. When she wakes up again, completely out of step with the world’s time, she feels better, very hungry, and she wants to wash up and change her clothes. Her contact appears some time later and tells her to be ready to return to China in a few hours.

  “But what am I supposed to write?”

  “Don’t worry,” her contact says. “You’ll write it.”

  And she does write it. The words come like magic, surprising her as they take shape on the page. She reads them over with the same sense of discovery she would have had if they had been written by someone else. Who? The person she is going to be from now on, apparently.

  She’s noticed it ever since she got back. No one knows that she’s been away; she has often retreated from sight to work on this or that project in isolation. But everyone she meets asks her if she’s gotten some sun, or lost weight, or changed her hair. While as far as she can tell she looks the same as ever, she’s nevertheless now invested with a new intellectual glamour; people hang on her words, and now everybody turns when she comes into the room with the same smile and slightly ducking head, the same uplifted hand, the same rapid step, as ever.

  *

  Storms rip through the ethereal plane. With shadow Smilebot at his side, and shadow Boringbot at its side, the shadow of Professor Aughbui works frantically, adjusting the city, throwing off black wind waves to hold back the lightning, but the chaos proliferates in a thousand tiny fractures in all directions faster than he can respond and he is being overwhelmed like the sorcerer’s apprentice—except he was the good apprentice, he never strayed out of line, he barely even existed, and now he has to clean up and contain the rampant consequences of other people’s sloppiness and irresponsibility. He gnashes his shadow teeth with an irritation on its way to becoming madness. The silhouettes of the other economists are still with him, but, since their decision to bilocate, they have been preoccupied with their business on the Earth plane while their ethereal shades have become listless and sluggish. In a rage of activity, Professor Aughbui tries to buy himself time to create minions he can put to work propping up what small order remains. It is beginning to seem as if the economists on earth are vying with him, working against him. Lightning dances all around, each flash threatening to disorient him, and he struggles to concentrate despite the incessant thunder blasts. He has to resist a wild impulse to plunge his hands into the city before him, plunge them in up to his elbows and rear back, ripping it in fragments, then shredding these larger pieces into smaller and smaller ones in a frenzy of overstimulation.

  More time is needed, silhouette Professor Aughbui thinks. It’s a precious gleam of rational thought in a blur of activity. If he could bundle all the gestures and interventions he’s been making together by species, then a single movement would then radiate off all the ancillary gearing movements needed. He is trapped in a reactive state with no future, only dearly bought time. He needs to throw the other into the reactive position, force it to scurry after him. Time bought with animal money is doubled. With one movement he opens the zoos while at the same time enclosing the city. He opens the landscape and the sky, and closes himself. His darkness gets deeper, and more solid, while his outline grows less distinct. He no longer resembles his human silhouette; now he looks more like a featureless mannikin. He gathers up handfuls of animals of all kinds and holds them out to the storm to zap with lightning, then returns these charged individuals to the enclosure. There, they whizz around above, on, and below the ground, lighting up the whole city with a feverish bio-glow. The silhouette looks like an animal. All of them do. There are figures down on those city streets who move in eccentric, maze-like paths, and every now and then tacking abruptly away, sending an image or a second self gliding rapidly on down the original line. Professor Aughbui touches one of these figures and switches places with it, driving on down the street against a pelting rain in waterlogged clothes and squelching shoes, then tack and send another Professor Aughbui shadow creature sailing into another department. SuperAesop looms over the city reaching out to adjust this little luminous point and that bright segment and knocking down barriers with a fingertip to allow the animals to come out. He looks at the shadow faculty around him, and the storm becoming part of the city. He runs his feelers out and makes the city part of the storm. He waves his hand over one or another neighborhood and sucks up the lights. He upends a cupped hand and the activity over in this part of the city speeds up. Professor Aughbui reaches up through his own back and grabs the looming hand, the two of them swing around again. SuperAesop drives on down the street. Professor Aughbui looms over the city. SuperAesop reaches out and takes Assiyeh by the hand. They swing. Assiyeh drives down the street, tacking, throwing off images when she tacks, vanishing without a trace her empty clothes still warm flutter down into a pothole and there in her place—an alien artifact: the left quarter raggedly broken off a hexagon suspended in total darkness, all the leftmost and nearly all of the upper and lower left facets—this thing is made of small bright yellow blocks of varying size, some cubes and some rectangular boxes, so that it resembles a cramped adobe city—there are three of these hexagon fragments hovering in space stacked one on top of the other, parallel and evenly spaced, the same color and composition but with minor differences—they move exactly in unison, rushing further to the “left” and then stopping abruptly, and with that abrupt stop, a heavy, invisible fluid seethes among the blocks across the fragments and collects in a slosh against the hard hexagon edge.

  Sharp contrasts of muted colors ... the limpid black night tear shadow—the desert has autumn and winter too ...

  The Uhuyjhn city rises up suddenly all around us as cyclops cars lunge out too late, careering in impotent rage around behind us but unable to follow this escape route. Shitty hatchback gives out—there’s a pop and a rattle and white smoke and oh shit and get out and what now, and who cares because we’re here and that’s all that matters, we made it. The Uhuyjhn floating above a tobacco kiosk turns to greet us, abrupt steps of its boneless legs the magnetic way
the tiny feet in black shoes seem to cling to the floor, the way its diaphanous bulk rolls and settles on itself, billowing and nodding like a benign monarch.

  Summer time for flesh and skin;

  In Autumn—skeleton time begin.

  The annual festival of the dead. At midnight the dead arise and fuck the living. Shadows creep from the cemeteries, the unmarked graves in out-of-the-way places. Shadows grope into houses. Warm bodies pressed by cool purple cadavers, foul kisses, crumbling paws. Sepulchral croons of release in the silence of a still and breathless night, a new moon.

  Achrizoguayla is rocked by the news of Tripi’s return. She is already in session with the electoral committee, who are trying to explain to her that she cannot simply pick up where she left off.

  “I am still the elected President,” she insists.

  “Madame President,” Dr. Besik, committee chair, replies patiently, “We cannot overlook the fact that new elections have already taken place. There is no constitutional precedent or procedure to guide us; if we void the results of the elections, even though they are inconclusive, I guarantee you there will be outrage, there will be violence, very likely widespread violence, necessitating a serious crackdown. If the army gets involved, as you must realize, our democracy will not last.”

  “And what about the people?” Tripi asks. “Should the votes they cast for me, in exercise of their already hard-won democratic right to vote, be voided? What sort of precedent does that set? Do they not have the right to vote for the candidate they want, now that I have come back? At the least, if you are not prepared to honor their original intentions, you should at least make allowances for their current intentions.”

  “This has been an extremely long and emotional campaign, Madame President. We have already had several extensions, and now the committee has had to appoint a new member to replace Professor Muoitisorpio, which made yet another delay necessary. The interim government is withered to a skeleton and has barely enough means to keep going.”

  “The people know me,” Tripi says. “All I ask is a few days to make my case to them.”

  At this point the party representatives rear up in protest.

  “We can’t postpone the election again!”

  “Our campaign funds are nearly all gone! How can we go on?”

  A visibly aging Dr. Besik lifts her hands and sighs.

  “If I may ...” she keeps repeating softly, into her microphone. “If I may ...”

  Presently, when it is possible to be heard speaking in a normal tone of voice, she goes on.

  “We must consider the public in both cases. If President Pina is given time to run, this will stretch the already depleted resources of the other two parties and cause their supporters to become frustrated and angry—”

  Here she pauses to give both party representatives a lingering look.

  “—if the party leadership does not make a serious effort to address and to dissipate that anger. However, President Pina still enjoys considerable support and popularity with the people, who have not forgotten the great strides Achrizoguayla has made with her leadership. If she is denied the opportunity to run, those people will—and, I remind you, they are not a few—we have to foresee that they will not be likely to accept as democratic and fair the outcome of such an election.”

  In the end, the committee votes to postpone the election yet again. Tripi has a narrow opening—four days. Many of her advisors are surprised at her uncharacteristic insistence. Why not sit out the election for the good of the country? After all, there would probably be another election some time, right? Now that elections seem to be the order of the day. Why not wait?

  “Something must have happened to her out there,” they say. “There’s something hard in her look that wasn’t there before.”

  “Or that was buried. Something her ordeal tested and brought out.”

  The official story was an amnesiac episode induced by a blow to the head, almost certainly as a consequence of a fall down the slope. She had seen a child in some distress, as nearly as she can recall, and, in trying to find and help this child, she must have strayed too near the edge. Her mind is a blank from the time she finished her cigarillo, standing a little way off from the gas station, to the time when she recovered her memory in a hotel room in Etsimen, where some good Samaritans had given her shelter. How she got all the way to Etsimen is not known—perhaps some unsuspecting truck driver gave her a lift. The hotel manager and his young son received the public credit for sheltering her during her recuperation.

  News of the postponement is met with loud, precarious protests and there are minor eruptions of violence in the crowd. Will they remain minor? People dressed for the festival of the dead, all in black, with black rings painted around their eyes and white gloves, shout political slogans. A fight breaks out in a cemetery as members of two factions clash while visiting the graves of their loved ones.

  *

  She’s increasingly worried about the owls—police in China are owls because they say who? Who invited you to the conference? Who did you meet there? Who does Dr. Sulekh Budshah work for? Who do your Los Angeles associates associate with? Who is the brother of the woman who cuts your hair? What’s his wife’s name? His daughter’s name? His best friend’s barber’s name?

  The remaining Professor Long lies awake in the dark playing out the interrogation, anticipating questions and testing herself instead of sleeping. Why did you call it Unrelated Books? What aren’t they related to—Marxism? Isn’t that a rather weird name for a publishing company? Are the books unrelated or is it the company? What do the two arrows mean? Did you design the logo yourself? On and on, all over tea, with every outward appearance of a social call, and suppression spraying out in an invisible haze from the bodies of the two plainclothes officers.

  Given the bizarre inaction of the police in her case she is beginning to get really worried. Why would they let her go for so long without a scare chat unless they were planning something worse? They could be giving her enough rope. They could be monitoring her contacts, using her to ferret out other nonconformists, but she’s never published anything by anyone in China who wasn’t already openly critical, at least by the narrow standard prevailing. Anything stiff was coming from exiles and from random people around the world. The worst suspicion of all was that they were using the press for their own purposes, that someone in the company was a plant or had been recruited or manipulated into working with the authorities. Actually, the worst suspicion was that the whole press had been body-snatched and she was the only real person left in it, deludedly going about her business inside a prison that looks just like everyday life. Then again, there’s a reason it’s so easy to make a prison look like everyday life, once you take away the more extreme manifestations. Take away the rape, the inmate violence, the guards beating you—maybe that’s why the prison reforms are happening now; not to make the prisons nicer, but to make it harder to tell the difference between being in or out of prison.

  Within a few months of its publication, the Unrelated Books expanded edition of Animal Money was everywhere. The remaining Professor Long pounded out a seventy page afterword over a single weekend and emerged exhausted and shaky. It was that afterword which prompted those states which had not already done so to ban the book, on the ground that it was “cult literature” or “religious propaganda” or some form of ultra-subtle indoctrination into Chinese ideology. The remaining Professor Long, who had had enough brains not to sign the afterword, is bombarded by demands to reveal the author’s name, but something about those demands smells wrong to her.

  Still no scare chat, or any of the other tell-tale signs of official interest. The demands all come from the wrong places, government agencies she’s never heard of, non-governmental agencies, newspaper editors. Of course she refuses with what some take to be a heroically stalwart stand against censorship, but she also uses a business trip to Los Angeles as a pretext to abandon Shanghai. Why did they let her go? She stays with
friends in San Gabriel, applies for jobs, ends up back in her weird gazebo-office in San Toribio a few months later, gazing absently out the narrow door into the indistinct greenery of the garden as if it had all been a daydream. There is in the world the same feeling she gets in dreams, of everything being different and yet nothing having changed.

  She wrote that afterword in a frenzy. It fastened on her almost the very instant she got back from Chayar’iliane. Anyone who knows anything about the subject can tell at once that the material in that afterword is of Uhuyjhn origin; much of it details a mystical kind of procedure, ostensibly included in the text as an example drawn from an anthropologist’s description of the practices of an anonymous tribe in an unspecified place and time. The celebrants sit on the ground close together in two rows facing each other, hands joined across the gap, softly chanting certain formulas and invocations, rocking to and fro faster and faster drawing closer together in contracting circles their heads going up and down like pistons. If this can be sustained long enough a haze of luminous golden particles will precipitate itself around the actors nodding in cantilever unison, rippling with their movements, tracing their exhalations and the plumes of heat given off by their bodies in branching, swirling arabesques of glittering motes. Make one mistake, lose concentration for one instant, and they will find you later, petrified, a gilded statue, nodding awfully. Do it correctly, and the mist will form a runway between the two rows. Something is coming down that runway, something that flashes, twists, luminous. A hand is raised to snatch it as it goes darting past, closing it in black fingers firm and dry as wood. A coin of thick, heavy gold, purer than pure, with a deep amber glow, blank, weirdly absent any temperature, and inexplicably easily mistaken for a butterfly. The coin never stays, but those who summon it will never be without again. They become impoverishedly wealthy; as Camus noted, the poor have the sun, the beach, the sky, the weather. Those who have conjured the coin acquire the ability to transmute their circumstances, to turn dead debts and obligations into something living and changeable, to make sleepwalking institutions wake up and dream another dream. What they owe becomes elastic and subtly variable, so that owing elicits more, and repaying elicits more, and buying and selling are a kind of respiration, and their wealth does not materialize in objects but in time. The late Professor Long was right: the exchange of animal money creates suspensions of continuity, which she terms “disengagements,” that allow for the direct application of alternative systems. The mystery of the missing value is solved, as far as she and Professor Budshah are concerned—Professor Crest being unconvinced, Professor Aughbui abstaining—by seeking it in an escape back into exchange, which is to say the mystery of its disappearance is put into circulation. Professor Crest complains that this makes animal money nothing more than a currency with a mystery standard in place of a gold standard. Nevertheless, this was the Uhuyjhn message the remaining Professor Long was selected to relay.