Animal Money

by Michael Cisco

  *

  I am buying wine for Carolina and me when a meaty paw alights gently on my left shoulder and pulls me around with soft irresistibility to confront myself—I’d know that almost too-narrow skull anywhere, adorned with a Hapsburg lip, and a pair of eyes popped out of horror cartoons. I hear a heavy laugh bubbling heavily up.

  “Me, not him! Over here!”

  The other hand points me to a glistening jovial face, a meaty man in a tropical shirt, stubble on his cheek, a mop of black curls showing some grey to top it off.

  He asks me if I’m me and I say yes, and he says he’s Mateo and digs a folded note out of his tropical pocket to give me between two fingers. It’s from Tripi.

  “Don’t say anything,” he says quietly.

  I know Mateo. He’s death. Everybody knows it. He is what they call a “Bronson.” That means he kills people, but he doesn’t take sides.

  I read the note. She’s asking me to come see her right away in her room at Hotel Jose Blounga. It looks like her handwriting—all the Tripis.

  “Which one?”

  “Which one do you think?” he chuckles. “Come on.”

  I let that light but heavy hand float me out the door. There’s a cab waiting outside. I think I might bolt, but somehow I get in and we are whirring through the glittering streets of San Toribio. It’s a warm dusky time of day. Mateo sits in front talking Achrizoguaylan whatever to the driver, an older man in a white cap and a crisp red shirt, with a gold chain around one wrist.

  I should be scared to death, but Tripi’s handwriting somehow consoles me. The idea of dying at all, but particularly now, when the night air comes in soft off the transvestites through the window, it just isn’t real. It isn’t my time. I know that the way I know I am sitting upright, that this is my hand.

  This part of town plotted out its traffic light scheme based on what must have been some very optimistic appraisals. Waiting at one light after another I watch the people. I could jump out and join them. Everywhere the same pleasing, even browns. The dry air, the dusk. My mother told me that she had taken me to Africa when I was a boy, a very small boy, but that was a dream, come to think of it. I dreamt, when I was a small boy, about lying in a bed in an African house, and I told my mother. At rest in the dream, the sun going down like a glob of hot glass, setting over Africa, all so vivid, and the feeling too. The dryness. The nameless smell I would recognize if I ever smelt it again, wouldn’t it be weird to go and smell that smell there? Something else in the air too, as the night came down, a rustle, like dust rustling against itself, mixing with voices, with insect noises. I was lying in a cot or something, a crib, on the floor, looking at a plaster wall with a rough line about a foot up from the bottom, and above the line the wall was a very pale green, maybe with a bit of festive, tentative red piping around the window, which had no sill, no sash, just a slot in the wall perfectly framing a setting sun that shone on me at an impossible angle, as if I were hovering over it and yet as if the horizon were a wall higher than the sill. It was so real because the primary sensation there was the absence of any pressure, as if the air had lost weight, as if I controlled all aspects of weight concerning myself, so that I would feel it in and from my body only. I felt safe in a dangerous place, an eerie place. I could look out the window and see unreal things, but they couldn’t come through to get me. I woke up and told my mother, who slept on the sofa across the room from me.

  “I’ve never gone there,” she said, when I asked her, thinking somehow her memory had given me my dream. She was a vague shape made of blankets over there against the far wall, with a comb of streetlight raking the wall over her through the blinds. The wind was blowing outside. I looked toward the window and saw stars in the blinds. The wind rushed and wind chimes jingled. I could only imperfectly distinguish between the chimes, the wind, the night sky, the stars; I thought the chimes were a sound the stars made; and since the wind made the stars easier to see by sweeping the dirt out of the sky, the wind affected the stars from my point of view, that logically the wind was among the stars, a star wind. I knew these ideas were beautiful and maybe more beautiful than true, although I couldn’t have explained that or even understood it then.

  I see my mother now, coming toward me through the kitchen door. I see her from my man’s height, although I never saw her that way in reality. She is all one lump, all at once and slopeshouldered like a popsicle or should I say a momsickle. She carried her head low, like her neck had retracted, and shuffled on skinny ankles. She’s in the shadow, in the kitchen. The kitchen is orange with early morning light behind her but she’s shadowed in the doorway, and now she steps out to look at me. She turns up her sagging, smiling face at me, like she never had the chance to do since I was never this tall when she was able to do any looking. My mother.

  She was a real philosopher. Everything upset her and nothing fazed her. I’d cut my body in half slowly if that meant I could see her come out of the kitchen now and smile at me one more time. She was a real philosopher. She knew the only thing that mattered. I don’t have a collection of her wise sayings, or I guess I do, but they don’t sound like anything repeated. Some of my mother’s aphorisms include: “Well, all right,” or “Then, you just have to do it, that’s it,” or “I know it’s tough,” or “You should go,” (with reference to some trip). or “That’s it.” There’s the moral, use it wisely.

  My mother was never married. She had me because she met a Mexican and they moved in together in his little shack-house in Eagle Rock. Evidently they lived together for a while before she got pregnant with me; he went out one day and never came back, but she would always underline the fact that he was in the US illegally and that he could have gotten picked up. I would always mentally underline the fact that they have telephones in Mexico too. I think my mother was less concerned about defending herself against the idea she’d been abandoned and more concerned about defending herself against the idea that US immigration might have killed my father somehow. She did believe immigrants were summarily killed by immigration officers, and she also thought a lot of immigrants died during deportation, getting stuck in overcrowded cells with no water and no air conditioning and no medical facilities and no toilet for days. “Would he just leave the house?” she would ask rhetorically.

  The cab stops in front of a low building painted dark red with black shutters, nearly engulfed from behind by palm trees that grope over the roof like a head of hair. There’s a single golden point of light, like a shining coin, I can see through the slats of one shutter. The wind comes up as we walk to the door, touselling the trees, whooshing and gushing like waves, and the sound and the light through the slat makes me think again of the room after my dream, the blinds, stars, wind, chimes, my mother on the sofa, and I wonder if this is a warning, if I’m going to die here looping back.

  Mateo throws open the black door with its brass knob and in we go; red tile floors, ghostly white walls in the gloom, and a smell like corn bread gone cold.

  “Hey Tripi!” he bellows.

  I get a whiff of tobacco smoke as we pass through into the room with the one lamp. Tripi sits at a table there, looking the same as ever, tweedy and professorial, and tired. Carolina is sitting across the round table from her, same side as me, back lit, naked as usual. That’s probably her dress tossed over the back of the sofa, her sandals there where she kicked them deftly off. Even without getting a clear look at her I can already tell her eyes are all pupil.

  “Here he is!” Mateo roars, gesturing at me.

  I sit down.

  “What you want? Coffee? Mate? You want whiskey?”

  What I want is a time machine.

  “I don’t know man, I’ll have whatever you have.”

  Mateo goes crashing off into the back of mystery zone saying something loud enough to come rebounding off the walls and yet I can’t make it out.

  Tripi gets up and I get up again and we shake hands and sit again.

  “I didn’t want to be too obvious abo
ut all this,” she says for openers. She straightens her skirt nervously.

  “You see, someone might want to kill me, to keep me out of the election.”

  “OK,” I say vaguely, looking at Carolina.

  “It seems that, during my time away, people I trusted have changed in ways that make trusting them more difficult. I have my doubts about who I can rely on now. At the moment, the country is at a watershed in its history, an opportunity to join in the greater economic community of Latin American states. You must know that integrating into that community was something I really struggled to achieve, and I think—and hopefully this is not mere pride talking—that I am genuinely the best one to lead the country during this time.”

  “You have my vote,” I say.

  “I want your help,” she says. “I want you to run my campaign.”

  “That’s crazy,” I say without thinking, the words flat facts.

  “Show me something sane in all this by way of comparison,” she says without batting an eye.

  I am sitting next to a stark naked woman who is, at the moment, calmly snapping off tabs of acid and forming them into a little cake to put beneath her tongue, next to the two or three she already has in there, and I am conversing with the quasi-president of the country. Mateo comes back with mate on a tray for me and for Tripi. He does not even glance at Carolina.

  “You’re not having anything?” I ask her.

  “No,” she says.

  Mateo throws a look at me.

  “No, I’m OK,” he says.

  “I would have thought I’m the last person you’d want,” I say. “I’m the one who sheltered all your counterfeits and people wouldn’t be questioning whether or not you’re really you if I hadn’t or is that why you want me, right? Because I will—”

  She’s nodding.

  “Right,” she says.

  “Getting me on your side means taking that weapon away from the opposition.”

  Still nodding, she says, “There’s another reason as well, which is why you bothered sheltering all those false versions of me. Although naturally I am glad that you seem to accept me for who I am without any fuss. The other reason is however the most important, and that is your devotion to the image. I feel I must not fail to tell you, that I am not under any illusion—I think—about any loyalty you may personally feel for me. While I would welcome and esteem loyalty as it is worthy to be welcomed and esteemed, what matters more, most of all, is fidelity to what I have come to stand for. An untold amount of hard work was necessary to get me into the running, to make our voices heard in quarters of influence, some even lost their lives doing it, and perhaps, provided you take for granted my boundless gratitude and admiration for all that work, a very huge element of good fortune also. To maintain a clear appraisal of my own contribution, that it is a contribution I make, and not an exalted foreordained consummation or a solitary and heroic labor entirely of my own, is something I struggle with every day. So, when I speak of what I stand for, I don’t want you to think I am really speaking about myself. I am speaking about the people of this country, everyone still languishing in slums, the Basques, and I am speaking, too, about Latin America, our role in it, and the world, even if all we stand for here is the insistence that our country, small and poor as it is, should likewise have a voice in a global chorus, and that this should be true for all small and poor countries.

  “You’ve noticed,” she says with a mirthless little smile, “that I am campaigning at the moment. If you’ll forgive the high rhetoric, I hope you won’t overlook the sincere sentiment and values that hold the rhetoric up. Those are the only things that should influence your decision on my side; certainly I can’t offer you much else. I have very little campaign money, and at present I can’t begin to think how the election will turn out or if we will even be able to hold one. The grumbling of the generals has been sub-sonic up to now, but I’m sure you’ve started to hear it. They are chafing to restore what they consider ‘order.’ And I know that some of them believe this election will lead to violence no matter what happens.”

  “You keep telling people they have to accept the results of the election,” I say.

  “Yes, but there may be riots anyway, because not everyone will be angry on my behalf, but simply because they will assume the elections are illegitimate. While I have my criticisms of the way the electoral committee has handled itself, I don’t believe it is corrupt. However, it is an irony of the time that the more adjustments they make, in their attempts to defend democratic processes, the more they seem to be tampering with them.”

  “Have you thought about coalition?”

  “Of course! Matild can’t make up her mind whether she wants me as a partner, junior partner, senior partner, advisor, this, that, the other thing—I get different messages every time I talk to her about it and the emails go round and round. And the NFP won’t even talk to me. They have decided to treat me as a pretender.”

  “Is that what I owe this invitiation—invitation to?”

  “I make this invitation to you,” she declares, “because I think you are an idealist.”

  “OK,” I say. “Where do we start?”

  *

  “Did you notice,” I ask Carolina later. “Mateo didn’t see you.”

  “Who’s Mateo?” she asks.

  “The one who brought me to Tripi’s.”

  “Oh,” she says absently. “But you came in alone.”

  “He came in with me.”

  “You came in alone, my dear.”

  *

  “Your Animal Money has caused a bit of trouble,” she says, coolly adopting the superior position. She sits on a bare stage, legs crossed, fashionable, as her mouth moves in speech I see flashes of the writhing sea louse inside. She is the next Urtruvel, trained in an Ursuline convent.

  The publication of Animal Money was a non-event having no effect at all, or it changed the world. It did both. Like a laser whose points of emission and of contact can be seen, but not the transit in between. Two lights or one in two ledgers. What really changed? What can a book do? Don’t fantasize the people. They do it. The book is like a person in certain respects, when it can become part of some kind of trouble. The book that is making trouble for me right now fell into my lap in the library the other day, handed to me by one of my more troublesome because inquisitive students. Hermetic Instruction among Leafcutter Ants, by a Palestinian entomologist named Assiyah Malahasoud. In this book, she describes her chance discovery of intricate pheromonal tracings, laboriously constructed by leafcutter ants in forms closely resembling the seals, circles, and composite symbolic images of hermetic magic. There are certain typical icons, repeated in variant forms from hive to hive even across enormous distances and over long periods of time, featuring in particular typical representations of very old drones. Ant drones are typically short lived, she observes, surviving maturation only for a few weeks, while queens can live for decades and even ordinary worker ants can live for over a year. Hence, an old drone would be a genuine anomaly, and something the ants would not likely know from experience. Uniquely among insects, ants have been observed teaching each other various skills—could they have some kind of folklore as well, including a story of a drone who lived a very long time?

  There were also special images representing pathfinder ants, those who venture out into the unknown in order to find a way around an obstacle. These are represented with modified versions of pheromones associated with queens, as if to dignify them. Sometimes they are depicted as surrounded by ants of other species, particularly those with cruder social structures; these “savage” ants are marked with odors associated with the unfamiliar and the dangerous, leading Dr. Malahasoud to conclude that these images show stylized encounters between leafcutter pathfinders and “wild ants,” the myrmecological equivalent of cave men. Again and again, these images stress an ambivalence about the hindquarters of the ant, specifically the way the ovipositor is modified to become a death-dealing stinger among the
sterile workers. Dr. Malahasoud speculates that this means the ants may have their own version of ambivalence, postulating that, while ants lack sophisticated neural organs, the collective mass of ants may develop intelligence socially. She points to a symbol that she claims to have found in every leafcutter diagram, and which she names the “air-eater” symbol. It shows an ant’s head, depicted by a minute representation of odor variations over the surface, with streaks of earth meticulously scrubbed bare of any smell at all near the mouth area. These streaks of earth actually have faint traces of smell at the end farthest from the mouth, deliberately attenuated as they draw closer to the mouth. Ancillary clues show that this “air-eater” symbol has extraordinary significance, causing ordinarily very active pathfinder ants to pause whenever they encounter one. Even when alarmed, leafcutter ants will not step on or disrupt the “air-eater” symbol. What’s more, Dr. Malahasoud has found that, shortly after the death of a queen, a new “air-eater” symbol will appear in or near the hive.