Animal Money

by Michael Cisco

  All this is very interesting, but what struck me in particular was the far less esoteric observation that ant hives are considered “social stomachs.” That is, all the food is shared even in the process of digestion. How much, I wonder, of the concept of “yours” and “mine” arises from the fact that a given morsel of food, once consumed, will not be retrieved by another? It is sealed inside a body that will either have to be cut open or compelled to disgorge the food: an unappetizing prospect. Is this an example of animal money, too?

  I am refreshed by this speculative turn to my thoughts. It’s like stepping out of a stuffy house into the cool evening air, and it brings home to me how little use I’ve made lately of my faculties of speculation. Now I am trying to run this grey market free university, the remaining Professor Long is publishing controversial books, and Professor Crest is an upper echelon in cosmic science. We came back down to earth. We took up our tools and set to work on concrete things, practical goals, and I suppose we all think of Professor Aughbui, who stayed behind, in a certain way, a critical way—but perhaps we are still wandering, too. In another way, an everyday way. A ticking of tasks off an endless list. We can see the shape, or the points, but why not both?

  Every man and woman is a star—you can see them out there in the dark, burning. Writhing, screaming stars. The blackened, cindered star flesh is blasted off the living skeleton in flakes, disbursed in tranches to the four winds, consumed, the bones charring and boiling brains foam from the apertures of the skull to be carried off like sea froth percolating on star wind. A bit lands on a flayed cheek or a burning leg, touching the bared nerve and for an instant there is an oasis of baffling, disjointed memory or fantasy in the death agony as the nerve contact transfers the memory. That was it. Pearl of great price fizzled out forever.

  Waves of desperate, frenzied animals ravage human cities and settlements, shattering the night with bellows and cries of all possible kinds, smashing glass, shrieking sirens and alarms, popping of guns and thudding of bombs. The capital is undergoing an imbalance correction. In twelve hours, San Toribio has deflated by as many percent, billowing into the sky. Coyotes erupt out of laundry hampers, refrigerators, jaws snapping shut on human throats. Songbirds swarm anyone who ventures outside in Avenida Nigelato, and the fires are coming this way—but San Toribio’s troubles are mild compared with the brutal spectacles unfolding elsewhere. Ravenous bacteria are liquefying the assets of citizens all across the northern hemisphere. In the wake of each devastating onslaught come opportunistic mercantile infections, people trying to make a buck selling bottled water to drowning victims and vaccines to people dead of the plague, fire extinguishers to human-shaped smudges of ash, bullet-proof armor to perforated corpses, sucked into threshing machines and wood chippers, sucked into the vacuum of a deficit belt that rings the globe.

  Uhuyjhn cities sprout in the midst of existing cities, bursting out like expanding foam from the cracks in the pavements, casually shoving aside the ugly scrim of glass boxes and gas stations.

  “Wait! Wait! We’re all still here, trapped in despair!”

  It’s not waiting for you or anyone and it brushes you aside as well, leaving you trapped forever and you’re the ones who wait and will go on waiting forever for something that is not only not coming but that you know is not coming. There’s nothing profound in your dead end, or not anymore anyway, and did you ever ask yourself if you would be feeling this hopelessness if your petty little country were “winning” instead of “losing” or “lost”? Who lost it? What was lost? Defeated—who by? Time? As opposed to what timelessness? What shit! The Uhuyjhn cities don’t care. The foam expands hydraulically and sprouts needle-like spires, big bubbly mushroom cap domes, coral reef angularities budding off little floating trams. There’s a bizarre music—can you hear it?—coming from somewhere in the middle of all that yeasty flocculation, and parchment scrolls elegantly inscribed sail past unfurling in the wind, diplomas, stocks and bonds, maps, title deeds, certificates of appreciation and acknowledgment and gratitude for coming up with more synonyms to apply to a hundred flavors of thank you notes. Military might is as impotent to stop this inhuman urbanism as it is against the march of time or against death. The development is visible from space, as pale puddings coagulate into cities and push the straw houses of humanity out into evacuated suburbs, peat bogs, into the sea, the desert, or crushes them against the feet of the mountains.

  *

  The music whips around and around with a thousand and one different things that go bang in the percussion kit sounding like a thousand kitchens turned upside down and brass brass brass, sweat pouring down their faces as they blow those notes faster and faster—Tripi is going to address the crowd. People can’t wait. I’m stepping out to the podium now, going to say a few words, slip a few casual asides to the Teeming like it was nothing, wearing my cool cerulean blue jacket and a shirt as white as snow, and went back and forth about it but finally opted to put the fluorescent orange silk neckerchief around my neck kind of halfway proletarian. I slip through a covey of unbelievably flamboyant transvestites thinking I’m going to need a machete to hack my way through all the fucking feathers. Suddenly there’s a grand cheer and surge as the crowd washes toward me and I look back in time to see Tripi bringing up the rear, shaking hands and more alive than I’ve ever seen her. Love is the name for what I see in her face; love of these people.

  “It really is her!” I think.

  Turning to avoid colliding with someone I notice a flat black something in a rising hand pop pop pop pop—

  *

  I’m on the ground.

  I’m on the ground.

  “What hit me?”

  Faces, noise, but no band.

  “The band stopped. Why did the band stop?”

  Carolina is standing over me, looking impassively down at me as if to say, “Get up.”

  She’s naked in this huge crowd how the fuck does she get away with it.

  I see an economist too, the dead one from Animal Money, between some faces up there, and Tripi’s face. She looks frightened. Upset.

  This is pain like no pain, like the first real pain—

  “I get run over?”

  Tripi keeps saying “They got him” and “I’m OK,” moving her mouth really emphatically to make sure I understand. I can’t feel my arm and I’m dizzy.

  “They got ...?”

  Black at the edges, smoking.

  I can’t feel my hand. It appears there, lifted, somehow, and it’s bloody. That’s all my blood.

  This is me.

  This is me.

  This is it for me.

  A voice says: “A billion years in the future Earth will lose all its water into space and all life will end.”

  I hold my blood out to her in my fingers like a coin.

  A voice says: “Let this be recouped against it. Money based on time recouped against the end.”

  I can’t make out what Tripi is saying but I’m pretty sure she’s calling for ...

  ... for help. Light head.

  It takes a huge effort for me to talk, like rolling a bowling ball off my chest.

  “Die like Hamlet. At play. Not understanding.”

  This is important. I have to get this out. One last joke. I don’t know if anybody’s listening, the light disappears around Carolina’s face. One last joke ...

  “But he ... he only dressed in black. I am black.”

  *

  “It’s disgusting, horrible,” the remaining Professor Long says, rubbing her forehead.

  “Senseless,” Professor Budshah says.

  “A tragedy,” Professor Crest corrects him. “Not a senseless death.”

  Emaciated, so bloodless it hurts just to look at him, glassy-eyed, Professor Crest sits in his chair like a dummy, his eyes glaring with alarming luster. He has lived long enough to raise his index finger one more time, in that marionette-like gesture that amused us once, but which now has an appalling effect since he really does look
like a mannikin now.

  “He wasn’t her bodyguard,” Professor Budshah says, a little nettled.

  “Even if he was,” the remaining Professor Long says, “he was just in the way, it wasn’t a voluntary act. He wasn’t shot protecting her.”

  “His altruism was his reason for being there in the first place,” Professor Crest insists. “He could not have been ignorant of the threats against the life of Ms. Pina. His work for her was pro bono. As a foreign national, he could not serve in the government.”

  *

  You tell me if I died. You tell me if I’m another black martyr or not. I’d rather be a living black martyr if possible. How much longer can I go on talking? Since I don’t know, let’s make it count. Let’s make this time worth its money. No, let’s make this money worth its time.

  End money, OK?

  End money.

  What is money? Social human power made numb and separate. Amputated under anaesthesia. You’ll feel all that pain later, though. Without knowing what it is.

  End money. Why let others decide how your social power, your time, your work will be unitized and stored up? Why not make your own money? Why not make your own society? What choice do you really have? A bank is a symbol of fear. End money. End it by making it. It’s all counterfeit, that stuff you use. End money. It didn’t come from you. It is you taken away from you by somebody else. Fed back to you in dribs and drabs and drabber every day. Money is not a means of exchange. Money is a means of preventing exchange. Look at the countries where there is the greatest volume of money circulating: those societies are frozen. There is relentless change but there is no difference. Everyone is bound by the enchantment of the money spell, cast by the most pedestrian magicians the world has ever seen. Exchange of what? Exchange is change ex’d out; ex-change. A real exchange: this for that. What you see if you will wake the fuck up and look: something for nothing. The endless augmentation of the nothing you have, which is the opening for an endless expansion of the everything on the other side. Everything is not fixed; it grows. So does nothing. The more everything, the more nothing. The more censorship, the clearer the censored message becomes. The spell is cast and the clarity itself magically becomes an impediment to realization; the sweeping wand of the minute hand is turning keys into locks. The buying and selling machines perform transactions by the nanosecond—even in the time it takes to reach over and shut the machine off, thousands of further transactions have taken place. And wouldn’t there be considerable advantage to the one who leaves the machine on? And aren’t there machines that are only pretending to be off? And are you still calling this indiscernible blur of microfrenzy among the processors “exchange”?

  Animal money culture grows to form a mycelial currency bed that fruits out counter money, types of money that are totally irreconcilable with primitive, simplistic international currency coordination rubrics. Irreducible money, like animals. Living and growing in the cracks of an international money system, deranging and polluting it, opening temporary escape chutes people can use to shift levels, dash around to the other end of the line, double dip, triple dip. Complicate, confuse, baffle, stun. Stun and stun again. End money. There is no intelligence that can deal with this. Intelligence gatherers gather only wool where animal money is concerned. Corpses rip free of their graves with thick coins in their fists, gloved in scales of nitre, the coins oxidized, iridescent from the earth like discs of oil, and oil wells up in empty graves, overflowing like pus from an infected wound. The bull market encounters matadors.

  Soil is alive. It billows like the ocean. It has currents, undertows, surf. A body in a shallow forest grave can feel, not with its nerves but with its quick bones, body filaments that scintillate faintly as they knit to the bone, flickering blue and red mycelial fibres overspreading it like long hair, the shifting thin coverlet of earth and leaf mold, the odor of smoke from the trees and rotting logs. The seasons change, Autumn comes, the sweat dries and hazy sights sharply snap into Autumn focus. The divinity of Autumn, whom we refer to as Barren October, his formal title, stands in waist-high wheat surrounded by trees who confetti him with orange and red leaves. He wears eighteenth century small trousers with knee stockings and buckled shoes, his torso covered in soot, by his dense mantle of dreadlocks and a beard streaked with white, with fringed deerskin on his forearms and a hood on his head, adorned with a pair of antlers. His wealth is the leaf rain falling around him, the space he swings through, the refreshed transparency overhead deepening in blue, and above all the escape system of the forest, rising up out of a heaving ocean of soil, peeling back to the bare but living bones of its skeleton by gusts of cheese-grater wind. Write the future in earthquake money.

  Me dying. Him maybe. A bullet rips through the wrong ribcage. Now I am dead.

  So now it’s just you and me. I am the animal you hold in your hands. I am here and there.

  *

  A jostle in the street—look up—a sinister figure with upturned collar and hat pulled down low hands you a crisp snow-white envelope and vanishes, eyes glittering, back into the fracas, people battering each other with purses and umbrellas over the last can of cat food—the luminous rune of the International Economics Institute seals the envelope.

  Your presence is requested at a hearing to be held in four days time at the location encyphered in the black square below. The duelling committee is going to announce its verdict. Look up from the paper at the narrow slot of sky and see an end coming, visible between the buildings, buildings strung with laundry, windows broken, smoke pouring from improvised fires, primitive traps for catching pigeons dangling from balconies. Somewhere SuperAesop is staring, riveted, at the outcome of his absolute halt experiment. Assiyeh Melachalos rises to deliver a boring economics paper at a conference of academic economists. Professor Aughbui weaves expertly down a desert highway strewn with wrecks, cyclops cars bearing down on him, the remaining Professor Long naked in the passenger seat tripping in cosmic grandeur under the effects of a Rabelaisian dose of hallucinogenic drugs. The silversaliva voice is the monastic tunnel howl. You have to wear a space suit to live on Earth now.

  *

  I am an animal. I don’t know what kind. Alllll that’s left. Of the left.

  I am an animal lying in a bed. I drink through my arm. I ...

  Sometimes I am on land, although I can’t exactly call it walking. Sometimes I am in the air, although I can’t exactly call it flying. Sometimes I am in the water, although I can’t exactly call it water. Just kidding. I can’t exactly call it swimming, what I do. I move through and over and around and under. I eat, I sleep.

  I eat through my arm. I can’t stand this metal thing.

  I sleep a lot. I sleep with my eyes open, looking up at the dim white sky and the rectangular white sun which is very faint and very near, like I could touch its corrugated surface if I could only stand up, if I could only feel my legs.

  I seek out others of my kind, but I am normally solitary. I am a riddle to myself.

  Oh hi Professor Long. You look like shit. You paying me a house visit?

  What do you mean I’m not at home?

  You always take back what you say. Maybe you could take me back, too. Back ... which way is back for me? I want to go with Carolina.

  Carolina! How long have you been there?!

  They’ve started arresting corpses, reviving the dead for interrogation in secret police bunkers.

  “You cannot take refuge in God,” Urtruvel wrote once. “We can and we will drag you back from God’s protecting embrace and put you to the question. Death will not save you from interrogations any more.”

  Screams of the dead, faint in the night. They have your dead mother, your dead friend, in there. You’ll talk.

  Now then ...

  Why did you leave your last job?

  *

  I have to escape toward everyone else. Don’t ask me how I know because I don’t; I can’t know anything now. If I live, we can start to talk about what I supposedly knew
now, what it turns out I knew. What you want, if you want to be a wizard, is to know that you know, especially if you know you’re wrong. I have found it’s safe to assume the uncanny dude who fixes you with eyes suddenly sprouted out incandescent and says “I know!” is tripping. I mean, that voice he’s hearing is not the voice of experience. So he’s got to escape the massive breakdown of everything, but his brainstorm is to escape toward the catastrophe, and gather up the flames in bouquets by the armfull, build the water buildings so that the advancing tidal wave’s wall has illuminated windows in it. Volcanoes gush molten gold and crazed mobs burn trying to collect it.

  The voices of countless ghosts sing to him from blue white hellparadise clouds or in the woods written in sunshine on every leaf—their words are impossible to understand, but the emotions in the voices are impossible to mistake—imploring, indignant, sorrowfully urgent, throbbing with hope and burning tears as they beg you to see, see, to act, act. You look at that leaf and turn it this way and that, watching the sunblaze slide back and forth. There’s nothing there, and it has something to say to you. There are arms outstretched to receive us there, like the arms reaching out to the drowning man, clutching at the air, straining.

  THE END*

  The neighborhood called Myrtle is a place of incessant economic activity, all of it nearly too small and too quick to see. None of the shops are open. The shelves are bare, the floor unswept, the windows opaque with dirt and soap. The place is a battered, beat-up chunk of town where you have to pay for every lick of recycled paint, every fragment of glass you fit together rubbing down the edges taping them into a sheet you can stick into a frame. You can buy fish from this Mexican guy sitting on a rock by the fire hydrant. He has a crate full of gelatinous grey fish from somewhere and for pocket change he’ll snatch one out put it on top of the crate and slice you off some crescent-shaped pieces with his pocket knife. As I watch the footage or digitage, here’s a black guy in a white t-shirt and baseball cap, in his thirties, gold chain around his neck, and another guy I can’t see comes up to him and sticks him up with a knife. The first guy passively hands him a leather wallet that looks worn smooth and flattened out like half-sucked ice cream. Then he just embraces the other man, who returns his quick embrace while unlacing the gold chain from his neck all in one gesture. Then the thief is gone. The victim just stands there, his face impassive, nothing on his face.