Animal Money Read online

  * * *

  Lazy Fascist Press

  PO Box 10065

  Portland, OR 97296

  www.lazyfascistpress.com

  ISBN: 978-1-62105-212-8

  Copyright © 2015 by Michael Cisco

  Cover Art Copyright © 2015 by Mat Brown

  Cover design and interior design by Cameron Pierce

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written consent of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

  All persons in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance that may seem to exist to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental. This is a work of fiction.

  Printed in the USA.

  “That bird is free – you owe me a bird.”

  Shunryu Suzuki Roshi

  For David Goodman

  Table of Contents

  Part One: Albino Blacks

  Part Two: In For Questioning

  Part Three: Nonsmoking Smokers

  Part Four: The Shituation

  Part Five: In For Questioning

  Part Six: Broke Bankers

  Part Seven: They Beg You For Mercy While They Are Killing You

  Part Eight: Fond Memories of Terror

  Part Nine: Drunk With Sobreity

  Part Ten: None of This is Real

  Part Eleven: Discount Riches

  Part Twelve: Prison Roads

  Part Thirteen: Living Skeletons, Elderly Drones

  Myrtle

  Pages of No Narration

  Although unavailable for analysis the moment it happens, being struck a violent blow on the head is a very interesting experience. When, as was true in this case, the blunt object makes its intervention without warning, instantaneously reducing the victim—me—to a state of unconsciousness, a fascinating blank spot in the continuity of events is introduced. It might be the briefest variety of episode possible. Whatever fear or pain one experiences in association with it is displaced to a later moment, and then retroactively loaned in hindsight to where there had not been the time. As for the sensation, I liken it to being transformed by a spell into a rattling chest of drawers suddenly. A crash of silverware that dance like a shoal of fish, contents tossed aside and tumbling onto the floorboards. Loose floorboards. Dusty ones. Revoltingly dusty, loose floorboards, with clots and footscrapes in the dust. There really was a white flash. I seem to recall also a yawing of my perception in two directions at once, as if my field of vision—I do not say my eyes—were focussed in two opposed directions, half slipped upwards, the other downwards, along a glassy barrier dividing them. A glassy, slick barrier. The bruises and hurts incurred in falling to the pavement had to be discovered one by one later on.

  The police assured me, with obvious embarrassment, that street crime is impossible in San Toribio, even for tourists. Tripi had put an end to all that and, despite her unexplained disappearance a month ago, San Toribio is still administered according to Tripist principles. They were very emphatic, very voluble on this point in particular. Until the emergency election next month, Tripism remains the official doctrine of the government. That I should have been knocked unconscious from behind while walking down a much-frequented street, without warning and in broad daylight, as I gazed in admiration at the snowy slopes of Mt. Cloticueta picturesquely rising before an almost pastel-blue sky, was almost an accomplishment, an athletic accomplishment. Luckily I had very little money on me at the time and so lost little by the theft in that respect, but my shoes and wristwatch had been taken as well and I had no others. The shoes I am not liable to miss right away, as I am still unable to walk any appreciable distance, but the absence of my wristwatch is a sickening ache. I do not feel complete without it.

  My name is Professor Ronald Crest. I am an assistant professor of economics at CUNY, currently attending an academic conference of economists in San Toribio, Archizoguayla, hosted by Achrizoguayla University. Or that is what I should be doing, what I expected to be doing. Instead I am laid up, recovering from concussion and a hairline skull fracture, my head heavily bandaged. I can not attend the conference proceedings. I can not hear papers given. I can not readily leave the hotel. I perforce can not therefore deliver my own carefully prepared and exactly timed paper. I can only stew over the waste of time, of labor, of resources, brought about by that untimely blow.

  It would be ungenerous of me to call it a consolation, so let me say that I discovered an opportune mischance when I learned that four other economists, who had also come to San Toribio for the conference, and who were also staying at my hotel, the Hotel Bluonga, had also suffered debilitating head injuries shortly after their arrival in a series of unrelated accidents.

  I was the only one among us struck down by violence. The tall, stylish but, I can not refrain from adding, impractically asymmetrical, drinking glass that is standard in all our rooms had shattered somehow on the nightstand in the night while Professor Long (Shanghai) was sleeping, and some of the fragments fell onto her pillow. Although not an especially deep sleeper, according to herself, she heard nothing and did not wake up until she rolled over onto the glass fragments, badly lacerating her right ear. A wad of bandage now protrudes like a jug handle from the side of her head, held in place by a broad white sash wrapped around her brow at an angle which gathers up her hair in an awkward-looking sheaf and interferes with her vision. The bandages partially camouflage her economist-mark, which is in her case a white oval that emerges from her bandages and then splits to form a parenthesis around her right eye. She is expected to make a complete recovery.

  The other Professor Long (Ottawa) had been bitten on the cheek by a mosquito while bringing his bags in to the hotel from the airport bus, on the first night of the conference; he went to bed that evening, and did not awaken again until thirty-six hours later, half-suffocated, one side of his face appallingly inflamed. The dressing covers the right side of his face like a mass of white dough. His economist-mark, a white equals sign above his right eye, is like two extra lengths of tape holding the bandages in place. The swelling is going down very slowly, but he is expected to make a complete recovery.

  It is not entirely clear what happened to Professor Aughbui (Zaragoza); something has suddenly gone wrong with one or another of the delicate equilibriums within the skull—the sinuses, or the ear canal or inner ear, or some anatomical carpenter-level or barometer or gyroscope—resulting in intense, nauseating vertigo or dizziness whenever he moves his head. Therefore, the doctors rigged up a booth of chicken wire that rests on his shoulders, which, when combined with a whiplash collar and bandages to hold the frame to the skull, immobilizes his head. His economist-mark, a white minus sign, crosses his lips like a tape gag. While the cause or causes of his disability are unclear, he is expected to make a complete recovery.

  Professor Budshah (Alkan) had been eating pahjcellourmi, the national dish, although originally of Turkish origin I believe, and dislocated his jaw when he bit down hard on an avocado pit the chef had overlooked. The doctor who examined him overzealously wired his jaw shut, and even applied a cast, which looks a bit like a jacket of shaving cream under and around the mandible, then wrapped bandages around the head to boot. We were all present when he received his refund from the restaurant. Sitting beside the first Professor Long, he looks like the vertical to her horizontal, especially because his economist-mark, a white number one without base or bill, bisects his face from the brow to just below the bridge of his nose. Like her, he is expected to make a complete recovery.

  In fact, we all are. We are all expected to make a complete recovery, provided we follow doctor-instructions.


  Enter the nurse, who comes over from a general practitioner-office on the next block several times a day to check on us. She is a sour-faced young woman with faded white skin and obviously dyed red hair. Whenever she flies into the room without a sound on thick carpet we all startle wildly disturbing our various injuries, and then, like a woodwind section tuning up, we groan with pain in our distinctive registers. Her name is Legale Fuene, an uneuphonious name, a hiccuped name. Perhaps her family was afflicted with congenital hiccups and the babies hiccuped in the womb strictly in sync with the hiccupping of the mothers.

  As usual, the Salutation is left to me.

  “The bank is there to save and lend.”

  The nurse, whose uncouth name I choose not to repeat, replies automatically, starting to perform her various functions with her eyes while her mouth and hand dispense with this formality.

  “—Workers work and customers spend.”

  When she was first assigned to take care of us, she told each one of us bluntly, in more or less the same prepared speech, that she refused to “do any scurrying,” by which she meant she was not going to attend to us each in our separate rooms in the hotel. She had enough to do without scurrying, she said. So, during the day, to oblige her, we were to congregate in one place in the hotel. She held up a finger. “One place,” she said firmly. She regarded looking for us in different common locations on different occasions as another variety of scurrying. We had to choose where we would do our daytime convalescing and stay there, if we wanted her attention.

  “I move that we go to the library here and consult the gods on this,” the first Professor Long says.

  “Second,” I say.

  “Is it necessary?” Professor Budshah asks through his teeth.

  Professor Aughbui agrees to the consultation in silence. The second Professor Long nods, and, curiously, beams, as if the idea had suddenly revealed some enchanted prospect to him.

  “I won’t rock the boat,” Professor Budshah says.

  We are getting up to leave, awkwardly of course.

  “The gods?” the nurse asks incredulously.

  As one, we all turn our attention to Professor Crest, because it is self-evident that he is the one of us best suited, perhaps ideally suited, to answer this impertinent question.

  “You’re going to pray? To Engels and Marx?” Nurse Fuene asks.

  Professor Crest takes hold of the nurse with his eyes, icily. With that annihilating disdain that is so particular to him, he says—

  “When we say the gods we mean the gods. The Surfeit is One.”

  She waves her arm with a sneer of derision as we hobble to the elevator.

  *

  The consultation with the gods was carried out at ten to five PM in a cramped carel in the University Library, set aside for this purpose. Actually, it was set aside principally for additional storage, but the necessary materials for the consultation were among the things stored there. In silence we invoked the Dii Lucri and other economic divinities. Mercury is the patron of the international order, but we economists call him Turms, his Etruscan name. The black stones outnumbered the red. We would take up the suggestion of the nurse.

  There were not that many places that would suit us; in the end, we chose a lounge or bar type of place on the third floor, evidently intended to take any overflow from the primary bar downstairs. The hotel is an incongruously glamorous backdrop for five such medieval-looking casualties as ourselves: it is all ultra-modern, asymmetrical, rounded planes and sweeps, pink, purple, made of artificial materials of varying degrees of translucency and impregnated with glitter and luminous ribbons. The chairs all look like treble clefs and ampersands.

  Five heads, engulfed in gauze and connected to medical appliances, propped in various awkward poses, we sit in a ragged circle, each of us bursting with undelivered revelations, so caught up in our own intricate ideas, so exhausted by pain and mending that we can not really pay attention to each other. And we had all come here daydreaming about finally being understood by somebody. As the day passes and one metronomic hour follows another without hurrying, without pausing, tediously and aggravatingly regular, we lapse into an oblivious silence. We listen down into ourselves and there is nothing going on, just the gurgling of our wounds as they gradually repair themselves, without hurrying, without pausing.

  Then, the detonation. The nurse charging toward us, impatiently shrugging off her jacket as she crosses over to the spot by the windows where we are sitting, irritated as if we had chosen this spot so far from the doors, although the bar is hardly more than twenty feet wide, to aggravate her with as much superfluous scurrying as we could get away with, given the terms of our arrangement.

  For some reason, embarrassment I think, her appearance prompts inane small talk from us. It comes out in an indistinct haze of brittle angularities; trying to hear and follow it is like looking right through a lacy iron screen and not being able to stop shifting focus from the screen to the nebulous green atrium down the passage and back again.

  The voice of the first Professor Long is the one that catches me most often.

  “Professor Nadler was ...” she is saying now. She often trails off like that, making a searching gesture with her fingers. She does the same when she speaks what I take to be Chinese—Putonghua is the correct term, if I am not mistaken.

  “—I could tell what he was after.”

  “Is he one of us, though?” I ask.

  “He is ‘one of us,’” Professor Budshah slushes through his teeth. “He just hasn’t taken the Third Oath yet. He’s still apprenticing.”

  “Who was his partner?” the first Professor Long asks.

  “Bright, wasn’t it?” pushing against his cast with little jerks as he tries to turn his head to us.

  No one seems to know.

  “I think it’s Bright,” the second Professor Long says. He has the sweet reticence of a painter, someone who communicates primarily by creating pictures. Speaking at any length apparently costs him some effort; his voice, much weaker now than before his injury, always has a strained, sorrowful note in it. “I don’t think it’s Bright. I don’t know who it is.”

  “What’s the Third Oath?” the nurse asks me, because she is currently examining me.

  “We economists all swear a series of oaths when we join the International Economics Institute,” I explain. “In the first year of the Master’s Program you must take the First Oath to be permitted to read certain economics textbooks. In that year you must also take the Second Oath, which authorizes you to make citations from those books. You can not teach until you have taken the Third Oath, and you can not publish until you have taken the Fourth and Fifth, and so on.”

  “So what’s the Third Oath?” the nurse asks, her voice flat, uninterested.

  “Celibacy,” I tell her.

  She is incredulous. “Really?” she asks, pausing to look me in the face to see if I am joking.

  “Oh yes,” I say.

  “Naturally,” says Professor Budshah.

  “Well,” she says, going back to plucking at my dressing, “We had another one of you from the conference in for food poisoning the other day and she was married. Her husband came with her.”

  “Do you remember who it was?” I ask, not caring.

  She does not. “But she was definitely married.”

  “Then she is not a genuine economist,” I say firmly.

  “Unless she was married before...” the first Professor Long says.

  “She would still have to be celibate at present,” I insist.

  “Yes,” the first Professor Long says. “But she could remain married.”

  “It seems wrong somehow,” I say.

  When the nurse has left, and we are alone again, the conversation begins to stir with frail new life. At last, we are free to turn our attention full on each other as colleagues, to speak our own language at last, at last to be understood. We begin by discussing the escalating instability of currency markets, which is the to
pic of the conference we are missing. This is a question of burning importance just now, because the Latin American Central Bank is preparing to inaugurate a single currency for the South American economic zone, to be known as the Latino. Will it yoke the weaker economies to the stronger ones? Or drag the stronger economies down? Is there going to be another fiasco?

  “How many Latinos is that Coke?”

  The name “Latino” strikes the second Professor Long funny. He will not stop making jokes.

  “That’ll be twelve Latinos for that Coke.”

  The first Professor Long specializes in the breakdowns and lapses in economies. The second Professor Long studies planned economies, and, I may say, this is an incomprehensible mismatch of person to speciality. Professor Aughbui is an expert on Piero Sraffa, constructs economic algorithms, mathematical models and computer simulations. Professor Budshah is a dissenting antibody, dismantling economic theories and predictions that he regards as inimical to something, skeptical about the validity of economics as such, but always, I must admit, courtly and cordial about it. For my part, I have devoted my life to the study of pre-Columbian economies (my book Beyond Whelks, Chert, and Copper: The Systemic Economy of Cahokia, was published in 2002 by the University of Illinois Press). We are all in anguish because we can not share our opinions with the other conferents, and we do not know what repetitions we are unwittingly getting into, what bright ideas we have that will be met with glazed eyes because it has all been chewed over a dozen times in a dozen different panels already. Peerness is running out of us by the hour. The solution is obvious and easily formulated, but difficult to propose for social reasons.