Michael Cisco

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.

"Je vaincrai toute émotion. Je ne m'abaisserai pas à faire ce que l'émotion me dicte, ce qu'elle veut que je fasse. ce qu'elle croit qu'elle veut. Je ne lui obéirai pas. Elle ne regardera pas à l'intérieur de mon costume. Je ne me conformerai pas à son idée."

"Comment pouvais-je avoir des désirs aussi vagues ? Ce n’était pas leur irréalité qui me déprimait, ou que je fuyais, c’était leur réalité qui me rejetait. Je n’étais pas assez réel pour eux, ou, même si je parvenais, ce que je ne peux expliquer, à exister, j’existais de la mauvaise façon, pas à leur façon, pas comme eux."

Qu’est-ce que l’argent animal ? C’est notre projet, comme je l’explique. Vous en voulez plus ? Eh bien, ce monde, j’explique, est en train d’être détruit. Il n’est pas en train d’être détruit, il est en train d’être remplacé, par là je veux dire qu’il y aura toujours un monde dans le futur, mais ce sera un monde qui existera littéralement au détriment de celui-ci. Ce qui détruira notre monde ne sera pas, probablement, les boums des guerres nucléaires ou la bave des eaux qui montent. Ces choses pourraient détruire le monde, mais ne le feront pas. Très probablement, non. Ce monde sera détruit par son économie. L’économie mondiale est devenue incontrôlable. Mais la solution ne consiste pas à la contrôler, non, je ne pense pas.

I was the only one among us struck down by violence. The tall, stylish but, I can not refrain from adding, unpractically 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.

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.