City, State part 3

Three days later my bank was gone, swallowed whole by a different institution that had the resources to absorb and then correct all of the mistakes my bank had made, the mistakes being all of the money leant to people who everyone knew would never pay it back. The new bank got to keep all of the old bank’s debt, and though I tried I couldn’t understand why the new bank would want the debt for its own—even if they could word their collection letters stronger, send more people to knock on doors and take cars out of driveways, the people who had borrowed the money would still not have it to pay back. My best guess was that they, the new bank, cared more about getting bigger, about owning the lives of the people indebted to it, than about having any more actual money than it had in the first place. This all felt feudal and warlike, as if the new bank was a lord who, seeing his neighboring fief whither and starve, deployed an army to go and capture a worthless piece of land on which only the desperate and apparently unproductive live at his, the lord’s, expense. The lord would get to rule over a greater swath of poverty, but where would his power come from? From the future, perhaps—the lord betting with all he has that his newly adopted peasants will produce again someday. But the new bank’s takeover of the old one was a different sort of phenomenon, different in the way that the financial system operating out of Lower Manhattan was different altogether from feudal societies—distanced as I was from my bank, I would never know what had happened, since nobody would come and burn down my hut to show off for the new authority, and the most I might notice would be a different color scheme at the ATM. Watching the morning news I noticed that nobody on television would make such a comparison, since surely there are people out there who would, if they didn’t already, fear for their huts. The news anchor said that of course everybody’s money would be waiting for them in the new bank, he read from a press release explaining the secure handover of account numbers and records and, at the end, the anchor mentioned, in a lower voice and with all his syllables compressed, that ten thousand or so of the old bank’s employees would be out of work.
The truth was that I hated the old bank, and I wasn’t sure if I hated the new one more or less. In spring I had gotten to know the old bank’s customs and insides, learned the distance between each line on every form and memorized the cracks and scratches on the teller windows of the branch closest to the office where I work. I still had dreams about standing on line with my pile of printed credit reports, getting to the window and the teller asking me if I was sure I wouldn’t rather just leave the country than fill out one more goddamn form, and then I listen, paralyzed, while the teller clears her throat over and over and orders me a one-way plane ticket to Australia. There was another dream in which the same teller reads through my papers and laughs and tries to get me to laugh at the man who went after my identity instead of someone else’s, hers, for example, or for pete’s sake anyone’s, anyone’s but mine; and another dream in which the teller is my mother, who just sits behind the bulletproof glass and cries about humanity. The teller from the dream is a real woman from my life named Lorraine who I saw once a week or more for months, who, if she saw me at another teller’s window, would come over and insist that I keep working with her, that she knew me and she knew my case. Lorraine was a heavy black woman about my age, who wore a different color eyeshadow every day but always the same hairstyle and bank uniform. I wondered if Lorraine would be one of the lucky old bank employees to keep her same post under the new management, or if she’d be left to come up with some other way to take care of the son she’d told me about. I thought about stopping at the branch on my lunch hour and explaining to her that I had gone downtown and asked for all of my money, that, no, I had no idea the bank would be collapsing, that I was grateful she had tried, if not succeeded, to make all of my hours in the bank less miserable than they could have been. Lorraine, I imagined, if she got to keep her job, would not care at all that she had a new employer—the way she sighed and looked bored waiting for her computer to come back with the information she needed indicated, somehow, that she was fine with her job as long as it afforded her these long moments in which to think about other things.
The sense of an understanding between us and the respect that I had for Lorraine matched the way I felt about anybody else who I didn’t know, who I was stuck in a situation with because something about one or both of our lives demanded that we talk to each other, who made an effort, strained or otherwise, to show me that he or she knew I was a real person who existed outside of our series of conversations. These are the people who don’t need corporate training on how to talk to other people; they will be interested either because they are, at bottom, either unbelievably social and friendly or irrevocably lonely or both. But Lorraine, I realized, had only tried the whole time to make it clear to me that she had nothing to do with the bank or with any larger system of things, and so, easily, I still hated the bank. Its machinations were the reason I spent the spring standing on lines with my stack of papers and pieces of identification, filling my memory with protocol and confirmation numbers. The bank was why I had felt I had to learn what I could about the trading of debt, the Federal Reserve, the acts of Congress that brought me and my country into this whole overwrought and overwhelming mire. I hoped, at the top of my brain, that somehow, my taking my money out had been one event in the chain that led to the bank’s bottomed-out stock, to its final and hesitant collapse. Of course that was not the case, and nothing in the world would have been different if my money had stayed a digital record instead of turning into the bills in my drawer, but I still hoped that I had been responsible for something horrible. If I was, if I could have been responsible, then at least the whole thing might have had some logical origin I could explain to myself. Collapsed bank or not, I still did not see my place in the fall of everything.