Summer and so on/City, State part 1

Here is something for the time between now and when I get my blog revived or decide what else might be done with it. I will be serializing a short story from my senior thesis. There will be a new section every week until the whole thing is posted. Please add the appropriate paragraph indenting with your imagination; I'm not adding html tags for every single line of dialogue. Without further preamble, I give you:

City, State

I live in a country where men will go through your garbage and steal your whole life on a piece of paper. This happened to me last spring, and for a long time afterwards, all I did with my weekday afternoons was stand on lines in banks and try to convince different people that it was someone else who co-opted my life, someone else who spent most of the money I had. The someone else, the man who had been through my garbage, has not been found or held responsible. I see ads on TV now for counseling services, organizations that, for a fee, will let you know what sorts of things you need to do in case someone steals your identity. The ads have interviews with people who have had the same thing happen as I have, and they say things to the camera like “I felt violated,” and “I felt like I wasn’t in control of my life anymore.” I never felt those things; they are sentiments I cannot take part in. What I felt was curiosity about this man, the criminal, who decided that what he really wanted to be, at least financially, was a thirty-three year old, single woman with no tax credits and an average history with money and how it gets managed. I wondered if he knew what else came along with being me, if he cared about my carpal tunnel or my apartment with leaky faucets and drafty windows. I like to imagine that, for however long he lived under my name, his wrists hurt more than normal.
My friends were not surprised when I started talking more about the financial system after all the time I spent inside banks and bent over lists of charges. All spring I stayed up late reading about things I never had to understand before, and what my friends said was that I had turned into an accidental economist in a matter of weeks. I was out of money, at least for a while, but it was during that time I learned that money, or at least money the way you think about it, doesn’t actually exist to begin with. I mean to say that I learned what fiat currency really is, and it is not, in fact, real, at least in the way you think about real. It works like this: you just agree with everybody else about what the piece of paper stands for, what you get when you give it to somebody, and everything is fine as long as the agreement stands. And then, of course, if anything goes wrong with the agreement, everybody has a problem. I couldn’t, and I still can’t, come up with a single way this is different from how Santa Claus works, or how the Earth was supposed to be, for a very long time, flat and at the center of the universe.
I had two things on my mind through the spring and spilling over into the next couple of seasons: the man who stole my identity and ran with it for as long as he could, and the way debts operate. I thought about things owed and how people let them get that way, about the difference between lending somebody your books or thoughts or sympathies and lending somebody ten thousand dollars at interest when you don’t actually have ten thousand dollars to lend.

Once I was done with the lines at the banks, with the advisers who recommended this or that recovery plan and made sure I filled out all the necessary forms, I was told that it was all right for me to start borrowing money from people again. If I wanted a car, someone should give it to me; if I wanted a new apartment, my credit report would say that I had gotten my identity stolen, and that nothing was my fault. But I didn’t want anything, really. I just had all of this new free time for as long as I could keep my boss convinced I was talking to bankers and lawyers all day, and by the end of August I was spending my afternoons in the Financial District, moving from bench to bench and watching the money shuffle around.
One Monday I was on the corner of Wall Street and Front Street. I could see three different banks, all with their neon signs in severe and perfect form. The problem, I realized, with having had my identity stolen wasn’t that I lost control of something. It wasn’t that I, like the people in the advertisements, felt that way I imagine a person feels after her house gets broken into or her purse gets snatched–there had been no violence. The problem was that I didn’t know, at the time, what it was I had supposedly lost control of. I had these pieces of plastic—four of them—that said I could be trusted to pay back tens of thousands of dollars I wouldn’t actually have for years. The money had never been real. The people I saw moving in and out of the banks, showing their ID cards to the security inside office buildings, screaming into their phones on the street, must have known something about money that I didn’t know. These, I thought, were the sort of people who purchased identity theft protection services with every credit card. I didn’t want to become one of them, I didn’t want the business degree or the corporate badge, I just wanted to know why it was they walked so fast, where it was they thought they were going, what they thought they were going to find when they got there.
I made my way down and around the tip of the island. It was a hot day, with thick air and dark clouds coming over the Hudson. The street vendors produced umbrellas and put on ponchos as if it was already raining. When I got to South Street Seaport the tourists were clearing out, all except a group of about thirty seniors—four men, and a slowly fluttering drove of women in purple dresses and red hats. They traded places on benches, read the placards in front of each decommissioned ship. Each one, I thought, looked like my mother, whose red straw hat always hangs by her front door, and all of them, my mother included, had voted for Ronald Reagan at least once. I remembered how one of the news commentators blamed the decline of everything the financial system touched—that is to say, the decline of everything—on Reagan conservatives, on their smug assurance that trickle-down theory was the answer to every question having to do with a population of people and their divided capital. So I called my mother and asked her, for the first time in my life, to tell me exactly why she had voted for Reagan. “Because he was a brilliant man,” she said. “And a handsome one, too.”
“But,” I said, “you were always a Democrat before then, right?”
“Oh, sure,” she said. “I cried the day they shot JFK. Why are you asking?”
“Because, Mom, right now I’m standing a few blocks from the Stock Exchange, and there are all these women at South Street Seaport who are members of that same Red Hat Club you’re in.”
“Oh! Do you know where they’re from?”
“No, but it made me think of you.”
“You should ask one of them where they’re from. Maybe I know some of them,” she said. “I wonder what they’re doing down by the Stock Exchange; usually the Red Hat ladies have better things to see than a bunch of money changing hands.”
“Yeah. Mom, why did you vote for Reagan?”
“I told you, he was a brilliant man. He got those hostages back, you know.”
“But all these people down here have so much more money than they need, Mom. I don’t understand how it’s all supposed to work.”
“Why are you so worried, sweetheart? You got your credit back on track after what happened, didn’t you?”
“Yeah, it’s fine now.”
“Okay then,” she said. “Now, go tell those women who your mother is. I’m very popular. They’ll probably want to buy you some pie or take you to a Starbucks.”
“Okay, Mom. Take care.”
“You should! It’ll be so much fun!”
“Bye, Mom.”
“Bye, sweetie.”
I didn’t say anything to the Red Hat women. I lit a cigarette and one of them gave me a nasty look. They loved their credit cards and paid bills on time. I was no closer to understanding what my mother saw in trickle-down economics, or what I saw, or didn’t see. The whole thing—the bankers, the day traders, the buildings—still didn’t make sense, didn’t add up to the larger architecture I was standing in the middle of. I went to Starbucks and bought my own coffee with my own fake money.
The Channel Seven news that night offered one explanation of why everyone, aside from myself and the Red Hat women, had been in such a hurry and looked vaguely, determinedly upset about something. There had been a big announcement about the money—everyone’s money—and the implication was that the money would be gone within a month. It was, according to the news anchor, simply getting lost. He listed the names of big companies and the billions of dollars that were gone. I stared at the stock ticker at the bottom of the screen and felt relieved that something was at least happening, something that might get other people to wonder the same things I wondered about money and what it did, what people did with it. I didn’t understand how all that money could be lost without someone else finding it or get it, but the numbers were so large that the whole thing was a catastrophe whether I understood it or not. It mattered, finally—no one was going to be able to fill out a series of forms and put supposedly unrecoverable money back where it belonged. There were no expensive things sitting in someone’s—some thief’s—house, because no one had gotten anything from the collapse that had happened inside all of those buildings that afternoon.

(to be continued.)