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.
6.30.2009
6.24.2009
City, State part 2
The next day I called in sick and went back to the Financial District in the morning, in time for the opening bell. I watched people walk from their trains to the office buildings and banks slower than they had the day before, in shirts that looked more wrinkled. I almost blended in, standing between buildings with my cigarette as if I, too, was headed for a desk in the same reconstruction zone. A man who looked as though he hadn’t slept asked me for a light without letting his eyes meet mine. I wanted to know who he was, whether he thought the catastrophe might have been, at least a little, his own personal fault. Before he walked away, he said, “Thanks, sorry for the inconvenience,” and he didn’t give me time to answer. From the way he said it I thought he must have had to deliver that line hundreds of times every day. “Sorry for the inconvenience”: your flight has been delayed, I’m out of five dollar bills, the cook has burned your chicken, the economy has collapsed. It didn’t matter what sort of inconvenience the man was apologizing for—in any case, he was blatantly insincere and blatantly tired.
The differences, downtown, between Monday and Tuesday, went beyond the tired, suited multitudes and their panic. There were cameras, police with more horses and more guns, no tourists posing on the steps of Federal Hall. I almost expected to see a flag at half-mast, an imposed state of mourning for the bottom that had so decisively fallen out of Reagan’s beloved market. I remembered, though, everything I had learned in spring about the economy: that anything that happens, happens because someone said it was going to happen. So if the right person declares a state of mourning and tells the population to start waiting on line for soup, then we all get a depression based only on prediction, and not on circumstance. If I decided just to go on what was in my own wallet, then I had plenty of fake money left for coffee and whatever else I wanted.
Across the street was a branch of the bank that was keeping all of the money that was mine to spend, that I could have in paper bills and not have to give back to anyone. I remembered every lesson I’d had about the Great Depression, and how people started asking to take all their money out of the banks, and how everyone realized, at the same time, that the money hadn’t actually been there for years. In order to make sure the same thing never happened again, the government, after the thirties, made laws about how much cash the banks had to keep, no matter what. What everyone learns in high school history is that a bank, if you give it one hundred dollars, can lend out or invest all but ten of your dollars, and it assumes that the rest will be there, in some form, if you ever ask for your money back. So it can’t use up all of your money—just most of it. And of course, it can go ahead and give you anyone else’s money if you ask the right way.
I wanted to know how many other people were in the bank, and what they were doing—if they were asking for their money, or for money that wasn’t theirs, or if they were handing more money over for safe keeping, knowing that ninety percent would get leant to someone else, probably within hours. I went in and stood on line and couldn’t hear what the people in front of me were asking the bankers. I didn’t mean for my turn to actually come, but by the time I was at the front of the line I hadn’t come up with anything else to do. I got to the window and slipped my driver’s license under the glass. I said to the woman on the other side, “I would like to have my money back, now.”
She asked me, “Did you fill out a withdraw slip?”
“No,” I said.
“Well, you’ll have to fill one out.” She put one next to my license in the space beneath the window. “I’ll start looking up your account.”
This woman looked more put together than most of the people on the streets. She had slept the night before, and maybe, on her way to the bank, she had gotten herself ready to be harder and more severe than usual. I filled out the top of the withdraw slip, printed my name, birthdate, and address. At the bottom was the line for how much money, exactly, I wanted the bank to give me. I asked the woman, “On this line down here, can I just put ‘All of it?’”
“All of it?” she said.
“Yes. I want all of it.”
“Ma’am, I can only give you a certain amount of money at one time.”
“And how much is that?”
“Based on your account settings,” she said, “I can give you $5000. Any more than that, you have to talk to a manager.”
“Is that really my account settings?”
“Your account settings, as determined by federal law,” she said. “Would you like to speak with a manager?”
“If that’s possible,” I said.
The teller left her window and came out through a door at the end of the line of teller windows. I had seen bankers leave their places before, but it didn’t make sense that a person who, for most of the day, is supposed to stand behind several inches of bulletproof glass can simply walk out at any moment as if they don’t need the glass anymore. She came back to the window with a man whose name badge was gold, rather than silver, and whose tie was covered in the bank’s logo.
“How can we help you today, ma’am?” he said.
“I’m told I need to speak with you if I want all of my money,” I said.
“Yes, you’re going to need my approval for any withdraw greater than $5000.”
“Okay,” I said. “Do I have your approval?”
“That depends, ma’am. May I ask why you’re withdrawing this money? Do you plan to close your account with us?”
“Not necessarily,” I said. “I just want to have my money with me.”
“I understand,” he said. “These are tough times, and we know that our customers are concerned about their financial futures.”
“Yes, I am concerned about my financial future.”
“I can assure you, ma’am, that you have nothing to be worried about. Your account is insured up to $100,000; your money is not going anywhere.”
“Yes,” I said. “I know, but I would like to have it, anyway, if that’s possible.”
“All right, it is your money, and you are entitled to the cash at any time. We just want to remind you that, while your money is in your private possession, you will not accrue interest, as you would if you were to leave it with us, and your money would not be recoverable in the event that—God forbid—it were stolen from your person or property.”
“Okay.”
The manager looked from me to the line that was growing longer. He was worried, either because the delay was my fault, or because the rest of the people would ask for the same thing. He slipped another form under the window.
“If you wouldn’t mind, could you step aside to fill this out, and I’ll be ready to assist you as soon as you’ve finished,” he said.
I stepped aside. It was a full page of questions, some verifying my identity, some about why I wanted or needed to have more than $5000 in cash. The questions about my identity were difficult ones, I thought, the kind that someone like the man who had gotten my information from a piece of paper in the garbage and used it to run up bills in my name would not have been able to answer. He could not have known the name of the street I lived on ten years ago or the make and model of every car I’d owned, and I wasn’t sure how the bank knew this information, either. These details were being kept somewhere, in case anyone really needed to use them to check that I was the person my life belonged to. I had a separate place in my memory for the pass codes, pin numbers, account numbers, and any other information I would need as long as I was in a bank or talking to bankers; there was someplace else for information from my real life, for memories of my first car and the places I drove to. They, the bank, had all of it, minus the pneumonic devices I had for remembering the numbers and the images for remembering my life. They kept it someplace—and maybe not even inside the building I stood in—someplace in a pile of other people’s lives. The man who had stolen my identity had managed to fabricate the first part of things, the numbers and financial information, but the bank had gotten hold of everything else. I wondered why the manager, if he had access to the details of so many different lives, didn’t steal their identities and make it look as though nothing had ever happened—he couldn’t have been that much more trustworthy than any other person I could think of, and as far as I knew, the man who had stolen my own identity probably had friends and maybe a boss who trusted him with things. The manager had started to walk away, leaving me with the form for as long as it took for me to dredge from my memory the information he needed. “Wait,” I said.
“Yes, ma’am?”
“This form is asking for my sister’s name. I don’t have a sister.”
“Just answer truthfully, ma’am.”
“Should I just put ‘None’ or ‘I don’t have a sister?’”
“If you don’t have a sister, put that you don’t have one. If you do, put her name. We have to be very thorough about these things, ma’am. Identity theft is a big problem these days.”
“I know,” I said.
“Most people would rather have us be thorough and be a little inconvenienced than run the risk of having their identity stolen. I know I would.”
I went back to my form. I answered a dozen questions about myself and slipped the paper back under the window. I got my money, down to the penny, in a set of thick envelopes and left.
When I got home I put the money in a drawer I never open. The news anchor repeated the same things he had said the night before, except with new graphs in the background whose lines stopped farther down than Monday’s lines. I mean to say that things had continued to get worse, but in the same way, and everyone said that they would keep getting worse. I stared at the drawer and didn’t open it.
The differences, downtown, between Monday and Tuesday, went beyond the tired, suited multitudes and their panic. There were cameras, police with more horses and more guns, no tourists posing on the steps of Federal Hall. I almost expected to see a flag at half-mast, an imposed state of mourning for the bottom that had so decisively fallen out of Reagan’s beloved market. I remembered, though, everything I had learned in spring about the economy: that anything that happens, happens because someone said it was going to happen. So if the right person declares a state of mourning and tells the population to start waiting on line for soup, then we all get a depression based only on prediction, and not on circumstance. If I decided just to go on what was in my own wallet, then I had plenty of fake money left for coffee and whatever else I wanted.
Across the street was a branch of the bank that was keeping all of the money that was mine to spend, that I could have in paper bills and not have to give back to anyone. I remembered every lesson I’d had about the Great Depression, and how people started asking to take all their money out of the banks, and how everyone realized, at the same time, that the money hadn’t actually been there for years. In order to make sure the same thing never happened again, the government, after the thirties, made laws about how much cash the banks had to keep, no matter what. What everyone learns in high school history is that a bank, if you give it one hundred dollars, can lend out or invest all but ten of your dollars, and it assumes that the rest will be there, in some form, if you ever ask for your money back. So it can’t use up all of your money—just most of it. And of course, it can go ahead and give you anyone else’s money if you ask the right way.
I wanted to know how many other people were in the bank, and what they were doing—if they were asking for their money, or for money that wasn’t theirs, or if they were handing more money over for safe keeping, knowing that ninety percent would get leant to someone else, probably within hours. I went in and stood on line and couldn’t hear what the people in front of me were asking the bankers. I didn’t mean for my turn to actually come, but by the time I was at the front of the line I hadn’t come up with anything else to do. I got to the window and slipped my driver’s license under the glass. I said to the woman on the other side, “I would like to have my money back, now.”
She asked me, “Did you fill out a withdraw slip?”
“No,” I said.
“Well, you’ll have to fill one out.” She put one next to my license in the space beneath the window. “I’ll start looking up your account.”
This woman looked more put together than most of the people on the streets. She had slept the night before, and maybe, on her way to the bank, she had gotten herself ready to be harder and more severe than usual. I filled out the top of the withdraw slip, printed my name, birthdate, and address. At the bottom was the line for how much money, exactly, I wanted the bank to give me. I asked the woman, “On this line down here, can I just put ‘All of it?’”
“All of it?” she said.
“Yes. I want all of it.”
“Ma’am, I can only give you a certain amount of money at one time.”
“And how much is that?”
“Based on your account settings,” she said, “I can give you $5000. Any more than that, you have to talk to a manager.”
“Is that really my account settings?”
“Your account settings, as determined by federal law,” she said. “Would you like to speak with a manager?”
“If that’s possible,” I said.
The teller left her window and came out through a door at the end of the line of teller windows. I had seen bankers leave their places before, but it didn’t make sense that a person who, for most of the day, is supposed to stand behind several inches of bulletproof glass can simply walk out at any moment as if they don’t need the glass anymore. She came back to the window with a man whose name badge was gold, rather than silver, and whose tie was covered in the bank’s logo.
“How can we help you today, ma’am?” he said.
“I’m told I need to speak with you if I want all of my money,” I said.
“Yes, you’re going to need my approval for any withdraw greater than $5000.”
“Okay,” I said. “Do I have your approval?”
“That depends, ma’am. May I ask why you’re withdrawing this money? Do you plan to close your account with us?”
“Not necessarily,” I said. “I just want to have my money with me.”
“I understand,” he said. “These are tough times, and we know that our customers are concerned about their financial futures.”
“Yes, I am concerned about my financial future.”
“I can assure you, ma’am, that you have nothing to be worried about. Your account is insured up to $100,000; your money is not going anywhere.”
“Yes,” I said. “I know, but I would like to have it, anyway, if that’s possible.”
“All right, it is your money, and you are entitled to the cash at any time. We just want to remind you that, while your money is in your private possession, you will not accrue interest, as you would if you were to leave it with us, and your money would not be recoverable in the event that—God forbid—it were stolen from your person or property.”
“Okay.”
The manager looked from me to the line that was growing longer. He was worried, either because the delay was my fault, or because the rest of the people would ask for the same thing. He slipped another form under the window.
“If you wouldn’t mind, could you step aside to fill this out, and I’ll be ready to assist you as soon as you’ve finished,” he said.
I stepped aside. It was a full page of questions, some verifying my identity, some about why I wanted or needed to have more than $5000 in cash. The questions about my identity were difficult ones, I thought, the kind that someone like the man who had gotten my information from a piece of paper in the garbage and used it to run up bills in my name would not have been able to answer. He could not have known the name of the street I lived on ten years ago or the make and model of every car I’d owned, and I wasn’t sure how the bank knew this information, either. These details were being kept somewhere, in case anyone really needed to use them to check that I was the person my life belonged to. I had a separate place in my memory for the pass codes, pin numbers, account numbers, and any other information I would need as long as I was in a bank or talking to bankers; there was someplace else for information from my real life, for memories of my first car and the places I drove to. They, the bank, had all of it, minus the pneumonic devices I had for remembering the numbers and the images for remembering my life. They kept it someplace—and maybe not even inside the building I stood in—someplace in a pile of other people’s lives. The man who had stolen my identity had managed to fabricate the first part of things, the numbers and financial information, but the bank had gotten hold of everything else. I wondered why the manager, if he had access to the details of so many different lives, didn’t steal their identities and make it look as though nothing had ever happened—he couldn’t have been that much more trustworthy than any other person I could think of, and as far as I knew, the man who had stolen my own identity probably had friends and maybe a boss who trusted him with things. The manager had started to walk away, leaving me with the form for as long as it took for me to dredge from my memory the information he needed. “Wait,” I said.
“Yes, ma’am?”
“This form is asking for my sister’s name. I don’t have a sister.”
“Just answer truthfully, ma’am.”
“Should I just put ‘None’ or ‘I don’t have a sister?’”
“If you don’t have a sister, put that you don’t have one. If you do, put her name. We have to be very thorough about these things, ma’am. Identity theft is a big problem these days.”
“I know,” I said.
“Most people would rather have us be thorough and be a little inconvenienced than run the risk of having their identity stolen. I know I would.”
I went back to my form. I answered a dozen questions about myself and slipped the paper back under the window. I got my money, down to the penny, in a set of thick envelopes and left.
When I got home I put the money in a drawer I never open. The news anchor repeated the same things he had said the night before, except with new graphs in the background whose lines stopped farther down than Monday’s lines. I mean to say that things had continued to get worse, but in the same way, and everyone said that they would keep getting worse. I stared at the drawer and didn’t open it.
6.11.2009
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.)
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.)
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