“Sometimes I cross the street against the light.” Willing could have let it go, but he didn’t feel like it. All the pleasantness had been exhausting. “When no traffic is coming. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think that’s a misdemeanor. I haven’t hurt anyone, or violated anyone’s right of way. But I have broken the law. Being able to cross the street against the light is important to me.”
“Jesus, Wilbur,” Goog said. “That’s fucking sad.”
“If you take that away from me, and every other opportunity to not quite toe the line,” Willing said, “then however many amusing things I’m at liberty to do, I don’t feel free. If I don’t feel free, I’m not free.” I don’t feel free, Willing did not add, and I have not felt free since you and yours jammed this fleck of metal into my neck.
“Why should the US government give a shit about your feelings?” Goog charged.
“Why should it care about anything else?” Willing countered. “If it feels splug to live here, what are we preserving and protecting? What is the country for?”
“That is the dumbest question I’ve ever heard,” Goog said. “This bash has seriously deteriorated. I’m going to push off.”
“But the bancor,” Savannah said. “When does it go cashless, exactly?”
“The announcement’s next week. Be a happy day, in our office. Champagne and cake.”
“So does the cash become worthless overnight,” Savannah said, “by decree?”
“Same as when the dólar nuevo was brought in. Folks will have a month to convert. After which, yeah, cash bancors won’t be legal tender—anywhere. It’s bound to be fascinating. All these funds suddenly popping up on the chips of the erstwhile strapped. Between the fees, the fines, and the back taxes, this is an epic windfall for the Bureau. Or, as Wilbur so nobly observed, for everyone. For the country.”
“But why would anyone chip black-market bancors,” Savannah said, “if you guys will take it all?”
“Because they might get to keep a teeny tiny bit of it as opposed to losing the whole whack, and in my professional experience, you lowlife taxpayers are greedy fucks who’ll paw after whatever you can get,” Goog said. “But why are you so interested?”
“I’m not!” Savannah bound her arms across her cleavage.
“Plenty of big-spending foreigners roll into this town, looking for entertainment,” Goog said. “You wouldn’t sometimes be paid in international currency, would you?”
“Well, if I were, ever, of course I’d chip the cash immediately!” Savannah looked as if she could hardly breathe. She was a dreadful liar.
“I bet you do,” Goog said. “I get paid okay, but it’s 100 percent on the record. Where I work, not only do I have to be squeaky clean? My whole family has to be squeaky clean. So I’m putting an alert on your chip. Any sudden spikes in income, we’ll be watching.”
On that happy note, Goog left the party. He took the last of the cognac.
• CHAPTER 3 •
RETURN OF THE SOMETHINGNESS: SHOOTING SOMEBODY, GOING SOMEWHERE ELSE, OR BOTH
Cleaning up after a bowl-on-the-floor party took five minutes. Fifa was out cold on the rug. Willing draped her with a blanket. She had to be up in three hours to install shower grips in Windsor Terrace.
“You went quiet. After Goog left,” Willing said.
“Mm,” Nollie grunted, drying the stainless steel mixing bowl.
“Going back to when you first arrived in East Flatbush. I’ve never known you to run out of money.”
“Mm,” she grunted again.
“I did some research,” he said. “Your other books did so-so. But Better Late Than sold millions.”
Not even a grunt. The bowl got very shiny.
“You brought back bancors, from France,” he said. “That ‘old boyfriend’ you visit in Flushing. Whoever it is, he or she trades currency on the black market.”
Nollie stopped drying and glared, eyes popping.
“It can’t hear!” Willing exclaimed. “I’ve experimented! I’ve said aloud in my bedroom, ‘I have secret sources of income that the Scab doesn’t know about,’ and nothing happened!”
“Very well,” she said reluctantly. “But my finances are private.”
“I’m only trying to help. Whatever you’ve got left—if you deposit it, they’ll tax it to the wall, and they’ll ask questions. You could be open to prosecution. Holding bancors is legal now. But when you brought those bills through Customs, their possession was criminal. They could use that pretext to confiscate the lot. On the other hand, if you don’t deposit it, you heard Goog. A date will come and go, and the cash will convert to confetti overnight.”
“So, what, I should use it to line a hamster cage? Insulate the attic?”
“I know this violates all your instincts. But the new reporting requirements on off-chip expenditures don’t come in until January. So before the public announcement about the bancor going cashless, which is going to flood the economy with bancors, and depress the exchange rate for cash transactions—you have to spend it.”
Nollie put the bowl down at last. “I’ve dodged them at every turn. Now I feel cornered. You’re not the only one who cherishes getting away with something.”
“Spend it on getting away with something, then.”
Nollie dried her hands on the dishtowel with an anxious twist. “Young people want money to buy things. Not only clothes and jewelry, but experience, thrills. Old people want money for one reason and one reason only: to feel safe.”
“You can never have enough money to be safe,” he said gently. “Money itself isn’t safe. We should know.”
“And how,” she seconded. “But then, life isn’t safe, at ninety years old.”
“Exactly,” he said. “The illusion of wealth is that it can buy what you want. Which it can, but only if you want, like, a pretty dress. You don’t want a dress. You want not to be old. We haven’t talked about it much, but don’t you wish one of those hothead boyfriends of yours had stuck around? Maybe you want to still be a famous writer, and you can’t buy that, either; there are no famous writers. Or you want to write with the same fire that lit you up when you started Better Late Than—the kind of fire that hardly anyone gets to keep. You want the thicker hair in your old snapshots. You pretend you don’t, but you want people to like you. You want not to get cancer. What threatens everything that’s important to you isn’t a cashless bancor, or currency depreciation, or debt renunciation, or economic collapse, but your own collapse. Other than being able to pick up, you know, a nice bottle of wine, or maybe a chicken, you can’t buy anything you want.”
“You kids think all we boomers have lived in a delusional bubble,” she returned. “Think it’s come as a shock I’ve got old? I’m not an idiot. I’ve been reading since I was your age about ‘elderly women’ raped and robbed in their homes, and in the back of my head I’ve heard a whisper: ‘Pretty soon, honey, that’s gonna be you.’ I’ve always anticipated becoming a target—defenseless, weak, and on my own. Maybe my parents had a premonition. Ever work it out? Enola is alone spelled backwards. So there was a discrete period in my forties when I had the opportunity to salt away some reserves, in preparation for a rainy day that might last decades—a monsoon—my own personal climate change. In my mind’s eye, I was stockpiling a veritably physical fortification. If I bricked the bills high enough, the barbarians couldn’t climb over. Less metaphorically? Maybe I could pay them to go away.”