The personification of money has always made sense to me: money does this, money does that. It’s as if it has legs. It might, at any moment, leave. This is one reason I didn’t pursue writing. In my Advanced Nonfiction workshop, our professor warned against nurturing a fallback plan. He said the problem with a fallback plan is that you’ll fall back. My classmates nodded and wrote this down. Personally, I liked the idea of falling back. I pictured myself in one of those summer camp trust exercises, plummet disrupted by a bed of hands.
“I get it,” said Lillian. “Puma was boring, and you’re sick of explaining Pim-Pam to geriatric CEOs. I am too, Wen. But this client is different. They’re interesting. I don’t know what they are. But as I said, the money’s real. This works out and from now on everything’s pickles and cream if you catch my meaning.”
“I don’t.”
“It’s a saying.”
“It is?”
“It must be.”
“Okay.”
Lillian kicked back her chair. She laid a leg upon my leg. I brushed the dirt from her shoe from my pants. She hit the roach and coughed hard. Her cheeks looked purple in the porch light.
“The account is ours,” she said. “God help me, I have a feeling. A rumble in my gut like the dam’s about to burst.”
“That may have been the shrimp. It felt a little slimy.”
“I didn’t eat the shrimp. I’m off shellfish. The smell makes me want to vom.”
I looked down at my plate. There were twelve shrimp tails on it. There were none on Lillian’s.
“Why’d you serve it?”
“It’s what you serve.”
She flicked a shrimp tail off the balcony.
Michael
Back outside, I was almost run over by a convoy of Citi Bike tourists speeding through a red light. With the introduction of Citi Bike, the increase in bridge tolls, the reliably annual announcement of long-term service stoppage on one or another subway line, and the continuing trendiness of those dumb caps with the flipped-up brims, New York had become a cyclist’s city, a war zone in which cars were the enemy, and pedestrians were bystanders in the line of fire. But while I appreciate the cyclist’s experience of the city—the way she hears words drift, car horns begetting car horns, and conversations cut up so that single syllables call out across avenues, each respondent ignorant of the next block’s aria—walking’s better for thinking, and I had a lot on my mind as I wound north through the Financial District.
Our office was uptown, but Ricky and I had a Monday tradition of coffee and omelets before riding the A/C to Forty-Seventh Street. He’d been my closest friend since fourth grade, when Steve Wyck called me a white-trash kike with a deadbeat dad who should’ve been killed in the Holocaust. I’d been about to point out that my dad wasn’t born until after the Allied victory when Ricky intervened with a judo chop to Wyck’s solar plexus, knocking the bully to the ground and earning my protector a three-day suspension.
I’d followed Ricky since: to Columbia, to Wall Street, to his gay bar du jour. I was not close with my parents, and had left home by the time my sister, Rachel, was old enough for joint commiseration. Until Wendy came along, Ricky was it, peer and mentor, bad influence, eccentric solver of problems. Even after, he was the only person who knew both versions of me: pre- and post-Wendy; the white-trash kike and the hipster millionaire. My fall was my own, but my previous prosperity had heavily hinged on his tips. And while his provocative nature didn’t always recommend him as a source of prudent guidance, Ricky’s role in my life was still that of advisor, and I currently, desperately, needed his counsel. He could be trusted in matters of finance.
Besides, I was interested in #Occupy. Protests now flared in previously #unOccupied Republican strongholds from Arizona to West Virginia; pro-#Occupy op-eds appeared daily on national news sites; and #Occupy leaders were finally getting face time on network news shows where they voiced increasingly popular support of the UBI. This windfall, they promised, would encourage participation in consumer markets and help the unemployed pay for privatized insurance. Recipients could quit degrading jobs and go back to school to earn higher degrees. They could contribute to the sharing economy. They could open small businesses knowing they’d have cash to fall back on if things went belly-up. As an added bonus, a financially contented populace might feel less imperative to freely spray bullets in public space. The logic went that if the ride or die Second Amendment crusaders could afford more powerful and expensive assault rifles then, paradoxically, they’d be less inclined to shoot the scary pacifists rallying to take those rifles away. But there was doubt on the right—from the very circles that fought so hard to abolish a public health-care option—that, left to their own devices, people could be trusted to correctly spend.
This was not the #Occupy I remembered from 2011, that Bonnaroo facsimile with its compost bins and People’s Library, its greased teens locking tongues beneath the honey locusts. There were still students, crust punks, and derelicts, but added to these ranks were laid-off workers from all manner of industries. These people’s tax dollars had gone toward the previous bailout, and they’d been repaid with foreclosures and overdraft fees. And now their jobs had been replaced by bots or shipped abroad. Unemployment was the highest in our nation’s history. The repeal of Dodd-Frank had led to another credit bubble, and speculators like me had sunk billions into industries bound to topple under the weight of an increasingly nonexistent consumer base.
The Senate was split on the UBI, though not entirely along party lines. Factories that our previous president had “saved” from offshore deportation had since laid off almost all
