By the time Aria took the bus to the address written on the meal voucher, the streets of the city were more like black rivers. Each raindrop that hit the surface splashed as if it was hitting the surface of a lake.
Aria sat at one of several long rows of tables with a plate of rice, carrots, tortillas and salsa. Just as Imani had suspected, they were serving vanilla sheet cake that night. The frosting, which had been over-beaten with shortening, was almost waxy. Still Aria savored the square of it that they had given her.
She was glad that no one would be singing the happy birthday song to her before she ate it. Even though there was no candle, she made a wish inside her own mind. The wish was to stay with Omkar forever.
“Do you think any o’ these poor saps know how much this shit they’re feedin’ us actually costs?” the man sitting next to her said. Aria had been chatting with him for well over an hour now, since they’d stood together in the line to get in; long enough to remember that his name was Mark. Aria smiled to acknowledge his question, but didn’t answer it.
“You know some o’ these places, they get companies to donate food or clothes and what-have-you and they charge what to most people seems like a small amount, but what they don’t even realize is just how much fuckin’ money these guys are makin’. You realize if someone gives me this coat for free and I sell it for six dollars, that’s a six hundred percent profit? You’re either the devil or a fuckin’ genius to think up a business plan like that.” He laughed to himself, pulling at the leather of a fruit roll-up with the front of his teeth.
Mark was one of the strangest people that Aria had ever met. Most people who didn’t have a place to live or food to eat were preoccupied with money. But Mark took it to a whole new level. He was financially obsessed. Money had dominated the majority of their conversation and much of it was financial advice about 401Ks and IRA accounts and other things Aria had never even heard of before. Aria took what he said with a grain of salt, given that he was giving advice about how to be a millionaire when he himself was out on the streets. Despite the length of his unkempt brown hair and the swell of his weathered face, even Aria had to admit that he looked more like a man who belonged in a corporate corner office than a man who would be on the receiving end of a charity dinner like this.
Mark had been a self-made man. His mother was a single mom who had raised four kids on a $250 welfare check each month. He considered himself an entrepreneur at the age of ten, when he and a buddy of his had realized that all the kids at school loved reading comics that their parents wouldn’t buy them. They saved up their money and bought as many as they could. Every day at school, they would charge the other kids money to read the comics they had bought. The profits they split from their little venture proved to be enough to buy himself what his mother could never afford. From that day on, he had harbored a secret love affair with money.
The first product Mark sold was investment-grade diamonds. From there he did private placement stock. By the time 2008 came around, Mark had become a banker.
In the late 1990s, banks had started taking huge risks. People were buying expensive houses with big loans that they couldn’t afford because of how easy it was to have good credit. It caused the price of homes to rise and also an economic bubble. Because they had a lot of money, loan companies made it easier and easier to get loans, even to those with bad credit. They called them sub-prime loans. Many homeowners during this time refinanced their homes, which changed their mortgages and gave them a lower interest rate. Many of them took out another mortgage on their house and used it for spending money. The companies loaning the money changed their terms so that the borrower would have low interest at first and higher interest later. They called them adjustable-rate mortgages. They often used these initially favorable terms to convince people to take their loans in the first place. Unfortunately, many of the people who accepted were those who also had sub-prime loans. As long as the price of housing was high, investing in sub-prime loans would make the banks and other loan companies a lot of money on top of allowing them to offer even more sub-prime loans. But in response to the economic bubble, the housing companies built too many houses.
However, as Mark explained to her, beginning in the summer of 2006, the price of housing began to fall. The value of many homes dropped below the value of their remaining mortgage debt. Because of this negative equity, the owners were unable to sell them and move. By March of 2008, almost nine million Americans had either zero or negative equity in their homes. When interest rates rose, many homeowners were unable to make the higher payments and so, they defaulted on their loans. Foreclosures were everywhere. People lost their homes. They filed for bankruptcy. The number of houses for sale caused the price of homes to decrease even further. The homeowners who had sub-prime loans were forced to leave properties that were now worth less than they’d originally paid for them. The loans were worth more than the houses themselves. But the loan companies could not make money with those houses. Because the economic housing bubble had collapsed, the value
