BOOK ONE : LISTENERS AND READERS

:: AUTUMN 2000

foreteller of catastrophe :: 10/31/00

She handles money for a living. Federal Reserve Note. She stands over a register, a pretty guard, and enters the codes that make documents out of transactions. Taxable Item. Taxable Item. Sum Total : $11.97. People hand her money, wilted bills fished from wallets, from pockets, sometimes (in summertime) from the moist space that exists between a sock and the flesh of a calf. Cash Tendered : $20.00. This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private. Change Due : $8.03. She feels, sometimes, like there is something godlike about the entire process. All those elements of abstraction and transformation. Not to mention the constant proximity to representations of the holy figures and places of America. In God We Trust and all that. Forget the cause, here’s the effect: the people who pass through buying CDs don’t seem quite real to her. OK no. It’s more that she feels like she is looking down upon them from a great height. It is not that she is better than them — it is more that they are far away —

(and she prefers it that way. There have been times when she has felt the border between her and the world bleed like watercolor, times when she has experienced too much reality, an overabundance of data surging in through her eyes and ears and skin, and so she now understands reality as magnitude and volume, migraines, as something that is terrifying when you are too much a part of it, too close to it, and this is a piece of why she does not mind this distance between her and other people—)

And yet she handles their money. And for all its abstraction it feels so human. It is wrinkled like skin. You can read someone’s fate in it like you would in a palm. And so she keeps up the distance by playing this register-game: Guess the Catastrophe. People come and buy their CDs and hand her their money and she feels its texture in her fingertips and looks them in the face and imagines some accident for them in the future. Miles Davis, Kind of Blue. Car accident, pinned between crushed door and steering column, punctured lung. G. Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, Illinois. Thomas Brinkmann, Pop Loops For Breakfast. Too much coke, too many amphetamines, a club, a hospital, all the light gone glassy, all the surfaces hard and cold. Department of the Treasury, 1789. Slint, Spiderland. A dark blot spreading in the brain, no, a hundred tiny patches, scattered in the lungs, a flung handful of ashes.

Eventually Freya tells her it’s breaktime and she goes and stands in the bathroom. She gets a ten out of her own wallet and holds it up against her forehead: looks at Hamilton’s face and then at her own. She is still wearing her sunglasses: they mask her even from herself. She tries to imagine something, anything that would end this. The answer comes quicker than she would like: for her the accident is to remain alive. She laughs out loud at this.

She wonders if it is possible to love Alexander Hamilton. There is something attractive about his austerity.

K 65832035 B.

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