Chapter 1 #2
I was so na?ve. This sucking-up from the airline would have at one time struck me as shocking and unbelievably unfair, nonsensical even.
Why wouldn’t a billionaire have to pay for something a poor person would absolutely have to pay for?
But I’d grown used to it in the past six soul-crushing years, so it no longer fazed me.
I immediately filed the whole incident under forgotten, went home, watched some Netflix, and fell asleep ignoring the unpaid bills piling up on my kitchen table, per usual.
A few days later I was g-chatting with Handsome Kevin Hanson from legal (that’s what every female in the office called him, or just Kevin Handsome for short) while shoveling spoonfuls of Pinkberry into my mouth.
I was enjoying an intense brain freeze coupled with the rush I always experienced while chatting with Kevin, when Billy the mail guy (aka “Patchouli,” on account of his stinking to high hell of the stuff and dutifully passing it on to all of our parcels) dropped a white, hippie-infused envelope onto my desk that read: Travel between getting the cavity in my molar filled and having that funky paramecium-shaped mole on my back looked at.
And, sure, I could get one more wear out of this pair of socks before I go to the Laundromat.
And look at this sheath of aluminum foil, it’s still good as new, I’ll just give it a little rinse.
No. No more of that. Instead, I could be living the good life of enjoying dire necessities and bountiful comforts.
I could pay my phone bill and go to the movies on the same day.
The next thing I knew, I’d come to in Canarsie.
This is the last stop on this train. Everyone please leave the train.
Something had to happen. I had to rip up that damn check!
Okay, fine, I told myself. I’ll do it.
Back in the safety of my bedroom now, blinds drawn, check in hand, I was poised to end this thing once and for all.
But maybe I would just, you know, take a picture of the check first. Not a selfie or anything, just a snapshot.
And not the kind that disappears thirty seconds after you take it, or whatever—just an old-fashioned photograph, to remember the check by.
And then I remembered that app on my phone, the one where all you have to do is click a photo of a check and—poof—it’s deposited into your bank account.
Damn you, technology.
Technology made it so easy to deposit that check, I could have done it by accident.
It wasn’t an accident—but it could have been.
First I had to open the magical check-depositing app and log on with my username and password. Then I had to snap a picture of the check’s front and the check’s back. Make sure the entire check is inside the box and touch the camera icon when you are ready.
Was I ready?
No, but the novelty of this process was so fascinating that I continued on anyway. Depositing a check with my phone? Who knew I’d ever see the day? It was just unreal enough to feel imaginary.
It wasn’t an accident when I logged on to my student-loan account either.
But that was the cunning whimsy of technology at work, too, because if I actually had to leave my house at any point—or even just sit down at my desk and write out a physical check, and stuff that check into an envelope, and walk that envelope to the mailbox to mail it—I don’t think I could have done it.
But quietly typing alone in my dark bedroom felt so innocuous, so anonymous, and even potentially undoable.
There’s something devastatingly permanent about dropping a letter into a public mailbox, isn’t there?
The way the envelope is in your grasp one minute, and then it’s gone, followed by that heavy metal lash of the door.
You open the door again just to make sure, as if in the history of all letters there was ever one that didn’t make it down.
And then there’s that split second of panic.
Did I remember the stamp? The return address? It’s too late now.
But just clicking Send? There would always be Cancel. Edit/Undo.
I stared at the words on my computer screen—Pay in Full—for a long time before making the decision.
Earlier in the day, Robert had had an argument with his wife about whether the peppers growing in their garden were jalapenos or habaneros.
He turned out to be wrong, so he had me run out to buy her the diamond bracelet she’d had her eye on from Tiffany. Total cost: $8,900.
So $19,147 was roughly only two lost arguments to Robert.
And it wasn’t even his money, was the thing. It was the Titan Corporation’s money, and Titan had billions—literally billions and zillions of dollars. Could anyone really blame me for not giving this minuscule-to-them-yet-life-changing-for-me amount of money back to the Titan Corporation?
It had already been three weeks since the reimbursement check was issued to me, and nobody had missed it. Nobody had missed it! Meanwhile, I could have fostered a family of Cambodian children for what I was paying in interest alone on my student-loan debt each month.
One click. Pay in Full. That was it, that was all it took, and it was done. I was free.