In the Red (22 page)

I
rina has reached zero. All the rows of numbers she has typed in neatly add up to nothing. Her cash is balanced for the day, to the penny. She stares at the 0 in the lower right corner of the screen. It looks expectant and open, as if waiting to be fed. The other tellers have balanced and gone. The other officers left Amy in charge of shutting down the closed bank for the night.

“We're done, right?” Amy says wearily as they lock up Irina's cashbox inside the vault. “We fed the ATMs.”

“We didn't do the night deposit.”

“Fuck. The night deposit.”

Amy looks so exhausted and demoralized that Irina has to ask what is the matter.

“It's…it's kind of personal,” Amy says, sighing.

Irina waits quietly while Amy locks up the enormous mechanism of the heavy vault door. The huge bolt clanging shut inside sounds like finality.

“Not that something being inappropriate usually stops me from saying it,” Amy observes, and gives a weak titter. “Okay. I'll tell you. I'm the worst person in the world.”

“That,” Irina says with some authority, “I doubt very much.”

Amy waves off Irina's assessment and starts her story without prompting. “Before I came to this city to work at this shitty bank, I lived with a man. He was a good one. I wasn't living with him for all that long before I got sick. Really sick, for a long time. I shat blood, I puked shit—every fucked-up thing a body could do to itself, my body went and did it. There was a lot of pain. There were lots of drugs. I had doctors put lots of things in various holes. I had other holes cut into me so that the doctors could put more stuff in them too. I lost fifty pounds. I fainted every time I stood up. There were lots of heavy drugs. I cried a lot, when I had the energy. I thought I was going to die. Did you know the human body can die of pain? Even if you're not actually dying per se, if you are in enough pain for enough time, say for years, you will fade away eventually. Your digestion slows. Your heart slows. Also the drugs help. For a long time, they didn't even know what was the matter with me. At first they said it was in my head, the fuckers. Two years of this shit.”

“What was it? The disease.”

“It doesn't matter, really. What matters is that this man I lived with stuck by me through all this nightmare. He drove me to the emergency room more times than I can remember. He held my hand and told me it was going to be all right even when we both knew that it wasn't. He watched my body, this body that was supposed to turn him on and make him happy, fall apart and waste away and become an object of degradation and pain. Lots of times, I counted my morphine pills to see if I had enough to off myself, but then I thought of him coming home and finding my dead body and I couldn't do it. How did he stay through all that? He stayed with me through it all, Irina. He was there when I woke up from the last surgery, the one that finally helped. He was there with a little pot of pink miniature roses. He must have gotten them from the hospital store. They were scrawny, miserable-looking flowers and they didn't smell like anything, but they were alive. He took me home and helped me to the toilet and fetched me food and took care of me until I was better. If watching your body die is some crazy shit, watching your body un-die is even crazier. He was with me through all this shit. When this shit ended we could have gotten married and had a real life. But once I was better, do you know what I did?”

“What?” Irina whispers.

“I left.”

The silence in the bank is hermetic. Outside there is a world, but it cannot get in.

“Can you believe I left him after that? How much do I suck? He saved my life every day for two years, probably so I could be his wife one day, and then I left him.”

“But why?”

“I'm telling you, I'm the worst person in the world.”

Irina wants to say that she has quite possibly met the worst person in the world, and he wasn't Amy. But maybe Amy needs to believe in her horribleness. That belief is the justice she dispenses to herself. She speaks fast, trying to explain.

“I couldn't. I just couldn't stay. He was so good to me that whole time and he was good to me after, but his face—all I saw in it was my time suffering and slowly decaying into an early grave. The pills and the pain and the slow coming apart. He had the sweetest eyes but my fucking death was in his eyes. That's what I saw when I looked at him, the slow process of dying. And here I was alive, and mostly all right, and here he was reminding me of all the dying.”

“You left to start over,” Irina says.

“I broke his heart.”

There is another silence. Then Irina tries to tell Amy that what she did doesn't make her the worst person in the world, but Amy snaps, “You can't tell me what I did was right.”

“You did what you had to, Amy.”

“But what I had to do was so shitty!”

Amy bursts into tears like a heartbroken child. Irina stands there flummoxed for several seconds, and then goes to her and awkwardly encircles her with her arms. It's normal, right? Just two bankers working late and weeping on each other. Inappropriate confessions are, after all, a matter of course in the vault. Except they aren't in the vault. Well, no matter. They are
near
the vault.

“Amy,” Irina says, rubbing her back in a way that she hopes translates as soothing. “Please don't worry so much. You're okay. You're not the worst person in the world.”

“So, what am I, then?”

Irina gives this question careful consideration in the time required to take a deep breath and slowly let it out again. Then she delivers her verdict: “You're just a garden-variety asshole like the rest of us.”

Amy laughs amid her tears. “Now that,” she says, “that sounds like the kind of shit I might say.”

“I know. That's why I said it.”

Amy's crying dies down. She wipes at her eyes with the heels of her hands with quick sweeps as if embarrassment is beginning to descend on her. “All right,” she says after letting out a deep sigh. “Let's do the night deposits.”

“Look, just go home. I'll do them.”

“But I'm the officer,” Amy protests weakly. “I have the key for that box.”

“Give me the key and I will leave it in your desk after I'm done.”

This is how Irina comes to be left entirely alone in the bank, after Amy waves good-bye when ushered gently out. It's very rare for a banker to be alone in a bank. It's practically unheard of for a teller to be in such a situation. A lower. Only uppers have the keys to the front door; uppers are the ones who let the lowers in.

When the glass door clicks shut in the darkening evening separating the two bankers, both still think they will see each other the next morning.

The creaky hinge yawns open. Irina reaches into the metal box and pulls out a few packets. Fortunately, there is not a lot of cash to count in the night deposits. The merchants have left mostly checks today. She sits at Amy's desk to do her tabulating. When she drops Amy's key in the top drawer of the desk, it makes a sonorous
ting
against some loose change left scattered among the pencils and Post-its. Irina stares at the key amid the office jetsam. It is small and silver-colored. Perfectly nondescript. It looks like a lot of other keys that open a lot of other locks in this bank, like for instance the little key Irina taunts herself with. Why has she played with herself for so long? What has she been waiting for?

Amy died and then un-died and then left the life that was given back to her. She left because she had to.

Elena, too, left when it was time, because she had to.

Irina was the only one who hadn't left when she had to. She left her good life because she felt like it, because she didn't want to be a good girl. Then, when she had to leave the bad life, she found that she couldn't. Even now she still clings to it. She's kept that goddamn key, consigning herself to limbo by being too chicken to look into the box that the key is supposed to open.

That whole time, she has waited here with her little talisman key for the bad life to come back to her. She still misses Andrei so much. Andrei, who, with his refusal to come for her and take her back, or shoot her for her theft, has effectively given her the contents of his safe-deposit box. It is another gift she could turn away.

But before she turns it away, she might at the very least take a little look at it.

Irina puts the bank's key in the left lock of the safe-deposit box. She puts her little golden key in the right lock. She turns them both. Their action is smooth and noiseless, as are the well-oiled hinges of the little metal door when she swings it open.

Where is Andrei? Is he dead? Is Dragos? Did Vasilii, in his cold storm of anger, shoot them both?

Or worse, has Andrei completely forgotten her?

She pulls out the reinforced box. It is very heavy. At least it's not empty. Wouldn't emptiness be the world's finest joke?

She opens the lid.

She recognizes the smell of what is inside before her brain even tells her what her eyes are looking at.

No. Impossible.

And yet—of course.

The box is filled to the brim with tidily stacked packets of hundred-dollar bills. Just stupid, stupid cash like the stuff she counts every day for her stupid, stupid job. No drugs, no jewels, no deeds to ancestral lands. No fake identities nor real ones. Just Benjamin Franklin's placid, sideways gaze looking at her from countless little pieces of numbered paper, as if asking her, What did you expect? Did you expect to find something that meant something? Well, no luck. It's only me again. Money. Just a bunch of paper printed with my dead face.

They are brand-new bills, ordered by serial number in neat packets held together by straps of paper. Just like a fresh shipment from the Federal Reserve printing press. This means that if someone cared, someone could keep track of the numbers on the bills and trace them. There is no doubt in Irina's mind that nobody cares. No one will bother tracing her.

She can smell that the bills are genuine; she doesn't need to fetch the pen with the gold-hued ink that turns blackish blue when it is swept across a counterfeit bill. Goddamn—it's all new bills. They'll stick together; they'll cut her when she counts them. The smell of the bills' ink will be on her hands; only lemon juice will get that smell off. The cleansing will sting the hell out of the tiny, invisible cuts in the delicate skin of her palms.

Judging by the volume, Irina's banker's eye tells her there is a good million dollars in there in uncirculated money that has passed through no hands, that has not yet touched the world. Money that belongs to nobody.

No. No fucking way
, Amy would say.

She has to laugh. She hopes they aren't dead. She hopes they are all thriving off their ill-gotten gains. She hopes Andrei still traffics whatever he has always trafficked, that he remains as eternally unchanged as a fairy tale. She hopes Elena is walking down a street somewhere wearing a string of large, blushing pearls, matching earrings, a lavender sapphire on her right hand, and a ruby on her left—like a woman betrothed on both sides. She hopes wherever Elena is, she has whatever she wants. She hopes that after seven years unfound, she will become human again. She hopes there will be children, and that these children will not be revenants.

Irina leaves one packet of the hundred-dollar bills in the top drawer of Amy's desk. Ten thousand dollars, the same amount Dragos had given her when they parted. She thinks of leaving it there without explanation. Then it occurs to her that this might be too confusing. Amy would be liable to turn over this unknown money to some authority somewhere, especially after it became clear that Irina would not come back. That wouldn't do when it is a gift.

Irina does the only thing she knows how to do to make money mean something.

She writes on it, one line on each of the first ten bills in Amy's packet, like pages from a children's storybook:

T
he Roman emperor Trajan commissioned this image to commemorate a victory. Carved in stone, clean-shaven soldiers on horseback surround a barbarian scrabbling on his knees. The soldiers brandish shields and lances. The barbarian, head turned to face his captors, slashes his own throat. Such was the fall of a rebel province at the edge of the Roman Empire. Dacia, the province was named.

Once upon a time something happened.

Nearly two thousand years later, the cornered barbarian king would be carved in stone again, forty meters tall on the bank of the Danube, by a nation that declared itself descended from Dacia. He would be stately this time, impassively watching the flow of the river from the side of the mountain. The nation that claims itself descended from Dacia speaks a language that is mostly Roman, leavened by the tongues of other conquerors. Of Dacian nothing is left, save possibly a few words that cannot be traced to any other language.

Had it not happened, it would not be told.

Decebalus is the name of the vanquished Dacian king who dared rise against the Romans. This is what history says. It carves itself in stone; it counts on the stone never crumbling.

On this contested land that now calls itself Romania, before it was washed over in blood by wave after wave of conquerors, before it was trodden by Dacians even, there lived a peaceful people with no name. Among this tribe, no one ever died. They did not know what dying meant. Only every now and then, a beautiful woman came and called one of them, and whoever followed her never returned.

One warm spring, a man from the outside came and settled with his family among the nameless people. He heard of the beautiful woman and could not wonder enough at the stupidity of those who followed her. He resolved that neither he nor anyone in his family would ever follow anyone who called them, no matter who it might be. He advised everyone who would listen never to follow anyone who called them if, as he said, they did not want to die. No one listened to the stranger's strange words and everything went on as before. That is, until one day seven winters hence, when, as the outside man and his family were sitting comfortably in their house, his wife suddenly began to shout, I'm coming! I'm coming! while putting on her fur coat. Her husband seized her by the hand and reproached her: What are you doing, madwoman? Stay here, if you don't want to die!

Don't you hear how she is calling me? I'll only see what she wants and come back at once, the wife said, struggling to escape from her husband's grasp. He held her fast as he managed to bolt all the doors in the room. Seeing herself trapped, the wife said, Let me alone, husband. I don't care about going now.

The man thought she'd come to her senses, so he loosened his grip on her. As soon as she felt his hand slacken, she wrenched herself from him and threw open the door, running outside. Her husband followed, pulling her back by her fur coat and entreating her not to go. The wife shrugged off the coat, leaving him standing there with his stunned hands gripping her shed garment, and disappeared into the cold night, her voice fading into the distance as she sang out to her seducer, I'm coming! I'm coming!

When she was gone and all was quiet, the husband collected himself, went back to the house, and told his children, If you're mad and want to die, go. In God's name, I can't help you. I've told you often enough that you must follow no one, no matter who calls you.

More days passed—many days, weeks, months, and years—and the peace in the outside man's household was not disturbed again.

Then one morning, when he visited his barber's as usual to be shaved, just as the barber was about to lay the blade on his throat, the outside man began to shout, I won't come, do you hear? I won't come!

The barber and his customers all stared. The man, looking piercingly at the open door as if someone was framed there, said, Take notice once and for all that I won't come, and go away from here.

He became increasingly restless, and then cried out, Go away, do you hear? Go away if you want to keep all your pretty skin, for I tell you a thousand times I won't come!

He continued to rave at the open door about being left in peace, finally springing up and snatching the razor from the barber's hand and leaping out the door, slashing at the air at the person calling him whom nobody else could see. The barber, who did not want to lose his razor, followed. The man ran and the barber pursued, until they were out of the village. Into the dark woods they went. There the man fell into a chasm from which he did not come out again, so that, like all the rest, he had followed the voice that called him.

The barber returned home, beside himself, and told everybody he met what had happened. So the belief spread through the land that the people who had gone away and not returned had fallen into that yawning gulf, for until then no one had known what had become of those who followed the voice of the beautiful woman.

The men from the village formed a search party to visit the scene of the misfortune, to see the insatiable chasm that swallowed up all the people and yet never had enough. Nothing was found. It looked as if, since the beginning of the world, nothing had been there except a broad, open plain. From that day forward, the peaceful people without a name lost their peace and began to die like all people from all time. Like we all must.