In the Red (6 page)

W
hen she got this job, it took a little while to get used to all the money. But now Irina can stand in the vault at eight in the morning, gummy-eyed and cotton-souled, completely indifferent to the fact that she is holding a hundred thousand dollars in each hand. The hundred-dollar bills, bundled with yellow paper straps into tidy packets each worth ten thousand dollars, are cellophaned into large bricks, each worth a hundred thousand. The first time she held so much heavy, live money in her hands, she felt the possibility of escape detonate inside her like a tiny explosive charge: what if she ran like hell?

Now that she is used to cash in shipments from the Federal Reserve, she knows the money has as little life in it as crates of apples, or drums of cat litter, or bundles of newspapers. Cash is a dead tradable like any other. It was partly the double custody that made the novelty wear off so fast: every task requiring the handling of large amounts of cash must be performed by two people. This is a theft-prevention precaution. It also normalizes the operation. When Irina saw how thoroughly unimpressed the upper was counting all this money, it made her unimpressed too.

The upper today is Amy, one of the banking officers. The upper can also be the manager or assistant manager. The lower is always one of the tellers. Today it's Irina. The vault is opened with two combinations, upper and lower. Nobody knows both. There are also upper and lower keyholes for most locks. All the bankers have jangling bunches of keys, like prison guards or custodial staff. Some of them carry the keys as big lumps in their pockets. Some of them keep the keys attached to rubbery straps they loop around their wrists or their belts. Losing keys does not happen. Misplacing them for so much as a few seconds causes flares of hot panic that spread out concentrically through the bankers like waves from where a rock is dropped into a pond.

Irina keeps her keys on a large metal ring with a little claw she hooks onto her belt loop. Amy is one of the wrist strap people. In idle moments, she has been seen passing one finger through the strap and twirling the keys around in an offhand manner that makes the manager give her a disapproving look. Amy is not white but a honeyed shade of brown of ambiguous ethnicity. Her Anglo name offers no clarification, and Irina doesn't ask for any. She watches Amy feed packets of cash into the money counter.

“It always smells like feet in here,” Irina says.

Amy shows the palm of one of her hands when she explains, “It's all the bacteria from people's hands festering in the paper.”

It takes Irina a few seconds to realize that by “paper,” Amy means all the piles of cash; she means the money is imprinted with more than ink. Ground into it is the sweat from countless unseen hands. Circulation has a certain organic stench.

Amy unbundles some hundreds and places them in the little top tray. She pushes a button; there is a leafy whir. They watch the machine pass the bundle and display the expected “100.”

“So,” Amy asks, “have you ever been in love?”

“What?”

Irina looks her coworker in the face, unsure of what is happening.

“Have you ever been in love?” she repeats.

Is Amy joking? Of all the words to say in a goddamn vault, “love” must be one of the most misplaced. Irina sees nothing but earnestness in Amy's face, which is in itself a trifle unusual. So she answers, simply, “Yes.”

Irina sighs. She thinks she's given enough of an answer, but Amy isn't moving, isn't taking the cash back out of the counter to rebundle it. She plainly expects more clarification, and asks for it. “How was it?”

“It was a fucking disaster,” Irina says.

Amy considers this answer and then shrugs. “Sounds about right,” she says as she reaches for more of the money.

Irina does not yet know that this is normal. Being hermetically sealed in the vault alone with another person can do that. Maybe it's the confinement, all the sounds of the outside world totally blocked off by the layers of metal and concrete. Something about the vault will make a banker tell another banker about the abortion she's never spoken of with anyone before; it will make a banker ask another banker—a near stranger—what fears keep him up at night. Some weird thing about being inside the vault will suffocate the bankers with yearning to give voice to the inappropriate. Maybe it has to do with the presence of all the money. Cash in such amounts does things to the human mind that are hard to understand.

The house Irina is drawn to is just a few blocks from the tiny apartment she has inhabited only slightly, like a ghost, for the past half year. Every day when she passes the house on the way home from the bank, she knows it's time to pull the string and work her way to the front of the bus. Today, when she gets off the hissing bus into a breezy evening, she backtracks and stands on the sidewalk considering the house for several seconds. It's painted white with blue trim and has been empty since she moved to the neighborhood. The front door is ever so slightly ajar; in the end it's an invitation she can't resist. She nudges it open with a finger, thrilling at the idea that inside she might find some drug-addled squatter dozing on a bare, stained mattress. Or at least a raccoon looking at her wide-eyed from its bandit mask. But of course there is no one, just the lazy coil of dust in the slanting afternoon sun in the snug entryway. The living room, completely empty. Past that, a kitchen with a cheap Formica floor etched in mock tile, peeling up at the corners. The refrigerator door is left yawning open. On its shelving sits a jar of what must have been mayonnaise, the contents having turned a sickish shade of green. Why leave this? Were they in a hurry?

Irina searches for the evidence of illicit activities on this neutral site, however small the crime. Like maybe dead vermin. A mouse, the head wrenched at a sickening angle, the delicate pink feet curled inward and splattered red by the spilled innards left there when the cat had grown bored. Instead there is only a cobweb in the corner, glimmering in the light streaming from the picture window. There isn't even an occupant in the web, not even one bitty drained insect husk from a ghoulish spider meal. The room is actually fairly pleasant. The house simply won't cooperate with Irina's desire to make it a crime scene. She's watched too many cop dramas over her microwave dinners. Last night's episode was a touch more gruesome than usual: when the trench-coated detective found the body splashed all over the ground as if it had been dropped there from an airplane, he serenely pronounced, “Whoever did this guy in must have really hated his guts.”

What an idea, that. Not only to hate someone, but even the meaningless tissue where he brews his shit. Standing with her hands in her jacket pockets looking out at a backyard bare except for a few scraggly weeds, Irina says aloud, “I hate his guts.”

Does she? Her face feels warm. She lets the heat wash over her—whose guts? Oh, there is only one
he,
isn't there? As long as Irina lives she will never be rid of him. Without his touch her body is a hollow thing slowly dissolving, like a shipwreck soundlessly evanescing into the blind deep.

After working at a bank for a while, Irina can look down the line and guess who's overdrawn, the person she'll have to turn away without money. The broke are always so fidgety. And respectfully awed. To a person with a comfortable balance, Irina is a human ATM. To the poor, she is an oracle who tells them what kind of week they'll be having. If they have eight dollars, she gives them the eight dollars. If they have negative eight dollars, they will have to scrape up eight dollars for the privilege of having nothing.

Zero is a precarious number. It never lasts long. If they are lucky, a paycheck comes in. If they are not, the bank charges them for not having a balance. When Irina tells them they're less than broke, they generally take that news with the bleary-eyed resignation of people who are seldom told good things. Today a scruffy man tries to cash a check that isn't his at her window. He probably hasn't stolen it. Probably he's just found it on the pavement, freshly fallen out of someone's wallet, still folded in on itself like a daisy before sunrise. He must have thought, Why not? He has no plan, no fake ID. He just stands there like an empty vessel while Irina tells the assistant manager, who then calls the police. He mills around in the lobby waiting for them to come get him. He doesn't sit down since he knows the armchairs people sit in while they open accounts are clearly not for him. Why do the police even bother putting handcuffs on him? They probably could lead him away by the hand like a child who's cried himself exhausted. Jail is, after all, a place to go.

When he is gone, Irina rips a piece of blank receipt tape out of her dispenser. She looks at it for a full minute, at the serrated edge created by the perfect row of steely teeth. There are watermark stagecoaches on the paper, the bank's corporate icon from its picturesque beginnings as a shipping company in the old west. She picks up a ballpoint pen and scrawls,
Love, of all things
.

It is her father's voice she hears when she writes. Why her father's voice, when she was thinking of Andrei? She would rather not consider this question. She slides the receipt among her blank slips, green for deposit and red for withdrawal. It disappears there like a whisper in white noise, blending seamlessly with all the other paper.

“What was that you were writing?”

Irina starts. She didn't realize that Amy had been watching her.

“Just—ah—a message,” Irina stammers.

“A message to who?”

Irina shrugs.

“Seems to me if you have a message, you should send it out, not tuck it away.”

Irina caps her pen and opens her mouth to answer but finds it impossible to argue against Amy's simple, right logic.

The safe-deposit boxes line the entire corridor back to the inner vault. To access your box, you must sign a register and show identification. Then you are buzzed behind the counter and led down the metal hallway by a teller. You find your box amid an entire wall full of them. You put your key in. The teller puts her key into the second lock and turns both keys at once. The little door swings open without a sound; it's well oiled. You pull the metal box out of the wall, cradle it in your arms. The teller guides you to a stall where you lock yourself in and do whatever secret things you do with your box in there. Take out an emerald the size of a cat's eye. Put in some deed to a new property. Count flawless, investment-quality diamonds in a little velvet pouch pulled from the bottom of the box, under all the other priceless gems you keep in there. Look over documents certifying, after extensive genetic testing, that you are the true heir of the Romanov dynasty, and fantasize about the revolution that will put you back in power.

This is what Irina thinks you might be doing in there, as she mills around outside the stall waiting for you to come out with your mysterious box closed again, ready to slide it back into the wall. But today, while she waits, she is not listening to the shuffle of your unseen papers. She is not thinking of you or your box. There is another box. She follows the numbers along the wall to find it. Here it is: 21012. It is one of the big ones along the bottom. When someone pulls one of those out of the wall, it is sometimes heavy enough that Irina has to help the customer carry it into the stall. A blank innocuous little metal door among thousands of blank innocuous little metal doors, snug between 21011 and 21013. If Irina opened it, would it give her the explanation she is looking for? What explanation is she looking for, anyway?

They haven't come for her. Fine. But how is it possible that they haven't come for the contents of this box?

She can hear you closing your lid. You will be out soon. Certainly, if you knew what she is thinking, you would tell her to stop running her finger along the smooth edge of the little metal door while smiling sadly to herself. Be reasonable, you would say. That box is not rightfully hers to open. It doesn't belong to her. It would be better for her to throw away the key.

It's not so much that she is suffering terribly; it's that she is waiting. Waiting in the same way that an elderly patient on a morphine drip waits in his hospital bed: too much pain, time to go. Waiting for it to come get her, the queasy suspicion growing that it will not, that she is the one who is supposed to let go and surrender to her own death.

Of course they won't come. All this waiting around is stupid. It's pure masochism. She should throw that damn key away and forget the whole thing, or she should open the box and take whatever is inside. Instead, she indulges her slow decay.

After Andrei sent her away, she started to lose her hair. She did not even notice until the day the barrette she used to clip it into a ponytail every morning slipped right off because there was no longer enough hair to hold it there. The jarring, tinny sound of it hitting the tile—only then did she truly see the serpentine black strands circling the drain in the shower all this time. All those mornings she had glanced over them without understanding what was happening. She is not in her body. When Andrei withdrew, he must have taken her away with him.

Will her hair come back? Will she?

Irina doesn't believe her identification papers when they say she is young. And yet when she looks in the mirror, she sees a smooth jaw, an unlined eye. Her face does not match the leaden weight of the sluggish blood stagnating in her veins.

Before she met Andrei, she suffered from a peculiar kind of female amnesia. She would come home from class bone tired. So weary, in fact, that her eyes were closing of their own accord before she could get through dinner. She would make her way to bed in underwater slow motion, sometimes falling asleep still fully clothed. The sleep was a hood pulled over her mind. When she woke up soaked in clammy sweat, she could not remember what nightmare had shocked her eyes open in the darkness.