Currency Devaluation

Currency Devaluation

            The boyfriend was drinking again and he was in jail.  Mr. Alexander couldn’t remember his name – it was something exotic and misspelled – but he could see the man in his mind’s eye as a dark blur with large dull eyes like some kind of nocturnal creature.  Jennifer was crying and the babies were whimpering through their slimy mouths.  The muzzles of both of the children were crusted with dried snot. 

            “When will it stop?”  Mr. Alexander asked his daughter.

            She shrugged and muttered something that he could not understand.

            A window was broken in the entry and a humid wind searched the corridor.  The air in the kitchen smelled of vodka and cigarettes.

            “Do you think I’m carrying that kind of money?”  Mr. Alexander said.

            “I don’t know what you’re carrying,” Jennifer answered.  “How could I know?”

            “Indeed,” Mr. Alexander said.

            In some hidden place, a cell phone or pager made an insistent buzzing sound.  Jennifer didn’t stir to answer the device.

            “If you can help somehow...” Jennifer said.  She paused.  The buzzing continued.

            “They take credit cards,” Jennifer said.  “The clerk of court told me that they’re set up to take credit cards.  You can set up an account, you know, for the inmates.”

            “They take credit cards?” Mr. Alexander said.

            Jennifer picked one of the babies underfoot from the floor.  She extended her arms, offering the wriggling infant to Mr. Alexander.

            “Your grandson wants you,” Jennifer said.

            “Of course, they take credit cards,” Mr. Alexander said.  “Everyone takes credit cards.  That’s the way it is.”

            He reached out and put the palm of his hand on the baby’s scalp.  That seemed the only place where the child was clean enough to touch.  But there was something sticky in the fuzz on the infant’s head. 

            “Everyone takes credit cards,” Mr. Alexander said.

            Of course, he would have to make proper arrangements -- a money order or a wire transfer.  It was yet another obligation among many others.

             The day brightened a little.  Traffic on the freeway was heavy but flowing freely.  Mr. Alexander turned on his car radio.  A dull cramp tightened his belly under his belt.  He thought it prudent to exit the freeway to be among service stations or fast food places.  His routine was disturbed.  This trip had taken him to unfamiliar suburb by unfamiliar roads.  Emergencies always had that effect.  They disturbed his bowels.

            He stopped at a convenience store and, for the sake of appearances, bought ten dollars gas.  Fuel was expensive: how could young people hope to make ends meet?  The rest room in the store was out-of-order – a piece of cardboard with the words “KEEP OUT” scribbled in magic marker was taped to the door.  Mr. Alexander handed the clerk a ten dollar bill.  The man behind the counter looked as if he had come from the Middle East.  He glared at the ten dollar bill as if it were counterfeit.  The face on the currency glared back with little grey and beady eyes.                      “Don’t get many of them?”  Mr. Alexander asked.

            The clerk didn’t know what he meant.

            “Everyone pays by credit card, right?” Mr. Alexander said.

            “Or by debit card,” the clerk said.

            There was a fast food joint a half-block down the boulevard.  But it was on the wrong side of the street.  Mr. Alexander sighed.  He would stop at the next place on his side of the median.

            At the restaurant, Mr. Alexander bought a cup of coffee for the sake of appearance.  The girl at the counter spoke with an accent.

            “Just a cup of coffee?” she asked.

            “Yes,” Mr. Alexander said, fumbling for his wallet.

            “Large, small, or medium?”  She looked at him as if the question had profound significance.

            “Medium, I guess.”

            “We have a drive- through,” she said.  “You should just go through the drive-through.”

            “Okay,” Mr. Alexander said.  “I’ll remember next time.”

            The coffee was lukewarm and he thought it might further disturb his bowels.  He left it on a table while he used the rest room and didn’t carry it out to his car when he left the place.

            Mr. Alexander listened to the radio while driving his familiar route.  Between deliveries, in stagnant lines of traffic, he rested his right hand between the front bucket seats, stroking the heaps of spare change piled in the car’s cupholders.  The coins were cold to the touch and Mr. Alexander could distinguish between the small slick discs of the dimes, the big weighty quarters with their bas relief surfaces, the clumsy and oafish nickels, and the gritty, plebeian pennies that always felt vaguely disfigured against his fingertips.  He had been raised Catholic, although he no longer attended church, and had prayed the rosary and Mr. Alexander found the sensation of the coins slipping through his fingers similar – a tactile experience that was both faintly thrilling and deliberative.

            On the radio, a confident baritone voice spoke incessantly.  It was a talk show and listeners used their cell-phones to call and comment on the topic.  This afternoon, the subject was the Federal Reserve Bank and Mr. Alexander listened attentively.  Most of the listeners who phoned the show agreed with the host.  Sometimes, a caller would disagree with the broadcaster.  In his loud, insinuating baritone, the host would denounce the disagreeable listener and question his patriotism and morals.  Then, other listeners would call to agree that the commentator was right to question the disloyal listeners’ ethics.  Mr. Alexander lifted fistfuls of coins and let them slither through his fingers into the cupholders.  Sometimes, he would raise a quarter to his eyes and inspect it – some of those coins had emblems representing states on one side: a cowboy on a bucking bronco signified Wyoming, a herd of mustangs plunging through the desert represented Nevada, Connecticut was a mighty tree, and there was a harbor and strange rounded tower for Puerto Rico.  Mr. Alexander had never been to Connecticut and Puerto Rico, but he felt that he knew those places, if only slightly, by admiring the quarters minted to represent them.

            The radio commentator urged his listeners to take a stand.  His voice seemed to tremble with rage, but was, also, paradoxically, serene and dispassionate.  The broadcaster’s rage was indifferent and abstract.  But the listeners all seemed frightened and obscurely passionate: their voices sounded moist as if they were bleeding or sobbing into their phones.

            Mr. Alexander stopped to go to the toilet.  His guts were in disarray.  He supposed it was worry over his daughter.  Back in traffic, rush hour was beginning and the intersections were starting to jam.  The host said that his listeners should take a stand.  Mr. Alexander fished his cell phone out of his breast pocket and began to dial, but, then, the stall suddenly dissolved and the traffic began to move once more and he thought it imprudent to talk on the phone when the car was moving.  Perhaps, he thought, it is against the law to talk on the phone at highway speed.

            At home, Mr. Alexander ate supper with his wife and, then, sat in his living room watching television.  A baseball game was on the tube.  Mr. Alexander’s wife told him that she had received a text message from their daughter about the trouble.  “I know,” Mr. Alexander said.  He said that he had visited his daughter and grandchildren at their apartment.

            “She is having lots of trouble,” Mr. Alexander’s wife said.

            He sighed and agreed with her.

            “What should we do?” she asked him.

            “I don’t know,” Mr. Alexander said.

            “We don’t want to be enablers,” his wife remarked.

            Mr. Alexander didn’t want to talk about it.  The subject ruined his equanamity and cast a dismal shadow over the brightly-lit diamond and the splendid green meadows of the baseball park shown on his flat-screen TV.

            “She wants me to clean it all up,” Mr. Alexander said.  “And, listen, if I could clean it up, if money or something would clean it up for her, I would.”

            “But it won’t help,” his wife said.

            “Nothing helps,” Mr. Alexander said.

            The next morning, Mr. Alexander drove his route and made his deliveries.  He listened to talk radio and played with the coins in the cupholders.  Apparently, the topic of the Federal Reserve Bank was fascinating to large numbers of people.  The radio host on the call-in show continued on that theme all afternoon.

            It was sunny and the traffic shimmered in the bright light.  Mr. Alexander put on his sunglasses to shade his eyes.  An hour before he had completed his route, Mr. Alexander saw that he was ahead of schedule and so he stopped at a Dunkin’ Doughnuts for some coffee.  His stomach was still a bit unsettled but he was tired from the emotional turmoil of the preceding day and needed some caffeine to keep his eyes open.

            Waiting in line in the doughnut place, Mr. Alexander removed his sunglasses and took his wallet from his pants pocket.  When he paid for his cup of coffee, he was dismayed to see that his right hand was discolored and looked greasy.  Obviously, the money that he had been fingering was filthy and had soiled his hands.  Mr. Alexander was troubled and perplexed.  – Didn’t I just wash those coins, just a little while ago? he asked himself.

            Carrying his coffee, Mr. Alexander went back to his car and, setting the styrofoam cup between his knees, assayed the coins in the cupholder.  Many of the pennies were sticky with some kind of greenish mold and several of the quarters had moist, adhesive surfaces, only one side – he imagined the sticky side as “tails” – like a postage stamp.  A couple of the pennies were so overgrown with corrosive mold that Abraham Lincoln’s profile was no longer discernible.  Mr. Alexander picked up a quarter and peered at it.  Behind the noble sculpted bust of George Washington, the coin represented Utah – two locomotives faced one another in a barren desert, a large spike like the upright stave of a scales separating the engines.  A mucousy film coated the emblem.

            It was puzzling.  He had just washed those coins not long before.  When?  When was it?  He remembered with pleasure filling his fists with coins and putting them in an empty coffee cup.  The coins were pleasantly heavy in the cup and, for a moment, Mr. Alexander thought that the styrofoam bottom might tear free and let the silver and copper cascade down to the ground.  How had he done it?  He recalled putting the coins in a colander in his kitchen sink and, then, running cold water on them while he stirred the precious metal, something like a prospector panning for gold.  When the grease and slime was washed away from the coins, Mr. Alexander remembered anointing them with a dash of vinegar to give them a tart, acid smell.  With a paper towel, he scrubbed out the cupholder.  Here was the problem: his daughter had dropped some candy into the cupholder – he found a decaying M & M and two popsicle sticks in the well of the cupholder.  It was his mistake.  He should not have let his daughter eat candy and popsicles in the car.  How old was she then?  Thirteen or fourteen, Mr. Alexander thought.  I washed the coins when she was thirteen or fourteen.

            It wasn’t until he merged onto the freeway that he recognized that his daughter had not been in his car for almost eight years.  Life was sad.  Time passed so quickly and children grew up and had problems of their own and, although a man ought to take a stand, there really wasn’t anything you could do.  Mr. Alexander thought that he must have washed his coins more than ten years ago – and, in fact, it was probably a different car with different coins in a different cupholder. 

            On the radio, the call-in host said that the Federal Reserve Bank had undermined the currency.  “We must return to the gold standard,” the host said.  It didn’t seem too hard to understand and just about all the listeners who phoned the show agreed with him.  Those who disagreed seemed to Mr. Alexander to be mentally ill.

            Before he got out of his car that night, Mr. Alexander extracted all of the coins from the cupholders between the two front seats of his Honda.  He put the coins in the breast pocket of his shirt.  The coins were cold and heavy over his heart and their weight pulled the shirt down from his shoulders.  It was a nice to sense the inert tug of those coins against his chest.

            In the house, he put the coins in the bright dish of the colander and ran ice-cold water over the dimes and nickels and pennies and quarters.  The profiles of the presidents glittered in the clear cascade of tap water.  He found a roll of Bounty paper towels, wet several of them, and went outside to his car.  Crawling into the front seat, he scoured out the double wells of the cupholders.  The coins had left a film of something moist and organic at the bottom of the cupholder – it was like a growth of algae. 

            Back in his kitchen, Mr. Alexander lifted the bright aluminum sieve and shook it.  Droplots of water sprayed down into the sink.  The coins tinkled against one another musically, like ice in a mixed drink.  Mr. Alexander ran some hot water into the colander and squeezed a couple of drops of dishwashing soup onto the swamp of coins.  He stirred the money and, then, rinsed it again.  Inspecting the coins, he saw that they were mostly clean, now, and sparkling.  He took some iron wool and scraped at a couple of pennies that looked badly corroded.  The abrasive scoured away the greenish deposit bearding Lincoln’s cheek and brow.  The pennies cleaned up nicely – they looked bright as new and, looking carefully, he could see the faint and tiny image of the enthroned president in the Greek temple embossed on the coins. 

            To make the coins fragrant, Mr. Alexander doused them in a couple of table spoons of cider vinegar.  He looked in his refrigerator and found a lemon.  Slicing the lemon in half, he squeezed juice on the coins until they glistened with moisture.  – I will let the coins marinate for an hour or so, Mr. Alexander thought to himself.

            He went to the living room and sat in front of this TV.  Another baseball game was on.  His wife came and sat in a chair near his recliner. 

            She told him that their daughter had sent her several text messages.

            “Have you talked to her?” Mr. Alexander asked.

            “I’ve texted her,” she replied.

            “So you haven’t talked to her,” Mr. Alexander said.

            “I’ve texted her,” his wife repeated.

            “What are we going to do?” Mr. Alexander said.

            “I just don’t know,” his wife said.  “I just don’t know.”

            Mr. Alexander forgot about the coins in their bath of vinegar and lemon juice.  He was tired and went to bed without retrieving them from the sieve in the kitchen sink.

            The next morning, before going to work, Mr. Alexander remembered to retrieve his spare change.  He took a coffee cup from the kitchen cabinet and thought that he would carry the freshly washed coins out to his car in that cup.  He looked forward to the sensation of the clean, fragrant coins pouring through his fingers once more.

            Something had gone wrong.  The money in the sieve no longer looked like coins at all.  Everything had melted and oozed together into a solid, half-spherical gob of metal.  The misshapen clot of metal was the color of an old, dirty penny.  A few bright flecks of silver, shrunken and warped dimes, studded the edges of the brown lump.  Mr. Alexander reached down and lifted the tumor from the sieve.  It was wet and felt mushy.  Apparently, the acid in the lemon juice and the vinegar had dissolved the coins and fused them into this hideous hunk of copper and silver.

            “My money!” Mr. Alexander cried.  “My god, what has happened to my money!”