money bombs

I succoumbed to the prize banner. My email is diseased. Single digits in my inbox carried revelations; lovers, fortunes, epiphanies. Now there are thousands of messages, feasting on my email address, dividing it’s few characters into meaningless bits, not even whetting their appetites. There is no room for curiosity in a system composed entirely of curiousity. My movements on the internet, I realize now, have always been gridlike, statistic. My brother designs antivirus software for a living. In his free time he makes viruses. He made one that copies nasty sentences about one friend from your emails and sends them to all your friends. He does not believe in irony. Everything that can happen will happen, he says. I have thus far received no prizes from the banner. Now I cannot think of another reason to access the internet, so I stare at the screen, trying not to wonder if, maybe, just one of these people can actually make my penis bigger.
Friendly booms, an unannounced grand finale to a mid-day fireworks show, pound outside in rapid fire. As I do every time, I assume it is bombs, a nation I have never heard of seeking retribution on my comfortable life. Without locking the door, or grabbing my keys, or checking my hair, I step outside. The third world lurks in our subconscious, tattoed faces and incantions. There are dark red tufts in sky. I begin walking in the wrong direction, towards the housing projects. They look like college dorms, containing racial segregation rather than studying it, incubating presidents of discontent. This could be big, I think. I’m looking for damage, I’m looking for infractions in reality. I know that it was not fireworks. Other people are in the street, squinting and looking up. Something is littering down from the sky, a confetti. More people are joining us in the street. I learn over to pick up the confetti, because the confetti is twenty dollar bills.Other people start picking up the money. There is no scramble, no hoarding. We are exchanging happy glances of incredulousness, wondering who we can trick with this. I hold a bill up in the sun. It is perfect, the right color, the right thickness and give. Tiny lines and patterns of authority, glittery tiny numbers. A black man in a white car slowly pulls over to the side of the road, parking diagonally. There are gunshots recorded into his music, which he leaves on. I’ve never felt so comfortable here, so able to make eye contact. A little girl who was playing with a ball continues playing with the ball. There are so many bills landing around us, landing on awnings, in oily puddles, on the hoods of cars. A small skirmish finally breaks out: a kid is trying to buy a coke from a street vendor with the money, but the vendor won’t take it.
I try to think of the date, this is history now, bombs full of money. I can’t remember it, I can’t remember anything. I pull out my personal device, PD, in the language of acronyms that sits squarly on top of the old one. We haven’t gotten dumber, the world has gotten smarter. It is remembering us for us. It is packing our lunch and picking our outfits. It is a mother that wants to be our girfriend too. It is something that has outgrown death, a traffic that never stops, the curve of the earth as a flat surface, crashing into the sun. When I look at a math formula, I can feel my brain heating up. I sleep when I am tired. I eat when I am hungry. In the back of my mind, I feel like everybody else; that I have commited a great crime that I can’t remember. I consider writing these thoughts into the device, but instead I turn on the news.
“In a massive coordinated “action”, warheads have erupted over seven major U.S. cities. We have reports of three possible causalities, as one warhead in Las Vegas landed in an auto repair shop and ignited its paper payload. We are advising people not to pick up the counterfeit money that is falling to the streets. We repeat, the money may be contaminated. Do not attempt to put these bills into circulation… Radiation… biological agent… Nerve gas…fundamentalists…” There is a helicopter frozen in place hovering over us, more menacing than the bombs, more insistent. My pockets are already stuffed with bills. I am unlearning their value already, looking for fifties and hundreds instead. “It is recommended that eveyone stay in their homes in these areas and wait for further information. And don’t panic.”

It is the president speaking now, in front of a blue draping cloth and a silly symbol, at a podium. “I would like to commend Americans for their candor in this situation.” I am in my home. The phone lines are beginning to open back up, I’ve spoken with family, neglecting to mention the pile of bills I collected. “Our initial reports have indicated no contaminates of any kind, but we must strongly recommend that all cash transactions be suspended. We are asking merchants to accept personal checks for food and related neccessities, and electronic transactions may continue as normal. The ecomony is in our hands. We can prevail over this sinister act of deception.” The warning is unneccessary. No one is taking cash anywhere. Communities of immigrants are becoming desperate. Unrest may erupt at any point. The government is providing food and emergency services in force, determined to avoid violence. The news channel ends the president’s speech and goes to footage of armored trucks, purposefully lumbering around the city at night, drawing up gold from one basement and depositing it in another, a massive silent changing of hands. My office has been closed for the past three days, so I can pretend to do something at home instead of pretending at work.

My mother has swiftly purchased a lake house with deflated currency, skillfully riding the wake before equilibrium returns. She insisted that I come to it, until the threat of violence in the city passes. An early morning train to the airport, fresh scratchitti, with scrapings of window still hanging from it. It is the ghost of grafitti, a desperate spirit exposed while its brightly colored carcasses hang in galleries and coffee shops, mummified on canvas. The skyline from the plane is spiky and unclear. I can see massive tankers in the harbor, their frieght is emmigrants, an urgent reversal of human flow. The government was quick and merciful, providing an easy escape for those whose lives relied on the anonymity of cash. A toddler presses his hand against the plane window. The small news terminal in front of me reads: “cuddling instead of sex for New York singles, xbox killings, koko the gorillas needs a dentist, Dollar continues to deflate, surpassing the Euro, now at 2.67 to 1”
Rivers of classic rock flow through the valleys upstate, 30 years of closed circulation to assure us that the invisible undercurrents have remained the same. My sister has picked me up from the airport. She changes the radio to an R&B station. As soon as I arrive in this post sexual world, we head out on a motor boat, battering ourselves on yellow innertubes pulled behind. Flaming red hair and lanky bodies, fourteen year-old red-headed step-child bouncing on the waves, one hand behind him smacking the air like a cowboy. The air above the lake holds a barbeque smoke layer. “Only three percent of the economy was printed money,” my little sister informs me.
The red heads have been torn from their tubes and we are stopped temporarily. I dive off the edge of the boat and point straight down, expecting an unapproachable abyss, but finding the bottom too soon. My hand is sliced along a dozen little white lines, wafting blood, from grazing an infestation of zebra mussels. Fish have sex by leaking fluids straight into the water. This is why their death is less eventful. My goldfish gasped on its side for days, because it didn’t care to draw a clean line between alive and dead. When we get back to the house I undress in the bathroom, pulling my suit from my cold damp butt cheeks. It is a marvelous feeling.
I spend an afternoon at work with my stepfather. Laughing, I ask my stepfather about the term “inbreeding algorithms”on his computer screen at work. He is happy to tell me about the computing power necessary to breed the dogs at this kennel properly. Millions of relatives, trillions of calculations. He is happy to tell me that the human population had to bottleneck no further in the past than the thirteen hundreds.
“If you assume a generation every twenty years, two parents, four granpdparents, 8 great grandparents and so on, your ancestors would need to total more that the world population in the thirteen hundreds sometime. Inbreeding is a carefully regulated part of the process.” Geneticists are becoming interested in their dogs, he says, 30 generations in complete isolation, perfect airconditioned records of lineage for a million relatives. He finshes up work and we head back to the lake. When we arrive he sits down to watch some rodeo, and a news banner below it scrolls, “…negotiations have failed…” The rodeo clown is not laughing or smiling as he is chased by the bull. It is becoming obvious that America will never use paper money again. It became merely paper, silently, wadded beneath mattresses and crumpled in socks, neatly folded in leather wallets, a visible loss of aura. I change and walk down to the water, jumping in. I swim past forests of seaweed underwater, heading into the deep green. Who could have made the money bombs except the government? I can only make memories underwater. Motor boat engines whine from nowhere. I become linked to every pruny version of myself underwater, in the past and in future.