Adam Haslett - Union Atlantic

“They trust us that much?”

“For these purposes, yes.”

She passed on to another compartment and gazed at the wall of shining gold.

“The tours come to the outer gate here every day. I think last year we had twenty-five thousand visitors. People love to look at it. It reminds me of something Galbraith said: ‘The process by which banks create money is so simple the mind is repelled. A deeper mystery seems only decent.’ I suppose this is what’s left of the mystery. And yet this,” he said, indicating with a sweep of his hand the whole contents of the vault, “barely matters. Add it up and it’s no more than eighty or ninety billion worth. The wires clear more than that in an hour. All anchored to nothing but trust. Cooperation. You could even say faith, which sometimes I do, though it’s certainly of an earthly kind. Without it you couldn’t buy a loaf of bread.

“Of course as my sister never fails to remind me, the bigger ethical question is what people — what governments do with their money. Whether they buy medicine or food or arms. But there are conditions of possibility for doing any of these things. Whichever choices we make. The system has to work. People have to trust the paper in their wallets. And that starts somewhere. It starts with the banks.”

Her fingers curled around the bars of the cage she stood before.

“I guess you know why I’m here,” she said.

“Yes. I think I do.”

AT THE END of August, Evelyn had paid $390,000 for a shingle cottage on a tree-lined street out in Alden. The kitchen at the back was a bit dark in the mornings but it had a view of a dogwood and a rhododendron in the yard. Upstairs was a bathroom and two bedrooms with dormer windows that made the rooms feel smaller than their dimensions but comfortable nonetheless. She’d always pictured moving into such a place with a husband, but with Aunt Verna’s encouragement, she hadn’t allowed that image to stop her.

On the new commute home, she passed a video store and often stopped to pick up a DVD, a comedy or romance, which she’d watch with dinner.

Years before, in college, she’d taken a literature course and they had read a lot of James Baldwin, among others. Though she couldn’t remember what book it came from, one line in particular had always stuck with her. People pay for what they do, Baldwin had written, and more, for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it simply, with the lives they lead.

On the one hand, this sounded harsh, as if people were forever letting themselves go, as Aunt Verna would say, and being punished for it with their own misery. That was one way to hear it. But there was a democratic spirit to it as well, a sense that life consisted of the distance traveled, for good or ill. In which case, her guilt at having all that she did while her brother had got nothing lacked a purpose. Experience provided its own justice. From where it would come, no one could predict.

Two weeks ago at church, she’d stayed after for coffee. There, she’d seen a boy of nine or ten, thin with a high forehead, whom she had noticed back in June passing out programs at Carson’s funeral. She’d noted him at the time because she didn’t recognize him and she’d wondered who had placed him there at the door if not a member of the family. He appeared afraid when she approached him and said it wasn’t the minister who had invited him to help that day.

“I came on my own,” he said. “Did I do something wrong?”

She assured him that he hadn’t. She was just curious, she said. Had he known Carson?

“He used to let me hang out with him. When he had calls to make in the park. He’d ride my scooter sometimes. The thing is … see … the thing is, I seen him shot. I was across the street when they did it. There was two of them. And then quick-like, there was people calling the ambulance and all that. But I seen him lying up in there before they came, his face all shot up, and all these bills on the floor, I don’t know why they hadn’t taken the money or nothing, but there was all this cash, his I guess. But when I came back a couple minutes later it was gone, so I guess someone musta took it.”

Yanked from the dimensionless efficiency in which she’d dwelt since the day her brother died, Evelyn had seen vividly for the first time the image of her brother’s corpse, of his shot brain smeared on the tile.

The next day she didn’t go to work. In fact, she ended up staying out half the week, in that new house of hers, in which she suddenly felt herself to be a stranger.

Coming to see Henry Graves, she’d known that eventually he would ask her why. Why was she telling him what she knew?

He put the question to her once they had ridden the elevator back upstairs and returned to his office.

“I must tell you,” he said, “in all my years here I’ve never had someone come through the door to report their own institution. I confess I’m curious.”

Evelyn drew herself up to deliver her piece. But what came to mind were not the words she’d prepared but the look on her aunt Verna’s face when she’d told her about her latest promotion, how her eyebrows had risen, her eyes brimming, her whole face opening up as her shoulders let go, as if for all the world she’d been told, as in a dream, that she were free from a burden she’d never thought to imagine gone. It was a look Evelyn had seen before, at each stage of her accomplishments, and each time it nearly broke her. She could never tell Verna how routine her job was, how bureaucratic and spiritually thin. That would be cruel. But then so, in its way, was coming here to blow the whistle. Once the lawyers got involved, who knew what would count for the truth? She had pieces of evidence about what McTeague and Fanning had done but she wasn’t, after all, the person in charge. As best she could tell, the protections for a person in her position weren’t worth the paper they were written on. It wasn’t only her hopes she was jeopardizing by being here.

Henry Graves’s welcoming expression had been replaced by a more sober, businesslike concern.

“I can’t say for sure,” she said. “You’re probably wondering if it’s because I have some grudge against Fanning. I don’t care for him but that’s not why I’m here. Maybe I’m just tired of worrying.”

“My staff is going to need to debrief you,” he said. “If it’s okay with you, I’d like to do that right away.”

She nodded and he reached for a phone on the side table. As he talked with his deputy, Evelyn looked about the office again. It was smaller than many occupied by the senior executives at Atlantic Securities and without the views. Perhaps she was only imagining it, then, this sense of imperturbable calm and yet it seemed manifest to her sitting there encased in those heavy stone walls, the gilt-framed paintings looking down from the wall, as the grandfatherly white man in his jacket and tie took the situation in hand.

She wondered if this were the feeling that so many people out there in the country hungered for: a sense of continuity, gone or never present in so many lives.

Give me one thing that won’t change. Just one.

Daddy will take care of the money.

The dealers whose henchmen had shot Carson knew the need for this feeling as well as anyone, and they used it every day. But here in the undying realm of the central bank no violence was required. Here the aristocrats of bureaucracy guarded money’s permanent interests. Part of her wanted never to leave this room with its promise of the cessation of all struggle. And yet to recognize this longing was to see herself as a traitor. To what, she wasn’t entirely sure. Life perhaps. Or the belief in it.

“We’re all set,” Henry said, putting down the phone. “Are you ready?”