It must have happened in the airport. I was in a rush. Took the cash from an ATM. I put the bills in my pocket and didn’t think about them. It was only later when I went to change them in Berlin that I noticed I’d been bleeding from a small cut. How did it happen? It wasn’t a big cut. Maybe it was something with a buckle or a lock on my bags. Maybe it was a hangnail that got torn off in the rush of leaving the terminal. Maybe it was just a paper cut. Maybe the bill itself cut me when I pulled it out of my pocket. Whatever it was, the change guy at the airport noticed. I tried to give him the hundred dollar bill. He looked at it and shook his head.
‘Nein.’
It was clear from my face that I didn’t understand.
‘Schmutzig,’ he said. ‘Schmutzig mit Blut. Blood. It’s got blood on it. It’s not clean.’
I really didn’t want to argue. I handed him the other five twenties I had.
He looked at them. Then he looked at me and he took them. He gave me about 50 euros.
Back at the hotel I decided I should try to clean the note just in case someone else might change it. That was when I noticed all the rest of the stuff. The writing. The sigils. The cry-laughing emoji drawn next to the phrase ‘In God We Trust’. The pentagram drawn around the dome of the image of Independence Hall in Philadelphia. Maybe a crazy person had it before me. So what? There are lots of crazy people in America. And people, whether they’re crazy or not, write on money all the time. Maybe it’s illegal, but all kinds of things are illegal that shouldn’t be. I washed the bill some more. I got most of the blood off, and some of the writing. I thought that would be enough for a Wechelstube. I showered, got the bill and my wallet and went for dinner. That was when the trouble - if you want to call it trouble - started.
Maybe it was good news. I know lots of people who would have regarded it as such. Maybe they’d have known better what to do than me, but over time, I still think it would have won. It was obvious what happened. I tried to pay the restaurant with a card. They wouldn’t take it because, apparently you can’t pay with a debit card in Berlin. You learn something new every day. I paid with the 50 euro note I got from the Wechelstube guy. I got my change. I left. I got on the train. I went to another Wechelstube in Alexanderplatz near the hotel. I pulled out the 100 dollar bill and there was another 50 euro note right beside it in my wallet. I’d only had one. I knew that for sure. I knew something strange had happened. I briefly considered that it was a mistake, that I’d gotten the wrong change, but the change from dinner was there still. The exact amount. I knew. I’d picked it up from a little plastic tray on the table with an American Express logo printed on it. The fifty euro note was new. Brand new.
I stood outside the Wechelstube. I looked at the 100 dollar bill. I went to the McDonalds in the station next to the Wechelstube. I bought a shamrock shake with a 20 euro note. I got a receipt. I looked at the change. I put it in a pocket in my blazer. I drank two drinks before I gave up on it. I threw it in the garbage. I guess I could have given it to somebody. But who would want it? Well, you never know. We were all in McDonalds after all.
I walked out into the station again. Outside the Wechelstube I checked in my wallet. There was a 20 euro note next to the fifty euro note. It was all still there. Growing. I was very happy. I decided it was good news.
I started to wonder how it was going to work. I didn’t quit my job at first. I kept the dollar and the spend-to-appearance ratio continued. When my first paycheck after the incident came through it was clear. The bill didn’t respond to money that I made, just money that I spent. Buying became a full-time job. I was still in Berlin, so they took cash everywhere. I piled up stacks and stacks that I kept in the hotel safe. I gambled in the late night casinos around where the wall used to run. No light. No time. Just money and boredom, and for most people, chance. The gambling was really interesting as the bill seemed to regard gambling as spending rather than earning: wins and losses paid. By the end of the month I had enough to put a downpayment on a flat in Berlin. I paid in cash. That spend gave me enough for a downpayment on one in London. Then one in New York. I took lodgers, but even the bill didn’t seem to respect money from being a landlord. That was fine with me. I was changing anyway then.
Looking back, I can’t say I was having any kind of moral qualms about the whole thing. It was more that I began to know that sooner or later it wouldn’t be so easy. That something would happen that would start to make it hard. Or maybe I was thinking too much. For example, I started thinking about how the bill ended up like it did. I knew it couldn’t be anything good that would have caused it but if it was something bad, like how bad was it?
I kept travelling and buying flats to avoid thinking about the backstory. But it wasn’t working, in fact it was getting worse. I spent hours, days even, trying to figure out what the deal was with the dollar. I invented all kinds of crazy theories, but then one day it hit me and I figured out the whole thing: I remembered that a couple of years ago there was something going on where congress was trying to stop the president from doing something, and they were talking on the news about how they might have to mint some special coin that would solve the crisis, like it would be worth a trillion dollars and they could pay off all the debts or all the people they needed to pay or whatever the deal was.
I remember the president saying that no way, no possibility, no chance ever would they ever mint that coin, which being that it was the government talking I knew would be both true and false at the same time.
So that was it, this dollar, it was somehow part of that project, like maybe they printed a lot of these notes to pay off that debt, or they made it so that no one could steal or destroy the money on the way to paying whoever it was they were going to pay with it to solve the made up crisis. Then they probably went to destroy the magic money, but maybe somebody kept one, or they lost one, or somebody stole one and it got free and that was what was going on.
It was about the time that I figured out the backstory that the, I guess you’d call them the visitations, started.
I was in a hotel in Malta one day, after I’d bought some beachfront property there with the money that the dollar had produced when I bought a flat in Athens. I was just watching Maltese TV, and I took out the note and fondled it for a bit, which I’d started doing, and which I didn’t like that I did, but which I also never stopped doing. I was kind of rubbing on my face and feeling my skin oils kind of seep into when I looked into the eyes of the picture of Benjamin Franklin on the front, and I wanted to stop looking but I kept lingering. I’d become interested, maybe fascinated in how they’d made a magic bill. Was it natural? Some element or law of physics normal people weren’t allowed to understand? Or was it something darker? Occult? Supernatural, even? I didn’t like the thought of that, but it was the one that I kept coming back to, because in a way it made the most sense. Especially in that the money seemed to have…I guess the word is ‘intentions’. The explanation I kept coming back to was that maybe they’d trapped someone inside the note, like the soul of some dead economist or something. Could you do that sort of thing? That day when I was looking at the bill as I was rubbing it over me, I thought, for a second, just a fraction of a second there was a little flash, like NO it CAN’T BE, but it felt like the eyes of Ben Franklin were looking back at me. I threw the bill across the room, but then I picked it back up and kissed it and apologised to it and I kind of drove that thought out of my mind, but inevitably it came back.
I was at the movies the next time the thought came, and it could be that I fell asleep or that I had a hallucination. I was doing everything I could then to drive thoughts about the economist in the dollar out of my mind, but now it would always enter my thoughts if I gave it the chance. I was probably asleep, but maybe I wasn’t, or maybe I was hallucinating, or I was in two different realities at once. You can never be sure about these kinds of things. The point is that at the movies that day, in the darkness of the cinema, as I rested my head on the plush seat at the Alamo Draft House - which I’d just bought - waiting for the film to start, I saw him, Ben Franklin himself, but it wasn’t really himself because the Ben Franklin I saw, huge and papery on the screen, was the Ben Franklin who’s on the dollar. He was there, all green and haunted looking and he was saying, in a very high pitched but very thin, quiet and reedy voice, very old: ‘Give it away! Give it away before it’s too late.’
And I had to take this as good news because it meant that it wasn’t already too late.
The situation was so strange, I started asking him questions that I realise weren’t totally germane to the situation: ‘So it’s really you in the dollar? Your soul or something?’
‘In a way. You have to understand it was a decision that was made back then, at the founding. It was James Madison’s idea. Poor fool,’ he tutted his tongue, it sounded like scraping on bark. ‘We performed a certain rite over a burial ground in Philadelphia. Somehow he knew a very haunted place where the veil between worlds was almost impossibly thin. Especially at time, in history, and in the season. It allowed us, and those of us connected to the secret, to live inside the money issued by the country we’d created. We could stay alive, at least as long as what we created did. We were grateful, then.’
And I don’t know why but the first thing I said was, ‘Is that true for coins too, or is that just bills?’ ‘It’s just bills. We agreed to put the people on coins so that they would remain dead.’
I couldn’t leave it alone. ‘Wait, but what about Lincoln? He’s on both isn’t he?’
‘How to explain? There’s…a witching…’ he said. He brought his face closer to mine then he seemed to think of something else, he turned his face to the side and then he vanished and the film started. It was a good film. Isabelle Huppert was in it.
As the days went forward, despite that incident, I didn’t give the bill away. I tried to convince myself that the Ben Franklin thing was some kind of mistake. Hallucination, drinking - I was drinking a lot in those days, especially after I bought Diageo. But it was all so real, so material that I couldn’t deny it. The way light fell on his body when he appeared in the theatre. I would have dreams about him later, dreams that I hoped were dreams. He’d come back to me and sometimes I’d look at him and wonder if he was actually Ben Franklin, or if he was pretending to be him to reassure me somehow to try to help me. Maybe the whole story was a lie. Maybe the story of the dollar was much, much worse. Sometimes when he’d come I’d look into his eyes and think he might be a woman. Or something else altogether. Maybe a demon. But maybe that’s just what you look like after you’ve been undead a long time and you stick to the dress sense of when you were alive. Maybe gender presentation matters less after you die. Maybe.
The visitations were daily now. And it wasn’t just Ben Franklin but all the presidents who were on bills. And Hamilton. He was there too. They would entertain themselves at my expense, reading poetry from the time they were alive. Maybe that they’d written. They’d give me long lectures on government as I sat in warehouse restaurants in London, or in whisky bars in Tokyo. On planes they’d perform for me. They were inspired by all the interest Hamilton had gotten in recent years and they all had musicals about themselves ready to go. Frankly ‘Bout the Benjamins was the worst. I still can’t get the songs out of my head. ‘Electric’: ‘I need a courtesan, stay out of my court if you can’t stand with me…’ And ‘Paris, 1799’: ‘I’m on it, doggone it. Sprinklin’ little Benjamins throughout the continent…’
It was torture so I thought I was being punished. I ignored them now during the visitations. One night, I was very drunk and I found myself in a toilet chamber on a beach in Santorini. Ben Franklin came to me, climbed up on my knees as I sat, the world spinning different directions at once. So many fumes, so many realities. He held my head in his arms and whispered ‘It doesn’t have to be a curse…’
When the paramedics revived me, I decided to try to reform. Not just my life, but also the way I understood the dollar. Maybe it was possible to do good, actual good with the money. But that was when the trouble really started.
I started walking around London in the evenings, just handing out pounds to people on the street. The money would always be back in the wallet. I was encouraged by that choice, like maybe the money was supporting the idea of doing good in the world, like maybe the reason I still had it was I hadn’t given enough of it away? You could see how that could be true.
After a few months of this, I noticed that the population of the London homeless didn’t seem to be declining. Which I thought was strange but then it occurred to me that it was because rents would just go up and up in response to the money I was handing out. Landlords would price it in. Then I decided a structural solution would be better for everyone. More sustainable. Able to actually change the system rather than just one person’s situation. Teach a man to fish and all that.
I started funding an NGO. I’d decided that I wanted to wipe out world hunger, but when I approached the WHO to donate, they said a bunch of stuff about how they couldn’t accept direct donations and how I would have to sign a lot of forms that proved I wasn’t laundering money. I didn’t feel like I could prove that, so I decided that the private sector was the better choice.
I partnered with a guy I met a long time ago in London. He was waiting in the airport with me as I was heading to New York and he was heading to Lagos. He was watching some game called ‘cricket’ on television. He tried to explain the rules to me but it made less sense the more he explained it. Eventually he gave up and told me about this project he was involved in, an educational project in Africa. I hadn’t heard about the country’s situation and the idea stuck with me, but I never felt serious about doing anything useful with the money until recently. I asked him what he was doing and he told me he had to give up on the educational project. Apparently the region was too unstable. Now he’d set up a company to market sustainable protein sources for developing countries with high risks of hunger. I was excited. It was almost like everything was falling into place just as I’d hoped. I told him I’d fund the project for a year.
He invited me to the country where we were doing the pilot, a small island in the Red Sea where the government had created a ‘special economic zone’ to try experimental policies to stimulate the economy. Graham was the guy’s name. I probably should have said earlier. So Graham had set up his offices on this island, maybe I shouldn’t use the exact name in case it could get anyone in trouble. I came to visit. I took a little motor boat from a big container port nearby. It was about an hour on the water. Container ships coming and going, we were like dust in the tail of a comet floating along, trying to avoid the massive waves they made. I felt terrified and lucky and maybe even good? I was going to help Graham, and he was going to help millions of people.
We met in the little office he’d set up which was basically just a computer and a printer and a lot of boxes stuffed into a construction made out of a disused container, but it had nice furniture and some plants in it, ferns I guess? It was kind of homey. Graham was happy to see me. He shook my hand and offered me the Aeron chair behind his office desk. He leaned against the boxes of his stock and told me the story. All the crazy stuff with his previous project. The suspicion he faced. He told me our conversation had been an inspiration though. He tapped his hand on the boxes and opened one. He threw me an energy bar in a bright green wrapper. Crick’s was the name of the company. It was printed in a clean black font on the front.
‘Try one,’ he said.
I unwrapped the bar and took a bite. It was the worst thing I’d ever eaten in my life. It was scratchy in texture and had some strange, unresolvable flavour.
‘How is it?’ He asked.
‘Ok, kind of like nutty maybe?’
He smiled and nodded very happily, ‘That’s good. Usually we get chicken.’
‘What’s in it?’
‘Oh lots of stuff, all very sustainable. Natural ingredients.’
‘What’s the main ingredient?’
‘Crickets.’
‘Crickets?’
‘And dates and buckwheat.’
‘Do you have any without crickets?’
‘We’re working on that. We’re working on a bar with locusts, which I think would be kind of an ironic triumph: locusts that solve famines!’
This was clearly some kind of joke but I had no idea what he was talking about. He kept talking.
‘And we’re thinking of calling those bars “not cricket” but that’s all speculative at the moment.’
The next day I pulled funding from the project. I think it was because I felt there was something colonial about the project, or maybe it was because I never saw Graham eat any of the cricket bars himself. Or maybe that amounted to the same thing? I stayed in Africa for a while after I left him on the island. That was kind of my downfall. Or the latest of them.
In Africa, Ben Franklin appeared to me more and more and he was singing more often now. I’d be sleeping in a hotel and he’d come in at night. He’d usually sit in a chair near where I was sitting but once in a while he’d squat on my chest. At first he’d take off his shoes which I think he thought was being polite, but actually that kind of made things worse. He’d try out all kinds of stupid Ben Franklin sayings as songs, stuff like ‘Early to bed early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.’ Sometimes I’d argue and I’d say if that were true, why was it he always came to me in the night? And, also, I was getting very wealthy no matter what, right? But he came anyway, and he’d want to debate me about things. Whether markets could become moral agents, whether there was greater value in monetary or fiscal policy to do the greater good, whether or not there was an interventionist God.
I started to stay out all night to avoid going back to the hotel where he’d be almost every night. I’d given up on doing good with the dollar. In fact, I tried to give it away even though I knew it wouldn’t work. I was in a country that had serious issues with hard currency. I gave it to a shop keeper but he looked at all the scrawls and symbols on it and gave it right back to me.
‘No sir, mister. I don’t want your haunted dollar. I know how you work. Give me another one.’
I know I blushed when he said it. He’d caught me. Maybe someone had even told him.
I tried it elsewhere. Not everyone was as concerned about haunted money as that first shop keeper. But it came back to me, over and over. I burned it. It came back. I shredded it in a shredder I had sent from the Bank of England. I shredded and burnt it. It came back every time. It was a physical object, but it wasn’t just a physical object. It had something in it, something that couldn’t be destroyed. Something that could only destroy. I knew it would always be with me somehow, in my blood, or my blood was in it? It was impossible to tell where I ended and it began now.
It was at this point that the real trouble started. It’s wrong to say I’d gotten sloppy. I wasn’t even trying to be secretive in any way, and so inevitably the people who created the money found me. Maybe it was the CIA, or some other organisation that no one knows about, but one day they kidnapped me. I woke up in a hotel in a different country than the one I remembered being in. I looked in my wallet. Everything was as it should be. Same ID. Same cards. Same haunted money. I tried to piece it together, if I’d been kidnapped and dropped in another country it had to be something to do with state forces. Why didn’t they just take the money when they found me? Maybe they didn’t want the responsibility for it. They needed me to have it so they could do what they wanted to do with it. I was the money. The money was me. One wouldn’t work without the other.
Every day I told myself I’d escape. I’d get fake ID papers. I’d buy guns, there were guns everywhere. I’d go to the airport, make them turn off the transponder. Take me to some mountainous forbidden zone…
But they’d always find me, as long as I had the dollar - and I always would - they had me. And so I continued speculating, looking for reasons where there could be none. Was it some kind of inflation game? They’d know what country they were dropping me in, that I’d spend whatever it took to get out, at least at first, and they could use that geopolitically? Micro-inflations one some internal market? Insider trading? Some kind of dark pool? No, it couldn’t be that. I never spend enough. Even when I was trying. Even when I was in the mad haze just trying to spend it away, even though I knew it could never work. Spending myself to death. There was the time lag too. Like if they knew I was somewhere it was no good to them on the market because someone would get wind of their trades and call them on it and ruin everything. It had to be done in the dark, whatever it was.
It’s like this now: I wake up in a hotel somewhere. I know better than to try to escape now. I know better than to try to kill myself. They’ve got that angle covered. I tried once on an island in Indonesia. I stuffed my pockets with rocks and took painkillers and drank illegal vodka and walked into the sea. I don’t know what happened but I had a vision that involved Ben Franklin resuscitating me, dragging me up through the dark waters. His wiry, aged body throwing me effortlessly onto the shore, breathing into my mouth, breathing the same air. Did I wake up with him stroking my head that night in the back of a Hercules transport plane as a bunch of troops dressed in black sat watching with rifles pointed at the floor? I don’t know. I don’t want to know. I gave up then. They would do what they wanted with me, and with the world through me.
Now I just do my thing. I walk around, I spend money. I see hungry people. I give them money. I create markets. And that turned out to be what it was, or at least as far as I can understand it. I’m here to create markets, markets for dollars. I have an infinite supply, so I spend it into the system. The people who they want to have the dollars I spend are the ones they tell. They track down whoever I spend it with. They shake them down. They probably steal it. Maybe they set up a local economy around me: I need this, I need that… They find someone to sell it to me, buy the dollars off them in local currency. Then they use the dollars to buy what They want them to buy. I’m just the first node in a system. Foucault’s pendulum, I learned about those when I was decorating a house I bought in the Hamptons. I’m the disturbance that gets conducted through the system to the other end. I only know when the wave moves back to me, pushes me out to somewhere else. Somewhere else I’m supposed to be. Endlessly until they tire of me, or maybe kill me.
It’s been like that for a few years, but then one night Ben Franklin came to me again. I hadn’t actually seen him for a while. I wondered where he’d been. I thought maybe even he’d given up on me. But this time, I was asleep in a hotel in Venezuela and when I woke up to find him, like always, sitting on my chest. I was almost happy to see him. He was the only person - if he was still a person in any sense of the word - who understood me. Maybe he saw that and he took pity on me. Saw that I was experiencing some small aspect of the torture of living like he lived, eternal, infinite, and afraid.
He leaned in to my ear, his lanky, thin hair rough like rope against my neck:
‘It’s hurting you. I see that. We see that. We wish no malice for you, though perhaps you feel differently towards us. Perhaps you have a right. We can free you, but we cannot free everyone. It is a price that must be paid.’
This line stuck with me, like the universe itself was some kind of market, or had been turned into it by whatever allowed Ben Franklin to be there that night, whispering to me.
‘Blood must be spilled. Directly. Over my mouth. Spill the blood. Then you’ll be free.’
He looked into my eyes. I saw the same red from the image on the bill. I wasn’t sure if I saw hate, or pity, or love in his eyes. I looked back. I closed my eyes. Both of us knew what I would do.
I woke up the next day and went down to the breakfast buffet. I looked around at the wedges of fruit, the plastic pots for tea and milk. If I gave it away all this would be gone. I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing, or a bad thing. I’d be alone again, back in the world, but I’d know the difference between what I saw and what they talked about on TV and online and wherever and the world that really was. The world with the trapped presidents and the treasury that knew about all of it. Spill the blood and you’ll be free. You’ll be free. You. You can only free yourself.
I sat in the breakfast buffet even after the buffet closed. They took away all the fruit and the eggs and the coffee, and the plates. They left the hot water machine and some tea bags. I looked at the hot water machine. What if I just stood under it? What if I scalded myself to death here and now? Would that end it? It wouldn’t end it. The dollar would still be there. It would just go to someone else anyway when I died. I thought about dying, about what would happen to the money then. They’d have plans for that. Maybe they’d even have a plan for me to join them in the notes.
First I vomited. Then I booked a plane ticket to Miami. It didn’t require any fake IDs. Or any planning. Or any guns. I just went to the airport and got on the plane, and that was it. What was different now? Maybe nothing.
There she was. Young. Entitled. Annoying. Sitting on one of the stools shagged in driftwood at the bar on the beach. It was called Jiménez. She’d probably call it something like a ‘cabana bar’. Unsophisticated, but worldly. Maybe that was me once. Cynical. Maybe I was the opposite now, and this is what you’re like after you’ve lived to have been all those things.
I bought her a drink. I noticed her gaze fall over my shirt. It was reassuringly expensive to her. I don’t know if I was smiling when I asked her to come out on the boat. I have no idea if she thought it was something sexual.
She did. But I didn’t let myself know that that was what I was suggesting. I let her drink her drink. Her very expensive drink. It was like she could instinctively tell which cocktail was the most expensive on the menu. It was morning. Substantially before noon.
It wasn’t so much that I wanted to give her the dollar to punish her. I wanted her to have it because she was the kind of person who it wouldn’t do the kind of harm it would do to other people. Maybe that damage had already been done to her somewhere along the line. Maybe I’d been involved in some butterfly wing kind of way: a shuttered plant somewhere in Middle America. A buyout of an envelope firm. Redundancies. Despair. Deaths of despair.
She took it. I cut her. Blood spilled. Not much. Not enough to seem dangerous. She was annoyed. Maybe not even that. Maybe it was the exact scene she wanted to play out. Healthy blood spilling out over haunted money. Blood spilled. I was free.
I took her back to the shore. We were both silent. Only the sound of the outboard motor on the boat I’d bought the previous night. Birds swooped overhead as we got nearer the shore. Shadows briefly casting our faces in mutual, then discrete darknesses. I thought I should say something when we got to the mooring. I couldn’t look her in the eye. There were little commas of blood on her calf. She had the dollar in the bra of her swimsuit. It was almost like she was afraid I’d want it back. I swallowed the laugh this thought gave me.
She seemed suspicious of me still, but not how I would have expected. She had a ‘where’s the catch’ expression on her face when I looked up to nod good bye to her. I just said ‘This could go badly for you. I’m sorry.’ I wish I’d been more definitive, said that it WOULD go bad for her, but I wasn’t sure it would be her that it would go bad for. Maybe it never does. Maybe it hadn’t gone bad for me, or maybe I was different from the me who had taken the note in the first place. If I even took it. Maybe it took me. But that was all in the past now. The dollar was gone. Blood had spilled. I was free. I looked into my wallet. I paid for drinks for everyone in a bar down the beach near where my hotel was. I watched the sun melt into the sea, the pinkness drain from the clouds, and spill into the sea. My wallet is smaller than it had been in years. It was over. I was free. Maybe I always had been.
It must have happened in the airport. I was in a rush. Took the cash from an ATM. I put the bills in my pocket and didn’t think about them. It was only later when I went to change them in Berlin that I noticed I’d been bleeding from a small cut. How did it happen? It wasn’t a big cut. Maybe it was something with a buckle or a lock on my bags. Maybe it was a hangnail that got torn off in the rush of leaving the terminal. Maybe it was just a paper cut. Maybe the bill itself cut me when I pulled it out of my pocket. Whatever it was, the change guy at the airport noticed. I tried to give him the hundred dollar bill. He looked at it and shook his head.
‘Nein.’
It was clear from my face that I didn’t understand.
‘Schmutzig,’ he said. ‘Schmutzig mit Blut. Blood. It’s got blood on it. It’s not clean.’
I really didn’t want to argue. I handed him the other five twenties I had.
He looked at them. Then he looked at me and he took them. He gave me about 50 euros.
Back at the hotel I decided I should try to clean the note just in case someone else might change it. That was when I noticed all the rest of the stuff. The writing. The sigils. The cry-laughing emoji drawn next to the phrase ‘In God We Trust’. The pentagram drawn around the dome of the image of Independence Hall in Philadelphia. Maybe a crazy person had it before me. So what? There are lots of crazy people in America. And people, whether they’re crazy or not, write on money all the time. Maybe it’s illegal, but all kinds of things are illegal that shouldn’t be. I washed the bill some more. I got most of the blood off, and some of the writing. I thought that would be enough for a Wechelstube. I showered, got the bill and my wallet and went for dinner. That was when the trouble - if you want to call it trouble - started.
Maybe it was good news. I know lots of people who would have regarded it as such. Maybe they’d have known better what to do than me, but over time, I still think it would have won. It was obvious what happened. I tried to pay the restaurant with a card. They wouldn’t take it because, apparently you can’t pay with a debit card in Berlin. You learn something new every day. I paid with the 50 euro note I got from the Wechelstube guy. I got my change. I left. I got on the train. I went to another Wechelstube in Alexanderplatz near the hotel. I pulled out the 100 dollar bill and there was another 50 euro note right beside it in my wallet. I’d only had one. I knew that for sure. I knew something strange had happened. I briefly considered that it was a mistake, that I’d gotten the wrong change, but the change from dinner was there still. The exact amount. I knew. I’d picked it up from a little plastic tray on the table with an American Express logo printed on it. The fifty euro note was new. Brand new.
I stood outside the Wechelstube. I looked at the 100 dollar bill. I went to the McDonalds in the station next to the Wechelstube. I bought a shamrock shake with a 20 euro note. I got a receipt. I looked at the change. I put it in a pocket in my blazer. I drank two drinks before I gave up on it. I threw it in the garbage. I guess I could have given it to somebody. But who would want it? Well, you never know. We were all in McDonalds after all.
I walked out into the station again. Outside the Wechelstube I checked in my wallet. There was a 20 euro note next to the fifty euro note. It was all still there. Growing. I was very happy. I decided it was good news.
I started to wonder how it was going to work. I didn’t quit my job at first. I kept the dollar and the spend-to-appearance ratio continued. When my first paycheck after the incident came through it was clear. The bill didn’t respond to money that I made, just money that I spent. Buying became a full-time job. I was still in Berlin, so they took cash everywhere. I piled up stacks and stacks that I kept in the hotel safe. I gambled in the late night casinos around where the wall used to run. No light. No time. Just money and boredom, and for most people, chance. The gambling was really interesting as the bill seemed to regard gambling as spending rather than earning: wins and losses paid. By the end of the month I had enough to put a downpayment on a flat in Berlin. I paid in cash. That spend gave me enough for a downpayment on one in London. Then one in New York. I took lodgers, but even the bill didn’t seem to respect money from being a landlord. That was fine with me. I was changing anyway then.
Looking back, I can’t say I was having any kind of moral qualms about the whole thing. It was more that I began to know that sooner or later it wouldn’t be so easy. That something would happen that would start to make it hard. Or maybe I was thinking too much. For example, I started thinking about how the bill ended up like it did. I knew it couldn’t be anything good that would have caused it but if it was something bad, like how bad was it?
I kept travelling and buying flats to avoid thinking about the backstory. But it wasn’t working, in fact it was getting worse. I spent hours, days even, trying to figure out what the deal was with the dollar. I invented all kinds of crazy theories, but then one day it hit me and I figured out the whole thing: I remembered that a couple of years ago there was something going on where congress was trying to stop the president from doing something, and they were talking on the news about how they might have to mint some special coin that would solve the crisis, like it would be worth a trillion dollars and they could pay off all the debts or all the people they needed to pay or whatever the deal was.
I remember the president saying that no way, no possibility, no chance ever would they ever mint that coin, which being that it was the government talking I knew would be both true and false at the same time.
So that was it, this dollar, it was somehow part of that project, like maybe they printed a lot of these notes to pay off that debt, or they made it so that no one could steal or destroy the money on the way to paying whoever it was they were going to pay with it to solve the made up crisis. Then they probably went to destroy the magic money, but maybe somebody kept one, or they lost one, or somebody stole one and it got free and that was what was going on.
It was about the time that I figured out the backstory that the, I guess you’d call them the visitations, started.
I was in a hotel in Malta one day, after I’d bought some beachfront property there with the money that the dollar had produced when I bought a flat in Athens. I was just watching Maltese TV, and I took out the note and fondled it for a bit, which I’d started doing, and which I didn’t like that I did, but which I also never stopped doing. I was kind of rubbing on my face and feeling my skin oils kind of seep into when I looked into the eyes of the picture of Benjamin Franklin on the front, and I wanted to stop looking but I kept lingering. I’d become interested, maybe fascinated in how they’d made a magic bill. Was it natural? Some element or law of physics normal people weren’t allowed to understand? Or was it something darker? Occult? Supernatural, even? I didn’t like the thought of that, but it was the one that I kept coming back to, because in a way it made the most sense. Especially in that the money seemed to have…I guess the word is ‘intentions’. The explanation I kept coming back to was that maybe they’d trapped someone inside the note, like the soul of some dead economist or something. Could you do that sort of thing? That day when I was looking at the bill as I was rubbing it over me, I thought, for a second, just a fraction of a second there was a little flash, like NO it CAN’T BE, but it felt like the eyes of Ben Franklin were looking back at me. I threw the bill across the room, but then I picked it back up and kissed it and apologised to it and I kind of drove that thought out of my mind, but inevitably it came back.
I was at the movies the next time the thought came, and it could be that I fell asleep or that I had a hallucination. I was doing everything I could then to drive thoughts about the economist in the dollar out of my mind, but now it would always enter my thoughts if I gave it the chance. I was probably asleep, but maybe I wasn’t, or maybe I was hallucinating, or I was in two different realities at once. You can never be sure about these kinds of things. The point is that at the movies that day, in the darkness of the cinema, as I rested my head on the plush seat at the Alamo Draft House - which I’d just bought - waiting for the film to start, I saw him, Ben Franklin himself, but it wasn’t really himself because the Ben Franklin I saw, huge and papery on the screen, was the Ben Franklin who’s on the dollar. He was there, all green and haunted looking and he was saying, in a very high pitched but very thin, quiet and reedy voice, very old: ‘Give it away! Give it away before it’s too late.’
And I had to take this as good news because it meant that it wasn’t already too late.
The situation was so strange, I started asking him questions that I realise weren’t totally germane to the situation: ‘So it’s really you in the dollar? Your soul or something?’
‘In a way. You have to understand it was a decision that was made back then, at the founding. It was James Madison’s idea. Poor fool,’ he tutted his tongue, it sounded like scraping on bark. ‘We performed a certain rite over a burial ground in Philadelphia. Somehow he knew a very haunted place where the veil between worlds was almost impossibly thin. Especially at time, in history, and in the season. It allowed us, and those of us connected to the secret, to live inside the money issued by the country we’d created. We could stay alive, at least as long as what we created did. We were grateful, then.’
And I don’t know why but the first thing I said was, ‘Is that true for coins too, or is that just bills?’ ‘It’s just bills. We agreed to put the people on coins so that they would remain dead.’
I couldn’t leave it alone. ‘Wait, but what about Lincoln? He’s on both isn’t he?’
‘How to explain? There’s…a witching…’ he said. He brought his face closer to mine then he seemed to think of something else, he turned his face to the side and then he vanished and the film started. It was a good film. Isabelle Huppert was in it.
As the days went forward, despite that incident, I didn’t give the bill away. I tried to convince myself that the Ben Franklin thing was some kind of mistake. Hallucination, drinking - I was drinking a lot in those days, especially after I bought Diageo. But it was all so real, so material that I couldn’t deny it. The way light fell on his body when he appeared in the theatre. I would have dreams about him later, dreams that I hoped were dreams. He’d come back to me and sometimes I’d look at him and wonder if he was actually Ben Franklin, or if he was pretending to be him to reassure me somehow to try to help me. Maybe the whole story was a lie. Maybe the story of the dollar was much, much worse. Sometimes when he’d come I’d look into his eyes and think he might be a woman. Or something else altogether. Maybe a demon. But maybe that’s just what you look like after you’ve been undead a long time and you stick to the dress sense of when you were alive. Maybe gender presentation matters less after you die. Maybe.
The visitations were daily now. And it wasn’t just Ben Franklin but all the presidents who were on bills. And Hamilton. He was there too. They would entertain themselves at my expense, reading poetry from the time they were alive. Maybe that they’d written. They’d give me long lectures on government as I sat in warehouse restaurants in London, or in whisky bars in Tokyo. On planes they’d perform for me. They were inspired by all the interest Hamilton had gotten in recent years and they all had musicals about themselves ready to go. Frankly ‘Bout the Benjamins was the worst. I still can’t get the songs out of my head. ‘Electric’: ‘I need a courtesan, stay out of my court if you can’t stand with me…’ And ‘Paris, 1799’: ‘I’m on it, doggone it. Sprinklin’ little Benjamins throughout the continent…’
It was torture so I thought I was being punished. I ignored them now during the visitations. One night, I was very drunk and I found myself in a toilet chamber on a beach in Santorini. Ben Franklin came to me, climbed up on my knees as I sat, the world spinning different directions at once. So many fumes, so many realities. He held my head in his arms and whispered ‘It doesn’t have to be a curse…’
When the paramedics revived me, I decided to try to reform. Not just my life, but also the way I understood the dollar. Maybe it was possible to do good, actual good with the money. But that was when the trouble really started.
I started walking around London in the evenings, just handing out pounds to people on the street. The money would always be back in the wallet. I was encouraged by that choice, like maybe the money was supporting the idea of doing good in the world, like maybe the reason I still had it was I hadn’t given enough of it away? You could see how that could be true.
After a few months of this, I noticed that the population of the London homeless didn’t seem to be declining. Which I thought was strange but then it occurred to me that it was because rents would just go up and up in response to the money I was handing out. Landlords would price it in. Then I decided a structural solution would be better for everyone. More sustainable. Able to actually change the system rather than just one person’s situation. Teach a man to fish and all that.
I started funding an NGO. I’d decided that I wanted to wipe out world hunger, but when I approached the WHO to donate, they said a bunch of stuff about how they couldn’t accept direct donations and how I would have to sign a lot of forms that proved I wasn’t laundering money. I didn’t feel like I could prove that, so I decided that the private sector was the better choice.
I partnered with a guy I met a long time ago in London. He was waiting in the airport with me as I was heading to New York and he was heading to Lagos. He was watching some game called ‘cricket’ on television. He tried to explain the rules to me but it made less sense the more he explained it. Eventually he gave up and told me about this project he was involved in, an educational project in Africa. I hadn’t heard about the country’s situation and the idea stuck with me, but I never felt serious about doing anything useful with the money until recently. I asked him what he was doing and he told me he had to give up on the educational project. Apparently the region was too unstable. Now he’d set up a company to market sustainable protein sources for developing countries with high risks of hunger. I was excited. It was almost like everything was falling into place just as I’d hoped. I told him I’d fund the project for a year.
He invited me to the country where we were doing the pilot, a small island in the Red Sea where the government had created a ‘special economic zone’ to try experimental policies to stimulate the economy. Graham was the guy’s name. I probably should have said earlier. So Graham had set up his offices on this island, maybe I shouldn’t use the exact name in case it could get anyone in trouble. I came to visit. I took a little motor boat from a big container port nearby. It was about an hour on the water. Container ships coming and going, we were like dust in the tail of a comet floating along, trying to avoid the massive waves they made. I felt terrified and lucky and maybe even good? I was going to help Graham, and he was going to help millions of people.
We met in the little office he’d set up which was basically just a computer and a printer and a lot of boxes stuffed into a construction made out of a disused container, but it had nice furniture and some plants in it, ferns I guess? It was kind of homey. Graham was happy to see me. He shook my hand and offered me the Aeron chair behind his office desk. He leaned against the boxes of his stock and told me the story. All the crazy stuff with his previous project. The suspicion he faced. He told me our conversation had been an inspiration though. He tapped his hand on the boxes and opened one. He threw me an energy bar in a bright green wrapper. Crick’s was the name of the company. It was printed in a clean black font on the front.
‘Try one,’ he said.
I unwrapped the bar and took a bite. It was the worst thing I’d ever eaten in my life. It was scratchy in texture and had some strange, unresolvable flavour.
‘How is it?’ He asked.
‘Ok, kind of like nutty maybe?’
He smiled and nodded very happily, ‘That’s good. Usually we get chicken.’
‘What’s in it?’
‘Oh lots of stuff, all very sustainable. Natural ingredients.’
‘What’s the main ingredient?’
‘Crickets.’
‘Crickets?’
‘And dates and buckwheat.’
‘Do you have any without crickets?’
‘We’re working on that. We’re working on a bar with locusts, which I think would be kind of an ironic triumph: locusts that solve famines!’
This was clearly some kind of joke but I had no idea what he was talking about. He kept talking.
‘And we’re thinking of calling those bars “not cricket” but that’s all speculative at the moment.’
The next day I pulled funding from the project. I think it was because I felt there was something colonial about the project, or maybe it was because I never saw Graham eat any of the cricket bars himself. Or maybe that amounted to the same thing? I stayed in Africa for a while after I left him on the island. That was kind of my downfall. Or the latest of them.
In Africa, Ben Franklin appeared to me more and more and he was singing more often now. I’d be sleeping in a hotel and he’d come in at night. He’d usually sit in a chair near where I was sitting but once in a while he’d squat on my chest. At first he’d take off his shoes which I think he thought was being polite, but actually that kind of made things worse. He’d try out all kinds of stupid Ben Franklin sayings as songs, stuff like ‘Early to bed early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.’ Sometimes I’d argue and I’d say if that were true, why was it he always came to me in the night? And, also, I was getting very wealthy no matter what, right? But he came anyway, and he’d want to debate me about things. Whether markets could become moral agents, whether there was greater value in monetary or fiscal policy to do the greater good, whether or not there was an interventionist God.
I started to stay out all night to avoid going back to the hotel where he’d be almost every night. I’d given up on doing good with the dollar. In fact, I tried to give it away even though I knew it wouldn’t work. I was in a country that had serious issues with hard currency. I gave it to a shop keeper but he looked at all the scrawls and symbols on it and gave it right back to me.
‘No sir, mister. I don’t want your haunted dollar. I know how you work. Give me another one.’
I know I blushed when he said it. He’d caught me. Maybe someone had even told him.
I tried it elsewhere. Not everyone was as concerned about haunted money as that first shop keeper. But it came back to me, over and over. I burned it. It came back. I shredded it in a shredder I had sent from the Bank of England. I shredded and burnt it. It came back every time. It was a physical object, but it wasn’t just a physical object. It had something in it, something that couldn’t be destroyed. Something that could only destroy. I knew it would always be with me somehow, in my blood, or my blood was in it? It was impossible to tell where I ended and it began now.
It was at this point that the real trouble started. It’s wrong to say I’d gotten sloppy. I wasn’t even trying to be secretive in any way, and so inevitably the people who created the money found me. Maybe it was the CIA, or some other organisation that no one knows about, but one day they kidnapped me. I woke up in a hotel in a different country than the one I remembered being in. I looked in my wallet. Everything was as it should be. Same ID. Same cards. Same haunted money. I tried to piece it together, if I’d been kidnapped and dropped in another country it had to be something to do with state forces. Why didn’t they just take the money when they found me? Maybe they didn’t want the responsibility for it. They needed me to have it so they could do what they wanted to do with it. I was the money. The money was me. One wouldn’t work without the other.
Every day I told myself I’d escape. I’d get fake ID papers. I’d buy guns, there were guns everywhere. I’d go to the airport, make them turn off the transponder. Take me to some mountainous forbidden zone…
But they’d always find me, as long as I had the dollar - and I always would - they had me. And so I continued speculating, looking for reasons where there could be none. Was it some kind of inflation game? They’d know what country they were dropping me in, that I’d spend whatever it took to get out, at least at first, and they could use that geopolitically? Micro-inflations one some internal market? Insider trading? Some kind of dark pool? No, it couldn’t be that. I never spend enough. Even when I was trying. Even when I was in the mad haze just trying to spend it away, even though I knew it could never work. Spending myself to death. There was the time lag too. Like if they knew I was somewhere it was no good to them on the market because someone would get wind of their trades and call them on it and ruin everything. It had to be done in the dark, whatever it was.
It’s like this now: I wake up in a hotel somewhere. I know better than to try to escape now. I know better than to try to kill myself. They’ve got that angle covered. I tried once on an island in Indonesia. I stuffed my pockets with rocks and took painkillers and drank illegal vodka and walked into the sea. I don’t know what happened but I had a vision that involved Ben Franklin resuscitating me, dragging me up through the dark waters. His wiry, aged body throwing me effortlessly onto the shore, breathing into my mouth, breathing the same air. Did I wake up with him stroking my head that night in the back of a Hercules transport plane as a bunch of troops dressed in black sat watching with rifles pointed at the floor? I don’t know. I don’t want to know. I gave up then. They would do what they wanted with me, and with the world through me.
Now I just do my thing. I walk around, I spend money. I see hungry people. I give them money. I create markets. And that turned out to be what it was, or at least as far as I can understand it. I’m here to create markets, markets for dollars. I have an infinite supply, so I spend it into the system. The people who they want to have the dollars I spend are the ones they tell. They track down whoever I spend it with. They shake them down. They probably steal it. Maybe they set up a local economy around me: I need this, I need that… They find someone to sell it to me, buy the dollars off them in local currency. Then they use the dollars to buy what They want them to buy. I’m just the first node in a system. Foucault’s pendulum, I learned about those when I was decorating a house I bought in the Hamptons. I’m the disturbance that gets conducted through the system to the other end. I only know when the wave moves back to me, pushes me out to somewhere else. Somewhere else I’m supposed to be. Endlessly until they tire of me, or maybe kill me.
It’s been like that for a few years, but then one night Ben Franklin came to me again. I hadn’t actually seen him for a while. I wondered where he’d been. I thought maybe even he’d given up on me. But this time, I was asleep in a hotel in Venezuela and when I woke up to find him, like always, sitting on my chest. I was almost happy to see him. He was the only person - if he was still a person in any sense of the word - who understood me. Maybe he saw that and he took pity on me. Saw that I was experiencing some small aspect of the torture of living like he lived, eternal, infinite, and afraid.
He leaned in to my ear, his lanky, thin hair rough like rope against my neck:
‘It’s hurting you. I see that. We see that. We wish no malice for you, though perhaps you feel differently towards us. Perhaps you have a right. We can free you, but we cannot free everyone. It is a price that must be paid.’
This line stuck with me, like the universe itself was some kind of market, or had been turned into it by whatever allowed Ben Franklin to be there that night, whispering to me.
‘Blood must be spilled. Directly. Over my mouth. Spill the blood. Then you’ll be free.’
He looked into my eyes. I saw the same red from the image on the bill. I wasn’t sure if I saw hate, or pity, or love in his eyes. I looked back. I closed my eyes. Both of us knew what I would do.
I woke up the next day and went down to the breakfast buffet. I looked around at the wedges of fruit, the plastic pots for tea and milk. If I gave it away all this would be gone. I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing, or a bad thing. I’d be alone again, back in the world, but I’d know the difference between what I saw and what they talked about on TV and online and wherever and the world that really was. The world with the trapped presidents and the treasury that knew about all of it. Spill the blood and you’ll be free. You’ll be free. You. You can only free yourself.
I sat in the breakfast buffet even after the buffet closed. They took away all the fruit and the eggs and the coffee, and the plates. They left the hot water machine and some tea bags. I looked at the hot water machine. What if I just stood under it? What if I scalded myself to death here and now? Would that end it? It wouldn’t end it. The dollar would still be there. It would just go to someone else anyway when I died. I thought about dying, about what would happen to the money then. They’d have plans for that. Maybe they’d even have a plan for me to join them in the notes.
First I vomited. Then I booked a plane ticket to Miami. It didn’t require any fake IDs. Or any planning. Or any guns. I just went to the airport and got on the plane, and that was it. What was different now? Maybe nothing.
There she was. Young. Entitled. Annoying. Sitting on one of the stools shagged in driftwood at the bar on the beach. It was called Jiménez. She’d probably call it something like a ‘cabana bar’. Unsophisticated, but worldly. Maybe that was me once. Cynical. Maybe I was the opposite now, and this is what you’re like after you’ve lived to have been all those things.
I bought her a drink. I noticed her gaze fall over my shirt. It was reassuringly expensive to her. I don’t know if I was smiling when I asked her to come out on the boat. I have no idea if she thought it was something sexual.
She did. But I didn’t let myself know that that was what I was suggesting. I let her drink her drink. Her very expensive drink. It was like she could instinctively tell which cocktail was the most expensive on the menu. It was morning. Substantially before noon.
It wasn’t so much that I wanted to give her the dollar to punish her. I wanted her to have it because she was the kind of person who it wouldn’t do the kind of harm it would do to other people. Maybe that damage had already been done to her somewhere along the line. Maybe I’d been involved in some butterfly wing kind of way: a shuttered plant somewhere in Middle America. A buyout of an envelope firm. Redundancies. Despair. Deaths of despair.
She took it. I cut her. Blood spilled. Not much. Not enough to seem dangerous. She was annoyed. Maybe not even that. Maybe it was the exact scene she wanted to play out. Healthy blood spilling out over haunted money. Blood spilled. I was free.
I took her back to the shore. We were both silent. Only the sound of the outboard motor on the boat I’d bought the previous night. Birds swooped overhead as we got nearer the shore. Shadows briefly casting our faces in mutual, then discrete darknesses. I thought I should say something when we got to the mooring. I couldn’t look her in the eye. There were little commas of blood on her calf. She had the dollar in the bra of her swimsuit. It was almost like she was afraid I’d want it back. I swallowed the laugh this thought gave me.
She seemed suspicious of me still, but not how I would have expected. She had a ‘where’s the catch’ expression on her face when I looked up to nod good bye to her. I just said ‘This could go badly for you. I’m sorry.’ I wish I’d been more definitive, said that it WOULD go bad for her, but I wasn’t sure it would be her that it would go bad for. Maybe it never does. Maybe it hadn’t gone bad for me, or maybe I was different from the me who had taken the note in the first place. If I even took it. Maybe it took me. But that was all in the past now. The dollar was gone. Blood had spilled. I was free. I looked into my wallet. I paid for drinks for everyone in a bar down the beach near where my hotel was. I watched the sun melt into the sea, the pinkness drain from the clouds, and spill into the sea. My wallet is smaller than it had been in years. It was over. I was free. Maybe I always had been.