What the Money Was Worth

In the first week of July the city cooked, and a magazine on Madison Avenue answered the heat by putting a line at the Department of Motor Vehicles on its cover. It was the last-word magazine, and it had decided that the last word on a summer nobody would remember was a fluorescent room and a ticket dispenser and a queue running out a municipal door into the glare, and a reporter who had wanted, sincerely, to spend a month inside one shift of one clerk's window and had gotten his month. The joke was gentle and the joke was real: while the reporter counted the people waiting to renew a license, the building that would print him ran its own line at a sprint, the longest one it had, pitch to plates, and did it every month, and thought the DMV was the funny part.

That was the same week the money became real four thousand miles east.

Sana Farid shot the public pool at noon, from the high board, with the whole deep end laid out under her and the heat coming up off the concrete so hard you could shoot for it if you underexposed. She had not wanted the color. The well wanted color and the ad book wanted color and so she was up on the board with the Nikon and three rolls of the Velvia the reps had been pushing all spring, the new stock, the one that made a red glow like a red had never glowed in life, and she distrusted it as she distrusted anything that flattered; it saw the wrong thing beautifully. She shot the pool anyway, the bathers packed gunwale to gunwale in the reduced-schedule water, half the city's pools dark that summer for the budget and the other half holding twice their share, and she got competent frames of a crowd being hot.

The storm gave her the spread. It came up over Queens a little after one, the light going bruise-green in a quarter of an hour, and the head lifeguard put his whistle to the sky and blew the long blast at the first far crack of it, and the pool emptied. That was the rule and the city kept it: thunder, and everyone out, twenty minutes minimum, the water cleared to a flat blue rectangle while the deck behind it went to chaos, four hundred people and their towels and their radios crammed under the overhang as the first fat drops came down and then all the drops at once. Sana stayed on the board through the first of it, soaked in ten seconds, and shot down the length of the empty pool with the rain starting to pock it and the crowd jammed dry along the far edge, and she knew before the strobe of the lightning that she had it: the water nobody was allowed in, in the middle of the hottest day, with the whole neighborhood pressed against the fence looking at it. She came down the ladder with the film in her fist inside her jacket, against the wet, and did not think about the frame again, because thinking about a frame you had was a waste of a frame you didn't.

The film had to be somewhere by five and someplace else by midnight or it was not in the book. She knew the schedule as well as she knew the aperture ring. Noon shoot, and the close was that night; the well's opening spread was hers if the color made the board and a wire shot of the same heat wave if it didn't, and the difference between those was a strip of processed transparency crossing a stormed city in time. She took the rolls herself to the E-6 line on Twentieth Street, the good pro lab, and stood at the counter dripping while the man clipped her leaders and hung them for the machine, and the machine did in a little under forty minutes the one thing the whole day turned on — first developer, color developer, bleach, fix, the tight hundred degrees of it, the chemistry that could not be rushed and could not be undone — and she waited it out in a plastic chair with her wet hair going to salt and did not read the magazine on the table, a competitor's, about the heat.

When the strips came up they came up as they always did, a small resurrection she had watched ten thousand times and had never once found ordinary: the clear leader, then the frames, the pool climbing out of the acetate already fixed and finished, a thing that had been light four hours ago and was now an object a person could drop on a floor. She held the strip to the window a second before she took it to the box, the storm in it upside down and backward and permanent.

The chromes came off the line still warm in their sleeves and she read them on the counter light box, the lab's five-thousand-degree tubes throwing the true color up, the loupe on the strip, frame by frame, the eight-power glass pressed to the emulsion until the pool came up sharp and wrong and perfect: the Velvia had made the storm-light a green no sky had worn, and it was a lie, and it was the picture. She ringed four frames with the china marker and starred the one and slid the strip into a glassine envelope and the envelope into a manila one and wrote the art department's name on it and the word RUSH, which meant nothing to a messenger and everything to the person who booked him, and she called the desk that booked them.

The messenger came at five into the rain. He was a thin kid with a pager on his hip and a U-lock run through the strap of his bag and a manifest on a clipboard gone soft at the corners, and he took the envelope and signed her copy and read the destination and the RUSH and did not change expression. He put her one envelope in against his spine where the sensitive thing rode, the chromes that could not be reshot, and went back down into the weather on the bike, and the city took him.

It took him east on Twentieth and up Sixth against the flooded gutters, standing on the pedals through the water at the crosswalks, past the curb cuts at the corners where the ramps ran the rainwater down in brown sheets — the new ramps, the ones the law a week off would make everyone's, though on Sixth Avenue in July they were just a place the water went. It took him past a knot of stopped traffic at Twenty-Third where another kid's bike lay on its side half under a livery cab and the kid sat on the curb holding his own arm and a cop stood over the two of them writing. He did not slow for it. He rode with the manifest against the day and the one envelope against his back, and somewhere over the avenues the storm was doing the thing storms did to that city in summer, turning the towers to grey water from the top down, the high floors gone to cloud, the whole grid of it lit and struck and washed and standing anyway, forty thousand rooms full of people who had gone to a window to watch the same rain and would go back to their desks, and the kid on the bike carried a pool through the middle of it in a paper envelope because the pictures were too heavy to send any other way and would be for years yet. Then he was down out of the weather again at the loading door on Madison, and the envelope went up in the freight car to seven, and the day had made its connection.

The separation house had the chromes by six and shot the seps by nine, the four films of it, cyan and magenta and yellow and the black, stripped up for the platemaker, and the proof came back to the art floor near eleven with the storm-green holding, and the well kept its opening spread, full, two pages, a pool nobody could swim in. What Sana never learned was that the two pages had nearly not been there to fill. The book had come in soft again, the ad pages down for the eleventh month running, and there had been a number three floors up that afternoon that wanted two more pages out of the well, and a man had read the number fully and without hurry and put it in his pocket and kept the pages, and told no one he had, and the spread she rode a stormed city to make ran in a space a silence had held open. She would credit the film. The film had made the close by four hours. Both things were true and only one of them was hers to know.

By midnight the smoke stood under the ceiling tiles as it stood every close, the six thousand compounds of it planed flat in the still air over the boards, and Sal was waxing the last of the type onto the flat for the caption bank, the honeycombed wax at its low heat, the roller, the burnish. The night crew moved around the boards in shirtsleeves with their coffee going cold, a radio low somewhere on seven, the parallel-motion arms swinging and locking, the scalpels, the blue non-photo grid coming up under the type. Sana stood at the light table with the grease pencil marking the crop the layout wanted, tighter than she wanted, the pool brought up to bleed off three edges, and she marked it because it was a better page and she was right about the fourth edge and lost it, and the platemaker was waiting, and she was still marking when the production man came for the board.

The money became real on the first of July, a Sunday, and Nora Kessler heard it become real at seven that evening with the receiver against her ear and her back against the chair and the lamp making its one pool.

She had cleared the evening for the call as completely as she had cleared the June Saturday for the tennis. It was currency-union day; the East had gone to bed on Saturday inside one money and woken on Sunday inside another, the West mark the only legal tender now from the Elbe to the Oder, and Heinrich had queued at his own savings bank on the Ku'damm on Friday among people who had crossed from the other side to open the accounts that made them, overnight, citizens of the harder currency. He told it to her at length, warmly, as he told her everything, and under the warmth ran the thing that was not warm, which was that he did not trust it. A money you could be handed for nothing was a money worth nothing; that was arithmetic, he said, that was simply arithmetic, a man's savings of forty years converted at one rate up to a ceiling and at half that rate above it, and who set the ceiling, and who decided a life's work stopped being worth one-for-one at the exact mark where it began to matter. He had views on the ceiling. She let him have the views, said noch mal where the places for it came, and did not tell him that the folded bills she sent him every month had, as of that morning, changed their meaning under his mattress, worth in the new money either more than they had been or less depending on an arithmetic neither of them was going to do out loud on a Sunday.

Then Matthias came on the line, and the line went bad.

It did that on the long transatlantic booking, dropped a register and filled with the sea, and through it her brother's voice came half-swallowed, and they had the argument they had, which was old and had no bottom. He had stayed. She had left. He had raised her daughter in his house with their father and painted the halls and been there every ordinary Tuesday of eighteen years, and he thought the new money was a mercy and an opening and about time, and he thought, though he did not say it and did not have to, that a person who had not been in the country for the forty bad years did not get a vote on the forty-first. She thought he was sentimental about a windfall that would take his neighbors' factories out from under them inside three years, and she was probably right, and being right was not the same as being owed a vote, and she knew it, and said the thing about the factories anyway, into the sea on the line. The connection ate half of it, and their father, in the background, told them both to stop — mein Gott, the two of you, on the phone that costs what it costs — and they stopped, because he was the one thing they still agreed on.

She sat a while with the receiver in her lap after the line went dead, and then she got up and put the apartment back into the order it was already in, because it was a thing to do with the hands: the pins parallel on the tray, the violet turned a quarter to face the room, the one glass rinsed and racked. The money on the other side of the ocean was worth what it was worth now, and there was no editing it from here. The East was inside the D-mark, and it was Sunday.

The close came as it came. The suburb essay crossed her desk on Tuesday — the furniture piece on the towns built to look like something they weren't, the colonial fronts on the tract frames — and it was good, and it made her laugh once, at the writer's find: that the zoning board in one such town had a term of art for the fake-fieldstone facing it required by ordinance, and the term of record, in the board's own minutes, was permastone (colonial character). She marked keep the parenthesis in the margin and moved on.

The front carried the Index of the Heat, the one-page tally the magazine ran in July because July gave it to them — the temperature of a rush-hour subway car measured with a thermometer a stringer had carried onto the Lexington line, the season's air-conditioner sales against last summer's, the number of parade permits the city had issued and the number of blocks a single ice-cream truck could cover before its freezer went to soup. It was the smallest thing in the book and the desk had checked every figure in it twice, the truck's blocks against the driver and the subway car's degrees against the man who took it, and Nora read it through once for the pleasure of a thing that was exactly what it was and initialed it.

Gil Ordway's galley she kept till Wednesday and did with the door shut. It was a City piece, a good one, the token booth and the man in the glass box, built partly out of a subscriber's letter Charlie had carried down to the desk in the spring; and it was long, and it earned its length, and in December she would have cut it to the bone and made him grateful for the cut. She did not cut it. She read it clause by clause with the pen capped and then she wrote in the margin, in three sentences, the closest thing her grammar would make: that the length was the argument and she would not touch it; that the man in the booth was the whole piece and he had known it before the desk did; that it should run as he had it. She signed it and sent it down, There was nothing on the page that said I cut you off at four o'clock on a Thursday in the winter and would do it again for the same reason and am sorry for the reason, because she had not written that, because she could not; the three sentences were what her hand could carry instead. She signed the galley and sent it down. Ordway got it back on Wednesday, read three warm margin sentences from an editor who liked his piece, and had a good week.

She killed the drive-in that night. It had come in overwritten, a profile of a man keeping a one-screen lot running against the multiplex math, and it was in love with its own dusk, and she took it down to a short thing, half the well space it had wanted, the man and the projector and the arithmetic and out — a mercy that would read, on the newsstand, as a piece that simply ran short. And the kill woke the letter, as it now always did; and she did not take her daughter's letter out of the drawer, and she did not write the answer she had not written for fourteen months. She took a sheet of the airmail paper and folded the month's bills into it, the money to Berlin, for her father, as she always sent it, because a wire would make it official and official meant Heinrich was declining; and she wrote three warm easy lines to go around the bills, and set it by her keys to be mailed, and the new money would take it at whatever rate the new money took it.

The book shipped at a quarter to midnight, and the crew went to the World on Second Street, because the World was where you went, and because Sana Farid had picked up the tab.

She had done it at the door with a word to the barman, quietly, before anyone could see it happen, and the first round arrived at the two shoved-together tables like weather, unasked for, and it took the room a minute to understand that the quiet one in the field jacket, the one who spent four words a year, had bought it. Tomás Vega watched them work it out. It was the only tab she had ever picked up in the building's memory, and it landed the way her frames landed in the layout meetings, without preamble and without a second one to follow it, and the crew drank it and made too much of it and she waved the making-too-much away with two fingers and it was over.

The jukebox at the World took quarters and gave back the summer's noise, and somebody kept feeding it, and by one the two tables had become a thing that was mostly laughing. A checker did the executive editor's throat-clear, the little cough he gave before he killed a pitch, and did it so exactly that the executive editor, three feet off, laughed hardest of anyone and bought the impression a drink. Half the copy desk argued whether the DMV cover was the funniest thing the book had run all year or a magazine laughing at a joke it had spent forty pages missing, and argued it with the pleasure the floor brought to the things that carried no stakes, because the things that carried stakes had shipped and the night was the wage for them. Somebody had brought the newsstand news in like a curiosity from a far country: the feminist monthly was back that month, reborn without one advertisement in it, at a cover price that made the two tables whistle — the editor who had founded it had written the lead herself, twenty years of what the ads had actually bought, the complexion clauses, the adjacencies, the recipes commissioned to sit beside the food pages — and half the table said no magazine could live on readers alone and the other half said theirs couldn't, which was not the same sentence, and everyone looked into their drink at the difference, briefly, and the jukebox saved them. Somebody was dancing near the cigarette machine, badly, gloriously, to a song that was not really for dancing.

He was at the edge of it as he had learned to be at the edge of most rooms now, in the summer between one thing and the next, the eastern assignment out ahead of him in the fall and nothing to do but wait for it and not drink. Down the tables the accounting was going on, the loving one the building did about itself — someone had it on good authority, first-hand even, that he had personally seen the activists in the good suits and the forged credentials chain themselves to the balcony of the stock exchange last fall, had watched the fake hundreds come down over the floor, had been right there; and nobody asked him how a man came to be on the floor of the exchange on a Thursday morning to see it, because it was midnight and the desk was off duty and nobody was checking anybody's facts. Somewhere in the same stretch a junior writer got the old bit wrong — the running gag about the correspondent the magazine had invented in the seventies and then had to keep filing for, the byline that covered three coups before an editor confessed he did not exist — got the country wrong and the decade wrong, and the personals checker, two drinks in and constitutionally unable to let a wrong fact stand, corrected him on both without looking up from her cigarette, and was right, and went back to her drink.

Charlie Whitfield bought Martin Kaye a round near one, and Tomás watched that too, because it was worth watching. They agreed about nothing, the publisher who loved the floor and the editor who ruled it, Charlie who came to the building for the singing and Martin who came to kill the weak pieces before they could embarrass anyone, and they stood at the bar for six minutes with the two whiskeys and were warm with each other about a magazine each of them thought the other slightly misunderstood. Charlie loved the floor — the pressmen, the paste-up men, the waxer's smell, the whole physical body of the thing his father had built — and thought a magazine was the people who made it. Martin loved the table, the kill memo, the weak piece caught before it could shame anyone, and thought a magazine was the judgment that let the good ones through. Charlie told the story about his father and a press chief in a blow off the Narrows, and Martin turned the Yale ring and said the moral of it was wrong, that a captain who felt accounted for in a storm was a captain about to drown his crew, and bought the wrong moral a drink anyway. Two temperaments that had shared a masthead for thirty years, agreeing on the whiskey and nothing under it. Then Charlie went to be host somewhere else in the room, and Martin went to be feared somewhere quieter, and the round was done.

Sana came and sat across from Tomás in the back booth near the end, where the noise dropped off, and they did the thing the two of them did, which was to say almost nothing and find it restful. They had never worked a story together; they knew each other from the light table and the layout meetings, the two people in the building who spent the fewest words and watched the most, and they had recognized something in each other early and never once discussed it. She had her drink and did not touch it much and he had his and did not touch it at all, and they watched the room together and compared none of it out loud — the dancer by the machine, the two colleagues in the far corner not sitting close enough, the checker doing the impression again for a table that had already heard it and wanted it once more. Two witnesses off the clock, reading a room neither of them would have to file. At the next booth a copy assistant was back from the bathroom sniffing against the air-conditioning, bright as a struck match, sure of everything, laughing a half-beat ahead of his own lines; and Tomás heard it and placed it and let it be.

"You keep the count," he said to her, quietly, "in a room. How many, and how young. I did it walking in tonight." He turned the glass a quarter and the whiskey caught the light, and the faintest tremor was in the hand that turned it — steady, always, over a notebook in a bad place, and unsteady here, at rest, around a drink he wasn't drinking. "I was at a checkpoint outside San Salvador the night the Wall went. A soldier had a radio and the reception was bad. He was smiling. He was younger than the rifle he was holding — seventeen, maybe. He didn't know what it meant. He only knew something big had ended." It was the second time in his life he had told it to anyone. "Everybody wants to be there for the big thing. Nobody tells you the big thing is a kid with a bad radio who can't hear it."

Sana looked at him and did not lift the camera. It was on the seat beside her, in the bag, and her hand did not go to it, and she let the frame go by unmade — the man in the low light of the booth telling the small true thing, the light doing exactly what she would have wanted it to do — and she left it where it was, in the place behind her eyes, and gave him the quiet instead of the picture. At the next booth the bright one laughed again and stood too fast and went out into the summer with a woman from the art floor, the two of them leaving together, and nobody wrote it down.

Tomás set the full glass on the table and stood. "You bought the room a drink," he said. "I'll tell them it was me, if you like. Ruin your reputation to save it." She almost smiled, which from her was a great deal, and he went out into Second Street where the storm had left the pavement steaming and the traffic going as it always went, not stopping, three in the morning coming and the trucks still on the avenue, and he stood in it a minute before he found a cab.

Dez Washington got the license piece on the Monday after, and it was the DMV cover, and it fought her.

She had come off the weekend with the close still in her, and the ride down had been ordinary, the D and the transfer and the walk where her posture did the thing it did, and she had the well feature on her blotter by nine-thirty: the reporter's month inside one clerk's window at a borough motor-vehicle office, open to close, the line and the forms and the woman behind the glass who processed a human being every four minutes for eight hours and had done it for nineteen years. It was funny and it was human and it did not need Dez to make it either. It needed her to make it true, and the truth of it lived in a thing the reporter had done that no reporter should have to redo: he had counted. He had sat in the office for a month and counted the woman's transactions against the office's own daily logs, and the numbers were the spine of the piece, the nineteen years and the four minutes and the two hundred souls a day, and Dez picked up the phone to confirm them as the desk confirmed everything, against the record, on two days.

The state could not find the record. She called the office and the office referred her to the regional and the regional referred her to Albany and Albany put her on hold to a recording about renewing by mail and then referred her back to the office, and somewhere in the third call it came clear, in the flat courteous way these things came clear, that the daily logs the reporter had sat and counted against did not, as a filed and retrievable document, exist — that they were kept for a window and then they weren't. The number the whole piece stood on could be confirmed only against a reporter's own tally of a thing the state no longer held. The exposé nobody had pitched, the one where you proved what a government office actually did with its day, could not be filed, because the office could not produce the record of its own hours. It was the smallest possible version of the largest thing the building couldn't do. She wrote it up plain — transaction counts per the reporter's log; state unable to produce daily records for the period; recommend attribute to reporter's observation, not to the Department — and stapled it under her initials, and that was the piece made honest.

The desk enjoyed it as it enjoyed all its defeats. Somebody worked out, over the cold coffee, that a man had spent a month proving a number the state itself could not stand behind, so that the magazine could report with total confidence that a motor-vehicle office would not tell you how it spent its own day. The desk found this very funny and could not have told you exactly why, and someone said the reporter should renew his license while he was at it and get the month reimbursed, and they went back to work.

The two of them from the night before were at the checking desk by ten, the copy assistant and the art-floor woman, and they were pure business, the both of them, a caption query passed and answered across the L without a wasted syllable, professional to the grain, nothing in the bodies, the morning after arranged like a filing. The drama, if there was drama, was not between them. It was in the thing the assistant said, low, leaning on the desk while the query printed, about a third person entirely — about Ordway, whose City piece was running long this month, that he'd been telling people at the party the editor had finally come around, had all but apologized in the margins, had said so himself; and the art-floor woman said that didn't sound like the editor, and the assistant said it didn't, did it, and shrugged, and took his answered query back to eight. Dez heard it the way she heard everything, in one pass, without turning her head, and filed it where she filed the things that were not yet anything. She uncapped the green pen and went back to the woman behind the glass and her four minutes and her nineteen years, and confirmed the years against the office's own personnel line, which the office could produce, and green-dotted it, and let the number the state had lost stay soft, and sent the piece up.

The August book went out into the racks in the last week of July, into a heat that had not broken so much as taken a Sunday off, the DMV line on its cover in black type on municipal beige, the fluorescent room and the ticket dispenser and the queue running out the door. A quarter million of it, warm off the press, standing in the steel racks beside every other magazine's summer.

Inside it a pool nobody could swim in opened the well, two pages, the storm-green holding on the newsstand as it had held on the proof. The license piece ran with its numbers attributed to a man who had counted them, and not to the state that had lost them. The drive-in profile ran short. In the foreign file, under the dateline BONN and a byline nobody on the desk had set in type before — a junior filling a chair a better man had left for a magazine that didn't kill him — a stringer's careful dispatch on a government quietly rehearsing the paperwork of a union the treaty language did not yet exist to describe, held a cycle and run at last.

In the second week of August, at the borough motor-vehicle office, a man slid his renewal form under the partition folded inside an open copy of the magazine, her page out, and asked the woman behind the glass to sign it. She stamped the form, dated it, signed the page in the stamp's own red, and had him out the door in under four minutes, which he would be telling people for years. By Friday the page was taped up in the office break room with her window number circled in somebody else's pen, and the line she had processed for nineteen years now contained, most mornings, one or two people timing her against the piece, checking their watches with the small pleasure of witnesses. The clerk did not read the magazine. She had read the page.

The call from Albany came the same week, courteous, a press officer wondering whether the Department might obtain the reporter's daily tallies for its files, and it came down to the checking desk as a query slip like any other. Dez typed the reply the desk's grammar required — the notes were the reporter's property; the published figures stood as attributed — and logged the call in the day book between a spelling and a date.

And on a wall one floor down, in the room with no clock, three prints hung where they had hung since spring, a woman's back and a girl in a studio and a man on a set of steps, and the book had never seen them, and nobody at the racks that week was looking at the wall.