Free The Subprimes by Karl Taro Greenfeld

credit had driven them out of the world and who now were subsisting on the fringes of the economy, on cash and barter, on propane tanks, illegal solar rigs, wood fires, purified water, and canned food. There was a distinctive pattern of habitation: one house was kept up while the surrounding ones were gradually stripped, the wood to be burned for fuel, the fittings sold as scrap.
    â€œIf you’re looking for crank, keep riding,” she heard a voice behind her.
    She turned to see a man in dusty black leather high-top sneakers, jeans, a flannel shirt open over a hairless chest and flat stomach. He wore a baseball cap with a UPS patch. He had a stubbled face, thin lips, a pronounced upper-lip apron, and a long nose. His eyes had a surprised, almost humorous quality, and as he gave his warning, he managed to be welcoming.
    Sargam shook her head. “Never tried it, never want to.”
    The man scratched the bottom of the right side of his chin. “And you won’t here. We’re trying to keep it civil. If you want to stay a while, why don’t you ride your bike down off of Bienvenida—that’s what they named this street—and find a squat off the main drag. It’s quiet here, and we aim to keep it quiet.”
    A few more residents had emerged, hands held over eyes to block the sun. They studied Sargam with expressions verging from hostility to warmth to curiosity to lust, the range she elicited everywhere she went.
    â€œWhere you from?”
    She lunged her bike off its kickstand and backed it down the driveway, bracing her slight weight against the heavy machine.
    â€œNowhere. Everywhere. I’m riding around,” Sargam said. “I’m trying to see what I can see.”
    â€œAnd what are you seeing?”
    â€œI’ll tell you when I see it.”
    She pushed her bike down the street, the small crowd parting for her. Sargam sensed that the individuals cohered into a few families, the men and boys linked to the women and girls. She liked that idea of families settling in a place that, at some point—if anyone had thought things through beyond slapping up drywall and getting signatures on loan documents—was intended for families. Or was meant to tempt families.
    â€œThere’s a few houses unlocked on Chapala. Second street down,” the man called.
    SARGAM PUSHED OPEN THE FRONT door; it gave silently on its still-oiled hinges into an entrance with an alcove on which still sat an opened can of eggshell-white paint with dried drippings running down its sides. The interior had been this optimistic white, but previous squatters had left their impressions in pencil, paint, and urine stains on the walls. “Subprime and Proud,” read one typical graffito; “National Debt Holiday NOW,” read another; and “I Want A Woman With A Juicy Box” read yet another. To the right of the living room was a kitchen with a center island stripped of its stone, and counterswith cavities where appliances belonged. A row of double-glass doors opened onto a backyard of bare dirt—no one had bothered to plant anything back there.
    Sargam guessed the house had never been lived in by an owner, just squatted in by successive subprimes looking for a place to crash. She preferred this to houses that still bore traces of actual owner-occupiers: stickers pasted by kids onto closet doors, a basketball rim over the garage, recipes tacked up inside cabinet doors. In those former homes she felt the void, all the emotions the home once had held gone like vanished spirits, leaving only the looted soulless shelter.
    She rolled her bike up over the threshold and into the living room, flipping open the saddle cases. The house did not smell too bad; some faint pissy odor was detectable but she had experienced worse. She knew better than to look in the bathrooms. She packed a spade she used to dig a latrine trench wherever she stopped. She guessed the living room was the