Free Ninety Days by Bill Clegg Page B

vestibule, the cash dropped from my jacket. With air rushing through the doors on either side of me, the money flew everywhere. Hundred-dollar bills, mostly. I remember how, for a moment, it didn’t look real and I was mesmerized. It looked like one of those game show challenges where people are put in a chamber of wind-tossed cash and they have thirty seconds to grab as much as they can. But when I saw a hundred-dollar bill fly out the door into the street I snapped to life.
    Standing here, two months later, I picture my thin, wrecked, desperate self, scrambling to collect a windstorm of bills. I remember sweat pouring down my face, and the blasts of cold air coming in from the street. I remember a guy with a bike helmet on and two young women helping me collect the money. I remember putting the wad of bills back into the same pocket and its falling out again, but this time the guy with the bike helmet pounces and prevents the bills from flying. You OK? he asks doubtfully, and as I double-check the zippers I see my hands—stained black from scraping charred wire screens, blistered with lighter burns, and scabbed all over from nicks and cuts from dozens of shattered glass stems. I shove the money in my jacket pocket again, hide my hands in my jeans, and, not knowing how to respond, hurry to the street.
    I try to remember where in the vestibule I was that day and how long it took to collect the bills. People—now in late spring clothes, not bundled for winter as they were then—pass in and out of the bank in front of me, and I try to picture one of them dropping three thousand dollars’ worth of cash. Twice. I try to imagine what I would do and how I’d react. How on earth did I not get arrested? It seems so cartoonish and unlikely, so far away.
    Further away is the memory of me and Kate meeting in this same space before sitting down with a bank officer to open the accounts we needed to start the agency. How many years ago was this? Four? Five? Three? I can’t remember, and I can’t see us then. It’s too painful or too long ago, but in either case I can catch only the edges of that day, the conspiratorial air, the excitement and trust that passed between us. The hope.
    I leave the little time machine bank vestibule and step out into the warm afternoon. It’s almost three and I have three hours to kill before the six o’clock meeting at the Meeting House. I’m hungry and exhausted and think, fuck it, the Meeting House can survive with one less junkie tonight. I think this even though I’d agreed to meet Polly there. I’m not a babysitter, I say out loud, feeling the giddy rush of deciding to skip the meeting pushing away the heavy memories of just a few moments ago. I’m no one’s keeper! I go on, declaring to the air like a lunatic.
    As I walk home, I wonder how long it will take the check to clear, how long before the six thousand dollars will add to the two thousand in the account already and make eight. Eight thousand seems like an enormous amount of money. More than three months’ rent. The apartment would be covered into the fall, and with bags of food from Jean, I’ll be OK past October. The bank is at 23rd Street and Sixth Avenue. My apartment is at 15th Street and Seventh Avenue. Somewhere south of 20th and north of 16th I remember again that day two months ago, leaving the bank with three thousand dollars stuffed in my jacket, calling Rico from the street and telling him to meet me at my room at the Gansevoort Hotel. I remember him saying he was only a block away and how my heart raced as I hailed a cab to get there before he did, how his van was pulling up to the hotel just as my cab was, and how I hopped from one vehicle right into the other. From call to cab to van and back to my room took less than five minutes, some kind of record, and in the middle of the day, no less. Remembering the return to the hotel room, the wealth of drugs, the remaining cash in hand, and the night ahead starts my heart