Free A History of Money: A Novel by Alan Pauls, Ellie Robins Page B

by the spirit speaking through him. It’s a slightly distressing idea: it forces him to think of the father he can see, first the everyday one (while he’s still married to his mother), then the weekend one (after the order to leave Ortega y Gasset), as a sort of body double for some invisible other, a replica that mechanically, as though following an instruction manual, carries out everything that should be done by one father, the original one, who is apparently too busy guessing cards, doubling bets, and frightening rivals with hands he doesn’t have to do a father’s work.
    Eventually, though, he ends up getting used to it. Gambling is a world, and it works. It has its own rules, schedules, customs, uniforms, backdrops, props. Like every world—no matter what dangers it contains—its founding principle is that it’s habitable. It might be distressing, but he now knows, or can guess, where his father is when he doesn’t find himwhere he hopes to find him, where he and maybe his mother before him most need him, sitting by his side in the middle of the night when he has one of the nightmares that take hold of him without waking him up and make him sit up very straight in his bed, like Pinocchio, his eyes open and as unseeing as coins, or calling the pediatrician after taking the thermometer out of his armpit, or cleaning the bits between his toes. It’s much worse, really, to imagine him crossing Rio de Janeiro at night in a brightly colored Volkswagen Beetle flying at the speed of light in search of a nameless, faceless debtor who no doubt couldn’t have anything further from his mind than paying the debt he’s about to be reminded of.
    Besides, it’s been clear since very early on, since before he could think for himself, as they say, that if there’s anyone who can determine where life is, it’s his father. In fact, he makes himself the authority on its everyday allocation (though his own existence demonstrates, perhaps in spite of itself, that there’s nothing less certain or less obvious than the things we take for granted when we talk about life) and, like a surveyor, traces the frontiers—or rather reveals the invisible ones that were always there—between simulations of life and real life, shams and experiences, disguises and the naked truth. Even when he was a young boy, accompanying his father on his rounds through the business district was like taking a crash course in the art of appraising other people’s lives. (Although “appraising” carries a trace of optimism: his father is a brutal evaluator, for whom nuances are pure affectation or gradations of fear. For him, there are two options: you’re either alive, or you’re dead.) You can start anytime. At the office, for example. He’s come straight from school to see him; they’re about to go out for lunch. The first lesson (like almost all of them) is conducted on the move, subtly imparted while they cross the office diagonally on the way to the elevator, fully exposed—particularly him, with his shyness, his bangs, and hispants’ knee patches torn by the schoolyard’s rough paving: an exotic animal, like all creatures from the outside who end up in the world of work—to the scrutiny of the other employees. While he walks and gives out general greetings, nodding his head and smiling, his father lets him in on the death certificates he’s already signed: “The fat woman with the hairband: dead. The guy typing with two fingers: dead. That one selling coffee: dead. That ugly woman who talks to you like you’re three years old: dead, dead, dead.” The sequence shot follows them into the elevator that jolts them downstairs, taking in the operator, who’s practically asleep (dead), through the lobby, with the doorman who’s shuffling envelopes with greasy fingers (dead), into the street, with the redheaded guy selling candy at a kiosk (dead), the woman selling flowers (dead), and the newsstand owner closing his stand to go eat (dead).