The Losses

I was heading towards the airport exit when I spotted the old man. At first glance, he looked no different from the other people waiting in the hallway, holding up printed or handwritten pickup signs. The only thing that made him stand out, besides the crumpled piece of paper he was holding, was his hairstyle. Courageously bald in the center, with wisps of salt-and-pepper hair swaying gently in the waft, the old man looked almost comical in his reasonable dark jacket and gray T-shirt. When our eyes met, he smiled at me genially, as if he had nothing to do with the sign, which read:

Giving away $20,000 for free!

The words were written by hand and slanted drastically towards the right.

To be honest, I was bone-tired from my business trip. I had the bad luck to sit beside a woman with a baby, and neither the food nor the flight attendant was palatable. Feeling cheated out of the money for the upgrade to business class, I was quite grumpy as I came to the exit and saw the ridiculous sign the old man was holding in front of his chest.

I decided to teach him a lesson. Striding towards him, I nodded to him and asked, “How did it go?”

“Not very well,” he replied.

His honesty made me respect him a little.

“Was anyone interested?”

“Nope.” He shook his head, his hair flowing in the air as if in slow motion. “Those who stopped only came to ridicule, just like you.”

It irked me to be seen through so easily. “Well, you can’t blame them. Who’s gonna believe this shit?”

“But it’s true.” he said. “And in cash.”

Things were getting more interesting. I did a quick calculation of how much space twenty thousand dollars in one-hundred-, twenty-, and one-dollar bills would each take. Although the total amount remained the same, I still felt an undeniably greater satisfaction at the mental image of twenty thousand one-dollar bills in thick stacks. I asked a question that I immediately regretted.

“Did you bring it with you?”

He gave me a slightly judgmental smile. “Of course not. I’ll take you to where I live.”

At this point it seemed too late to step back and say, “It’s alright, I’m just asking.” The old man seemed sane enough to pique my curiosity about him. Was he a philanthropist, a rich man in disguise, or someone out of his mind? I’d like to see for myself that amount of money in cash and, if someone was crazy enough to give it away, gladly take it.

I asked him where he lived.

“Not too far,” he said.

He turned around and began moving towards the exit, and I had no choice but to follow. Going in the opposite direction from the crowd, we descended the airport highway and soon came to a winding country road, crowded by wild plants I couldn’t name. The road was muddy and bumpy. I had to lift my suitcase to protect its wheels and the soles of my feet grew hot and itchy from the rubble. The old man, however, wearing a pair of flimsy cloth shoes only found in martial arts movies, moved so briskly that I found it difficult to keep up.

Hopping over a shallow pool, he stopped in front of a red-tiled, white-walled bungalow. It had a few trees left to grow wild around the house, neither energetic nor sickly. “This is where I live.” The old man opened the door.

I followed him into the house and was not repulsed by what I saw. The room was insufficiently lit, a bit crowded, but rather tidy. There was no interior decoration to speak of, but every piece was functional and of good quality, especially the sofa and the table, which looked sturdy enough to last for another fifty years. I was slightly surprised by the presence of a computer near the window, but it was chunky and archaic, certainly not purchased in the past fifteen years. The old man disappeared into his bedroom and reemerged with a wooden box in his hands. He opened it with his bony fingers and revealed a bundle carefully wrapped in a faded handkerchief. He handed me the bundle without a trace of hesitation or regret.

“Count it however you like it,” he said.

I couldn’t believe my eyes. A sense of surrealness engulfed me; my mind hummed with the things my wife would say when I returned home with twenty thousand dollars. Her first reaction, however, would be that I was somehow cheated. But what could I be cheated out of? The worst thing that could happen to me was that maybe some, if not all, of the bills were counterfeit, and the only thing that would suffer would be my ego, which wasn’t brittle to begin with. As I swiftly counted the money, inhaling the sweet, slightly moldy smell of twenty dollar bills that hadn’t seen daylight for quite some time, I found myself devising a million ways to spend it. A new car, a premium golf club set, a family trip to some island…after working at the same company for ten years, I felt that I’d reached a plateau in my career, that I was growing slow to absorb the latest terminologies, that the traveling life was taking a toll on my body. This windfall wouldn’t be enough for me to quit my job, but it would no doubt alleviate some pain, provide some solace and relief.

I was immersed in the rosy prospect when the old man took out a small black notebook from the bottom of the box. He fished out a pen from his jacket’s inside pocket and gave it to me.

“Whenever you’re ready,” he said.

“Ready for what?” I asked.

“Sign your name on whatever page you like.”

I stared at the little notebook, its corners slightly tarnished, a few scratches on the surface. My body began to cool down.

“Do I have to?” I winced inward at my slightly trembling voice.

“I just gave you twenty thousand dollars for nothing. Surely I can know your name?”

“Right…”

“I’d like to check the name against your phone, if you don’t mind.” he said placidly. “I believe honesty to be everything. Whether it comes to people’s names or twenty thousand dollars. Don’t you think?”

“Maybe,” I answered evasively. Sweat began to seep through my shirt, even though the room, with its ceramic floor tiles, was as cool and unperturbed as a lake.

He thrust the pen into my hand and flipped through the notebook in front of me. It was almost unused, and because it had been saved in the wooden box for who knew how long, its pages were yellow and buttery but generally wrinkleless. It must feel quite good to write on it. I swallowed.

I took the notebook from his hand, wrecking my brain for some way to procrastinate, or wear out his patience until he decided my signature was unnecessary. Strangely, the way things developed made me feel extremely uncomfortable in surrendering my name, even though I’d given it to numerous meaningless forms in the past.

The difference was, when filling out those meaningless forms, I had gained nothing and expected nothing in return. In this case, I was to take home a generous amount of money. Something was sure to be taken away from me if I signed it.

Opening the notebook at a blank page, I was about to flip it through like the old man just did, but he stopped me.

“Please don’t look at other people’s pages,” he said. “I respect your privacy as much as theirs.”

“There were other people?” I stared at him. “You’ve given money to them as well? What have they done with it?” What I really wanted to know was: What had happened to them?

“You don’t need to know that.” he said, smiling placidly.

For a second I wanted to slap that stupid smile off his old wrinkled face. There was nothing funny about surrendering one’s name to a stranger. Name, after all, was the only thing we could hold onto after our body was gone. The more I thought, the more unnerved I was, so much so that I wanted to dash out of this sinister house and immerse myself in what remained of the daylight.

“Having second thoughts?” he said. “Well, some people do get cold feet at the last minute. You can always change your mind.” He reached out a hand for the solid bundle of cash.

I hesitated a little and took a step back. Before I knew it, I had scribbled my name on the page and almost tossed the notebook and the pen at him. He dodged the pen and received the notebook agilely.

“Now spend it however you want, my friend.”

I tucked the cash under the towels and unwashed clothes in the suitcase and stepped out of the bungalow. The sun had almost sunken completely behind the horizon; the air thickened in the bluish twilight. In the distance I could barely make out the sprinkles of canola flowers in the fields. A gigantic plane scraped over the top of the nearby bungalows. Not a single soul in sight.

I found the bumpy path that led me to the old man’s house and rolled my suitcase absent-mindedly along it, not minding if it rattled against the sharp pebbles. What happened in the house weighed heavily on my chest. The more I thought about it, the more unnerved I became. What use could he have for my name? Would he use it to forge my identity? Would he blackmail me and my family in the future? Was he a witch? Did he need my signature for a spell?

The last question made me realize how agitated and uneasy I was. Regret began to overwhelm me on this abandoned country road. When I could no longer bear it, I swerved around and returned to the old man’s bungalow. I hid my suitcase behind a tree and found a shovel resting against the wall in the shade. I picked up the shovel and pushed open the door, which wasn’t locked when I left the house. In the dimness, the old man was sitting in front of his computer, murmuring as he clicked the mouse. Gingerly I tiptoed across the room and hit his head with the shovel before he could make a sound. After rearranging his body so that it wouldn’t collapse, I went into the bedroom in search of the wooden box. On the top of his nightstand I found it, sitting beside a small lamp and a few pill bottles. I shook the box open and found the notebook.

Leafing through the pages, I found the only other page that had any word on it. It was just a name in faded ink, written the same way as the phrase on the old man’s pickup sign, slanting slightly towards the right, as if yielding to an invisible gust of wind.