OLD MONEY SMELL

“Mirlande, look at this, it’s locked!” Julián calls out.

Julián and Mirlande are scavengers. They rummage through houses in abandoned towns and neighborhoods. Emmanuel, Mirlande’s father, taught Julián the job but he is retiring. Not that there is much to teach, just go into houses that now belong to no one and find something that can be sold back in the cities. Julián is teaching Mirlande, though Emmanuel had hoped his daughter would pick up something else. ‘Nothing left to scavenge,’ is old man Emmanuel’s saying, ‘everything has been picked.’

Locked doors are a rare find. Emmanuel is right, most houses and apartments have been already ransacked. Mirlande jumps out of the truck and comes running under the rain. Julián pulls out his screwdriver, forces the door lock, and pushes with his elbow to open the door. The air inside the house is stale but for Julián and Mirlande old air is thrilling, the smell of promise.

In some houses, storms, humidity, previous scavengers, or racoons, have broken a window or even torn down a wall. Sometimes, something else has taken over, cats or lizards or the occasional rat, though with people and their groceries gone, rats too are mostly gone. Still, when they do jump out, rats scare the hell out of Julián. Mirlande instead, like her father, is never startled by rats. ‘They make their life, we make ours,’ is what she has to say about it.

A rusty sign on the road told them what the population here used to be, 97,316. The houses of this town all look similar, no one living there was particularly rich, which is why other scavengers have not bothered with this place. From the outside, the narrow house does not look like much, wooden walls painted gray, built for mountain winters. Inside, a small living room, a kitchen, two bedrooms, and a bathroom each, that is all.

Both Julián and Mirlande do what Emmanuel would do if he were here. They head to the bedrooms to look through the drawers. They hope to find rings, necklaces, earrings, any kind of jewelry. Emmanuel always insisted that jewelry means the least weight and volume for the most profit, but finding jewelry is unusual.

However, the drawers and the whole place look like they were cleaned out by whoever lived in it before abandoning it.

“This is all I found,” Mirlande says.

Julián thinks of how Emmanuel would have said something in his Haitian Creole. It always bothered him that Emmanuel would say things that Julián would not understand. Julián would retaliate by cursing in Spanish, but Emmanuel could guess easily what he was saying. Now Julián wishes Mirlande would say something in Creole but she always speaks English around him.

“What is it?” Julián asks.

Mirlande hands him over a black notebook kept closed with a rubber band and with something stuffed inside. When Julián pulls the rubber band to take it off, the band snaps whipping his fingers. Mirlande laughs as Julián shakes off the pain. Their job is lonely, looking through abandoned places. Little accidents like this lighten their day.

Stuffed inside the notebook are $50 dollar bills. Julián counts them. He has not counted paper money in years. Mirlande is too young, but he can remember the smell, the feeling of counting money. He once worked at a gas station. It is at moments like this when the old world comes swirling in unexpectedly.

It was his first job when he was just a bit younger than Mirlande’s age now. The smell of money brings back the smell of gasoline and of car fumes and of the city where he grew up, thousands of miles from here, the city was already had eight million people. He has always lived in crammed cities which is why he likes this job so much. It allows him to get out, and see space, and hear the wind and the birds and the world, not just the permanent noise of voices and speakers and screens. He distrusts silence but he loves the quiet where he can hear tree leaves rustling.

“Twenty-thousand dollars,” he says when he finishes counting.

“Was that a lot of money?” Mirlande asks.

He tells her that yes, it was. Back when there were countries and borders and paper money, it was a lot of money. Here where they found the money, twenty-thousand dollars would have bought a car, or food for a family for a year. In places like the ones where Julián grew up, or in the island where Mirlande’s father, Emmanuel, grew up, that money would buy a house.

“A whole house?” Mirlande asks.

“A whole house,” Julián says.

“And how about here?” she asks. “Could you have bought this house with that money?”

“Not even close,” Julián says.

“Why could you buy an entire house in one place, but not in another with the same money?” she asks.

“I don’t know,” he says.

Julián flips through the pages of the black notebook. He likes finding things that say something about what life used to be like in a place. He likes photographs, diaries, toys. His own children, Tomás and Yamile, like old books. Every time he finds paper books, he brings them with him as gifts. Paper books are no longer being made.

The pages of the notebook however are just filled with columns of figures, sums and subtractions, some dates, and last names. Stewart, Abejuela, Worrell, Kim, Jones. A couple nicknames, Mikey, Fatso. It is an accounting notebook and the money is a part of it but he cannot guess what it was about. He wonders if it was something illegal. But not drugs, the names would not have been made so easily identifiable. Perhaps the owner of the notebook ran a gambling ring. Or maybe it was just personal loans or a family business.

He looks at the last date on the notebook. June 24. It does not say the year, but Julián knows exactly what year, nine years ago. The next day, June 25 was when the announcement came out. All paper money, worldwide, in fact all money backed by governments would cease to be accepted by June 28. Only electronically encrypted currency would be allowed after June 28.

People were told to deposit their paper money in banks by that date and to convert it to electronic currency or lose it. Chaos ensued. The banks were swamped. Some people held to paper money refusing to believe in the change or hoping that the deadline would be extended. Gangs took advantage of the panic and robbed large amounts of cash and set up deals with bankers to get preference to turn the stolen cash into electronic money. The migration to the cities had already begun but after that it became a flood. Living outside the restricted utility and electronic networks of the largest cities became impossible.

Many were not able to deposit their money and bitterly saw that their money had become paper and nothing more than paper.

Julián looks around. The furniture of the place is mostly plastic. Other than jewelry and books and toys, he is always on the look for sturdy, quality wooden furniture which has become impossible to find in the cities and can be sold at a good price.

When Emmanuel tried to dissuade his daughter, Mirlande, from becoming a scavenger like him, she told her father that he no longer knew what to look for, that he did not understand what people now wanted. She said, ‘the old is always the new.’ Vinyl records, old sports shirts, bright clothes. Anything that makes people, especially the young, feel like they are reconstructing the old world, that is what they want.

Julián puts the notebook with the old money down.

“Are you not taking it?” Mirlande asks.

“Nothing of interest,” he says.

“I’ll take it,” she says, and she holds on to the notebook and the money.

They move on to the next house and the next and the next. Mirlande does find some shirts and old tapes that she thinks she can sell. Julián finds books and some old electronics that he thinks he can pass on to collectors at a good price.

Noon comes and goes, the rains and showers stop, and the sun comes out. When they leave the abandoned town, the roads are slick. Julián turns off the self-drive mode of the truck. That is one of the favorite parts of his job. He likes driving, feeling in control, somehow still connected to the machine rather than at its mercy. Human driving is forbidden in the cities and only allowed in the abandoned regions. And driving on the wet roads gives him the pleasure of winding history back. Mirlande however gets nervous. Like all young people, she has a deep fear of human driving.

On the road, they see sunrays filter through the white clouds over the mountains, the beauty is undeniable, something that only people like them, who venture out of the cities, can enjoy. Mirlande relaxes a bit. She takes out the notebook with the old money.

“What are you doing with that?” Julián asks.

“I have found notebooks like these before,” she says. “They are always half-used. I have a couple diaries and someone’s old sketchbook. I continue them. I invent and keep writing their diaries or doodling their sketches, like I am their future selves.”

“What are you doing with this one?” he asks.

She flips through the pages of the notebook. “I don’t know, it’s one thing to imagine someone else’s diary, it’s quite another to fill out columns of numbers. What would you have done with the money, the $20,000?”

Julián laughs, “Once when I was young and dumb like you, I got $2,000 all at once. I went out partying for a week.”

“I may be young, but you really are dumb. I’d know better than to waste it all in a weeklong hangover.”

“So, what are you doing with your newfound money?” he asks.

“I haven’t figured it out,” she says. “I just hadn’t seen that much old money up close.”

She then tells him about things she sees on the screens, little and small, the video games, the commercials, the movies, the music videos. They show images of the old world. She always sees sports cars at full speeding on flawless roads through the plains with mountains in the background. Of course, there is much more happening but those cars on lonely landscapes fascinate her, they seem impossible. Once she saw a movie, this guy on a yellow sports car going through the dessert with a bag full of cash.

“Keeping money in a bag seems so strange to me,” she says. “It is like packing your dreams and zip them closed.”

She then grabs a grabs a handful of the $50 bills and sniffs it. “Ugh, that was a bad idea,” she says. “Hey, speed up, I know what I want to do.”

Julián smiles. “I cannot go fast on these winding hill roads, much less now that they are wet,” he says.

“Just do what you can,” she says.

Julián accelerates. Mirlande buzzes the window down and throws the handful of money out to the wind. They both laugh. The old worthless cash flutters around the truck.

“How is that different from what I did with my old money?” Julián asks.

Mirlande flick the pages of the notebook and gives him a knowing smile, “I know what to keep and what to throw away.”