He doesn’t really know me, thought Alice. After that, she rarely talked to him about her other life. It was the first thing that she knew they would not have in common, the end of that time when everything seems possible, when bodies feel endless in each other’s arms.
Alice could see past Michael, now. She tried to make up for this by mothering him. He needed help with his class work. She would re-explain calculus to him at the kitchen table, the one where her parents used to play chess. It took up a lot of her time in the evenings. Often, to make up for this, she would work late in her old bedroom, then smoke hash or weed to help her get to sleep. Sometimes, she’d fall asleep in there, in her old bed. If you had told her, a year before, that they could be in the same house and not sleep together, it would have sounded nuts.
One night, she woke up alone in the small hours, in her old bed, fully dressed. She couldn’t remember going to sleep.
There was a sound outside the door. It was what had awoken her. A floorboard creaked as if a weight was lifting off it. She lay there, listening. The sound came again, and again. But the sound had a rhythm. Old timbers were settling. There was no one sneaking about in the hall.
After her first relief, it came to her that she would have liked to hear the bedroom door opening, and see Michael’s shadow, tiptoeing in to join her. There would be barely enough room for two in this narrow bed. It would be like the first times, when they’d lain pressed together all night, wasting the space of her parents’ king-size mattress. It seemed to her, alone in the dark, that sleeping together in here would feel hot and adolescent. Weren’t they adolescents still? It would feel transgressive. They had never done it in her old bed before. They could stifle their noises, pretend that her parents were sleeping next door.
She wondered to what extent her love for Michael – and his love for her, if that’s what it was – was bound up with physical warmth, and comfort and shelter: the same things she’d been given, in a different form, by her parents. Would animal warmth be enough to keep them together when there were other things that would pull them apart? She decided, after some thought, staring at the street light in the gap above the blinds, that warmth would be enough for her, for now. Alice was a dreamer, but she was also pragmatic. She got up, took her clothes off, and tiptoed next door.
One evening, in the first semester of their third year at college, Michael cycled home from class, cold and soaked, and found Alice waiting for him with a bottle of wine.
I’ve decided to drop out of school, she said.
By now, Alice was earning good money by tutoring students in the years above her. Headhunters emailed, even called her on the phone. Still, Michael pretended that he was surprised.
Why?
I’ve been working on a thing of my own. I didn’t tell you about it before because I wasn’t sure it could work. Now, I think it can. If you want, you can do it with me.
I’m not like you, Alice. I’ll need a degree to get work after college.
Not if you’re working for me.
She didn’t notice how this stung him. She went on:
I’ll handle all the coding and stuff. You’ll do what admin there is, and the front and back of house. There won’t be much of that, but you’d be very useful. A lot of people in this scene don’t like dealing with women.
So I’d be your beard.
You’d be my partner.
Tell me about it, he said at last.
She poured him some wine.
Here’s what it is: it’s a distributed peer-to-peer cash ledger, a lot like a blockchain, but maintained altruistically, as a co-op, with no coin mining and no environmental cost.
Sorry?
OK . . . It’s a new kind of bank. Sort of. But for cash only. It stores all its cash with its customers, and moves it on demand from person to person, without any middleman. Like a dating app for money. Or a crowd-sourced ATM.
I don’t get it.
OK . . . Suppose you belong to our network. You’ve installed our app and paid in a deposit, maybe a few hundred bucks. Later, if you needed some cash, you would order it from our app, just like you’d order pizza or a taxi. Our network would find a member nearby who was holding some cash and wanted to offload it. You’d arrange to meet them somewhere secure. You’d use the app to authenticate the transaction, they’d hand you the cash, then you’d go your own ways.
What’s wrong with regular ATMs?
They charge ridiculous fees. And worse than that, they’re watching us – them and everyone else who has access to their data.
So it’s really about secrecy?
It’s about freedom. Think about it: you can’t get paid anymore, or make most kinds of payments, without going through the servers of a credit card or a bank. Some countries are even talking about banning cash completely, and pushing all payments online. And Silicon Valley wants to take it a step further and launch its own cryptocurrency. OmniCent, they’re calling it. Campbell Fess and Inscape are taking the lead, because they dominate fintech. If it works the way I think it would, it could end up replacing all the money in the world.
How is your thing different from that? Or any other cryptocurrency?
It’s totally different. Mine is based on cash, not control of online data. Cash is our last freedom. Without it, whoever controls the machines controls all the money, and controls all of us. In The Handmaid’s Tale, they turned women into serfs overnight by transferring all their money into accounts owned by their men. Soon, that won’t be fiction: they could switch off anyone they don’t like. But as long as there’s cash, we still have some wriggle room. We can log off, put our phone in a drawer, take a bus and pay in change, or buy a hot dog from a stand. And we can give a few coins to some poor bastard on East Hastings so they can buy something that’s bad for them but they really need. Which is why we’ll handle small change too, on principle. The banks won’t give you change for a buck anymore. But we will.
Seriously? Who the hell is going to go online to ask a stranger for loonies or quarters?
Maybe someone who’s too shy to ask a stranger on the street. Maybe someone who’s looking for change for a payphone.
Payphones? Do they still exist?
Sure they do. People just don’t notice them anymore because we’ve all got our own smart phones. But I see them everywhere. They’re invisible time machines. Like the Tardis.
How is this going to make us money?
It won’t.
What?
It won’t make any money. We won’t offer loans, or invest the deposits. No interest, no profits, no bank charges, no creation of sketchy new money through reckless lending. It’ll be completely frictionless.
How are we supposed to eat, if we’re not getting paid?
I can earn enough by freelance coding to keep us both going. We’ll keep our names out of it, and when the project is up and running we’ll just disappear. Like Satoshi Nakamoto. Or Keyser Söze. No one even needs to know who we are.
You’re bullshitting me, aren’t you? You’re not really going to do this?
I’m calling it Yoyodime. It’s a pun – like the Yoyodyne corporation, in Thomas Pynchon.
I haven’t read him.
You don’t read enough fiction, Michael. You’d be surprised what you could learn.
It’s a crazy idea.
You don’t want to do it?
Michael had never told Alice about the bag of money on the floor of the empty Alberta apartment. When they’d first met, he told her that he was paying his way through college with compensation from the trucking firm whose driver killed his folks. He must have wanted to seem more substantial than he was. In fact, the insurance wouldn’t pay out for his parents because it couldn’t find any trace of their legal existence. Michael must not have wanted Alice to know this, or that he had taken that money, not knowing who it really belonged to. To make thing
s worse, the cash hadn’t lasted as long as he’d expected; Vancouver was even more expensive than he’d thought. Now it was almost spent, and he still couldn’t tell her.
It’s different for me, Alice. I’ll need a degree to get any kind of real job. Things don’t come easy to people like me. Not like for you.
His gesture took in the house, Alice, the wine on the table.
And Alice, hurt again, believed then what she hadn’t believed before, that maybe he too could see past the pair of them. She never mentioned Yoyodime to Michael again. Secrets breed secrets.
Every summer they would get jobs in the Rockies, working in tourist resorts, hiking the trails. For Alice, it wasn’t so much for the money as the chance to be outdoors. For Michael, it was both. There was another reason too: summers in Jasper gave them something in common.
A week before the summer vacation in Michael’s third year, when he was on campus, sitting an exam, Alice opened a letter addressed to her parents. It was from the estate of the woman who owned the house, telling them that she was dead. The house had already been sold to an overseas property trust that rented out period homes in bijou locations. So much for first refusal.
The letter noted that Alice’s family didn’t seem to have a formal lease or written agreement with the late owner of the house. It advised them to make contact with the new owners’ representatives, details enclosed.
Alice said nothing to Michael, and sent off an email.
Two days later a letter arrived from a company called Mayfield Real Estate Investment Trust, with an address at the office of a big downtown law firm. This letter acknowledged that the Fields seemed to have had an informal arrangement with the previous proprietor, and therefore the new owners were prepared to give them a chance to enter into a new tenancy agreement.
There it was: a first refusal, of sorts.
If they wished to formalise their tenancy, they should please provide the listed documents, guarantees, and deposit, and sign the enclosed lease. Rent had been adjusted in line with the present market rates in Kitsilano, a district considered highly desirable for its bayside location and bohemian history. If this was not satisfactory, they should please get ready to vacate the house.
Alice did some sums in her head, hid the letter.
When Michael came home she was making them dinner. She had opened another bottle of wine. He looked at it, and then at her.
What’s wrong?
I can’t go to the mountains this summer. I have work to do here.
Seriously? Work? Not your Yoyodime thing, is it? Or some other cause?
No, it’s not Yoyodime, or any of my causes. I have to take on some more freelance coding. I need the money.
Since when do you give a damn about money?
Since the landlord just raised our rent.
You said the rent hadn’t gone up since the nineties.
Now it has.
How much?
She told him his share of it. He looked surprised.
That’s not as bad as I would have thought, in this market. But we can’t afford it.
I can. I get offers of work all the time.
What about my half? I haven’t got that kind of money.
Then just pay what you pay already. I’ll make up the difference.
She saw that he was tempted. But he put the temptation away.
I’ll pay my full share. But why don’t we just move somewhere else? This house is too big for us, anyway. And there are way cheaper places to rent than Kitsilano.
I’m keeping the house for my parents, for when they retire.
Pensioners can’t pay that kind of rent either, or those prices.
I’ll think of something. Until then, I have to keep up the lease on this house.
Maybe, it occurred to Alice later, it had suited Michael to go to the mountains without her. Maybe they both needed the space and time apart. But he insisted on sending her his share of the rent, all summer long. She couldn’t refuse it.
When he came back in the fall for his final year of university he got a job – or rather, work – delivering takeout food on his bicycle, weekends and nights, taking orders from an app that was based in California. He could have used that time better for studying for classes, where he was struggling, but he was determined to pay Alice his full share of the rent.
To go to work, Michael would put on the cheap spandex shirt that the company had sent him after he paid a non-refundable deposit. He would strap the insulated food box, which he’d also had to pay for, to the back of his mountain bike, and then he’d wait for the app on his phone to ping. When it did, he had seconds to bid against other unseen members of the Neighbourhood Delivery Community for the chance to pick up from a nearby joint. If his bid was accepted, the app would monitor his progress with his phone’s location services. Each delivery was timed and logged by a database, and an algorithm would send him smiley-faced warnings if it thought he was too slow. But the algorithm had been coded in California, and it didn’t seem to know or care about Vancouver conditions, about steep roads, slick with dead leaves and spilled oil, or the insistent rain. He had a couple of falls and collisions that winter, as we can confirm from his medical records. To maintain his performance-related pay rate, he worked most of the way through a dose of the flu, infecting several of his clients. His fitness monitor, which backed his figures up online, tells us that he lost ten pounds. But his tax records show that his earnings, when averaged by the hour, were a good bit less than the minimum wage. The app that he worked for was cashless, and advised its clients not to tip.
At the end of that winter, Alice wrote to her sister that she loved the new tightness in Michael’s muscles, but that he was always too tired to be any fun.
Michael’s chance of being a boss engineer, of pouring concrete, and of spanning northern rivers with bridges of steel, standing in mud in a hard hat and work boots, died in his last year of college. He didn’t get good grades. His best hope now was to go into the admin end of the trade, work in an office, liaise with subcontractors, do a part-time MBA. But he didn’t see that.
You should have gone to business school, Alice thought. Or you should have studied the humanities. You’d have had an easier time at college, and got a better grade on your degree. But she never said that to him. Instead, she watched as he doggedly applied for jobs that he was never going to get, the kind of jobs he had dreamed of. A lot of the students in his year had been hired straight out of college – headhunted, even – but Michael had to fill out forms, tailor his résumé, learn from the web how to fasten a tie – a trick which his father, who’d never worn a tie in his life, hadn’t taught him. She watched him leave for the assessments, the group interviews, the one-to-ones, and – if they really wanted to dick him around – the final interview too, with his five original ideas and PowerPoint presentation. Once, he made it all the way through the process and was offered a six-month internship, unpaid. He couldn’t afford to take it. Meanwhile, he still went out to race his bike against the algorithm. Even so, some months he needed help with his rent.
Alice said she could afford it. She had taken on a big project, coding from home. Michael, having rejected her Yoyodime proposal, felt too guilty to ask her about this new gig. She worked all hours. He would hear her through the door, typing, and he would knock and open the door to find her sitting at her laptop, the screensaver on, trying to smile at him. Other times, she would be lying on her old bed, staring up at the ceiling, and she wouldn’t even see that he was there.
He became jealous of the numbers that competed for her attention. But he couldn’t get at the numbers, so he took it out on her instead. They argued. Most nights, now, she worked late in her office, slept in her old bed. They seldom had sex, and they never went out together. She ate at odd hours, ordering in, and bought hash from a dealer who delivered. She would smoke it while he was out.
Al
ice was now holed up in a cave. She acted like she was frightened of something. Michael must have noticed this. He’d seen fear before, in his parents. And what else could be frightening her, he later told the police, apart from him? He hadn’t known it before, but he did have a temper.
Michael was working an afternoon shift, between Christmas and New Year, when the app on his phone pinged. Someone wanted a pizza at a house in Kitsilano. He bid for the gig, then noticed the address.
He put the pizza on the porch, wheeled his bike into the hall, went back and got the pizza. On the door mat lay a small, square, white envelope with Alice’s name on it, handwritten, no stamp or address. It was unopened. The morning mail was on the table by the door. There were a number of bills, some junk mail, and a letter, already opened.
Michael looked at the letter. He read it, then read it again.
He picked up the mail and the pizza and went down the hall. He could hear her typing in her office. He opened the door and she stopped.
Alice was sitting by the window. She had activated her screensaver, so that all he could see on her screen was Campbell Fess’s winking face. She wore sweatpants and a T-shirt pinpricked with burn holes. He hadn’t seen her in daylight for days. Her eyes were bruised. The room smelled of hashish. She looked at him blankly, then she noticed the pizza.
Oh. You brought it. Thanks.
He put the box on the unmade bed. There was an overflowing ashtray on the floor.
I saw the letter from the landlord, he said. The one you left out in the hall.
Oh.
Did you want me to see it?
No . . . I forgot to put it away. I didn’t think you’d be home yet.
He looked at the letter again, made some calculations.
I thought I was paying half the rent here. But according to this, the rent was twice as high as you told me it was. I’ve only been paying a quarter. You must be paying the rest.
I can afford it.
It says here that they’re raising the rent again.
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