THE INFINITE CASHBACK SYSTEM

The Last Money

Ethan Carter

By Saturday morning, Ethan had learned that a quiet apartment has its own kind of noise.

The refrigerator. The radiator was ticking. A dripping faucet he had been meaning to fix since spring. Without Victoria's voice filling in the gaps, every sound in the place seemed to point at him.

He sat at the kitchen table with a notebook and a pen. The blue lamp glowed beside him. He had turned it on last night and hadn't been able to make himself turn it off.

He opened the banking app first, because he was a man who believed in facing things.

Available balance: $287.16.

It had dropped again overnight. A streaming subscription he had forgotten to cancel, fifteen ninety-nine, and a bank f*e for dipping under the minimum. Twenty-five dollars, gone, for the crime of being poor.

They charge you extra for that. Isn't that something?

He wrote the number at the top of the page and drew a line under it. Then he started the list on the other side, the way his mother had taught him when he was a kid and the money ran short. Write it down. It's smaller on paper than it is in your head.

Rent this month: $1,150.

Rent, last month, still owed: $425. (Mrs Petrakis had let it slide because he'd brought her soup when she was sick. He had promised to make it up first.)

Credit card: $1,900. (Most of it from the winter, when the heater broke and his landlord said it wasn't her problem.)

Clinic bill: $640. (The ER visit two years ago that he still didn't like thinking about.)

Phone, electric: about $140.

He added it. Then added it again, slower, hoping the first answer had been a mistake.

Four thousand, two hundred fifty-five dollars.

Against two hundred eighty-seven.

Ethan put the pen down and pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes until he saw colours. The number sat there on the page, small and neat and impossible.

Fine. Okay. Think.

He could find another job. Of course he could. He had four years of experience, a spotless record, a résumé any dispatch office should want. But he had also spent the whole night at the kitchen table sending applications, and by dawn, three automated replies had arrived. We've received your application. Nothing else.

And even if someone called him on Monday, the first paycheck was three weeks away. Rent was in seven days.

There was the paycheck Northline owed him. He called Denise at 9:00 and got voicemail. He called again at 9:40. He left a message that sounded calmer than he felt. Then he sat and watched the clock on the stove, which was four minutes fast, and which Victoria had never let him fix because she liked being early.

Stop thinking about her.

He thought about her.

At noon, he put on his shoes and walked to the corner market, because he needed to eat and because sitting still had started to feel dangerous.

The store was small and bright and smelled like bleach and oranges. Ethan took a basket and made a rule for himself. Twenty dollars. That's the limit. Whatever fits.

It turned out to be a strange kind of math. Rice, a big bag, was cheaper per pound but cost more up front. A can of beans, two for three dollars. Eggs. Bread. He picked up a jar of peanut butter, then put it back, then picked it up again, then stood there like a man defusing a bomb.

A woman reached past him for the good peanut butter, the kind with no sugar. She glanced at his face, and he saw her expression change, just slightly. She had seen what he was doing. He knew what it looked like. He had seen it on other people's faces for years and never understood how much it stung.

Don't. Please don't be kind to me.

She smiled and said nothing and moved on. He set the peanut butter in the basket and walked to the register as if he had chosen it freely.

His phone buzzed while the cashier scanned the eggs.

Marcus: Heard about Northline. Everyone's talking about it. I'm so sorry, man. Come by tonight. Elena's making that chicken thing you like.

Ethan looked at the message until the cashier said, "Sir? That's eighteen forty."

He paid. He put the change back in his wallet, all sixty cents of it, and carried the bag outside. Then he stood on the sidewalk and read Marcus's text again.

Marcus Bell. They had started on the dock the same week, both twenty-two, both too proud to admit they were scared. Marcus had a wife now. Elena. She was seven months pregnant, and they were living in a two-bedroom over a laundromat, and Marcus was working doubles every weekend to save for the baby.

He was also the man who had covered two months of Ethan's rent last winter, when Ethan's mother got sick and the money went to the hospital. Marcus had never mentioned it. Not once. He had just quietly stopped letting Ethan pay for lunch, and Ethan hadn't known how to stop him.

Ethan had paid him back, slowly, in pieces. Two hundred, then a hundred and fifty. There were still nine hundred left, and Marcus had told him twice to forget it.

He would give me the money tonight. He'd probably empty his wallet on the table before I finished the sentence.

That was exactly the problem.

Ethan opened the messaging screen. He typed: Hey, could I borrow

He stopped.

He pictured Elena's face. Marcus's hands cracked from the cold. The nursery they were painting themselves because they couldn't afford anyone to do it. He pictured Elena quietly setting a plate in front of him, and Marcus not looking at him too hard, and the two of them doing their own math in the kitchen after he left.

Four hundred dollars is a week of diapers.

He deleted the message.

He typed something else. Thanks, man. Rough day. I'm okay. Rain check on dinner? And he added a little smiling face, which he hated, and hit send before he could think better of it.

Marcus's reply came in seconds. You sure? You don't have to be okay with me.

I know, Ethan thought. That's what makes it harder.

I'm sure, he wrote. Talk soon.

He walked home slowly, past the shuttered hardware store and the bakery that smelled like someone else's good morning. A kid on a scooter almost hit him. A man outside the laundromat was arguing with his phone. Everything looked the same as it had a week ago, and it seemed unfair, somehow, that the world hadn't noticed.

In the lobby, he ran into Mrs Petrakis, checking her mailbox with the slow care of a woman who no longer trusted her knees. She was seventy-three, five feet tall, and owned the building outright. She had once told Ethan that she'd bought it with her husband's life insurance and her own stubbornness.

"Ethan." She looked at the grocery bag, then at him. Her eyes were sharp, but not unkind. "You look thin."

"Long week, Mrs Petrakis."

"Mm. The first is coming." She said it gently, the way you remind someone about a dentist appointment. "I don't like to ask. But my son does the books now, and he does not have my heart."

"I know. You'll have it. All of it."

"I believe you." She patted his arm twice. "You're a good boy. Good boys should not have to hear this from an old woman in a lobby."

He climbed the stairs afterwards with his jaw locked tight. It was worse than being shouted at. She believed him. Everyone believed him. That was the trouble.

At the apartment, he cooked rice and two eggs and ate standing at the counter. It tasted like nothing. He rinsed the plate and dried it and put it away. A man with a plan would do that, he told himself. A man who had things under control.

Then he sat down again with the notebook, and this time he made another list.

People I could ask.

Marcus, crossed out. His old landlord crossed out. A cousin in Ohio he hadn't talked to since the funeral. His father.

He looked at that last name for a while.

His father lived three states away with a woman Ethan had met twice. They talked at Christmas, when Ethan called. It was always the same conversation. How's work? Good. How's the weather? Cold. His father was a man who had spent his whole life asking for help and had never once, in Ethan's memory, been given enough.

Ethan crossed out his father's name too not out of anger, but out of something worse. Recognition.

I'm going to end up like him.

The thought came up from somewhere deep and cold, and it was so clear that he sat very still for a moment.

Cap in my hands. Voice folding. A stranger who won't look up from his paper.

"No," he said out loud. His own voice startled him in the empty room. "No."

He got up and washed his face at the kitchen sink. The water was almost too cold to stand. He held his hands under it until they hurt.

I've been leaning on people my whole life. That was the truth under the pride. His mother had carried him through school on double shifts. Marcus had carried him through the winter. Victoria had carried him for three years in ways he was only now beginning to understand: the groceries she picked up without saying anything, the rent she quietly rounded up when he was short. He had let her. He had let all of them, and told himself it was love.

And where did it get me? A man with three hundred dollars and a list of names I'm too ashamed to call.

Something shifted in him then, smaller and meaner than courage. It was a refusal.

I'm not asking anyone. Not this time. If I go under, I go under on my own.

It wasn't a wise decision a smarter man would have picked up the phone but Ethan had been holding his spine straight for so long, on so little, that he no longer knew how to bend it.

He turned off the kitchen light and went to lie down.

The bedroom was dark except for the streetlight leaking through the blinds. He lay on his side of the bed with his eyes open. On the nightstand, Victoria's hair tie was still wrapped around the base of the lamp, a small black loop she had forgotten. He didn't touch it.

Tomorrow I'll find something. Anything. Loading trucks. Delivering pizzas. Anything.

He thought about tomorrow's applications, and the day after that. He thought about how many hours a man could go on saying thank you for your time to inboxes that never answered. He tried to picture the exact moment the money would run out, and could not. It was like trying to see the bottom of a well.

Eventually, sleep came, thin and restless, the kind that leaves you more tired than before.

Sometime past midnight, a sound pulled him out of it.

It wasn't loud. A faint chime, clear as a small bell struck once. It hung in the dark like a held breath.

Ethan lay motionless. The apartment was silent, not the neighbour's TV, not the radiator. The sound had come from inside the room, or, he thought, with a prickle up his arms, from inside his own head.

Ding.

There it was again.

Then a soft blue light began to spread across the ceiling, though his phone lay dark on the nightstand and there were no lamps on.

Ethan sat up very slowly, his heart hammering.

And in the blue glow, words began to appear in the empty air.