I’m Broke But I Swear I’m Grateful

I’m Broke But I Swear I’m Grateful

Christine Vines

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“Please Accept This Token of Thanks” by Christine Vines

My sister raises her glass of sangria and clutches her heart, sequined top and cleavage trembling with her gratitude. “You guys are the sweetest,” she says.

It’s her birthday and the three of us—Valda; her best friend, Harriet; and me—are splitting a carafe of prickly pear sangria on the rooftop bar at El Nido. It’s been impossible to get into this place since it opened. I had to book our reservations a month ago and couldn’t get anything earlier than 9pm. Not ideal for a Monday night, but Valda loves exclusive things and I’ve insisted on treating.

Granted, a month ago I thought I’d have a job by now and would be paying for our dinner with real money. I’ve been trying not to use my TOT card unless absolutely necessary, but seeing as I’ve been staying on Valda’s couch for three months, this probably qualifies.

Our server appears and asks if we’re ready to order food. Valda and Harriet nod and work their way down the list of tapas we decided on—Padrón peppers, jerk mussels, dates, mushrooms, calamari, beet salad, lobster thermidor, and sea bass, which are all somehow priced like mains. I try not to do the math in my head, so instead I admire our server’s balayage and wonder if she paid for it with money. It looks expensive. Which I guess is another way of saying it looks good.

When I step inside to find the bathroom, I catch sight of a lanky man hunched in a familiar way over his cocktail. My face goes numb. He throws his head back too far in laughter and I know it’s him.

Years ago, Sam worked at the textbook publisher with me. Just a blip before moving on to the bigger things that had always been waiting for him. Data was a beautiful thing in his hands. Complicated sets poured themselves effortlessly into visuals. The one time we slept together, back when I was harboring delusions of us moving to the Hills and presiding over the city as some kind of power couple, I pictured a time-lapse video he made of phonemes in languages over time—dots migrating across a map of the world that swelled my tongue with longing.

Sam’s work runs on the front page of the Chronicle now. I know his stuff before I even get to the byline. It pulls my eye out of the stories and sets off a hunger in my chest. It’s always the most elegant thing on the screen, a dancing, interactive chart that lights with color as you move your mouse.

I emailed him last year to ask about any job openings at the Chronicle. I’d taken three pay cuts at the textbook publisher by then and knew I wouldn’t outrun the layoffs forever. It was a humiliating email to send and even more humiliating to receive his reply: Audrey, hey! Good to hear from you. Unfortunately nothing that I know of. You’re still at AdAstra, huh? Can’t believe you’ve stuck it out all this time. Good for you. S

1) My name is Aubrey, not Audrey. 2) Obviously I’d memorize this email and the word good would forever lose its meaning.

It’s true that I’m probably not qualified to work at the Chronicle. I’m a good designer, but I can be clumsy with code. I’ve been trying to remedy this, sitting on Valda’s couch all day fiddling with Python and R, trying to animate my static charts and plot in 3D.

I haven’t emailed Sam since I lost the job at AdAstra because the only thing more humiliating than telling him I still work there is telling him I work nowhere.

I force my shoulders back and approach his table. The woman across from him is glamorous and poised. High red ponytail. Gold cuff wrapped around one bicep like something Cleopatra might wear. It makes me think of the interview tip I read, to Wear a fashion statement to spark conversation. I’m wearing a plain gray dress and a silver necklace with a tiny A that hangs below my collarbone. If my outfit is making a statement, it’s whispering.

He sees me and his eyebrows go up. “Audrey, hi!” He asks how I am and introduces the redhead as simply Genevieve, which means they are on a date.

I tell him about the layoff in the brightest tone I can manage, one that indicates it’s no big deal, an opportunity for better things. I smile and remember to Look your interviewer in the eye. “The Chronicle doesn’t need anyone, do they?” I ask, as though this has only just occurred to me. Demonstrate that you’ve familiarized yourself with the company’s work. “I saw your piece about cell phone usage policies and car accidents last week—it was amazing.” I don’t mention that I locked myself in Valda and Dave’s bathroom with it and masturbated on the fuzzy bathmat. Car accidents are not sexy, but the chart was so streamlined and clean and I kept thinking of his fingers moving across the keyboard, punching enter in the same gentle, decisive way he’d curled them into me.

“Oh gosh, thanks,” he says, as though he barely remembers this chart. “But damn, yeah, I don’t think we’re looking for anybody right now.”

“Well,” I shrug, “if anything comes up, I’ve been fleshing out my portfolio. Working on animating a multivariable set right now.” These are probably second nature to Sam, so not a great brag.

“Oh, well, cool.” He nods. “If you want any help, I’d be happy to look it over for you.”

“Wow,” I say. “Yeah, I mean, that’d be great.”

I wonder if Genevieve will feel threatened by his offer, but she smiles brightly.

“Sure,” Sam says. “Send it over. I’ll take a look.”

I think of Valda and her friends, how casually they thank one another for favors with lavish spa days and expensive wine. If I had real money, I could send a fancy fountain pen to Sam’s office later, with a note that says, Thank you for your genius eye! Instead, I take out my phone and say, “I actually won the TOT lottery after the layoff. I’ll send you some TOTs right now.”

They’ve been running a pilot lottery system since the bill passed two years ago. Only ten percent of applicants get approved; it was such a relief when mine went through.

“Oh, cool,” he says. “I mean, you don’t have to.”

People say this, but as with real money, it’s just the cue to say, “I insist.” Which I do.

Between courses—glistening bowls of peppers and mussels, cheese-crusted lobster, all of it outrageously delicious—Harriet asks if I’ve heard anything more from Freeman & Freeman. A week ago, I had a preliminary interview at the finance company she works for after she referred me to HR. It went about as well as it could, given that no part of me wants the job. Or, I should say, only the part of me that wants an apartment of my own again and money for food.

When Harriet told me they were hiring a data visualist at Freeman & Freeman, I’d been staying with Valda and her husband Dave for two months already, listening to Dave every day on his headset through the thin office wall. “Oh, great,” I said, trying to believe it could be great. When she forwarded my resume to HR, I sent her a hundred TOTs from my phone and the caption 📈🤓🤞!

I tell her I’m still waiting to hear back about the performance task I sent in. The datasets they gave me to visualize were complicated and deeply uninteresting. Risk assessment, revenue trends. Analyzing them felt like dragging my brain over gravel. At AdAstra, I made charts of whale migration patterns and human lifespans throughout history. “They said I should hear back tomorrow if I’ve made it to the next stage.”

“Well, I have a good feeling about it,” she says. Harriet is the kind of person who has a good feeling about a lot of things.

When the server with the balayage drops off our check, I lay my TOT card on the tray and slide the A on my neck back and forth on its chain. Like all TOT cards, mine is bright yellow—a horrendous, almost chartreuse that calls as much attention to itself as possible. I’m sure everyone on the rooftop with us can see it. It’s awkward enough using it at the grocery store or on the bus, but here, where churros are thirty-five dollars, I feel like I’m committing a crime. Valda and Harriet generously ignore it.

I remember standing at the voting booth two years ago, clicking Yes on Prop 10: Alternative Banking, and feeling magnanimous. What were a few of my tax dollars to help “redistribute access to those in need”? The FOR column in the ballot booklet listed endorsements from every major state politician and researchers at prominent universities citing the psychological benefits of gratitude. Take your thanks to the banks! The AGAINST column was blank. Now I imagine filling the space with the word “humiliating.”

Still, of course, I’m grateful for it.

When our server comes back, she lifts the check tray and makes only the subtlest of glances around the table, as if wondering which of us is responsible.

A minute later, she returns with a strange look on her face. “Um, I’m sorry,” she says to the table. “This card has been declined.”

“Really?” There’s no way I could’ve maxed it out already. I’ve only had the thing since I lost my job and have used it as sparingly as possible.

She nods. “Do you have, um, a debit card? Or a credit card maybe?”

“Shit.” My spine curls. I dig through my purse, even though I have neither of those things with me and no money in the accounts anyway. In a zippered pocket, I find two yellow tokens worth approximately 3% of this meal. I can’t decide if it’s worse to procure them.

Valda interrupts. “I’ll get it.”

Harriet puts out a hand. “Absolutely not.” She looks up at our server. “It’s her birthday.”

“Happy birthday,” our server says uncomfortably.

Harriet opens her purse. “I’ll get it.” And as easily as one might hand over a napkin, she deposits her blue credit card on the tray.

I check my account from my phone and it reads Uh oh! No remaining Tokens of Thanks ☹️. 

I scroll back through my payments looking for the error, but the math, somehow, adds up. The payment I sent Sam an hour ago maxed it out.

I don’t know how it happened so quickly. The amount I was approved for seemed astronomical at the time. Plenty to tide me over for a brief stint of unemployment. The woman who approved me recommended I pay it off in increments every month. “Some users like to select a recurring date to come in. We can book you for every month on the 1^st? The 15^th?”

I was in the middle of a fight with my landlord at the time, a woman who’d been terrorizing me ever since she’d found out her rent might be arriving in TOTs. She’d turn the water off at random intervals, “in case someone needed to fix the plumbing.” She’d taken two of my windows from their frames and put them in storage, claiming “new ones were on the way.” Flies and bees wandered in freely, and every time I left the apartment I worried my things would be stolen. During my approval call, a squirrel let itself in and knocked over a plant.

I swished at it with a flyswatter and told the woman on the phone I’d have to figure out my payment plan later. “Your limit is on the higher end,” she said. After I’d been selected, I filled out a long questionnaire intended to determine my gratitude capacity. Thankfully, gratitude has always come naturally to me. “I don’t recommend paying it off all at once. Some users find this experience taxing.”

I’d heard grumblings to this effect—a couple of people at AdAstra had accounts—which is maybe why I’ve been putting it off. Also, the Alternative Banking Office is all the way across town and I don’t have a car. I wonder if the tokens in my bag—the remainder of a bonus from when I opened the account—are enough for a ride there tomorrow.

The server returns with Harriet’s card and smiles brightly at her. “Thanks so much.” She turns to Valda. “And happy birthday.”

Valda has a meeting up the 101 the next morning, the wrong direction from the ABO, and Dave has a consultation with a big prospective client, so I tell them I can get myself there. Dave never lets me drive his precious Audi, and the tokens in my bag are only enough to borrow his bike anyway. This is the sort of thing I once imagined would be free—a single ride on a bike that belongs to my brother-in-law. But I hand over the tokens and try not to feel rage as Dave pokes at them in his palm. Nothing is free here.

“Height okay?” he asks, headset already fitted behind his ears, doorknob in hand. He can see that it’s not, and I can see that the answer he needs is yes.

I give a thumbs up and he closes the door to the garage behind him.

The seat must be too high by six inches. I pray it’s one of those easy-adjuster posts, but it’s not. No toolbox or wrench in sight. I hoist myself onto the bike and wobble my way across town, overlarge helmet shifting on my head. It feels like someone is taking a potato peeler to my calves. At red lights, I fall gracelessly, bruise my pelvis on the bar. When I get to the ABO an hour later, I’m so tired I can barely lift my arms to lock the bike.

Entering the lobby is like stepping into a child’s birthday party. Blinding yellow walls. The words Give thanks! and You’re very welcome! in person-sized letters across them. Smiley faces in the exclamation marks.

I tell the woman at the front desk I’m here to pay off my charges. “Wonderful.” She smiles. “Do you have an appointment?”

I explain that my card maxed out last night and I came right away.

“Oh, hmm. Maxed out?”

I nod.

“That may be a slight problem.” She types something into her computer. “There’s a surcharge for walk-ins, so you’d need to have some cushion in your account.”

Shit.

“We have an appointment. . .,” she scrolls, clicks, types, “. . .next week if you want to come back then?”

I imagine biking back across town. A week without spending. I need TOTs for everything.

“I. . . can’t.” I look around the room, at the few people filling out forms or waiting with a clipboard in hand. “Can I wait here, maybe, until there’s a cancelation?”

She offers a sympathetic frown. “That would still be a walk-in, I’m afraid.” She must see the distress in my eyes, because she reaches out a hand and lays it gently on mine. The nerves in my fingers throb, skin rubbed raw from gripping the handlebars too tightly. “Let me see what I can do.” She gets up and disappears behind a yellow door.

When she returns, she’s smiling like the exclamation marks on the walls. “Great news. I spoke with my manager and he says he’ll waive your surcharge if you clear the account.”

“Clear the account?”

“Just, pay the whole balance today.”

“Oh.” I exhale. “Sure, I can do that, sure.”

“Perfect.” She hands me a form to fill out and a yellow pen. “Oh good,” she says. “You brought a helmet.”

When my name is called, a man with a retractable keycard swipes us through a heavy door into a yellow hallway. We pass door after door, behind which I hear muffled music or silence. As we turn the corner, a door marked Room 7 opens and the sound of weeping escapes. The words “I am” pierce the hall. A man in a yellow lab coat locks the door behind him. He makes a quick Yikes or Woops face at the man I’m following.

“Is that person okay?” I ask the man with the keycard.

“He’ll be fine.”

We turn down another hallway. “He didn’t really sound fine.”

“Have you been here before?” he asks over his shoulder.

I shake my head.

“It’s all non-invasive. Completely safe, medically-speaking.”

“Medically-speaking. . .” I read all the paperwork when I was setting up the account—my mother taught me to never sign anything without reading every word—but the section about the repayment process was just a long, scientifically dense description of a brain scan.

He waves his hand dismissively. “The rooms back there are for small debt. Some people just bring the dramatics.”

I want to ask how my own debt ranks, but the man stops and unlocks a door. I feel a little woozy, but I follow him into another wing, then into a small room, covered floor-to-ceiling in yellow padding. 

I stash my belongings in a cubby by the door, and the man gestures to a barber chair in the middle of the room. The chair faces a big-screen television and what appears to be a giant thermometer. A long, white wire dangles above the open seat.

“Go ahead and make yourself comfortable. You’ll have a few minutes to clear your mind, then one of our adjusters will be here to help you with the process. Any questions?”

I think about asking if it hurts, but he says, “Okay then,” and slips out the door.

My tailbone stings as I lower myself into the chair.

Eventually, a knock.

“Yep,” I say.

Another man in a yellow lab coat enters, introduces himself as Cameron. I focus on my gratitude that it’s not the man who made the Yikes or Woops face. He settles onto a stool beside a panel of controls and a computer.

“So, Aubrey. How’re we doing today?”

It doesn’t escape my attention that Cameron is extremely attractive, though I’m not sure if this is objectively true or if he just got my name right. I tell him I’m good.

“Great.” He smiles. “I’m told this is your first time.” I nod and he identifies the wire dangling in front of me as the sensor, shows me how to separate the end into two buds that fit in my ears. “Comfortable?” I imagine he’s holding me from behind, moving the hair off my neck. I say yes. 

“Okay, so I’m going to read through your payments, and I want you to think back to the moment of exchange. When you visualize it, a clip from your memory will appear on the Memovision,” he gestures at the TV, “to help you reenter the experience. Then this big guy over here,” he points to the thermometer like they’re old friends, “will take a read on your gratitude levels. When you’ve filled the gauge all the way up, we can move on to the next payment and do it again. Sound good?”

I nod.

“Great. I’m just going to read the company statement before we get started.” He flips a page on his clipboard. “Financial distress has been shown to impact physical and psychological health, leading to higher rates of anxiety, depression, schizophrenia, substance abuse, and suicide.” His voice is strangely chipper. “Fostering and acknowledging gratitude, on the other hand, decreases stress hormones and feelings of anxiety. Regularly practicing gratitude may lead to lasting changes in brain chemistry that promote happiness and wellbeing.” Cameron looks up, smiles. “Today, we’re collecting the necessary receipts to maintain public support and keep this program alive. Incidentally, we’re also providing the client—Aubrey Cline—an important opportunity to spend time with the gratitude they’ve been cultivating since their Alternative Banking account was established. We’re honored to be working with you toward this mutual goal of improving your health and wellbeing!” He turns the clipboard around, hands me a yellow pen. “I just need your signature here, acknowledging the purpose of today’s visit.”

I read the page, like my mother taught me, and sign.

“Okay, we generally start with the smaller payments to ease you in. Work our way up to the big stuff.” I imagine one of his fingers slipping inside me, then another. My chest thrums, pelvis aches. “Ready?”

“Um, yeah.”

He begins with a day in the grocery store when I toppled a corner display of limes. The Sprouts interior appears on the Memovision in soft-focus. It’s the same day my last paycheck from AdAstra came in and those limes felt like my whole life scattering across the produce aisle. A woman weighing grapes stops, bends to pick up the limes between us. “Limes on the run,” she says, like we’re playing a game. Later, when she wound up behind me in line with only a handful of items, I told the cashier to add them to my bill. 

It’s immediate, the feeling that washes through me for this woman. A digital simulation of mercury flies to the top of the gauge. A soft ding sounds.

“Wow,” Cameron says. “That was fast.”

A loud part of my brain wonders if he finds my gratitude attractive.

Cameron reads a series of payments to strangers or people I barely know—bus drivers, cashiers, baristas. Every time red fills the thermometer in a matter of seconds. Red, ding, red, ding, red, ding. A heaviness sags in my chest, but for once I feel powerful, capable. “Whaddaya know,” Cameron says. “No assistance needed.” He laughs, and I think I detect a flush in his cheeks.

Next is a payment to my mother who lives across the country. The Memovision lights up with the soft green of my old living room. Looking at it again makes me sad. My hands appear onscreen, taping up a box, writing KITCHEN on the side of it in Sharpie. My mom comes through the door carrying two pizza boxes and a bottle of wine. “Guess who does To Go food if you ask nicely?” She opens the boxes to reveal sourdough pizza from the fancy restaurant up the block. “Mom,” I hear myself say. “I thought you were gonna get sandwiches from the deli.” “Well,” she says, “I thought this would be a nice treat. No reason.”

Of course, there was a reason. It was my last week in the apartment because my landlord had flat-out refused my TOTs when her harassment campaign hadn’t done the trick. I’m pretty sure this is illegal, but she threatened a lawsuit and I didn’t have the money to gamble on it. It had been ten years since I moved into that rent-controlled studio and my landlord had been itching to get me out ever since rents had skyrocketed. I knew it distressed my mother that she couldn’t help—Valda and Dave had bought their house with a down payment from Dave’s parents—and shame burrowed into me for causing her that. “Let me get it,” my old self says, tapping out the payment on my phone. “You came all the way here to help me move.”

I look over at the gauge and the red wobbles around the mid-point, rising and dipping a few times. Embarrassed, I glance at Cameron, who gives a breathy, sympathetic laugh. “Moms,” he says. “Always tricky.”

But my mother is not tricky and I was grateful. I remember it. Onscreen, my past self slips into the bathroom, sits on the closed toilet. I hear myself start to cry through the speaker and wish Cameron would look away. The gauge dips again. No, I think, no. I close my eyes and imagine digging through a sandbox of my shame, excavating handfuls until I knock against something buried there. I open my eyes. The red climbs in the gauge. My neck cramps, shoulders tense. Ding. 

“Doin’ alright?” Cameron asks.

I nod.

“That’s right, you’re a pro.” He smiles coyly and reads my payment to Harriet. Already, nausea twists behind my eyes. On the Memovision, Harriet sits beside me on Valda’s couch, looking over my resume, assuring me brevity is fine. Freeman & Freeman will love that I’ve been at the same company for so long. “Okay,” she says, “I’m doing it.” She attaches my resume to the email she’s written, clicks send. Her computer makes a whoosh.

Current-me has the impulse to check my phone. It’s possible there’s already an email in my inbox, inviting me to a second interview or beginning, Unfortunately. . . Both possibilities make me feel ill.

I glance at the gauge and am dismayed to see it’s mostly empty, the red hovering at the one-third mark. I was grateful to Harriet—of course I was—and it feels unfair that I should have to prove it. The red dips lower.

Onscreen, Harriet closes the laptop and pours us glasses of white wine. She pours another for Valda and the three of us cheers. “To a bright future for little sis,” Harriet says. I’m older than Valda by two years but her friends always forget this because I’m single and broke.

Valda smiles, features blurrier than Harriet’s. “To movin’ on up.”

When I saw the starting salary at Freeman & Freeman, I thought it was a mistake. It was three times what I’d made at AdAstra. Harriet grimaced when she saw the listing. “I guess our charts people don’t make a ton,” she said and I wondered, for the first time, what her life was like, what it meant for numbers like this to look small.

The red in the gauge drops to the one-fourth mark. I grasp the leather armrests, palms beginning to sweat.

“Would you like some assistance?” Cameron asks.

My heart beats loudly in my ears. I want to say no, but the red drops further. “Um, okay.”

Cameron scoots his chair in and twists a few dials. He types, clicks. “Alrighty. So. It looks like this position is quite a lucrative one, given your employment history.” Cameron can see my employment history? I tell him I’m grateful for the opportunity. But the red drops again.

He looks back at the computer. “Okay. Well. It appears this recipient—Harriet—hasn’t referred anyone to the company in,” he scrolls, “three years.” He looks at me and my heart knocks against the center of my collarbone. I wish Cameron were less attractive so I could focus.

“Her last referral was fired after some account mishandling. Lots of internal drama. . .” His eyes move back and forth across the screen. “Wow, a whole restructuring of the department ensued. She’s been reluctant to attach her name to applications since then.”

The red wobbles and I close my eyes. I didn’t know any of that. I feel a tenderness for her, a growing warmth. She must believe in me, or really love my sister, or both. I open my eyes and the red is rising steadily, slowly. My arms grow heavy. Chest tightens. Ding. I exhale.

“Great,” Cameron says. “Great.” He clicks the mouse and asks if I need a break. I can’t leave the room until the session is over, he explains, but I could stand up, stretch my legs. I shake my head, wanting this to be over and still wondering if I can impress him.

It seems to work, because he says, “Dream client.” He blushes. “Just, sometimes people take these long breaks. Like, totally, move around a bit. It’s when they start staring into space for an hour that I’m like, that can’t be helping? Definitely not with my commission. If you request me,” he says, “I can work your account every time.”

I’m starting to feel like I might throw up, but I say, “Yeah. Definitely.”

Then he reads my weekly payments to Valda, which he decides to lump into one large payment with a keystroke. My hand appears on the Memovision, carrying suitcases into Valda’s apartment, stacking them in the corner of Dave’s office beside the pull-out.

I’m scared to look at the gauge. I’m grateful, so grateful, but I’m aware of other feelings closer to the surface. Shame, annoyance. A general sense of inadequacy for mooching off my little sister. The loathing that surges whenever Dave is around. 

When I do look at the gauge, the red is all over the place. Quivering, jumping, falling. Cameron says, “This happens with recurring payments. It’s aggregating data over time, so it may take a minute to settle.”

When I first mentioned rent to Valda, she made a face. “Rent?” But Dave interjected that they’d probably have more expenses with a third resident. “Might as well take some help from the government.” I’d been happy to—wanted to—send her a TOT payment until he said that. It felt good to know I could offer something. But Dave saw it as the government’s money anyway, as rightfully his. Suddenly I wanted Valda to put her foot down. To say, Aubrey doesn’t owe us anything. Aubrey’s family. Aubrey has worked her ass off and we only have this house because someone else put down the money for it. Instead, she shrugged. Said, “If you really want to.” 

I watch breathlessly as the fluctuations slow and the red teeters in the middle. Not terrible, I think. Then the red spikes once more and drains almost entirely from the gauge. Shit.

“Okay, well, no worries,” Cameron says. “That’s what I’m here for.” He toggles some buttons, types. “So.” Bounces his head as he reads. “This payment is significantly lower than the rent in your prior apartment.”

I try to focus on the amount I’m saving, but the Memovision displays a bleary image of Dave’s office as my alarm goes off at 5:25 a.m. He works for a travel agency headquartered on the other coast, so I need to be out of the room by 5:30. Like every other morning, I strip the sheets from the pull-out, fold it back up, drag the marble coffee table back in front of the couch so it all looks untouched. Dave knocks on the door at 5:29, says, “Okie doke,” a phrase I’ve come to loathe.

The sliver of red that was visible at the bottom of the gauge disappears and a sound like a car alarm comes through the speaker. I startle and Cameron shouts over the noise. “It’s okay!” He twists a dial. “Let’s do a counterfactual, okay? You’ll have a little more control there.”

I don’t know what that means, but I nod.

“I’m initiating a park sequence!” he shouts. Clicks, types. A dimly lit park appears on the screen. Chain-link fence, dead grass, a single bench surrounded by broken glass. It looks like no park I’ve seen in town, but Cameron tells me to envision myself there.

It’s hard to imagine anything with the alarm still blaring, but sure enough, my body appears onscreen like a character in a video game. I’m wearing grimy sweatpants and a sweatshirt I do not own.

“The sun has set,” Cameron shouts over the alarm, “it’s getting cold.” My avatar shivers and I feel it too. “You lie down on the bench and try to sleep.”

My avatar approaches the bench. It’s covered in bird shit. I look at Cameron and he nods, encouraging. Surely this is not actually the alternative to staying with Valda and Dave? Couldn’t I have flown home and stayed with my mother? Built out my portfolio from her bedroom while her book club drank margaritas down the hall?

The park onscreen begins to melt and Cameron says over the alarm, “Ope, ope. Gotta focus. We’ll have to reboot if you wipe this scene.”

I inhale and feel the night chill again. When my avatar lies on the bench, the metal is hard and I feel it in my hip. Or maybe that’s from this morning when I fell off Dave’s bike.

I think about how this is the reality for so many people, people who are not me, and I recall the give of the pull-out couch in Dave’s office, the goose down duvet Valda pulled from storage. The alarm goes quiet and I try not to think about the ethics of using other people’s misfortune to pay off my debt. A tiny bit of red shows in the gauge. The park fades from the Memovision and Valda’s living room replaces it, my legs folded into the sectional, computer open on my lap to a screenful of code. The red climbs incrementally as I focus on the warmth, the WiFi, the fridge full of food. Dave’s voice comes through the walls. “. . .fewer of our deliverables. . .” His work-laugh is a stone skipping water. “. . .absolutely position this to your liking. . .” Their Pomeranian, Randy, whines to go outside. It’s my job to walk him now, to feed him and pick up after him, since I’m “free all day.”

The red dips again. My throat tightens. Something scrapes in my lungs.

“If I may,” Cameron says. “This payment was made to—,” he checks his screen, “—Valda Cline?” I nod. “She hasn’t made many appearances.”

I see far more of Dave than I do of Valda, but it’s true the payment goes to her. I breathe and remember the day I moved in. On the Memovision, she FaceTimes our mother and says, “Guess who gets a permanent sleepover!” When she was little, she used to beg to sleep in my room. She’s thirty-two now and works eighty hours a week, but insisted this arrangement would be fun, would be just like when we were kids. The red totters in the gauge, climbs slowly.

It hasn’t, of course, been just like when we were kids. 

When we were kids, there was no Dave, asking every day when I think I’ll have a job. No Dave, planning extravagant outings every weekend—wine country, hot springs, trips to Hawaii—because he knows I can’t afford to come. I keep expecting Valda to notice, to suggest we stay in and play board games one weekend. Valda and I grew up with the same lack of money, but you wouldn’t know it from the way she pouts and calls me a party pooper for never wanting to use my TOT card on fun things. “You have free money right now!” she says. “Live a little!”

The red in the gauge is erratic again—down, up, back down. All of these things have unfolded on the Memovision.

“Hmm,” Cameron says. “How about another counterfactual? We can do something a little more targeted.”

“Um. I don’t know.”

Cameron nods. “They can be uncomfortable, but they’re a very efficient way of extracting gratitude.”

The word extracting makes me shiver.

“Let’s just try it out, see how you do.”

I say nothing and he taps the keyboard. My avatar appears onscreen again, this time in a yellow sundress I’ve never seen before. A living room materializes around me that looks like a set from a play. Bland hotel art surrounds a giant wall mirror. “This is your home,” Cameron says, and I think, Mine, okay, I could be grateful for that.

A man walks through the door in a blue business suit, sets a briefcase on the ground. He looks not unlike like Sam. “Honey,” he calls to me, “I’m home,” even though I’m standing right there. My avatar walks to greet him and I decide to indulge this hypothetical with a long kiss, a bit of tongue. The character onscreen doesn’t seem to expect this. He freezes momentarily, says, “Thank you, my wife.” Then something changes in his demeanor. He lifts his nose, sniffs. “Where is dinner?” he says angrily. “I have worked all day and am hungry.”

I stifle a laugh. I, too, have been cooking dinners for Valda and Dave. Because they have worked, because I am “free.” It’s not exactly the same tired plot here, but it’s not so far off.

I imagine my avatar saying, “I’ve been busy today too,” and she does. “With the baby,” I add, for maximum defensibility. A crib pops onto the screen. Cool. Just like that, a baby.

“Our baby does nothing all day!” my husband shouts. “Just like you!”

Jesus, I think, and my avatar repeats this. “Jesus.”

“What did you say?” he screams. I don’t know who wrote this script, but we’ve gone from zero to a hundred. My husband grabs my avatar by her dress collar and throws her to the ground. My jaw drops. What the fuck, I think. My avatar says, “What the fuck.”

“You are useless,” he screams. Veins pop in his neck as he lifts my avatar by her waist and throws her directly into the mirror on the wall. The mirror shatters and rains down around her.

“What the fuck,” I scream.

“What the fuck,” my avatar screams.

My head throbs like it has hit something. I close my eyes to block out the scene. No fucking way am I doing this. Getting gratitude this way. Extracting. My mother has alluded to the three years of her marriage to our father, before she left him, before he lost parental rights. I know it involved yelling, broken things. But I open my eyes and the red climbs in the gauge. My stomach turns.

“Great,” Cameron says. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”

I feel nauseous, heavy-limbed. I focus as hard as I can on Valda. Guess who gets a permanent sleepover! Finally, her face overtakes this horrible scene on the Memovision. I’m so relieved I could cry—Valda hugging me from behind when she gets home from work; Valda listening to me talk about the new chart I finished, even though she still doesn’t understand scrollytelling; Valda loaning me a dress for the Freeman & Freeman interview. The red passes the halfway mark, the two-thirds, higher. I feel all the bones in my ribcage when I breathe.

I’ve been trying to make myself small at their house—never leaving a dish unwashed or a crumb on the table, keeping my belongings folded and stashed in suitcases. Last week, I was curled into a blanket in the corner of the couch and Valda accidentally sat on me. “Oh my God!” she said. “I thought you were a blanket.” I felt strangely proud. She sat back down on me intentionally. “Best blanket.” Now, in the barber chair, the memory of her weight in my lap grows, expands. Crushes something in my tailbone. I can’t breathe. Why can’t I breathe?

“Stop, stop,” I gasp. I want to tear the sensors from my ears, but for some reason, I can’t. My arms won’t move. “What’s happening?”

Cameron hits a button. The Memovision pauses on a close-up of Valda’s face. “You okay?”

I tell him my arms won’t move and he says, “Shoot, okay. We’ll take a break.” He retrieves the clipboard. Flips several pages, scans. “Are your fingers tingling?”

Yes, I realize, nodding.

“No problem. We can work that out.” He scribbles something on the clipboard and rolls his stool over to mine, asks if I consent to a massage.

“Um, okay.” I feel myself blushing.

He lifts my left arm and, to my horror, I feel nothing. I ask if I should be worried about that and he says, “Nah. The feeling will come back in a second.” As he massages my arm, he says, “I know this can be a little—unsettling. But the research on gratitude shows tons of benefits. Reduced stress, stronger immune system. You’ll even sleep better.”

I’m having trouble listening, because the feeling is returning to my left arm and Cameron’s touch is soft and gentle. He rolls to my other side, works his way down my right arm. My palms begins to sweat. I realize I’ve been sweating for a while. My left hand comes away slick from my temples. A faint odor’s coming off me. “Could I, maybe, have a towel?”

I once read that a post-workout flush is attractive to potential mates—something about replicating the exertion of sex—but I’ve never sweat sexily. Valda calls me a lollipop when I get home from a run, my face bright red. When I can lift both arms to his satisfaction, Cameron digs through a drawer and tosses a hand towel into my lap.

“Okay.” He marks something on his clipboard and looks at the gauge, which seems to have emptied again during the massage. “We can finish this payment now if you want, but I’d suggest we move on and loop back at the end. Clear out what you can first. Bigger doesn’t always mean harder.”

I flush and feel crazy for hearing innuendo in everything he says. “Okay. Sure.”

He taps the keyboard. “Alrighty then. Only one other payment.” He sounds delighted, but I know which one it must be. I don’t understand how it could be bigger than my weekly rent, but Cameron adds, “This one does come with an overdraft fee. Pretty hefty, I’m afraid. That’ll get ya.” I take the opportunity to bury my face in the hand towel and soak up the sweat that drips from my hairline. The fibers are rough against my skin.

“Ready?”

I breathe in the scent of lemon detergent and something plastic and wonder what will happen if I don’t move or respond.

“You’re so close, Aubrey.”

My neck seizes. I can feel the hollow in my chest where something has been wrested from me. There is, I imagine, an inverse correlation between gratitude and the amount of gratitude demanded of you. I see the scatter plot in my head and the dots dropping sharply off, stray limes rolling down a hill.

“Not to rush you, but my lunch break is coming up in a few minutes here.”

Behind the hand towel, I imagine finishing this session in time for Cameron’s break, joining him at the seafood restaurant on the pier. We share a prawn cocktail and he confides in me that the inverse correlation is real, that he’s never seen anyone muscle through every payment so quickly. I inhale, sit up, set the towel on my knee. “Okay.”

Cameron smiles, reads the payment, and the screen displays the inside of El Nido. My chest constricts as Sam offers to look over my portfolio.

Even before the overdraft fee, I sent such a big payment because I thought he might not do it otherwise. Also, I wanted him to know I didn’t expect anything because of our history, that night on his rooftop in the fog.

Before I can stop it, the restaurant fades from the Memovision and Sam’s rooftop comes into focus. I hear myself moan through the speaker in the ceiling. Sam’s bare chest appears, his thin muscled arms reaching up to me, patchy chest hair gold under the string lights. I’ve masturbated to this memory for years but it’s a shock to see it onscreen.

Cameron hums uncomfortably.

I look over at him. “Sorry. How do I turn it off?”

“Just—” My voice moans louder through the speaker. “Ah, really concentrate on the moment of exchange.” This, too, is a moment of exchange. But Cameron reads the payment again and the Memovision cuts back to El Nido.

Sam says, “I mean, you don’t have to,” waving a hand that’s been inside me, fingers I’ve sucked on.

I look over at the gauge, but before a reading can appear, my moans siphon back through the ceiling. Sam’s rooftop is back. Fog closing in on us. So low it obscures all the neighboring buildings and creates the impression we’re alone up there, fucking inside of a cloud.

“Um, let’s—yeah, let’s back up.” Cameron rereads the payment. El Nido rematerializes.

Sam says, “I mean, you—,” but the frame freezes and the audio of us breathing and moaning plays behind it.

“Fuck me, Audrey,” Sam says, somewhere off-screen, and just like that I want to die, because even Cameron knows my name is not Audrey.

Apparently the frozen picture of El Nido is enough for the gauge to take a reading, because a moment later, the alarm is back. WAH WAH WAH. “Yes,” Sam cries, “fuck yes.”

Cameron shouts the payment again, but the alarm and the moaning carry on. He clicks frantically at the computer. Grabs a phone from the wall. “. . .screen is frozen. . . what do I do. . .” When he hangs up, he types, shouts, “We’re gonna try some music, okay? Sometimes music,” he taps his chest, “gets deeper.”

He pulls a lever under the desk and the lights dim. A disco ball descends from a hole in the ceiling. “Really try to focus on the payment,” he shouts, as Celine Dion competes with the breathing and shouting and moaning and alarm. Dots of light spin over us and Cameron cranks the volume until Celine’s is the loudest voice in the room. I’m thankful to be here, she sings, thankful to feel clear. . .

I don’t know how I’m meant to focus on anything right now, but I try to get the picture of El Nido on the screen to move. Sam’s face is frozen with his lips puckered. It’s basically impossible not to think about kissing him. Not to remember how, at one point, he wanted that.

As though someone has turned up the volume on our sex track, my voice climbs over Celine’s. “Tell me how you’d chart this,” I say, panting. Sam, distracted: “Chart what?” “This,” I say. “How good I’m making you feel.”

I only vaguely remember saying this, but hearing it pumped through the sound system at full volume, my stomach turns, face heats. I don’t know how to make it stop.

“Oh yeah,” he says. “So good.” I remember being frustrated by that, because it wasn’t what I’d asked. I’d wanted axes, plot points, code. Now I want to vanish. The memory of Sam’s rooftop is spoiling. Cameron, Celine, the disco ball—they’re all ruining it.

I pull the wire sensors from my ears, but this just skips the audio on our sex track so the last few seconds play on repeat. How good I’m making you feel, my voice says. Sam’s Oh yeah. So good.

How good I’m making you feel. Oh yeah. So good.

Celine and the alarm carry on in the background.

I turn to Cameron. “Can you turn it off?”

He lifts his palms. Shouts, “It’s stuck.” 

It feels like I’m cracking down the center, listening to this terrible remix, Sam’s frozen lips puckered at me onscreen. I push myself out of the barber chair and feel my legs protest. I’m not sure they’re going to hold me. “Can you let me out?”

Cameron grimaces. “Safety regulations. We can’t.”

Whose safety?, I wonder. “Please, I need a break.”

He shakes his head at the door. “No can do. But. . .” Flips through the pages on his clipboard.

A whole chorus backs up Celine. Thankful to be here.

How good I’m making you feel. Oh yeah. So good.

When he finds the information he’s looking for, he digs through the desk drawers and tosses me a pair of noise-canceling headphones. “See if these help,” he shouts. “Maybe we went the wrong direction with the music.”

I turn them on, fit them over my ears, but all they really do is dampen the lower register, muddying Sam and Celine. The alarm comes through unhindered. So does my voice. How good I’m making you feel. WAH WAH. How good I’m making you feel.

I stumble toward the back wall, as far from the speaker as possible. When I get there, my legs buckle under me. I slide down the yellow padding. My head spins with the pinpricks of light.

I think of the voting booth, my ballot booklet open to Prop 10. I imagine adding my gratitude scatter plot to the AGAINST column, the caption Mathematical impossibility. Nowhere did it say you’d feel like a person turned inside out. Nowhere did it say your nose would try to split your face open.

I realize I’ve been banging an open palm against my nose when a trickle of blood makes it into my mouth. I wish I could throw up or pass out. WAH WAH. How good I’m making you feel. I knock my head against the wall and suddenly I understand why it’s padded. An impulse I’m unfamiliar with takes over as I bang my head harder and harder. Cameron’s on the phone again, gesturing agitatedly at his screen. My head bounces off the cushioning. I can almost feel the vomit creeping up my esophagus.

When I got the stomach flu growing up, my mother would sit on the bathroom floor with me and rub my feet. Valda, who never seemed to catch anything, would lie beside me, feet in the air. “Me too! I’m sick!” she’d cry. She always wanted to be where I was.

Last weekend, when Dave surprised her with a romantic birthday getaway, her voice hitched. “I wanted to celebrate with Aubrey, too.” Dave told her she’d love the hotel he’d booked, plus it wasn’t refundable. “I guess we have our girls dinner on Monday. . .” At the time, I thought she was looking for excuses to go, but now I wonder if she was buckling under pressure. If she misses our old dynamic as much as I do. “You know Dave,” she said to me once. “Loves to get his way.” A protective tenderness rises in me.

I try to push myself up, but my legs are too weak. I tip onto all fours and drag myself toward the barber chair, knees burning on the glowing carpet.

How good I’m making you feel. WAH WAH. Celine must’ve changed keys, because the words thankful and alive seep in through the headphones.

The chair seems impossibly high when I get to it. I slump onto the metal footrest, try to still my vertigo. I wish the disco lights would stop moving.

Suddenly Cameron’s crouching beside me, asking if I want help up. I nod and he grabs me under the arms, lifts clumsily. I feel like a baby being hoisted by someone who doesn’t like babies. I’m achingly aware of the sweat dripping from me, the odor clinging to my shirt. WAH WAH. How good I’m making you feel. He sits me in the chair. I feel the nausea rising. I lean forward and the headphones slip from my ears, clatter onto the floor. All the sounds barrel back at me. WAH WAH. Oh yeah. So good. How good I’m making you feel. I vomit onto my knees. It’s mostly stomach bile because I didn’t have breakfast.

“Oh boy,” Cameron says.

“Sorry,” I groan. I’ve splattered his pants and shoes. “I’m so sorry.”

Cameron picks up the phone again, asks for help in Room 14. I’m no longer a dream client. Celine’s back to singing about butterflies. My ears clog. Brain blisters. I dig my fingers into the leather armrest and one of them sinks into a hole there, finds rough-edged metal beneath. I rip at the hole until the metal edge is exposed and wonder if I could use it to crack my head open and make this all stop. Safety regulations. 

Cameron must see me fiddling with it because suddenly he’s retrieving Dave’s helmet from the cubby. “This is probably a good idea.” He sits me up and sets the helmet on my head, snaps the straps—too loosely, I think—under my chin. His hand comes away flecked with blood and vomit. He wrinkles his nose, wipes it on his yellow lab coat.

“Sorry,” I repeat. Somehow the helmet makes the possibility of death via armrest real and I feel a little afraid of myself.

Cameron proffers the dangling sensor like a rhetorical question. I can feel his desire to be done, gone, eating lunch in a fresh pair of pants.

I wonder what it would take to get me out of here, to never do this again. Suddenly, I want the Freeman & Freeman job. I can see that life now—bored out of my mind every day but going to wine country with Valda on the weekends, living in my own apartment. I’d be the one people sent TOTs to: Thank you so much for letting us crash in your spare bedroom! I’d get to say: There’s no need. Or, It’s really okay. Maybe I’d even have a rooftop that occasionally flooded with fog. I take the sensors from him.

“The control room is working on a full reboot,” he shouts over the noise, “but it’ll mean starting over.” I can hear the annoyance in his voice, so I try not to gawk at him. “If you can get this thing filled up before then, that’d be—you know, great.” The thermometer is still at zero, the alarm blaring alongside every other sound.

I fit the sensors into my ears and wonder if this will actually kill me. There’s no way I’ll be able to start over. I feel myself beginning to resent even, for some reason, the lime lady from Sprouts. The Memovision’s still frozen on Sam’s face at El Nido—eyes half-open, lips protruding. Stupid of me to have sent so much. I try to focus on the generosity of his offer—the measly half an hour it’ll take from his life. No, not that. The kindness of helping an old friend. The alarm falls away as a tiny bit of red shows in the gauge. I feel faint. Celine and the sex sounds carry on. A slow-burning rage grows in me—that I can’t just thank Sam with money, the way Valda and her friends do. Gift cards and bottles of wine they deliver and never think about again. Sam’s giant puckered lips taunt me, incense me, and his face begins to fade.

I’m doing it. Rage must be the trick. But then a new, blurry face replaces Sam’s. Eyes half-open, lips protruding in almost exactly the same way. Dave. He’s too close to the camera—to me—and I know what this memory is, even with the voices of Sam and Celine playing over it. It’s 5:31 a.m. I’ve overslept. Dave makes awful, kissing noises like he’s coaxing their dog out of bed. “Hey, Sleeping Beauty. Am I gonna get this minute back?” Even now, I can feel the pressure of his thumb on my mouth, wiping at my drool. The revulsion washing through me. The horror of the seconds I lay there, wondering what exactly I owed him.

I wait for my past self to scramble out of bed. Tell him not to touch me. Instead, a yellow haze takes over the screen. No, not the screen. My vision is yellowing out, the way it does when I stand up too fast. “I—can’t see,” I say, breath catching. I’m not sure the words have made it past my lips. There’s solid yellow everywhere.

Thankful to be here, thankful to feel clear.

How good I’m making you feel. Oh yeah. So good.

I hear myself crying and it must be my current self because something salty drips into my mouth. My lungs are hollow. Fingertips tingling. I need Cameron to hear me, to get me out. I remove a foot from the footrest and feel for the carpet. Push myself up, take a step.

Everything goes black.

Suddenly, I’m sitting on a rocky outcropping at the beach with Valda and our mother, feet dangling into the sand. It’s eight years ago. Valda’s about to start law school and our mother has come to help move her in. Valda never even visited the other schools she got into. She wanted to be here, where I live, to drink cheap wine with me by the ocean, as the three of us are doing now.

We sip from compostable cups and discuss all the things we’ll do together now that she lives here. Hiking, farmers markets, five-dollar Tuesdays at the cinema. Our mother sets her cup at her feet, grabs one of our knees in each hand. “My girls.” She tears up. “My girls.”

Then, disco lights spinning. Celine Dion crooning about paper dolls. How good I’m making you feel. Oh yeah. So good. It takes me a moment to understand where I am. Dave’s face is frozen on the wall, at a strange angle. I must be on my back, facing the ceiling. Something trickles into my eye and I lift a heavy hand to wipe it away. Blood. My forehead is throbbing. I feel around my head and find a helmet there, Dave’s helmet. It has slipped so far back as to be useless. Did I hit my forehead on the way down? Death via armrest.

A ding sounds and I think, deliriously, I’ve done it. Filled the gauge. Finally, finally. But the gauge, even from this angle, shows the same tiny sliver of red. No, it turns out, I’m not sufficiently grateful. Not to Sam, not to Valda. Certainly not to Dave. This is the ding, I realize, of my phone in the cubby. An incoming email. We are pleased. . . We are sorry. . .

I close my eyes again, hoping this will return me to the beach. But the music and the voices loop faithfully—Oh yeah. So good. Soon fingers are prodding into my neck, feeling for a pulse. I open my eyes. Someone—not Cameron—bends over me. She looks familiar. She takes my hand in hers and I realize it’s the woman from the front desk. She doesn’t look fazed by the sex noises or the too-loud music. “Aubrey,” she says, and the sound of my name is like a caress in my hair. “Are you still with us? Can you keep your eyes open?”

I try to do what she’s asked, but my vision begins to yellow again. The woman goes in and out of focus, yellow smoke I try desperately to clear. “Is the man in Room 7 okay?” I croak. She glances away from me, perhaps at Cameron, whom I can no longer see. “Room 7,” she says uncertainly.

My eyelids grow heavy, close. A far-off voice that sounds like my own says, Let’s do a counterfactual.

Valda and my mother and I dangle our feet into the sand at the beach. Valda laments that her sublet has fallen through at the last minute.

“Just stay with me, Val.”

“Are you sure?” she says. “I know you’re tight on space.”

I wave my hand. “Of course. As long as you need.”

A distant voice says, This is not an appropriate counterfactual. The voice sounds like mine, siphoning through a speaker in my ear canal. Another voice pipes in: Aubrey? Are you with us? Can you stay with us?

“Okay!” Valda leans over our mother to cheers her cup of wine to mine. “Permanent sleepover!”

My mother taps her cup to ours and we laugh.

“Not permanent,” Valda promises.

“Temporarily permanent,” I say.

A woman appears beside us on the sand then, forehead bleeding profusely. Blood dried under her nose. Vomit stains on her t-shirt, pants. She looks like me. She gestures at the three of us, addresses someone I can’t see. “You’re not getting this,” she says. “You’re not measuring it.”

Measuring what?, I wonder.

“There’s something you can use here.” She begins to cry. “I know there is.” Her voice cracks, her edges blur. “Please,” she turns a hazy yellow. “Please.” She flashes a blinding chartreuse and is gone. 

Someone down the beach turns on a portable speaker and Celine Dion comes through, singing about butterflies and heaven. From somewhere far-off, voices I dimly recognize.

How good I’m making you feel.

Oh yeah.

So good.