God gave me my money.
—John D. Rockefeller
My luck with money reached its end at the Field Museum. Joan covered my entry fee, swore she didn’t mind. We forced quips about the mummies and their talismans, but even this couldn’t mask her nascent vexation at paying my way. You’re the only scrub who gets love from me, she used to coo when the server dashed off with her debit card. But a scrub’s charm fizzles after a year, give or take. Joan’s dad owned the rights to that scream you hear in all the movies. My mother, who slept and boozed in a leased Winnebago, said dating a well-to-do woman was yet another of my happy accidents.
And it’s true, I’d always crash-landed into little sums. In college I bought a desk on Craigslist and found, lodged behind a panel, a hard plastic condom-carrier with a rolled-up $50 and one Lifestyles Ribbed For Her Pleasure. Occulted among semi-official websites, I unearthed, applied to, and was awarded a $500 grant for young Chicago writers—mere weeks before Peoples Gas would’ve roasted me in small claims court. More than once while purging my shelves for quick cash, some ratty paperback, origins unknown, fetched big bucks at the secondhand bookshop. A bike messenger cooks noodles in bulk, shoplifts, triages the MasterCard against the Chase Visa to satiate Discover. Over time, I felt as though some bored god kept dangling me over the precipice, only to yo-yo me to safety at the last feasible moment.
Joan once called me a survivor and in the sober morning apologized for any condescension. She’d read at Oberlin how the Economy often failed to produce fair outcomes. She taught me how to drum up a hearty salad and say Proust’s name right. We took day trips to the Indiana dunes and buried one another in loamy sand.
The Field Museum date would be one of our last. We sulked through helmets and scepters of pre-Columbian gold. In one glass case, a Scarlet Ibis and Mute Swan posed luminously. Joan wrenched free of my hand, which had sweat too much on her hand. She’d lent me some money for those faceless busybodies at Fannie Mae. I hadn’t paid her back yet—and sure, I’d bought drinks at an unkind hour. We made sighs and apologies, but often lacked the proper words.
In one diorama room, early hominids slouched among rockpiles and plastic trees. Reddish fur patched their skin. A plaque informed us that they were still hundreds of thousands of years away from proper homo sapiens; they didn’t exactly have language, but knew how to do things like bury their dead and befriend wild dogs. “What’s that?” said Joan, pointing at one of the hominid’s feet. I leaned over the wooden rail: a wad of cash stuck out between the figure’s plaster toes. We were alone in this part of the exhibit—most visitors had come for the new dinosaur show, to have their faith restored by those expensive, featherless animatrons.
So I slunk under the rail into the diorama. Joan, unable to dissuade me, kept lookout. I dipped low to the Astroturf, army-crawled toward the memorialized brute. It wasn’t until my fingers wrapped around the money that I heard the throaty groan. At first it registered as ambiance, piped-in from hidden speakers. I tilted up: the hominid’s eyes, bovine and rude, menaced me, repulsed by this supplicant at its feet. Joan cried out but I couldn’t hear her over the rumble, an engine I couldn’t stop. The hominid’s breath heaved like a stallion’s as its foot began to rise above me; hot slobber trickled down, dampening my hair. The bills, soggy with palm sweat, chafed against my hand. I edged weakly backward. Even then, just before the hominid’s raw, operatic howl, I understood that a rot had entered my life.