ONE HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS
I have one hundred million dollars. When I was 16, I made five dollars and twenty-five cents an hour at the fast food restaurant. My paycheck was about a hundred dollars a week. That is one one-millionth of the amount I have now. And I don’t work anywhere near as hard now as I did when I was 16. Though I don’t let anyone know that. They might think I didn’t deserve my one hundred million dollars.
When I take time off for myself, which I do to show the people who work for me that it is important to take time for yourself, which I do so they will continue working for me—I do not do things that people with one hundred million dollars do, because I am not the kind of person who has one hundred million dollars. Even though I have one hundred million dollars. I do not torture Indonesian workers for sport in a Dubai skyscraper or crash a car made of gold in the Scottish highlands. I ride a mountain bike in the mountains or go on three-day hikes in the woods or pilot a dog sled. The gear I use costs ten thousand dollars. The gear is a suit of armor between my body and everything else. It keeps the money out. Especially if I move quickly. If I run away from the money, from where it is accumulating, from where it is growing larger—in my office, in my house, on my phone. Because of course it keeps growing. In the time it took me to write this, my hundred million dollars generated maybe another thousand. It is so much money that you cannot write about it fast enough to be accurate. Your understanding is always lagging behind. It becomes unreal.
You make it real by buying things. I bought a plot of land near the ocean. I bought it for one million dollars. A beautiful stretch of ocean here in California, where the people with a hundred million dollars live, because that is where they made their money. The ocean is beautiful and I love it. I love to be in the ocean. It makes me feel like I am 16 again, rinsing the chicken grease off my forearm hairs in the brine as they dangle beside my surfboard. It makes me feel like I am a real person again. The feeling is so strong that I only needed to be next to the ocean to feel it. That’s why I bought this plot of land. So I could come home from work and be next to the ocean and feel like a real person again. Not a holding vessel for one hundred million dollars.
It did not work.
I built a hard house on my plot of land that I purchased for one million dollars. Around the house is a patio made of concrete and stone, and the house is made of stone and glass. Anywhere in or around the house you might drop something fragile, it will break. If you lie down on your back you will squirm uncomfortably. I built a hard house because I do not want to vanish into my house. When I was sixteen I would on some days not be allowed to go to the ocean but would instead have to visit my grandfather. He vanished into his house. He had a soft, worn sofa the color of autumn leaves, and he sat on it every day wearing a shirt and pants the color of autumn leaves. He sat there and listened to sports on his radio and he smoked cigarettes and the smoke soaked into the wallpaper the color of autumn leaves. When I went to visit him I would wear blue, like the ocean, like the uniform of the fast food restaurant where I worked, so I would not vanish into his house. So the softness would not entrap me.
At my house, everywhere you sit, you slide off. I am told it is uncomfortable, but it is a comfort to me. When I am home by myself, as I usually am, I leave the patio doors open. If I were to lose myself, I would slide off my hard bench and across my slate floor and over my concrete patio and down the beach and into the ocean. Where I would turn into a real person again. And maybe I would cease to be a vessel for this one hundred million five thousand dollars. Maybe the house would take on this burden instead. The house would become the kind of person who has one hundred million dollars. It would be able to bear it. It is hard. I made it that way.
I was not made that way. If I had children, they would be made that way. They would grow inside the vessel of the hard house and take its shape, become hard creatures themselves, at ease around one hundred million dollars. I am only at ease when I forget it exists.
I do not have children.
That is why I built my escape route into the ocean. If I lost myself and was guided into its embrace by the elevation differentials I had carved into my surroundings, then I would awaken inside my floating body. I would not be lost. I would look back on my hard house and not recognize it. And I would know exactly where I was.
Mike Barthel's stories have appeared in Fatal Flaw, JAKE, and Tower. He is working on a book about Miley Cyrus' "Party in the U.S.A." and revising a speculative novel. He lives in Washington, D.C. with his wife and three soft children. He can be found on Instagram @mikebarthelauthor.
