“This happened overnight?” Emily scrambled for the chair closest to Wendi. “While we were asleep? Do you think people were drunk-donating?”
“Still counts.” Wendi scrolled through the thousands—thousands!—of members who’d already submitted their debt statements to the site.
“I’ve got to hand it to you, Tina,” Wendi said. “This was not my original vision for my program, but it’s working out pretty nicely.”
“This wasn’t my original vision for becoming a millionaire either.” Emily’s face shone with the radiance of her laptop screen. “But it is working out nicely. It’s like, who even remembers anymore what we took from Titan?”
For a moment, I feared Wendi might gore Emily with her horns.
“It’s okay.” I cautiously touched the elbow of Wendi’s hoodie. “She knows not to talk like that outside of this apartment.”
Wendi contorted her face into a sneer and then shifted the laptop away from Emily and closer to me. “Let me show you how the new site works.” She continued scrolling through our many members. “Until we can make this a more perfect science, I suggest just picking a winner at random, like a lottery. Watch me now.”
She double-clicked to open a debt statement for $81,101 that belonged to a twenty-nine-year-old woman in Chicago.
One click, two clicks, three clicks, and an e-check for $81,101 was sent to the woman’s account. The ticker labeled Money Donated flipped accordingly.
“That’s all there is to it,” Wendi said. “The only tricky part is to pace yourself with the money.” She turned the laptop toward me. “Your turn.”
It was so idiotically simple a Gen X monkey with no computer training could have done it. I clicked on a debt statement for $108,023 that belonged to a twenty-six-year-old woman in Portland, Oregon.
One click, two clicks, three clicks, and an e-check for $108,023 was sent to her account.
The Money Donated ticker flipped to $189,124. It made me light-headed, like my first adolescent drag of a cigarette, which by the way was not electronic.
“This could get addictive,” I said.
“Let me do one.” Emily slid the laptop back toward herself.
“Just a moment, Memoir of a Geisha.” Wendi placed a bullying hand on Emily’s silken shoulder. “You have to be careful to limit the amount you give out each day. It has to be a ratio, so people recognize there’s a direct correlation to the giving and receiving. Like supply and demand, understand?”
Emily glanced up from the screen. “Do you honestly think there’ll ever be a supply to meet this much demand? That’s absurd.”
Wendi erupted in inexplicable high-pitched laugher. “You’ve got a better head for business than one would think. You’re correct, this site is the technological equivalent of throwing a bunch of money onto the street. There’s not going to be any left over when you walk away.” She turned to me. “But the more money we take in with time, the more we can distribute. For now, send out five checks a day. No more, no less. This’ll make people excited about it, like a contest or a sweepstakes. Try to mix it up, some small debts with some large ones each day. But obviously you can’t exceed the amount we’ve got in the Money Raised bank at any time.”
“That’s it?” I’d already snatched the laptop back from Emily and was scrolling through the statements, searching for our next winner. “Only five a day?”
I felt like God, or what I sometimes imagined God to feel like when he was blowing off steam: scrolling through people’s lives on his iPad like an old lady at a Vegas slot machine. Cherries-orange-apple—you’ll get hit by a car today. Lemon-grapes-banana—sorry, that’s cancer. Triple sevens—jackpot; someone just paid off all your student-loan debt.
It felt good, playing the Almighty. Because like the Tibetan Buddhists who don’t even believe in Him claim (and who, by the way, threw awesome concerts with the Beastie Boys in the late nineties), real happiness just might come from putting others first.
Though the Buddhists would probably insist that the “real happiness” also be egoless—and this was definitely not that. No, this was a way more Americana type of happiness, steeped in pride and self-regard. Happy as a pig in shit, Robert might have called it. Or maybe that’s what I’m calling it, I don’t know. Because something about it was sort of shitty. Yeah, I was happy I was helping others. And I was happy I’d struck upon something I was good at, and even got applauded for. And I was happy to really feel like somebody for the first time in my life. But more than all that, I was happy that we’d gotten away with it.
Emily was right. It was like, who even remembered anymore what we took from Titan? But I remembered. And somehow seeing how all this was turning out—how at times I’d catch myself being genuinely excited and hopeful and optimistic about my future, and then remember—it was making me realize the person I could have become if only I hadn’t . . .