The Numbers
I was seventeen when the numbers appeared.
The day before happened like any other Wednesday during the school year. I went home after band practice, did my homework, had dinner with the family, mom, dad, Mikey, and me, then I farted around on my phone for a bit, then read until bedtime.
The next morning, I woke up, and the numbers were there; prominently displayed holographically above the head of any person in my line of sight.
I of course noticed my number first, when I went to brush my teeth. There in the mirror above my head, in see-through green, was: 218.34
There was no symbol or anything like that. Just a green number.
I considered the possibility that I was dreaming.
But then I went downstairs and there were numbers above mom’s and dad’s and Mikey’s heads, too, and it was clearly too real to be a dream.
Above mom’s head was a see-through red 74,289.91.
Dad’s was a red 85,421.79.
Mikey’s was a green 17.08.
I had no idea what they meant at the time, but looking back, I was stupid for not realizing it right away. I guess I wasn’t a good pattern recognizer just yet.
Anyways, I could make this a much longer story than it needs to be, but for now, just know that we went to the hospital, the doctors checked me out, and after performing my new trick for a number of people that analyzed me, it was determined that the numbers I was seeing were the financial net worth of the person I was looking at.
Green numbers were positive.
Red were negative.
Most of the younger doctors in the hospital had red numbers in the hundreds of thousands. The nurses were generally in the green, but never had huge numbers. And the few older doctors, all except one, had big numbers in the green. That one doctor, though, the old guy with a red number, he was visibly nervous when he heard what I could do. We made eye contact through the glass looking into my room and I could see him panic. I took special note that the number hanging above his head was a red 2,845,542.10. I wondered what he was involved in, who he owed that much money to, what was the money for?
Spoiler alert, I never found out.
From there on out, I always took note that the people with the largest red numbers of all, they always belonged to people who appeared on all fronts to be "successful", who flaunted money they clearly had no true possession over. Some, I guess, just know how to work and move it around in their favor better than others.
Anyways, considering mom’s and dad’s red numbers, I guessed they owed money on the house and probably some credit card bills. I never asked them.
On the ride home after we finally figured the whole thing out, we stopped for gas.
Since dad was an hourly worker at the time and did not have any investments that generated passive income, I saw his number, in red, go from 85,720.01 to 85,740.01 the second he gave the gas attendant a $20 bill.
One day soon after I got this ability, I remember on payday, which came once every two weeks, I was up late with him at midnight watching a movie when the transfer went through. I saw his red number decrease by 980.67.
Naturally, I told my best friend immediately.
She didn’t believe me at first, so I told her the number above her head: 178.20. And between what was in her bank account, her wallet, the change in her car and in her piggy bank, I was dead on.
My best friend then told someone else and before I knew it, everyone knew.
Word spread fast around town and a local paper came by to interview me and put my new ability to the test. Naturally, understandably, there were a lot of skeptics.
They recorded the whole segment.
They found 15 willing participants and asked them to write their net worth on a piece of paper before I was brought in.
As it turned out, people are pretty lousy at guessing how much money they have. I told 13 of the 15 participants a number that was different than what they wrote down – usually worse – and then after doing some better math, looking at all their accounts, it turned out I was right. The two participants who got their own number right worked as accountants.
That news segment went viral.
Over the next few days, in the time it would have taken me to confidently fill out and mail off a single college application, I received dozens and dozens of pre-emptive acceptance letters from schools all over the world offering me full scholarships.
Needless to say, this was welcomed news in my house. It made me think of a time before I got my power, when I sent off those two applications and mom and dad flashed that dreadful look of worry between one another, as if they were saying at the same time, how the hell are we going to pay for this?
Before I could make a decision on which school to go to, I started receiving employment offers.
One of those offers, the one from Capital Property Management, CPM, stuck out among the rest. In part, it read:
Look, we’re going to be up front and straight with you, because that’s how we do business. We believe that your talent would be an invaluable asset for us. We are prepared to offer you a unique position, one we have made just for you: Vice President of Negotiations. All the job requires is that you are present during contract negotiations and report what you see. For that, you will be paid an annual salary of $750,00.00, with abundant bonus opportunities.
Consider this: why go to a school like Harvard, when all they’d be training you for, is to get a job with a company like ours.
This is a tremendous opportunity. We hope to hear from you soon.
I mean, I only had a few months left in high school, and for some silly reason it was important to me to finish and get my diploma. I replied to CPM’s letter saying so.
They must have thought I was negotiating, or perhaps stalling to see what other offers were coming, because they replied immediately with a counter saying that if I signed a contract with them, they’d offer a two hundred thousand dollar signing bonus and would increase my annual salary to one million dollars a year, plus that healthy bonus structure, and I wouldn’t have to start working until after graduation. Looking back now, considering how little I said early on, they clearly needed help with negotiating.
Anyways, duh, I took the job and signed the contract.
And the good child that I am, knowing what my incoming salary would be, I paid off my mom and dad’s debts with the signing bonus. The look on their face when I told them their numbers were now green, was priceless.
I worked at CPM for 8 years before the gravity of its soul-suckingness wore me down to the ground.
Their primary business was real estate, and they specialized in land development. They would target potential high-growth areas on the come-up, and would sharkily purchase the land from the landowners, the town, whoever it was that “owned” it. CPM would then demolish any buildings on the property, if there were any, or would clear-cut the land and pave over everything to put up cookie-cutter housing developments on the residential side, or what I call an Anytown, America Shopping Center on the commercial side. In my head, for 8 years, Joni Mitchell’s Big Yellow Taxi played incessantly.
They paved paradise, put up a parking lot.
My role at CPM was to expose weak or strong points in whoever we were negotiating with, so as to provide information that would more firmly ground our negotiating position. For example, the owner of one piece of property had a red number in the millions, despite his best efforts to appear to everyone in the news and around town as a huge financial success. CPM’s offer was substantially lower than the fair market value, knowing that this guy was desperate.
Before my friends started graduating college and getting job offers that would raise their numbers 45-80,000 a year, my number was green and in the millions.
But again, I soon started hating myself and what I was doing with my newfound gift. Really, what I was doing with my life. The number above my head, it turned out, wasn’t everything.
Sure, after a certain number, a tremendous amount of life’s worries go away – like what happens if I get sick, what if there’s some other type of emergency, how am I going to pay my bills, or for fuck’s sake, I just want to have some fun and I treat myself to nice things and a good time. But beyond that number, I really started to question if raising my number so much every year, doing what I was doing, was really worth it.
When my second contract was up, I quit CPM. They offered me a crazy amount of money to stay, but I declined.
Honestly, I had more money than my family ever dreamed of having, so I decided it was time to do some soul searching and figure out a way I could utilize this gift for the greater good.
With nothing much to do during the day, besides think about what I should be doing, I took up people watching.
Every day, I’d go downtown and study the faces beneath the numbers, looking for some correlation between the number and the expression on the face. I wanted to better understand how, if at all, these numbers affected the faces.
One evening, I was sipping a cappuccino at one of our city’s European-influenced bistros. I had the perfect seat outside to watch a busy downtown corner. Notably, I kept my eyes on the homeless man weakly holding up a cup to everyone that passed him by.
When I first got my cappuccino, the number above his head was a green 2.43. When I was on my second drink, a young and happy college couple approached and the homeless man’s number was a green 6.20.
The young coeds may have been a couple, maybe not, but either way, they were holding hands. So, they were clearly on a date. The girl was a cute one, wearing fashionable vintage clothing I’m assuming she got second-hand, but surprisingly, her number was a green 85,467.98. I didn’t know her personally, of course, but I liked her nonetheless. I’m guessing she was a trust-fund kid, but she didn’t like to flaunt it, and I liked that about her. The boy was cute as well, with his attempting-to-be-rugged-but-not-old-enough-to-pull-it-off-yet look. His number was a red 28,701.14, which was an easy one. Student loans. They seemed to be having a wonderful and jolly time together. Oh to be young again.
When they got to the homeless man on the corner, I made the determination that these two did not really know each other that well, and they must be on a first or second date or something, on account of what the boy did.
In an effort to impress his beau, he reached into his pocket and put some bills into the homeless man’s cup. The homeless man’s number went up to a green 8.20, and the boy’s number went down to a red 28,703.14. The girl looked at the boy and I could tell she liked his – what I’m assuming was – theatrical compassion.
Now, what I’m asking you, dear reader, is this:
What the hell am I supposed to do with all this information?