I go under the bed sheets and fall into a crouch in a wooden dinghy in the trough of a cold titanium swell awash with 1000-ruble bills and islands of blood clots. I don’t know how to stand. The sky is pre-tornado green. I peer over the edge of the boat, grasp at the bills and toss them onto the rotted deck. I don’t see any MVDs, but the thought of their arrival makes me tension my gut, girding my intestines upwards, lessening the pressure they exert on my pelvis. A minted thumb is massaging circles on my aorta, causing me to pull my shoulder blades back and together. The left one moves down farther to try and squeeze the thumb out.

The money is cold and some of it is bloody.
…
I am on land, face to face with my friend Jörn. He has an angular face he says dogs don’t like. He’s one of the people I trust most. We’re face to face, shoulders pushed forward to shield my shoaf of notes from view. I’m counting them, they’re the color of fir needles, with a sentient granite obelisk hulking sentinel over an immemorial plain. We count the notes together aloud- 24,000 rubles. We get to the last bill, it’s worth 5000 rubles and is sherbet orange on counting thumb textured cream paper. The picture is in motion- goateed Spanish centaurs in seamy, cast tin armor are shepherding a crowd of Incas over a cliff at blunderbuss blast- refulgent celeste plumes are being engraved live on these moving innocents. The women’s breasts are swinging, and they and their children are moaning sexually no faster than they can take fresh air. Jörn, whose name is pronounced ‘yearn’, grips the bill like he wants to keep it, but looks at me with the same serious look dogs hate and which makes me know he’s listening and tells me, you’re rich, do you understand, you’re rich now, do you understand, you’re rich, don’t let this go, you don’t have to be poor anymore. I can see he wants it, and he sees me seeing him, but we are friends.

Nobodyhood. Hours of nothing to look back into. I have been revitalized- my blood feels slower, my extremities are tingling and warm, my skeletal muscles are lax to each strand.