When I was a teenager and so covered in pimples that I knew everything, I argued with my mother about money.

“One day,” I announced, “I’m going to be rich.”

“What does that mean?” she asked.

“What do you mean, what does that mean?”

“What’s rich?” she asked.

“I’m going to have a hundred million dollars,” I declared.

“What can you do with a hundred million dollars?”

“What’s going on?” I asked. “What do you mean, what can I do? One hundred million dollars!”

My mother lit a cigarette and wrote something on the back of an envelope.

“Here,” she said.

She’d written $100,000,000.

“What’s this?” I asked and tossed the envelope onto the table.

“It’s a hundred million dollars,” she said.

“It’s not,” I sneered. “It’s a stupid envelope with a number on it.”

“Well,” my mother said as she sat down at the table, “if you had a hundred million dollars in the bank, it would look just like that. A stupid number on a piece of paper, or a screen.”

“I know—” I began.

“Just having that money is what’s stupid,” she went on. “If you don’t use it, you might as well not have it.”

It began to feel as though my mother was going to talk me out of my hundred million dollars.

“I know—” I said again.

“Why do you want it?” she added.

“So I can buy stuff.”

“Ah,” she mused, “stuff. What kind of stuff? Things, or experience?”

“What?”

“A car is a thing,” my mother said, “just like money is a thing. A drive is an experience. What do you want?”

“I want my own car,” I said.

“To look at, or to drive?”

“To drive,” I conceded.

“See,” my mother said, “you don’t really want a car, just like you don’t really want a hundred million dollars. You want what you can do with those things, not the things themselves.”

“Somehow you’ve done away with the hundred million dollars,” I complained. “I don’t like that. I want a hundred million dollars.”

She got up and came around to my side of the table.

“You already have a hundred million dollars,” she said calmly.

“Oh yeah?”

“Yes,” she said. “You just don’t know it. Would you like to see what I mean?”

“Can we just talk about being rich?” I groaned.

“Close your eyes,” my mother said.

“Why?”

“Just do it.”

I closed my eyes reluctantly. I could hear her move away from the table and open a drawer a little way off. Then she returned.

“Keep them shut,” she instructed.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“I’m blindfolding you.”

She wrapped a strip of dark cloth around my head and secured it in place with something else. I couldn’t see anything.

“There,” my mother said when she’d finished. “Now you’re blind.”

“And?”

“And here’s a hundred million dollars.”

She retrieved the envelope from the table and placed it in my hand.

“You’ve been struck blind,” she said, “in exchange for a hundred million dollars.”

“It’s just an envelope,” I said.

“Imagine, OK?”

She moved away and lit a cigarette. The flick of her lighter sounded metallic now that I could only hear it.

“What now?” I asked.

“Now we wait,” she said.

“What for?”

But she didn’t answer me.

“Where are you going?” I wanted to know as she began to walk away.

“I’m going downstairs to work,” she said. “You don’t have to. You’re rich, remember?”

When she’d gone I sat at the table and tried to imagine that I’d closed my eyes on purpose because I was concentrating on a problem. My father had once pointed at the clock on the wall when it was exactly noon and asked me what the time would be when next the hour and minute hand were on top of one another. I thought about this until I got to the point where I knew I had to divide twelve by eleven, but I wanted to make a drawing to see exactly why. After a few minutes I tried to move about but it felt as though unseen spikes would pierce my eyes. I kept going toward the stairs, but I couldn’t do so without covering my blindfolded eyes with one hand, leaving me only one hand to feel around with. I found my way back to the table and sat down again. Even though I’d known this kitchen my entire life, it was now a place of strange sounds and narrow spaces. There were red-breasted weavers in the tree outside the window. I listened to their chirping and tried to imagine that I could see out the window, right through the blindfold, but it was hard and I couldn’t keep an image in focus for more than a fleeting moment. I wondered what the colour red sounded like. I could hear the traffic in the street behind our house, and a dog barking for a moment, far away. To sit at this table without the blindfold is to be a part of these things, but blindness had crystalised me as something separate. I desperately wanted the blindfold off, but that would’ve given in to my mother, and so I just waited.

“Being rich isn’t so great, is it?” she said when she returned. “Even for twenty minutes.”

It had felt like an hour.

“Would you like to see again?” she asked.

I mumbled that I’d like to. She carefully took off the blindfold and for a few moments I blinked in the dazzling light.

“The hundred million dollars,” she said and held out her hand.

I gave her the envelope.

“By tonight—” she remarked as she lit a cigarette, “or tomorrow—you’d have happily paid a hundred million dollars just to see again. A hundred million dollars just to have what you’ve had all along.”

I felt shallow and ungrateful and so I said nothing.

“And?” my mother asked after a few moments.

“I see,” I said.

She smiled to herself.

“That’s what you can do with a hundred million dollars.”




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