Demographic Futures

Han knew she'd raised an American boy when she overheard Max selling toilet paper to his friends. Not by the roll, but by the square. She was carrying laundry down Max's hallway on the second floor, and there was Jason, a friend from school, estimating how much toilet paper he would need before going into the bathroom. Jason was a buncher, not a folder, and he had no clue how much he would use in one sitting. If he went in with too few squares of toilet paper, he would have to slide money under the door, and Max would slide squares of toilet paper back. If he bought too much, there would be no refunds.

"Why are you making your friend wait out in the hall?" Han asked him.

"We're doing math," Max answered, and after a moment of bemused silence, Han walked past him down the stairs because math had always made her feel inadequate.

Han opened the dryer door and emptied the whites into a basket, then took the delicates from the washing machine to hang, and filled it back up again with Max's gym clothes and towels. While folding the socks, she noticed that Max was down to four pairs. She ought to be used to it by now, she told herself; something as mundane as missing socks should not make one feel so helpless.

So what if Max preferred cash over socks? If he doesn't mind going barefoot, and other kids don't mind buying their hosiery secondhand, why should it bother her? At least he was selling something they could hold in their hands this time.

When Max was nine years old, Han found out that he had been selling time. Instead of taking turns with the video game controller, Max made his neighbor Arvid pay for fifteen minutes of play, as they do in the arcades. If Arvid had his sister Fran along, she'd have to pay just to watch.

No doubt, Han thought, Max's ruthlessness was a trait passed on from Owen, except with Max's father, instead of money, it was women. Stingy with his feelings but always willing to negotiate a seduction, Owen left a legacy of single motherhood in the state of New Jersey, which he'd left behind six years ago to have his shot at Hollywood stardom. Owen was charming, she remembered, but lacked range: he couldn't play anything but charming. And she'd never heard of him since.

________

When Max found out that eighth-graders were selling little bags of torn-up maple leaves for ten bucks a pop and calling it marijuana, his stomach tightened. The overhead on bags of leaves was basically nothing, so every sale was entirely profit. But after a quick risk-benefit analysis, he decided not to pursue that commodity. Max was no apostle of quality, but to sell a product that had no intrinsic value was a business plan doomed from the start. He'd corner the market on necessities and let the bag-of-leaf merchants go bust on their own.

"Max, I'm telling you, the future isn't baseball cards and chewing gum, man. You have to start selling nudie pictures," Max's associate Al said to him over a lunch of steak hoagies in the cafeteria.

"There's no way, Al. We can't compete with the internet. They have free nudie pictures all over the place. For free."

"I don't know. Some kids aren't even allowed to use the internet," Al added incredulously.

"And what do you mean, 'baseball cards and chewing gum'? Where'd you get those sunglasses? Where'd you get all your Jay-Z cds?"

"I'm just saying you have to find the right product—something people want." Al was a burly seventh-grader who, if things became difficult, Max could depend on to collect.

"People don't know what they want," Max observed.

________

Han herself was not against commerce, per se; it had done many good things for her over the years. She owed all her clothes, furnishings, and books...