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The window is closed.
I mean my window.
The little steel one at Reyes Padala & Cargo, on Mission Street. My father counted bills behind it for thirty years. I counted them for twenty-two.
We shut it in 2039.
You want to know what killed it? Not a bank. Not a law… it was speed.
Sending money home is free now, and it takes four seconds. My sister Nene in Cebu taps her wrist and the cash is there before she finishes saying thank you. When our mother got sick in 2036, I moved eleven thousand dollars to a clinic in Mandaue in the time it takes to boil water. Every cent arrived. Not most of it. All of it.
I used to charge six cents on the dollar. Sometimes more. I told myself it paid for the forms, the safe, and the lady who came in on Saturdays to translate. It really paid for the wait. People gave me money to bridge three days.
Nobody pays for three days anymore.
Here's the part the young ones don't believe.
The money is still dollars.
All of it.
Nene prices her rice in dollar tokens. So does her landlord. So does the fish guy at the wet market who has never met an American in his life.
When I was young, every smart voice on the radio said the dollar was done. Debt… sanctions… just wait for the crash.
The dollar never crashed.
It just stopped needing America to move it.
That's the odd thing about 2045. The old empire lost its throne and kept its job. Washington doesn't run the pipes. Three token houses do — Meridian, Corso, and one in Singapore I still can't say right. They hold more short-term US paper than most countries do. So my sister's grocery money helps fund a government she has never voted in.
Meanwhile the governments went the other way.
They went to metal.
The Bangko Sentral keeps its gold in Manila now. Not London. Not New York. They opened a vault in Quezon City in 2033 and there was a ribbon and a speech about dignity. My uncle laughed at that speech. Then he remembered the year Russia's reserves got frozen, and he stopped laughing.
So that's the world. Private dollars fly. Public gold sits still.
And men like me got squeezed out of the middle.
I still work.
Ward 4 pays me to be a cash bridge.
Here's what that means. About nine thousand people in this county never went digital. Old, mostly… some scared, some stubborn, some who got their wallet drained in the '32 hack and never came back. I turn their tokens into paper. I read their balance out loud. Mrs. Alcantara is ninety-one and she wants to hold it, count it, and put it in a tin. I let her.
I miss the line.
Saturday mornings it went out the door and around the corner. Kids on the floor. Somebody's uncle fighting about the rate. It smelled like the bakery next door. That line was the whole neighborhood standing in one spot… and it only existed because the money was slow.
We made the money fast.
The line went away.
I don't want it back.
But I want to be honest about the price of it.
My hands still know the count. Three fingers, thumb, snap. Fifty years, and I can still feel a short stack.
Nobody needs that now.
But Mrs. Alcantara likes to watch.
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