Chapter V. Diary, ‘Debt’ - Letter From A Persevering Friend
Chapter V. Diary, ‘Debt’
If the young-adult man forced himself to become a skeptic of his own writing, what he wrote about Ace Dias was, after all, his interpretation of a metaphysical matter of the past. However, the debt of the past and the debt of the present were concrete undisputable liabilities and parallel lines in his life.
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I have never had as big a debt as this before; in fact, I never had a ‘real’ debt in the past. Six thousand dollars. Ok, it is not such a big amount compared to the average consumer debt in US, but it is a tremendous amount given the fact that I have no steady income now. Of course, even if I count the existing income, it averages out to be a couple of hundred dollars a month. It is ridiculous; it does not even pay interests. Maybe it does. Well, it does not matter. Obviously, I have other expenses, so it does not pay anything. But the more I think about the whole financial situation, the less important these details become. See, the thing is that my credit line is five thousand five hundred dollars. Should I say it was five thousand five hundred dollars? It does not really matter, does it? I have not been able to make any payments for months, so the collection agency is handling the debt collection now. I called them once to have a small chat. My god, the lady who worked for the collection agency had a flat impervious monotonic tone. Completely emotionless and inhuman. That was not the voice I want to hear again. What should I do about this? Good thing that I have been using Arte’s address in California for this credit card. Otherwise, they would be calling me in Japan; that will not be pretty. I still need to do something about this though.
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The date of this dairy entry was earlier than dates of three other ones, which he read so far, ’Living room’, ‘Money is the faith and the conviction’ and ‘Headache’. He made a decision to strike on his own shortly after he quit the job in New York, but making the decision took him more than a couple of months. In the mean time, he took money out of his retirement account to pay his bills. He then started borrowing against one of credit cards, which had his largest credit line, five thousand five hundred dollars. It took him more than a year to start earning a steady income, so he was unable to make any payments during that time. He did make a few payments, but that did not help. Interests and late payment penalties kept adding up and the card was maxed out eventually. He never ever had a debt like that, though, like most people, in the past, he borrowed small amounts here and there, from friends and his parents. But this was different; this was a genuine debt.
What happened next was a story of its own. The debt went to the collection agency because he could not make payments. The agency called his friend Arte in California because he was using his friend’s address there in order to keep using US bank accounts and credit cards. And that was because he had been planning to return to US in near future. Of course, that plan was already a big question mark because of his financial status. But regardless of that, the fact that he did not directly receive the call gave him a breathing room. He had to do something about it though because the agency kept calling his friend. At this point, he contacted Ace Dias to seek a solution. Though he was already very frustrated with Ace and the relationship between two were already deteriorating, he had to turn to someone. Ace apparently felt that the situation needed to be rectified somehow and he took care of the debt, or so was he told.
To this day, he felt awkward about this particular event. In the end, he made a copy of the IT infrastructure and handed it to Ace for nothing. Even if he took the minimum wage in US, he had provided enough work to justify the lump sum Ace supposedly paid to take care of his debt. So, he justified how the debt was paid off; he justified that he only received what he was deserved to. But even then, he could not help feeling perturbed. At the end of the day, he did not come up with any hard cash by himself. What made him feel even more confused was the fact that Ace Dias lied to him so many times; it was a fact that he confirmed sometime after the credit card incident. Was the debt taken care of? Too many questions and too much confusion.
Now that three years had passed, he concluded that the debt was indeed managed by Ace Dias and that, in exchange, he provided enough unpaid work to him. After two essentially broke up the partnership, Ace contacted him several times and asked him to provide IT service to him; he promised him to pay for the work. He completed every task Ace asked him to do; he submitted time estimates, price estimates and invoices. Yet he never received any payments. He let it go because of the debt that was supposedly handled by Ace. But two years ago, he completely stopped doing any favor to him; he justified that the debt he owed to Ace had been paid off and that the closure was justified.
But the big question now was not about how he finally cut off the connection to Ace Dias. He was once again in debt; he once again got to that point in part listening to his business associate, partner or the person who was defined by a similar term. Of course, circumstances were different. He also had to admit that he took a major role in making of the disaster. But he could not help observing similarities between two series of events. He felt eerie. When he looked back the series of past events, he often put his fingers on his temple, closed his eyes and sighed. Ordeal he went through as he associated himself with Ace Dias nearly ruined his entire life. One ought not to make the same mistake repeatedly, but he feared that he was essentially making the same mistake. Was he? This was the big question. He feared that he would not be able to mend the current difficult situation, but that failure itself might be less catastrophic than that he was caught or was destined to be caught in the endless circular motion of failures. This was the kind of thought that kept him awake all night long.
