The Coin

I am going to tell you about the coin.

I do not tell you because I am required to, or because the story has not quite worked if I leave it out. I tell you because I have been telling you things for twenty Notes now, and the coin is what I have been telling you around; the shape at the center that everything else has been arranged to outline.

The doubloon is a 2-escudo piece, minted in Mexico City in 1714. I know the year because the date is pressed into the gold by a man who has been dead for three hundred years. The king whose face is on the other side has also been dead for three hundred years. The gold is still the same temperature as my hand.

I keep it in my left pocket. I have kept it in my left pocket for a very long time.

The coin does not whisper to me. I want to be precise about this; I am not describing a supernatural phenomenon. What happens is simpler and more difficult: when I hold it in a particular kind of quiet, I remember. I am three hundred years old and my memory is essentially perfect and I have killed a great many people, and the coin in my left pocket is the oldest thing I own that was present for all of it.

It was in my hand on the Sanguine Judge when I took the crewman’s head. It was in my pocket in Louisiana when I walked away from the Fortier papers. It was on my person in 1779 when I tore the soldier apart. It was at the table in 1877 when I looked at Ochoa across a room in the Territorial Legislature and said what I said.

I do not count the dead. I am not going to perform that accounting for you. I will tell you only that there have been a great many of them, and the coin has been warm through most of the ones that mattered, and that in certain hours of certain nights I take it out and hold it and look at the dead king’s face and the cross on the obverse and I think about what it costs.

Not the gold. I know what the gold cost. I know the price of every treasure ship.

What it costs to be what I am. What gets paid and what does not come back.

The coin is seven grams. It is warm. It is the cross and the dead king and three centuries of my hands.

I put it back in my pocket.

I keep it oiled. I keep it sharp. You know by now that this is how I feel about the tools I intend to keep.

Some of them have kept me, in return.

The coin has never let go of me.

I have never let go of it.

We have an arrangement.