“Minimum Payment Due”
by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh
from the November 25, 2024 issue of The New Yorker
There was a minor gap in time where we didn’t get any stories by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, but we’ve had one per year since, and this is his eighth or ninth in the magazine since they started publishing his work in 2010. I’ve tended to like his work.
Here is how “Minimum Payement” begins:
It was four o’clock in the afternoon and my phone was ringing, number unknown, which meant, of course, that it was one of the collection agencies. They had called me three days ago. They had called me three days before that. They were clearly not going to take no answer for an answer. The last time I’d made the mistake of picking up, the woman had sounded as if she was about twenty years old, calling from somewhere in the heartland, speaking with flat vowels and a maternal tone, firm but loving, never mind the age difference. “We would hate for it to come to that,” she said, which was code for legal proceedings. I wanted to tell her that the irony was that sooner or later someone was going to be calling her about the student loans she couldn’t pay back. Instead, I said, “No, Ma’am. Yes, Ma’am.” There was additional irony in the fact that the phone I was using had been bought on credit the week before—because I’m susceptible to sales—increasing the grand total of what I owed, distributed across two Visas, one Mastercard, and an American Express, not to mention Target, Walmart, and Best Buy. But that was the kind of irony that wasn’t funny. Meanwhile, compound interest was accruing daily.
What a stressful start to the week! Please feel free to drop a comment below with your thoughts on the story.
At first I thought this was going to be a problem and solution story; 1,000 words introducing the problem, 1,000 words to describing all the horrible things that happened and then a 1,000 word ending or solution.
There was an ending but the guy still had the same problem at the end of the story that he pretty much had at the beginning, which is maybe the more important point.
Or was it really about fraud prevention like see something say something. Or if it doesn’t feel right it isn’t? But how many things do most people end up having to go through in life that don’t feel right? Makes you wonder.
It also seems to make the whole self improvement thing seem like such a sham. To most people, it seems exceedingly difficult to turn your life around if you seem headed in a certain direction. Some people call that predisposed destiny.
And I wondered, maybe this story is all about algorithms. If you are going to sell something to somebody who probably won’t buy it at least at first, what do you have to do to completely destroy all their strongest doubts? Whoever designs that stuff knows exactly how to include all the precise emotional keywords so the person will definitely instantly buy no matter their worst reservations.
Then I thought. Well it’s probably about all of that and some other stuff that only certain readers will pick up. So, I think that makes a good story when a really good story gets one thinking about all of this.
It had opposed dichotomies in that we know most of the details of how the protagonist got into trouble but practically no detail on how Reggie had gotten out of his difficulties so quickly, so definitively and with such certainly. How did he get the nice suit? How did get the money for Part 1 and now would have enough money for Part 2 and all the rest no worries at all?
And how do outwardly seeming really smart people get into debt or could be so easily swayed? And how do people who are have done really badly and live in room, sudden have a completely unforseen resurrection that makes them king of the world?
So this story is sort of a looming insolvency meditation about how the not so smart can somehow beat all the odds and the smart person who has everything going for them loses a lot and seems headed for the inevitable total failure that Reggie seems to have suddenly risen above within a short span of five years.