The last word: Subprime U.S.A.

Scattered clothes. Runaway mold. Snakes coiled in refrigerator bins. Clearing out a foreclosed home, says Harper’s writer Paul Reyes, is always a study in broken dreams.

Scattered clothes. Runaway mold. Snakes coiled in refrigerator bins. Clearing out a foreclosed home, says Harper’s writer Paul Reyes, is always a study in broken dreams.

When I ask my father what he remembers about the first houses he “trashed out”—a phrase we use to describe the process of entering a home that has been foreclosed upon by the bank and hauling all of what the dispossessed owner has left behind to the nearest dump, then returning to clean the place by spraying every corner and wiping every inch of glass, deleting every fingerprint, scrubbing the boot marks off the linoleum, bleaching the cruddy toilets, sweeping up the hair and sand and dust, steaming the stains out of the carpet (or, if the carpet is unsalvageably rancid, tearing it out), and eventually, thereby, erasing all traces of whoever lived there—he says he doesn’t remember much. It was around 15 years ago, for one thing, well before I joined him; and since then he has trashed out so much bizarre flotsam that his memories of those first few houses have faded.

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