“Buying distance from other people”

Zara’s declaration, “I buy distance from other people,” turns money into a means of regulating proximity. In her account, wealth does not merely purchase comfort or status: it creates space between people. The phrase is both a concise description of the services she values and a revealing expression of how she approaches contact—with distance as something that can be chosen, priced, and secured.

The phrase in conversation

The line comes in a session with Zara’s psychologist, who asks what Zara does with the money she earns. The question follows an observation about winners and wealth, but Zara’s answer redirects the discussion from winning as an achievement to money as a practical instrument. When the psychologist asks what she means, Zara offers examples rather than an account of her feelings: expensive restaurants leave larger gaps between tables; first-class airplane cabins have no middle seats; exclusive hotels give guests staying in suites separate entrances. The examples extend across ordinary public spaces, travel, and lodging, making her point less a description of one purchase than a general principle about how luxury is organized.

Zara sums up that principle by observing that, in the most densely populated places on the planet, distance is the most expensive thing a person can buy. The wording makes separation sound like a commodity with a particularly high price. It also sets up a paradox: money can buy an individual a reprieve from the crowd, but that reprieve depends on a world in which people are crowded together in the first place. Her examples do not suggest that she is seeking greater intimacy through comfort. They identify the value of wealth, for her, with the ability to have fewer people close by.

Zara’s habits and the meaning of distance

The remark fits the conduct the psychologist has noticed during their meetings. Zara avoids eye contact and does not want to shake hands; the psychologist regards her as, to put it mildly, empathetically challenged. She also works with numbers, a choice that the conversation touches on when Zara distinguishes her work as an analyst from that of most people doing similar jobs, whom she describes as economists. These details frame her sentence as more than a clever account of expensive amenities: it resonates with an established pattern of reluctance toward interpersonal closeness.

The psychologist does not treat the phrase as self-explanatory. She has already found it difficult to ask Zara directly about the traits she observes, and instead asks why Zara likes her job. In the conversation about money, too, Zara responds to a broad question with concrete examples that keep the subject at the level of spaces, prices, and arrangements. The answer gives the psychologist an unexpected formulation, not a confession that resolves Zara’s character. Its force lies partly in the mismatch between an ordinary question about earnings and a response that makes distance the central benefit of wealth.

Distance as privilege

The novel places this purchasable distance beside a sharply different material condition. After her marriage ends, the Bank robber lives apart from her daughters, who remain in an apartment in the other parent’s name. She does not want to make a fuss, but the separation leaves her without a home of her own. With no job or savings, buying an apartment is impossible, and renting requires four months’ rent as a deposit. The practical gap between the two women’s circumstances is not simply that one has more money: one can spend money to secure space from other people, while the other cannot readily secure space in which to live.

The Bank robber finds a small sublet near her daughters’ apartment, by the bridge, for six thousand five hundred a month. She empties her bank account and sells her possessions to cover one month, hoping to find work before she must pay again. Even after she gets a job, her first month’s wages are withheld until she has worked two months. The bank refuses her a loan because the job is not permanent, while the lawyer’s letter threatens an application for sole custody on the grounds that she has neither a home nor a job. These pressures make rent, rather than privacy or luxury, the immediate measure of whether she can remain near her children.

A phrase sharpened by contrast

That rent recurs when Jim asks why the Bank robber needed money from the attempted bank robbery. She explains that she needed six thousand five hundred to pay the rent because her husband’s lawyer was threatening to take the girls if she had nowhere to live. The exact sum makes the contrast especially stark: money buys Zara distance in restaurants, airplanes, and hotels, while for the Bank robber the same amount stands between having somewhere to stay and facing a threat to her family life. The text does not suggest that Zara’s answer is a response to the Bank robber’s circumstances; rather, placing the expression within a story shaped by housing insecurity lets its implications reach beyond Zara’s immediate conversation.

“Buying distance” therefore names both a personal preference and an unevenly distributed power. Zara describes a form of separation made available through wealth; the Bank robber’s circumstances show how housing and financial security can instead determine whether a person has a place to live at all. The phrase’s sharpness comes from that difference. Distance may be presented as a luxury one can purchase, but a home is not a luxury to the person whose access to shelter, work, and time has narrowed to the next rent payment.