The Mandibles

by Lionel Shriver

  Lowell had that look on his face of wanting to write that down.

  “Florence and I are worried that Jarred’s going down a similar route. I think he’s more into eco-horror, but same idea. Although to be fair I’d hardly characterize Jarred as delighted. He’s been pretty morose.”

  “Well, Vandermire is ecstatic. He loves the attention, and he’s on a high of having been supposedly right all along. ‘Unsustainable! The national debt is unsustainable!’ If I heard him say the word unsustainable one more time this afternoon I’d have punched him in the nose. The functional definition of unsustainable is that-which-is-not-sustained. If you can’t keep something up, you don’t. After all that noise twenty years ago about the deficit, the melodramatic shutdowns of government over raising the debt ceiling, and what’s happened? Nothing. At 180 percent of GDP—which Japan proved was entirely doable—the debt has been sustained. It is therefore, ipso facto, sustainable.”

  “Don’t let Vandermire get to you, then. If he’s off the beam, he’ll soon look as dumb as you think he is.”

  “His sort of loose, inflammatory talk is dangerous. It undermines confidence.”

  “Confidence, shmonfidence. What’s it matter if a few rich investors get edgy?”

  “Money is emotional,” Lowell pronounced. “Because all value is subjective, money is worth what people feel it’s worth. They accept it in exchange for goods and services because they have faith in it. Economics is closer to religion than science. Without millions of individual citizens believing in a currency, money is colored paper. Likewise, creditors have to believe that if they extend a loan to the US government they’ll get their money back or they don’t make the loan in the first place. So confidence isn’t a side issue. It’s the only issue.”

  The trouble with being a professor is that when you pontificate for a living it’s hard to cut the crap once you get back home. Avery was used to it, though she didn’t find Lowell’s rants quite as enchanting as when they first got married.

  “You know, most of the other doom mongers like Vandermire are also gold bugs,” Lowell resumed. “Honestly, hanging on to a decorative metal as the answer to all our prayers, it’s medieval—”

  “Don’t start.”

  “I’m not starting. But I don’t know why Georgetown hired that jackass. He’s meant to be a token of the faculty’s ideological ‘breadth,’ but that’s like claiming, ‘We have academic breadth because some of our professors are smart and the others are nitwits.’ The gold standard was put to rest sixty years ago, and nobody’s missed it. It was clunky, it constrained the tools available to central banks to fine-tune the economy, and it artificially limited the monetary base. It’s antiquated, superstitious, and sentimental. What the gold bugs never concede? Now that the metal has almost no real utility in and of itself, it’s therefore just as artificial a store of value as fiat currencies, or cowrie shells.”

  Avery studied her husband. Maybe he’d refrained from turning on the news because he was afraid of encountering his bête noire Mark Vandermire. Or maybe he was afraid of the news itself. “You seem worried.”

  “All right—a little.”

  “But I know you. So here’s the question: are you worried about what’s actually happening? Because I think you’re more worried about being wrong.”

  Kicking himself for that third glass of wine with Avery, Lowell got an early start the next morning with a muddy head. Skipping his usual compulsive glance at the one news website he marginally trusted, he decided to grab coffee at the department—even if it was mostly a sassafras-pit substitute; in Lowell’s private view, the biggest agricultural catastrophe in recent years wasn’t soaring commodity prices for corn and soy but the widespread dieback of the Arabica bean crop, making a proper latte the price of a stiff Remy. Driven more than ever to advocate for educated, creative, modern economics now that the likes of Vandermire would have everyone trading wampum with an abacus, he wanted to make progress on his paper on monetary policy before his 10 a.m. course, History of Inflation and Deflation. The class had hit Industrial Revolution Britain, nearly a century of persistent deflation during which the blasted country did nothing but prosper, which always put Lowell in a bad mood.

  On his walk to the Metro, the sidewalks of Cleveland Park were busy for such an early hour. Though the sky at sunrise was clear, pedestrians had the huddled, scurrying quality that crowds assume in the rain. One woman quietly crying didn’t surprise him, but two did, and the next weeper was male. While Lowell didn’t by policy wear his fleX while strolling a handsome city whose sights he preferred to take in, his fellow Washingtonians routinely wrapped theirs on a wrist or hooked one on a hat brim. Yet it was very odd for so many pedestrians to be conducting audio phone calls. True, since the Stonage a handful of purist kooks had boycotted the internet altogether, and that atavistic bunch jabbered ceaselessly because talking was the only way those throwbacks could communicate. For everyone else with a life, the phone call was by consensus so prohibitively invasive that a ringtone was frightening: clearly, someone had died.

  As he descended the long gray steps of his local station, the faces of scuttling commuters displayed an unnervingly uniform expression: wrenched, concentrated, stricken. He squeezed into the train as the doors were closing, barely wedging into the crowd. For pity’s sake, it was only 6:30 a.m.

  Here, too, everyone was talking. Not to each other, of course. To fleXes. How low is it now? … Well, in London it’s only … Hitting margin calls … Buy Australian, Swiss francs, I don’t care! No, not Canadian, it’ll get dragged … Bet POTUS has already been roused from his … Stop-loss … Crossed stop-loss two hours ago … Stop-loss …

  Even by Washington standards, Lowell Stackhouse was exceptionally averse to getting news everyone else was in on already, and after thirty seconds of this murmurous churn he’d heard enough. He whipped the fleX from his pocket, stiffened it to palm-size, and went directly to kind-of-trustworthy Bloomberg.com: DOLLAR CRASHES IN EUROPE.

  • CHAPTER 3 •

  WAITING FOR THE DOUGH

  In the most ordinary of times, Carter Mandible would drive up to New Milford debating to what degree he felt guilty about dreading a visit with his own father. Why, most people his age would strain to extend themselves to the rarefied realm of ninety-seven, even if Douglas Mandible didn’t subject his son to the additional trials of feeblemindedness. Rather, Carter sometimes wished that his father showed more signs of mental fatigue, which might excite his sympathy, and lay grudges to rest. One of those grudges being first and foremost that the old man was still alive.

  Oh, Carter never actively wished that his father would die. He was entirely sure—he was fairly sure—that when the time came he would be felled by the customary measure of filial grief. Friends had warned that the loss always hits you harder than you expect. But that was a discovery for which he’d been more than ready for fifteen years.

  It was also standard on the two-hour trip from Brooklyn—this leafy section through Connecticut was pleasant—for Carter to question his motivations for these visits. With an eye to the long view, you naturally dote on an elderly parent as a subtly selfish prophylactic: to be able to assure yourself, on receipt of that fatal phone call, that you’d been devoted. Sometimes being a shade more attentive than you’re quite in the mood for can prevent self-excoriation down the line. After all, old people have a horrible habit of kicking it right after you ducked seeing them at the last minute with an excuse that sounded fishy, or on the heels of a regrettable encounter in which you let slip an acrid aside. To be dutiful without fail is like taking out emotional insurance.

  Yet in Carter’s case, the self-interest was crassly pecuniary. Did he keep in his father’s good graces with monthly runs to the Wellcome Arms only to safeguard his inheritance from, say, a rash or spiteful late-life impulse to endow a chair at Yale? He’d never know. Worse, his father would never know, and might not ever feel confidently cherished for himself. A family fortune introduced an elem
ent of corruption. While Carter might sentimentalize the ideal world in which he spent as much time as possible with Douglas E. Mandible because he loved his father, and enjoyed his father’s company, and was resolved to make the most of his father’s blessedly extended lifespan while he still could, the money was an inescapable contaminant, and it wasn’t going to go away.

  Or in theory it wouldn’t go away.

  For this was not the most ordinary of times.

  While it was certainly usual for Carter to chafe that by the time he came into the legacy he’d be too old to spend it, this afternoon that exasperation rose to a frenzy. He and Jayne still lived in the same modest, increasingly disheveled Carroll Gardens row house—brick, not brownstone. It was finally paid off, but for years the mortgage was a stretch. He and Jayne did get to Tuscany in 2003—a first proper vacation, in their early forties! But they’d always planned on Japan. Now that Jayne was so fearful that she’d rarely leave the house, adventures farther afield than Sahadi’s on Atlantic Avenue were out of the question. On one charge, newer cars would make it to Canada; this ten-year-old BeEtle couldn’t get past Danbury. Once he got that post at the Times he was already sixty, by which time America’s shrinking “paper of record,” having already stooped to selling creative writing courses and colonial knickknacks, was snarfing up desperate aging journalists for pocket change. His pension was farcical. If they might free up some equity by downsizing in the brief window during which their youngest had pretended to leave home, that meant finding someplace smaller and meaner and more depressing. Great.

  Yet a breezy, no-cares existence had been in the pipeline all his life. The money was stuck further up the system, like a wad of the disposable diapers you’re told never to flush. Meanwhile, awaiting his birthright had suspended him in an extended adolescence. This state of decades-long deferral presaged when his real life would begin. He was sixty-nine. Real life would be short.

  What Carter craved was not so much furniture and electronics, cruises and wine-tasting tours—whatever he might buy—but a feeling. A sensation of ease and liberation, of generosity and savor, of possibility and openness, of whimsy and humor and joy. Granted, he expected too much from mere money, but he’d be happy to find that out, too. Relieved of this endless waiting, he would embrace even a reputably adult disillusionment. Because he still felt like a kid. And now that theoretical Valhalla in which he and Jayne could leave the heating jacked up to sixty-eight the whole night through, or make an airy fresh start on a wide-skied ranch in Montana where Jayne might get over the terror she associated with Carroll Gardens, well—in the last few days, that future had, very probably, gone to hell.

  For this last week was the most historically savage of his experience, and that was counting 9/11 and the Stone Age. As for the latter, sure, the power went out, and there was looting of course, including of Jayne’s chichi delicatessen on Smith Street, from whose gratuitous destruction she had yet to recuperate. Traffic lights going black resulted in a host of dreadful pile-ups. He could skip rehearsing all those airline disasters again, the train wrecks, the poignant human-interest packages about cardiac patients whose pacemakers began beating double-time, like an invigorating change-up in a Miles Davis recording. Parts of the country had no water, though that was good practice for the dryouts to come. Telecommunications and national defense systems ceased to function, even if in Carter’s view America’s vaunted “defense” had long put the country in the way of more munitions than it deflected. Understandably, then, for Florence, Avery, and Jarred, 2024 constituted the direst of calamities. But Carter hailed from a different generation—one raised locating phone numbers in scrawled paper diaries and tracking down zip codes in fat directories from the post office, painstakingly diluting encrusted Liquid Paper with plastic pipettes from tiny overpriced bottles of thinner and later upgrading with outsize gratitude to the self-correcting ribbons of IBM Selectrics, flicking through yellowed rectangles in the long wooden drawers of card catalogs and looking up articles in the Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature in the library. There was only so gravely he was likely to rate going without the internet for three weeks.

  Albeit eerily invisible, eerily silent, this last week’s turmoil was of another order. The Stone Age produced immediate, palpable consequences: the lights wouldn’t go on, food rotted in the fridge, and none of the few stores remaining open carried milk. Throughout this latest mayhem nothing changed. A conventional number of cars on I-84 were doing the usual five miles per hour over the speed limit. The sky was mockingly clear. Exiting for a recharge, Carter didn’t have to swerve around bodies littering the ramp, or duck to avoid gunfire. Its lot half-full, Friendly’s was continuing to sell maple-walnut cones and SuperMelts. Strolling between chargers and convenience stores, none of Carter’s fellow motorists appeared hurried or flustered. This whole placid commercial stretch testified to the fact that the folks most affected by the week’s historical bad weather weren’t temperamentally inclined to pitch rocks through plate glass. One such under-violent character was bound to be his father.

  If you believed its literature, the Wellcome Arms was the most luxuriously equipped assisted-living facility in the United States. The high-tech gym was really a come-on for prospective tenants, promising retirement as renewal, as the unfettered free time to step into the trim, fit incarnation you’d always been too busy to manifest—until the shine wore off and residents were confronted with the odious exertion of using the machines. The joint actually kept horses, though Carter had never seen anyone ride one. Replete with water therapists and massage jets, the pool saw more traffic, since a proportion of the residents could still float. It went without saying that the home provided the medical facilities of a top-flight private hospital; given Wellcome’s astronomical charges, it was worth the institution’s while to keep its clients, however nominally, in this world.

  Although Douglas Mandible would not commonly be parted from his fleX before the 4 p.m. close of the New York Stock Exchange, pulling into Visitor Parking, Carter spotted his father on the nearest tennis court. Douglas was once a hard-hitting, cutthroat singles player, who would risk stroke or seizure to retrieve a skittering down-the-line—in the same fashion that as an equally cutthroat literary agent he had pulled out all the stops to score celebrated novelists. Yet in advanced age he’d refined a very different game, whereby he ran this much-younger opponent (late seventies, Carter guessed) from corner to corner. Barely returning the shot, the other guy would blob his own right to Douglas’s feet, and Pop could keep the ball in play without moving more than five inches in any direction. It was the same hyper-efficient, energy-conserving manipulation that Douglas could employ to effortlessly control his family without leaving his chair.

  With a wicked crosscourt sharding out of the service box, Douglas dispatched the point in the spirit of simply having had enough. Carter didn’t flatter himself that his father had cut the point short because he’d spied his son in the parking lot. Having given notice of this visit, Carter was right on time. Had Pop given a damn about not keeping his son waiting, he wouldn’t have been playing tennis in the first place.

  Douglas made a show of mopping his face and waved at Visitor Parking with the towel. His figure was closer to scrawny than sleek, but his bearing remained debonair. The mane of blazing white hair was more spectacular than the younger auburn version. In October, he sported a leathery tan. While spinal compression had shaved a good two inches off his height, that still left the patriarch a touch taller than his only son. Age had scored his long face with an expression of drollery once fleeting and now ceaseless. He would look dryly amused in his sleep.

  “Carter!” The pumped joy in his voice was heartening, even if Douglas lavished the same elaborate glad-to-see-you on everybody. “I’m going to grab a shower. Meet in our library, shall we?” That trace of British inflection—lie-bree—was always deft enough that you couldn’t quite accuse him of affectation.

  Back in the day, Douglas Elliot Mandible
had been an illustrious bon vivant and raconteur. Since Carter could remember, his father had been able to summon the names of obscure, long-dead authors and to reel off multiple lines from Philip Roth or William Faulkner verbatim—a facility the man had cruelly neglected to hand down to his son, who was more apt to launch into a point about some latest movie and then spend five tedious minutes trying to remember what the film was called. As a child, Carter took his father at face value: the literary eminence was fully formed, a given. But by adulthood, the sheer A-to-B of his father’s flamboyant persona had grown confounding. How did anyone start out as a callow, superficially educated, and surely in any important sense rather stupid young man, and then ugly-duckling with no noticeable transition into a suave, lively, charming adult to whose parties celebrities and intellectual heavy hitters alike would eagerly flock? For not once had any of Douglas’s copious, well-connected acquaintances ever taken Carter aside and shared, “For years, your dad would tell anecdotes in company that fell flat as pancakes. You don’t slide into that kind of style like slipping on a jacket. You have to practice.” So had Douglas sequestered himself behind closed doors for weeks on end memorizing long witty passages, the better to unspool them over the rims of two-onion martinis? Really, how did you make the journey from mouthy, naive, full-of-shit Yale undergraduate to one of New York’s Great Characters, who could wear an ascot every day of his working life without looking ridiculous? Though perhaps the more pressing question now was how a redoubtable Manhattan mover-and-shaker had borne the indignities of extreme old age without appearing to have been humbled in the slightest.