The Mandibles

by Lionel Shriver

  Carter signed in at the office, whose Doric columns and classic New England white clapboard were meant to evoke a timelessness at odds with a clientele whose time was conspicuously running out.

  “Your daddy gonna live forever, sí?” the portly receptionist quipped, to which Carter responded distractedly, “Yeah, afraid so.” She shot him a look.

  In truth, his natural impulse in encounters with strangers the last few days was to powwow over this “bancor” business and press them on what they presumed the game plan was in DC—since that’s what happened after 9/11, wasn’t it? All the social barriers fell, and you found yourself having heart-to-hearts with the clerk scanning your pretzels. We’re all in this together, that was the conceit. Except we weren’t all in this one together, and Carter stopped himself. A Lat minding the desk at an old folks’ home was just the sort to have floated obliviously through the crisis, perhaps blissfully unaware that there was a crisis: no assets.

  Douglas and his hapless second wife were allotted a whole compound—the better to absorb a goodly share of the effects from their liquidated estate in Oyster Bay. (Carter accepted a claret-red leather sofa from the excess, which from the moment it arrived made all their other furniture look tattered. They’d unloaded it on Florence.) That was the concept at Wellcome: to reconstruct as best you could the home you’d left behind.

  Accordingly, the front door was thick, wooden, and beveled, with a heavy brass knocker, as would befit the entrance of a grand house. A male orderly in whites answered wearing plastic gloves. “Just getting Luella changed.”

  Chances were he was not referring to her outfit.

  Carter padded the hallway’s plush crimson carpet. The baseboards and notched cornices were a lustrous mahogany, the doorways topped with finely latticed panes. The bathrooms gleamed with alabaster and gold-plated taps. Such opulence lavished on people during the one period of their lives they were least capable of enjoying it seemed subtly obscene. Besides, as much as he would have relished the luxury of no longer worrying about the size of his Con Ed bill, he was suspicious of luxury in its conventional sense. For Carter, extravagance backfired. Taken to the max, the many-splendored thing merely demonstrated the limits to how wonderful a given whatnot got. A toilet with a heated seat and electric lid-lift might flush with a discreet hush, but you still pissed in it. Brass or plastic, a doorknob was a doorknob. It opened the door. He had never understood what fixtures that cost hundreds of dollars apiece were supposed to make you feel other than hoodwinked.

  Douglas’s appointments added a note of bygone class. The walls were decorated with framed dust jackets of novels by former clients. Through the French doors, the spacious library was lined floor-to-ceiling with literary properties Douglas would have sold to editors at auction, often for a great deal more money than the royalties they reaped. (If an author earned back his advance, went the Mandible Agency’s ruling maxim, the agent had failed.) Oddly, though the physical book had only in the last few years made a wholesale departure, the room exuded the ambience of a historical diorama from the eighteenth century. All the effort poured into each volume—not only the effort of composing the text, but of choosing the font, selecting the paper, styling the diamonds under the chapter headings, and designing the cover, down to the touchy-issue size of the author’s name—seemed both poignant and pathetic. But Carter resisted his father’s sentimentality over a mere format. It made no more sense to get maudlin over hardbacks than it did to burst into tears over a mottled box of floppy discs. His grandkids had no idea what a microfloppy was.

  “See anything that interests you, you’re welcome to borrow it.” Douglas closed the French doors behind him. He’d changed into one of the cream-colored suits he favored all year, though today’s cravat was a seasonably autumnal rust. “But I’m fussy about my returns policy. Never did understand what about books makes people feel free to steal them. Casserole dishes, drat them, always come back.”

  Carter turned from the shelves. “Reading is an act of possession. You read it, you own it.”

  “So it seems! Most people assume what kiboshed publishing was the Stone Age. Suddenly nobody dared buy anything online anymore—”

  “Actually, hackers had pretty much killed the online marketplace altogether way before the Stone Age—”

  “—but supposedly readers had already made the leap to digital, and wouldn’t go back to the textual equivalent of the ox cart,” Douglas powered on; it was always fruitless to interrupt. “In truth, piracy had already brought the industry to its knees. Well before 2024, no one was buying books, in any form. The end of internet commerce was simply the coup de grace. What’s left to download may be plentiful and free, but it’s one big slush pile. Browsing is like falling into a sewer.”

  Carter had heard this shtick. Douglas would be mortified to realize how often he repeated himself now. Never retelling anecdotes to the same parties was a point of pride.

  “By the end of Shelf Life,” Carter said, “all Jayne made a profit on was the coffee. Watching Amazon go down in flames, I broke out marshmallows.”

  “I never told you”—Douglas had told him—“but I lost a small fortune on Amazon. Call it trading with the enemy, but I was holding some serious stock.”

  Reference to his father’s portfolio was awkward at the best of times. Carter didn’t want to seem too interested, but Douglas would never be persuaded by a contrived indifference. Carter had always to indulge the conceit that of course Pop’s investment decisions were none of his business—which was horseshit. While he and his sister saw eye to eye on little, they agreed on this much: their father’s unfettered day trading with their inheritance was worrisome. If Douglas seemed pretty together, they might only be alerted to the fact that he’d lost it by the discovery that he’d lost the money, too.

  Douglas unstoppered a crystal decanter on the liquor cabinet. “Noah’s Mill?”

  “Early for me. And I’m driving.”

  “I thought nobody drives anymore, either.”

  Carter accepted the bourbon he thought he’d declined. Given the visit’s agenda, he’d drain it. Driverless cars having virtually eliminated DWI, cops weren’t on the interstate prowl anymore. “Our BeEtle has a driverless function, but I don’t use it. I’m like you—a dinosaur.”

  “To paleontology, then!” Clinking Carter’s cut-glass tumbler against his own, Douglas sank into a leather armchair by the window. Even five-inch tennis must have worn him out. “It was a splendid life while it lasted. At least Enola had a good run.”

  “But Nollie refuses to write for nothing. Which means an esteemed novelist like my sister writes nothing.” Carter added unctuously, “Such a terrible waste.”

  “As her former agent, I can only approve.”

  “I never have sorted out how much she raked in,” Carter fished. “She didn’t have another bestseller after Better Late Than.”

  “We’re all entitled to our financial privacy.” Not the most promising preface for their pending confrontation, and the short i in privacy was annoying.

  “So how’s Luella?” Carter asked, though he didn’t care.

  “Oh, same, same. In remarkably fine fettle, I’m told.” He sounded dismayed.

  Leaving Carter’s mother, Mimi, at sixty for a thirty-eight-year-old assistant might have given Douglas a second lease on life, but in due course the joke was on him. Oh, Douglas and his floozy girl Friday had a good stretch together—or so Carter was informed, since Nollie buddied up to their father after the divorce, while for years Carter avoided the couple’s sumptuous new estate in Oyster Bay out of loyalty to their mother. But the willowy, elegant interloper—who was trendily Afri-merican to boot, which seemed to a liberal New York family like cheating—was stricken with dementia in her late fifties. Douglas kept the condition under wraps for years. But at length he came upon his second wife naked in the shower, a mechanism she didn’t know how to turn on and whose purpose escaped her. That proved unfortunate, since she was also smeared head-
to-toe in a smelly, sticky brown substance she could no longer identify and was trying to eat. Were it not for Luella, Douglas might have lasted a lot longer on Long Island. An irony that Mimi never ceased to savor: when Douglas dropped a thirty-six-year marriage like a hot brick, his wife was running the Dementia Research Foundation, and at ninety-five she was still on the board—stubbornly of sound mind, if only for revenge.

  Relieved of his wife’s day-to-day care by Wellcome staff, Douglas now modeled his marriage on the relationship of master and pet. He fed Luella treats, to which she responded with the human equivalent of a tail-wag—when she remembered to chew and swallow, and didn’t remove the chocolate to melt it on the radiator. He did continue to talk to her; Carter had heard the running commentary when the two were in the next room. But then, lonely people talked the same way to their dogs.

  “Ever wonder if this family is cursed?” Carter mused, still standing. Assuming the chair beside his father would have demarcated the point at which they were really going to talk. “I’m a newspaper journalist, and now Jayne complains that she can’t find any newsprint to clean the windows. As for Nollie, the career novelist is over. And, Pop, you were a king! But of one of those island nations swamped by sea-level rise that aren’t even a dot on the map anymore. There are no more literary agents. Even diesel engines: they’ve sunk without a trace. Everything we’ve done has vanished.”

  Reference to diesel engines was strategic. The bulk of the Mandible money was amassed by Carter’s great-grandfather Elliot, a Midwestern industrialist. Douglas had added to the pile a bit, but he’d always lived high, and Mimi extracted a fair whack of his agency earnings in the divorce. The inheritance from Mandible Engine Corp. was protected from marital depredations by a trust. So if Carter hadn’t earned the cash to which he should soon be entitled, neither had his father. It pleased him to underscore that Douglas was a mere fiduciary caretaker, another undeserving beneficiary of capitalistic injustice.

  Douglas expressed a sudden frustration with preparatory social niceties by rising with some difficulty for another finger of bourbon. Bad sign. He never drank before 8 p.m. “Since you were a journalist, you’ve been following the news?”

  “Insofar as it’s possible, with no in-depth coverage, no fact-checking—”

  “The end of the New York Times,” Douglas said patiently, “was not the end of the world. We all miss it, Carter. But it became a shadow of its former self.”

  “Meaning when I worked for it.”

  “Tetchiness doesn’t suit you. Aren’t you over seventy?”

  “Not yet.”

  “But old enough to realize that the end of the world takes place on rather a larger scale. As you must have begun to appreciate. Quite a week!”

  “Well”—Carter took a deep breath—“with the stock exchange shut down, I guess you’ve had something of a vacation.”

  “If having the federal government deny you access to your own accounts—scarcely different from being locked out of your own house—well, if that’s your idea of a vacation, yes. It’s been all beach umbrellas and boat drinks.”

  “And do you know, ah—I mean, ballpark, what kind of a hit you’ve taken?” His father played his financial cards close to his chest. Carter had no idea of the size of the portfolio, down to the number of zeros.

  “Use your head. Trading closes automatically once the market dives a set percentage or point drop. The SEC hasn’t deigned to re-open the Exchange since the Level 3 circuit breaker kicked in on Thursday. It doesn’t take much imagination to picture what will happen to the market when they do. I’m sure the SEC has pictured it. So whatever the values at which stocks left off are academic. The question is not what they are worth, but what they will be worth three seconds after the bell. Imagine all those investment-bank computers primed at the starting line—with which my poor fleXcreen can’t compete. Of course, one could argue that the value of assets to which you are denied access, perhaps indefinitely, is zero.” Reseated at a jaunty angle, Douglas had assumed a whimsical demeanor. He seemed almost pleased.

  “One could argue?” said Carter. “Or that’s what you’re saying?”

  “One could also argue,” Douglas continued with an infuriating mildness, “as a contingent on the web is already promoting, that this is an extraordinary and irrational hysteria from which the market will promptly bounce back. After a historically unprecedented dip, about which academics like your son-in-law will produce miles of trying analytical text, the dollar and the market may both more than recover. In which case, the next month or so could provide a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to buy low and sell high. With a bit of leveraging, investors swimming against the tide could easily grow their holdings by three or four times.”

  This was not the multiple choice for which Carter had made this journey: his father was (a) destitute; (b) rich and about to get a whole lot richer; (c) somewhere in-between. Thanks.

  “They’ve put limits on withdrawals, you know,” Carter said sulkily. “I can’t get more than three hundred bucks from an ATM.”

  “They’re afraid of more bank runs. By trying too hard to prevent them, more bank runs are exactly what they’ll get—should they ever be so imprudent as to let you at your own money again.”

  “The Fed chief was emphatic. Krugman said the limits were for a few days, max.”

  “Anyone in a position of authority telling you something unpalatable is ‘temporary’ is a red flag. The quick fix of capital controls can seem so alluring: ‘We’ll simply make the rabble keep their money here. We’ll pass a law!’ The hard part is lifting capital controls, which becomes unthinkable the moment they’re instituted. Who wants to keep funds in a country that confuses a bank account with a bear trap? The moment you remove the constraints, the nation is broke. So you can be sure that at least the freeze on making monetary transfers out of the US will stay in place for some time to come. Look at Cyprus. The capital controls levied in 2013 weren’t entirely rescinded until two years later. Know how long those controls were meant to stay in place at their inception? Four days.”

  “But this is the United States. Here, they can’t—”

  “They can. And will. There’s nothing the Fed can’t do.” Again, this cheerfulness. Douglas fished a steamer from an inside pocket. The family patriarch was once a two-pack-a-day smoker, and Carter blamed electronic cigarettes for the man’s now-catastrophic longevity. The e-bacco emitted a teasing scent of French vanilla.

  “Why do you seem to find this debacle so entertaining?”

  “What does it matter if I’m entertained? After all, wasn’t it interesting,” Douglas supposed, stabbing the air with his stainless-steel wand like a Philharmonic conductor, “when the ECB, Japan, the Bank of England, and the Fed banded together to intercede the day after the rate spike, and all that doing ‘whatever it takes to support the dollar’ backfired? Traditionally, investors bow to the inevitable when central banks move in. But rampant purchasing of US securities meant the Fed was conjuring up yet more money out of thin air to buy the bonds. Which is why the dollar tanked in the first place. Made the fire sale of the dollar infinitely worse. I love it when by-the-book remedies don’t work the way they’re supposed to.”

  “But you don’t seem the slightest bit upset! Is it because you’re practically a hundred? And there’s not much time left for you? Because not only am I planning to stick around a few more years, but I have kids, and they have kids—”

  “Right now, every major stock exchange in the world has halted trading. It’s relaxing. You should enjoy the respite. Because Quiet Time won’t last.”

  Finally Carter plunked into the adjoining armchair, doubling his chin on his clavicle with a scowl. He should remember: for the time being, he and his father were on the same side. “Economics isn’t my bailiwick. I don’t understand this ‘bancor’ business. The American news coverage is so hostile that I can’t make heads or tails of it. Guests on CBS just start shouting.”

  “I suspect it’s
a good idea—if it was not a good idea for Putin to roll it out.”

  “At least these days Mr. President for Life keeps his shirt on.”

  “I’m intrigued by how a whole new international currency was ready to go. Not the sort of thing one works out on the back of an envelope.”

  “Maybe I’d expect a financial putsch from Russia and China,” Carter said. “But this coup is by US allies, too. Okay, not Europe—and never mind them—but the Saudis, the Emirates, Korea—after the tens of billions we shifted to them after unification? Ingrates. Not to mention Brazil, India, South Africa. Even Taiwan! Everyone’s ganging up on us! What’s going on?”

  “We should be grateful,” Douglas said. “You do realize that without the bancor lined up as a replacement reserve currency, the fall of the dollar would plunge the entire world economy into a Dark Ages? We’d be buying eggs with rocks.”

  “But how can they simply announce that oil, and gas—the whole commodities market—is henceforth to be conducted in these goofball ‘bancors’? It’s our damn oil, too, and our damn corn.” A New York Democrat really shouldn’t be spouting this indignant, nationalistic bilge. Too much American twenty-four-hour news, all singing the same apoplectic tune. Besides, father and son had chosen parts at the start. Douglas had co-opted the voice of reasonableness and fairness, which left Carter to fume.

  “A better question is how we’ve got away with shoving our currency down the rest of the world’s throat for so long,” Douglas observed. “It’s been a multipolar world for decades. After the refunding of Social Security, the US defense budget won’t buy a cap pistol. Why should commodities be traded internationally in dollars?”

  “Big whoop, you call it a bancor instead of a dollar. Like this ‘New IMF’: semantics.”

  “Not just semantics. New means administered by a consortium of countries that presently doesn’t include us.”