The Mandibles

by Lionel Shriver

  All gold exports from our shores are henceforth prohibited. In retaliation for outside agitators’ attempts to fray the very fabric of our flag, all foreign gold reserves currently stored with the Federal Reserve are hereby confiscated, and become the property of the American government.

  Lastly: it is the intention of a conspiracy of foreign powers to yoke the government of this illustrious land with an intolerable and infeasible encumbrance from the interest on its debt. That debt was borrowed in good faith, and in due course, under any but the most extraordinary circumstances, would have been repaid in good faith. But when our probity is returned with malice and betrayal, continued good faith counts only as credulity and weakness. Both sides need to honor an agreement for any contract to remain in force. What’s more, this great country will not so honor its obligations as to destroy its very existence in the process. A nation conceived in liberty cannot conduct its daily business on its knees.

  As of this evening, myself, the secretary of the Treasury, and the chairman of the United States Federal Reserve have declared a universal “reset.” In the interest of preserving the very nation that would meet its obligations of the future, we are compelled to put aside the obligations of the past. All Treasury bills, notes, and bonds are forthwith declared null and void. Many a debtor has wept in gratitude for the mercy of a wiped slate, the right to a second chance, which for individuals and corporations alike all fair-minded judicial systems like our own have enshrined in law. So also must government be able to draw a line and say: here we begin afresh.

  Thus let us strike into the future, our step lightened, our hearts gladdened—confident in the endurance of the greatest country on earth. God bless you. And God bless the United States of America. Good night.

  The moment it was over, the address was available all over the web, but sometimes too much access discouraged you from taking advantage of it; all urgency evaporated. So Florence was content for Willing to summarize the speech—with remarkable thoroughness for a thirteen-year-old—as she hung out the wash in the utility room off the kitchen. That low-water cycle always left the light loads dingy.

  “That’s a lot to digest.” Florence eyed her son, at attention beside the washer, arms straight, hands flat to his sides, dark eyes burning forward, quite the little soldier. She’d no idea how she’d raised such a sober-sided boy, ready to take on the weight of the world at a scant eighty-six pounds. “You’re not worried, are you? You look worried.”

  “I’m worried,” he reported.

  “Listen.” Abandoning the socks in the drum, Florence knelt more than need be with his height at last shooting up. “From what you’ve told me, we’ve nothing to worry about. You see any gold lying around that we have to give the government? Even if we had some, they’d pay us for it, that’s what you said.”

  “If the government can make us give them anything they want, what else can they make us give them? If they said they need all the dogs, would I have to give them Milo?”

  She laughed. “President Alvarado is never going to take Milo. He’s a nice man. Esteban and I voted for him, remember? And that newfangled money, well—I wouldn’t know a ‘bancor’ if it bit me on the butt. Do we ever take ‘bancors’ to Green Acre to buy cereal? No. So no one’s going to arrest you, or Esteban, or your mother for carrying around some nonsense currency that really has to do with complicated financial dealings between countries. As for this … ‘debt renunciation’?”

  “That’s what the commentators called it.”

  “Off the top of my head, I bet that ‘reset’ you told me about will keep our taxes down. That’s good for us. That way we keep more of my salary.”

  “The president borrowed money from people and now won’t pay it back. That doesn’t seem careless. That seems kind of boomerpoop.”

  Florence stood briskly and spanked her hands. “First off, this president borrowed hardly anything. He inherited the debt from other presidents, who couldn’t stop rescuing jerkwater countries that only ended up hating us for our helping hand. Also, most of that money is from the Chinese, who are big cheats, and the real boomerpoops, since they almost certainly knocked out our whole country’s internet five years ago. Fuck them.”

  “Nobody caught them. Nobody came up with any proof.”

  “That makes the operation even nastier. Not owning up? But you’d have to be an idiota not to know who did it.” Florence caught herself. “Sorry, I didn’t mean you’re stupid.”

  “But the Chinese won’t like this. If they could take out the internet before, they could do it again.”

  “No, they can’t. All former vulnerabilities have been secured.” Florence was uncomfortably aware of reciting this received wisdom with a slight singsong.

  “That’s what people say. That doesn’t mean it’s true.”

  “Willing, I’ve no idea how you got to be such a cynic by the age of thirteen.”

  He glowered. “They could do worse than knock out the internet.”

  “Stop it. You’re letting your imagination run away with you. The point is, none of what you told me the president announced on TV has anything to do with us, okay?”

  “Everything has to do with everything else,” he announced grimly.

  “Where did you get that?”

  “From the universe.”

  “Jesus, my son’s become a mystic. Lighten up. Let’s have some ice cream.”

  Given that he was eternally free to watch the other two-thousand-some channels streamed en español, Florence knew better than to believe that Esteban was watching the second delivery of the address in Spanish to “maintain his fluency.” Still jubilant over Dante Alvarado’s narrow victory in 2028, he was basking. During this first honeymoon year, for hardcore supporters like Esteban, America’s first Lat president could do no wrong.

  The other slightly-less-than-half of the country was if anything more sullen than in 2008, but also more prone to keep their mouths shut. This time around, no dyspeptic “birthers” could object that the Democrat was born outside the country. Its passage greatly assisted by Arnold Schwarzenegger’s failed bid for 2024, the Twenty-Eighth Amendment nullified the arcane constitutional requirement that presidents be born on American soil. (Florence wasn’t the only one who attributed the Terminator’s surprise defeat to the eleventh-hour incumbency gimmick of nominating Judith Sheindlin—a.k.a. “Judge Judy”—to the Supreme Court. The Court’s sessions had been livelier since, and shorter.) Dante Alvarado being unabashedly born in Oaxaca had helped to get him elected. The fact that many DC press conferences and congressional debates were now conducted in Spanish was an enduring source of pride for Esteban’s community. Although some Democrats regarded Alvarado’s decision to deliver his inaugural address in January exclusively in his native language as gratuitously provocative, Florence didn’t care. The broadcast of that soaring, historic speech on the Washington Mall had provided a welcome opportunity to brush up on her own Spanish.

  Besides, back in 2024 she’d put herself on notice that Florence Darkly was a racist.

  At 5:08 p.m. that fateful Saturday in March, she and Willing had been shopping in Manhattan, taking advantage of the blowout spring sale at the sprawling Chelsea branch of Bed Bath & Beyond. They’d just got through checkout when the store’s lights went off. Out on the street, the sidewalks were jammed with people shaking out fleXes in frustration; checking for connectivity on her own fleX was as compulsive as it was futile. A blackout was one thing—the whole area seemed to have no power—but that didn’t explain the absence of satellite coverage. People poured out of the subway stations; the trains had stopped. The stoplights out, an accident at West Nineteenth Street had brought traffic on Sixth Avenue to a standstill. The cacophony of horns was strangely comforting: signs of life.

  Clutching her son’s hand, she hadn’t yet entered the world in which refusing to relinquish their new wicker laundry hamper was ridiculous—though its being weighed down with other bargains stuffed inside made the bulky object e
specially awkward. As they negotiated their way through crowds milling toward hysteria, her struggling with the white elephant must have been conspicuous. When a muscular Mexican attempted to take it away from her, she assumed he was undocumented and a thief, using the pandemonium to hustle. She yanked the hamper back.

  The man promised her in soothingly correct English that he was only trying to help. He said no one he’d spoken to seemed to know why suddenly nothing worked, because the very devices with which you answered such questions had ceased to function. He warned her that, clutching the hamper with one arm and a child with the other, she risked being trampled. He asked where they lived; she was reluctant to tell him, but didn’t want to be rude. He said he also had to get home to Brooklyn. He suggested they take the Manhattan Bridge, whose pedestrian ramp would be less popular than the Brooklyn Bridge one, sure to be mobbed. He hoisted the loaded hamper on his shoulder. At first they didn’t talk. He terrified her. But as he prowed through crowds across Eighteenth Street, then down Second Avenue to Chrystie, she had to admit that she’d never have carried their chattel so far on her own, nor would she have as expertly navigated the most direct route to the pedestrian entrance at Canal Street without an app. He was right about the choice of bridge. They weren’t jostled so badly that they were ever in danger of being pushed over the rail into the East River.

  On the ramp, they all agreed that the hardest part was not knowing what had happened. On every side, other pedestrians volunteered their sure-fire theories: Halley’s Comet had hit New Jersey. The government was conducting a security drill. There’d been another terrorist attack. Harold Camping’s notorious prediction that the Rapture would arrive on May 21, 2011, was only off by thirteen years, nine months, and fifteen days.

  When they finally curved down the ramp to their borough, she begged to assume the burden and proceed with her eight-year-old’s help. Their Mexican escort claimed to live in Sunset Park, six miles west of East Flatbush, and his continuing in the wrong direction didn’t make any sense—unless he planned to accost her.

  Yet by now it was dark, obliteratingly so. Only individual fleXpots penetrated the blackness. Behind them, Manhattan could have been a mountain range. Traffic perfectly gridlocked, since driverless functions and onboard computers relied on the internet, most cars had been abandoned, though families huddled inside a few sedans, doubtless with the doors locked. So the Lat insisted not only on seeing them home, but on depleting his fleX to light the way. By the time the trio was trudging up Flatbush near the park, his fleX went dead, and they had to switch to Florence’s. The avenue was lined with other pilgrims and the waning glow of their small devices, like penitents with luminarias. The whole trip on foot was nearly ten miles and took four and a half hours. So by the time they turned onto Snyder, Florence assumed the hamper and let their protector carry Willing, who fell asleep in his arms. Later the man would explain that of course he’d been scared, as everyone was scared, but that the surest way to keep his head was to concentrate on the safety of these two strangers. His name was Esteban Padilla, and by the time they reached East Fifty-Fifth Street, dog-tired, fully in the dark again because Florence’s fleX was shot now, too, in need of locating candles and matches in the kitchen on their hands and knees, Florence was a lot less of a racist and in love.

  Last November’s election meant so much to her partner that she’d kept a slight queasiness about the new president to herself. Oh, she was thrilled by the symbolism; after all the acrimony over immigration, a Lat in the White House was the ultimate emblem of inclusion. Yet the man had a baby-faced softness only emphasized by the palatalized consonants of a Mexican accent, which in Alvarado’s case sometimes seemed a bit put on. (When he spoke to white audiences during the campaign, his pronunciation crisped right up.) It wasn’t only that he was fat—what the hell, three-quarters of the country was fat—it was the kind of fat. He had a momma’s boy puffiness that might make foreign heads of state regard him as a pushover.

  Pulling down bowls, Florence debated asking Kurt to join them for ice cream. She was always of two minds about how much to enfold their basement tenant, a part-time florist, into the family’s social life. He was sweet about bringing back aging bouquets that would have been thrown away, cheering their home with freesias. And she liked him well enough, which she wished he would simply register and then relax. After all, he was polite, solicitous, intelligent, well spoken, and eager. (Overeager? And eager for what? To be liked, obviously, and even being liked well enough would have sufficed.) Yet his outsize gratitude for every common kindness was exhausting. The fact that he never complained made their lives easier, but he’d every right to complain. Tall for the low ceiling downstairs, he perpetually hit his head on the crossbeams, which she should have cushioned with foam appliqué. An amateur musician, he would only practice the sax with no one else home, while upstairs, even Willing’s light, stealthy tread translated into elephantine pounding from below. Did Kurt Inglewood even plead with the family to keep the TV low? No, no, no. So what tilted the balance this evening toward three bowls not four made Florence feel sheepish.

  Roughly her age, trim and nicely proportioned, with a long, sharply planed face, Kurt should have qualified as handsome. A guy with a middle-class upbringing who’d struggled from one unsatisfying, low-paid job to another just as Florence had, Kurt would have come across as a charming and competent striver waiting for one decent break when he was younger. But one of the corners he’d cut for years was dental care. Decay had blackened an engaging smile into a vampiric leer. Absent fifty grand’s worth of implants, fillings, and bridges, he’d be single for life. Now in his forties with those teeth, he’d tipped tragically, unfairly, and perhaps permanently into the class of loser—an ugly, dehumanizing label that she had narrowly escaped herself. She encountered no end of poor dental hygiene at the shelter, and maybe that was the problem tonight. She wouldn’t have minded sharing ice cream with Kurt-as-Kurt. But it had been a long day at Adelphi, and she simply couldn’t face that smile.

  Florence dished up three scoops. Feeling that edgy gaiety of something major having happened even if she couldn’t tell yet if it was good or bad, she impulsively put a chunk of peppermint chip in Milo’s dog dish. They convened in the living room with spoons, and Esteban turned off the TV.

  “So what’s your take on the address?” she asked Esteban as they lounged with dessert on the sofa.

  “Está maravilloso,” he declared. “Those decrepit Republicans—they’re always carping about how Alvarado is weak and spineless. This’ll show them. Talk about standing up for this country! That’s the nerviest set of policy decisions I’ve heard from any president in my life. They can’t call him a pussy now.”

  Florence guffawed. “They might call him some other things. Like a grifter.”

  “Only people get hurt deserve it,” Esteban said confidently. “Bunch of Asian assholes. Who gives a shit.”

  Densely silent since their conversation in the laundry room, Willing emerged from his stewing with a prize-winning non sequitur: “We could always move to France.”

  “Oka-ay …,” Florence said, stroking her son’s neck with a forefinger as he sat rigidly on the floor. His ice cream was melting. “And why would we do that?”

  “Nollie lives in Paris,” Willing said. “It might be safer. The president said they won’t let dollars out of the country. He didn’t say they won’t let people out. Yet.”

  Florence glanced at Esteban and shook her head like, Don’t ask. “I suppose you might visit your great-aunt someday. You two seemed to get on well during her last trip to New York.”

  “Nollie does what she wants. Everyone else does what they’re supposed to,” Willing said. “Jayne and Carter say she’s selfish. That might be a good thing. It’s the selfish people, a certain kind of selfish, who you want on your side.”

  Florence assured her son that there were no “sides,” observed that he was overtired, urged him to bed, and finished his ice cream, now turned to
soup. After he’d brushed his teeth, she murmured in the boy’s doorway that no one was moving anywhere, and that lots of events that seem strange and scary up close end up looking like the plain ups and downs of regular life later on. The Stone Age seemed like the end of the world, didn’t it? And it wasn’t.

  Yet later her own sleep was troubled. The disquiet was subterranean. Bedrock was shifting—what had to stay the same in order for other things safely to change. In 2024, Florence came to appreciate the vast difference between something bad happening and the very systems through which anything happens going bad. Even if the president’s somber decrees had no concrete impact on the day-to-day in East Flatbush, the edicts seemed to challenge her life at ground level—not so much the trifling to-and-fro of what she earned and what she spent, what she did and where she went, but who she was.

  Walking to the bus stop the next morning, Florence crossed to drop the Con Ed bill in the mailbox—a payment method that felt as primitive as lighting a fire with flint. So history could reverse. Now that any transaction involving vital infrastructure or finance had to be conducted offline by law, trashy, space-eating paper bank statements and utility bills once again littered domestic tabletops. The checkbook, too, had been salvaged from the dustbin of the past, hairballs and used dental floss clinging between its leaves. But at least the necessity of scrawling on a rectangle “Two hundred forty-three and 29/100s” alone justified mastery of the formation of letters by hand. Close to losing the skill altogether, she’d been forced to void the first Con Ed check at breakfast because it was illegible. So she’d tutored Willing on printing the alphabet, since they didn’t teach handwriting in school anymore. Most of his classmates couldn’t write their own names. This was progress? But that was an old-fashioned concern that kids considered drear.