The Mandibles

by Lionel Shriver

  When Avery specialized, drawing a hard line between mental and bodily suffering had seemed glaringly misguided, since treating the whole patient meant addressing what a person felt in every sense. Having completed a grueling but powerfully driven, goal-oriented project, many patients post-chemo got depressed. Simply staying alive had abruptly ceased to qualify as a respectable prime directive. Accustomed to the energizing terror of mortality up close and personal, some patients missed being sick. Others contending with milder ailments like arthritis had strong feelings about whatever restrictions knee replacements had placed on their Extreme Running regimes, and yearned to air their despair about relinquishing an ambition to run one hundred marathons in as many days in their eighties. To a man and woman, all of her elderly patients had been surprised to be old—which Avery privately regarded as a serious failure to pay attention. PhysHead was an eclectic discipline, drawing on tai chi, a variety of talk therapies, yoga, dream analysis, weight training, and forced crying—whatever worked.

  The last thing she’d considered when qualifying as a clinician was whether PhysHead was recognized by Medicaid and Medicare. For most of her career, exclusion from the programs was a blessing (government reimbursement rates were roachbar), but in 2030 it deprived her of the only clients who might have afforded her treatment. She shouldn’t have taken the deluge of desertions personally, but a few bit so close to the bone that she acted unprofessionally. Perhaps betraying her own priorities, she’d cried after one formerly loyal patient, “I bet you’re still budgeting for a case of wine every month!” To which the woman replied smoothly, “Two cases.”

  Lowell was so dominating that without the ballast of her own work she feared for the even keel of her marriage. Yet he was terribly sweet about helping her to move out of the office she’d rented for nine years, during which they glass-half-fulled about how maybe it was for the best, since the kids had to handle their own disappointments and could use some old-fashioned mothering.

  A Washington summer was hot and sulky, more so now that Lowell had banned air-conditioning. They switched off Mojo as well, whose monthly maintenance was a killer, and the loss felt oddly intimate; now that you couldn’t shout imperiously for home-cooked brownies, it was as if some long-abused domestic had stormed out. The kids were surly, with nothing to do, and understandably angry about having had all their plans for the season canceled.

  “You might find,” she told the boys in the breakfast room as they glowered at fleXes, “that in a public school you have more opportunity to excel. At Gates and Sidwell, the intake is so selective, it’s harder to stand out—”

  “I already excel at Gates,” Goog grumbled. “Don’t try and sell being thrown into a cesspool as some great opportunity.”

  “But these are extraordinary times, honey. As your father says, in even a few months—”

  “According to Aunt Florence,” Goog cut her off, “she graduated from college in the perfectly roachbar year. Everyone who graduated when she did was cursed, while students a few years behind her did okay.”

  Florence should really keep a lid on her questionable theories about why she’d underperformed, when the real problem was her vague, do-goody double major. “I don’t think working at a homeless shelter means you’ve been ‘cursed’—”

  “Would you want to do it?”

  “No. But Aunt Florence is more self-sacrificing than I am.”

  “Even if the country recovers, I could be part of a marked generation, too. We could all end up walking around with ash on our foreheads, like Cain.”

  “Tell Dad,” said Savannah, gliding past in micro-shorts with that air she’d refined of seeming permanently aggrieved, “I’m not applying for any more of these booby jobs.”

  True, with foreign tourists overrunning the city, the upscale hotel and restaurant sectors were thriving. But teenagers had now to compete with forty-year-old former hedge-fund managers begging to wait tables.

  “Why don’t you and Goog consider going up to Citadel in Gloversville?” Avery suggested. “I talked to Uncle Jarred last week, and he could use some help harvesting vegetables and feeding livestock. I don’t know how much he could pay, but more than I will for languishing around the kitchen making toast.”

  “God,” Savannah said. “Not only am I some waster with no prospects for a college degree, but now I’m a farm hand!”

  “Yeah, Mom,” said Goog. “Tell Uncle Jarred that’s what they make undocumented immigrants for.”

  “Actually, since the amnesty,” Avery said, though she was not helping her own case, “most immigrants won’t do that work, either.”

  “It wasn’t called an amnesty,” Goog said. At thirteen, he’d written one paper about the long-in-coming immigration reform bill of 2020—the very year used to promote it as a signature of clear sightedness—which qualified the boy as an expert.

  “I’ll go to Citadel,” Bing said softly. “In biology camp, we learned to pull carrots. I thought it was careless. And somebody has to make some money or we can’t go to the grocery store.”

  “You’re a bit young to send into the fields,” Avery said, ruffling his hair. “I could be done for violating child labor laws. But I like your attitude, sweetie.”

  “He’s a scaredy-cat toady momma’s boy,” Goog said scornfully, “who knows full well you won’t make him dig potatoes. He’s just saying what you want to hear.”

  “Scaredy-cat toady is a mixed metaphor,” Avery chided. The boys went through phases of being close, but ultimately when she christened her two sons, Avery created competing search engines. (She was attached to their names, of course, which seemed so fresh, quirky, and contemporary when she and Lowell chose them, and at this point she couldn’t imagine the children called anything else. But perhaps it was the very products of trying too hard to be modern that were guaranteed to date. One of those engines had so decisively trounced the other, too, that she worried the boys would internalize the hierarchy as fated.)

  Embarrassed to have time on her hands in a town that placed a premium on being overbooked, Avery sometimes dragged the kids out shopping to cool down. Yet many stores had also grown stingy with the AC, leaving her nostalgic for the days when shopping in America in July required a down parka. Only the luxury outlets, popular with foreigners, were jumping. Milling with a few other local families also seeking respite from the heat, Macy’s and the like were nearly deserted. Shopping had become a spectator sport. It was almost thrilling, tracking how much a flimsy pair of shorts made in Sri Lanka went for this week.

  Fortunately, the kids were bored with the museums by now, since strolls down the Mall were out. The iconic national thoroughfare was so often colonized by violent cost-of-living protests that the long lawn was brown and trampled. Municipal authorities were unable to keep ahead of the graffiti that defaced the steps of the Capitol—MEXDRECK SOLD US DOWNRIVER—or that smeared down the border of the Lincoln Memorial’s reflecting pool: THE BUCK STOPS. The abbreviated aphorism was chilling.

  Competing convocations on the Mall displayed a classic inconsistency. Jovial raves, with dancing and booze, celebrated the demise of the universally despised “über-rich,” with banners declaring: STINKIN RICH NOW JUS STINKIN, or FAT CATS BOWL EMPTY, BOO-HOO! Yet the very same people would return the next day for demonstrations of outrage that the wealthy had escaped unscathed, waving placards like WALL STREET GOT HEADS-UP ON THE BIG WELSH; REPATRIATE OFFSHORE TREASURE CHESTS! and BANKERS EAT CAKE! The double-think reminded Avery of the Middle Eastern response to 9/11 when she was fourteen: the same Muslims who told pollsters the World Trade Center was toppled by the Jews also wore Osama bin Laden T-shirts in homage. Who says you can’t have it both ways?

  Even the armies of Asian tourists that flooded the Smithsonian in the spring were dwindling. Flashing arrays of hundred-dollar bills like geishas with cheap fans, too many girlish visitors in ridiculous shoes were getting beaten up. When word went out on the web that the Chinese were routinely distracting their assailants
by tossing fistfuls of cash, for which locals would scramble in preference to kicking them in the kidneys, the rumor fueled still-larger crowds of rowdies, eager to turn a profit on racist attacks.

  The closure of her practice might have desolated Avery more had her small business failure not constituted a single daub on a large and strangely exhilarating canvas. The tumultuous times shouldn’t have been exhilarating, and she felt self-conscious about an excitement she made every effort to hide. Many Americans could barely feed their families. All the same, she was reminded of the vitalizing urgency that a brush against terminal illness had provided her patients. She felt privileged to benefit from the same energy, the same frisson of risk, the same casting aside of complacency, without also losing her hair. While the delay of Savannah’s college entrance and the boys’ demotion to public schools was a waste, Goog and Bing would later leap to the fore with high test scores, and all three would get back on track when the country got back on track. Meanwhile, they were getting a different kind of education that money couldn’t buy.

  As a point of pride, Avery hadn’t unduly relied on a pending birthright as a backstop. Earning your own way was more reputable than counting on a handout from a long-dead industrialist. The Stackhouse assets had always manifested a moral purity that inherited wealth would soil, and she told herself that she wouldn’t have wanted the tainted old money anyway. Be that as it may, the erosion of a chunk of change that might have arrived somewhere down the line recalled those thin, chafing blisters from poorly fitting sneakers, wearing away that very top layer of skin one can barely manage without. Yet should the abrasion continue, the next layer down will smart. The Mandible fortune in the background had offered an extra film of protection, without which her family was a degree more exposed.

  Fair enough, they didn’t eat bluefin tuna any longer, but they weren’t starving. They had a roof over their heads, a handsome roof. Avery may have been haunted by Savannah’s hurtful remark in June—about how if only her mother had specialized in a “useful” therapy her practice might have survived. But Savannah was right, in a way: yesterday’s essential was today’s extravagance. Under duress, people could live without tricep dips and personalized soul-searching. What a relief, then, that in an age of turmoil playing to her husband’s very expertise, at least Americans would always need professors of economics.

  When summoned to a meeting with the chancellor in August, Lowell assumed that Ellen Packer wished to apologize in person about the unconscionable delay of his salary. In straightened times, you cut the budget for the student union, and reduce the opening hours for the pool. You don’t punish the faculty.

  An ironclad grievance conferred a sense of clout, and he went back and forth beforehand over giving the woman an earful versus acting magnanimous. Feeling jaunty, Lowell wore his pink shoes, which he jittered up and down while Packer kept him waiting in the outer office. At no point did the chancellor’s secretary look him in the eye, not even when the young man announced that the chancellor would see him now.

  Ellen Packer was fat. Not pudgy or plump, but full-tilt, what’re-you-lookin’-at fat, with a lack of apology that alone unsettled his expectations for this encounter. Of course, he’d never use the word fat in company, the judgmental adjective having joined the N-word and the M-word as not careless, period. Besides, more had changed in the last fifteen years than language. Plunked behind an equally massive desk, Packer’s enormity was a political statement. Ever since the obese had obtained majority status, peoples of scale had won a sly advantage over punier contemporaries. After all, nouns like weight and gravity implied importance and seriousness; a paper that had heft made an impact. Folks like Packer deployed their mass to emphasize that they were forces to be reckoned with. Confronting those meaty arms splayed frankly on either side of her fleX, he didn’t feel sorry for her. He felt intimidated.

  “Professor Stackhouse, I don’t see anything to be gained from beating about the bush,” she announced after he assumed the hot seat before her desk. It was always surprising: her voice was high and musical. “I’d like to thank you for your long service to this university, and I hope you won’t take this as a reflection of the administration’s dissatisfaction with either your teaching or research skills. But I’m afraid we’re going to have to terminate your contract.”

  Lowell was sufficiently stunned that his comeback arrived a beat too late. “That’s impossible. I have tenure.”

  “Late last night, the board voted to revise Georgetown’s bylaws. From this September, the university will no longer offer tenure, and previous promises of permanent employ are forthwith rescinded. Professorial salaries are consuming an unacceptable proportion of the budget.”

  “But tenure protects academic freedom—”

  “Tenure is an anachronism,” she interrupted. “What other occupation offers jobs for life?”

  “There are procedures for removing tenured faculty,” Lowell said, trying to keep his temper from flaring into self-immolation. “But the protocol is elaborate—much more so than a single visit to the chancellor’s office. Rare cases almost always involve accusations of sexual harassment or racial insensitivity. Neither of which have I been charged with—unless you have some other happy news to convey.”

  “You’re welcome to sue,” she said casually. Previous to their 4 p.m. appointment, she must have conducted this conversation several times. “Though in your position, I’d think twice about incurring legal fees. The university has also consulted counsel. You’ll find our i’s dotted. What’s at stake right now is the very existence of this institution. Were you and other laid-off colleagues to prevail in court, there could be no university. So much for your restitution.”

  “But tenure aside—this is flat-out unfair dismissal.”

  “Unfair dismissal does not apply when the position you occupy has been eliminated. Off the record, I agree that, in a short-of-legal sense, your losing your job is unfair. Look around this town and you’ll see similar unfairness on every corner.”

  “Given the nature of current events, I’m staggered by how you could fire anyone in the Economics Department.”

  “I concede the irony,” she said blandly. “But if your discipline were a harder science, the nature of current events might be otherwise.”

  “Just because Economics includes a few outlier nincompoops doesn’t mean we all have our heads up our asses.” The acid was an indulgence. “Speaking of which—do you mind telling me which other faculty members in my department are getting the boot?”

  “I shouldn’t. That’s confidential. But I suppose it will be common knowledge soon enough.” She rattled off the names of a handful of his colleagues.

  That was half the department. But Lowell mostly made a note of the names he didn’t hear. “You’re keeping Mark Vandermire? He’s a rabble-rousing populist twit!”

  “I’m not going to justify the thinking behind every very difficult decision. But with the gold recall and debt settlement with China, Professor Vandermire’s research on precious metals continues to be germane.”

  “So ideology did play a part in this cull. So much for academic freedom.”

  Packer scrolled down her fleX. “Did you or did you not publish that the United States could ‘readily manage’ the national debt of 290 percent of GDP we were on track to hit in 2050? Or that the Fed had in fact ‘under-used’ monetary policy, which could afford to be ‘more expansionist’? That inflation is a ‘social good’ that helps the poor by relieving indebtedness, and that ‘sound money’ is merely ‘a fetish of the wealthy’? I’m not sure that my by-no-means-affluent neighbors would agree with you. Not now that they’re paying twenty dollars for a Tootsie Roll.”

  “Vandermire fed you those quotes, didn’t he?” They were the same snippets in which the weasel had been rubbing Lowell’s nose for months. “But I stand by every one of those statements, since this calamity has nothing to do with the national debt, or monetary policy, and everything to do with the bancor! Besides,
what about Ryan Biersdorfer? Are you telling me you’re keeping him on because the university endorses his view that financial collapse is the best thing to happen to the United States since the frost-free freezer?”

  “Between ourselves, I find his iconoclasm extreme. But his treatise The Corrections is getting a great deal of play internationally, and may help him to raise funds for Georgetown abroad. At least it’s a positive perspective that seems to make some people feel better.”

  “That’s how you’re selecting your faculty now. By rescuing the academics who make students feel better.”

  “I’m sorry, Professor Stackhouse, I didn’t mean to involve myself in the internal conflicts of your field. I’m afraid we’re going to have to bring this meeting to a close.”

  Lowell started to panic. He hadn’t meant to get adversarial. “Listen, what if I accept a reduction in salary?”

  “Then I’d say you were a poor economist indeed. This country has an annualized inflation rate of 80 percent—and that’s the official figure. It’s hardly the time for wage cuts, even if I were empowered to offer such a thing.”

  “Well, what about my back pay?” Lowell would have worried that he sounded sniveling, but his mind was clamorous with the mortgage, his kids, and Jesus Christ, how to break this to Avery.

  “There you have an excellent case. The university is doing everything in its power to bring terminated faculty up to date.”

  Rolling her chair back in regal slow motion, the chancellor stood formally behind her desk. “I hope you appreciate the fact that I am choosing to conduct these painful conversations myself, though I might have delegated the unpleasant duty to an underling. I’d also like to apologize for letting you go at the last minute, right before the term resumes. The board had been desperately hoping that applicants from Asia and the subcontinent would make up for the devastating drop in domestic enrollment. But the highly publicized, often racially motivated violence downtown has led to a sudden wholesale withdrawal of foreign students, who pay much more lucrative levels of tuition. They now prefer the Ivy League satellite campuses in Delhi, Beijing, and Jakarta, where they feel safer. Our own satellite campuses are Georgetown’s only sectors in the black. But their surplus can’t supplement the shortfall in DC, because we’re having trouble repatriating bancors. Which you of all people should understand.”