The Mandibles

by Lionel Shriver

  Odiously, Ryan Biersdorfer and his sidekick Lin Yu Houseman were better than safe. While The Corrections couldn’t rake in the royalties of the old hardbacks, Biersdorfer had cannily priced the download so low that for better-heeled foreign buyers it was too much trouble to go looking for a pirated copy, and the pittances added up. More substantially, he was much in demand on the lucrative international lecture circuit. That meant earning bancors (doubtless through an offshore shell company), and the currency confoundingly did nothing but appreciate. So rather than convert his foreign income to dollars, required for repatriation, Biersdorfer was reputedly buying up real estate in Paris, Tuscany, Hanoi, and Jakarta. Any American who championed his own country’s collapse as well-deserved payback and promise of socialist rebirth was a treasured performing bear abroad, since most of the fatuous economist’s serious scholarly competition back home couldn’t bankroll airfares. Europeans were fascinated by the rare Yank who had been allowed out of the country, thus moronically conflating capital controls and controls on freedom of movement. (On second thought, maybe being at liberty to go wherever you want so long as you don’t spend any money there is fairly tantamount to house arrest.) Typically, too, Biersdorfer and his sexy Asian yes-woman spent little to no time in the US these days, which apparently made them ideal interlocutors for explaining to the rest of the world what it was like here.

  Lowell wasn’t hung up on masculinity, but it was hard on a fellow, having to appeal to his sister-in-law for the means to acquire a new lip balm and then being abjured to please use a dab of lard instead. So when in October of ’31, Georgetown finally came through with his back pay for the summer before last, he felt literally flush: his blood vessels dilated, his cheeks ruddied, the tips of his fingers tingled. Determined to be an asset for once, Lowell offered munificently to do the week’s shopping.

  He shook out some slacks and a stylish shirt, both worn only ten days since their last wash. (The competition for washing loads was fierce, and he tended to cede the two items permitted per resident to poor Savannah.) Grandly, he filled the Jaunt’s gas tank to the brim. Outside Green Acre Farm, he relished the ease of parking, since few Brooklynites could manage the costs of running a car. Sashaying through the entrance with a whistle, Lowell found his posture had improved, his first realization that it had ever deteriorated. His pink suede loafers may have been blemished in places, but they still drew glances from afar. He felt like a man, a real man, for the first time in months, a sensation startlingly reliant on trouser pockets that bulged with banded cash.

  While imported goods were still out of stock, the shortages of American products the previous year had given way to shortages of income. You could now buy eggs and broccoli and even meat—for a price. Emboldened by the deposit that had only cleared that morning, Lowell refused to check the scribbled price tabs, and bought whatever he wanted. That was how men shopped. The mounding cart drew even more envious glances than the pink loafers.

  After the last of his swag swept through checkout—where all the trusting self-service machines had been removed, stealing having grown too socially acceptable—Lowell froze. Hands on his padded pockets, he had to ask the girl to repeat the bill; her second iteration was snide. So that’s why Ellen Packer had relented when he once more threatened to sue: back pay from one of the foremost universities in the country meant to cover four months of prestigious employ could not now cover one tank of gas and a week’s food.

  Lowell marshaled his most theatrical indignation and marched coolly from the store, leaving its minions to put the groceries back. The stylish exit meant sacrificing the canvas shopping bags, already packed with flank steak, for which he was sure to get it in the neck from Florence. The least he could get out of the humiliation was a parking space, so he left the Jaunt where it was and launched farther down Utica Avenue. It wouldn’t do to return empty-handed. He could pick up enough eats for the next couple of days at the Quickee Mart on Foster.

  “Spare some change.”

  A snatched side glance at an unshaven young man with greasy hair gleaned only that he was wearing the same sort of collarless tunic-style suit jacket in which Lowell had looked so snazzy during his final year at Georgetown. The fellow had sidled so close that the sleeve brushed Lowell’s arm.

  “No, thank you,” Lowell said, a bit insensibly, eyes straight and gait stiff.

  “Nice shoes, pal.”

  The compliment hailed from the opposite side, as a second under-washed gentleman brushed the other arm. He’d noticed both of these young men nearby him in the supermarket, where they’d idly picked up lamb chops and put them down again. Lowell wasn’t born yesterday, and inferred some sort of hustle. Yet it took him a beat too long to register that the white guys bracing him weren’t swindlers but hoods. Though no one else witnessed this moment of being hopelessly dim, the slow uptake embarrassed Lowell in front of himself. He shouldn’t have had to lay eyes on the knife to get it.

  A mere kitchen knife but of excellent quality, one of those German-steel numbers of which his wife had bought whole butcher-block sets, all forsaken in their ignominious scuttle from Cleveland Park. Not the chef’s but the utility knife, that’s what the contents list on the box would call it, was pointed at Lowell’s gut. Lo, it did seem very useful.

  Perhaps their routine was sufficiently established that the duo was bored by it, for rather than focus on the business at hand, Lowell’s new friends chatted between them about an all-agricultural mutual fund that was doing improbably well, then commiserated over their favorite sushi bar on Liberty Street in lower Manhattan having finally closed. Were they indeed former Wall Street financiers, the segue from one form of larceny to another could only have been graceful. Keeping their target tightly between them, as the second fellow pressed the knife tip just below the ribs, they steered him onto Avenue D and up East Forty-Ninth. They needn’t have bothered to get off the main road; other pedestrians took no more notice of that blade flashing in the sun than they would have of a glinting rearview mirror. His escorts pushed him through the gate of the overgrown front yard and kicked him onto a mound of briars. The thugs would score more handsomely than usual, though as he emptied his pockets Lowell had never been happier that the US Federal Reserve had debased the banded stacks into fancy green insulation.

  It was worse that they found his fleX, hidden in Lowell’s left loafer. Worse still, they found the fleX because they took the shoes. Wiping beads of blood from his briar-torn cheeks and limping back to Green Acre Farm in socks, Lowell rehearsed the gratitude that he would underscore on return to the Darklys’: thank God he’d kept walking toward the Quickee Mart, and they hadn’t got the car.

  They’re only objects,” Willing said patiently. “You’re confusing the objects with what they mean to you. With objects, you can take the meaning back. They return to being empty things. Cuboids. Heavy cuboids that take up a lot of space.”

  They were in the attic, to which Willing alone was admitted. This was the warmest room in the house, which wasn’t saying much. Though headroom was restricted, his great-aunt commanded more square feet for her personal use than anyone else. No one objected, because she was also the only resident besides his mother who contributed to their tiny economy. Other than by drawing Social Security—and the stipend was too modest to explain her generosity—he was not sure how. He did not know how much Nollie had left or where it came from. But of course he was interested. Nollie was the only one who didn’t spend her money as fast as possible, before it turned to ash. Yet she didn’t run out. This, too, was interesting. All the same, she was very particular about what she would pay for. It had to be a strict necessity.

  “They’re not ‘cuboids,’” Nollie objected. “They’re my life’s work.”

  She was balled on her mattress like a kid. The laces on her tennis shoes had broken and been knotted back together several times. The bulky red sweater was too big for her. She was wearing gloves, though they all wore gloves indoors. It was gloves that Avery sho
uld have bought up in Walgreens. The fingers of his own had holes.

  “It’s getting cold.” He would speak slowly and clearly. She had to be coaxed. “It’s only December. It’s going to get colder. The natural gas costs too much to use through the whole winter. We have to save it for emergencies. Medical emergencies. Meanwhile, we have to keep warm, and cook, with the oil drum out back. The snow has covered the cemetery and the park. Which have been picked clean of firewood anyway. Even if we found any, the sticks would be wet. You can help.”

  She was sulking. “Book burning is the end of civilization.”

  “All your novels are available online.”

  “The pirated versions.”

  “Piracy is a compliment.”

  “Forgive me if I’m not bowled over.”

  “Your copies.” He would push his luck. “They say the same thing over and over. You have boxes and boxes of the same books.”

  “I save them, to give to special friends. They’ll never be printed again.”

  “They are produced in an obsolete format,” Willing said. “Most of these ‘special’ people would regard a present like that as a burden. They’d take it home and burn it in an oil drum.”

  “So if I gave you one of my novels, you’d march downstairs and burn it.”

  “Yes,” he said steadily.

  “You’ve never expressed the slightest interest in my work.” She sounded peevish.

  “No,” he said. “Maybe later, on the other side of this.”

  “Will there be an ‘other side of this’?”

  “That’s up for grabs,” he conceded. “But now isn’t a time for novels. Nothing made up is more interesting than what’s actually happening. We’re in a novel.”

  She seemed to like that.

  “You’re sort of old,” he said, quickly amending, “but not immense old. I mean, you’re in malicious shape. All those jumping jacks. No one would think you were seventy-four.” This was pro forma flattery for her generation. It should have raised a red flag for boomers: obviously the fawning lickspittle plying them with hackneyed compliments wanted something. Yet it always worked. “But you don’t live in the past. One of the things I like about you. You seem to be following the plot, more than the others. Lowell not hiding his fleX in a smarter place than his shoe. Avery mooning about how careless it used to be, ordering groceries online. They don’t get it. You seem to. Maybe it’s all those books you wrote. Maybe you’re used to staying a step back, keeping track of the larger arc, aiming for that final chapter. So holding on to these old-format hard copies, when we need them to boil pasta—it isn’t like you.”

  He could feel her relenting. He was relieved. He didn’t want to take the cartons by force.

  “My father would be horrified by your proposition, you know. Book burning is antithetical to everything the Mandibles stand for.”

  “But everything important about those books is safe,” he said. “The words don’t burn. They live forever on the internet.”

  “So long as there is an internet,” she countered.

  They thought the same way. They both lived in a world that was provisional. The ground was forever soft. For Willing, flux kept him supple. It toned his balancing muscles. It was like having sea legs on land.

  “Besides, you’ll die,” he said. “When you’re not here, you won’t care whether anyone reads your work. You won’t care whether they used to read your work even when you were here. That’s the great thing about nonexistence. It’s not that you don’t care, either. It’s not as if you still feel, but you feel apathetic. You can’t care. There’s nothing to do the caring. So you won’t care about ‘the Mandibles,’ or what they stood for. The Mandibles will be the same as every other family. The same as rocks, or dust particles, or the Taj Mahal, or the Bill of Rights, or the Pythagorean theorem. Because you won’t be a ‘Mandible’ anymore, and you won’t know what a ‘Mandible’ is.”

  Somehow he’d turned the key. “You’re right,” she said flippantly. “Once I kick it, these boxes are more trash to dispose of, oui?”

  “Oui,” he said. “But now they can serve a purpose.”

  “Only one condition,” Nollie said, hoisting a carton labeled “The Ecstatic, MM PB, Hungarian” in a show of strength. “Don’t touch the foul matter.”

  When he informed the rest downstairs that Nollie would sacrifice the books for cooking the evening meal but insisted on reserving the loose manuscripts, Avery and Florence fell over each other laughing. Jokes were hard to come by.

  “Can you believe,” Avery said, training her voice low enough that she wouldn’t be heard in the attic, “she’s still holding out for her papers to be bought by some highfalutin university library? I mean, what university library? What university? They’re all going down the tubes! Just goes to show,” she added, with a pointed glance at her husband, “the last thing to go is ego.”

  Bundled glumly in a blanket in the kitchen, Lowell shot his wife a black look. “It’s still vital to maintain top-flight scholarly research facilities. Her protection of those manuscripts would be more than justified, if only the beastly woman were any good.”

  The books burned well, though they made a lot of ash. Nollie soon came downstairs and firmly removed the task from Esteban, who was displaying an undiplomatic relish, and insisted on feeding paperbacks to the oil drum herself. Once she got into the swing of the occasion, she seemed to enjoy it. There must be something exhilarating about immolating your own attachments. Trial by fire. That was an expression. When you make glass very hot, it gets stronger. Willing assessed his great-aunt, her face red from the flames. She looked excited. She was having a tempering tantrum. This was real exercise, better than jumping jacks. By the time she finished tossing Gray, The Stringer, Ad-Out, Cradle to Grave, The Saint of Glengormley, and Virtual Family into the drum, she would be stronger.

  As dirt clods flickered in the light of the fire, Willing cast a mournful eye at the waste ground of their poky backyard, trying to learn the same lesson. Throughout the spring and summer, he had tended their small crops—potatoes, tomatoes, onions, string beans. He eked out just enough water on the plants during dry spells that the produce wouldn’t cost more to raise than it was worth. He had allowed himself affection for the infant vegetables as they developed: as a rule a mistake. Aside from a single tomato and one pot of beans, the harvest was stolen. A gang rampaged through the garden late at night and trampled the plants. The destruction was deliberate. He suspected someone at school. He still attended Obama High to glean intelligence—the spy kind. Other students must have been sniffing around for scuttlebutt also. He may have mentioned the garden once, and should have known better.

  No one gave a shit about Christmas. For his sixteenth birthday in January of ’32, his mother made Willing a cake out of cardboard.

  It was shortly thereafter that he came upon his mother, bowed over her dresser upstairs. She had already been on a rampage in the kitchen.

  Before the Great Renunciation, many were the evenings that his mother or Esteban had despaired that there was “nothing to eat.” Willing had always known what they meant: Esteban had forgotten to thaw the chicken burgers. Or after a draining day at Adelphi, his mother was running short on ideas for a meal they hadn’t already eaten three times that week. But this time, no cans of pineapple in sugar syrup lurked at the back of the pantry; no peeled plum tomatoes lay at hand for a meatless Bolognese. There wasn’t a half-used, iced-up bag of corn in the far corner of the freezer, or a long-spurned package of desiccated pork sausages whose packaging had torn. The canisters beside the stove no longer brimmed with flour and sugar and cornmeal. The cabinets were bare of rice and couscous and kasha. His mother had ceased disposing of foodstuffs beyond their “sell-by date,” a policy she now ridiculed. So it wasn’t a matter of overcoming a reluctance to open a can of stew beyond its prime. There was no stew. Willing felt partially responsible—his quiet thieving through the neighborhood had netted little of late; in the current clima
te of mistrust, property owners had improved security—but there was no food in the kitchen, at all, anywhere, of any sort.

  A matter different but hardly unrelated, there was no money, either. It was the end of the month; per custom, they’d already spent his mother’s paycheck. Nollie was meeting an old boyfriend in Queens, and his mother refused to rummage through her aunt’s things looking for cash. That would be stealing. Esteban hadn’t picked up work as a day laborer for weeks. Thus far, Avery hadn’t been able to interest their neighbors in buying or trading her stockpiled toenail fungus kits, replacement door hinges, or window-screen spline—in a variety of widths.