The Mandibles

by Lionel Shriver

  “At least a whole o-o-o-o-oeuvre,” Nollie said, “beats a handful of articles about hatchbacks and condominiums—”

  “Children!” GGM cried. “Enough! Carter, your sister garnered many fine reviews, and no one publishes multiple novels without drawing the odd stinker. Enola, there’s nothing ignoble about an article about condominiums so long as it’s written with panache. I’ve listened to this scrapping my whole life, and I shouldn’t have to put up with playground fisticuffs at my age.”

  “Still, if we’re too weighed down, Nollie,” Willing’s mother said, “we’ll be marks. This time of night, gangs rove all over this neighborhood.”

  “I guess if anyone gives us trouble,” Avery said, “we can always threaten them with foul matter.”

  It wasn’t fair. They were picking on Nollie because they couldn’t take their frustration out on Sam and Tanya, or the Federal Reserve, or the president.

  “I’ll carry it for now,” Esteban offered begrudgingly, though he was already burdened by the largest backpack. “But keep an eye out for a Dumpster.”

  “No,” Willing said. He took the box from Nollie. It was staggeringly heavy; maybe his great-aunt really was fit. He fished a sheet of plastic from his pack and wrapped the box, to protect it from the chill mist. He rested the carton on the back of the bike and lashed it to the rack with bungee cords.

  “Willing,” Carter said, fetching the box he’d left in the basement stairwell. “Do you think you could manage this, too?”

  Banded with another bungee cord, the silver service fit neatly in one pannier. Though precious metal would have value as barter, Willing had already consigned one sentimental attachment to functional currency. So he vowed not to trade those engraved utensils for transient food and shelter unless their lives depended on it. That set of silver was their inheritance. Sam and Tanya had the sofa. The Mandible estate, the fabled appointments of Bountiful House, came down to this one box.

  It was only three or so miles to Prospect Park, but the journey took hours. Kurt took responsibility for Luella at first, but Florence had to admit he was too gentle. When Luella lunged in the wrong direction, he wouldn’t jerk the leash with enough brutality to get her to heel. When she sat on the sidewalk and refused to get up, he stood over her reasoning and offering incentives, a rational appeal that didn’t work with small children, either. Esteban took over, and slung her over his shoulder. But she struggled, kicking and biting, until he dropped her in disgust. Florence’s mother was better at managing her than the men. She employed the steady, stolid, unrelenting resolution with which women had pursued their purposes for centuries. As for Florence’s father, for the time being he didn’t voice his grief over having lost their house, or having lost her house, either. All he did declare, more than once and with vehemence, was that he was “not minding Luella for one more minute.”

  Grand Man might have been in fine fettle for a virtual centenarian, but his energy was spent, after the fire, and a harrowing second ejection from his sole safe haven. He had to take frequent breaks, leaning against a parking meter, or resting on the rim of an overflowing public trashcan (garbage collection having grown intermittent at best). His cane helped, but he was as handicapped by bewilderment as by old age. It must have been jarring to go from debonair, high-stakes mover and shaker in Manhattan publishing, to retired eminence gris cum day trader in the plushest assisted-living facility in the country, to exiled nonentity shuffling along the dark, litter-strewn streets of East Flatbush. Yet however fiercely Florence summoned sympathy, it was exasperating to walk this slowly.

  Goog kept complaining his pack was too heavy, and Bing wouldn’t stop crying; the flapping of his left sole on the concrete must have been getting on everyone’s nerves. Avery kept stopping to use their only fleX under contract to try to reach Savannah, who alone of the kids had kept her own fleX paid up. But the calls went to voicemail. On her husband’s insistence, Avery dialed 911 to report the house-jacking, but a recording about a high volume of calls repeatedly suggested she try again later. Lowell railed with establishmentarian outrage, whereas Kurt probably counted himself fortunate for having put off a move to the Prospect Park encampments this long. The mizzle thickened to a drizzle, and the damp cold was miserable.

  Wheeling his bike at the rear, Willing shot frequent glances over his shoulder. It was no longer an hour at which sensible people went for a walk. As Linden Boulevard swished with occasional cars streaking through the area as fast as possible, their only company was huddles of lone homeless people—fellow homeless people—scowling protectively, their supermarket carts having grown more enticing than wallets. Florence jumped at the scuttle of mangy, malevolent strays. It was irksome to have to credit her son for the foresight, when she’d thought giving Milo away to Brendan’s family was deranged. But sure enough, few people could cover pet food anymore. Cats and dogs had been released by the thousands to fend for themselves.

  Florence should have been seething, but she couldn’t afford to seethe. Instead she focused on getting their company through the night. Willing had a tarp; she’d found another, left behind by that useless outfit that waterproofed the basement. They had a few blankets. If they could all sardine onto one tarp, and sandwich under the second, they might stay dry; body heat should keep them warm. She’d rescued bags of peanuts and raisins from the pantry, and hoped the city had the sense to supply water in the park. This was the way poor people thought. The long view was a defining feature of prosperity. The destitute planned a single step ahead.

  At last, after they’d climbed the long hill on East Drive inside the park, they reached an access point. In the sulking glow of the city’s ambient light, the sweep of Long Meadow quilted below. It was a sorry version of the promised land: edge to edge across what was once the site of picnics and games of ultimate Frisbee, a patchwork of plastic tarpaulins, planks, pressboard, Sheetrock, and corrugated iron, many of the materials for these improvised dwellings salvaged from the abandoned construction sites that hulked across all five boroughs. The patter of rain on the metal panels was almost peaceful.

  Presumably, to wake in a bad mood, Lowell would have to have slept first. He’d positioned himself on their improvised pallet-for-thirteen next to Avery, but she kept the two boys on her other side, which left him snug against Nollie. Intimate proximity to an elderly woman who, like the rest of them, granted, hadn’t bathed in days was noxious. And she snored. In the light of day, too, it became apparent why this patch on the edge of the encampment was available. They were under a tree, at least a handy anchor for leashing Luella. But branches had dripped on his forehead even after the rain stopped. Their communal bedroll was laid over a barren depression, without a blade of grass for cushion. The dip collected water, so the tarps were now sloppy with mud, which had crept up the cuffs of his only pair of trousers. He hadn’t been up for brushing with bottled water at 3 a.m. in a shantytown, and his sticky teeth emitted a sour tang.

  As he struggled upright, Lowell panicked when at first he couldn’t find his shoes. Good God—in this glass-strewn rubble, merely having your shoes stolen could mark you as done for. Probably a good idea to keep them on all night, though the crud between his toes would fester. His clothes were rank and damp, his unshaven chin itchy, his hair lank. The line between owners of swank Washington townhouses and denizens of his sister-in-law’s Fort Greene shelter was perhaps thinner than he’d previously appreciated.

  Putting Lowell’s nose further out of joint, his smarty-pants nephew had already disappeared, absconding with their party’s only paid-up fleX. Lowell was determined to pursue the return of Florence’s property through proper channels, and internet access would be a start. Her ownership of the house was a matter of public record. He was incensed by how readily the rest of this crowd gave up on standard procedure. It was when you neither believed in systems, nor employed the tools of systems, that systems broke down for good. Look at what had driven inflation, far more than monetary policy: the self-fulfilling social
assumption that the dollar was worthless and would be only more worthless tomorrow. The world has a confounding way of fashioning itself in the form of your imaginings. Act as if a city is lawless, and lawless it becomes.

  He would have to write this down.

  At least the kid wouldn’t have traveled far, since he’d left his bike—looped with a lock and laden with that cockamamie box of manuscripts and the incongruous silver service hidden in a saddlebag. Nollie stood watch. What did you want to bet that she was defending the printout primarily, and the silver only as an afterthought?

  Before, to Lowell’s amazement, going to work, Florence distributed a niggardly handful of peanuts apiece as “breakfast,” apologizing that there were no more raisins, because she’d come upon Bing polishing off the bag. Everyone picked on that boy. It wasn’t his fault that he was young, growing, and hungry. Kurt said some self-appointed bouncer had already threatened their company with expulsion—from a shantytown!—because Luella’s “night terrors” had kept nearby squatters awake. With Douglas’s permission, Kurt volunteered his only spare pair of socks for a gag. Generous, yes. Nevertheless, Lowell was flummoxed by why the tenant, in arrears for a second year, was still this family’s problem. Apparently you have to keep taking care of people solely because you’ve been taking care of them. By inference, you shouldn’t take care of anybody, because if you did you’d never get rid of them.

  Grabbing some ass napkins, Lowell sought local inquiry.

  “How do you do?” he introduced himself formally to their nearest neighbor—a grizzled, filthy old lady. But pots and pans dangling from hooks on a crude but sturdy wooden structure suggested established residence. Queasy about a handshake, he settled for a nod. “Lowell Stackhouse, professor of economics, Georgetown University.”

  She smiled wryly. “Professor emeritus, I presume? Deirdre Hesham, air traffic controller. I took early retirement myself.”

  Because she knew the word emeritus, he inspected her more closely; the “old lady” couldn’t have been fifty. “I gather air travel has halved,” he commiserated.

  “Worse than halved,” she said. “But now that they’ve decided folks like me are expendable, I wouldn’t get on so much as a hop to Hartford if I were you.”

  He explained that he was new here, and tried to describe his mission with discretion.

  “Don’t go near the porta potties,” Ellen warned. “They haven’t exchanged them for a year. Try the woods that way—though watch your step. You won’t be the first, if you get my drift.”

  Once he returned distastefully from a sea of the one thing worse than mud, Lowell mourned the loss of his fleX: he had nothing to read, and couldn’t bury himself in his treatise (which should have been backed up on multiple servers—but Lowell had finally parsed this era’s crucial distinction between should and would; he’d only rest easy when he laid eyes on the text). When Florence returned from Adelphi much too early that afternoon, the excitement was welcome.

  “What happened?” Esteban reached toward but did not touch a red streak along Florence’s jaw, the center of which was blistered.

  “I was lucky to be wearing the bandana,” Florence said shakily, touching its brown singe around her left ear, “or he’d have set fire to my hair. As it is, only a few escaped strands burned off. Smelled terrible.”

  She backtracked: undeterred by Adelphi staff’s standard no-room-at-the-inn, to gain admittance an obstreperous white guy had held Florence hostage with a blow torch—“the upscale stainless-steel kind—that you use to caramelize crème brûleé.” To demonstrate he had enough butane to be dangerous, he’d turned it on.

  “You are not going back there,” Esteban said.

  “But I bring in our only paycheck,” Florence said weakly.

  “Ever,” Esteban said.

  “He’s right. You’ve done your part, Mom.” Willing had reappeared. With an obscure glance at Nollie, he announced, “We’ve reached the Final Chapter.”

  What an insufferable twit. Rounding up his cousins and elders, the kid called a group meeting around the tree. For reasons beyond his uncle, this sixteen-year-old punk was now their Dear Leader. Any day now the boy would start buzz-cutting his hair above the ears, drinking loads of cognac, and executing his relatives.

  “I got us protection,” Willing said, keeping his voice low. In the cover of his apostles, the boy withdrew an object from his jacket halfway. Metal caught the sun. Oh, for Christ’s sake.

  “How did you get that?” Florence asked, aghast. Only yesterday she would have asked why. “Did you steal it? Like everything else?”

  Something dense passed between mother and son that piqued Lowell’s curiosity.

  “He thinks he’s so careless,” Goog grumbled to his brother.

  “I bought it,” Willing said.

  “But we’ve got so little money—” Florence began.

  “With something of value,” Willing said. “Which rules out dollars, doesn’t it.”

  Florence murmured, “The goblets,” whatever that meant.

  “We have one left,” Willing said. “But don’t say the G-word aloud in this place. Even in a whisper.”

  As Lowell couldn’t imagine why saying “goblets” could be perilous in a public park, he assumed the boy meant G-as-in-gun. The coyness was absurd. It was widely known that encampments like this were armed to the teeth. “You know how to work that?” he charged.

  “I read up,” Willing said pleasantly. “It’s not complicated. That’s why stupid people have been getting their way with these things for centuries.”

  “Wouldn’t want to fault your research,” Esteban said. “But if anybody’s packing in this party—no offense, it should be a grown man.”

  “Whoever carries has to be Willing to use it.” The kid did have a knack for delivering punch lines with a straight face.

  “You could be a danger to yourself—” Carter said.

  “This is a distraction,” Willing cut him off. “Stories like ours—and worse—are all over the web. I think we got off lightly. The administration’s expression civil unrest is misleadingly mild. We’re not talking widespread insomnia. And the ‘unrest’ is mostly in big cities like New York. We have to get out.”

  “Where’s any better, in your expert opinion?” Lowell sneered.

  “Gloversville, obviously.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Goog said. “Who died and left you president of the world?”

  Willing ignored his cousin, as usual. “There’s food, shelter, and a well. I talked to Jarred. He’s short of labor he can trust. It’s easy to find people desperate for a job. But food is at a premium. Employees get tempted to steal. Organized crime is heavily into the agricultural black market. He’d welcome us all, if we’re willing to work. That would include standing armed guard over the fields at night. Thieves are harvesting whole crops while farmers sleep. Jarred has room for us, too. The Mexican migrant workers who’ve been squatting over the last two winters have moved on.”

  “If Gloversville is such an oasis,” Esteban said, “why would they leave?”

  “To go back to Mexico, of course,” Willing said. “Mexico signed on to the bancor. It picked up a lot of the trade that the States has lost. The economy is booming.”

  “He’s right,” Carter said. “Though it’s hard to sort fact from fiction lately—”

  “Dad, enough! Give it a rest!” Avery and Florence said at once.

  “I was only saying!” Carter snapped. “TV news, webzines, they’re in rare accord: immigration’s reversed. Mexico’s established a huge military presence at the border. Nationals are being let back in, but white Americans are universally denied visas—even temporary tourist visas. Illegal immigrants from El Norte are being deported in droves.”

  “Gosh,” Nollie said. “Hispanics are undocumented. Whites are illegal.”

  “Hypocrites,” Avery muttered.

  “I don’t call it hypocrisy,” Esteban said. “I call it payback.”

  “Except the M
exican border police are giving third-, even second-generation Lats a hard time, too,” Carter warned.

  “Do you have a Mexican passport?” Willing asked.

  “Why would I?” Esteban said. “Any more than you would?”

  “That’s too bad,” Willing said. “It would now be much more valuable than one from the American State Department.”

  “That’s a turnabout I could drink to,” Esteban said. “About time you honks find out how it feels when folks who happen to be born in a place lord their precious passport over you like they’re anointed. Man, at the border right now, I’d laugh my head off.”

  “Can we please get back to what we’re going to do?” Jayne implored.

  Willing gestured to the encampment. “We’re luckier than most of these people. We have somewhere to go. We have only one problem: how to get there.”

  “We should sneak back and swipe the Jaunt,” Avery said. “They only took my one key fob.”

  “No,” Lowell confessed morosely. “They were way ahead of you. They demanded mine, too, and the spare.”

  “I’ve tallied our cash,” Willing said. “We can’t afford a single bus or train ticket to upstate New York. And even if we had the money—according to InnerTube, Port Authority, Grand Central, and Penn Station are mobbed. We’re not the only ones who’ve figured out it’s time to go.”

  “So what are you proposing?” Lowell said. “That we all pile onto your bicycle, like one of those 1950s stunts with phone booths?” (The taunt fell flat. Willing wouldn’t know what a phone booth was.)

  “We’ll have to walk,” Willing said.

  “To upper New York State?” Lowell cried.

  “It’s a hundred and ninety-four miles by car. Somewhat longer, by back roads. Esteban used to lead treks along the Palisades for a living. He can show us the way.”

  “My, I can’t believe Our Lord and King would hand his scepter to someone else,” Lowell said, and Avery kicked him.