The Mandibles

by Lionel Shriver

  “I have to invite Goog to come Friday,” he told Nollie when he’d signed off.

  “Why would he want to come?” she said. “He hates you.”

  “He enjoys hating me. And he likes to be in on things. It’s one of the attractions of his job: the inside track.”

  “The attraction of his job,” Nollie said, “is throwing his weight around and making everybody sweat.”

  Speaking of sweat: she’d just finished her jumping jacks, and was dressed in athletic gear. Another two inches shorter after all that pounding up and down, she was wearing out her third set of knee replacements. The scars on the joints were the only smooth aspect of her spindly, withered pins. Privately, Willing didn’t understand the purpose of his great-aunt’s exercises, commonly pursued to look more attractive. There was little enough chance of that.

  “He was such an asslick as a kid,” Willing said.

  “He’s still an asslick. I’m sure he brings his minders the limp carcasses of citizens he’s destroyed, like cats bring mice to their masters. As a teenager, he always took the party line. It’s a type. They side with authority and parrot received wisdom.”

  “Well, sucking up to the suits has sure worked out for him. One lousy training course. And he makes more money than any of us, by a yard.”

  “Does that matter?”

  “It is noteworthy,” Willing said, “that it pays so well to work for the Scab.”

  “You’d better practice spelling those letters out, and putting the B up front,” Nollie advised. “You know Goog reviles that acronym.”

  No one called the Bureau for Social Contribution Assistance anything but the Scab, and the migration of Bureau to the end of its name was so inevitable that the yunks in DC should have seen it coming. “I’m not the one who renamed the IRS after dried blood,” he grumbled.

  “Or a strike breaker. But that’s before your time.”

  “You know what perplexes me,” Willing reflected, “isn’t the fact that the BSCA is the largest arm of the federal government. What’s perplexing is that it wasn’t always the largest arm of the federal government.”

  “Yes …,” Nollie said, squinting. “I see what you mean.”

  I’ve never stood on ceremony myself,” Nollie said that Friday, before his cousins arrived. “But sitting around with communal bowls on the floor—it’s the way you’d feed dogs.”

  “No one has ‘dinner parties’ anymore,” Fifa said, draping her long limbs over the sofa. “They’re biggin’ uncruel. Lord, I don’t know how my mother could stand it. All those glasses. All those spoons.”

  Willing slopped several cans of kidney and garbanzo beans into a stainless steel mixing bowl and conceded to salt. They would scoop the muck up with flour tortillas and splash vodka into disposable plastic glasses. Grateful as children to be fed anything, Willing’s generation had rebelled against their parents’ bizarre obsession with food. He made sure to slurp the bean liquor messily up the sides of the bowl. Obliviousness to presentation had become a presentation in itself.

  He streamed some retrotech for ambience. Only with Nollie’s assistance had he been able to identify the constituent bars of the music, all drawn from the sounds of bygone mechanisms: the sshtick-brrrr of a dial telephone; the EEE-khkhkh-EEE-khkhkh of a connecting fax; the poo-pi-pur-pi-poo-pi-puh … BEE-di-duh-BEE-di-duh … kchkchkchkch of a dial-up internet connection; the oceanic slosh and hum of washing machines that used many gallons of water; the crazed white noise of a boxy cathode-ray TV with no reception; the dementing recording “Please hang up and try again,” over and over, of a landline telephone off the hook. The clap-clap-clap-DING! of a manual typewriter echoed the ting of an opening cash-register drawer, the ping of an arriving text, the doo-di-dring! of an arriving email, and the default marimba ringtone of an iPhone when you didn’t have enough pride to buy something more interesting. Mixed well, the tones fused into a soaring symphonic rush with a staccato under-beat. The sounds were once so blithely integrated into the audio of daily life that few could remember them when they grew extinct, and their interweaving was both catchy and mournful.

  Savannah arrived first. Willing did not understand how women had the patience to mummify themselves in the narrow strips of fabric demanded by the latest fashion of “bandaging,” but he had to admit that the gaps where the skin showed through were alluring. The bands across her breasts had an impressive effect on her décolletage. But her choice of red, white, and blue strips could only have been ironic. He’d scheduled this do before he realized “next Friday” was the Fourth of July. A few small towns in the heartland continued to stage fireworks displays for their aging “Old Glories”—throwbacks who burbled about purple mountain’s majesty, the dawn’s early light, glory, glory, hallelujah, liberty and justice for all. In hipper coastal cities like New York, the holiday had become an embarrassment.

  In the wake of so many deaths from antibiotic-resistant bacteria—one of whose strains had killed Willing’s mother—social protocols had grown less intimate. Reaching for a handshake was a giveaway that you were a clueless yunk who lived in the past. Pecks on the cheek were equally uncruel, and if you tried to say hello by smacking an acquaintance straight on the mouth they’d probably hit you. Willing touched his cousin’s shoulder lightly, and she his. “You buy those bandages,” he asked, “or do you lie around nights ripping up sheets?”

  “I make too much money lying on my sheets to rip them up,” Savannah said, sashaying into the living room with a bottle of Light Whitening. Nostalgia for the crude homebrew that fueled the encampments in the thirties made commercial moonshine chic.

  Fifa nodded sleepily from the sofa. She was jealous of Savannah, for whom Willing continued to carry a tiny torch. But Fifa was safe. Oh, he appreciated that Savannah’s work as a “stimulation consultant” was now a legitimate career. While he might have expected to discern a clichéd coarsening in her features, her manner, or her spirit, in truth he detected no such thing. Accredited, registered, regulated, and—most crucially—taxed, Savannah parlayed a respectable expertise. She carried business cards. She didn’t hide behind any euphemistic “escort” nonsense. She was high end. She’d held her own against the robs—increasingly inventive, cheaper, and programmed to swallow at no extra cost. So she was doubtless very good at it. Still. Willing had a conservative side. You couldn’t legislate away that little shiver.

  “I think you should take up art again,” he said, knowing he was wasting his breath. “It’s edgier now. The stuff artists made before the Renunciation was treasury. Empty, and a scam. The new stuff—it doesn’t sell for much. But you should see the show on the American slave trade in SoHo. Bigging brutal. And it’s not about the nineteenth century.”

  “Yeah,” Fifa said sloppily—she’d already had a shot or two—“ain’t nobody claiming ‘today’s young people’ don’t have shit to say.”

  “That doesn’t mean anyone’s listening,” Nollie said, walking in with the beans.

  Wizened and no better than four ten, Nollie continued to wear the T-shirts, cut-offs, and tennis shoes she’d worn summers her whole life, and now resembled a gnomish extra from The Hobbit. Willing was glad she’d joined them, of course. He liked her, and he could see through the crenulations to the mischievous, scandalizing provocateur of fifty, sixty years before. But Nollie had had no children, much less had she been put in her generational place by her children’s children’s children. The way she saw herself had never changed. So it would never have occurred to her to leave the “young people” to their own evening.

  “Spare us the cheap sympathy, Noll,” Fifa said, with a nasty bite. “Long as we stoop down, turn around, pick a bale a’ cotton, and you get your Social Security checks, and your specially, individually designed chemo drugs like personalized craft beers. Your face replacements, your brain replacements, your desire and drive and love and hope replacements, well—you don’t really care what kind of artwork we make in all our spare time. Honest to God, I get a good laugh wh
en I remember how my dad used to come home from work and go running.”

  Fifa worked three jobs. She did housework and cooked indifferent meals for a cantankerous Bay Ridge shut-in. She installed residential shower bars and handrails for a thriving online retailer, stayinyourownhome.com. Three nights a week, she distributed crunchy tomato slices in a Williamsburg sandwich factory owned by a magnate in Myanmar. Unskilled labor had always to undercut the robs, so the pay was appalling. Fifa did the work that foreigners didn’t want.

  Yet it was early in the evening for acrimony. The diffident knock on the screen door was opportune.

  “Full faith and credit, man,” Bing said, with a biff of solidarity on Willing’s shoulder.

  “Full faith and credit,” Willing returned, with a light biff back. The ritual greeting went over the heads of their elders. Whenever older people tried to appropriate the exchange in order to sound cruel, they never got the tone right—the bone-dry straight face, the exquisite subtlety of the underlying sourness.

  At twenty-eight, Bing was a big guy, tall as well as broad. The shortages of his pubescent years had left him with a chronic terror of missing a meal, and if he was anticipating another famine he may have over-prepared. Yet he’d taken to farm work at Citadel, and his frame packed plenty of power. Good-natured and generous, he’d never shed his oddly endearing quality of seeming a little lost.

  The latest arrival dangled a baggie. “Brought heroin to snort later, if you’re interested.”

  “How’d you ever manage that?” Savannah said.

  “Walgreens had a Fourth of July sale. I was going to go for blow, but they were out. Christ, you ever hit the ‘More Info’ on your chipsite? The skag itself is dirt-cheap! It’s not the product, it’s—”

  “The taxes,” the rest recited in unison.

  “I think you should wait till Goog gets here and save it all for him,” Savannah said. “But only if you bought enough for an overdose.”

  Bing’s face fell. “Nobody told me Goog was coming.”

  “You’d have begged off,” Savannah said. “And with that thug around, I need my protector.”

  They settled on the floor, a trendy convention that may have hailed from so few young people being able to buy furniture. The custom was fortuitous. From childhood, Willing had been happiest on the floor.

  “Have you thought about renting out the basement again?” Savannah asked.

  “I always hated knowing when I walked across the living room I was an elephant over Kurt’s head,” Willing said. “And when you don’t get to keep the rent, really … What’s the point?”

  “What about … under the table?” Goog hadn’t arrived yet, and still she whispered. “Do it in bancors.”

  “Risky. Get caught, and … I don’t want to think about it. Besides, who’d live in that dank, dark space if they had access to international currency?” Willing’s murmur was instinctive. However seemingly inane, Nollie’s question from six years ago circled back: Can that thing hear?

  “You’d be surprised,” Savannah said. “There’s a whole economy out there you don’t know about. How else would I pull off this fashion statement without ripping up my sheets? Anyway, just an idea. I might be able to help. But don’t bring it up on maXfleX, obviously.”

  The discussion made everyone anxious. Willing changed the subject. “Nollie’s started writing again. I caught her.”

  Nollie glared. “It’s not more of my famous egotism. I’ve nothing else to do.”

  “I was glad,” Willing said. “It may be free, but there’s some brutal writing online now. Like the art. People have better stories. ‘Real stories.’ The kind you said you only like when they happen to someone else.”

  “Anyone who remembers what one says that verbatim is a menace,” Nollie said.

  “I read Better Late Than,” Willing said.

  His great-aunt looked discomfited, and pleased. “A pirated copy.”

  “Of course. We burned the hardbacks. Some of it was good.”

  “I’m overwhelmed,” Nollie said.

  He didn’t realize she’d be so touchy. “The story didn’t take place immense long ago. But it felt like ancient history. It was hard to identify with the characters. They live in an economic vacuum.”

  “You mean they’re rich?”

  “You don’t even know if they’re rich,” he said. “They make decisions because they’re in love, or they’re angry, or they want adventure. You never know how they afford their houses. They never decide not to do something because it costs too much. The whole book—you never find out how much these characters pay in taxes.”

  “Great,” Nollie said. “I’ll make my next novel about taxes.”

  “Good,” Willing said, turning a blind eye to her sarcasm. He had accomplished something this evening. She would get it later, when she recovered from feeling injured.

  “Hey, how’s it going at Elysian?” Bing asked.

  “Okay. After all”—Willing nodded at Nollie—“I’ve done geriatric care most of my life.”

  “None of your new charges is doing three thousand jumping jacks a day,” Nollie snapped. “You’ve hardly been wiping my butt, kid.”

  So predictable. He loved getting a rise out of her. “Yes, Nollie’s what the orderlies call a walking shriv. She can make it to the bathroom, which is all staff at Elysian cares about. Then there are the blithers, who are demented. And the morts—bed-ridden, comatose, vegetative.”

  “Not a very compassionate lingo,” Savannah said.

  “No,” Willing said. “It’s not.”

  “So is it mostly toilet duty, changing sheets?” Savannah was groping. The jobs they all did were dismal and repetitive. It was challenging to express interest in other people’s work when they weren’t interested in it themselves.

  “Yes. And cleaning crevices the robs have missed. But the most important thing I do is listen. Especially to the walking shrivs. They seem hungry to talk to someone who isn’t a hundred years old. Just because you’re ancient yourself doesn’t mean you like being around a bunch of relics any more than we do.”

  “God, I know what you mean,” Fifa said. “On the bus this week, the biddy next to me started yakking. Grabbed my arm, really sank her claws in. It was like sci-fi, and she was sucking out my life force through her fingernails. I got off, I felt weak.”

  “And they stare at you,” Savannah said.

  “Because you’re beautiful,” Nollie said, with a rare wistfulness. “Because you’re as beautiful as we used to be, and we didn’t know we were beautiful at the time.”

  “I don’t feel beautiful,” Willing said.

  “You’re a devastatingly handsome man,” Nollie said. “You should.”

  Willing’s cheeks burned. She was his great-aunt, she was ninety years old, and she was flirting with him. “I didn’t realize before this job how many Chinese shrivs have been shipped here. At least a third of the residents are from Asia. It’s cheaper to get Americans to take care of them than to pay the higher cost of labor over there.”

  “They have an enormous cohort that’s over eighty,” Nollie said. “Result of the one-child policy. Their age structure looks like a mushroom.”

  “They don’t speak English,” Willing said. “But I listen to them anyway. American residents get cross, and demanding—you know, the way younger Asians are now. But the Chinese at Elysian were raised in another time. They’re quiet. They curl up. The problem is, they don’t ask for anything. You have to check, because they’ll sit in their own waste for hours. Last week, one of them died from dehydration. He couldn’t lift a glass by himself, but he wouldn’t ask for a drink of water.”

  “Isn’t nursing home work getting chancy?” Bing asked. “All those shootings.”

  “Nothing’s happened at Elysian yet,” Willing said. “So their security is lax. No X-rays or searches. But you’re right. It’s a fad. And it’s spreading. How many did that last lunatic in Atlanta take out?”

  “Twenty-two residen
ts,” Bing said.

  “Twenty-four, really,” Savannah said. “That’s the one where a ninety-something veteran tackled the killer into the hydrotherapy pool, and they both drowned.”

  “The shooter did those useless old coots a favor,” Fifa said, “and everyone else.”

  “Your girlfriend,” Nollie said, “is a misagenist.”

  “Don’t worry, I take precautions,” Willing said. “I don’t advertise it, but I carry the revolver from Prospect Park to work.” Technically, his trusty protection was a Smith & Wesson .44 called an X-K47 Black Shadow. For Willing, it was simply the Shadow. True to its nickname, the classic pistol with an amber grip went everywhere he went. His mother would be horrified. A fact that he rather enjoyed.

  “Not rusted out yet?” Bing asked.

  “Great Grand Man taught me how to maintain it—after which he showed me how to use it.” Regarding this aspect of their shared past, Willing preferred to be matter-of-fact. GGM had left this world with a selfless act, and wouldn’t want them to avoid its mention. “The real trouble is that I could work at Elysian indefinitely. Same as you guys. We’re all at a standstill. There’s no trajectory. None of us will ever be flush enough to have kids. We could be frozen, in the same moment. We could be dead.”

  “Let’s have none of this ‘dead’ business! The United States of America needs its able-bodied to look alive! You’ll report to work every morning if we have to prop up your corpse with a stick!”

  With dread, Willing rose to unlatch the door. Most of their contemporaries’ speech was trailing, wispy. Goog’s voice was booming.

  “How long have you been eavesdropping?” Savannah asked.

  “Long enough to know this is one splug bash. You letting the doomster here prophesy another fiscal Armageddon? When, to our shaman’s dismay, everything’s turning over tickety-boo.”

  Goog spurned the floor for the broken-down recliner, the better to hold court. He banged down a bottle of real cognac. The luxury perk would only partially compensate for his demolition of their evening. Willing had wanted to talk further about his sensation of running in place. He’d have liked to canvass his cousins about whether they thought anything might credibly happen to them that wasn’t terrible. Now there wasn’t much point. Everyone would be careful.