“I take exception, Wilbur, to your claim that ‘none of us’ will have kids,” Goog said. “I personally plan to sow the Stackhouse seed. Just haven’t decided between a lab job—blue eyes, high IQ—or the old-fashioned route. No lack of candidates in that department!” Bearded, barrel-chested, and shorter than he struck people at first meeting, Goog was almost good-looking. He only got over the hump when women learned what he did for a living.
“Poor little tyke,” Savannah whispered in Willing’s ear. “I’ve never felt so sorry for someone who doesn’t exist yet.”
“This is new,” Bing said respectfully. “And very exciting. You’re planning a family soon?” He might have been talking to his schoolteacher, not his own brother.
“Sooner the better,” Goog said. “Somebody’s gotta do it. You’re hardly up and at ’em with the ladies. And our sister’s a hole.”
“You know I don’t like that word,” Savannah said.
“I don’t like being called a scabbie, either,” Goog said. “I’ve manned up about it. You can’t honestly expect me to call you a stimulation consultant with a straight face.”
“I have a degree,” she insisted quietly.
“A community college degree in a subject that comes naturally to any slit who can lie on her back. Listen, I know it’s asking a lot, but could I have a real glass?” The rest were passing the cognac. Bing lunged to the kitchen. “Like I was saying. Seems I’ll have to carry the procreative can. And I’ll spring for more than one, too. Because having kids is patriotic.”
“Seriously,” Nollie said. “You’ll have children to improve the country’s age structure.”
“Why’s that so far-fetched?” Goog said. “This generation’s been biggin’ lazy in the reproduction department. The birthrate plummeted in the thirties, fine, but it should have recovered by now. Building into a real problem down the line.”
“Yeah, we’re lazy,” Fifa said. “After fifteen hours of slog on splug jobs, netting the bus fare home for our trouble, we should be fucking all night, just to breed the next generation of little taxpayers.” She was slooped. But even sober, Fifa’s reaction to her own fearfulness was defiance. Willing would need to watch her.
“So what’s up with your parents?” Willing interceded.
“Dad’s two years from sixty-eight,” Goog said. “Then he’ll be sitting pretty.”
People used to dread being put out to pasture. Desperate to qualify for entitlements, these days everyone couldn’t wait to be old.
“Also,” Goog added, “some of those investments he made during the Renunciation, and held on to over my mom’s dead body? They’ve biggin’ appreciated.”
“That’s really great for the country, then,” Willing said.
“Why’s it not great for my dad?” Goog asked sharply.
“Eighty-five percent capital gains.” Willing beamed.
“Yeah, well. Everybody gotta do their fair share, right?”
“Absolutely,” Willing agreed. “Their fair share.”
Goog scrutinized his cousin for signs of irony. Willing’s expression was impenetrably pleasant.
Goog leaned back in the recliner again. “I think Dad’s enjoying being back in the department at Georgetown. Even if it’s an honorary position, and he only lectures one night a week. Trouble is, his area of expertise—debt, inflation, and monetary policy—has been kind of wiped out. Fucking NIMF controls all that now, why they deep-sixed the Federal Reserve. Fucking country doesn’t have a monetary policy anymore—”
“Or debt,” Willing added. “Or inflation.”
“Point is, it’s not his fault—”
“Not his fault having been wrong.” Willing should really keep his mouth shut.
“Not his fault having been overtaken by events,” Goog said.
“If the US had participated in the bancor from the beginning, instead of negotiating from a position of desperation in ’34, we might have avoided the depression.”
“Depression is just a word.”
“I bet for the people who starved to death it didn’t feel like just a word.”
“So Dad likes being back to teaching again?” Savannah said, peacekeeping.
“Yeah,” Goog said, calming down. “I guess you could call the appointment a sinecure. Still, it means something to the guy. This is off the record, but I like to think I had something to do with it. I notified the university that because of certain irregularities in all that foreign financing—joint is all backed by Beijing, why the student body is lousy with platefaces—their tax-exempt status was in peril. Administration fell all over themselves to be of service.”
“You never told me that,” Savannah said.
“I’m telling you that now. But you repeat it, you’ll be audited up the asshole.” Goog’s delivery was jocular. No one else seemed to find the advisory funny.
“And your mother?” Willing had maXfleXted Avery last week. He was plenty up to date on her life. Savannah was right: stick to safe subjects.
Goog rolled his eyes. “Truth is, we don’t talk much.”
“She didn’t want you to join the Scab,” Savannah said.
“No, she didn’t want me to join the BSCA. Which makes her a biggin’ yunk. Best idea I ever had. So much for advice at your mother’s knee. Anyway, you know she got that do-gooding bug. Only got worse after your mother died, Wilbur. Like she had to carry on the same splug tradition. So she’s started some ‘youth food bank’ in the District. Biggin’ wrongheaded.”
“Why?” Savannah asked.
“Demotivates,” Goog said officiously. “Why does she think we eliminated welfare except for the disabled? Half of them are shirkers, too. Sprained their pinkies.”
“The medical exams for disability are pretty grueling,” Nollie said.
Goog waved her off and took a slug from his glass. “I don’t know what we’re going to do about the strikers. Numbers go up every year. Filthy slumbers, too. Makes my blood boil. I’m not saying it should be against the law—”
“You’re just saying it should be against the law,” Savannah said.
“Maybe the Scab should start importing black people from Africa in big long boats,” Fifa said. “There’s enough of them—two and a half billion! No one in Lagos would miss them.”
“You got one serious attitude problem, honey,” Goog said.
“A bad attitude should be against the law, too, I guess,” Fifa said.
“I’m sick of this.” Goog leaned down into Fifa’s face. “America is not a police state. This is a free country, and you can say whatever you fucking well want. I’ve had it up to the gills with people like you, always mouthing off about ‘oppression’ and ‘subjugation’ and ‘tyranny.’ So you’re expected to do your part, to help keep this economy’s show on the road, and what’s wrong with that? Nothing wrong with people over sixty-eight getting medical care, either, or drawing a modest stipend from a retirement system they’ve paid into their whole lives—”
“They didn’t pay enough in,” Fifa said, “to cover sitting around and falling apart for longer than they worked—”
“So just because you have to contribute to the same system,” Goog plowed on, “doesn’t mean you live under the heel of goose-stepping Nazis, got it?”
“Could have fooled me,” Fifa said smoothly. “Didn’t you threaten Savannah with ‘auditing her up the asshole’? So go ahead. Audit my butt off. You won’t find anything kicking around my chip but digital dust bunnies.”
“I could have you re-chipped. On the premise that yours has been hacked—”
“I thought it was unhackable.”
“It can be hacked in the old sense of the word—hacked out. It’s not enjoyable.”
“Ooh, ooh, go ahead,” Fifa said, offering Goog the serrated knife for sawing their stale French bread.
“You’re slooped,” Goog said disdainfully.
“Gloriously,” Fifa said, taking another slug of Goog’s cognac straight from the bottle—hygienically
, dead uncruel. “Wanna hear some real freedom of speech? I think strikers are heroes. If I had any guts, I’d stop fetching some Bay Ridge bitch her stinky slippers, layering other stiffs’ miserable sandwiches, and anchoring guardrails for the walking dead. I’d put my feet up, too. Anything but drudge like a dray horse for scabbies like you.”
“The strikers are having the last laugh on you, sister,” Goog said. “They’re not sacrificing for their principles. They’re lounging around their parents’ house and sponging off their grannies’ Social Security. And the more strikers and slumbers? The higher your taxes go. You’re being had.”
“So do you think refusing to work for only 23 percent of your wages should be against the law?” Savannah said.
“Yeah, maybe,” Goog conceded gruffly. “Maybe I do.”
“I’m not sure slumbers are in the same category,” Willing said. “They’ve saved up—though I don’t know how. What little slumbers cost, they pay for up front.”
Just as he didn’t understand why it took so long for the IRS to rise from a beleaguered, underfunded agency to the rechristened behemoth it was today, Willing was also perplexed by why slumbering hadn’t taken off decades earlier. When recreational drugs were legalized, regulated, and taxed, they became drear overnight. Only then did people get wise to the fact that the ultimate narcotic had been eternally available to everyone, for free: sleep. A pharmaceutical nudge into an indefinite coma was cheap, and a light steady dose allowed for repeated dream cycles. Inert bodies expend negligible energy, so the drips for nutrition and hydration had seldom to be replenished (slumbers were hooked to enormous drums of the stuff). The regular turning to prevent pressure sores provided welcome employment for the low skilled. Slumbers didn’t require apartments—much less maXfleXes or new clothes. They needed only a change of pajamas and a mattress. An outmoded designation revived, “rest homes” denoted warehouses of the somnambulant, who were only roused and kicked out once their prepayments were extinguished. Previous generations had scrounged to buy property. Many of Willing’s peers were similarly obsessed with scraping together a nest egg, but with an eye to dozing away as many years of their lives as the savings could buy.
“Slumbers cost in productivity,” Goog said.
“I’ve thought about it, if I could raise the funds,” Willing said. “Maybe a year? Every time my alarm rings at five-thirty, it seems like bliss.”
“Willing, you wouldn’t!” Nollie said in horror.
“I’d rather watch my own dreams,” Savannah grumbled to Fifa, “than another fucking Korean TV series. Separated twins set up housekeeping after unification, and the Northern twin mistakes a hairdryer for a bazooka … Mom and Dad had no idea how lucky they were to watch sit-coms set in Minneapolis.”
“Mom says the physio after slumbering is pretty grim,” Bing said. “Though that new sideline of hers, Vertical Reconditioning, is doing pretty well. Their muscles are jelly. They get rolled out of rest homes on gurneys, like you move bodies from a morgue. Actually being awake can be scary, too. There’s been a lot of suicides. I’d rather emigrate.”
“Like where?” Savannah asked in alarm.
“The Javanese in management at IBM seem civilized,” Bing said. “Maybe I’d head there.”
The Indonesian Business Machines plant in New Jersey where the youngest Stackhouse worked as a manufacturing overseer was producing robs that could be tooled as manufacturing overseers. Willing could see why Bing might be making other plans.
“How are you going to get into Java?” Savannah said. “They don’t give visas to much of anybody, and they really don’t give visas to Americans.”
“There are ways …” Bing shot an anxious glance at his brother.
“Getting into anywhere in Asia illegally is a bastard.” In her determination to dissuade her beloved younger brother from flying the coop, Savannah was oblivious to Bing’s nervousness about Goog. “There’s none of that ‘human rights’ and ‘due process’ and ‘claiming asylum’ treasury. They don’t give you weekly stipends or put you up in public housing with a flabby little advisory that you’re not supposed to work. There aren’t any polite trials with a free lawyer and then when you’re turned down you can appeal, and appeal, and appeal. There’s no forgetting all about you even though you’re not supposed to be there, because they’re too disorganized, and politically ambivalent about their right to throw you out of the country in the first place, and frankly too broke to pay for your deportation plane fare. No, no. They keep track all right, and they never throw you idiotically on your own reconnaissance: oh, it would be nice if you showed up for this court date eighteen months from now. They chuck you summarily in detention, with rats and spoiled food, and when they collect enough of a crowd they don’t even send you back to your own country. They dump you anywhere: Siberia, France, Nigeria. Wherever’s convenient for them. Especially in China, they’re bigging T-bills. You might never get back home.”
“Oh, it can’t be that hard,” Fifa said. “China and India are both awash in illegal immigrants. Lots from Africa, too, and they’re kinda recognizable.”
“But I’ve got to do something,” Bing said mournfully. “Even if they keep me on at IBM, which I doubt, it’s like Willing said about Elysian. I’ll never advance. All the senior positions are filled by Southeast Asians. And it’s not like I don’t want to do my fair share.” As he shot another glance at his brother, his expression curdled like a puppy’s after peeing on the rug. “It’s not that I mind, at all, you know, keeping the economy on the road … I’m glad to help the shrivs—I mean, sorry, Nollie, the long-lived. It’s medical care they biggin’ deserve, right? Still. I don’t get paid much to begin with. When the chip is finished chewing it up, there’s nothing left.” He wouldn’t look at Goog at all now. “At least if I emigrated …”
“Hate to burst your bubble, bud,” Goog said. “But one aspect of the US tax code hasn’t changed since the Civil War. Americans are taxed on their worldwide income, and that includes expats. You get some credit for foreign taxes. But if Jakarta doesn’t suck your chip dry, we take up the slack. So it’s fortunate you don’t mind paying your dues, my brother. BSCA satellites can extract what’s owed if you’re sprinting across the Mongolian tundra. Not that it would ever occur to you to cheat your very own United States government, but now that chipping has taken off internationally? Your ability to get your hands on any readies whatsoever without our knowing about it to two digits after the decimal, well. It’ll be slight.”
“Wow,” Fifa said, flat on her back. “What a great party.”
“What about Mexico?” Willing suggested. “You might move up the ladder there. The manufacturing sector is huge. It’s got a bigger GDP than the US—”
“That’s not saying much,” Nollie quipped.
“But Esteban is doing great,” Willing said. “He runs his own wilderness expedition company now—”
“I don’t know how,” Nollie said. “Mexico doesn’t have any wilderness.”
“Well, nowhere does, Noll,” Fifa said irritably to the ceiling. “Maybe he takes groups to a parking lot where there are still some empty spaces.”
When his much-missed de facto father struck out for the southern border in 2039, Willing had been moved by the depth of the Lat’s reluctance to leave what he regarded profoundly as his country. Esteban was an authentic American patriot. By contrast, in the liberal northeastern tradition, the Mandibles had routinely said mean things about America, as if hating it here made them better. True, Esteban scorned aging honks who were vain about their “tolerance” but who didn’t really want him here. Who missed the old days, when they controlled everything. But he never insulted the country itself—the idea of the country, and the way it was supposed to work, even when it wasn’t working that way (more or less always). Jayne and Carter, GGM, Nollie, and his mother had sometimes seemed to take a savage pleasure in the downfall of the United States. For Esteban, the decline of what he genuinely believed was the greatest nation
on earth was solely a sorrow.
Loads of Lats like Esteban had filtered back to the lands of their forefathers. The loss was greater than one of numbers. They’d been American with the zealotry of converts. Emigration being at an all-time high, the US population was contracting for the first time in its history. The remaining public felt trapped, stranded, left behind. These were often the same people who had vituperated about foreigners piling across their borders. Now that outsiders didn’t risk their lives to reach America anymore, the native-born felt abandoned. They missed their own resentment. They felt unloved. Little satisfaction was to be found in clinging to something, holding it close, defending it, when no one else wanted it anyway. Maybe Willing could see how white Americans his mother’s age and older had sometimes felt invaded, or alienated, or replaced—though they’d have felt so much less threatened if they’d only learned Spanish. But clearly there was one situation direr than living in the country where the rest of the world wanted to live also: living in a country that everyone wanted to leave.
Esteban had been loyal in a personal sense as well. He stuck by their family at Citadel—though grubbing the land in Gloversville duplicated the mindless manual labor that his father had done, and his grandfather, which he thought he had escaped. But then, after all they’d been through together, he lost Florence to a cut finger. His son in all but name had come of age. You could hardly call it desertion.
Savannah roused Willing from his reverie. “Why would Mexico be any easier to get into?”
“Esteban got across the border,” Willing said. “He had to hire coyotes, but that was pretty simple. The same guys who ferried Lats to El Norte had started doing the same job in the opposite direction.”
“Esteban slipped across before they finished building the fence,” Savannah said. “Which is electrified, and computerized, and 100 percent surveilled, from the Pacific to the Gulf. Esteban has a pedigree, too. He’d have a chance at naturalizing. They don’t naturalize any ‘non-Lat whites’ down there. We’re a pest species. Even if Bing were miraculously to make it across the Rio Grande, the discrimination is killing. I know what I’m talking about. My clients are a better source of information than the web. As Ameri-trash, Bing would be treated with bigging contempt. Worse, remember that old slag, mexdreck? Try yankdreck. That’s what they call us. It’s comical, considering the likes of Fifa here is working three jobs, but they think we’re lazy. And they definitely think we’re stupid.”
The Mandibles Page 35