The Mandibles

by Lionel Shriver

  “To have that much power and let it go?” Nollie said. “That is pretty stupid.”

  “It always goes,” Willing said. “Whether or not you let it.”

  “Having that much money and letting it go, then,” Nollie revised. “Having that much money and still spending more than you’ve got. I call that stupid.”

  “That’s the most fatuous version of the last twenty years I’ve ever heard,” Goog said.

  “Can we not?” Savannah said. Teasing out what had happened, why it happened, to whom it had especially happened, and what it meant was a running conversational obsession everywhere you went. Willing could see how she might be tired of it.

  “I’m still shredded we didn’t do anything when China annexed Japan,” Bing said sadly. “I always liked Japanese people for some reason. With their special ways of doing things. Everything just so. I felt sorry for them.”

  “When they sank that Chinese destroyer, the Japanese did pick the fight,” Goog said, paraphrasing what the president had told the American people at the time. “I think they wanted to be invaded. They were going down in flames anyway. It was one big hari-kari kamikaze go-ahead-and-shoot-me-already.”

  “It’s true, the whole Japanese race has practically evaporated,” Savannah said. “So I found the elbow-room argument pretty convincing. With that deluge from Africa and all those refugees from the Water Wars, China’s bursting.”

  “Still, you can’t help picturing how badly that fleet would have got it in the neck if the Chinese had gone for an American ally when we were kids,” Goog reminisced fondly. “I’m biggin’ sorry to have missed that ballyhoo. We’d have buried Beijing so deep that the watchtowers of the Forbidden City came poking out the other side in Omaha.”

  “Treasury,” Savannah differed. “If we’d intervened, we’d have made a mess of it, as usual. Same goes for Taiwan. Thank fuck we finally couldn’t afford it.”

  “After so many fiascoes—Vietnam, Iraq, New Zealand—I’d expect to agree with you,” Nollie said. “But our sitting idly by, and making excuses for sitting idly by … I thought it was a disgrace.”

  Nollie’s sense of shame was widely shared by her whole generation, and most of Florence’s, too. But Willing did not have strong feelings on this point. Around the time that the American money in his pocket disintegrated to so much Kleenex, he deftly decoupled something. The abstraction into which he’d been drafted by dint of having arbitrarily been born here no longer seemed to have anything to do with him. He was American as an adjective. He was no longer an American as a noun. He saw no necessity in taking the US demurral from declaring war on China personally. If it meant that he himself hadn’t been forced to become a paratrooper billowing onto the rooftops of skyscrapers in Chengdu, this was a good thing. Otherwise, if he were to feel powerless, the source of the sensation would be closer to home: he was obliged to have a cousin to dinner whom he did not like. That was impotence. But he did not feel implicated by Taiwan or Japan. His country did not help because it could not help. It did not have the money. That was relaxing. This must have been what it had felt like to live in most countries, when the United States was sending bombers and ships and troops and airlifts whenever something went wrong. If there was genocide in Madagascar, they didn’t beat themselves up for not doing anything about it in Argentina. That was better life. When Willing was young, it was common to despair that a person had “no boundaries.” Friends who had “no boundaries” were embarrassing. They had no sense of what to keep to themselves. So maybe one merit of being in a country at all was its boundaries. They drew a line around what was your business. They helped to maintain the existence of such a thing as your business.

  “Listen, have you guys seen that glass house that’s gone up on the site of Jayne and Carter’s in Carroll Gardens?” Savannah brought up. “It’s some Vietnamese palace. Garish beyond belief.”

  “Well, that’s all of Brooklyn for you,” Goog said. “Half the brownstones have been razed. Platefaces don’t have a preservational bone in their bodies.”

  “Goog, your pejorative is passé,” Savannah chided. “You do realize that women like me are going under the knife to get narrower eyes and flatter noses?”

  “I talked to Carter and Jayne last week,” Nollie said. “Jayne is still fomenting over not getting the insurance payout. But that couple from Hanoi paid a fortune for the land—more than enough to make up for the fact that, between inheritance taxes and back maintenance fees, my mother’s co-op wasn’t worth reclaiming. They could still buy what they wanted—or thought they wanted. Maybe that’s the problem.”

  “They’re pretty old to be holding down a ranch in Montana by themselves,” Bing said. “At least I helped them choose a caretaker rob. Except with the top-of-the-line kind they got, the conversation is splug. The cheaper ones keep picking up on the wrong key words. They’re hilarious, and a lot more fun.”

  “Problem with robs?” Fifa said. “Hurl a skillet at one, and you’ve only wrecked your own pricey appliance. My Bay Ridge Bitch could afford a primo caretaker rob five times over. But then she wouldn’t be able to drive it crazy, or ruin its day.”

  “I guess I can see how, after living cheek by jowl at Citadel, they craved solitude,” Nollie said. “But Jayne was practically a normal person by the time they left the farm. Now their whole acreage is one big Quiet Room. She’s back to being a nut. And Carter’s regressed, too. Jesus, I thought we hashed it out at Citadel. But now he’s worked himself into a lather again about the ‘lost years’ with Luella that give him flashbacks. I swear, couples cooped up one-on-one are deadly. There’s not enough to talk about. So you go back and mine horrid, selfish Enola over and over, if only to keep from going for each other instead. You can’t eat all day, so you feast on umbrage between meals. Honestly, our conversation was barely cordial. And after I didn’t put up a stink, at all, about those two helping themselves to the whole Bountiful House silver service. I didn’t ask for one butter knife.”

  “If you’d stopped by Carroll Gardens more often back then,” Willing said, “you’d realize why a little silverware can’t begin to compensate.”

  “I couldn’t stand it,” Nollie admitted.

  “No one could stand it,” Willing said.

  If Jayne really was backsliding to neurosis and Carter was grudge-farming, that made them quite the exceptions. Across the nation, Americans’ mental and physical health had vastly improved. Hardly anyone was fat. Allergies were rare, and these days if people did mention they avoided gluten, a piece of bread would probably kill them. Eating disorders like anorexia and bulimia had disappeared. Should a friend say he was depressed, something sad had happened. After a cascade of terrors on a life-and-death scale, nobody had the energy to be afraid of spiders, or confined spaces, or leaving the house. In the thirties, the wholesale bankruptcies of looted pharmacies, as well as a broad inability to cadge the readies for street drugs, had sent addicts into a countrywide cold turkey. Gyms shut, and personal trainers went the way of the incandescent light bulb. But repairing their own properties, tilling gardens, walking to save on fuel, and beating intruders with baseball bats had rendered Americans impressively fit. Sex-reassignment surgery roundly unaffordable, diagnoses of gender dysphoria were pointless. If a woman leaned toward the masculine, she adopted lunging, angular movements and crossed her ankle on her knee; everyone got the message, and the gesturing was more elegant. As dreaming beat drugs, sexual fantasy had always been a cleaner, sweeter, not to mention cheaper route to gratifying a whole host of wayward inclinations, in contrast to the crude, painfully imperfect experience of acting the fantasies out. No one had the money, time, or patience for pathology of any sort. It wasn’t that Americans had turned on oddity; they simply didn’t feel driven to fix it anymore.

  “Hey, Willing,” Bing said. “You’re always reminiscing about how brutal it was at Citadel. If Elysian is splug, why not go back? You took to that farm treasury more than most of us did.”

  “I’d co
nsider it,” Willing said. “But I haven’t been able to contact Jarred for months. I finally fleXted Don Hodgekiss at the property next-door. He says Jarred cleared off. Left Citadel to the feds. Jarred’s gone dark.”

  “Where do you figure he went?” Bing said.

  Nollie rolled her eyes. Savannah intently swabbed a last tortilla around the bean bowl.

  “How should I know?” Willing didn’t meet anyone’s gaze. He was careful both to not look at Goog, and to not seem to be not-looking at Goog.

  “It’s obvious, isn’t it?” Goog said. “You don’t all have to play innocent. Who’s the real nut in this family? Who’s naturally seditious? Who’s the asshole renegade, with no respect for authority? Who was opportunistically price-gouging all through the thirties? Who completely ignored the weapons amnesty in ’38?”

  “He didn’t completely ignore it,” Bing said. “When they canceled the Second Amendment—”

  “No one canceled the Second Amendment, you yunk,” Goog said. “It was clarified. Modern constitutional scholars now believe it was never meant to apply to individuals in the first place. A ‘well-regulated militia’ means the police and the armed forces. Not some lunatic with an AK in a shopping mall.”

  “Jarred did turn in a pistol or two for appearances’ sake,” Bing said. “And everyone ignored the amnesty. All those from-my-cold-dead-hands stand-offs—”

  “Also, who regarded his dopey farm as a ‘citadel’—a fortress and a territory apart?” Goog carried on. “Who has no sense of loyalty to this country, and who has doubtless suffered the consequences?”

  “We can’t be sure of where he went,” Savannah mumbled. “Besides, that rumor about the self-destruct in the chip. I’ve never been sure it’s true.”

  “Oh, it’s true,” Goog said ominously. “Believe you me.”

  Willing almost blurted that, as far as he knew, Jarred wasn’t chipped. Which would have precluded the back of his head exploding like a shot-gunned pumpkin the moment a Scab satellite detected that he’d set foot where he wasn’t supposed to. Willing managed to keep his mouth shut. The information might have denied his cousin a malevolent satisfaction, and it was not in their interest to deny Goog Stackhouse satisfaction of any sort.

  “I heard they live like, you know, animals there,” Bing said. “No internet. So it’s like the Stonage, forever. People live in mud huts, or teepees or something. No electricity, no TV, not even any radio, ’cause the US jams it. There’s lots of webzines say they have nothing to eat, and the whole place is into cannibalism.”

  “It has to be a shit hole,” Goog said. “It’s completely cut off from world trade. Violating US sanctions lands you in prison for so long that even off-chip dirtbags won’t risk smuggling. The only country that’s recognized the USN is Eritrea. Even if you could get past the guards and mines at the border, which you can’t—defection to those subversive wackos is classified as treason. Which is the only crime left on federal statute books that’s still a capital offense. So I hope none of you ever get as restive as Jarred seems to. A whole BSCA unit with maximum-security clearance has been deputized with the authority to press the button.”

  Willing would obviously feign disinterest around Goog. Yet like most people, he was intrigued by the United States of Nevada, incorporating several Indian nations as well as the original polity, colloquially the Free State (causing much resentment in Maryland, which had laid claim to the moniker since 1864). How could you not be fascinated by such a black box, a trapezium that nothing and no one got out of and nothing and no one, at least officially, got in? Ever since the state’s secession in 2042, any information about the breakaway republic had been shut down as soon as it went up. The NSA must have installed internet filters, since to do a search on the fledgling confederacy you had to use coy, constantly reconfigured euphemisms like “high-stakes gamble,” which would also cease to work within days. Willing was glad there had been no second Civil War. He was glad that the same public enervation, sovereign destitution, and sour-grapes excuse-making that had kept the US from coming to the rescue of Japan had inclined Congress to write off the ungrateful western dustbowl with a sneering good riddance. (America now conducted livelier commerce with Cuba than with a no-go hole in its own interior. In modern maps of the US, Nevada was spitefully blank.) True, national borders could mercifully exclude as simply immaterial all that lay outside them. Yet the United States of Nevada still seemed to have to do with him. Assuming his uncle had not been shot on the American side while trying to penetrate its notoriously militarized perimeter, he had no doubt that this was where Jarred had fled. The moments the USN crossed his mind were the only instants in his day when Willing felt awake.

  It was probably true that the borders were uncrossable. It was probably true that your chip was programmed to blow your head off in the unlikely event that you succeeded in crossing anyway. Nevertheless, Nevada was the sole exception to Goog’s assertion that there was no getting away from the Scab. It was the one place on earth where millions of Americans weren’t paying federal taxes. Accordingly, mere mention of the traitorous malcontents drove Willing’s most influential dinner guest into a rage. It would be prudent to change the subject.

  “So how’s it going at the Bureau, then?” Willing asked Goog brightly.

  “What’s this,” Goog said suspiciously. “Interest in my work?”

  “Everyone in America is interested in your work.” Willing had perfected this poker face in adolescence. His ridicule and sincere esteem were indistinguishable.

  “Since you asked,” Goog said, “we’re bringing in some new reporting requirements that are bound to affect you, Nollie. After all, it doesn’t seem fair that most of the country sends in so much data on income and expenditures, while outliers can operate under a cloak of secrecy and obfuscation, does it?”

  “Yes, my keeping a purchase of incontinence panty shields to myself seems a rank injustice,” Nollie said.

  “Starting in January next year”—Goog’s voice rang with relish—“the unchipped will be legally obliged to file a same-day report on every purchase and deposit. We’ve already designed the online forms, and they’re quite extensive: address of vendor, federal tax ID number, time and date, serial or product number, purpose of purchase—”

  “You mean the federal government needs to know why I bought incontinence panty shields,” Nollie said.

  “Best of all, the forms don’t accept cut-and-paste.” Goog simply could not stop smiling. “You may find that remaining outside the system will cost you rather a lot of toil and trouble.”

  “That’s harassment,” Nollie said.

  “Looked at one way,” Goog said blithely, “all of government is a form of harassment. But you wouldn’t want to look at it that way, would you?”

  Savannah puzzled, “Why not just make the shrivs get chipped like everyone else?”

  “Coercion is crude, and invites tantrums,” Goog pronounced. “This way, the long-lived are persuaded to embrace chipping as a welcome salvation from the paperwork equivalent of Abu Ghraib. Think about it: if I wallop you with a cudgel, you’ll get mad, and you might even hit me back. If I prick you over and over with a straight pin, you’ll thank me when I stop.”

  “You’re diabolical,” Nollie said.

  Goog accepted the compliment with a gracious nod. “Oh, and we’ve also started digging into old files, now that Congress rescinded that random seven-year limit on our curiosity. Lotta irregularity in the thirties. Like those Tax Boycott crybabies, who refused to file returns in some boo-hoo over having been bankrupted by ‘their own government.’ With compounded interest and fees, those chiselers will lose everything. It’s complicated, converting dollars to nuevos, but we’ve worked out a formula.”

  “Toward the end, the value of the dollar was changing every day,” Willing said. “Every hour, even. So your formula must be terribly sophisticated.”

  “It works out roughly to our advantage, if that’s what you mean,” Goog conceded.r />
  “Yes,” said Willing. “That is what I meant.” He took care to add, “More patriotic that way. Better for everyone. For the country as a whole.”

  Goog studied his cousin again, searching for mockery. But he must have been accustomed to civilian pandering. Willing’s was pro forma.

  “So it turns out other folks were under the yunk impression that they could deduct losses from voided Treasury bonds,” Goog continued. “Or they had the impudence to subtract the difference between what they were compensated for gold and its grotesque over-valuation on the open market. Like Dad always said, it’s a moronic investment, so they deserved to take a hit just for being nitwits, if you ask me.”

  “I don’t know how foolish an investment it’s turned out to be,” Willing said, keeping his tone companionable. “Anyone who kept hold of all that glitters in ’29 would turn a handsome profit today—even after 85 percent capital gains.”

  “They’d earn nothing but a prison sentence,” Goog said sharply. “Any gold in this country remains the property of the US government. You wouldn’t happen to know anyone who’s still hoarding?” Hoarding remained a synonym beloved of bureaucrats for retaining your own assets.

  Willing bore up with a bashful smile. “I was being theoretical.”

  In the face of the kind of grueling interrogation once reserved for terrorists and now exclusively practiced on alleged tax cheats, the suspect’s most commonplace mistake was to assume a range of high-intensity emotions: indignation; flopping, tearful contrition; wrath. Yet the most effective defense against Goog had always been bland geniality. An unruffled happyface drove the scabbie insane, but he couldn’t object to it.