The Mandibles

by Lionel Shriver

  “I have enough bancors to buy an extremely nice car,” Nollie said. “This time, we wouldn’t have to walk.”

  Virtually no one bought a car anymore. Major American cities like New York bore more resemblance to mid-twentieth-century Shanghai than to the whizzing futuristic metropolis of The Jetsons. In eerie silence, multitudes of electric bicycles swarmed single public buses like bees around a queen.

  “I’m chipped,” he reminded her. “They can track where I am.”

  “If they care. That is, if you were the mass murderer at Elysian and you’d escaped, you’d have a problem there. But you were the good guy. As I understand it, too, the police have to appeal to the Scab to use their satellites, and scabbies are proprietary.”

  Granted, despite Fifa’s conviction that they lived in a police state, the powers of the police per se were surprisingly restricted. The FBI was little more than a website. Movie buffs who watched classic thrillers like the Bourne trilogy must have been disconcerted by this mythically demonic organization called the CIA, whose sticky fingerprints no longer stained assassinations and coups all over the globe, and whose Langley headquarters, according to Avery, had been taken over by a discount grocery chain from the Punjab. (In a flurry of films and series from abroad in the thirties, Americans were popular villains: schemers from the Federal Reserve out to defraud innocent investors with sales of bonds they knew full well would soon be worthless, or wicked financiers who escaped the economic depredations of the era by absconding with ill-gotten gains. But in the Korean and Vietnamese entertainment of this decade, American characters were mostly walk-ons—incompetent or hapless buffoons played for laughs.) The powers of the Scab, by contrast, were very real, and veritably limitless.

  “Is it even possible?” he asked. “To just—not show up for work, and—go? Wherever you want? Without asking, or filling out a form, or notifying some official?”

  Nollie’s smile was pained. “People used to pick up and drive across the country for weeks at a time. Stopping where they wanted. Doing what they wanted. Generally this was called a vacation. Back when wage earners got vacations. But the fact that young people like you think you need permission to careen into the horizon, think it must be against the law to quit a scurvy job without asking—that alone is reason to go.”

  “But if it’s true. About the chip. You might get through. For me, it would be suicide.”

  “So you can sleep or ass-wipe your life away, or you can take a chance. Which I rate at about fifty-fifty. Sixty-forty maybe,” Nollie said, reconsidering.

  “Which direction?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “I’ll have to ask Fifa to come, too.”

  “Of course. Although—well, she talks a good game …”

  “I know,” Willing said sadly.

  “Let’s get out of here. We have a car to buy. Meanwhile, if anyone comes nosing around looking for the savior of Elysian Fields, you’ll be out.”

  Statistically, most people anguish longer over the purchase of a pair of shoes than over whether to buy a house. In kind, two of the biggest decisions of Willing’s life had been dizzyingly expeditious. It took under a second to determine whether to stop a fellow staff member from putting more residents out of their misery and instead to put Clayton out of his. It took less than five minutes to resolve to commit treason.

  On the way back from the dealer, they swung by Fifa’s house. Typically, she lived with her parents. Willing had arranged to meet between her railing installations and her shift at the sandwich factory that night (the holiday weekend being extinct). She’d been relieved to hear from him. The shooting at Elysian was already on the news—though the reporting was blasé, nursing home melees having become so commonplace. To give them privacy on Fifa’s stoop in Brownsville, Nollie stayed in the Myourea—Thunderbird in Khmer, a much-coveted import from Cambodia. Its sweet hydrogen lines combined with a 1950s teal-and-cream two-tone drew admiring onlookers.

  “You mean, practically right now,” Fifa said incredulously after hearing him out. Her face was ashen, and she needed a shower. She looked hung-over.

  “Tomorrow,” he said. “We have to throw some things together. I doubt we’ll head out of town until afternoon.”

  “Oh, well, that’s different,” Fifa said caustically.

  “This isn’t out of the blue. We’ve talked about it before. You thought it would be so cruel. The final frontier, we said. Becoming modern-day homesteaders.”

  “We’ve mused about it. But you’ve no idea what it’s like there. Accounts on the web all contradict each other, and you never hear from people who actually live in the Free State. If anyone lives there. The whole population could’ve sunk into the desert from another round of A-bomb tests at Yucca Flats and nobody would know about it here.”

  “I love not knowing,” Willing said. “Our future in the old United States is too known. Most of what I know I don’t like.”

  “You’re not being practical. I’ve seen pics of the border. It’s worse than Mexico’s fence along the Rio Grande. The walls are massively high, and massively thick, and bristling with guns and soldiers. How would you get across, even if you successfully tippy-toe through the minefield leading up to it?”

  “I’ll find out when I get there. Any armor has a chink. And there’s supposedly an underground railroad.”

  “Willing, most of what’s on the web is fantasy! Have you ever met a real person in this ‘underground railroad’?”

  “All right, no.” He added staunchly, “But other people have made it.”

  “All you can be sure of is that other people have disappeared. You can disappear without popping up somewhere else. Have you ever heard from Jarred?”

  “No, but they stop communications from getting out. I doubt he’d be able to sail a paper airplane in my direction, much less a fleXt.”

  “And you’re assuming that the chip’s self-destruct is treasury. Why would it be? You heard Goog. A whole unit at the Scab, he said. And doesn’t it sound like exactly what they’d program your chip to do, if you had the impertinence to throw down your cotton hoe, and the ingratitude to walk away from the greatest nation on earth? These people are motherfucking T-bills! Seems biggin’ likely to me that instead of allowing you to throw off your chains, they’d rather you be dead.”

  “I would rather be dead,” he said, surprising himself, “than stay here. It’s not only the taxes. It’s what I was trying to explain last night. A heaviness. I feel watched. I pay up, as if I have any choice. It’s splug how little is left, but that’s not what gets me down. I feel like a criminal all the time. When I think about it, I’m doing everything I’m supposed to. It’s what my mother told me it was like going through airport security—though I’ve never been on an airplane myself. She said you always felt like you were doing something wrong. Even when you took off your shoes, and removed your ‘laptop,’ and raised your arms in a full-body scanner, like surrendering when you’re under arrest. But I feel that way walking down the street.”

  “Of course you do,” Fifa said impatiently. “It’s called terrorism. Which isn’t only the ploy of religious lunatics. It’s a tool of the state. It works by making examples of a handful of people, and then there’s a multiplier effect of scaring everyone else shitless. Terrorism is a money saver. The Scab is a terrorist organization, but so was the IRS—the old initials just didn’t have the resources to stick an emotional cattle prod up your ass on the same scale. Nothing’s changed.”

  He took a different tack. “But all the companies are owned by foreigners. Even the old national parks. Elysian Fields is owned by a corporation in Laos. Unless you’re a doctor, or a pharmaceutical researcher, the only jobs available are the drear ones you and I do now. What can we look forward to? And then the likes of my aunt Avery and uncle Lowell—you know, like your parents—all they do is talk about how great everything used to be and how splug it is now. So why not come with me? If only for an adventure. The worst that could happen is we ge
t there, we can’t get in, and we come home.”

  “That’s not the worst that can happen. They can throw you in jail for trying to defect. And talk about working for foreigners—all those commercial prisons are also owned by Asians, and they drive you like dogs, not for 23 percent of your pay, but for dick. You’ve no idea what you’re risking.”

  Fifa’s defiance had always rung hollow. But they’d seen each other for three years. His impassioned appeal was an obligation, and so was hers.

  “The shooting at Elysian,” she said. “It’s left you rattled. That makes sense. Having a brush against … Well. It makes you take stock. I’m glad you’re okay, though Nollie’s right: I think you should have let him finish what he started. He was doing God’s work. But that scene having fucked your head up doesn’t mean you should do anything crazy—”

  “Agency,” Willing said. “That’s what I discovered this afternoon. That I could do something. In the United States, doing something generally means either shooting somebody, or going somewhere else. I’m a dropout. I don’t know much American history. Still, I do understand that a long time ago we ran out of new land, and the space program was too expensive. It’s never been the same here since there was nowhere to go. But it’s possible to get somewhere else by going backwards.”

  “Brutal,” Fifa said. “First, you’re planning to get shot climbing over the wall into the USN. Now it’s time travel.”

  “Yes. I’m not sure, but I think Nevada is time travel.”

  When they parted, he pressed a set of keys into her palm. “Take the house.”

  “What happens if you wise up and do a U-turn a hundred miles short of Vegas?”

  “Then I’ll move back in, you can stay, and we’ll find out whether misery really does love company.” He kissed her. “I’ll miss you.”

  “Not as much as you think,” Fifa scoffed, offhand. “I’ve always played second fiddle to your real girlfriend.”

  “Like who?”

  “That shriv in shades sitting in the sharp car.”

  What’s he doing here?” Nollie said irritably.

  In the rare warmth of mid-summer, they’d once more thrown the front door open, with only the screen door latched. After serial declarations of martial law in the latter thirties, American cities had restored the protection of property rights and imposed civic order; New York had a surprisingly low crime rate. For most of the public, the miscreants who posed any serious danger were over-zealous keepers of order—one of whom was standing on their stoop.

  Goog could see them through the screen, stacking luggage in the living room. They couldn’t pretend they weren’t home. Refusing to invite an immediate relative inside would seem weird.

  “Going somewhere?” their visitor asked, scanning the bags.

  “Taking a tour,” Nollie said briskly. “Seeing our nation’s sites. Inspired by the Fourth of July.”

  “What sites?” Goog asked skeptically. “Platefaces bought most of them up.”

  “They haven’t put coolie hats on Mount Rushmore. Yet.”

  “So what’s up?” Willing asked, trying to sound casual, which never worked.

  “Heard about that ruckus at Elysian,” Goog said. “Seems some valiant, self-sacrificing employee intervened, or the carnage would have been worse.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Willing said. “I spent the whole time crouched in a closet. Made a run for it as soon as the shooting stopped.” Irksome, playing to Goog’s contemptuous opinion of him, but he’d no reason to care what his cousin thought.

  “Funny,” Goog said. “The home’s administration must have been misinformed, then. Because however grateful those poor souls cowering in Elysian might have felt, seems our Good Samaritan was carrying an illicit handgun. So the NYPD put in a request to the Bureau for tracking. I recognized your name.”

  “Barking up the wrong coward,” Willing said, milking the false humility a bit.

  “I’m doing you a favor, bud. Thought we might keep this all in the family. Turn in the sidearm—and we both know we’re talking about that forty-four you were always waving about Citadel whenever some skinny wayfarer came near your precious potatoes. What with your benevolent intercession and all, I bet I can get the cops to drop it. They just want the gun.”

  Nollie’s story about the weapon having been left behind by squatters would never wash with Goog, who was present in Prospect Park when the Shadow notched its seminal two fatalities. Nor would he believe his annoying cousin would have pitched his protection into the East River. Willing was debating the best method of stonewalling when Goog’s eye was drawn by a battered carton on the floor.

  “Foul matter,” Goog read from the carton’s side, and something clicked. “Only times I’ve seen you drag along that grubby box, Auntie, are when you’re planning a one-way trip.”

  “I’m old,” Nollie said. “Getting dotty. Sentimental. Some writers travel with lucky fountain pens. I need my printouts.”

  “This is way too much crap for Mount Rushmore,” Goog said. “And that new Myourea out front. Yours?”

  “Getting rash, too,” she said. “You know those dementia sufferers. Irrational. Impulsive. Can’t be trusted with money.”

  “Speaking of money: where’d it come from?” Goog never left his work at the office.

  “I earned it,” Nollie said with fervor. “I got a good idea, I worked very hard to realize it, I paid taxes on the rewards of my labor—rather high taxes, or so I imagined at the time—and however improbable you may find this now, afterwards I had two cents to rub together.”

  The entire scenario was bound to strike any scabbie worth his salt as highly irregular. But for once Goog Stackhouse’s imagination was inflamed by something other than fiscal malfeasance. “You could hop a U-pod for a fraction of the price. Old ladies don’t buy state-of-the-art hydrogen sedans to play tourist for a few days.”

  “Last I checked, it was legal to drive across the land of the free without getting a permission slip from your own grandnephew.”

  “It’s legal with one exception. If I even suspect an intention to defect to the USN, you two aren’t going anywhere.”

  Willing was a master of the impassive. Nollie was less adept. It didn’t help, either, that her fleX was stiffened on the coffee table, its open GPS app already programmed for the route to Reno. Pity she didn’t do updates. In current versions of Google Maps, a search on “Nevada” brought up the name of a street in Greenwich, England. The state itself was missing.

  “Wilbur, aren’t you the type,” Goog said, after a victorious glance at the fleX. “Intoxicated by an idea of yourself as having a direct line to Jesus, or whoever’s voices you’ve been hearing since you were a maladjusted kid. Just the sort of loser who used to sell his soul to Scientology—since the so-called Free State is just another fringy, goofball cult. And always so cozy with that fruitcake rabble-rouser Jarred. Makes perfect sense you’d snuffle the wacko’s trail, searching for the pothead at the end of the rainbow. Sorry to poop your pipe dream, but I’ll be flagging your chip. Drones from the Bureau will descend from the sky the moment you leave the tri-state area. As for you,” he told Nollie. “Conspiracy to defect to the USN is one of the few statutory justifications for forced chipping. So you might start shaving the back of your neck.”

  “How convenient,” she said. “Its hairs are already raised.”

  “Later, you’ll both thank me,” Goog said. “No nonagenarian with writer’s block would ever have scaled a considerable improvement on the Berlin Wall. And your head, Wilbur, would have splattered over the sand like a busted watermelon the moment you crossed the border.”

  “Really? I guess we’ll find out.” Willing had to admit he felt yunk, pointing an X-K47 Black Shadow at his cousin. It simply didn’t feel serious. All the same, in seconds he had ratcheted up the stakes of this encounter in a manner that was difficult to ratchet back down. When you’ve pointed a gun at someone, you pretty much have to keep pointing it. You can’t put it back in y
our pocket and return to calm, interested discussion of your travel plans.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Goog said, with a quaver in his voice. “I’m not only your cousin, which obviously doesn’t mean much to you—”

  “Or to you,” Willing said.

  “I’m also a Scab agent.” Interesting slip. “Any idea what happens to you if you shoot one of us?”

  “Nothing worse,” Willing calculated easily, “than if I don’t shoot you. The difference between drudging at Elysian for next to nothing and drudging at an outsourced prison for absolutely nothing? Negligible.”

  “I came here to be nice,” Goog hissed.

  “You came here to be disarming,” Willing said. “It always pissed you off that Jarred didn’t trust you with the guns.”

  “But what are we going to do with him?” Nollie said.

  “We could tie him up,” Willing supposed. “But there’s food and water to consider. Unlikely, but he might do something resourceful. And this is the last housewarming present I’d want to leave Fifa.”

  “Nuts,” Nollie said. “You mean we have to bring the prick along. And I had been looking forward to this trip.”

  • CHAPTER 4 •

  SINGIN’ THIS’LL BE THE DAY THAT I DIE

  They only include a manual setting for emergencies,” Willing advised.

  “Remember what I told you about preserving your dignity by breaking the rules?” Nollie said, struggling into what no one even called the driver’s seat anymore. “That goes double for driving your own fucking car.”

  “People your age insisting on controlling the vehicle are the only reason anyone has accidents anymore. It’s two and a half thousand miles.”

  “You want to drive?”

  “I don’t know how.”

  “No one does. It’s pathetic.”

  Willing had always liked his aunt for her obstinacy. So he couldn’t object when she wouldn’t comply with his wishes, either. He suppressed a tremor of trepidation in the seat beside her. This whole venture was a suicidal careen toward a sheer cliff. If they slammed into an interstate meridian midway, the truncated expedition would simply be more efficient.