They set off with their reluctant passenger in the backseat, de-fleXed, wrists duct-taped graciously in his lap rather than uncomfortably behind his back. They allowed Goog to expend his vexation by listing the many crimes they were committing: abduction, false imprisonment, obstruction of the official duties of a federal employee. Yet as they retraced the route their family had trod in the cold, wet spring of ’32—east on Atlantic Avenue, over the Brooklyn Bridge, up West Street—even the captive got caught up in reminiscence. Its personnel much reduced, the second Mandible migration was blindingly swift in comparison to the one on foot. Oh, mobes in gang formation did veer into the road with no warning (crazed blithers on motorized trikes having long ago replaced the comparatively anodyne cyclist as the New Yorker’s anathema). Yet a shrunken, flat-lined GDP had done a spectacular job of thinning vehicular traffic. After its fifty-some years of snotty road-hoggery, only grinding poverty coast-to-coast had put the kibosh on the hulking sports utility vehicle by about 2040. When Willing pointed to one up ahead, the sighting was rare. “Still chugging!” he said. “It beats me where they get the gas.”
“Man, the SUV was one of the cruelest American inventions of all time,” Goog said. “I fucking loved my mom’s Jaunt. When it went out of production, I was all set to snag the latest model.”
“Bullying, brutish, and plug-ugly,” Nollie quipped. “Guess people recognize themselves in cars same as they do in dogs.”
On the GW, the metal grates of the surface rattled, the bridge itself lurching with a subtle sway. “I get the willies crossing these things,” Nollie said.
“No kidding,” Goog said. “This rusted contraption hasn’t had any serious maintenance since the 1990s.”
“According to Avery, the federal buildings in DC are just as dilapidated,” Willing said. “She said the ‘White House’ is a misnomer. Congress, the Lincoln Memorial—they’re all a dingy yellow dripping with black streaks. She said chunks of the Washington Monument keep falling off. After a girl was killed by one, you can’t get within a hundred yards.”
“My mom is biggin’ exaggerating,” Goog sneered. “I looked up pics of the Mall online. Pristine.”
“That’s because it’s cheaper to post old photographs than to pay for steam cleaning,” Willing said.
They curved on I-95 and bumped onto I-80 in Teaneck. Willing’s mood began to lift. He’d only been to New Jersey a handful of times, mostly with Jarred to plow rapidly inflating profits into hard-asset farm equipment. Besides New York, this was the only state of the union in which he’d set foot. As soon as they hit Pennsylvania, it was a brave new world. If these truly were the last days of his life, they’d be interesting days.
Nollie plugged her fleX into the sound system, cranking up the harmonies of her youth: “Hotel California,” “The Weight,” and some of the yunkest lyrics Willing had ever heard in a song called “A Horse with No Name.” She played Don McLean, JJ Cale, and Fleetwood Mac, until Goog exclaimed, “Christ, Nollie! This is like Tunes of Cro-Magnon Man. What’s next, Vivaldi?”
“I’m bankrolling this operation. This is my car, and my road trip,” she declared. “Ergo, my music. You’re a hostage, remember? Act like one.”
In truth, the moldy soundtrack grew on them. By the time they’d hit Stroudsburg on the Pennsylvania state line, both Willing and Goog were driving their Chevies to the levy at the top of their lungs.
With the late start, the first day was short. Nollie drove manfully—and pointlessly, since the Myourea could have done the job by itself—until 9 p.m., when they pulled into a rundown motel in Dubois. The proprietor was none too happy about Nollie’s being unchipped—since a chip would have automatically covered him for losses if his ninety-year-old guest went berserk on Jack Daniel’s and trashed the room. But he accepted a fleX payment because his operation was clearly hard up.
Nollie sent Willing across the way to fetch takeout. Goog lobbied for a proper restaurant meal, but they didn’t want to have to explain a taste for bondage in a diner banquette. He wheedled for them to please cut the duct tape so he could eat without making a mess, and it took discipline to resist his imprecations. Likewise, Willing took no pleasure in binding his ankles to the bedstead in the room they all shared.
For Goog had so entered into the spirit of the adventure that it was hard to remember he was being coerced. Only that afternoon, he’d threatened to restrict Willing’s movements to the tri-state area with militarized Scab drones and menaced Nollie with compulsory surgery. Granted, he often made cheerful allusions to the doom awaiting at their destination. So perhaps he’d decided to enjoy the ride, confident that he’d have the last laugh: Willing’s brain would fry; Nollie would be picked off by a border-guard sharpshooter. At the least, the duo would be drably arrested, and Goog would figure out how to take the credit.
Be that as it may, Goog’s travel history was also provincial. He claimed to have attended a Bureau conference in Cleveland, but being on the outs with Avery, he hadn’t even returned to Washington since his parents moved back in ’44. Alone of the cousins, he could have afforded to explore beyond his tight New York orbit. But theirs was a crimped, wary, stinting generation, and travel is an acquired appetite. Maybe it never occurs to you to go anywhere in particular on a given weekend when you don’t ever feel you’re going anywhere in a larger sense.
So with the promise of wider horizons farther west, even Goog the ultimate T-bill seemed energized. His work must have been boring—totals, percentages, and occasional deviations from the norm. He was powerful, but wielded only the clenched power to ruin people’s lives, as opposed to the looser, open-palmed power to improve them. Everybody with whom he came in contact hated him, and had to pretend they didn’t. A few days’ unofficial vacation from being an asshole must have been welcome.
As they rolled through the Alleghenies and entered Ohio the following day, Willing continued to be astonished that this journey was possible. No drone descended and fastened itself to the roof of their car with gecko-like suction cups because he hadn’t reported to work at Elysian that morning to do his fair share. The chip at the base of his neck didn’t glow and heat as it sensed his growing geographical distance from the means of making a social contribution.
While the wooded hills rolled past his window and Nollie played the contented la-la-laah-laah of “Our House,” Willing considered all that data pouring into federal supercomputers. He had previously conceived of the central network as an omniscient, all-seeing overlord, which sorted and stored every minute detail to perfectly reconstruct the smallest infringements of each American citizen. But perhaps instead the data fed a bloated, overloaded behemoth choking on its own information excess and suffering from a sort of digital obesity. Woozy from gorging on a smorgasbord of similar tidbits, maybe the monster was helpless to know where to stuff the fact that Willing Mandible nee Darkly of East Flatbush, NY, had bought a packet of soda crackers for 2.95.
In any event, nothing and no one seemed to care that Willing and Enola Mandible, and even Goog Stackhouse—who might not be as important at the Bureau as he pretended—had gone AWOL. It was exhilarating.
Nollie’s having plotted their course with her fleX GPS turned out to be unnecessary. The directions all the way to the Nevada border at Wendover, Utah, came down to: “cross George Washington Bridge, then turn right.” To Willing’s amazement, I-80 stretched in a virtual straight line across the continent from Teaneck to San Francisco. Granted, the tarmac was degraded, and he felt wistful about those apocryphal days when one could smooth along this route at 85 mph, in which case they might have made this whole trip in a mere three days instead of five. Willing was a fairly proficient economics autodidact, but knew soberingly little else about the country.
Because Nollie claimed that “children in the backseat need toys,” they disabled the personal communications on Willing’s maXfleX, password-protected the settings, and let Goog play with it. Big on showing off his general knowledge as a kid, he enjoyed pitching o
ut factoids: “The interstate highway system was initiated in 1956. I-80 took thirty years to complete. It closely approximated the route of the Lincoln Highway, the first road across America, and also duplicates much of the Oregon Trail and the Transcontinental Railroad.” Clearly, this uncompromising streak of roadway gouged remorselessly through boulders and mountain ranges was a staggering feat of engineering. Willing had harbored a variety of emotions about the United States over his short life: disappointment; anxiety, even fear; incomprehension; a whole lot of nothing. Pride was new. It was nice.
To pass the time, Nollie regaled them with reports from her friends in France, who said Americans’ reputation abroad was looking up. The arrogant, loud, gauche, boastful stereotype was obsolete. The few of their compatriots who ventured to Europe were widely regarded as modest, deferent, deflective. They were increasingly renowned for a sly acidity, dry self-deprecation, and black humor. No one tossed off clichés about Americans having “no sense of irony” when their entire country had become an irony writ large. And Yanks told great stories. In Paris, it had grown fashionable to invite lively American raconteurs to dinner parties, much as one might previously have invited the Irish.
Yet as the Myourea sped through Indiana and Illinois, the landscape was blighted on either side with huge, warehouse-style manufacturing plants. These would be abundantly automated and 100 percent foreign-owned. Locals were glad for the few low-level jobs that real people who would work for peanuts could do so cheaply that it wasn’t worth the capital expense of buying and tooling up robs. The US had become a popular location for foreign investment: the land was ample and economical. If income taxes were fiendish, DC was desperate to raise the employment rate, and corporate tax rates were trifling. Undereducated, true, the workforce was also cowed, biddable, and grateful. A higher than average incidence of workplace shootings was unfortunate, but Americans mostly killed each other, and the casualties were easily replaced. Willing had recently heard from their old tenant Kurt, who after Jarred went dark had ended up in one of these sprawling, single-story factories in the Midwest. Kurt said employees slept in dormitories—more like mausoleums than the kind that housed college students. By day, you could walk for half a mile along the shop floor without coming across another human being. It was lonely work, which Kurt said was worse than the boredom.
Their progress moderately impaired by Nollie’s insistence mornings on doing her jumping jacks, they struck Iowa on the third day. Fields of corn stretched to the horizon, rarely interrupted by a farmhouse. The region had always been the country’s breadbasket. Now it was the rest of the world’s. The harvest also mechanized, nearly all this grain was for export. Two years ago, the global population had crossed the ten billion mark earlier than expected. Disappearing for decades, family farms like Citadel had now been swallowed altogether by single concerns with holdings so extensive that they could have become independent countries. Companies from China and India had colonized American agriculture with a sense of entitlement and no small hint of self-righteousness. Feeding ten billion was supposedly a great achievement. Presumably feeding 10.5 billion in three or four years’ time would be an even greater achievement. Willing couldn’t see the satisfaction himself. Maybe they’d even succeed in feeding twelve billion, but then what did you have—that you didn’t have before? He’d rather build an interstate.
Throughout, the housing stock was a disconcerting patchwork. Disheveled clapboards with blistered paint and broken porch railings sat side-by-side glassy, impeccably kept retirement communities with tennis courts and pools. But plenty of smaller outposts along this route were ghost towns. He wondered where everyone had gone.
It was on the fourth day, in Nebraska. At their motel on the outskirts of Omaha that morning, they’d forgotten to fill up the water bottles. Nollie declared she was parched. (She could have been closer to insane, or hypnotized anyway. Between Lincoln and Grand Island, I-80 was so straight you could have used the roadway for a ruler, the land so flat you could have used the prairie for an ironing board. Mr. Expert in the backseat verified that the route didn’t vary in its relentless, perfectly western direction by more than a few yards for seventy-two miles. For once Willing and Goog agreed on something: Nollie’s refusal to put the Myourea into automatic along this mind-numbingly monotonous passage was yunk.) She pulled off onto an unlabeled side road that soon gave way to dirt.
“No way you’re going to find a minimart here,” Goog said. “Turn around.”
She might have, had Goog not opened his big mouth. Nollie never took directions from their hostage. “Maybe not, but even Nebraska isn’t depopulated. Americans can’t be so far gone that they won’t give a stranger a drink of water.”
The track ended at a low-lying building they almost missed, since it was camouflaged by dust, and banked with windblown sand. A few exposed streaks revealed a surface the dun color of the landscape, as if it were designed to be missed. The hockey-puck structure was round, with a flat top and no windows. The featureless dwelling had only one door, which yawned open.
“Looks deserted,” Goog said. “Let’s go back. This place is weird.”
For Willing, unease battled curiosity, and curiosity won out. He stepped gingerly over the sand-mounded threshold. “Hello!” he called, and there wasn’t even an echo. “Give me my maXfleX,” he told Goog. “It’s dark.”
Willing struggled with the screen for a moment. The old fleX rolled neatly into a flashlight in a trice, but the new and improved conversion was awkward. Even when he got the tube rolled, the beam splayed asymmetrically to the left.
The immediate interior was also full of dirt, with the odd empty vodka bottle on top: they weren’t the first to discover this place. Willing swiveled the beam. It found more dirt, a smooth interior black wall, and a hole in the middle: a spiral staircase, with no direction to go but down. The entrance had once been protected by a hatch cover, which leaned at a dysfunctional tilt. Someone had jimmied it up. A smell rose from the opening—stale and dry, with an undertone of corruption. The impression of desolation was absolute. No one was here.
“What is this, Indiana Jones?” Goog whined. “We should get out of here.”
“I’m surprised at you,” Willing said. “There might be something down there you could tax.”
“Ha-ha. But I’m not setting foot in that pit with my hands taped.”
Actually, they’d grown pretty casual about the tape. It hadn’t been replaced since the day previous. Goog could probably have twisted free if he’d tried.
“He can stay up here, then. I locked the car,” Nollie assured Willing. “He’s not going anywhere. I want to check this out.”
As he and Nollie cautiously descended the gritty obsidian stairs, Willing glanced enviously at her older fleX. The roll was sweet, the light beam clean. Though the afternoon sun of the Nebraska plains was baking outside, the stairwell was cool. The foul taint in the air grew more intense.
One flight down, Willing swept his fleXpot to the side. It struck, of all things, a dusty treadmill. Behind it, the wall was lined with metal dumbbells of ascending size. A few feet to the right sat a cross-trainer, and next to that a rowing machine. He had no understanding of why anyone would bother to build a gym underground.
“Stop,” he shouted sharply to Nollie behind him, embarrassed by the pound of his chest and the bile that rose in his throat. “If you’re at all squeamish, or easily spooked, you should go back up.”
“You can’t imagine I’m ‘squeamish,’ much less—” She dropped the complaint cold.
Willing’s fleXpot was trained on the stationary bicycle. Rather, on its rider. Slumped over the digital readout as if having set the machine for an overambitious hill climb, the figure was draped in a dusty tracksuit. Skulls always appear to be grinning, though this one had enough leathered skin stuck around the mouth to convey more the grimace of exertion. One of the arms had fallen off.
“This guy’s been dead a long time,” Willing said. “That probably
makes us lucky.” Were he pressed to theorize: what made corpses horrifying was moisture. The completely alive and the completely dead, fine. The in-between was the problem.
“You up for one more level?” Nollie gestured to the staircase, which wound farther down. “I’m intrigued.”
“Take my hand.” She seized it. He wasn’t sure who was comforting whom.
The floor below contained an elaborate kitchen: convection oven, microwave, slow cooker, a KitchenAid mixer with a clatter of attachments. Finely tooled ash with stylish brass fixtures, the cabinet doors were flung open. Whatever ruffians had rifled the larder were not culinarily inclined. They’d left behind the bread maker, pasta machine, and food processor, while julienne slicers and olive pitters littered the linoleum. Though the floor was sticky from broken bottles of evaporated goo, several shelves were lined with cocktail onions, caviar, artichoke hearts, anchovies, hazelnut oil, and preserved lemons. What struck Willing about this buried Dean & Deluca Christmas basket was that there wasn’t merely one jar of Seville marmalade with Glenlivet. Like all the other chichi comestibles, there were dozens of marmalade jars—foreshortening two feet deep.
He picked up a jar of candied kumquats, and brushed it off. Mumbling, “My mother didn’t believe in sell-by dates,” he slipped it into his belt pack.
Nollie was panning her fleXpot over the contents of an open chest freezer, six of which lined a whole quadrant of this level. Poking at the contents with a long-handled barbecue spatula, she read from the labels. “Sea bass, filet mignon, duck breast, quail, foie gras, smoked salmon—”
“Eat your salmon,” Willing remembered.
“I don’t think so.” The airless plastic packets were uniformly an evil black.
The Mandibles Page 39