The Mandibles

by Lionel Shriver

  “Displays a certain grim consistency,” Nollie said.

  “Don’t matter,” the man said. “Nobody use a chip here anyways. Think of it as shrapnel from the Income Tax Wars. But better get used to it, kid: you’re broke.”

  “What about bancors?” Nollie asked warily.

  “The USN don’t trade, with nobody,” the man said, enjoying himself. He had a sadistic streak. “Part philosophy, part practicality—’cause ain’t nobody will trade with us. So if you can’t make it, mine it, fix it, grow it, or invent it in Nevada, you can’t get it. Which means, ma’am, a bancor is about as useful for the purchase of provisions as a drowned rat.”

  “Do Nevadans use money at all?” Willing asked.

  “What do you think, we use beads? We’re not savages. Carson City issues continentals. First currency of the original thirteen colonies. But it went to hell pronto in the late 1770s. ’Cause it wasn’t backed by nothin’. We fixed that.”

  “Don’t tell me,” Willing said. “You’re on the gold standard.”

  “Ain’t you quick! Before we cut loose, the Free State produced the majority of American gold anyways. But supply of continentals is real restricted. Learned our lesson from the thirties. Everybody round here pretty much agree that on the face of it the gold standard’s dumb. Arbitrary, the governor calls it. Not much to do with the stuff but wear it around your neck. Can’t eat it. But for currency, it works. Even if we don’t quite know why. One continental buy you a whiskbroom today? One continental buy you a whiskbroom tomorrow. So it’s not that dumb.”

  “Well, thanks for the advice,” Willing said, by way of getting a move on.

  “I don’t recall dishing out any advice,” the man objected. “Though I worry you’re not focused on your sichiation. You got no money. Even if you do find refueling stations for that fancy jalopy of yours, how you going to pay? Here’s your advice, and I hand it out free to all the dewy-eyed newcomers who duck through that fence: Nevada ain’t no utopia.”

  “Did I say anything to imply I thought it was?” Willing asked.

  “You all think so,” the man dismissed. “But your friend there. A lovely lady, I’m sure—”

  “Watch who you’re calling lovely,” Nollie barked.

  “But she ain’t exactly fresh off the conveyor belt,” he went on. “You bring in old people, you pay for old people. No Medicare here. No Social Security. No Part D prescription drug plans. No Medicaid-subsidized nursing homes. No so-called safety net. Every citizen in this rough-and-tumble republic gotta walk the high wire with nada underneath but the cold hard ground. Trip up? Somebody who care about you catch you, or you fall on your ass.”

  They struck out on the two-lane US 93. The land was flat and dry, with a rumple of low mountains on the horizon. Tufts of scrub pilled the plain like the puff of cumulous clouds overhead, the terrain a perfect reflection of the sky.

  “You seemed pretty confident, when you crossed the border,” Nollie said.

  “More than your 60 percent confident anyway,” Willing said. “When Goog talked about the condition of the Washington Monument, something fell into place. It’s more economical to monitor photographs online than to clean the buildings in real life. So when I saw the fence, I got it. They don’t have dogs, or sharpshooters, or a huge concrete barrier around the entire perimeter of Nevada. But not because the chip is coded to self-destruct. They’re too cheap.”

  Nollie chuckled. “Same reason they weren’t interested in fighting another Civil War in the first place.”

  “Rumors are free. They spread themselves. Hiring people to post a lot of nonsense about the USN costs next to nothing. It’s what Fifa said about state terrorism. Policing by propaganda is a money saver. And honestly, Noll,” Willing added as an afterthought. “It’s the United States. It’s not what it once was. But they still don’t assassinate you for tax evasion.”

  They got their first lesson in Nevadan brass tacks that very night. They were running low on natural gas, and wouldn’t make it to Vegas without refueling. While the small town of Ely did have a motel and a diner, they hadn’t the money for either. So they pulled off 93, locked the doors, and wrapped up in the sweaters that only Nollie had thought to pack in July. After sundown in the desert, it got cold.

  Willing didn’t care. He’d been colder. During the winter of 2031–32, when his mother wouldn’t set the thermostat above forty-three—barely high enough to keep the pipes from freezing. Hunkered down in a trickling culvert on the way up to Gloversville, unable to sleep, waiting for the sun to rise. Freezing his fingers on the handlebars as he pushed the bike up weedy riverbanks, struggling to keep the cycle upright, Nollie’s and Carter’s boxes making the load top-heavy. The tacos from Final Feast may have run out long ago, but this was hardly his first skipped meal. Avery had taken a year or two to disentangle luxuries from requirements. Willing knew the difference as a kid.

  He hit the pavement early, and offered to fry up short orders at the diner. Begrudgingly, the proprietor agreed, but only through the breakfast rush. He heard mutterings about “illegal immigrants”—a slightly bent usage, since what made Willing and Nollie illegal wasn’t being denied permission to enter this new country, but being forbidden to leave their own. After also cleaning the bathrooms, he earned his first continentals—their arcane colonial design in sepia even hokier and more retro than the old greenbacks.

  Were the prices on the menu any guide, his wages were splug—lower than his post-tax pay at Elysian. Yet it felt better to make less money and keep all of it than to net more money after the income had been plundered. The fact that the diner’s owner didn’t request the web address of the metal in his neck was heady. These were his first earnings in six years that hadn’t been automatically reported to, and neatly evaporated by, the federal government. Dear Goog, Wish you were here.

  Next, he collected dried cowpats to be sold as manure for a ranch near the highway. He spent the afternoon mending the rancher’s fences—the very quotidian chore that killed his mother. Willing took care to wear gloves, even in the heat. The work gave him flashbacks: Florence’s forefinger, at first merely sausage-plump, with a halo of red around the cut. She tried to be mindful, soaking the laceration in warm salt water, which afterward the doctor said was futile. Within two days, the hand ballooned into an unmilked udder, and red streaks striped her sturdy forearm. Supposedly, the result would have been the same had they whisked her to the hospital the moment the finger began to swell. “Drugs that don’t work,” the internist announced forlornly, delivering the respectfully folded bandana like a miniature American flag at a military funeral, “don’t work early any better than they work late.”

  Meantime, Nollie did jumping jacks beside the car, earning no end of rubbernecking hilarity from passing locals. Willing would never have called it to her attention, but her form had decayed. Her hands no longer met overhead, but rose only as high as her ears, then descended to the level of her waist. The result was a weak, dying-butterfly motion. The jumps, too, were ineffectual. She used to click her heels. Now her feet lifted off and dropped in the same place, about shoulder width. When briefly airborne, she hovered only half an inch from the ground—you could hardly even call it a jump. The deterioration pained him. The lunatic regime always had a comical side, but this feebler version would only amuse strangers.

  Even Enola Mandible couldn’t do calisthenics all day, however lamely articulated. By their second day, she was scavenging for odd jobs herself: shelving canned goods in the minimart, swabbing floors. After which, back aching, she didn’t need to do jumping jacks.

  It was a poor area, made poorer because tourists from the likes of Boise and Portland were no longer passing through on the way to Vegas. Worse, like Willing, soon after secession the state’s entire population—albeit with an unchipped sector vastly larger than the national average—had their chips zeroed by Scab satellites. Nevadans dubbed this punitive farewell fleecing “the Petty Larceny.” The cumulative extraction was not in
substantial. The term alluded less to meager takings than to small-mindedness.

  As the pittances locals could pay their migrant visitors added up, the community’s hostility broke down. Willing worked hard and well. He kept his mouth shut. By the end, more than one Ely native had invited them both for a meal. After five days of living out of the Myourea, they rustled up enough spare continentals to refuel the car.

  Nevada had always been a magnet for kooks. Misfits, outcasts, miscreants, mavericks—the malcontents, the fantasists, the seekers of shortcuts. Born of mining boom and bust, the economy was founded on vice: prizefighting, loose women, drunkenness, gambling, and marital fecklessness. Even before going it alone, the state was an outlier, making it all too easy to get married, easier still to divorce. Alcohol was plied twenty-four hours a day. A lenient relationship to prostitution well predated the era in which Savannah was able to earn an accredited community college degree in stimulation therapy. Real cigarettes—or giant smelly cigars, for that matter—were legal in casinos. A prohibition against state income tax was enshrined in its constitution. In 2042, Nevadans had merely formalized that they were a people apart. Thus the mutinous new nation-within-a-nation was tailor-made for Willing’s eccentric, ceaselessly outraged uncle. But with what or whom would an iconoclast shadowbox here? The image was discordant: Jarred Mandible, perfectly happy.

  Willing had known his mentor as a far-sighted landowner, who had appreciated before the rest of the family the primacy of the need to eat. He always pictured Jarred in muddy gumboots, with a shovel. Surely in the USN Jarred would already have procured a farm—Citadel resurrected, liberated from the humiliating requirement to sell nearly all its meat and produce, at scandalously low fixed prices, to the US Department of Agriculture. Yet the urban address on http://usn should have challenged this rosy, pastoral vision of his uncle’s circumstances.

  Willing couldn’t suppress a bubble of excitement as Nollie crossed the Las Vegas city limits. He had never been interested in gambling—with money, that is. More broadly, he was very interested in gambling. He was gambling now.

  Besides, he instinctively responded to the city’s reputation. Its wildness, abandon, and incaution naturally called out to a young man whose childhood was constricted by wariness and vigilance. The institutionalized recklessness of a town where many an individual blew the entirety of his assets in a single whirl of the roulette wheel couldn’t help but appeal to a chronically parsimonious Brooklynite who had measured out exact three-quarter cups of rice for his mother, that the bag might last the week. He savored the city’s obliviousness to the tut-tutting opprobrium it had always attracted from the tight, the prim, the rectitudinous. It cared nothing for virtue. It was crass, it was loud, it was heathen. It was silly, and it was fake—honestly, admittedly fake, which gave it a genuineness of a sort. It did not apologize for itself. Over time, the city had made scads of money for its residents on the very back of what was wrong with it.

  Las Vegas was the Anti-Willing. Everyone is drawn to what they are not.

  Yet as the sun began to set and Nollie drove past the storied strip, his heart fell. Casinos like the Wynn, the Venetian, the Bellagio, and the Singapore were hulking and dark. The fabled main drag had grown funereal. A sprinkling of neon spangled only farther out. More traffic coursed the freeway than in Manhattan, but the preponderance of vehicles were haulage trucks; extravagant motors like their own were scarce. The immediate touch and feel of downtown was disappointingly serious.

  Jarred’s address was located on the very outskirts in the far southeast. As they drew from the center of town, sprawling white stucco ranch houses with manicured cactus gardens gave way to smaller, cheaper-looking dwellings with no landscaping—rows of identical homes plunked on barren red dirt. Jarred’s development, Aloe Acres, had been left half-finished. Terra-cotta roof tiling its sole cursory nod toward Spanish Modern, the bleak white house numbered 2827 was surrounded by abandoned, partially built rectangular walls rising waist-high. They’d either run out of money, or the developers had hightailed it when the famously renegade state grew more insubordinate than investors were prepared for.

  Jarred was not expecting them. He answered the door wearing boxers and a rifle.

  “Christ Almighty, it’s my right-hand man! And one of the only old ladies I can stand!” Abjuring social protocol, Jarred threw medical caution to the winds and embraced them both in a bear hug, the rifle cutting uncomfortably into Willing’s chest. “Full faith and credit, mi hermano y mi tía! I was hoping you’d make it! And what do you make of that treasury at the border, huh? I actually bothered to kayak across the Colorado, when I could have driven the fucking pickup on I-70 without so much as a wave good-bye. Felt like such a yunk! Come in, come in.”

  Inside was stark: a small laminated table, two straight-backed chairs. Everything but the concrete floor was white, and nothing hung on the walls. As the last of the crimson sunset winked through a stingy window, Jarred switched on a dangling bare bulb. His wild black curls were if anything longer, escaping a careless ponytail. Before his uncle left to throw on a robe, Willing noted that at fifty-three Jarred had finally grown a potbelly. Whatever he was up to, it wasn’t tilling, planting, and slopping out hogs.

  As if realizing what Willing was thinking, Jarred said on return, “Man, you’ve got even skinnier.”

  “Slavery is slimming,” Willing said.

  Jarred fetched a plastic stool, a bottle of tequila, and three mismatched glasses. “Smartest self-starter around here is the guy who decided to plant blue agave after secession,” he said, pouring. “No good having Patrón headquartered in town if they’re cut off from their Mexican suppliers. Now this local harvest stuff is all over the Free State, and the guy who makes it is stinking rich. Cheers! To the indomitable Mandibles, may we forever flourish!”

  “So there are rich people here?” Nollie asked.

  “Better believe it,” Jarred said. “This state needs practically everything. Figure out what hole to fill, and you can make a killing. What’s more, you keep it. Flat tax of 10 percent. And that’s not 10 percent plus sales tax, property tax, state and local, Medicare tax, and Social Security. Ten percent, period. Fucking hell, nobody even resents it.”

  “I can’t picture you, my boy,” Nollie said, “not resenting anything. You must be desolate.”

  “I could always resent,” Jarred posited, “not resenting anything.”

  “Do some people not pay the 10 percent?” Willing asked.

  “Oh, probably. But the police force is biggin’ small, overstretched, and easily annoyed. I wouldn’t cross them. Justice is pretty rough. They’d probably show up at the door, take whatever continentals they could find, and beat you up. If only for being a nuisance. With no, I mean no, welfare—no unemployment checks, no disability payments, no aid to dependent children, zip—there are some seriously down-and-out lowlifes in this town, and the crime rate is monumental. Hence the rifle at the door, sorry. You still have that sexy little Black Shadow?”

  “Naturally,” Willing said, patting the pack on his hip.

  Nollie looked edgy. “It’s sounds as if we shouldn’t leave our things in the car.”

  Willing frowned. “There’s not much out there that’s worth anything.” He didn’t want to immediately pile their luggage into Jarred’s house, as if they were moving in—especially if that’s just what they were doing.

  “Maybe not to you.” Nollie scuttled out the door. She returned laboring with a box, and Willing leapt up to take it from her.

  Jarred guffawed. “Not the foul matter!”

  He didn’t want it to be true, but Willing worried that his great-aunt was starting to lose it. Yes, the elderly had their attachments. But she had dragged those old manuscripts into every hotel room on the road trip here. She’d plunked the box beside her in the booth when they ate at Final Feast. She’d even kept it beside her doing odd jobs in Ely, where she’d also arrived at locals’ houses for dinner, arms wrapped around its failing
cardboard like a toddler clutching a stuffed bunny. Fair enough, the documents were totems of her lost life as a professional author. Yet the ferocity of the clinging was off. Willing and Jarred locked eyes with shared embarrassment.

  After breaking out corn chips and salsa, Jarred extended the bottle for refills, and Willing put a hand over his glass. “Since when are you so abstemious?”

  “I’m not. I’m sentimental.” Willing unzipped an outer pocket of his belt pack. Delicately, he withdrew a bundle of fabric. He unwound the sock. It was the same knee sock he had once packed with coinage, and used to threaten the red-haired boy into abdicating his fatty ground beef. Willing placed the object inside daintily on the table. “Pour the next shot into that.”

  “Hey, I recognize that!” Jarred exclaimed. “It was my sister’s, God rest her. She had a fucking fetish about those things. Biggin’ unlike her, too. Charming, in fact. Don’t take this wrong, but your mother could be a drear. For her to be infatuated with one pair of thingamabobs that were frivolous, and fancy-schmancy, and preposterous—it was a huge relief.”

  Even in the crude glare of the bare bulb, the cobalt stem gleamed like the windows of a cathedral. The tiny cup was warm and loving. “I always meant to give it back to her,” Willing said. “I was keeping it safe. This is all we’ve got left of Bountiful House. It’s our inheritance.”

  Jarred poured, and they toasted: “To our inheritance!” Hygiene be damned, Willing insisted that they all have a sip from the goblet, which passed between the three like a Communion cup. The ritual sanctified the evening. It seemed to bind them in a pact of some sort. To do what wasn’t clear.

  To crown the festivities, Willing brought out the ridiculous candied kumquats. When you saved symbolic gestures for too long you could miss your opportunity. If they did not eat the goofy fruits now, he might own the pointless jar in perpetuity. He explained its provenance.