The Mandibles

by Lionel Shriver

“Now I believe in fairies. You found a colony of the über-rich!” Jarred said. “I always figured the feds promoted the myth of this loaded elite to justify draconian tax rates. Presidents always rail against ‘billionaires and trillionaires,’ and then the top bracket conveniently kicks in, not at a billion, but 250K.”

  “They’re not fairies,” Willing said. “More like an endangered species.”

  “Say, your mother was right about those sell-by dates.” Nollie licked her fingers. “Little sweet for me. But not bad.”

  “So do you know what it was like here,” Willing asked his uncle, “when the USN declared independence? After the border last week, I don’t trust anything that was on the news in ’42. The massacres, the anarchy. The paramilitary confrontations between patriots and secessionists. Was any of that real?”

  Jarred loved to pontificate. He’d only vanished from Citadel six months ago, but that was ample time for Jarred Mandible to become an expert on a new country—if his authoritative air was undermined somewhat by the bathrobe and the plastic stool.

  “That was all CGI,” he declared. “There were no paramilitary battles—because there weren’t any ‘patriots.’ Everybody had fucking had it with DC, and anyone feeling swoony about America the Beautiful was welcome to leave. From what I’ve been told, ’42 was the most graceful revolution in history. Municipal governments were already in place, and they stayed in place. Ditto the state government—which simply became the national government, bingo, overnight. So people woke up. Sun rose. They went to work. Nothing changed. After all, ever think about what the federal government does? Takes your money and gives it to somebody old. That’s about it. Oh, and then the feds do expend an awful lot of energy interfering with anything you want to do. Really miss that.”

  “There’s the Census Bureau,” Willing said. “I don’t know how much good they do, but it’s pretty benign.”

  “The American Battle Monuments Commission!” Nollie posited. “Harmless.”

  “The Coast Guard,” Willing remembered victoriously. “Actively good.”

  Jarred laughed. “Okay, I’ll give you the Coast Guard.”

  “Remember back when Republicans had the numbers to let Washington run out of funding?” Nollie said. “The federal government pulled down its shutters, and nobody noticed.”

  “Only one thing made folks cross,” Jarred remembered. “The closing of national parks. And now the feds have sold off Yellowstone. So much for that.”

  “Hey, what’s happened to the Las Vegas Strip?” Willing asked, hoping to pull his uncle out of an all-too-familiar sourness. “I’ve seen pictures of that neon boulevard all my life. Now it’s dark.”

  “Well, early in the Renunciation,” Jarred said, “Vegas made a killing. Foreign tourists swamped the casinos. With the exchange rate in their favor, drinks, hotel rooms, big shows, and buffets were practically free. Trouble was, at the tables, all you could win was dollars. Alvarado wasn’t letting more than a hundred bucks out of the country, so you couldn’t take the cash back home. And even if you spent it, in situ? Once inflation took off in earnest, in no time a big win wasn’t worth any more in real terms than the stake you’d started with. Didn’t make for a satisfying experience. Ironically, with all its early associations with the Mafia, Vegas stayed safer than most American cities in the thirties. The flood of foreign money seeped through the cracks and damped down desperation. So what really destroyed the Strip wasn’t mayhem. It was order. The sort of order that fired that lump of tin into your neck, you poor bastard.”

  “The windfall tax of ’37,” Nollie recalled. “It applied not only to property sales, but to gambling earnings.”

  “Ninety percent,” Jarred said. “So a two-to-one win nets a tenth of the bet. The risk-to-benefit ratio went to hell. All very well, long as Uncle Sam was relying on your upstanding character to report that bucket of nuevos from the slots. But then they brought in chipping, and taxing at source at the casinos, even for foreigners. For the pros, it was a death knell. No one could make a living, even if they were biggin’ sharp. Then the kibosh: they eliminated the cash nuevo. The feeling of physical money—being able to thumb a stack of hundreds, or heft five pounds of quarters from a one-armed bandit—it’s always been crucial to the whole gaming gestalt. When you only got credit in abstraction, most of which was immediately extracted … Well. It was the end of fun. If you want a single explanation for secession, that was it. Locals say the public outrage was so palpable that the air turned red.” Jarred sounded wistful. He’d missed the party.

  “Their motto, as I recall,” Nollie said, “was No Taxation. That’s all. They didn’t give a shit about representation. Feisty buggers. I was impressed at the time. Like Hungary rising up against the Soviets. Not an auspicious analogy, either.”

  “By and large, I think Nevadans were relieved not to fight a civil war,” Jarred said. “But they would have put up a fight. Nobody but nobody in this state handed in their arms after the reinterpretation of the Second Amendment.”

  “The Strip could have revived after independence,” Willing said.

  “Not with the embargo,” Jarred said. “The big casinos could never survive on locals, who are mostly low-stakes players. They need tourists. That’s been the biggest blow to this economy: no more tourists. Only a steady stream of strapped wetbacks like us. Washington won’t grant Nevada-bound planes the right to enter American air space. I hope you realize the scale of what you’ve done. There’s no air travel in or out. And while it may be dead easy to get into the Free State, I’m pretty sure they do arrest you if you go back. At the least, they do you for back taxes—with interest and penalties, compounded; so in either a real prison or a de facto debtors’ prison, it’s a life sentence. Especially if you’re chipped, Willing—this Brigadoon is for keeps.”

  “So are there any casinos left?” For Willing, it was a matter of atmosphere. He wasn’t yearning to play craps. But he didn’t want a city for which he’d permanently sacrificed his house, most of his extended family, and a far-better-than-serviceable girlfriend to be just like everywhere else.

  “The old downtown dumps like the El Cortez are limping along. Hate to admit it, but I’ve been hitting their tables myself. I don’t know how else I’ll amass any capital. You remember those long cold nights at Citadel: I’m ace at blackjack.”

  “Have you won big, then?” Willing said.

  “Haven’t lost much,” Jarred grunted. “An achievement.”

  Nollie crossed her legs and propped her feet on the foul matter box.

  “DC has clearly expected,” Jarred said, “that by choking off trade, collapsing tourism, blocking communication and transport links, and throwing a state notoriously short on water totally on its own devices, they’ll bring the USN to its knees. So the parallel is less Hungary than the Siege of Leningrad. Thirsty, poor, isolated, and frantic for fresh peaches, Nevadans will beg to be let back into the union—or so goes the theory. Meantime, the Army doesn’t have to fire a shot. No one in Washington had the appetite for American troops mowing down other Americans on maXfleX. As a strategy, it’s canny, frugal, and politically cunning. The Chelsea Clinton administration quietly assumed that the USN would crumple into a whimpering, remorseful heap within months if not weeks. Except it’s been five years. Nobody’s crying.”

  Jarred exuded an infectious local pride that he may have caught from his neighbors. Yet there was a conspicuous disconnect between Jarred’s gung-ho and this dismal, Spartan dive. Willing hadn’t noticed any transport parked in Jarred’s drive. The bare bulb glared, and Willing was preparing for another night in the Myourea. The corn chips and kumquats were finished, and he wasn’t counting on more to eat.

  “Is this so-called country working?” Willing said tentatively, trying to be tactful. “Or are people here just bigging stubborn?”

  “This state is a riveting social experiment, and maybe the vote’s still out,” Jarred said with gusto. “All Western social democracies have traveled the same ar
c. They start out decent and quiet and kind of careless, but eventually they get puffed up with their own virtue. Infatuated by fairness. Of course, in a perfectly fair world we’d all have a big, malicious house and mounds of food. Unlimited access to state-of-the-art medicine, free childcare, biggin’ brutal education, and plumped pillows for the long-lived—”

  “Fresh flowers every morning,” Nollie added. “A cup that infinitely runneth over with tequila.” She held up her glass for a refill.

  “Exactly,” Jarred said, obliging with another shot. “All in exchange, it goes without saying, for doing dick. Socially? An easy sell. Economically? Bit tricky. So the state starts moving money around. A little fairness here, little more fairness there. But it’s like shuffling cargo in the hold, and you have to keep shoving trunks left and right, the boat always lurching in one direction or the other. Eventually, social democracies all arrive at the same tipping point: where half the country depends on the other half. It becomes an essentially patrician funding system. It’s no longer contribute—” Jarred had had his share of tequila, and stumbled. “Contributory. Which is divisive. Everybody’s unhappy. The lower half don’t get flowers. The patricians feel robbed. And all that fairness, all that shifting cargo, the taking from Peter to pay Paul—”

  “High transaction costs,” Willing donated.

  “Right. So what started as a reasonable, straightforward arrangement, whereby everyone throws in a little something to cover their modest communal requirements, like roads and a cop on the corner—it’s morphed into one of those complex systems you’re always harping on about, Noll, the kind that courts ‘catastrophic collapse.’ Government becomes a pricey, clumsy, inefficient mechanism for transferring wealth from people who do something to people who don’t, and from the young to the old—which is the wrong direction. All that effort, and you’ve only managed a new unfairness.”

  “I don’t see why you wouldn’t have the same problem here,” Willing said.

  “Lotta shrivs—sorry, the long-lived—left at secession. Couldn’t face life without Medicare. And I’ll be honest with you, Noll. The oldsters who’ve stuck it out—usually native-born Nevadans; the blow-in retirees fled in droves—well, they’re getting sick. Nevada doesn’t have any pharmaceutical plants, and the drugs ran out years ago—for hypertension, cholesterol, angina. So they’re dying sooner. I’ve seen it plenty on an anecdotal level, but if anyone bothered to assemble statistics here I bet you’d find a sharp drop in life expectancy. I’m not sure that’s such a bad thing. An opinion broadly shared in this part of the world, but scandalous in the Outer Forty-Nine. If you’re frail or ailing in Nevada, you have to rely on someone else, and I don’t mean collectively, on an institution. A relative, or a neighbor.”

  “Isn’t it interesting that seems so weird,” Nollie said.

  “The Free State is an experiment in going backwards,” Jarred said. “Even technologically—there don’t happen to be any rob plants within its borders, yet. So as the existing robs break down they’re replaced by human employees. It’s not an answer in the long run—someone’s bound to manufacture the bastards in due course—but in the short term, loss of automation has really helped the labor market. You’ll see, there’s plenty of work here. Though it’s either biggin’ low skilled and often physical, or it requires a level of education you and I, Willing, don’t have anywhere near.”

  “We’ve gone to some trouble to get here,” Nollie said, glancing around a room far more depressing than the cozy home in East Flatbush they’d left behind. “I want to be optimistic. But what makes the USN so much of an improvement?”

  “It’s what I said to Goog on the Fourth of July,” Willing said. “Freedom is a feeling. Not only a list of things you’re allowed to do. I feel better.” He might have just taken his own temperature. “I feel better already.”

  “Tax forms in this state, believe it or not,” Jarred said, “are one page long. That’s pretty much the way it is with everything. You don’t get a business license or a marriage license, an entertainment license or a liquor license. You do business, get married, entertain yourself, and drink.”

  “However,” Willing said. “Nevada is not a utopia.”

  “No, no, no!” Jarred agreed vehemently. “It sure isn’t. This town is filthy with losers and T-bills, scammers and swindlers. And people really do starve. Nobody helps you here unless they want to, and what’s worse they have to like you. Just being needy doesn’t cut it. Native Nevadans are apt to give each other a hand, but we interloping Outer Forty-Niners are on our own. Nobody asked us to come here, so we’re expected to make ourselves useful or go away. Right at secession, folks were worried only the hardcore would stick it out, and the state would rapidly depopulate until it wasn’t viable. Now the prevailing fear is just the opposite: that refugees from Scab persecution will pour into the Free State in quantities Nevada can’t absorb. That’s a big reason people don’t try harder to get word out that it’s not so bad here.”

  “So maybe some of the more outlandish rumors in the USA,” Nollie said, “about cannibalism and genocide, are actually propagated by the USN.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised,” Jarred said. “I’m getting reluctant to spread the gospel myself.”

  “But if everyone here is a maverick,” Willing said. “Doesn’t that make you a conformist?”

  “Very funny,” Jarred said. “Problem is, mavericks rarely get on with other mavericks. And you’ll find out soon enough how much stuff you simply can’t get: replacement parts for your maXfleX. Lemons. Realize how few dishes you can make without lemons? The Chinese takeout is splug, because there aren’t any more water chestnuts, or bamboo shoots, or shiitakes—not even in cans. You’re entirely dependent on some entrepreneur who’s had the bright idea to manufacture wooden salad bowls, or you can’t get wooden salad bowls unless you carve them yourself. Nevada has started to generate its own media—TV shows, movies—which sounds cute, but they all suck. People write their own books, but they’re awful.”

  “Glad to hear it,” Nollie said. “No competition.”

  “I can’t overemphasize, though,” Jarred said, “how leery locals are of new arrivals. They’re not touched by your eagerness to convert. They’re not impressed by your bravery in coming here. Obviously, a lot of Lats drained south of the border when Mexico’s economy went ape shit. After secession, Nevada lost a fair number more. With all the holdout Republicans around Reno and Carson City, Lats were edgy that an independent state would turn into a racist repeat of the Confederacy. Well, everyone needs a cat to kick, and that’s us. We’re the new undocumented workers. Forty-Niners show up with unrealistic expectations, no education, and worst of all, no assets. They get chip-stripped at the border. You’re unusual; most of us don’t realize we could have brought in a car.”

  “Most of us wouldn’t have cars,” Willing reminded him.

  “I kick myself for not crossing in the pickup. I’ve been getting around on a ramshackle bicycle that isn’t even electrified. In the heat of summer, it’s insufferable. As for this place, I know it’s not much to look at. But it’s a miracle I have somewhere to live. Plenty Forty-Niners are homeless. I only stopped dozing in doorways at the beginning of May.”

  “What kind of work are you doing here?” Nollie asked.

  “I work at a cheese factory,” Jarred announced shamelessly. “Separating curds and whey—the whole Little Miss Muffet nine yards. Nevada’s had a dairy industry for ages, but they didn’t make much cheese. Couldn’t top a taco anymore, and everyone freaked. The market for Monterey Jack is biggin’. Casa de Queso is thinking of expanding into a knockoff Parmesan. I know guys who are quasi-suicidal because they can’t get Parmesan.”

  “It’s crazy,” Willing said, “but I pictured you owning another farm.”

  “How would I do that? No capital, mi amigo. You’ll see. I mean, you and Nollie are welcome to crash here. But even in the land of self-reliance with a negligible flat tax, it could take you a while to
swing your own place.”

  “I’d hate to part with it,” Willing said. “But selling this goblet might raise enough for a security deposit on a small apartment. The top part is solid gold.”

  “But what you complained to me about, when you moved back to Brooklyn?” Jarred said. “The no trajectory problem? Here, in that respect, nothing’s changed. Man, this is the first time in my life I wish I’d earned a degree. Nevadans don’t really need another fifty-something yunk to press, cut, and schlep cheese. They need chemists, and engineers.”

  “What would you do,” Nollie said, “if you did have capital?”

  “Waste of time to fantasize.”

  “Wrong answer,” Nollie said.

  Jarred indulged her. “I’d build a gigantic greenhouse. I’d grow lemons.”

  “That’s better,” she said, turning to Willing. “What would you do with capital?”

  This house was ugly. With its partially constructed rectangles of waist-high walls, the whole development was ugly. But the sunset had been stunning. On the drive into Las Vegas, looming red mountains to the west were impervious to whatever government came and went. The cityscape was goofy; the land on which it sat was austere. The balance was good. A lightness leavened Willing’s body that hadn’t percolated through his limbs since before the Stonage. He personified a favorite chocolate bar when he was small, its muddy cocoa solids pipped with hundreds of air bubbles, so what had been heavy and indigestible became fluffy and almost weightless. He didn’t know what he was doing tomorrow, and he liked that.

  “I would earn a degree in hydrology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas,” Willing said. “I would research how people like Jarred can grow lemons without the USN siphoning so much water from the Colorado River that Arizona brings in the National Guard, and Mexico’s objections to reduced flow over the border create a diplomatic crisis. Only five million people lived in Nevada before secession. Washington can live without the tax take. What will endanger the USN’s independence is water. Tensions with adjacent states over drainage of Lake Tahoe, the Humbolt River, and Lake Mead.”