The Mandibles

by Lionel Shriver

  As the envelope fluttered into the blue maw, she frowned. If “internet vulnerabilities” had been fixed, why did we still have to pay electric bills by check?

  The “gentry” encroaching ever farther east into Brooklyn took private transport. As usual the only white passenger on the standing-room-only bus, Florence strained to pick up any reference to Alvarado’s address. The Afri-mericans spoke their own dialect, only partially discernible to honks, infiltrated by scraps of mangled Spanish. Among the Lats, the only rapid urban Spanish she could confidently translate concerned the latest music rage, beastRap, comprising birdcalls, wolf howls, lion roars, cat purrs, and barking. (Not her thing, but when artfully mixed, some of the songs were stirring.) A screeching seagull tune with an overlaid rhythm track of pecking seemed to generate more excitement on the B41 than the wholesale voiding of American bonds. Yet once the news filtered down to the street, gold nationalization wouldn’t go down well with this crowd, many of whose toughs were looped with gleaming yellow chains. It was hard to picture these muscular brothers and muchachos lining up patriotically around the block to deliver their adornments to the Treasury. With the likes of that hulking weight-room habitué looming by the door—were the feds planning to wrestle him to the pavement and yank out the gold teeth with pliers?

  A generation ago, this stretch of Flatbush Avenue north of Prospect Park was trashy with the loud rinky-dink of carpet warehouses, discount drug stores, nail salons, and delis with doughnuts slathered in pink icing. But after the stadium was built at the bottom of the hill, the neighborhood spiffed up. The “affordable housing” that developers promised as part of the stadium deal with the city was nearly as costly as the luxury apartments. Flatbush’s rambunctious street feel had muted to a sepulchral hush. Pedestrians were few. The bee-beep of the private vans that used to usher the working class up and down the hill for a dollar had been replaced by the soft rush of electric taxis. The avenue was oh, so civilized, and oh, so dead.

  Florence rather relished the fact that the commercial transformation of the once vibrant, garish area must have put the well-heeled new residents to no end of inconvenience. Oh, you could get a facelift nearby, put your dog in therapy, or spend $500 at Ottawa on a bafflingly trendy dinner of Canadian cuisine (the city’s elite was running out of new ethnicities whose food could become fashionable). But you couldn’t buy a screwdriver, pick up a gallon of paint, take in your dry cleaning, get new tips on your high heels, copy a key, or buy a slice of pizza. Wealthy residents might own bicycles worth $5K, but no shop within miles would repair the brakes. Why, the nearest supermarket was a forty-five-minute hike to Third Avenue. High rents had priced out the very service sector whose presence at ready hand once helped to justify urban living. For all practical purposes, affluent New Yorkers resided in a crowded, cluttered version of the countryside, where you had to drive five miles for a quart of milk.

  Florence hopped off at Fulton Street and headed east with her collar pulled close. Fall had been merciful so far, and this was the first day of the season the wind had that bite in it, foretelling yet another vicious New York winter. The jet stream seemingly having hove south across the whole country for good, the anachronism global warming had been conclusively jettisoned in the US. She hung a left on Adelphi Street, whose traffic had grown lighter now that the underpass was closed off a few blocks farther up; ever since the horrendous collapse of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway along Hamilton Avenue, not far from her parents’ house, no one was allowed to come near it.

  She assessed the intake line as pro forma: about twenty families, the ubiquitous strollers looped with as many bags as they could carry without toppling over. Several adults were smoking. These were some of the last holdouts who puffed on real cigarettes, despite their being far pricier than steamers. Ridiculous, since she’d never been addicted herself, but the sharp, toxic scent of tobacco made Florence nostalgic.

  On a leafy street in Fort Greene, the Adelphi Family Residence was formerly a private apartment building willed to the city by a childless landowner—one of a torrent of bequests that had poured into public coffers as well as into private charities from the boomer generation, a hefty proportion of which had neglected to reproduce and had no one else left to be nice to. The tall, tawny-bricked building with period details was a big step up from the much-discredited and now-defunct Auburn shelter in the projects a few blocks away. To accommodate more residents, the apartments had been carved into stingier units with no kitchens and communal bathrooms, but there was also a cafeteria and nominal rec room (whose Ping-Pong tables never had balls). Funny, she and Esteban could never afford this tony a neighborhood in a million years.

  Florence waved at Mateo and Rasta, the guards at the entrance, then threw her backpack on the lobby’s security belt and did a stylish twirl in the all-body X-ray. (Mere metal detectors no longer cut it. Plastic gun replicas made from home 3-D printers had improved.) It was too bad that the lobby’s intricate nineteenth-century tiling was obscured by posters—HOME IS WHERE THE HEART IS!; SUCCESS IS JUST FAILURE TRIED ONE MORE TIME!—though the cheerful admonishments helped to compensate for the grimmer notice, VERBAL OR PHYSICAL ABUSE OF STAFF WILL NOT BE TOLERATED.

  Adelphi wasn’t the vermin-infested hellhole teeming with sexual predators that her pitying neighbors like Brendon the Financial Clairvoyant no doubt imagined. What depressed Florence about her job, then, wasn’t squalor, or even the poverty and desperation that drove people here. It was the aimlessness. The collective atmosphere of so many people in one place having lost any purposeful sense of traveling from point A to point B—that milling-about-and-waiting-to-die fug that penetrated the institution—disquieted her not for its contrast with her own driving, forward-thrust story, but for its reflection of how she, too, felt much of the time. At Barnard, she’d never have imagined herself mopping up vomit with the best of them, save perhaps in a charitable capacity, in some brave, brief experimental phase before getting on with her career. She didn’t understand how she ended up at Adelphi any more than its residents did. She didn’t know what could possibly lie on the other side of this place for her any more than they did, either. While crude survival from one day to the next might be every human’s ultimate animal goal, for generations the Mandible family had managed to dress up the project as considerably more exalted. Motherhood might have provided a sense of direction, and Willing did give gathering indications of being bright—but the smarter he seemed, the more she felt impotent to do right by his talents. Unlike Avery, she’d no problem with Willing being taught in Spanish, so long as he was taught. Yet every fact he volunteered, every skill he exhibited, either she had taught her son or her son had taught himself. The school sucked.

  An armed security guard behind her, Florence assumed the desk in the lobby and processed the morning’s arrivals. As ever, a handful of families imagined they could simply show up at the door and grab a bed. Ha! So she’d send them to the DHS intake in the South Bronx, along with a voucher for the van parked outside. Few would be back. Qualifying as homeless was an art, and God forbid you should mention a great-uncle with a spare room in Arkansas or you’d be on the red-eye bus to Little Rock that night. For the others who’d jumped the hoops, arriving with fattening sheaves of documents in sticky plastic binders, Adelphi had barely enough vacant units, and larger families would be crowded. The shelter operated at maximum capacity because two-thirds of the units were permanently bed-blocked. In theory, shelter accommodation was temporary. In practice, most residents lived here for years.

  Florence ushered the new families to their quarters, parents clutching pamphlets of rules and privileges. In the rare instance that the family hadn’t lived in a shelter before, the environs came as a shock. Rooms were equipped with dressers missing drawers and mattresses on the floor, with the odd kitchen chair but seldom a table to go with it. Though Adelphi had a few OCD neatniks, most occupied units were piled thrift-shop high with clothes in every corner, the floors junky with plastic tricycles,
broken bikes, and milk crates of outdated electronics.

  So the intake always complained: What, you telling me there a shared baffroom? Where Dajonda gonna sleep, she sixteen—ain’t she get a room with a door? What do you mean we can’t have no microwave? Them sheets, they stained. Lady in the lobby say these TV don’t get Netflix! Melita here allergic to wheat—so don’t you be serving us any of that soggy pasta. Not much of a view. From our old room in Auburn, you could see the Empire State Building!

  Florence always shimmered between two distinct reactions to this inexorable carping: I know, I would hate to share a bathroom with strangers myself. Being homeless doesn’t mean you don’t value privacy, and if I had a teenage girl in one of these places I’d keep her close. The policy on microwaves is unreasonable, since warming up a can of soup hardly means the room gets infested. Homeless people have every reason to value clean linen, to hope for quality entertainment, and to expect their dietary requirements to be catered to. Me, I hate overcooked pasta. Overall, it makes perfect psychological sense that, brought this low, you would want to firmly establish that you still have likes and dislikes, that you still have standards.

  A millisecond later: You are in the most expensive city in the country if not the world. You have just been given a free place to live, three free meals a day, free electricity, and even free WATER, while people like me working long hours in jobs we don’t always like can barely stretch to a chicken. For reasons beyond me, you have seven children you expect other people to support, while I have only the one, for whom I provide clothing, food, and shelter. You may have to share a bathroom, but your old-style torrent of a shower beats my “walk in the fog” by a mile, so put a sock in it.

  Flickering back and forth all day induced an intellectual strobe that was fatiguing.

  For lunch, Florence grabbed a cafeteria sandwich and retreated to the staff room, lively today. The locust protein filling was supposed to taste like tuna fish. It didn’t.

  “Fantastic,” Selma was saying, propping her legs on a table; the calves were the circumference of industrial mayonnaise jars. “Malicious, as my boy would say. I love the pitcher of all them rich folk having to cough up they big piles of gold. Had my way, wouldn’t get no ‘compensation’ for it, neither. Somebody got to level the playing field. Whatever happen to that idea of them ‘wealth taxes’ a while back? Platform Colbert run on. That was the shit. What I’d have Alvarado turn upside down, this just the start.”

  “You didn’t even vote for him!” Florence objected over her sandwich. Afri-mericans had been roundly hostile to Alvarado’s candidacy.

  “I abstain,” Selma said fastidiously. “Don’t mean el presidente can’t be useful.”

  “Wealth taxes are double taxation,” Chris mumbled, with the nervous cringing of being the only white man in the room—a pale, weedy white man at that.

  “Careless,” Selma said. “You loaded, tax didn’t work the first time.”

  “What about the debt thing?” Florence threw out neutrally. For reasons she hadn’t pinpointed, it nagged at her.

  “Stroke a genius,” said Mateo, the stocky Guatemalan on a break from guarding the lobby. “I declared bankruptcy six years ago. Registered the vehicle with my sister, so even kept the car. Now I got credit cards coming outta my ears. Sorted everything out bien bonita. No reason the country can’t do the same thing.”

  “You loan money to folks can’t pay it back, joke’s on you, right?” Selma agreed. “’Sides, I don’t see why the gubment ever pay anything back. Pass a law say, ‘We don’t got to.’ Presto. No more loan.”

  “But the majority of the people who’ve loaned the federal government money”—Chris trained his eyes on his teabag, which he only dipped twice; he liked his Lipton weak—“are other Americans.”

  “Mierda,” Mateo said. “I heard it was all the chinks.”

  “Yeah,” Selma said. “And they want they money back? Come and get it.”

  “You know, the American military isn’t what it used to be,” Florence said cautiously.

  “Bull.” Mateo punched the air. “We got the pow-ah! Biggest army in the fucking world.”

  “Actually, the Chinese have the biggest army in the world,” Florence said.

  “But never mind the Chinese,” said Chris. “It’s our fellow Americans—”

  “Ain’t nothing ‘fellow’ about ’em,” Selma said. “’Cause you mean rich Americans. With them port-fo-li-os.”

  “Not only.” Chris added a disgusting amount of milk to his tea. “Our pension funds are invested in Treasury bonds. They’re always part of a balanced port-fo-li-o.”

  Selma eyed him for signs of mockery. “City don’t come across with our pensions?” She smiled prettily. “We gonna burn the place down.”

  Chris said quietly, “Then you may have to.”

  Is it true?” Florence pressed Chris after the other two had returned to work. “That the debt is mostly from us?” The us jarred. You always had to cite which us.

  “From what I’ve read.” Chris fluttered his fingers to the side, a routine gesture for if-you-can-believe-anything-you-read-now-that-there-is-no-more-New York Times-Economist-FT-Guardian-LA Times-or-Washington Post. “And the feds aren’t only reneging on the interest, but the principal. My dad gave me a ten-K Treasury bond when I graduated from college. As of last night? That money’s wiped out. And my family’s not rich. This is going to be … explosive. Those guys don’t get it.”

  “They get something,” Florence said. “Selma and Mateo are both married. I know that partly because they have a traditional way of showing it. But this morning, when they came to work? They weren’t wearing their wedding rings.”

  Riding the bus home, contrary to policy Florence tugged out her fleX; many of these passengers could only spring for smart phones, and the distinctive sparkle of metallic mesh could make her a target. But she couldn’t resist a scroll through the news sites. Sure enough, they bannered wall-to-wall outrage. By international consensus, the US was now a “pariah nation.” All over the globe, there were riots outside American embassies, several of which had been overrun and looted. Her country’s diplomatic service had ceased operations until further notice. American ambassadors and staff were evacuating their posts under armed guard.

  Meanwhile, Florence detected much joshing and shoulder punching on the bus about earrings, studs, and chains, all noticeably less on display. The one tenet of Alvarado’s address that had sunk in with the hoi polloi was the part about the gold, a form of wealth they understood. But in neither Spanish nor a host of street dialects did she detect a single comment on the “reset.”

  Come to think of it, throughout her afternoon, on coffee breaks, when pairing up with colleagues to do spot checks on residents for cleanliness and contraband, banter had featured no further remark on the renunciation of the national debt. Menial Adelphi employees were on low enough wages to pay no income tax, and plenty would qualify for working families’ tax credits, which entailed getting what were perversely called “refunds” for taxes they’d never paid in the first place. When you weren’t responsible for paying the interest on a loan, maybe you didn’t regard yourself as responsible for the loan itself, either. Neither her fellow passengers nor her colleagues at Adelphi felt implicated.

  In the scheme of things, Florence paid pretty minimal income tax herself, though it sure didn’t feel minimal, what with Social Security, Medicare, and state and local on top, while meantime Wall Street shysters connived to pay practically nothing. As for a pension that may or may not have been eroded by Alvarado’s address, its monthly stipend was far enough in the future to be abstract. Even if the Social Security Administration didn’t go broke again, the official retirement age was bound to keep moving forward, to sixty-nine, to seventy-two, to seventy-five, like a carrot tied before a donkey’s nose. The sole rescue in her decrepitude for which she held out any hope was trickle-down from Grand Man’s fortune—about which she kept her trap shut at Adelphi. (In college, her o
ne reservation about adopting her mother’s surname, Darkly, in a failed bid to cheer her more fragile parent out of a chronic depression, was that rejecting Mandible might alienate her grandfather in a way that could backfire later on. Fortunately, the redoubtable old man had never seemed that petty.) Otherwise, she belonged to a generation widely betrayed, one with no reason to believe that anything but more betrayal lay in wait. Still. Something. Something was bugging her.

  She didn’t think about being American often, though that may have been typically American in itself. She didn’t regard being American as especially formative of her character, and that may have been typically American, too. The Fourth of July was mostly an excuse for an afternoon picnic in Prospect Park, and she was relieved that next year Willing would be old enough that he wouldn’t be too disappointed if they didn’t go all the way to the suffocating crowds along the East River to watch the fireworks. For years now it had ceased to be controversial to suppose that the era of the “American Empire” was fading, and the notion that her country may already have had its day in the sun she didn’t find upsetting. Plenty of other countries had flourished and subsided, and were reputed to be pleasant places to live. She didn’t see why being a citizen of a nation in decline should diminish her own life or make her feel personally discouraged. She was duly condemnatory of various black marks on the US historical game card—the slaughter of the Indians, slavery—but not in a way that cut close to the bone. She hadn’t herself massacred any braves or whipped Africans on plantations.

  This was different.

  She felt ashamed.