The Mandibles

by Lionel Shriver

  Lowell clapped. “Bravo! Chip off the block. A bit cynical, kiddo. But I like that line about ‘strangling the baby currency in its crib.’ Classy.”

  “We’re doing ‘American entities should be allowed to trade in bancors’ in Debate Club. I’m affirmative. In the new year, we’re doing ‘The United States will never be able to borrow again.’ Dad says I should take the negative. Dad says Argentina defaulted in 2001, and came back a roaring success only four years later. Dad says pretty soon everyone was ‘bending over backwards’ to loan them money—some of the same banks, hedge funds, and companies that had been burned. Dad says America’s going to bounce back even faster.”

  Tom said, “Yeah, well, you want to win that debate, hon, best leave off the Dad says.” Everyone but Ryan laughed.

  Goog’s visit relaxed the table somewhat, and they let him show off a bit more before Lowell shooed the boy to bed. It was obvious: Goog’s know-it-all loquacity could abruptly get on Lowell’s nerves because his son sounded just like him.

  Given most of the evening’s conversational fare, Belle’s segue into how terrifying even simple surgery had become in a world of failing antibiotics qualified as light relief. She said that chemotherapy, which weakened the immune system, had become much more perilous with the prevalence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and at the very point at which designer drugs could be perfectly tailored to the individual patient.

  “These bespoke drugs may be miraculous, but they’re exorbitant!” she said. “Medicare is groaning under the strain. Alvarado may have declared a ‘reset,’ but the entitlement burden will simply run the debt back up again in no time.”

  “How do you run up a debt if you can’t get a loan?” Avery asked. “Maybe ‘Deadbeat Nation’ will refurbish its reputation in only a few years, but there’s no way anyone’s going to loan America a dime right now. So unless our taxes double—which for us would mean giving the IRS more than we earn—I don’t understand where the money for those individually tailored chemo drugs of yours is going to come from.”

  “They-will-print-it,” Tom said emphatically.

  “Tom, I’m sensing a running theme here,” Lowell said, no longer disguising his annoyance.

  Tom took another hefty slug of wine. “I happen to have given this some thought. Your wife’s dead on: for a right smart number of years to come, nobody’s gonna loan us a sou. So the deficit’ll be covered by cash conjured up from ether. ’Cause foreigners want dollars like a hole in the head, the funny money’s gonna flood our own country and nowhere else. Am I right, or what? You’re the expert.” This time the deference was sour.

  Lowell said, “Well, that’s only one direction the Fed could go—”

  “Bang,” Tom said, “inflation shoots through the roof.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Ryan announced at the far end of the table, where he’d been brooding silently for half an hour.

  Tom guffawed. “Tell the Germans in the 1920s that it ‘didn’t matter’—”

  “Tom, in the field,” Lowell said, “nothing could be more hackneyed. The Fed can always raise interest rates—”

  “I am tired”—Ryan was more like drunk, actually—“of listening to some bloodless Keynesian technocrat who thinks an economy is a widget you just got to tighten a few screws on, and not made of people—most of whom are a whole lot harder up than the pampered fussbudgets around this table. And I am tired of listening to this whining and carping and hand-wringing from a bunch of spoiled, affluent white folks worried about where their next side of smoked salmon is coming from and how much it’s going to cost.”

  “He doesn’t mean he didn’t like your appetizer,” Lin Yu directed to Avery with a nervous smile.

  Ryan thumped the table and the silver rattled. “This whole package. The debt renunciation, the stock market crash, the gold recall, the poor barracuda corporations who aren’t allowed to hold bancors … The decimation of fat-cat pensions, the incineration of the bloated portfolios of the über-rich … It’s the best thing that ever happened to this country, you hear me? It’d got out of control, you hear me? The preening rent seekers sipping another esoteric flavor of martini, wracking their brains over how to waste another billion dollars today, casting about for whatever else they could possibly still want. Sucking the country dry while everyone else scrapes by, terrified of turning on their central heating when it’s fifteen below. That’s not what America was ever meant to be, you hear me? We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal. So screw the plutocrats. The upper echelon in this country is wiped out. Finished. Which I think is fucking great. What’s kid-speak for ‘fucking great’ again? Right, malicious. I think it’s fucking malicious.”

  “Ryan and I agree,” Lin Yu chimed in.

  “What a shock,” Avery whispered to Tom.

  “This moment,” Lin Yu said. “At long last, it’s the great leveler. In fact, Ryan and I are thinking of co-writing another book. We thought we’d call it The Corrections, and distribute it free online. What we’re going through, it’s better than a revolution. More like a divine intervention. At long last, we have a shot at real justice in this country.”

  “What,” Tom said incredulously. “By making everybody poor?”

  “Better everyone is somewhat less well off than we keep tolerating the grotesque economic disparities of the last thirty years,” Lin Yu said. “As Americans, we can return to first principles. This is a chance at reboot and rebirth. A chance for transformation and redemption. An opportunity to eschew corruption, and cronyism, and inequity, and division, and re-create this country from the ground up. To be the United States again, to live in a united state. To restore this nation to the egalitarian utopia the founding fathers envisioned. We should all be proud to be participating in this watershed.”

  “Are you participating?” Tom charged across from her. “’Cause participating means losing something. Losing a heck of a lot. Waking up and finding your pension—sorry, fat-cat pension, as I gather even the pensions of firemen and schoolteachers are called—waking up and finding your savings for retirement have been halved overnight. But you can’t have much of a pension, hon. Or savings; more likely you’re drowning in student loan debt, which any runaway inflation in the pipeline would marvelously melt away. Only way you could have taken an investment hit would be through Ryan there. Who”—Tom swiveled to the foot of the table—“mysteriously don’t count hisself as rich—’scuse me, über-rich, apparently the only color rich come in. Sorry for raising an awkward subject, old boy, but you must’ve cleaned up right smart after Fair Game.”

  “Not that my finances are any of your business—”

  “Why not?” Tom said. “You regard everyone else’s finances as your business. Fact is, you made a killing from sticking your nose into other people’s bank accounts.”

  “Hardly a killing,” Ryan said disdainfully. “Internet piracy was already approaching its zenith. For the handful of the upstanding, Amazon was discounting at 70 percent. As for what small royalties I did recoup, my ex-wife walked off with half. Calling me wealthy would be absurd.”

  “Always loved it,” Tom said, “you having used a treatise on the evils of the rich to join the club.”

  “For pity’s sake, darling,” Belle said. “You don’t get rich by writing anything.”

  “It’s a slippery category in any case,” Lowell said. “Rich means anyone who makes more money than you do.”

  “I didn’t mean he flies his own jet,” Tom said. “Point is, our friend Biersdorfer here is worth something. But last time we all get together for dinner? Him and I jawed about how he’d got out of the market. It was ‘over-heated,’ he said. Fucker’s all in rental property, he told me. And for now, hard assets are safe. They’ll weather currency depreciation, they’ll weather inflation. And he sure as heck wasn’t holding any Treasury securities. Know how you can tell? He’s not pissed off. So no wonder Ryan and Lin Yu think this whole debacle’s so fabulous. It don’t affect th
em!”

  “You have any bonds, Tom?” Lowell asked softly.

  “Yes, we did. And I feel personally betrayed. By my employer. By my country. It don’t seem like any triumphant return of the true American spirit to entice people to loan you money and then pull out your empty pockets with an embarrassed little grin. ‘Renunciation’ my ass. Regular people call that stealing. You realize that beyond the standard five-K deduction for market losses, they won’t even allow you to take the defaulted principal off your taxes?”

  “Oh, and why should you?” Ryan snarled. “All investment entails risk. Any bond can default, which you know going in.”

  “Not US Treasuries. That’s how we’ve got away with paying such miserable interest for decades: safest investment in the world! Which makes reneging on repayment disgraceful. I don’t blame folks from Turkey to Nicaragua for burning KFCs and McDonald’s. Over here, we got ever reason to self-mortify. Those two bombings of federal buildings near the Mall? Perfectly understandable.” After what had to be his second bottle of wine, that came out perfickly unnustannable. “What I don’t understand is why this whole town’s not burnt down.”

  “Because,” Belle said, “the people with the ‘broadest shoulders’ who lost their shirts aren’t the rioting sort.” She gestured to Tom and Ryan. “Why, look at you two. Standing red-faced by your chairs, hands lifted at your sides, quick-draw? But neither of you has thrown a glass or a punch. You’ve got to worry about the state of American manhood. Maybe this really is the end of the empire. Now, let’s all help Avery clean up.”

  Collecting plates that rattled loudly in the silence, Avery was chagrined; she had never hosted a dinner party that had grown so uncivil. Yet later she would look back on the fractious evening as positively elegiac—indeed, as profoundly civilized. In a few months’ time, even if you were so rash as to invite other people to dinner, you wouldn’t be sure whether your friends really wanted to see you, or if they just wanted a free meal.

  • CHAPTER 6 •

  SEARCH AND SEIZURE

  Since Florence didn’t think of herself as someone who would own any gold, it had taken her days to realize, with a sudden stab, that she did.

  After her Barnard graduation, Grand Man had convened a blowout lunch for the extended family in a top-floor restaurant on the Upper West Side. The paterfamilias tinged his glass after dessert. He thought it fitting, he said, for his grandchild to possess some small token from his own grandfather’s estate—the majestic Second Empire mansion with a broad, canopied front porch in Mount Vernon, Ohio, of which Florence had inherited a few digitized sepia snapshots. Stocked in her imagination with crystal, starched linen, and sterling cutlery, the imposing home of her great-great-grandparents, long ago torn down, emblemized the very opulence she philosophically deplored. Yet those faded archival photos of Bountiful House, lovingly transferred from smart phone to tablet to speX to fleX, always filled her with a mournfulness that was hauntingly familiar. For years, Florence had been disquieted by a recurrent dream, in which a big blue swimming pool shimmers barely out of reach—on the other side of a locked gate, restricted by a prohibitively stiff entry fee, or useless without her swimsuit. She would awake both stirred and melancholy.

  In dreams about those alluring pools, she was never allowed to dive into the deep end, but the gift with which her flamboyant grandfather bestowed her that afternoon fostered the sensation of dangling a toe in the water. The box was the size that held stationery in the days when people sent thank-you notes, its sturdy cardboard mottled, its corners soft and gray. Only the ribbon was new. Grand Man apologized that the contents were of no practical utility whatsoever, and he was right. Nestled in brittle yellowed satin, inside lay two matching miniature goblets, about four inches high—for schnapps or port perhaps, though chances were good that no one had drunk a drop from either. The stems were the deep cobalt glass of European cathedral windows. Engraved with ELLIOT IRA MANDIBLE on one and DORA ROSE MANDIBLE on the other, the cups were gold. And not merely plate. Funny how you could tell: a thin, crass coating refracted light; the butter of pure metal invited light inside. Grand Man had no idea what the goblets symbolized; maybe they acknowledged a wedding anniversary, or expressed civic gratitude. Elliot Mandible had given away a fair portion of his fortune, albeit not nearly as much as he kept.

  The finely wrought pair was a rare tangible connection to a past that Florence had otherwise repudiated. Like so many of the absurd objects that wealthy people both manufactured and attracted, the goblets were merely money reconformed. They were never intended to be folded unassumingly into the conduct of daily life, but would always be aggressively given things. Thus they displayed a particular ostentation on the part of the benefactor, for the set was a present that never stopped presenting itself. The goblets were silly and all for show. The world in which they existed didn’t vary a jot from the world in which they’d never been crafted in the first place.

  Consequently, Florence adored them. Such a grindingly pragmatic person, she treasured the midget stemware for the very fact that it was of no earthly use to anybody. She’d tucked the goblets tenderly into their aged box each of the dozen-some times she’d moved, and currently stored them on the highest shelf of what was farcically dubbed the master bedroom, slipped so close to the wall for safe-keeping that you couldn’t even see them without climbing on a chair. She was indifferent to the cups’ value in metallurgical terms. They were precious because they were hers. Thus the prospect of pitching those artisanal heirlooms into a US Treasury grab bag, where the cobalt stems would shatter, and the cups would await smelting into lumps, all for the sake of “patriotism,” whatever that was, struck Florence as not simply anathema, but out of the question.

  She first remembered the Bountiful House goblets in the shelter’s staff room; a dirty espresso glass by the sink dislodged the memory. She fretted for the rest of the day, and rushed for the bus the moment her shift ended. Back home, she scuttled upstairs, stood on an armchair, and slid the keepsakes from the shelf, dusting the cups before resting them in the mottled box stashed in her dresser. All the while she felt oddly watched, jumping at creaks from the hallway so slight that they must have been imagined. Using what lay at hand, she pulled a spare blanket from under the bed, wrapped the box multiple times around, and stuffed the bundle back under the bed in the very middle, surrounded by duvets and guest pillows.

  Someday this lunacy was sure to pass, and one could again prop a couple of shiny yellow knickknacks on a high shelf without being fined a quarter of a million dollars—the very thought of which sent her pulse into the stroke zone. Once the “abdication deadline” of November 30 uneventfully came and went, she was able to think about something else.

  Until, that is, a rude knock thumped the front door one weekend in January, a few days after Willing’s fourteenth birthday.

  “Mom,” Willing said placidly, as if this happened every day. “It’s the Army.”

  “You’re joking.” Oh, word was out about the house-to-house searches, but Florence had assumed the police, National Guard, and US Army units drafted into the operation would stick to neighborhoods ritzy enough to make their efforts worthwhile.

  There were two of them. The bigger and taller white fellow was dressed in regulation combat fatigues, but by force of sheer sullenness managed to look slovenly. His heavy face conveyed an impression of both stupidity and cunning; perhaps it was the tiny eyes. His slight subcontinental companion stood officiously upright, and neither’s bearing was apologetic. At a glance, contrary to cliché, there was no Good Cop.

  “Can I help you?” Florence said coldly, keeping the screen door closed and allowing the front door open only a few inches. It was in the teens, with a skim of snow on the porch, and she’d splurged on putting up the thermostat to fifty-eight.

  “Don’t need no help,” the big one said, spinning the laminated ID around his neck with a contemptuous flick. “Comin’ in, lady.” He opened the screen door himself.

 
Florence barred his way. “Excuse me, do you have a warrant?”

  “Got better than a warrant,” the lout said. “Got a law. Let’s move, Ajay.”

  “I don’t allow guns in this house,” she insisted.

  “Ain’t that a shame. ’Cause the US Army don’t leave M-17s on the porch like shoes outside a mosque.”

  Armed also with metal detectors, the two trooped into the foyer uninvited, neglecting to wipe their boots on the doormat and getting black snow on the rug.

  “Why are you wearing that camouflage when we don’t have any trees?” Willing asked, studying them from the stairs. “If you don’t want people to see you in this neighborhood, your uniforms should look like aluminum siding.”

  “That smart mouth’s not doing your mom any favors, kid,” the big private said.

  “I am giving you a final opportunity before we search the premises,” the smaller soldier said in a mincing Indian accent, “to declare any gold, even in very small quantity on a larger object, that you have failed to turn in to the federal government. The penalties will be less severe if you surrender hoarded material. If we find it instead, you will be subject to criminal prosecution.”

  “What the fuck are these assholes doing in our house?” Esteban had a deadly authority problem.

  “They’re ransacking every inch of this dump,” the first soldier said, “if members of the United States Armed Forces get called assholes one more time by some hothead Lat who obviously got no real loyalty to this country.”

  “Tear up our house, I’ll sue you to kingdom come, Army or no,” Esteban said.

  “Know how many times a day I hear that? About a hundred. Good luck, bozo.”

  “I can do you for racial abuse,” Esteban said.

  “I did say Lat,” the big guy said. “Not spic or wetback or mexdreck.”

  “Mention versus use,” Willing said. Florence had no idea what he was talking about.

  “You have anything to declare, ma’am?” the Asian repeated.