The Mandibles

by Lionel Shriver

  “You may masturbate as long as you like if you turn off the water. Soap is a more effective lubricant when the suds don’t wash down the drain.”

  “You let Savannah shower for ten minutes, I timed it! You were just trying to get a peek at her tits—”

  “Five minutes,” Willing would say stoically. “I gave you fair warning.”

  At which point the spigot filling a pot with water for pasta in the kitchen would slow to a drizzle.

  “Wilber, you asshole! I’ve got shampoo in my hair!”

  Willing had learned to operate the main shut-off valve to great punitive effect. His purpose was honorable, but his interventions as water policeman were not improving his relationships with his cousins. He may have enjoyed his offices a bit too much.

  Then there was the emotionally charged issue of toilet paper. In most major cities, stockpiling of family packs was rife, leading to chronic shortages and gouging. At the shelter, it had become impossible to keep the restrooms supplied, because residents swiped the rolls; the Department of Homeless Services had issued a memorandum withdrawing funding for paper goods altogether, to Adelphi’s decided olfactory detriment. Public facilities in the likes of department stores and museums also ceased to provide the means of tidying up after one’s ablutions, presumably having suffered the same pilfering from a higher class of clientele.

  Florence initially taped a TWO SQUARES PER WIPE notice above both holders, a polite request that, given the continued depletion of this precious resource downstairs, was roundly ignored. She tried discreetly taking her sister aside to suggest that maybe she “peed too often”; if she was capable of disciplining her digestive tract during dryouts, perhaps she could direct a degree of similar grit to her bladder. Big surprise, Avery was offended. Florence had also to take Savannah to task for leaving wads in the trash with red and beige traces: the paper had been squandered on removing makeup. Monitoring her guests on such a tawdry level was embarrassing, but when both expense and sheer availability were at issue, she had no choice. Substitutes like cotton balls, paper towels, and napkins were bad for the plumbing, and soon as hard to come by as the real thing.

  Eventually, the inevitable occurred, what Florence had been dreading: repeated shopping trips netted no replenishment, and they were down to their last two rolls. Enraged internet postings established that New Jersey, Long Island, and Connecticut were experiencing the same scarcity. She was aware of neighbors quietly trading their stash one roll at a time for red meat and chicken, which was nothing short of extortion. So she assigned Willing a research project, and called a house meeting.

  “I realize this is mortifying for everyone,” Florence said. “But until the situation improves, we’re going to have to do without in the ass-wipe department. Willing?”

  “Before indoor plumbing,” Willing said. “Americans used newspaper, or pages of a Sears catalog. But there are no more magazines and newspapers.”

  “Dad would be so proud,” Avery said. “Finally one good reason to rue the downfall of the New York Times.”

  “The Romans used a sponge soaked in vinegar on a stick,” Willing said. “Also, that tradition of only eating with your right hand in India? It’s not just a ritual, but a biological imperative. Because I knew they wipe with their left hands. I didn’t know they do it with no paper.”

  “Oh, grossss!” Bing wailed.

  “Nix that,” Lowell said. “I’d sooner use the bedspread.”

  “That’s sort of what we’re coming around to,” Florence said. “I have a bag of clean rags, and I could stand to cull my closets. Anything you also don’t wear we can cut into small pieces. With vinegar by the toilet, too, you might find the sanitation a step up.”

  “But you can’t flush cloth,” Willing said.

  “In megacities like Rio and Beijing,” Nollie said, “people haven’t put paper down the toilet for years. The sewers are too delicate. They put it in a bin, beside the john.”

  “We could get used to it,” Willing said. “You can get used to anything.”

  “Well, I can’t get used to that,” Avery said, standing up. “I’m opting for the American solution: I’m going shopping.”

  “I’m with Mom,” Savannah said. “You people are barbarians.”

  Avery and her daughter flounced out to the Jaunt, and were gone for hours.

  They returned chastened, however. After scouring Long Island and New Jersey while exhausting nearly all the gas in the car—also exorbitant and hard to come by—they scored one package of paper towels (reserved for roll-your-own tampons), along with two bottles of white vinegar, an admission of defeat. Meantime, the rest of the crew had spent a riotous afternoon snipping “ass napkins” from torn sheets, old towels, worn-out socks, lengths of fabric left over from hemming curtains, and Florence’s iffier thrift-store purchases. Harlequin squares piled in sprightly towers like vertical quilts. If and when Florence was once again able to reach for a squishy nine-pack from a grocery shelf, she was bound to feel a curious loss.

  Willing might have quit going to school altogether because they taught the wrong things: algebra and state capitals. If he held sway, they’d be learning how to purify water and how to forage for edible plants. How to build a fire when your matches were wet. How to pitch a tent, or make one from a rain poncho. How to tie knots, how to grow potatoes. How to catch and skin a squirrel. How to load a gun.

  Students at Obama High studied biology, but teachers did not apply the lessons to the right environment. The urban ecosystem was unusually fragile. It was terrifyingly interdependent. Too many things had to work in order for a city to work at all. You could not count on many things working. You did not count on anything working.

  When the Renunciation first began to bite, people shared on social media the best Dumpsters to dive and which supermarkets had breakfast sausage. But city dwellers soon kept such tips to themselves. If Pathmark had thrown out some only-slightly-moldy pre-sliced Swiss, the last thing you did was tell someone else.

  Thus Willing continued to go to school because his classmates were excellent sources of information. Their parents would be alarmed to learn it, but kids blabbed. They couldn’t keep from boasting about the family stash. Thanks to other students’ bluster, he knew the Rosangels on Tilden had laid in two cases of Goya coarse-ground cornmeal. Having run out of room owing to repeated shopping bonanzas, they stacked the boxes on the back patio: easy pickings. The Browns opposite, gentrifiers who’d yet to relinquish vanities like being “lactose intolerant,” kept a bottomless supply of Trader Joe’s vanilla-flavored rice milk in their basement. Its small upper window over the washer was never locked. The Garrisons on the corner had salted away hundreds of cans of garbanzo beans in a backyard tool shed. The padlock was decent, but the door’s hinges were on the outside. Tapping them out was a cinch. Best of all, once the hinges were tapped back in, no sign remained of invasion. As for the Doritos and other salty snacks that lined the average cellar, Willing let them be. The bags crackled, and would give him away.

  Naturally his mother had taught Willing not to steal. So inclined, he might have contrived a host of rationalizations for his foraging. In their panic, most families had overstocked. Poorly protected provender fell prey to rats and insects. After a power outage in March, the streets of East Flatbush were lined with trashcans full of reeking meat from overloaded freezers. He never pillaged in quantity; the judicious disappearances were less theft than tax.

  But Willing felt no need for rationalizations. He was refining a skill, like purifying water and building a fire—one that would later come in handy when thou-shalt-not-steal joined anachronisms like lactose intolerance. If Willing’s descent to thievery signaled a broader corruption of the American moral order, the moral order would decay with or without him. The degradation of his mores was merely a matter of keeping up to date, like downloading the latest operating system on his fleX.

  So far, his mother hadn’t queried where the mysterious additions to her pantry hailed
from. Everyone was pitching in, and she wasn’t about to look a gift bag of Carolina long-grain in the mouth. She must have known, really. It was called disonancia cognitiva. No one else paid any attention when Señora Perez floated the concept in Social Sciences, but Willing liked the fact they’d given lying to yourself a fancy name.

  Other people focused on their wretchedness. But Willing knew that these were the good times, that they were shy of something. And he liked having so much to do. It was useful that he was still, at fifteen, slight, and naturally watchful. Made for stealth, he could penetrate fences and slit window screens in silence. (It was horrifyingly easy to gain access to pretty much any house, especially since the one implement he selected for himself when Avery went on her rampage in Home Depot was a glasscutter.) Besides, much of what he scavenged was from Dumpsters and trashcans. He kept the house supplied with fabric for ass napkins. He scoured as far away as Prospect Park for sticks and small logs, so they could have barbecues out back and also keep warm while they ate, the better to save on natural gas. When his mother decided to plant vegetables in the backyard that spring—nothing pointless and watery, like radishes and lettuce, but crops that provided real sustenance, like squash—he had to remind her that the tiny plot had been used as a latrine. So he spent a solid week filling his bike panniers with dirt from Holy Cross Cemetery and emptying them in the garden, to build a six-inch upper layer uncontaminated by human waste—after which he implored everyone that during a dryout they had to use a pail. He planted the seeds and watered the rows. According to a news report, residential yards were being converted to vegetable gardens all across the nation. Pre-Renunciation, lawn grass was the largest crop in the US—three times bigger than corn, covering an area the size of New York State. But you couldn’t eat it. The trend toward beets instead was eminently sensible.

  It was an energizing time, an industrious time. It was better than it would be later.

  Meanwhile, the news itself made for fascinating study. For months now, anchors had referenced the present with nouns like crisis, catastrophe, cataclysm, and calamity, and they were running out of C-words. They’d already used up the D’s, like disaster, debacle, and devastation. Terms like hardship, adversity, tragedy, tribulation, and suffering didn’t mean anything anymore—they didn’t work; they seemed to allude to experiences that were no big deal. The English language itself was afflicted by inflation, and when everything got ten times worse the newscasters would be stymied. There would be no words left to call the next phase. Maybe CBS News would take refuge in understatement: what had happened to America was a pity, a bit of a shame, rather a waste, pretty unfortunate, or something of a disappointment.

  There were already difficulties, of course. When his mother scored a quart of fresh milk, she insisted on reserving it for whitening tea—that’s the way she liked it—but she kept it so long that most of it curdled. When the lumps bobbed to the top of her cup, she cried. Bing stole food in the house, quite a different matter from foraging elsewhere, and the pilfering was increasingly obvious because the twelve-year-old was the only member of the household gaining weight. Lowell did nothing all day but hammer in the basement on his fleX, writing his “treatise,” and Willing was beginning to wonder if his uncle was insane. Esteban had grown surly; standing around hiring himself out for casual labor was too much like what his father did. He didn’t kiss Willing’s mother as often, or hold her at the sink. Kurt was in such terror of being any trouble that he absented himself most of the day; he came back looking cold and drawn. Aside from spending hours at a time standing on line for food trucks, he probably did nothing but walk around. There was a lot of that. There was a lot of walking around.

  Goog and Bing weren’t benefiting much from classes taught in Spanish, but going to school did provide the theater of normalcy. Though scornful back home, in school Goog relied on “Wilbur” to translate for him, a dependency he detested. There were more honks in Obama High now, since many other families could no longer send their precious white kids to private schools, but if you didn’t speak Spanish, you were going to get beaten up. Willing tried coaching Goog on a few verbs, but his cousin clung to German as his second language, which was immense dumb because to communicate even in Germany you were better off learning Turkish.

  Poor boneheaded Bing made himself a further mark by toting his violin to play in his middle school’s small, tuneless orchestra. The afternoon on which the usual well-wishers had thrown the instrument over a hedge and broken its bridge, Willing pressed his youngest cousin: “But why study the violin, when the best violinists have already been recorded playing everything?”

  “Well,” Bing said thoughtfully. “Someone might write something new, and then they’ll need somebody to play it.”

  “But a computer could play it,” Willing said. “Better than you ever will, if your practicing is anything to go by.”

  Bing began to whimper. Sighing, Willing found one use for Avery’s Gorilla Glue and repaired the bridge, though he wasn’t really doing Bing any favors.

  Savannah often vanished, which gave him a queasy feeling, both in regard to what she got up to and the fact that she wasn’t there. Everything about the girl should have grated. She was prissy and pointlessly resentful. She acted above it all, and lounged listlessly around the house when she could at least be stealing something, like a productive member of society. Yet she had a secret life, and that was irresistible. She was pretty, and it made him feel weak that this made any difference. Whenever he came home and she was gone, the air went flat. Helplessly, he sympathized with her perspective. She was supposed to be in college. She should have been leaving her stuffy parents and annoying brothers behind for a new life. Learning the hard way not to drink too much tequila, switching her major when she figured out that she wasn’t interested in fabric design after all, falling for the wrong guys. Instead she was stuck with her family, in the crowded home of relatives, like a frat house without the booze. It must have been hateful. No wonder she barely spoke to her mercurial fifteen-year-old cousin.

  So he was excited when the two found themselves in a rare moment in the living room with no one else around. Any small intimacy in a house so packed was to be cherished.

  “We’re fucked, you know,” Savannah said, lolling on the sofa. “For our whole generation, it’s over.” She lit a cigarette. A real cigarette.

  “Why don’t you use a steamer?” he asked tentatively.

  “Because they don’t kill you.” The world-weariness was affected.

  “The smell will give you away.”

  “What will they do, send me to my room? What room? Refuse to pay my college tuition? Put me to bed without dinner? With the slop we’re eating, that would be a mercy.”

  She was beautiful, but a hollowness in her eyes made her less so. He wondered where she got the money for the cigarettes. She was wearing makeup, too—a profligacy most women went without. Willing accepted that he didn’t interest her. But it was upsetting that a promising girl of nineteen was not interested in anything or anyone else, either.

  The hardest of Willing’s duties fell to him because no one else would do it. The others said they were too busy, or they’d go next week, or they wouldn’t want to intrude at an inconvenient time. But the truth was that they didn’t go because they didn’t want to: cognitive dissonance. Not Nollie, who claimed she wasn’t welcome, not his cousins, neither Avery nor even his mother, which was especially strange. Except that the situation at the shelter was so grim: the job at Adelphi, she said, was mostly about protecting the legitimate residents from the crowds camped on the sidewalk who wanted in. The homeless with an actual room had become the elect; these days, she said, “no one complains about the view.” Still more grimness probably presented itself as out of the question. In a moment of honesty, she’d explained, “I can’t take care of everybody.”

  So every couple of weeks, Willing mounted his bike, loaded with a few choice comestibles that the neighbors had contributed for the care o
f the elderly, and cycled to Carroll Gardens. He sometimes used these rides to contemplate how being encouraged—nay, commanded—to call his grandparents “Jayne and Carter” might have affected the way he saw them. More sharply, but less generously—as if warm-and-fuzzy generic monikers might have offered a form of protection. He saw them more clinically. More as separate real people like anyone else, and all this clear-sightedness was not necessarily in their interests. Everyone else at school called their grandmothers, for example, Nan, Nanna, Gran, Gramma, Abuela, or Yaya. When he referred to his own as “Jayne” in an essay assignment to describe your family tree, his classmates found the usage both bizarre and pathetic. Perhaps irrationally, he felt a loss, as if deprived of the traditional terms he didn’t actually have a grandmother and grandfather, but two older acquaintances with whom he had little in common.

  In any event, they were not doing well. After enough visits, he’d passed through the phase of everyone pretending to be fine, though he sometimes wished they’d go back to putting on a brave show. The biggest issue was Depends. They long before ran out of adult diapers. While Willing often brought old sheets, bedspreads, and worn-out clothes from the trash of people whose houses had been foreclosed upon, the scrounged fabric was limited. His grandparents had inevitably to wash and reuse Luella’s swaddling: unpleasant.

  Jayne and Carter kept Luella tied up—either lashed to her chair or on a short leash anchored to a table leg. When Willing mentioned the trussing to his mother, she was aghast. But he thought the policy sensible. On a tear, Luella could wreck the place. Not that you could tell, now—that is, whether it was wrecked or not.

  It was as if the dementia were contagious. No one made beds, or picked up, or took out the garbage. They hardly cooked, and there were no mealtimes. Someone would idly open soup and eat straight from the can. Of course Luella had lost the ability to use silverware, but now the other three often ate with their fingers as well. Worse was the loss of the concept of conversation. Dialogue had become a series of random iterations: “There’s a new camp of nursing-home refugees on Smith Street,” Carter would say. “We’re down to our last few smears of cortisone cream,” Jayne would say next. Then Great Grand Man would declare, “If Alvarado keeps digging in his heels on the bancor, he’s going to forfeit the ’32 election.” So when Luella chimed in, “My husband will pay whatever you ask!” the disjunction fit right in.