• CHAPTER 12 •
AGENCY, REWARD, AND SACRIFICE
It would have been around July ’31 when Florence first held a $100 bill up to the light and called, “Lowell? Could you come up here, please?”
Her brother-in-law shambled up from the basement in one of his suits, of a sort common at the shelter: creased fine tailoring that hadn’t seen a dry cleaner in months. He’d stopped shaving, and unevenly scissored a beard that already grew in tufts. Irregular beard lengths had grown trendy, as had “the DIY” haircut: the results of hacking off fistfuls in a bathroom mirror. The popular self-barbering had put most salons out of business.
She handed him the bill. “This has changed.”
Lowell fingered the waxy C-note. “Looks counterfeit. Afraid you’ve been suckered.”
“That’s what I thought at first. But these bills are from all over town. Look.” She pulled the wad from her wallet—they did not make wallets large enough to carry the bills an average shopping trip required, and this wallet would no longer fold in half—and splayed the cash on the kitchen counter. “It’s not the same quality of paper. The ink isn’t right, either. It’s brighter. Greener. Garish.”
“Well, they often change the design to prevent counterfeiting.”
“But this isn’t adding holograms or finer engraving—and Ben Franklin looks smudged, to my eye. It’s cheaper.”
“And why, exactly, are you reporting this to me?”
“You said. That one of the signs was the physical degeneration of the deutsche mark—”
“I do not run the federal mint. If they’ve decided to save on the costs of production, good for them. In an era of belt-tightening, it makes no sense to lavish resources on a mere medium of exchange, which has no value in and of itself but only represents value.”
As he stalked off, she called behind him, “You know how I know this isn’t counterfeit? Because no one would bother!”
She didn’t know what she’d wanted from him. An apology, when he hadn’t done anything wrong? Or more of his improbable optimism, assurance they’d get their furry, avocado-colored dollars back in no time? Florence returned mournfully to the bills, separating the older notes from the stiff, crass reissue. The new bills were smaller, too, albeit in that cheaty, oh-the-little-dimwits-will-never-notice way that a half-gallon of ice cream had evaporated to twenty ounces. Regarding herself as not especially concerned with money, she was surprised by the depth of her sorrow.
Hitherto, the one-dollar bill had not changed its design in her lifetime. Funny, for an item she handled daily, she’d never looked hard at a single. Her corneas stiffening at forty-six, she located a magnifying glass to examine a buck of the sort she grew up with. The engraving was absurd, really. The bay leaves sprouting around the four 1’s and beneath the cameo of Washington. The radiant crisscrossing and minute curlicues around the perimeter. The fine parallel lines shadowing THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. The now-dubious contention in crimped print that THIS NOTE IS LEGAL TENDER FOR ALL DEBTS, PUBLIC AND PRIVATE. The multiple numbers and letters and signatures of ambiguous purpose. The reverse was even more grandiose, the crosshatching yet more exuberant. Insistence on printing “one” over the numbers in each corner seemed overkill. The pyramid on the left, with its unblinking triangular “eye of providence” hovering like a levitation trick over the top, lent the bill a mystic air, as if the currency had magical powers (and maybe it did; maybe the fact that you could ply a total stranger with a bundle of green paper and he would give you a doughnut was nothing short of miraculous). The bald eagle opposite, bristling with arrows in one claw and an olive branch in the other, could only remind citizens and foreigners alike which talon had been historically the more persuasive.
A barrage of Latin always imparted pretension, if not also a desire for obscurity. For the first time in her decades of counting these notes into an open palm at checkouts, feeding them into the grinding maw of a MetroCard machine, and fishing their crumples from a jeans pocket, she looked up the translations online. NOVUS ORDO SECLORUM meant “New Order of the Ages,” implying that the creation of her country marked a transformative era not only for Americans but for the whole world. Ratcheting up the braggadocio still further, ANNUIT COEPTIS meant “He favors our undertaking”—He being God, of course. E PLURIBUS UNUM she already understood—“Out of many, one”—though in the fractious, factionalized USA of her lifetime E PLURIBUS PLURIBUS might make a more suitable slogan. The Roman numerals not a millimeter high at the bottom of the pyramid decoded as 1776. News to Florence, the strings of foreshortening bubbles on the perimeter were purportedly thirteen pearls. For only in America was thirteen a lucky number: the pyramid had thirteen layers; above the eagle gleamed thirteen stars; the heraldic shield on the bird’s chest boasted thirteen stripes. The poor scrap of paper was so freighted with symbolism that it was amazing you could pick it up off the floor. Yet haul this mighty token into a minimart, and it wouldn’t buy a gumball.
Florence rifled the fat wad from her wallet to compare the old one-dollar bill to the new version. She shuffled the stack twice. There were no new singles. Clearly, like the metal coinage technically in circulation but increasingly a form of litter, singles weren’t minted anymore.
Comparing hundreds would have to suffice. The C-note was redesigned in her twenties, at which time a hundred-dollar bill seldom crossed her palm; she was living with her parents, unemployed. But her father brought one home for Jarred and Florence to marvel at. The renovated bill had grown only more self-important, with a host of ingenious devices to prevent counterfeiting. It was less scrip than toy—wrapped like a Christmas present, a purple ribbon vertically woven into the very paper. On close examination, the ribbon shimmered with tiny Liberty Bells, which moved up and down on a diagonal trajectory when shifted one way and switched to 100s when shifted the other. The worn hundreds in her wallet weren’t as dazzling as that first fresh one, but the holograms still functioned. The Liberty Bell in the inkwell turned from copper to green. Held up to the light, a ghostly reiteration of Ben Franklin’s portrait loomed in a rare blank space on the right. Goofy, minuscule 100s in faint yellow freckled the left-hand face, arrayed in the irregular pattern of doodles.
The latest C-note sported no ribbon, only a purple stripe like a slash from a Magic Marker. Poor-quality reproduction smeared Ben Franklin’s expression from a gentle grimace of resolve to a sarcastic smirk. The complex anti-counterfeiting devices had been dropped. The paper was thin and slick. This was a mere gesture toward a hundred-dollar bill, a nod, an allusion—an oh-you-know-what-I-mean from a mint that couldn’t be bothered with all that tiresome symbolism. The bill looked and felt worthless.
Florence had never before reflected on her uncharacteristic affection for her country’s cash. In defiance of her compatriots’ reputation for being uncouth, the design of American bills distinguished itself from more flamboyant currencies with dignity and reserve. Though the new notes’ shrinkage drifted alarmingly toward the size of Monopoly money, the dimensions of the originals were attractively modest. For a yet young nation, its notes had a stodgy, antiquated cast. Like the typeface of the New York Times, whose masthead remained staunchly archaic to its final issue, or the comfortingly eternal form of a Tabasco bottle, dollars felt storied, grounded, timeless. By contrast, her aunt claimed that the notes of individual European nations had never recuperated their grandeur and particularity after the euro debacle. Florence had seen samples left over from Nollie’s travels: the revived pesetas, drachmas, and lire looked plain, stripped down, and interchangeable. They looked embarrassed.
Her relationship with the downy older bills in her wallet was surprisingly emotional. They were primitively associated with her earliest experiences of agency, reward, and sacrifice. In grade school, exchanging a cherished sheaf of ones for a Walkman was a seminal assertion of will. When she was sixteen, these rectangles were the prize after six weeks of repainting the entire interior of the family’s house in Carroll Gardens
every afternoon after school, while her friends cavorted off to Canal Jeans. Dropping a twenty on the sidewalk in haste drove home the cost of inattention; finding a five buried in a handbag emblemized serendipity; parting with a taller stack of these tokens than she’d planned for her mother’s birthday taught the return on generosity. The soft green tender was inextricably bound up with her experience of loss and gain, achievement and inadequacy, caution and imprudence, calculation and abandon, benevolence and malice, taking advantage and being taken advantage of. So the shoddy, coarse pretenders palmed off on her during the last visit to Green Acre Farm made Florence feel robbed, personally insulted, and anxious for the United States, as if in compromising the integrity of its mere emblems of value the nation had devalued itself.
This was the most riveting period for his profession that Lowell had ever lived through. Yet Avery regarded his growing treatise as a child’s puttering in a sandbox. Indeed, one of the very regressions he was documenting was the way all cerebral endeavor had been demoted to irrelevance—thereby sending civilization hurtling backwards at warp speed. Had Avery expressed such contempt for her husband’s papers in the Georgetown days? No! She would knock timorously on his study door, ask if he wanted a bowl of soup, and apologize, apologize profusely, for interrupting. Nowadays, when he was poised over his fleX mid-inspiration, she’d bark that he could at least join the kids in combing curbsides for cast-off furniture they could use for firewood. Rather than cruelly break the flow of his intellection and thus imperil the very future of American scholarship, she could as well have come across him with his dick in his hand.
Lowell had to admit that his wife astonished him. Previous to this reversal of fortune, he’d have described her as spoiled. Now, it wasn’t such an egregious thing, being spoiled, so long as you had the wherewithal to cover life’s niceties. It was in the nature of niceties, too, that they would slide to needs. Seen from the perspective of plenty, her extravagance had appeared a form of refinement. He had always brought in the larger measure of their income, and had privately considered her “practice” barely a step up from the all-female book club: it was cute.
In the initial stage of this Jobian trial in East Flatbush, Avery had assumed a demeanor he was tempted to call whiny. But something happened shortly after he and Avery mournfully downed the last bottle of chenin blanc. In a tribute to the homonym, once their evenings ceased to be winey, her daytime disposition could no longer be characterized by the adjective’s crabby twin. She seemed to have made a conscious decision: to be stoic, heroic, and selfless. Incredibly, after having quite reasonably drawn the line at living without toilet paper, a few months later his fanatically hygienic wife hadn’t given her sister the slightest grief when Florence announced that they couldn’t keep snipping up old clothes and linens to wipe their privates, because they were running short of fabric. And get this: Avery volunteered to collect the bags of used cloth squares from both bathrooms every weekend, to run a laundry load of these noxious “ass napkins,” and to restore stacks of fluffy clean ones to beside the toilets! This was a woman who, the first time she had to walk out in public without eyeliner, burst into tears!
Lowell’s difficulty was not so much that he was living with a woman he no longer recognized, which might have spiced things up. Rather, they had a yin and yang problem. It was as if Avery had co-opted the sole chair labeled “Valiant Survivor Type Rising to Challenge in Face of Adversity and Discovering Brave Sides to Self Hitherto Unsuspected,” and the only other chair left for her husband to assume was labeled brutally “Big Baby.” With Avery marching about seeing to everyone’s needs, mending and chopping and fetching and washing up; soliciting Kurt whom she didn’t even like to please have some more polenta because the so-called tenant was looking peaked while going without seconds herself; urging Kurt and Bing to play evening concerts in the living room when duets of sax and violin were preposterous, not to mention the fact that Kurt’s saxophone drove her crazy—all with nary a peep of petulance or confession of fatigue, never the hint of an admission that she reviled living in this cramped, ugly house with people whose company had grown more than trying … Well. Someone had to insert a note of peevishness into this hellishly halcyon Keep Calm and Carry On. Generating some reputable resentment, giving voice to the free-floating outrage that imbued their environs like smoke from a burnt dinner—it was a job to do, as Avery’s tireless goodwill was a job. With corresponding self-sacrifice, he’d taken on the less glamorous task of reminding the rest that this sucked, it all sucked, it wasn’t fair! Savannah should be a sophomore at RISD, Goog should be applying to MIT, Lowell should be giving speeches in Geneva. Lowell was officially the grump, the grouse, the grouch, the Grinch, the grumbler, and he gave himself up to the part heart and soul, thus allowing the others their virtue, their high-mindedness, their this-too-shall-pass-ness. His diligent dyspepsia made all their infernal goodness possible.
Not that he got any thanks. Rather, his housemates seemed to blame him for this whole mess. But writing about inflation doesn’t mean you control it. In fact, no one including the Fed really listened to economists about anything. Governments did what suited them, and in the high-turnover administrations of elective democracies, that meant whatever suited them in the myopic short term. Though that sententious pipsqueak Willing Darkly sought always to cast his uncle as naive, Lowell was savvy enough about the artificial divide between central banks and national treasuries. So obviously in printing money like it was going out of style—which it sort of was—the Fed chief was doing the president’s bidding. Across the board, Alvarado was taking advantage of what most electorates tend to shy from: a sovereign state can do anything, really. The reserve-currency coup, the Renunciation, Alvarado’s refusing to play ball with the bancor bullyboys—it was all politics, and precious little to do with economics. The next boomerpoop who tossed off the popular trope that economists were “modern-day witch doctors” he would deck.
Moreover, no one could posit cogent academic theories that covered the flukish arrival of every deus ex machina, a.k.a. people from outside the system doing dumb shit. This bancor nonsense was like being hit by a comet. The towering eminence of the field having failed to allow for cosmic annihilation didn’t invalidate Keynes. (The fact that John Maynard Keynes himself had whimsically coined the inane word bancor Lowell experienced as a slap in the face.) Besides, whoever heard of loaning in one currency and then demanding to be paid back in another—particularly in a currency you just made up?
The truth was, Lowell Stackhouse hadn’t been proven wrong, about anything. He remained confident that well into the indefinite future the US could have continued to accumulate a quiet, steadily climbing national debt while keeping a foot on interest rates, which had been so low for so long that ages ago it became standard practice for banks to charge hefty fees for the bother of stashing your cash. For debt is an engine of growth, and fattens the pie for everyone. Why, imagine a world in which you need cash in hand to buy a house: the middle class would purchase a home around the age of eighty. “Neither a borrower nor a lender be” was the motto of a public that swung from trees. Lowell’s avoidance of debt in his own life was a psychological problem; perhaps in childhood he’d felt a discomfort with accruing an implicit debt to his scrimping parents for taking care of him that a little boy could never pay back. Because philosophically, he believed in debt—leveraging, for the sophisticate—which down through the ages had earned an undeservedly tainted reputation. He didn’t even care for the word forgiven in relation to a liability that’s been written off, implying that a loan is a sin. What was wrong in America at the moment? Not indebtedness but an inability to borrow: that is, lack of indebtedness. However temporarily, the United States couldn’t buy a house.
Lowell’s reasoned, seasoned positions were the braver for also being unpopular. Yet in what passed for his own home, he got no respect. While even an economist was reluctant to reduce all of life to dollars and cents, people revere work that pays. Pres
ently, the work of the mind didn’t pay. In the USA of 2031, scientists, academics, and engineers suffered a lower status than the all-hallowed farmer.
Witness: in August, Lowell’s feckless brother-in-law Jarred made a run down to the city, his pickup laden with fruits and vegetables from his kooky dude ranch in Gloversville. Having ridiculed the backwards agrarian project from the start, even Avery treated her younger brother’s arrival in Brooklyn like the Second Coming, while the kids jumped up and down and danced around in a frenzy they were all too old for. You’d think they’d never seen a tomato. Not that their uncle’s trip from upstate had been motivated by familial largesse. Jarred bestowed on his kin a few potatoes, early apples, and bunches of kale, but the majority of the haul had been reserved for the market at Grand Army Plaza, where the price gouging was criminal. So long as farmers were able to flip the money quickly into hard assets like seed and equipment and other people’s foreclosed property, the entire agricultural sector was making profits hand over fist.
Having lost his own house and credit cards, Lowell had to admit that it rankled: depreciation of the dollar had allowed his irresponsible, blowhard brother-in-law to painlessly pay off the fixed-rate mortgage of so-called “Citadel” in full, as well as to dispatch the debt from previous whimsies. Having taught his students at Georgetown that the evaporation of debt was one of the most marvelous powers of inflation, Lowell was comfortable with macroeconomic “injustice” in the service of systemic correction. That he couldn’t quite install his own dogma on a private, emotional level probably constituted an intellectual failing: microeconomic injustice, up close and personal, bugged him as much as the next guy.
By contrast, Lowell was purely relieved that their friends Tom Fortnum and Belle Duval were doing all right, even if Tom’s fleXts to him and Belle’s to Avery emphasized the negative out of discomfiture. Shortly before the Renunciation, Belle’s parents had taken early retirement while still in good health. Investing the profits from an app start-up in the naughts, they’d bought a top-of-the-line e-RV, and had plans for a global tour. Cut to the chase, all that was left was the e-RV, parked permanently in Tom and Belle’s drive. Yet all misery is relative: unlike Lowell’s in-laws in Carroll Gardens, at least Belle’s mother still knew the difference between a hairbrush and an aardvark, and the parents didn’t exactly live in the house. Tom and Belle’s kids were attending second-tier colleges, but they weren’t kicking around their aunt’s mildewed basement, or worse, turning tricks in town for pocket money, as Avery claimed Savannah had. (Lowell didn’t kid himself that his daughter was a virgin, but for Avery to mistake the girl’s footloose experimentation for whoring … Really. The gorgeous but aging mother jealous of her alluring daughter—couldn’t his family come up with something fresh?) Bottom line: Tom worked for Justice, and Belle’s patients were mostly Medicare. When financed by loose monetary policy, government expenditure is most valuable when first spent; high inflation would erode both Tom’s and Belle’s incomes only as the cash infusion rippled through the larger economy. Both government salaries and Medicare reimbursement rates were now linked to an inflation algorithm that didn’t require further action from Congress. Even if a Snickers bar eventually cost five billion dollars, they were safe.
The Mandibles Page 26
