The Mandibles

by Lionel Shriver

  Of course, for professional traders on the stock exchange, money had always been imaginary—just as notional, just as easy come and easy go, as the points in a video game. Wage earners like Willing’s mother thought money was real. Because the work was real, and the time was real, it seemed inconceivable that what the work and the time had converted into would be gossamer. They had been promised that they could store the work and the time, later to exchange it, if only for other people’s work, and other people’s time. But money was just an idea, and most people did not understand that natural forces also acted on the abstract: evaporation; flood, fire, and erosion; seepage, leakage, and decay. Most people liked the prospect of justice, and confused what was appealing with what was available.

  So his mother had spilled a jarful of coinage that had accumulated for years on her dresser. She was feverishly separating the pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters, then stacking them in what looked like piles of ten. The scene made Willing sad. It wasn’t only his mother’s desperation. It was the coins themselves. When he was small, a tower of quarters had seemed so precious. Something about the character of metal—hard, shiny, heavy, and immutable—had always made change seem more valuable, more substantial, than paper bills. The jar on his mother’s dresser had glinted like the treasure you might unearth in a buried chest, or raise to the surface with pulleys and divers from the timbers of a shipwreck. As a boy, he had walked the streets with a front pocket bulging with change, which would pull down his jeans on that side and thump against his thigh. Even in grade school he knew that the paper five in the opposite pocket was worth more than the coins. But it was the swinging, sagging swag of copper, nickel, silver, and tin that made him feel rich.

  Now a coin was a mere disc, like a Tiddlywink—a historical oddity, since metal money was no longer minted. The change his mother was maniacally separating was rinky-dink, and her project was dumb. After spending an hour on this chore, she’d be lucky to assemble enough legal tender for a can of Coke.

  Willing swept his hand over his mother’s piles, and toppled the towers. Coins rattled to the floor and curled under the bed. He surprised himself. There was anger in the gesture. He seldom afforded himself anger, and he wondered where it came from.

  “What was that about?” his mother cried. He wished she wouldn’t get down on her knees like that and chase quarters among the dust balls. It was undignified. No one stooped to retrieve a quarter from the sidewalk. “Now I’ll have to start all over again.”

  “You’re wasting it.” Willing fetched a sock from Esteban’s dresser, and checked that it had no holes. By the fistful, he loaded coins into the sock, until the toe sagged as his pocket had in boyhood. Then he knotted the sock above the change.

  “Green Acre won’t accept that,” his mother said. “They only take coins if they’ve been counted into sleeves.”

  “I’ve heard of socking money away.” Willing swung the pendulum, thudding the coinage against his opposite palm. It had force. It had momentum. “This what they mean?” He launched the sock from behind him and whacked the ball of metal against the bedroom door frame. The cracking sound was loud. The coins made a dent in the wood.

  His mother looked frightened.

  “It makes a good weapon,” Willing explained. “A weapon is worth more than anything this junk would buy.”

  “You’re changing,” she said.

  “I’m adapting,” he said.

  “Stop adapting,” she said.

  “Animals that don’t adapt,” he said, “die.”

  Give me the bag.” He said it gently, with a tinge of sorrow. The boy could not have been more than ten or eleven. At least he was white, which would make this easier.

  They were on East Fifty-Second, a side street, two blocks from Green Acre Farm. As ever, the walk was blighted by human excrement. Interesting, how readily one spots the spoor of one’s own species.

  “I can’t.” Intimidated against a fence, the boy gripped the canvas bag to his chest. He would have been sent to shop for dinner. He was slight and red-haired, with a wary, flinching twist to his face that in a few years would grow permanent. His coat was too thin for the weather. “I’ll get in trouble.”

  “Give me the bag now.” Willing swung the sock into his opposite palm, as he had in his mother’s bedroom. For Willing and the boy also, the motion was hypnotic. “Or you’ll get in worse trouble.”

  The boy glanced up and down the street. It was scarcely bustling, but it wasn’t deserted, either. They were in front of a house, from which someone peered, then drew the curtain. When the boy’s gaze met the eyes of an older woman down the block, she turned and hurried in the opposite direction. That’s the way it was now.

  The kid started to run, but there’d been a tell—a sudden feverish glance in the direction he planned to bolt. That gave Willing time to grab his arm. The contact was shocking for them both.

  “Okay, okay!” the boy wailed. He held out the bag solemnly, an offering. Willing let go. With another look at the sock as the sagging toe reeled lazily from his tormentor’s right hand, the quarry ran.

  Willing examined the groceries. Artificially flavored cherry drink, the kind of sponges that fell apart, white sandwich bread, a pound of fatty hamburger. Fatty was good. Fatty had more calories. In all, the haul was poor and not to his mother’s taste, but they wouldn’t go hungry. Funny, he hadn’t thought the change on his mother’s dresser would buy anything near dinner, and it just had.

  At first he hoped Savannah would be home tonight, so that his commonplace bullying might pass as chivalry. This was the sort of escapade that impressed girls. But he would have to stop himself from bragging, which would sound foolish to his own ears later and would get back to his mother. The most useful skill he’d mastered in childhood was keeping his mouth shut. At sixteen, the aptitude was harder to sustain.

  As he walked home with his booty, the thrill of success was muted by melancholy. During previous exploits, he had shied from verbs of thievery; the stashes stacked on back patios had been confiscated, raided, or taxed. But this form of borrowing a cup of sugar from the neighbors felt different, and Willing was aware of having crossed a line. Others would cross it, too, then. Still others had crossed that line so long ago that they’d lost sight of it, and there was no line.

  Thus at dinner—a crumble of ground beef, two slices of bread apiece that were soaked in grease—Willing announced, “We need a gun.”

  “Are you off your nut?” his mother exclaimed. He would let her sputter through her predictable indignation, but he was bored. “We are not having a gun in this house. I don’t believe in guns. Half the time it’s the person who owns the dratted thing who gets shot. What on earth would we need a gun for?”

  “To protect us,” Willing said, “from people like me.”

  • CHAPTER 13 •

  KARMIC CLUMPING II

  Carter accepted philosophically that human life was sacred. He also accepted that in this country all men—women, too, in more enlightened times—were “created equal,” even if, as a well-educated and temperamentally more competitive man than his father ever recognized, he had always found the assertion optimistic. All right, he knew what the Declaration of Independence meant really, not that everyone was good at math but that they all had the same rights. Ergo, even Luella Watts Mandible enjoyed the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—the most vital being that first item, since he and Jayne were most certainly denying her liberty, and were she ever to pursue happiness she would forget she was pursuing happiness within sixty seconds and come back instead with a parsnip. Carter could marginally credit the possibility that somewhere deep inside that tangle of rhyming paranoia in his stepmother’s head remained some tiny glimmer, some infinitesimal remnant—under the size of a pea, even smaller than one kernel of popcorn—of the graceful, stunning, well-spoken, black-only-in-the-sense-of-exotic but comfortably-white-in-all-but-name seductress who had stolen his father’s heart in 1992—though Carter co
uldn’t locate an iota of the femme fatale himself. Theoretically, too, what was at issue in the compassionate, respectful day-to-day caretaking of a woman who through no fault of her own had COMPLETELY LOST HER MOTHERFUCKING MIND and was nothing but a PISSING, SHITTING, SHRIEKING SHELL wasn’t only the physical comfort, sense of self-worth, and feeling of psychic safety of their ward, but perhaps more importantly their own humanity, because obviously the very measure of a society is how it treats its most vulnerable citizens, so that to save his very soul and to represent the very best in what it meant to be a real American he was clearly obliged to ruin EVERY DAY and EVERY NIGHT of his WHOLE REMAINING MOTHERFUCKING LIFE.

  So. Perhaps his calm, considered, rational, progressive forbearance had its limits. Belonging to the first generation of American men who pulled their domestic weight, Carter had already changed the X-thousand diapers he’d planned to, and at least his infant children hadn’t bitten him in the process. Yet God forbid his father would lend a hand. Douglas had embraced such a perfect passivity that you’d never know he had any causal link to the presence of this creature in their house.

  Deploying the difficult situation to fortify the all-for-one-and-one-for-all of their marriage, Carter and Jayne convened in the kitchen, just the two of them, before bed, in the precious interval before Luella’s “night terrors” set in and she began to wail. Together they’d each sip a tiny glass of port. An emblem of better days, the measured extravagance helped to preserve their sanity. (A few luxuries had been facilitated by the sale of the BeEtle—a mere encumbrance now that they never went anywhere, and a liability given that the police may have abandoned investigating burglaries, muggings, and homicides, but were more rigorous than ever about issuing revenue-raising tickets for alternate-side parking violations.) The couple always lit a candle and turned off the overhead to create a semblance of romantic ambience. Ritually, exhaustedly, they would share the indignities of the day.

  All the same, Jayne blamed him—their visitors-for-life were his family—and knowing she shouldn’t blame him merely buried the resentment into the deeper, more instinctual emotional stratum where the feeling was at its most virulent. Likewise, Carter couldn’t help but fume when Jayne threw up her hands, reminded him of how strenuously her doctors had advised against “stress,” withdrew to her Quiet Room, and locked the door—deaf to his proclamation that they had now entered a hard-assed era of American culture during which all that gutless guff about ADHD, gluten intolerance, and emotional support animals was out the window.

  Yet the prime target of his enmity wasn’t his wife, but Luella herself. Carter had never much cared for the woman when in possession of her faculties. That floating, willowy deportment she’d cultivated, the hyper-civilized manners, the too-precise elocution—he’d never bought it. Luella’s whole shtick had been an artificial construct, and now, he believed, the surface refinement had been stripped off to reveal the real thing. Deep down, she’d always been a catty, cunning, covetous animal—ferociously determined to get her way; suspicious of others, since calculating, self-centered schemers always assume that everyone else is just like them; shrewd, but not very smart. It didn’t surprise him in the slightest that when you set her mind loose it produced rhyming drivel.

  He found it telling, too, that the only food she’d eat without its being shoved forcibly down her gullet was anything chockful of sugar. In Luella’s heyday, she’d claimed to have no taste for sweets, a pretense that serviced her fashion-model figure. Add a few protein plaques and a smattering of miniature strokes to that mean scrabble of predatory opportunism in her head, and behold: a sweet tooth the size of a mastodon’s.

  Luella had never liked Carter, either. She didn’t find him impressive. He’d overheard her once despairing to Douglas that his only son hadn’t inherited more of her husband’s esprit and joi de vivre. But the real reason she was uncomfortable around her stepson was that Carter had her number. She was a fake, she was a social climber, she had plotted from the start to marry Douglas only to outlive him and inherit his fortune, and when it eventually got out that Luella had left for la-la land in her latter fifties, Carter thought that was the best news he’d heard all day. Except now the revenge had boomeranged. She seemed to have deposited herself on his doorstep on purpose, like, There. You wanted the real Luella? Well, this is the real Luella. Happy now?

  It didn’t help, either, that Luella was now a drooling kewpie-doll substitute for his real mother, whose disappearance into Manhattan’s anonymous mire of unremarked murders and missing persons had deprived him of any formal mourning of her passing. Only three years ago, the demise of the formidable powerhouse of charity fundraising would have occasioned one of the best-attended memorials of the year. If at last genuinely necessary, most charities had folded in the interim, and the sort of celebrity gala he imagined was unheard of. No one with a sou would flout it.

  Carter saw no point in disguising it from himself: he wished Luella dead. While he might not have throttled her with his bare hands, in his personal Twilight Zone he’d gladly have thought-crimed the hellion cleanly to the cornfield. Because for all the hype about how dementia sufferers were “still capable of joy” and “still had value as human beings,” he detected no joy in their charge; the household hardly sponsored the buoyant sing-alongs and imaginative crafts projects of the apocryphally stimulating nursing home. And lifetime liberal or no, he was inexorably rounding on the view that to have “value” as a human being you needed to be of some earthly use to someone else.

  At least Carter didn’t wish his father dead, too. Their relationship decontaminated of ulterior motives, Carter continued to feel a bedrock fondness for his father that he’d never trusted when it paid too handsomely. Late-life penury had likewise confirmed that his father’s character transcended the two-onion martini. Oh, he railed along with the best of his class, but at length Douglas had accommodated lifestyle demotion with surprising aplomb. So long as they kept him in liquid nicotine, he rarely complained. (In these ravenous times, the newer flavors of e-bacco stuck to the ribs: turkey-and-gravy-with-stuffing, or caramelized-ham-and-red-onion-chutney.) It was only the repetition that had grown unbearable; if Carter heard the three criteria of a functional currency one more time he would scream. Otherwise, Douglas had quietly adjusted to reading digital books and watched loads of TV.

  Which was just how he was occupying himself in his room on the third floor the afternoon of March 7, 2032. Douglas was obsessed with the approaching presidential election, and that month would see primaries in Texas and Florida, among others—heavily Lat states that could help the incumbent. Naturally the Republicans were a write-off; the leading GOP contender had branded Dante Alvarado “Herberto Hoovero,” an epithet widely decried as racist. Yet the president was battling a serious challenge for the nomination from the leftwing grandee Jon Stewart, who was campaigning to wave the white flag on the bancor. Since the smallest little child could see that boycotting an increasingly entrenched international currency had proved a calamity for the US, the primaries—which, without a viable opposition party, were the election—pitted it’s-the-economy-stupid against the consolidation of ethnic equality. None of the Lats and white progressives who’d elected Alvarado wanted to see America’s first Mexican-born president serve only one term. Carter himself was torn, though he wasn’t telling Jayne that.

  Not that Carter was allowed to divert his energies to the paltry distraction of who would be the next American president, since he was wholly absorbed in the more monumental matter of feeding Luella lunch. She’d been in restraints for two days in a row, and they weren’t running Guantánamo. To prevent muscle cramping and pressure sores, they alternated lashing her to the chair with a four-foot leash. This being a leash day made shoving protein down her throat more difficult. Jayne had begged him not to feed Luella cheese. If his stepmother got constipated, in lieu of hard-to-come-by enemas or laxative tablets, one of them would have to dig the shit from her anus with their fingers. But cheese was
easier to force her to chew than chicken. With Jayne barricaded in her Quiet Room, Carter, a bit spitefully, chose the cheddar.

  This time, however, Luella didn’t seem in the mood for her sélection de fromage, and after noshing the first chunk into a viscous paste she spewed it halfway across the kitchen, spraying Carter’s cheek in the process. Thereafter, she picked bits nimbly off her nightgown with dinner-party fastidiousness.

  “You’re not worth your father’s little finger,” she said distinctly.

  These moments of lucidity always threw him for a loop, and if the sentiment she’d expressed had been nicer it might have moved him to gentleness. Instead, on the next hunk, he clapped his hand around her mouth to keep the cheese in. Luella reached around and grabbed a fistful of his precious remaining tresses and pulled for all she was worth.

  Okay, that was it. Wiping a saliva-smeared palm on a dishtowel, Carter marched from the room. She could starve for all he cared. “Jayne!” he shouted up the stairwell. “You’re going to have to watch Luella, because I’ve been tearing my hair. I’m going out for some air.”

  Marginally becalmed by a well-earned constitutional, Carter returned about an hour later, planning on a couple of Advils for his aching knees. A singe smote his nostrils the moment he unlocked the door. Had Jayne burned a casserole? The formerly passionate recipe clipper rarely boiled an egg. A haze fogged the hallway, and Luella, last left leashed to a table leg, was too quiet.

  He rushed into the kitchen to find the candle for port-sipping marital debriefings lit. Eyes gleaming, Luella was fluttering a flaming paper napkin into the open trashcan. The cheese wrapper on top caught fire. As Luella must have been sticking everything within reach into the candle and tossing incendiary projectiles every which way, Carter’s immediate extinguishing of the candle was starting a bit small. The curtains were on fire. The trashcan was on fire. A patch of linoleum was on fire, right around the table leg to which Luella was still attached. As smoke thickened rapidly, the choice was stark: try to save the house or the people in it. Well. All that liberal upbringing proved good for something.