The Mandibles

by Lionel Shriver

  “The first part is straight-forward,” Willing said. “Down Flatbush, over the Brooklyn Bridge, up the Westside bikeway to the GW. All these exit routes are getting crowded, so it can be faster to walk than drive. But it’s not like a disaster movie. Zombies aren’t rampaging through the streets. There aren’t any giant lizards on Fifth Avenue. The Empire State Building is still standing. Midtown isn’t on fire.”

  “Son,” Douglas said, having sagged onto the pile of backpacks stacked on the tarps. “It took us four hours to go three miles last night. At my age, that’s about as far as I’m good for in a day. Off the top of my head, I reckon that would put us on the road, and preyed upon by the kindness of strangers, for over two months. You younger folks might have a chance. But you’ll never make it to Gloversville with Luella and me in tow. You should leave us behind, you hear? We’ve had our day. It was a good day. Better than yours is likely to be, from where I’m sitting.”

  “We’re not leaving you behind,” Willing said firmly. “If it takes two months, so be it.”

  “But what about supplies?” Jayne asked. “We barely have enough food to make it through today. If our cash can’t buy a bus ticket …”

  “The camps don’t use cash,” Willing said. “It’s all barter, some credit, but you pay your debts with real goods, too. We can’t carry enough provisions for the whole trip. But we can make a start. Because, Avery? People around here are desperate to lock down what little they’ve got left. They have to be able to make shutters.” He pulled a fistful of plastic baggies with Home Depot labels from his backpack. “So guess what’s in short supply?”

  Avery smiled. “Hinges.”

  The plan was lunatic. Yet Lowell welcomed an excuse to get out of this cesspit, and accompanied Avery and the boys to the nearest supermarket on Third Avenue, where they parlayed a portion of the cash for nonperishables with a high calorie-to-weight ratio: fudge, salami, halvah—the antithesis of the micro-greens and tuna-carpaccio table they’d laid in Georgetown. On their return, Willing had traded hinges for raccoon jerky—a local delicacy.

  Meantime, Florence helped Lowell convince Avery to stop leaving messages for Savannah. They shouldn’t deplete the remaining credit on the fleX. Of the three kids, their daughter had demonstrated the keenest aptitude for living on her wits. The girl had friends in Manhattan, and was at the age when she couldn’t abide the company of her parents. They had to have faith, and hope for the best. Avery left Jarred’s address, as well as their whereabouts in Prospect Park—locations bound to put their daughter off reuniting with her family anytime soon.

  Sure enough, Savannah fleXted late that afternoon: “im nt gnna liv on any fking farm.”

  If this motley Chosen People were to set off on their exodus the very next day, as their underage Moses had commanded, Lowell thought privately that burdening their party with Douglas and Luella was self-destructive. That dapper old geezer and his mad consort would never manage a hike of two hundred miles—sleeping rough, depending on serendipity for sustenance, probably trudging much of the trip on an empty stomach. Fair enough, they were his wife’s grandparents, but condemning the expedition to certain failure merely to express loyalty to elders near death anyway seemed sentimental. They’d be better off leaving the couple at the encampment, since charity often arose more readily among the penniless than among the prosperous. In short order, however, Lowell was relieved to have kept the opinion to himself.

  As Willing told it later, in his Oyster Bay heyday the Mandible patriarch had socialized with the hunting and skeet-shooting set, and was no stranger to firearms. In the flicker of their campfire that evening, Douglas had asked to see the protection for their travels that Willing had secured that morning, the better to ensure that his great-grandson understood the safety catch and how to load the weapon. It happened in a trice: Douglas shot his wife in the chest, and himself in the head. At the sound of shots, even Deirdre Hesham opposite simply battened her shutters.

  2047

  • CHAPTER 1 •

  GETTING WITH THE PROGRAM

  Returning full circle to East Flatbush should have been gratifying. Willing grew up here. His mother had worked hard to buy this house. With ample funds from helping to grow food during what politicians still refused to call a famine in the mid-thirties, she had paid off the mortgage. Legal New York property owners in exile were obliged to press their claims by a certain date, or forfeit title to the state. The state—a cyclone that sucked up houses, trailers, pets, and children in its wake. It was better, he would remain calmer, if he thought of it as weather.

  Regaining possession of his childhood home was more complicated than he had anticipated. Years before, Willing had traded his surname, handed down from his grandmother Jayne, for Mandible. The rechristening was a tribute to Great Grand Man—like so many tributes, too late for the honoree to receive the compliment—who had sacrificed so that their exodus from a deepening urban sinkhole might succeed. Yet as far as officialdom was concerned, only Willing Darkly could inherit his mother’s property, and his New York State identity card cited the wrong name. So the headache took patience to sort out. But Willing was patient.

  Asserting his claim to 335 East Fifty-Fifth Street also entailed having its current residents evicted. Now paid handsomely in dólares nuevos linked to the mighty bancor, the NYPD undertook such tasks with forbidding relish. To be the instigator of this violent flinging aside was disquieting. His mother had never evicted her own delinquent tenant, but had folded him into her family. Oh, Sam, Tanya, Ellie, and Jake had long ago been replaced by other usurpers. If the condition of the house was anything to go by, recent residents had been less genteel (and he should thank them: ravaging squatters had so depressed the property valuation that it sneaked in just under the backdated cutoff for inheritance taxes). Maybe the benevolence of taking Nollie with him to Brooklyn compensated for the uncharitable expulsion. Eighty-four when they moved back to town and now ninety, she had a horror of nursing homes. Besides, he was not his mother. He was a thief. He had mugged a boy in the street. In 2032, he had raided gardens, pilfered orchards, and held up convenience stores to feed their bedraggled party on the long trek north. He had not been a nice boy. He was probably not a nice man, either.

  He had been sorry to leave Gloversville, but by the end, only so sorry. Working the land at Citadel was never the same after the federal government nationalized the farms. The Mandibles were demoted to sharecroppers. They were allowed to retain a small percentage of their yield for private use. The rest of the meat, dairy products, and produce was confiscated by the US Department of Agriculture. There were even rules about which parts of your hogs you could keep: butts, shoulders, cheeks. Farmers were seen as profiteers. As many of them had been. So when it was first brought in, the policy was wildly popular, helping to secure the Democrats a landslide in 2036. It was less popular with the farmers. Many burned their crops and massacred their livestock—anything but abdicate the fruits of their labor to a government that had savaged the economy in the first place. But as public relations, spite in the countryside backfired with starving city dwellers, who had hoped the nationalizations meant Valhalla: well-stocked supermarkets with reasonable prices. Instead, most of the federal agricultural haul was exported. Washington needed to improve the current account deficit, and China wanted pork.

  At least Willing’s reasoned intercession successfully discouraged his volatile uncle Jarred from torching his own land. Even so, submitting to Jarred’s rages on a daily basis had been draining. Coal-haired, hollow-eyed, and ferocious, it was Jarred who moved Willing to contemplate the geometrical validity of the political designations left and right. That is, if you turn left, and left, and left again, you end up on the right. Jarred had started out a radical environmentalist, a position only ninety degrees from survivalist. With one small last adjustment in the same direction, he transformed to libertarian gun nut. Willing himself was not very interested in these categories, but they seemed to mean something to othe
r people. What mattered to Willing was that his uncle’s wrath was wasted energy. In each political permutation, Jarred needed, or thought he needed, an enemy. The warring left him spent. Meanwhile the enemy, if there was one, remained unfazed. The enemy did not know that Jarred existed.

  Willing was grateful to Jarred. Who had saved his own life, and the whole family. It was a shame that for Citadel’s owner working the farm as a serf of the nation came to feel so mean, oppressive, and embittering. Like Avery when something in her settled, Willing was able to lose himself in hard work—tilling, sowing, and cutting kale. He had never wanted to “be” anything, to “make something of himself.” Why conjure up a fantasy future that was not obtainable? Perhaps he had no ambition by nature, and he could live with that. As an unambitious person would.

  He understood that this was a country where individuals were believed to determine their destinies. But a helpless pessimism—pessimism particularly on that previous point, about whether there was anything worth “becoming,” anything worth aiming for, anywhere to go—characterized his whole generation. With the exception of Goog, who was galvanized by malice—Goog had become an utter T-bill—his cousins seemed precociously worn out, almost elderly in their fatigue. Willing’s girlfriend Fifa also—she was languid, slurring, stretched out, sluggish. It was what he liked about her. If there seemed an element of laziness in her flopping over the sad shredded remnants of Great Grand Man’s claret-colored sofa, beneath her reserving and conserving of energy lay something quite other. A belligerence. She said at work she had refined what the old unions called the go-slow. She had calculated the exact pace at which she could not be upbraided. She was doing the job. Just. This digging in of heels was growing commonplace. The countless overlords of your life would take so much, but you would hold something back, or you would not even have yourself. Fifa had herself. If he pressed himself on the matter, Willing liked to believe that he had himself as well. But he was not confident of this. It was possible that he was not here. That he had been stolen.

  Which is why resuming residence in his late mother’s house had not turned out to be all that gratifying.

  Return to the city necessitated a proper job. Packing up at Citadel in ’41, he already suspected that a job meant being chipped. It was routine; everyone said so. Like applying for a Social Security number. A bureaucratic matter, a relatively painless, pro forma protocol of the modern day. Thus Willing had not considered the inevitability of the procedure with sufficient seriousness. He had been lulled by what was regular, by what was expected and customary. No doubt all ages have their usual things, about which no one at the time thinks twice. Their leeches and bloodletting, their homosexual “cures,” their children’s workhouses and debtors’ prisons. When drowning in the is-ness of the widely accepted present, it must be hard to tell the difference—between traditions like burying your dead and having dinner at 8 p.m. and other, just as mesmerizingly normative conventions that later will leap out to posterity as offenses against the whole human race. Maybe he was letting himself off the hook. He’d had misgivings, after all. Yet it is always challenging to choose otherwise when you are informed in no uncertain terms that there is no choice to make.

  When Willing was small, people made a great brouhaha over pedophilia, and sexual abuse of any kind. His mother had taken him aside with a formality that wasn’t like her when he was four or five. She knelt with a maudlin solicitation that made his skin crawl. Her voice dropped into a timbre both stern and over-tender. He should never allow adults to touch him in his “private places.” That expression was not like her, either. She had always been a straight shooter. If she wanted to refer to his dick or his asshole, she called them precisely that. Which is how he recognized that her mind had been contaminated by a communicable virus. The “private places” lecture was repulsive. It made him feel dirty. It made him recoil from his mother in an instinctive dislike that was singular.

  In those days, playing outside was forbidden. Employees at daycare centers were required to get criminal-record checks. All scoutmasters were suspect. No one ever seemed to care if you were a murderer. Murderers were let out of prison and blended right back into the neighborhood. They could live wherever they wanted. Sex criminals were marked for life—shuttled from hostels to underpasses, and required to report their whereabouts, which were posted on the web—the better for local parents to start picketing campaigns to have the filth evicted. The no-go radius around schools and playgrounds widened every year. It was worse to be a rapist than a killer. By inference, rather than be raped, you were better off dead.

  Willing did not want to return to the preoccupation with “private places.” It didn’t bother him that sex had grown incidental. He and Fifa enjoyed it, but he didn’t see what all the fuss was once about, and most of the time they were too tired. Dispensing with the business in private was more efficient.

  Yet long after the larger social conversation had moved on, hovering over new fixations like a cloud shadowing other parts of town, he finally appreciated what they’d been talking about when he was a boy. It wasn’t, probably, as bad as being murdered—though he’d never been murdered so he couldn’t say. But it was horrific all the same. It was like being murdered and living through it. And you could remember not only the violence but the dying part. You have survived your own death but you have still died, whereas usually survival means not dying after all. He was certain this was what had occasioned the hushed tones, the kneeling, the deep warning strangeness from his mother in his childhood. She had kept him safe, for years thereafter, but she was gone now and couldn’t protect him, so that when he was twenty-five it happened and all those teachers and counselors and moderators of school assemblies—it turned out they hadn’t been exaggerating after all: Willing was raped.

  That was the only word he had for it, a word he did not, therefore, use to anyone else, not even to Fifa. The very word, as it applied to the experience, in addition to recollection of the experience itself, was stored in a “private place.” The stasis with which he was now afflicted six years later, that pessimism about whether there was even anywhere to go were he to suddenly discover an ambition to get there, this heavy unmoving sameness—he couldn’t help but wonder whether it was all related to having been raped. He wasn’t sure what he’d been like before. Clinically, as reliable biographical information, he could recall a deep sense of belonging at Citadel. The big round-table dinners. The loamy exhaustion after milking cows and slopping hogs. A gathering fondness for a group of people several of whom were very different from him—which made the emotion more of an achievement. A fondness for each person yet also for whatever the combination of them made together, which was more than the sum of parts. Yet since this numbness had descended, he could summon only the fact of the warmth; he could not inhabit the warmth itself.

  He tried not to rehearse it (though the memory would intrude, when he was unguarded, falling asleep or not yet woken). He was still more disciplined about not discussing it. Virtually everyone else had been through the same thing. Thus, or so went the reasoning, there was nothing to say. This most minor of medical indignities was less of an ordeal than getting your teeth cleaned. Any expression of his distress would be interpreted as Willing Mandible being a big baby. Indeed, even newborns were now subject to the same procedure within their first hour in the world. Granted, some parents had expressed concern that infants might find the operation painful, traumatizing, a rude introduction. But physicians had reassured the public. The local anesthetic was skillfully targeted. The foreign object was the size of a pinhead. A mere poke would be more painful, a squeeze, even. Parents were far better off anguishing over male circumcision, now roundly discouraged. Willing envied the newborns. The real trauma had little to do with physical torment. A baby’s clean slate would preclude any horror over what the “foreign object” was for.

  Since he was eight years old, Willing had understood that most systems worked badly. It was a surprise to discover in his youn
g adulthood that they could also work too well.

  He had recently moved back to East Fifty-Fifth Street. Of a lesser order, the return also entailed a violation. The house had been occupied by strangers for nine years. Their alien residue was everywhere—dirty shirts, empty liquor bottles, syringes. More upsetting was the familiar—cups his mother had lovingly washed in gray water salvaged in the plastic tub year after year, now chipped, missing handles. Nary a plate or a bowl he’d grown up with wasn’t broken or cracked. Comically, remnants of Avery’s raids on Walgreens, Staples, and Home Depot remained. He continued to come across the odd packet of L-braces, a half-used bottle of Gorilla Glue, a scatter of multicolored paperclips in the basement. From the ripped-open packaging, he construed that someone had actually availed themselves of the toenail fungus kits. The closets had been rummaged. The few leftover shreds of his mother’s wardrobe were speckled with mildew. Her beloved Bed Bath & Beyond laundry hamper, emblem of Esteban’s devotion, had been moved to the kitchen for use as a garbage pail, and smelled. The cleaning job alone was arduous, and underneath the scum and the dust lurked deeper structural issues. A pervasive dampness was ominous. Oh, Florence Darkly—you and your obsession with shabby waterproofing.

  From the start, he knew the variety of employment widely available: home health aide placements, health insurance and billing, design and maintenance of healthcare websites, answering healthcare help lines, medical device manufacture, service of medical devices, medical transport, medical research, pharmaceutical manufacture, pharmaceutical research, pharmaceutical advertising, hospital laundry, hospital catering, hospital administration, hospital construction, and work in assisted-living establishments that served every level of decrepitude from mildly impaired to moribund. Like so many his age, he was a high school dropout. That ruled out neurosurgery.