The Mandibles

by Lionel Shriver

  “Though if gold is such a yunk investment,” Willing added politely, “why does the government want it?”

  “The US didn’t set up the terms of the bancor,” Goog said with contempt. “Speaking of which—I got an advance tipoff on a revolution in the works that’s gonna make our lives at the Bureau biggin’ easier. The administration’s been lobbying for years, and the decision’s finally gone our way. So you heard it here first: the NIMF is going to eliminate the cash bancor.”

  Nollie crossed her legs on the sofa with a demure femininity out of character. Savannah blanched, barely able to get out, “Why?”

  “Use your head,” Goog said. “The entire black market is conducted in bancors. But the cashless economy is catching on the world over. Pretty soon you won’t be able to stash liquidity in a shoebox anywhere. Being off-chip will be the same thing as being flat broke. The complete elimination of cash internationally will dispatch corruption, tax evasion, racketeering, and misconduct of virtually every sort.”

  “I wonder …,” Willing mused, as if having only just thought of this, though he and Jarred had discussed the matter at length. “What do you make of the proposition that the definition of a truly free society is a place where you can still get away with something?”

  “I’d say that’s a treacherous definition of freedom, Wilbur. The law is the law. You obey it, to the letter. Freedom is what’s left over. If the law doesn’t say you can’t do it, then you can.”

  Willing put on a confounded expression. “I’m not sure freedom works for me as a remnant. Like the snippets of material left over when my mother made curtains. Isn’t freedom a sensation? After all, you don’t have to exercise a freedom to possess it. I don’t have to get up for a drink of water. But knowing that I could get up, it changes the way it feels to sit, even if I stay sitting.”

  “You’re talking treasury, kid,” Goog said. “You were obviously claiming that in a ‘free’ society everybody gets to break the law and not face the consequences. So in your deviant little mind, liberty is just another word for rampant criminality.”

  “Sometimes I cross the street against the light.” Willing could have let it go, but he didn’t feel like it. All the pleasantness had been exhausting. “When no traffic is coming. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think that’s a misdemeanor. I haven’t hurt anyone, or violated anyone’s right of way. But I have broken the law. Being able to cross the street against the light is important to me.”

  “Jesus, Wilbur,” Goog said. “That’s fucking sad.”

  “If you take that away from me, and every other opportunity to not quite toe the line,” Willing said, “then however many amusing things I’m at liberty to do, I don’t feel free. If I don’t feel free, I’m not free.” I don’t feel free, Willing did not add, and I have not felt free since you and yours jammed this fleck of metal into my neck.

  “Why should the US government give a shit about your feelings?” Goog charged.

  “Why should it care about anything else?” Willing countered. “If it feels splug to live here, what are we preserving and protecting? What is the country for?”

  “That is the dumbest question I’ve ever heard,” Goog said. “This bash has seriously deteriorated. I’m going to push off.”

  “But the bancor,” Savannah said. “When does it go cashless, exactly?”

  “The announcement’s next week. Be a happy day, in our office. Champagne and cake.”

  “So does the cash become worthless overnight,” Savannah said, “by decree?”

  “Same as when the dólar nuevo was brought in. Folks will have a month to convert. After which, yeah, cash bancors won’t be legal tender—anywhere. It’s bound to be fascinating. All these funds suddenly popping up on the chips of the erstwhile strapped. Between the fees, the fines, and the back taxes, this is an epic windfall for the Bureau. Or, as Wilbur so nobly observed, for everyone. For the country.”

  “But why would anyone chip black-market bancors,” Savannah said, “if you guys will take it all?”

  “Because they might get to keep a teeny tiny bit of it as opposed to losing the whole whack, and in my professional experience, you lowlife taxpayers are greedy fucks who’ll paw after whatever you can get,” Goog said. “But why are you so interested?”

  “I’m not!” Savannah bound her arms across her cleavage.

  “Plenty of big-spending foreigners roll into this town, looking for entertainment,” Goog said. “You wouldn’t sometimes be paid in international currency, would you?”

  “Well, if I were, ever, of course I’d chip the cash immediately!” Savannah looked as if she could hardly breathe. She was a dreadful liar.

  “I bet you do,” Goog said. “I get paid okay, but it’s 100 percent on the record. Where I work, not only do I have to be squeaky clean? My whole family has to be squeaky clean. So I’m putting an alert on your chip. Any sudden spikes in income, we’ll be watching.”

  On that happy note, Goog left the party. He took the last of the cognac.

  • CHAPTER 3 •

  RETURN OF THE SOMETHINGNESS: SHOOTING SOMEBODY, GOING SOMEWHERE ELSE, OR BOTH

  Cleaning up after a bowl-on-the-floor party took five minutes. Fifa was out cold on the rug. Willing draped her with a blanket. She had to be up in three hours to install shower grips in Windsor Terrace.

  “You went quiet. After Goog left,” Willing said.

  “Mm,” Nollie grunted, drying the stainless steel mixing bowl.

  “Going back to when you first arrived in East Flatbush. I’ve never known you to run out of money.”

  “Mm,” she grunted again.

  “I did some research,” he said. “Your other books did so-so. But Better Late Than sold millions.”

  Not even a grunt. The bowl got very shiny.

  “You brought back bancors, from France,” he said. “That ‘old boyfriend’ you visit in Flushing. Whoever it is, he or she trades currency on the black market.”

  Nollie stopped drying and glared, eyes popping.

  “It can’t hear!” Willing exclaimed. “I’ve experimented! I’ve said aloud in my bedroom, ‘I have secret sources of income that the Scab doesn’t know about,’ and nothing happened!”

  “Very well,” she said reluctantly. “But my finances are private.”

  “I’m only trying to help. Whatever you’ve got left—if you deposit it, they’ll tax it to the wall, and they’ll ask questions. You could be open to prosecution. Holding bancors is legal now. But when you brought those bills through Customs, their possession was criminal. They could use that pretext to confiscate the lot. On the other hand, if you don’t deposit it, you heard Goog. A date will come and go, and the cash will convert to confetti overnight.”

  “So, what, I should use it to line a hamster cage? Insulate the attic?”

  “I know this violates all your instincts. But the new reporting requirements on off-chip expenditures don’t come in until January. So before the public announcement about the bancor going cashless, which is going to flood the economy with bancors, and depress the exchange rate for cash transactions—you have to spend it.”

  Nollie put the bowl down at last. “I’ve dodged them at every turn. Now I feel cornered. You’re not the only one who cherishes getting away with something.”

  “Spend it on getting away with something, then.”

  Nollie dried her hands on the dishtowel with an anxious twist. “Young people want money to buy things. Not only clothes and jewelry, but experience, thrills. Old people want money for one reason and one reason only: to feel safe.”

  “You can never have enough money to be safe,” he said gently. “Money itself isn’t safe. We should know.”

  “And how,” she seconded. “But then, life isn’t safe, at ninety years old.”

  “Exactly,” he said. “The illusion of wealth is that it can buy what you want. Which it can, but only if you want, like, a pretty dress. You don’t want a dress. You want not to be old. We haven’t talked ab
out it much, but don’t you wish one of those hothead boyfriends of yours had stuck around? Maybe you want to still be a famous writer, and you can’t buy that, either; there are no famous writers. Or you want to write with the same fire that lit you up when you started Better Late Than—the kind of fire that hardly anyone gets to keep. You want the thicker hair in your old snapshots. You pretend you don’t, but you want people to like you. You want not to get cancer. What threatens everything that’s important to you isn’t a cashless bancor, or currency depreciation, or debt renunciation, or economic collapse, but your own collapse. Other than being able to pick up, you know, a nice bottle of wine, or maybe a chicken, you can’t buy anything you want.”

  “You kids think all we boomers have lived in a delusional bubble,” she returned. “Think it’s come as a shock I’ve got old? I’m not an idiot. I’ve been reading since I was your age about ‘elderly women’ raped and robbed in their homes, and in the back of my head I’ve heard a whisper: ‘Pretty soon, honey, that’s gonna be you.’ I’ve always anticipated becoming a target—defenseless, weak, and on my own. Maybe my parents had a premonition. Ever work it out? Enola is alone spelled backwards. So there was a discrete period in my forties when I had the opportunity to salt away some reserves, in preparation for a rainy day that might last decades—a monsoon—my own personal climate change. In my mind’s eye, I was stockpiling a veritably physical fortification. If I bricked the bills high enough, the barbarians couldn’t climb over. Less metaphorically? Maybe I could pay them to go away.”

  “But that is delusional,” Willing said. “At your age, the main menace isn’t rapists and robbers, or waves of marauders in a second Dark Ages—or anything else from the outside. Every day, you face down the enemy within. So the one commodity that you bigging can’t buy, more than any other, is safety. Why doesn’t that release you? From trying to protect what you’re going to lose anyway? It should make you feel brave.”

  “You’re one to talk about brave,” Nollie said bitterly, and her tonal turn injured him; he’d put a big effort into that soliloquy, which he thought had come out rather well. “Were you talking trash, for fun? Or have you seriously considered slumbering?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I have.”

  “So if I offered to spend the bancors on putting you into a self-induced coma for five years, you’d take me up on it.”

  In truth, the proposal was immediately tempting. “You say that with disgust. But would five more years of ass-wiping at Elysian Fields improve on sleep? I love to sleep.”

  “Willing.” Arms folded, she confronted him square on, her back to the counter, trapping him against the stove with that look. She was so much shorter than he was; he was damned how she managed to seem daunting. “I don’t often play the elder, and deliver judgment from on high. So hear me out this once. All through the early thirties, you were sly. Resourceful. Inventive. Disobedient. Impossible to intimidate. I used to love watching you stand your ground with that cretin Lowell Stackhouse, though he was three times your age. There was a somethingness about you. Sorry. I’m not as articulate as I used to be. Too many brain cells down. Too much homemade hooch. But the somethingness, it’s what fiction writers like me—former fiction writers like me—it’s what we always try to pin to the page. We always fail. That doesn’t mean it isn’t out there, only that it’s impossible to capture, like those tiny, nefariously evasive moths you can’t grab from the air. Even at Citadel. You worked so hard. You savored the effort. You were tilling fields like an ox, and the somethingness only thrived. But ever since the chipping, you’ve gone gray. You seem like other people. The boy I knew in 2030 would never have squandered his great-aunt’s resources on sleep.”

  “The chip,” he said. “I doubt it’s messed with my mind in the way you’re implying. They’re not that clever. It probably is merely a means of accounting. Though a means of accounting that won’t let me cross the street against the light.”

  “Cheating,” Nollie agreed, “is restorative. It maintains your dignity. Breaking a rule a day keeps the doctor away far better than a fucking apple.”

  “In the fields at Citadel,” he went on, “we had plenty of time to talk. Avery told me about how hard it was for cancer patients when they got better. She said that when you’re bigging sick, making it to the next day is a victory. When you’re well again, being alive isn’t a triumph anymore. She said patients often got depressed not during chemo, but after it had worked. For me, the thirties. They were exciting. Our whole family—over and over, we almost died. When the fleX service went down on the trek to Gloversville, and we had to rely on Esteban, and on the paper map I stole from a recharging station—there was no guarantee we were going to make it. It was a miracle the recharging station even carried a paper map to steal. Carter could barely walk, because of his knees. Bing had something like trench foot, from his shot-out shoe and wet socks. And then we got to that narrow, unpaved drive and found the tiny label on the mailbox, CITADEL? We cried. But now. It’s this grinding in place. No horizon, no direction, and no threat. We may not keep much of my salary, but we’ll probably be all right, even without your bancors. That’s part of the problem. The okayness. The nothing but okayness. So chip or no chip. It’s not exciting.”

  “Well, then,” Nollie announced decisively. “We won’t buy safety. We’ll buy excitement.”

  Willing discovered the very next afternoon, as he had as a boy, that the most exciting excitement is free.

  Nollie frowned. “You’re back early. Were you fired?”

  “I fired,” he said, his breath quick. “It’s not a passive construction.”

  “What?”

  “I never really expected it at Elysian,” he said, pacing. He was probably disheveled. The way you look after you’ve squeezed into a linen cupboard. “Nothing happens there. Even when people die, it’s more nothing-happening. It’s expected. Or not-dying. That’s expected, too. I carry because I always have, since I was sixteen. Call it a fetish. A dependency. And I’m not the only one. You need money to feel safe, but I don’t trust money. After our whole family was forced from this house at midnight in the rain, I need a gun. I like the fact that, like you said, it’s against the rules. For most people, packing is a bigging bad idea. The Supreme Court was right. But it’s not a bad idea for me.”

  “Unfortunately, that’s what everyone thinks,” Nollie said. “Now, stop. Organize yourself.”

  “I have no idea whether I killed him.”

  “An excellent first line for a short story. But even a story would have to back up.”

  “I don’t know the guy well.” Willing bombed onto the sofa, to force himself to sit still. “Little older than me, maybe thirty-five. He’s on staff—was. Since even if he makes it, well—Elysian definitely has grounds for dismissal now. Always looks under-slept. Probably has a night job, too. I talked to him last week, at lunch. He supports his sister, who’s a striker. He tops up his younger brother’s slumber account, because it’s cheaper to keep the brother in storage than to support him if he’s unemployed. This guy, Clayton. His wife got pregnant. They both wanted the baby. Badly. But there was no way they could afford to keep it. She’d just had an abortion. He seemed pretty shredded about it. Looking back, I guess he was twitchy. But those ‘warning signs’ you’re supposed to look out for. They only seem obvious in retrospect. In the present—stressed, angry, having money problems, expressing resentment of shrivs—they apply to everyone I know.”

  “Your friend Clayton shot up the nursing home.”

  Nollie was hardly psychic. The protocol had become such a cliché.

  “I don’t know where he got the gun, but that amnesty in the thirties was a farce.”

  “Any idea of the body count?”

  “Not really. He started with the morts, so that would have upped the numbers. I’m sure you could go online and find reports of casualties anywhere from ten to a hundred and forty. The usual.”

  “You took him down.”

  “Do
es that impress you?” In truth, Willing was in shock. For fifteen years, the Shadow had been a mere mascot—part companion, part lucky charm, a metal version of Milo. He’d almost forgotten what it was engineered to do: something a bit more drastic than “sit.”

  “I’m impressed that you didn’t let him go at it. Your mother told me you advocated ‘shooting’ Luella well before my father did the honors. She worried that having said that might have made you feel bad later.”

  “It didn’t,” Willing said.

  “Fifa will disapprove. She’ll think you should have joined in.”

  “I had a clear line of sight from the cracked-open door of the closet where I was hiding. The chance wasn’t going to last. I had to make a split-second decision. I think I only hit his shoulder. An orderly pinned him when he dropped. I slipped out in the pandemonium. The trouble is—”

  “You’re more energized than I’ve seen you in years.”

  “So that’s the answer. To my malaise. Shoot people.”

  “Seems a start.”

  “I might have been seen. That orderly could have noticed it was me.”

  “But you’ll be a hero.”

  “I don’t want to turn in the Shadow. I shouldn’t have given away that I have it.”

  Nollie squinted. “We could hide it. You could claim to have thrown it in the East River in some PTSD revulsion. We could make up a story about how you’d found it in the house, how it was left behind by squatters. How you’d always planned to turn it in. But look at you. Just now, your face fell. You don’t want my good excuses. You miss urgency. You like the idea of having to leave. Of being on the run.”

  She knew him well. And he knew her. So they began talking about what they had been talking about since the previous night, without ever saying so outright.