The Mandibles: A Family, 2029–2047

Flickering back and forth all day induced an intellectual strobe that was fatiguing.

For lunch, Florence grabbed a cafeteria sandwich and retreated to the staff room, lively today. The locust protein filling was supposed to taste like tuna fish. It didn’t.

“Fantastic,” Selma was saying, propping her legs on a table; the calves were the circumference of industrial mayonnaise jars. “Malicious, as my boy would say. I love the pitcher of all them rich folk having to cough up they big piles of gold. Had my way, wouldn’t get no ‘compensation’ for it, neither. Somebody got to level the playing field. Whatever happen to that idea of them ‘wealth taxes’ a while back? Platform Colbert run on. That was the shit. What I’d have Alvarado turn upside down, this just the start.”

“You didn’t even vote for him!” Florence objected over her sandwich. Afri-mericans had been roundly hostile to Alvarado’s candidacy.

“I abstain,” Selma said fastidiously. “Don’t mean el presidente can’t be useful.”

“Wealth taxes are double taxation,” Chris mumbled, with the nervous cringing of being the only white man in the room—a pale, weedy white man at that.

“Careless,” Selma said. “You loaded, tax didn’t work the first time.”

“What about the debt thing?” Florence threw out neutrally. For reasons she hadn’t pinpointed, it nagged at her.

“Stroke of genius,” said Mateo, the stocky Guatemalan on a break from guarding the lobby. “I declared bankruptcy six years ago. Registered the vehicle with my sister, so even kept the car. Now I got credit cards coming outta my ears. Sorted everything out bien bonita. No reason the country can’t do the same thing.”

“You loan money to folks can’t pay it back, joke’s on you, right?” Selma agreed. “’Sides, I don’t see why the gubment ever pay anything back. Pass a law say, ‘We don’t got to.’ Presto. No more loan.”

“But the majority of the people who’ve loaned the federal government money”—Chris trained his eyes on his teabag, which he only dipped twice; he liked his Lipton weak—“are other Americans.”

“Mierda,” Mateo said. “I heard it was all the chinks.”

“Yeah,” Selma said. “And they want they money back? Come and get it.”

“You know, the American military isn’t what it used to be,” Florence said cautiously.

“Bull.” Mateo punched the air. “We got the pow-ah! Biggest army in the fucking world.”

“Actually, the Chinese have the biggest army in the world,” Florence said.

“But never mind the Chinese,” said Chris. “It’s our fellow Americans—”

“Ain’t nothing ‘fellow’ about ’em,” Selma said. “’Cause you mean rich Americans. With them port-fo-li-os.”

“Not only.” Chris added a disgusting amount of milk to his tea. “Our pension funds are invested in Treasury bonds. They’re always part of a balanced port-fo-li-o.”

Selma eyed him for signs of mockery. “City don’t come across with our pensions?” She smiled prettily. “We gonna burn the place down.”

Chris said quietly, “Then you may have to.”

Is it true?” Florence pressed Chris after the other two had returned to work. “That the debt is mostly from us?” The us jarred. You always had to cite which us.

“From what I’ve read.” Chris fluttered his fingers to the side, a routine gesture for if-you-can-believe-anything-you-read-now-that-there-is-no-more-New York Times-Economist-FT-Guardian-LA Times-or-Washington Post. “And the feds aren’t only reneging on the interest, but the principal. My dad gave me a ten-K Treasury bond when I graduated from college. As of last night? That money’s wiped out. And my family’s not rich. This is going to be … explosive. Those guys don’t get it.”

“They get something,” Florence said. “Selma and Mateo are both married. I know that partly because they have a traditional way of showing it. But this morning, when they came to work? They weren’t wearing their wedding rings.”

Riding the bus home, contrary to policy Florence tugged out her fleX; many of these passengers could only spring for smart phones, and the distinctive sparkle of metallic mesh could make her a target. But she couldn’t resist a scroll through the news sites. Sure enough, they bannered wall-to-wall outrage. By international consensus, the US was now a “pariah nation.” All over the globe, there were riots outside American embassies, several of which had been overrun and looted. Her country’s diplomatic service had ceased operations until further notice. American ambassadors and staff were evacuating their posts under armed guard.

Meanwhile, Florence detected much joshing and shoulder punching on the bus about earrings, studs, and chains, all noticeably less on display. The one tenet of Alvarado’s address that had sunk in with the hoi polloi was the part about the gold, a form of wealth they understood. But in neither Spanish nor a host of street dialects did she detect a single comment on the “reset.”

Come to think of it, throughout her afternoon, on coffee breaks, when pairing up with colleagues to do spot checks on residents for cleanliness and contraband, banter had featured no further remark on the renunciation of the national debt. Menial Adelphi employees were on low enough wages to pay no income tax, and plenty would qualify for working families’ tax credits, which entailed getting what were perversely called “refunds” for taxes they’d never paid in the first place. When you weren’t responsible for paying the interest on a loan, maybe you didn’t regard yourself as responsible for the loan itself, either. Neither her fellow passengers nor her colleagues at Adelphi felt implicated.

In the scheme of things, Florence paid pretty minimal income tax herself, though it sure didn’t feel minimal, what with Social Security, Medicare, and state and local on top, while meantime Wall Street shysters connived to pay practically nothing. As for a pension that may or may not have been eroded by Alvarado’s address, its monthly stipend was far enough in the future to be abstract. Even if the Social Security Administration didn’t go broke again, the official retirement age was bound to keep moving forward, to sixty-nine, to seventy-two, to seventy-five, like a carrot tied before a donkey’s nose. The sole rescue in her decrepitude for which she held out any hope was trickle-down from Grand Man’s fortune—about which she kept her trap shut at Adelphi. (In college, her one reservation about adopting her mother’s surname, Darkly, in a failed bid to cheer her more fragile parent out of a chronic depression, was that rejecting Mandible might alienate her grandfather in a way that could backfire later on. Fortunately, the redoubtable old man had never seemed that petty.) Otherwise, she belonged to a generation widely betrayed, one with no reason to believe that anything but more betrayal lay in wait. Still. Something. Something was bugging her.

She didn’t think about being American often, though that may have been typically American in itself. She didn’t regard being American as especially formative of her character, and that may have been typically American, too. The Fourth of July was mostly an excuse for an afternoon picnic in Prospect Park, and she was relieved that next year Willing would be old enough that he wouldn’t be too disappointed if they didn’t go all the way to the suffocating crowds along the East River to watch the fireworks. For years now it had ceased to be controversial to suppose that the era of the “American Empire” was fading, and the notion that her country may already have had its day in the sun she didn’t find upsetting. Plenty of other countries had flourished and subsided, and were reputed to be pleasant places to live. She didn’t see why being a citizen of a nation in decline should diminish her own life or make her feel personally discouraged. She was duly condemnatory of various black marks on the US historical game card—the slaughter of the Indians, slavery—but not in a way that cut close to the bone. She hadn’t herself massacred any braves or whipped Africans on plantations.

This was different.

She felt ashamed.

chapter five

The Chattering Classes

I told you I didn’t want to do this.”

Avery eyed her husband warily at the kitchen counter as he poured himself a girding glass of French Viognier. After he’d put up such a stink about this dinner party, she wasn’t about to let him know how much that bottle had set them back. The exchange rate with the nouveau franc must have been ghastly. To cover her tracks, she had buried the wine shop receipt in the outdoor trashcan.

“We haven’t had anyone over in two months,” she objected, “and it’s coming up on Christmas.”

“Notice we haven’t been invited to one holiday bash this year? It’s understood: if you’re raising a glass, you’re getting plastered by yourself, with the door locked.”

“But you’re the one who keeps saying this is temporary.”

“I do think this is temporary. But for the time being, we’re surrounded by people who think they’ve been ruined.”

“According to you, if only everyone would stop freaking out and act normal, the economy would settle in no time. Since I never go this long without having people to dinner, that’s what I’m doing: I’m ‘acting normal.’”

“It sends the wrong signal,” Lowell grumbled. “This town is roiling with suspicion that certain-someones got their cash out of the country in advance. Or worse, have made a fortune at everyone else’s expense. It’s not a good time to live conspicuously high on the hog.”

“Fine, we’re not having pork,” Avery said brusquely. “And there’s nothing highfalutin about the menu.”

This was not entirely true. Avery had her standards. People thought you couldn’t get bluefin tuna anymore, but you could—for a price. After all that ruckus about the bees and patchy pollination on the West Coast, tossing shaved almonds in a salad was like scattering gold leaf. Since the jet stream’s burro-belly sag over North America had frozen Florida’s crops again, the lemons and the avocadoes were from Spain; the guy stacking them reverently in the produce aisle said shipments from Europe were so extortionate that Wholemart might stop stocking citrus altogether.

Worst of all, like most cooks of her generation, Avery listed the primitive necessities of life as fresh water, shelter, clothing, and extra-virgin olive oil—preferably oil pressed in Cyprus; all the Italian stuff was fake. But when the liter went through the scanner at checkout, she objected that there must have been a mistake. Perhaps weary of this interchange multiple times a day, the surly clerk assured her that the bottle had scanned correctly, and asked if she wanted to have the olive oil put back. Embarrassment won the day, and Avery shook her head no, she’d take it. That receipt went into the outdoor can, too.

“It’s not only the risk of ostentation,” Lowell said. “I’m not in the mood. I ran into a guy from Administration today, and he said to be prepared for a big drop in enrollment next semester. Parents are pulling their kids out of school. They can’t cover the tuition—if they ever could. Lucky I got tenure. When it came through, I took it as a compliment. Now it’s a lifeline.”

“Therapists, I’m afraid, don’t get tenure,” she warned him, grating ginger. “Four more cancellations today. Those patients may never be back.”

“They’ll be back.” He smoothed a hand over her rump, wrapped in a tight little black number for the evening. “If only to get counseling over, ‘Oh, why on earth did I sell my GM stock after it took such a dive? Had I simply held my nerve, I’d be sitting pretty!’ Like my wife”—he gave her buttock a squeeze—“who can’t help but sit pretty.”

“Thanks. Listen, I do want credit: when you were so tepid about tonight—”

“Not tepid. Violently opposed.”

“When you were so ‘violently opposed,’” Avery revised, “I cut the guest list to the bone. It’s only going to be Ryan and Lin Yu, Tom and Belle.”

“My, two out of the four I can actually stand. Good odds, as dinner parties go.”

“It’s in your interest to stay on Ryan’s good side. Mark Vandermire’s a passing clown who got lucky, and given your positions you were always going to hate each other. But Ryan is your boss.”

“He’s only head of the department, in defiance of my seniority, because he threatened to take his marbles to Princeton. They should never have capitulated to blackmail.”

“That’s because Ryan Biersdorfer is a rock star. Economics doesn’t have many rock stars, so you have to make nice.”

“Your husband’s not a rock star?” He’d have tried to say this lightly, but it came out wounded.

She looped her wrists around his neck, keeping her ginger-hairy hands from soiling his shirt collar. “My husband’s more like a jazz musician. Much more careless.”

Lowell left to check on the kids upstairs. Hopefully with that butt-patting banter and grousing about the guest list, he’d pulled off a reasonable facsimile of the grumpy yet affectionate husband on an ordinary Saturday evening when he wasn’t up for company. Everything he did and said lately felt fake—like cover, or distraction. Yet he did believe fiercely: this too shall pass, and more rapidly than anyone expected. Look at the Stonage: the country sprang right back. GDP took a hit in ’24, but the market recovered lickety-split. So: all that hair-tear for basically nothing. Same cycle, all over again.

He rapped on Savannah’s door, then poked his head in. “You consider joining the grown-ups tonight?”

“Nah.” His seventeen-year-old was sprawled on the bed, hunt-and-pecking on her fleX. Savannah was one of those girls who managed to make brown hair seem exotic. He trained his eyes away from her long bare legs; she was a knockout, she had powers, but he was her father. Which made him fortunate. He’d hate to be one of the teenage boys she turned to jelly. “I want to finish this application. I can ask Mojo for an omelet.”

“Better make it yourself. Mom’s turned Mojo off for the night. She didn’t want it to bury the guests in the backyard or something.”

“There’s a new Netflix series about that, you know. About a murderous Mojo run amok.”

“Oldest sci-fi plot in the book. Goes back to 2001: A Space Odyssey.”

Savannah frowned. “Why would science fiction be set in the past?”

“Because when the novel was written, 2001 was in the future. Like 1984—which seemed far away when Orwell wrote it, but then the real 1984 came and went, and it wasn’t nearly as horrible or alien or sad as he predicted. Plots set in the future are about what people fear in the present. They’re not about the future at all. The future is just the ultimate monster in the closet, the great unknown. The truth is, throughout history things keep getting better. On average, the world’s population has a higher and higher standard of living. Our species gets steadily less violent. But writers and filmmakers keep predicting that everything’s going to fall apart. It’s almost funny. So don’t you worry. Your future’s looking sunny, and it’ll only get sunnier.”

She looked at him with curiosity. “I wasn’t worried.”

Well, that makes you a colossal idiot popped into his head before he could stop the thought. “What’s the school?”

“Risdee. I can draw. But they want you more than anything to be able to talk about drawing. I’m not sure I’m so good at that.”

“Visual art stopped being about making anything a long time ago. It’s all about talking. The talking is what you make.”

“Doesn’t ‘visual’ art have to be something you see?”

“I guess text is something you see.”

“Not anymore,” she said. “Nobody at my school reads anything. They use ear buds, and get read to.”

“Sounds slow,” Lowell said glumly.

“It’s easy. It’s relaxing.”

“They do know how to read.”

She shrugged with a smile. “Not all of them.”

“You have to be able to read even to work for the post office.”

“Not really,” she said with an air of dreamy mischief. “Hand scanners can read aloud addresses, too. Careless, huh?”

Lowell rolled his eyes. “Good luck with the application.”

He shut the door. Not long ago, he’d been pleased that Savannah had fostered the marginally practical ambition to become a fabric designer, and of course she was pretty enough—no father was supposed to think this way anymore—that some guy was bound to scoop her up and take care of her come what may. But at this exact point in time, Lowell was leery of quite so airy-fairy a profession as crafting new prints when the world was already chockful of paisley. More pressingly still, last he checked a degree from the likes of the Rhode Island School of Design cost about $400,000—before room and board. The 529 Plan that Avery’s grandfather established when Savannah was born, meant to cover Goog’s and Bing’s higher education as well, was currently worth about ten cents.

When Lowell stopped by Goog’s room, Bing was on the bed, too. Indoorsy and pale, Goog managed to thrust his chest out when seated on a pillow with his back to the bedstead. Didn’t a normal fifteen-year-old slump? As ever, his chestnut hair was neat, his clothing tidy. The boy seemed always to be putting himself forward for inspection, and Lowell worried that the kid conceived of himself too much in relation to adults.

They both clammed up when their father made his appearance. But if they were up to something, Lowell would hear about it. Goog had the same garrulous, eager-to-please, desperate-to-impress quality that he had evidenced from the moment he learned to talk. He couldn’t keep a secret for five minutes. Bing could—but for all the wrong reasons. Soft and a touch overweight, their ten-year-old was chronically frightened. He’d make ideal prey for pedophiles: warned that if he blabbed he’d get into terrible trouble, Bing would hush-hush the story with him to the grave.

“You boys planning to stay upstairs tonight? Because you can come down and join us if you want. Though I’m not sure Mom has quite enough fish.”

“Oh, yuck!” they said in unison. They didn’t realize it, but given the outlandish prices and poor availability of anything but the farmed varieties, which tasted like pond scum, these boys had been trained to hate fish.

“Mom said we could have grilled cheese,” Bing said.

“Who’s coming?” Goog asked.

“Mom’s friend Belle Duval—you remember, the cancer doctor—”

“Oncologist,” Goog corrected scornfully.

“The oncologist.” God forbid you should insult Goog’s vocabulary. “Her husband, Tom Fortnum, is a lawyer with the Justice Department. Also, my colleague Ryan Biersdorfer and the woman he lives with, Lin Yu.”

Goog squinted. “The guy who did that ten-part documentary on inequality.”

Lowell’s middle child was keenly alert to the proximity of fame and influence. It required an unearthly maturity to keep from getting irked that the kid’s celebrity radar didn’t blip around his own father. Hadn’t Dad been on TV, too?

“What made Ryan’s name was a book, believe it or not. One of the last big bestsellers. It predicted that American low-skilled wages will soon be so abysmal that the Chinese will outsource their jobs to us.” Lowell tried to discipline the derision from his voice. “One of the things that makes an economist popular with regular people is a proclivity for hyperbole. Which means …?”

“A tendency to exaggerate,” Goog said promptly. “But how could you get more hyperbolic than what’s really happened? Olivia Andrews has taken a leave of absence from school because her father shot himself in their kitchen. I don’t think you guys have been exaggerating enough.”

“Sounds like you two should come downstairs, then. Join the conversation.”

“I don’t wanna listen to a bunch of economy stuff,” Bing said.

“Then maybe you were born into the wrong family.”

“Yeah. Prolly was.”

“Tonight, Bing?” Lowell said. “I’m with you. You guys stay up here, I might sneak away and join you. Ryan is a bigmouth showoff. I bet you know the type at school. When you grow up, nothing changes.”

He turned toward the door, but Goog piped up, “Dad, can I ask you a question?”

That boy could never get enough attention. Alas, bigmouth showoff was a label that might apply to his elder son. “Sure,” Lowell said coolly.

“A friend of mine at school. He said his mother had a bar of gold she bought a while ago in Dubai. Where I guess you could buy it like, you know, shampoo, without a paper trail. His mom had to explain to him about Dubai because he walked outside when she was digging a hole for the bar in the backyard. Isn’t that against the law?”

“Right now, yes. But your friend is a knucklehead. He shouldn’t have told you that. He needs to keep his piehole shut.”

“Well, he made me swear not to tell anybody.”

“So why are you telling me?”

Goog looked hurt. He’d be the only teenager in DC upbraided for sharing secrets with a parent. “’Cause I wonder what to do. Whether I should report it to somebody.”

“Like the police?”

“Yeah, that’s what they told us to do in assembly.”

“That,” Lowell said, “is sinister. And the answer is no, you do not want to report that gold to the police, or even to a teacher. Keep a lid on it. Your friend’s mother could be fined and even thrown in jail.”

“But what about the law?”

“I don’t care. There have been places and times where everyone rats on everyone else, and nobody trusts anybody. They were bad places, and bad times. This is the United States, and we don’t operate that way, got it? If I had some gold I wasn’t handing over to the feds, would you turn me in?”

“Are you hiding any?”

“Given this discussion, I wouldn’t tell you if I were.” The levity fell flat.

“But if people who surrender their gold get a roachbar price from the Treasury, like you said … And then the recalcitrant”—Goog gave the recent addition to his vocabulary an emphatic flourish—“not only get away with hiding their gold but can get a better price for it on the black market, or overseas …” Lowell was bursting with pride that his son had mastered the basics here without any help. “Doesn’t that mean that the people who follow the rules get punished?”

“As your father, I shouldn’t be letting you in on this rather ugly fact of life, but people who follow the rules are almost always punished.”

On that mournful note, Lowell headed downstairs, where the guests had arrived.

Word of warning,” Ryan advised. “It slows down security something fantastic.”

Avery was a bit exasperated that their company didn’t sink into the plenitude of seats in the soft chocolate living room. Everyone remained standing with their wine, instinctively encircling the dark, striking man in a trendy bronze-weave tie. He employed the flamboyant hand gestures of a VIP accustomed to holding court. Receding hairline, true, but Ryan Biersdorfer exemplified that good looks were 50 percent conviction. He was neither as smart nor as entertaining as he thought he was either, but since he did think he was, other people did, too.

“We flew out of Reagan last week, since I had to give a lecture in Zurich,” he continued. “The lines were staggering. I’d say add two hours. Even in ‘Fast’ Track.”

“Naturally,” Lin Yu said. “Business travelers are the worst offenders.”

Half Chinese, Lin Yu Houseman had reaped the best of both worlds—with the smooth, purified lines of a classic Asian face, but a Westerner’s slender nose and wide eyes, which women in China were once eager to endure plastic surgery to mirror. (Avery had read that the younger mainland set now considered eyelid augmentation pandering and undignified.) Barely thirty, she combined that hint of the orient that fifty-ish men like Ryan found sexy with a relaxingly straight-up American accent. Intellectually as well, she’d melded the diligence of an Asian upbringing—she’d been one of Ryan’s star grad students—with the earnest political passion of the East Coast liberal. Avery would have admired the young woman more had she parted ideological ways with her partner-cum-mentor even occasionally.