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. Presently, 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.
Odiously, Ryan Biersdorfer and his sidekick Lin Yu Houseman were better than safe. While The Corrections couldn’t rake in the royalties of the old hardbacks, Biersdorfer had cannily priced the download so low that for better-heeled foreign buyers it was too much trouble to go looking for a pirated copy, and the pittances added up. More substantially, he was much in demand on the lucrative international lecture circuit. That meant earning bancors (doubtless through an offshore shell company), and the currency confoundingly did nothing but appreciate. So rather than convert his foreign income to dollars, required for repatriation, Biersdorfer was reputedly buying up real estate in Paris, Tuscany, Hanoi, and Jakarta. Any American who championed his own country’s collapse as well-deserved payback and promise of socialist rebirth was a treasured performing bear abroad, since most of the fatuous economist’s serious scholarly competition back home couldn’t bankroll airfares. Europeans were fascinated by the rare Yank who had been allowed out of the country, thus moronically conflating capital controls and controls on freedom of movement. (On second thought, maybe being at liberty to go wherever you want so long as you don’t spend any money there is fairly tantamount to house arrest.) Typically, too, Biersdorfer and his sexy Asian yes-woman spent little to no time in the US these days, which apparently made them ideal interlocutors for explaining to the rest of the world what it was like here.
Lowell wasn’t hung up on masculinity, but it was hard on a fellow, having to appeal to his sister-in-law for the means to acquire a new lip balm and then being abjured to please use a dab of lard instead. So when in October of ’31, Georgetown finally came through with his back pay for the summer before last, he felt literally flush: his blood vessels dilated, his cheeks ruddied, the tips of his fingers tingled. Determined to be an asset for once, Lowell offered munificently to do the week’s shopping.
He shook out some slacks and a stylish shirt, both worn only ten days since their last wash. (The competition for washing loads was fierce, and he tended to cede the two items permitted per resident to poor Savannah.) Grandly, he filled the Jaunt’s gas tank to the brim. Outside Green Acre Farm, he relished the ease of parking, since few Brooklynites could manage the costs of running a car. Sashaying through the entrance with a whistle, Lowell found his posture had improved, his first realization that it had ever deteriorated. His pink suede loafers may have been blemished in places, but they still drew glances from afar. He felt like a man, a real man, for the first time in months, a sensation startlingly reliant on trouser pockets that bulged with banded cash.
While imported goods were still out of stock, the shortages of American products the previous year had given way to shortages of income. You could now buy eggs and broccoli and even meat—for a price. Emboldened by the deposit that had only cleared that morning, Lowell refused to check the scribbled price tabs, and bought whatever he wanted. That was how men shopped. The mounding cart drew even more envious glances than the pink loafers.
After the last of his swag swept through checkout—where all the trusting self-service machines had been removed, stealing having grown too socially acceptable—Lowell froze. Hands on his padded pockets, he had to ask the girl to repeat the bill; her second iteration was snide. So that’s why Ellen Packer had relented when he once more threatened to sue: back pay from one of the foremost universities in the country meant to cover four months of prestigious employ could not now cover one tank of gas and a week’s food.
Lowell marshaled his most theatrical indignation and marched coolly from the store, leaving its minions to put the groceries back. The stylish exit meant sacrificing the canvas shopping bags, already packed with flank steak, for which he was sure to get it in the neck from Florence. The least he could get out of the humiliation was a parking space, so he left the Jaunt where it was and launched farther down Utica Avenue. It wouldn’t do to return empty-handed. He could pick up enough eats for the next couple of days at the Quickee Mart on Foster.
“Spare some change.”
A snatched side glance at an unshaven young man with greasy hair gleaned only that he was wearing the same sort of collarless tunic-style suit jacket in which Lowell had looked so snazzy during his final year at Georgetown. The fellow had sidled so close that the sleeve brushed Lowell’s arm.
“No, thank you,” Lowell said, a bit insensibly, eyes straight and gait stiff.
“Nice shoes, pal.”
The compliment hailed from the opposite side, as a second under-washed gentleman brushed the other arm. He’d noticed both of these young men nearby him in the supermarket, where they’d idly picked up lamb chops and put them down again. Lowell wasn’t born yesterday, and inferred some sort of hustle. Yet it took him a beat too long to register that the white guys bracing him weren’t swindlers but hoods. Though no one else witnessed this moment of being hopelessly dim, the slow uptake embarrassed Lowell in front of himself. He shouldn’t have had to lay eyes on the knife to get it.
A mere kitchen knife but of excellent quality, one of those German-steel numbers of which his wife had bought whole butcher-block sets, all forsaken in their ignominious scuttle from Cleveland Park. Not the chef’s but the utility knife, that’s what the contents list on the box would call it, was pointed at Lowell’s gut. Lo, it did seem very useful.
Perhaps their routine was sufficiently established that the duo was bored by it, for rather than focus on the business at hand, Lowell’s new friends chatted between them about an all-agricultural mutual fund that was doing improbably well, then commiserated over their favorite sushi bar on Liberty Street in lower Manhattan having finally closed. Were they indeed former Wall Street financiers, the segue from one form of larceny to another could only have been graceful. Keeping their target tightly between them, as the second fellow pressed the knife tip just below the ribs, they steered him onto Avenue D and up East Forty-Ninth. They needn’t have bothered to get off the main road; other pedestrians took no more notice of that blade flashing in the sun than they would have of a glinting rearview mirror. His escorts pushed him through the gate of the overgrown front yard and kicked him onto a mound of briars. The thugs would score more handsomely than usual, though as he emptied his pockets Lowell had never been happier that the US Federal Reserve had debased the banded stacks into fancy green insulation.
It was worse that they found his fleX, hidden in Lowell’s left loafer. Worse still, they found the fleX because they took the shoes. Wiping beads of blood from his briar-torn cheeks and limping back to Green Acre Farm in socks, Lowell rehearsed the gratitude that he would underscore on return to the Darklys’: thank God he’d kept walking toward the Quickee Mart, and they hadn’t got the car.
They’re only objects,” Willing said patiently. “You’re confusing the objects with what they mean to you. With objects, you can take the meaning back. They return to being empty things. Cuboids. Heavy cuboids that take up a lot of space.”
They were in the attic, to which Willing alone was admitted. This was the warmest room in the house, which wasn’t saying much. Though headroom was restricted, his great-aunt commanded more square feet for her personal use than anyone else. No one objected, because she was also the only resident besides his mother who contributed to their tiny economy. Other than by drawing Social Security—and the stipend was too modest to explain her generosity—he was not sure how. He did not know how much Nollie had left or where it came from. But of course he was interested. Nollie was the only one who didn’t spend her money as fast as possible, before it turned to ash. Yet she didn’t run out. This, too, was interesting. All the same, she was very particular about what she would pay for. It had to be a strict necessity.
“They’re not ‘cuboids,’” Nollie objected. “They’re my life’s work.”
She was balled on her mattress like a kid. The laces on her tennis shoes had broken and been knotted back together several times. The bulky red sweater was too big for her. She was wearing gloves, though they all wore gloves indoors. It was gloves that Avery should have bought up in Walgreens. The fingers of his own had holes.
“It’s getting cold.” He would speak slowly and clearly. She had to be coaxed. “It’s only December. It’s going to get colder. The natural gas costs too much to use through the whole winter. We have to save it for emergencies. Medical emergencies. Meanwhile, we have to keep warm, and cook, with the oil drum out back. The snow has covered the cemetery and the park. Which have been picked clean of firewood anyway. Even if we found any, the sticks would be wet. You can help.”
She was sulking. “Book burning is the end of civilization.”
“All your novels are available online.”
“The pirated versions.”
“Piracy is a compliment.”
“Forgive me if I’m not bowled over.”
“Your copies.” He would push his luck. “They say the same thing over and over. You have boxes and boxes of the same books.”
“I save them, to give to special friends. They’ll never be printed again.”
“They are produced in an obsolete format,” Willing said. “Most of these ‘special’ people would regard a present like that as a burden. They’d take it home and burn it in an oil drum.”
“So if I gave you one of my novels, you’d march downstairs and burn it.”
“Yes,” he said steadily.
“You’ve never expressed the slightest interest in my work.” She sounded peevish.
“No,” he said. “Maybe later, on the other side of this.”
“Will there be an ‘other side of this’?”
“That’s up for grabs,” he conceded. “But now isn’t a time for novels. Nothing made up is more interesting than what’s actually happening. We’re in a novel.”
She seemed to like that.
“You’re sort of old,” he said, quickly amending, “but not immense old. I mean, you’re in malicious shape. All those jumping jacks. No one would think you were seventy-four.” This was pro forma flattery for her generation. It should have raised a red flag for boomers: obviously the fawning lickspittle plying them with hackneyed compliments wanted something. Yet it always worked. “But you don’t live in the past. One of the things I like about you. You seem to be following the plot, more than the others. Lowell not hiding his fleX in a smarter place than his shoe. Avery mooning about how careless it used to be, ordering groceries online. They don’t get it. You seem to. Maybe it’s all those books you wrote. Maybe you’re used to staying a step back, keeping track of the larger arc, aiming for that final chapter. So holding on to these old-format hard copies, when we need them to boil pasta—it isn’t like you.”
He could feel her relenting. He was relieved. He didn’t want to take the cartons by force.
“My father would be horrified by your proposition, you know. Book burning is antithetical to everything the Mandibles stand for.”
“But everything important about those books is safe,” he said. “The words don’t burn. They live forever on the internet.”
“So long as there is an internet,” she countered.
They thought the same way. They both lived in a world that was provisional. The ground was forever soft. For Willing, flux kept him supple. It toned his balancing muscles. It was like having sea legs on land.
“Besides, you’ll die,” he said. “When you’re not here, you won’t care whether anyone reads your work. You won’t care whether they used to read your work even when you were here. That’s the great thing about nonexistence. It’s not that you don’t care, either. It’s not as if you still feel, but you feel apathetic. You can’t care. There’s nothing to do the caring. So you won’t care about ‘the Mandibles,’ or what they stood for. The Mandibles will be the same as every other family. The same as rocks, or dust particles, or the Taj Mahal, or the Bill of Rights, or the Pythagorean theorem. Because you won’t be a ‘Mandible’ anymore, and you won’t know what a ‘Mandible’ is.”
Somehow he’d turned the key. “You’re right,” she said flippantly. “Once I kick it, these boxes are more trash to dispose of, oui?”
“Oui,” he said. “But now they can serve a purpose.”
“Only one condition,” Nollie said, hoisting a carton labeled “The Ecstatic, MM PB, Hungarian” in a show of strength. “Don’t touch the foul matter.”
When he informed the rest downstairs that Nollie would sacrifice the books for cooking the evening meal but insisted on reserving the loose manuscripts, Avery and Florence fell over each other laughing. Jokes were hard to come by.
“Can you believe,” Avery said, training her voice low enough that she wouldn’t be heard in the attic, “she’s still holding out for her papers to be bought by some highfalutin university library? I mean, what university library? What university? They’re all going down the tubes! Just goes to show,” she added, with a pointed glance at her husband, “the last thing to go is ego.”
Bundled glumly in a blanket in the kitchen, Lowell shot his wife a black look. “It’s still vital to maintain top-flight scholarly research facilities. Her protection of those manuscripts would be more than justified, if only the beastly woman were any good.”
The books burned well, though they made a lot of ash. Nollie soon came downstairs and firmly removed the task from Esteban, who was displaying an undiplomatic relish, and insisted on feeding paperbacks to the oil drum herself. Once she got into the swing of the occasion, she seemed to enjoy it. There must be something exhilarating about immolating your own attachments. Trial by fire. That was an expression. When you make glass very hot, it gets stronger. Willing assessed his great-aunt, her face red from the flames. She looked excited. She was having a tempering tantrum. This was real exercise, better than jumping jacks. By the time she finished tossing Gray, The Stringer, Ad-Out, Cradle to Grave, The Saint of Glengormley, and Virtual Family into the drum, she would be stronger.
As dirt clods flickered in the light of the fire, Willing cast a mournful eye at the waste ground of their poky backyard, trying to learn the same lesson. Throughout the spring and summer, he had tended their small crops—potatoes, tomatoes, onions, string beans. He eked out just enough water on the plants during dry spells that the produce wouldn’t cost more to raise than it was worth. He had allowed himself affection for the infant vegetables as they developed: as a rule a mistake. Aside from a single tomato and one pot of beans, the harvest was stolen. A gang rampaged through the garden late at night and trampled the plants. The destruction was deliberate. He suspected someone at school. He still attended Obama High to glean intelligence—the spy kind. Other students must have been sniffing around for scuttlebutt also. He may have mentioned the garden once, and should have known better.
No one gave a shit about Christmas. For his sixteenth birthday in January of ’32, his mother made Willing a cake out of cardboard.
It was shortly thereafter that he came upon his mother, bowed over her dresser upstairs. She had already been on a rampage in the kitchen.
Before the Great Renunciation, many were the evenings that his mother or Esteban had despaired that there was “nothing to eat.” Willing had always known what they meant: Esteban had forgotten to thaw the chicken burgers. Or after a draining day at Adelphi, his mother was running short on ideas for a meal they hadn’t already eaten three times that week. But this time, no cans of pineapple in sugar syrup lurked at the back of the pantry; no peeled plum tomatoes lay at hand for a meatless Bolognese. There wasn’t a half-used, iced-up bag of corn in the far corner of the freezer, or a long-spurned package of desiccated pork sausages whose packaging had torn. The canisters beside the stove no longer brimmed with flour and sugar and cornmeal. The cabinets were bare of rice and couscous and kasha. His mother had ceased disposing of foodstuffs beyond their “sell-by date,” a policy she now ridiculed. So it wasn’t a matter of overcoming a reluctance to open a can of stew beyond its prime. There was no stew. Willing felt partially responsible—his quiet thieving through the neighborhood had netted little of late; in the current climate of mistrust, property owners had improved security—but there was no food in the kitchen, at all, anywhere, of any sort.
A matter different but hardly unrelated, there was no money, either. It was the end of the month; per custom, they’d already spent his mother’s paycheck. Nollie was meeting an old boyfriend in Queens, and his mother refused to rummage through her aunt’s things looking for cash. That would be stealing. Esteban hadn’t picked up work as a day laborer for weeks. Thus far, Avery hadn’t been able to interest their neighbors in buying or trading her stockpiled toenail fungus kits, replacement door hinges, or window-screen spline—in a variety of widths.
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.”