Читать книгу The Mandibles: A Family, 2029–2047 - Lionel Shriver - Страница 11

In the most ordinary of times, Carter Mandible would drive up to New Milford debating to what degree he felt guilty about dreading a visit with his own father. Why, most people his age would strain to extend themselves to the rarefied realm of ninety-seven, even if Douglas Mandible didn’t subject his son to the additional trials of feeblemindedness. Rather, Carter sometimes wished that his father showed more signs of mental fatigue, which might excite his sympathy, and lay grudges to rest. One of those grudges being first and foremost that the old man was still alive.

Oh, Carter never actively wished that his father would die. He was entirely sure—he was fairly sure—that when the time came he would be felled by the customary measure of filial grief. Friends had warned that the loss always hits you harder than you expect. But that was a discovery for which he’d been more than ready for fifteen years.

It was also standard on the two-hour trip from Brooklyn—this leafy section through Connecticut was pleasant—for Carter to question his motivations for these visits. With an eye to the long view, you naturally dote on an elderly parent as a subtly selfish prophylactic: to be able to assure yourself, on receipt of that fatal phone call, that you’d been devoted. Sometimes being a shade more attentive than you’re quite in the mood for can prevent self-excoriation down the line. After all, old people have a horrible habit of kicking it right after you ducked seeing them at the last minute with an excuse that sounded fishy, or on the heels of a regrettable encounter in which you let slip an acrid aside. To be dutiful without fail is like taking out emotional insurance.

Yet in Carter’s case, the self-interest was crassly pecuniary. Did he keep in his father’s good graces with monthly runs to the Wellcome Arms only to safeguard his inheritance from, say, a rash or spiteful late-life impulse to endow a chair at Yale? He’d never know. Worse, his father would never know, and might not ever feel confidently cherished for himself. A family fortune introduced an element of corruption. While Carter might sentimentalize the ideal world in which he spent as much time as possible with Douglas E. Mandible because he loved his father, and enjoyed his father’s company, and was resolved to make the most of his father’s blessedly extended lifespan while he still could, the money was an inescapable contaminant, and it wasn’t going to go away.

Or in theory it wouldn’t go away.

For this was not the most ordinary of times.

While it was certainly usual for Carter to chafe that by the time he came into the legacy he’d be too old to spend it, this afternoon that exasperation rose to a frenzy. He and Jayne still lived in the same modest, increasingly disheveled Carroll Gardens row house—brick, not brownstone. It was finally paid off, but for years the mortgage was a stretch. He and Jayne did get to Tuscany in 2003—a first proper vacation, in their early forties! But they’d always planned on Japan. Now that Jayne was so fearful that she’d rarely leave the house, adventures farther afield than Sahadi’s on Atlantic Avenue were out of the question. On one charge, newer cars would make it to Canada; this ten-year-old BeEtle couldn’t get past Danbury. Once he got that post at the Times he was already sixty, by which time America’s shrinking “paper of record,” having already stooped to selling creative writing courses and colonial knickknacks, was snarfing up desperate aging journalists for pocket change. His pension was farcical. If they might free up some equity by downsizing in the brief window during which their youngest had pretended to leave home, that meant finding someplace smaller and meaner and more depressing. Great.

Yet a breezy, no-cares existence had been in the pipeline all his life. The money was stuck further up the system, like a wad of the disposable diapers you’re told never to flush. Meanwhile, awaiting his birthright had suspended him in an extended adolescence. This state of decades-long deferral presaged when his real life would begin. He was sixty-nine. Real life would be short.

What Carter craved was not so much furniture and electronics, cruises and wine-tasting tours—whatever he might buy—but a feeling. A sensation of ease and liberation, of generosity and savor, of possibility and openness, of whimsy and humor and joy. Granted, he expected too much from mere money, but he’d be happy to find that out, too. Relieved of this endless waiting, he would embrace even a reputably adult disillusionment. Because he still felt like a kid. And now that theoretical Valhalla in which he and Jayne could leave the heating jacked up to sixty-eight the whole night through, or make an airy fresh start on a wide-skied ranch in Montana where Jayne might get over the terror she associated with Carroll Gardens, well—in the last few days, that future had, very probably, gone to hell.

For this last week was the most historically savage of his experience, and that was counting 9/11 and the Stone Age. As for the latter, sure, the power went out, and there was looting of course, including of Jayne’s chichi delicatessen on Smith Street, from whose gratuitous destruction she had yet to recuperate. Traffic lights going black resulted in a host of dreadful pile-ups. He could skip rehearsing all those airline disasters again, the train wrecks, the poignant human-interest packages about cardiac patients whose pacemakers began beating double-time, like an invigorating change-up in a Miles Davis recording. Parts of the country had no water, though that was good practice for the dryouts to come. Telecommunications and national defense systems ceased to function, even if in Carter’s view America’s vaunted “defense” had long put the country in the way of more munitions than it deflected. Understandably, then, for Florence, Avery, and Jarred, 2024 constituted the direst of calamities. But Carter hailed from a different generation—one raised locating phone numbers in scrawled paper diaries and tracking down zip codes in fat directories from the post office, painstakingly diluting encrusted Liquid Paper with plastic pipettes from tiny overpriced bottles of thinner and later upgrading with outsize gratitude to the self-correcting ribbons of IBM Selectrics, flicking through yellowed rectangles in the long wooden drawers of card catalogs and looking up articles in the Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature in the library. There was only so gravely he was likely to rate going without the internet for three weeks.

Albeit eerily invisible, eerily silent, this last week’s turmoil was of another order. The Stone Age produced immediate, palpable consequences: the lights wouldn’t go on, food rotted in the fridge, and none of the few stores remaining open carried milk. Throughout this latest mayhem nothing changed. A conventional number of cars on I-84 were doing the usual five miles per hour over the speed limit. The sky was mockingly clear. Exiting for a recharge, Carter didn’t have to swerve around bodies littering the ramp, or duck to avoid gunfire. Its lot half-full, Friendly’s was continuing to sell maple-walnut cones and SuperMelts. Strolling between chargers and convenience stores, none of Carter’s fellow motorists appeared hurried or flustered. This whole placid commercial stretch testified to the fact that the folks most affected by the week’s historical bad weather weren’t temperamentally inclined to pitch rocks through plate glass. One such under-violent character was bound to be his father.

If you believed its literature, the Wellcome Arms was the most luxuriously equipped assisted-living facility in the United States. The high-tech gym was really a come-on for prospective tenants, promising retirement as renewal, as the unfettered free time to step into the trim, fit incarnation you’d always been too busy to manifest—until the shine wore off and residents were confronted with the odious exertion of using the machines. The joint actually kept horses, though Carter had never seen anyone ride one. Replete with water therapists and massage jets, the pool saw more traffic, since a proportion of the residents could still float. It went without saying that the home provided the medical facilities of a top-flight private hospital; given Wellcome’s astronomical charges, it was worth the institution’s while to keep its clients, however nominally, in this world.

Although Douglas Mandible would not commonly be parted from his fleX before the 4 p.m. close of the New York Stock Exchange, pulling into Visitor Parking, Carter spotted his father on the nearest tennis court. Douglas was once a hard-hitting, cutthroat singles player, who would risk stroke or seizure to retrieve a skittering down-the-line—in the same fashion that as an equally cutthroat literary agent he had pulled out all the stops to score celebrated novelists. Yet in advanced age he’d refined a very different game, whereby he ran this much-younger opponent (late seventies, Carter guessed) from corner to corner. Barely returning the shot, the other guy would blob his own right to Douglas’s feet, and Pop could keep the ball in play without moving more than five inches in any direction. It was the same hyper-efficient, energy-conserving manipulation that Douglas could employ to effortlessly control his family without leaving his chair.

With a wicked crosscourt sharding out of the service box, Douglas dispatched the point in the spirit of simply having had enough. Carter didn’t flatter himself that his father had cut the point short because he’d spied his son in the parking lot. Having given notice of this visit, Carter was right on time. Had Pop given a damn about not keeping his son waiting, he wouldn’t have been playing tennis in the first place.

Douglas made a show of mopping his face and waved at Visitor Parking with the towel. His figure was closer to scrawny than sleek, but his bearing remained debonair. The mane of blazing white hair was more spectacular than the younger auburn version. In October, he sported a leathery tan. While spinal compression had shaved a good two inches off his height, that still left the patriarch a touch taller than his only son. Age had scored his long face with an expression of drollery once fleeting and now ceaseless. He would look dryly amused in his sleep.

“Carter!” The pumped joy in his voice was heartening, even if Douglas lavished the same elaborate glad-to-see-you on everybody. “I’m going to grab a shower. Meet in our library, shall we?” That trace of British inflection—lie-bree—was always deft enough that you couldn’t quite accuse him of affectation.

Back in the day, Douglas Elliot Mandible had been an illustrious bon vivant and raconteur. Since Carter could remember, his father had been able to summon the names of obscure, long-dead authors and to reel off multiple lines from Philip Roth or William Faulkner verbatim—a facility the man had cruelly neglected to hand down to his son, who was more apt to launch into a point about some latest movie and then spend five tedious minutes trying to remember what the film was called. As a child, Carter took his father at face value: the literary eminence was fully formed, a given. But by adulthood, the sheer A-to-B of his father’s flamboyant persona had grown confounding. How did anyone start out as a callow, superficially educated, and surely in any important sense rather stupid young man, and then ugly-duckling with no noticeable transition into a suave, lively, charming adult to whose parties celebrities and intellectual heavy hitters alike would eagerly flock? For not once had any of Douglas’s copious, well-connected acquaintances ever taken Carter aside and shared, “For years, your dad would tell anecdotes in company that fell flat as pancakes. You don’t slide into that kind of style like slipping on a jacket. You have to practice.” So had Douglas sequestered himself behind closed doors for weeks on end memorizing long witty passages, the better to unspool them over the rims of two-onion martinis? Really, how did you make the journey from mouthy, naive, full-of-shit Yale undergraduate to one of New York’s Great Characters, who could wear an ascot every day of his working life without looking ridiculous? Though perhaps the more pressing question now was how a redoubtable Manhattan mover-and-shaker had borne the indignities of extreme old age without appearing to have been humbled in the slightest.

Carter signed in at the office, whose Doric columns and classic New England white clapboard were meant to evoke a timelessness at odds with a clientele whose time was conspicuously running out.

“Your daddy gonna live forever, sí?” the portly receptionist quipped, to which Carter responded distractedly, “Yeah, afraid so.” She shot him a look.

In truth, his natural impulse in encounters with strangers the last few days was to powwow over this “bancor” business and press them on what they presumed the game plan was in DC—since that’s what happened after 9/11, wasn’t it? All the social barriers fell, and you found yourself having heart-to-hearts with the clerk scanning your pretzels. We’re all in this together, that was the conceit. Except we weren’t all in this one together, and Carter stopped himself. A Lat minding the desk at an old folks’ home was just the sort to have floated obliviously through the crisis, perhaps blissfully unaware that there was a crisis: no assets.

Douglas and his hapless second wife were allotted a whole compound—the better to absorb a goodly share of the effects from their liquidated estate in Oyster Bay. (Carter accepted a claret-red leather sofa from the excess, which from the moment it arrived made all their other furniture look tattered. They’d unloaded it on Florence.) That was the concept at Wellcome: to reconstruct as best you could the home you’d left behind.

Accordingly, the front door was thick, wooden, and beveled, with a heavy brass knocker, as would befit the entrance of a grand house. A male orderly in whites answered wearing plastic gloves. “Just getting Luella changed.”

Chances were he was not referring to her outfit.

Carter padded the hallway’s plush crimson carpet. The baseboards and notched cornices were a lustrous mahogany, the doorways topped with finely latticed panes. The bathrooms gleamed with alabaster and gold-plated taps. Such opulence lavished on people during the one period of their lives they were least capable of enjoying it seemed subtly obscene. Besides, as much as he would have relished the luxury of no longer worrying about the size of his Con Ed bill, he was suspicious of luxury in its conventional sense. For Carter, extravagance backfired. Taken to the max, the many-splendored thing merely demonstrated the limits to how wonderful a given whatnot got. A toilet with a heated seat and electric lid-lift might flush with a discreet hush, but you still pissed in it. Brass or plastic, a doorknob was a doorknob. It opened the door. He had never understood what fixtures that cost hundreds of dollars apiece were supposed to make you feel other than hoodwinked.

Douglas’s appointments added a note of bygone class. The walls were decorated with framed dust jackets of novels by former clients. Through the French doors, the spacious library was lined floor-to-ceiling with literary properties Douglas would have sold to editors at auction, often for a great deal more money than the royalties they reaped. (If an author earned back his advance, went the Mandible Agency’s ruling maxim, the agent had failed.) Oddly, though the physical book had only in the last few years made a wholesale departure, the room exuded the ambience of a historical diorama from the eighteenth century. All the effort poured into each volume—not only the effort of composing the text, but of choosing the font, selecting the paper, styling the diamonds under the chapter headings, and designing the cover, down to the touchy-issue size of the author’s name—seemed both poignant and pathetic. But Carter resisted his father’s sentimentality over a mere format. It made no more sense to get maudlin over hardbacks than it did to burst into tears over a mottled box of floppy discs. His grandkids had no idea what a microfloppy was.

“See anything that interests you, you’re welcome to borrow it.” Douglas closed the French doors behind him. He’d changed into one of the cream-colored suits he favored all year, though today’s cravat was a seasonably autumnal rust. “But I’m fussy about my returns policy. Never did understand what about books makes people feel free to steal them. Casserole dishes, drat them, always come back.”

Carter turned from the shelves. “Reading is an act of possession. You read it, you own it.”

“So it seems! Most people assume what kiboshed publishing was the Stone Age. Suddenly nobody dared buy anything online anymore—”

“Actually, hackers had pretty much killed the online marketplace altogether way before the Stone Age—”

“—but supposedly readers had already made the leap to digital, and wouldn’t go back to the textual equivalent of the ox cart,” Douglas powered on; it was always fruitless to interrupt. “In truth, piracy had already brought the industry to its knees. Well before 2024, no one was buying books, in any form. The end of internet commerce was simply the coup de grace. What’s left to download may be plentiful and free, but it’s one big slush pile. Browsing is like falling into a sewer.”

Carter had heard this shtick. Douglas would be mortified to realize how often he repeated himself now. Never retelling anecdotes to the same parties was a point of pride.

“By the end of Shelf Life,” Carter said, “all Jayne made a profit on was the coffee. Watching Amazon go down in flames, I broke out marshmallows.”

“I never told you”—Douglas had told him—“but I lost a small fortune on Amazon. Call it trading with the enemy, but I was holding some serious stock.”

Reference to his father’s portfolio was awkward at the best of times. Carter didn’t want to seem too interested, but Douglas would never be persuaded by a contrived indifference. Carter had always to indulge the conceit that of course Pop’s investment decisions were none of his business—which was horseshit. While he and his sister saw eye to eye on little, they agreed on this much: their father’s unfettered day trading with their inheritance was worrisome. If Douglas seemed pretty together, they might only be alerted to the fact that he’d lost it by the discovery that he’d lost the money, too.

Douglas unstoppered a crystal decanter on the liquor cabinet. “Noah’s Mill?”

“Early for me. And I’m driving.”

“I thought nobody drives anymore, either.”

Carter accepted the bourbon he thought he’d declined. Given the visit’s agenda, he’d drain it. Driverless cars having virtually eliminated DWI, cops weren’t on the interstate prowl anymore. “Our BeEtle has a driverless function, but I don’t use it. I’m like you—a dinosaur.”

“To paleontology, then!” Clinking Carter’s cut-glass tumbler against his own, Douglas sank into a leather armchair by the window. Even five-inch tennis must have worn him out. “It was a splendid life while it lasted. At least Enola had a good run.”

“But Nollie refuses to write for nothing. Which means an esteemed novelist like my sister writes nothing.” Carter added unctuously, “Such a terrible waste.”

“As her former agent, I can only approve.”

“I never have sorted out how much she raked in,” Carter fished. “She didn’t have another bestseller after Better Late Than.”

“We’re all entitled to our financial privacy.” Not the most promising preface for their pending confrontation, and the short i in privacy was annoying.

“So how’s Luella?” Carter asked, though he didn’t care.

“Oh, same, same. In remarkably fine fettle, I’m told.” He sounded dismayed.

Leaving Carter’s mother, Mimi, at sixty for a thirty-eight-year-old assistant might have given Douglas a second lease on life, but in due course the joke was on him. Oh, Douglas and his floozy girl Friday had a good stretch together—or so Carter was informed, since Nollie buddied up to their father after the divorce, while for years Carter avoided the couple’s sumptuous new estate in Oyster Bay out of loyalty to their mother. But the willowy, elegant interloper—who was trendily Afri-merican to boot, which seemed to a liberal New York family like cheating—was stricken with dementia in her late fifties. Douglas kept the condition under wraps for years. But at length he came upon his second wife naked in the shower, a mechanism she didn’t know how to turn on and whose purpose escaped her. That proved unfortunate, since she was also smeared head-to-toe in a smelly, sticky brown substance she could no longer identify and was trying to eat. Were it not for Luella, Douglas might have lasted a lot longer on Long Island. An irony that Mimi never ceased to savor: when Douglas dropped a thirty-six-year marriage like a hot brick, his wife was running the Dementia Research Foundation, and at ninety-five she was still on the board—stubbornly of sound mind, if only for revenge.

Relieved of his wife’s day-to-day care by Wellcome staff, Douglas now modeled his marriage on the relationship of master and pet. He fed Luella treats, to which she responded with the human equivalent of a tail-wag—when she remembered to chew and swallow, and didn’t remove the chocolate to melt it on the radiator. He did continue to talk to her; Carter had heard the running commentary when the two were in the next room. But then, lonely people talked the same way to their dogs.

“Ever wonder if this family is cursed?” Carter mused, still standing. Assuming the chair beside his father would have demarcated the point at which they were really going to talk. “I’m a newspaper journalist, and now Jayne complains that she can’t find any newsprint to clean the windows. As for Nollie, the career novelist is over. And, Pop, you were a king! But of one of those island nations swamped by sea-level rise that aren’t even a dot on the map anymore. There are no more literary agents. Even diesel engines: they’ve sunk without a trace. Everything we’ve done has vanished.”

Reference to diesel engines was strategic. The bulk of the Mandible money was amassed by Carter’s great-grandfather Elliot, a Midwestern industrialist. Douglas had added to the pile a bit, but he’d always lived high, and Mimi extracted a fair whack of his agency earnings in the divorce. The inheritance from Mandible Engine Corp. was protected from marital depredations by a trust. So if Carter hadn’t earned the cash to which he should soon be entitled, neither had his father. It pleased him to underscore that Douglas was a mere fiduciary caretaker, another undeserving beneficiary of capitalistic injustice.

Douglas expressed a sudden frustration with preparatory social niceties by rising with some difficulty for another finger of bourbon. Bad sign. He never drank before 8 p.m. “Since you were a journalist, you’ve been following the news?”

“Insofar as it’s possible, with no in-depth coverage, no fact-checking—”

“The end of the New York Times,” Douglas said patiently, “was not the end of the world. We all miss it, Carter. But it became a shadow of its former self.”

“Meaning when I worked for it.”

“Tetchiness doesn’t suit you. Aren’t you over seventy?”

“Not yet.”

“But old enough to realize that the end of the world takes place on rather a larger scale. As you must have begun to appreciate. Quite a week!”

“Well”—Carter took a deep breath—“with the stock exchange shut down, I guess you’ve had something of a vacation.”

“If having the federal government deny you access to your own accounts—scarcely different from being locked out of your own house—well, if that’s your idea of a vacation, yes. It’s been all beach umbrellas and boat drinks.”

“And do you know, ah—I mean, ballpark, what kind of a hit you’ve taken?” His father played his financial cards close to his chest. Carter had no idea of the size of the portfolio, down to the number of zeros.

“Use your head. Trading closes automatically once the market dives a set percentage or point drop. The SEC hasn’t deigned to re-open the Exchange since the Level 3 circuit breaker kicked in on Thursday. It doesn’t take much imagination to picture what will happen to the market when they do. I’m sure the SEC has pictured it. So whatever the values at which stocks left off are academic. The question is not what they are worth, but what they will be worth three seconds after the bell. Imagine all those investment-bank computers primed at the starting line—with which my poor fleXcreen can’t compete. Of course, one could argue that the value of assets to which you are denied access, perhaps indefinitely, is zero.” Reseated at a jaunty angle, Douglas had assumed a whimsical demeanor. He seemed almost pleased.

“One could argue?” said Carter. “Or that’s what you’re saying?”

“One could also argue,” Douglas continued with an infuriating mildness, “as a contingent on the web is already promoting, that this is an extraordinary and irrational hysteria from which the market will promptly bounce back. After a historically unprecedented dip, about which academics like your son-in-law will produce miles of trying analytical text, the dollar and the market may both more than recover. In which case, the next month or so could provide a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to buy low and sell high. With a bit of leveraging, investors swimming against the tide could easily grow their holdings by three or four times.”

This was not the multiple choice for which Carter had made this journey: his father was (a) destitute; (b) rich and about to get a whole lot richer; (c) somewhere in-between. Thanks.

“They’ve put limits on withdrawals, you know,” Carter said sulkily. “I can’t get more than three hundred bucks from an ATM.”

“They’re afraid of more bank runs. By trying too hard to prevent them, more bank runs are exactly what they’ll get—should they ever be so imprudent as to let you at your own money again.”

“The Fed chief was emphatic. Krugman said the limits were for a few days, max.”

“Anyone in a position of authority telling you something unpalatable is ‘temporary’ is a red flag. The quick fix of capital controls can seem so alluring: ‘We’ll simply make the rabble keep their money here. We’ll pass a law!’ The hard part is lifting capital controls, which becomes unthinkable the moment they’re instituted. Who wants to keep funds in a country that confuses a bank account with a bear trap? The moment you remove the constraints, the nation is broke. So you can be sure that at least the freeze on making monetary transfers out of the US will stay in place for some time to come. Look at Cyprus. The capital controls levied in 2013 weren’t entirely rescinded until two years later. Know how long those controls were meant to stay in place at their inception? Four days.”

“But this is the United States. Here, they can’t—”

“They can. And will. There’s nothing the Fed can’t do.” Again, this cheerfulness. Douglas fished a steamer from an inside pocket. The family patriarch was once a two-pack-a-day smoker, and Carter blamed electronic cigarettes for the man’s now-catastrophic longevity. The e-bacco emitted a teasing scent of French vanilla.

“Why do you seem to find this debacle so entertaining?”

“What does it matter if I’m entertained? After all, wasn’t it interesting,” Douglas supposed, stabbing the air with his stainless-steel wand like a Philharmonic conductor, “when the ECB, Japan, the Bank of England, and the Fed banded together to intercede the day after the rate spike, and all that doing ‘whatever it takes to support the dollar’ backfired? Traditionally, investors bow to the inevitable when central banks move in. But rampant purchasing of US securities meant the Fed was conjuring up yet more money out of thin air to buy the bonds. Which is why the dollar tanked in the first place. Made the fire sale of the dollar infinitely worse. I love it when by-the-book remedies don’t work the way they’re supposed to.”

“But you don’t seem the slightest bit upset! Is it because you’re practically a hundred? And there’s not much time left for you? Because not only am I planning to stick around a few more years, but I have kids, and they have kids—”

“Right now, every major stock exchange in the world has halted trading. It’s relaxing. You should enjoy the respite. Because Quiet Time won’t last.”

Finally Carter plunked into the adjoining armchair, doubling his chin on his clavicle with a scowl. He should remember: for the time being, he and his father were on the same side. “Economics isn’t my bailiwick. I don’t understand this ‘bancor’ business. The American news coverage is so hostile that I can’t make heads or tails of it. Guests on CBS just start shouting.”

“I suspect it’s a good idea—if it was not a good idea for Putin to roll it out.”

“At least these days Mr. President for Life keeps his shirt on.”

“I’m intrigued by how a whole new international currency was ready to go. Not the sort of thing one works out on the back of an envelope.”

“Maybe I’d expect a financial putsch from Russia and China,” Carter said. “But this coup is by US allies, too. Okay, not Europe—and never mind them—but the Saudis, the Emirates, Korea—after the tens of billions we shifted to them after unification? Ingrates. Not to mention Brazil, India, South Africa. Even Taiwan! Everyone’s ganging up on us! What’s going on?”

“We should be grateful,” Douglas said. “You do realize that without the bancor lined up as a replacement reserve currency, the fall of the dollar would plunge the entire world economy into a Dark Ages? We’d be buying eggs with rocks.”

“But how can they simply announce that oil, and gas—the whole commodities market—is henceforth to be conducted in these goofball ‘bancors’? It’s our damn oil, too, and our damn corn.” A New York Democrat really shouldn’t be spouting this indignant, nationalistic bilge. Too much American twenty-four-hour news, all singing the same apoplectic tune. Besides, father and son had chosen parts at the start. Douglas had co-opted the voice of reasonableness and fairness, which left Carter to fume.

“A better question is how we’ve got away with shoving our currency down the rest of the world’s throat for so long,” Douglas observed. “It’s been a multipolar world for decades. After the refunding of Social Security, the US defense budget won’t buy a cap pistol. Why should commodities be traded internationally in dollars?”

“Big whoop, you call it a bancor instead of a dollar. Like this ‘New IMF’: semantics.”

“Not just semantics. New means administered by a consortium of countries that presently doesn’t include us.”

“What, is it just, presto!” Carter flailed. “And the dollar is worth zip?”

“Theoretically, the US could buy into the bancor along with everyone else. But only by ponying up real assets to back it. That’s the difference in a nutshell. To swap fiat currency for bancors, you have to fork over to the New IMF a strictly proportioned basket of real commodities—corn, soy, oil, natural gas, deed to agricultural land. Rare earths … copper … Oh, fresh water sources! And gold, of course.”

“No way is Fort Knox moving to Moscow.”

“I don’t expect Washington to play ball. It’s too humiliating. Though if it makes you feel any better? The likes of Indonesia and Pakistan may have leapt to embrace the bancor as an antidote to chaos, but this new regime is going to screw plenty of the very governments that are backing it to the hilt. There’s modest flexibility built in, to avoid another euro debacle. Countries who’ve merely pegged their currencies to the bancor can appeal for devaluation. But the NIMF is bound to be stringent on that point. Since the whole idea of the bancor is to restrict the money supply. From the 1970s, the G-30 have all been churning out Monopoly money as if drawing from a board game with the combined components of several sets. It’s going to ferociously mess with some heads that now you have to cover your expenses and pay your trading partners in a currency that has real value.”

“The whole thing stinks to high heaven. Maybe Putin and his new friends were passively waiting for an opportune moment to pounce. But it’s a hell of a lot more likely that they caused the crash of the dollar.”

“Oh, that’s certainly how the White House is playing it. Big conspiracy. Threat to national security. Nothing to do with a Congress that won’t rein in entitlements. Nothing to do with the deficit, or the national debt, or a monetary policy modeled on the population’s waistline. Only evil outside forces conniving to destroy the greatest country in the world.”

Carter raked his fingers through what remained of his hair; the gene for male pattern baldness being handed down from the mother was a formula for father-son resentment. “I don’t understand how this happened.”

“Carter. I will let you in on what isn’t a secret to any housewife who’s bought a cucumber. The American dollar is worthless now not because of the rate spike, and not because of crashing on the international currency exchange, and not because of the bancor. It is worthless now because it was worthless before.”

“That’s melodramatic.”

“Not melodramatic—dramatic. In the hundred years following the establishment of the Federal Reserve in 1913, the dollar lost 95 percent of its value—when one of the purposes of the Fed was to safeguard the integrity of the currency. Great job, boys! Ever wonder why no one talks about millionaires anymore—why no one but a billionaire rates as rich? Because a man who had about ten grand in 1913 would be a millionaire a century later. Hell, everyone’s a millionaire these days, every halfway solvent member of the middle class. And the majority of that currency decay is historically recent. Why, the dollar lost half its value in the mere four years between 1977 and 1981.”

Never a science-fiction fan, instead Douglas now immersed himself in the more recently minted genre of apocalyptic economics, rehearsing debt-to-GDP ratios as he had once memorized Saul Bellow. (When younger, Carter had never imagined he’d grow nostalgic for being quoted to death from Seize the Day.) If Pop couldn’t remember the age of his only son, the chances were poor that any of this pontificating tutorial was even ballpark accurate. What few scraps of his feverish reading that the old man did recall verbatim would be exaggerated for effect. Yet the last Loony-Tunes statistic was the limit.

“You might double-check that,” Carter chided gently, in preference to what a load of crap. “In 1981, I was a junior in college. Why wouldn’t I remember my own currency that steeply in freefall?”

“Because it’s boring, son. The American government counts on your being bored by it. Why, I barely remember the fallout from Nixon going off the gold standard myself. I buried my head in books. Perhaps the wrong books, looking back, but it’s too late now. The point is, when you’ve debased your currency that utterly, there’s not much further left for it to fall. Besides the sheer dullness of it all, the dollar sliding to the penny hasn’t been all that noticeable because every other government has been busy doing the same thing—running the printing press overtime on the justification that a junk currency advantages exports. The world is drowning in worthless paper. But America in particular has been getting away with murder—playing on the heartbreaking international belief in Treasury bonds as the ultimate ‘safe haven.’ Really, the blind trust bears all the irrational hallmarks of theology. What else, financially, is there to believe in besides the full faith and credit of the United States? So we’ve borrowed for basically nothing on the basis of a childlike credulity for thirty years. You know the Fed’s been steadily trying to monetize the debt—”

“Cut it out, Pop. You’re showing off.” In the agency days, Douglas Mandible held forth about anastrophe, metonymy, and onomatopoeia—and now it was all arbitrage, margin calls, and open market operations. Day trading had infected his father’s mind like a fungus.

“You try living to ninety-seven with a wife who can’t recognize a fork. You’d acquire new expertise out of desperation, too. And it’s not complicated. Why, I taught Willing about monetizing the debt the last time you brought Florence up here, and the kid got it right away. Though I have to say that boy’s got a knack. Has that sharp-eyed, quick-on-the-uptake quality that was obvious in Enola by the time she was three.”

Drawing on an inhuman self-control, Carter stifled, Oh, give me a break!

“So,” Douglas continued. “You loan me ten bucks. I photocopy the bill four times, give you back one of the copies, and announce that we’re square. That’s monetizing the debt: I owe you nothing, and you’re stuck with a scrap of litter. For years, the fact that one can swap dollars for tangible goods and services has been a miracle of God. Why do you think I’m invested in the market? In theory, stocks entail owning real things. Unfortunately, I didn’t take into account that most of those stocks are denominated in dollars. And I’ve been as vulnerable as the next idiot to the bias that keeping the majority of your funds in American companies is erring on the safe side. So I do apologize. Had I any idea what was in the offing, I’d have diversified quite differently.”

The apology was Douglas’s first acknowledgment that the portfolio that may or may not have abracadabra-ed into a bunny rabbit was in the long run more his son’s than his own.

“I was going to ask you.” Carter’s tone was defeatist; he already knew the answer. “I have a 401(k), and a small pension from the Times. Is there anything I should do, to protect myself?”

“There’s nothing you can do, for as long as this asset freeze is in place—which is relaxing, too, isn’t it?” At last Douglas gentled his diatribe with a note of paternal tenderness. “As for when the SEC says, ‘Ready, set, go!’—I’d advise moving to gold, but that’s what millions of competing investors will be trying to do at the same time. There’s simply not that much of the metal on the planet, which is one of the main reasons it’s been a staple store of value for five thousand years. When the SEC called time, gold was already at an all-time high. When and if the game resumes, it will go through the roof before you can say Jack Robinson. I’m afraid the same advice pertains to any of the commodities that back the bancor. It’s too late,” Douglas announced elegiacally. “I wouldn’t bother.”

It had long before grown dark, and the banker’s lamp on the table between them cast a soft, protective glow. Once again Carter was struck by how nothing, or nothing tangible, had changed. He’d gulped a horrifying quantity of bourbon, and it was only mid-evening. He shouldn’t drive in this condition, and hadn’t the presence of mind to figure out the driverless function in the BeEtle now. He’d have to stay over. Jayne would be frantic. She wasn’t accustomed to spending the night alone. His wife had determinedly not kept up with the news this week, and wouldn’t be amenable to the idea that exceptional times required extensive consultation with his father. Jayne had become a firm believer in rising above news of any sort, all of which was bound to blow over if you ignored it resolutely enough. The head-in-a-paper-bag strategy worked a surprisingly high proportion of the time.

Douglas patted Carter’s thigh. “What say we have a bite? There’s the dining room, or Grace could whip up something here that isn’t low-salt, low-fat, low-fun.”

“This conversation hasn’t done wonders for my appetite.” Carter continued to slump. He didn’t call Jayne, who if she had attended to the nature of this errand at all would only want the gist. Which he still hadn’t grasped. A bit of bravery was in order—not his strong suit. “Have you been trying to tell me that we’re—that you’re wiped out?”

Douglas laughed. “No, no, no! It’s not as bad as that.”

Relief didn’t immediately drain the surge of adrenaline. Heart pounding in his ears, Carter felt faint, and dropped his head. “You never tell me about this stuff. Like you don’t trust me.” Hard booze made Carter morose.

“Not at all! I simply haven’t read you as interested in the nitty-gritty.”

“I guess I haven’t been. Now there’s nothing but nitty-gritty.”

“Quite. Some detail, then. I’ve steered clear of index funds, but only because I’ve got a piece of every company listed on the Dow.” The same pride once attended acquisition of the complete works of W. Somerset Maugham. “That aspect of the balance sheet could be grim. But I hold gold ETFs, mining stock, even the title to bullion in a safe-deposit box in downtown Manhattan. I always keep 10 percent in cash—with which one will still be able to buy a loaf of bread in the country, and you don’t have travel plans, do you?”

“No, the safari in Tanzania can wait for another year. No animals left anyway.”

“Good. Since the next endangered species will be the American tourist. Otherwise, a good tranche of the portfolio is in Treasuries. The yield is piss-poor, and they’ll drop in value now that the rate’s gone up, but, worse comes to worst, one can always wait for maturity. Times like these, it’s the principal you most want to hold on to.”

“But you said buying American bonds was a sign of worldwide gullibility.”

“That’s right! So why should I be any different?”

They were rising to head to the dining room—if Carter didn’t get some food into him soon he’d be sick—when a knock rapped on the library door. “Mr. Mandible, sir?” The orderly who’d been minding Luella poked his head in. “The president is about to address the nation on TV. The desk was sure you’d want to know.”