Читать книгу The Mandibles: A Family, 2029–2047 - Lionel Shriver - Страница 12

Mom! Alvarado’s on in a minute!”

“That’s okay, sweetie!” his mother shouted from the kitchen. “I’ll watch it later.”

This was another of those where-were-you-then moments, and it was ominous when they bunched together. Back against Great Grand Man’s heavy wine-colored sofa, Willing nestled cross-legged on the floor, where he always felt safer, more deeply seated. The thrum of the announcer’s in a few moments … has made only one other address to the nation … rose up from the wooden parquet and trembled in his palms. For once he didn’t feel self-conscious about the blare intruding on Kurt in the basement. Alvarado was their tenant’s president also. Kurt should be paying attention: Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States. That was another sign that stuff was going roachbar. When they had to say it the long way—not only “the President” but “the President of the United States.” “The United States of America.” That was the worst.

Milo barked. Just once, before huddling into the protection of Willing’s thigh. Milo had never seemed too sure about Alvarado.

His mother was making a mistake. There were copies of everything. The duplicates seemed identical to the originals. Willing, too, could wait and listen to this speech later. On fleX or catch-up TV, the address would be indistinguishable from the image he was following now. But the copy would not be happening. He couldn’t explain it, but that made it completely different. Forever after, Willing will have watched this address when it was happening. Those sounds again, the artificially downward music of the announcers’ suppressed excitement, the forcing of their voices into darker, whispering tones when really they wanted to shout, assured him that later he would be glad and proud that he was watching this now and not after the fact.

Because big news got old fast. If you waited, somebody was bound to tell you about it before you learned it for yourself. They’d change the words around, too, and get everything in the wrong order. Willing hated being told what had happened. The telling people always seemed so smug and powerful, and they maintained their power by keeping their special knowledge to themselves for as long as possible. So they would feed you bits of information in sadistic dribs, like dog treats for Milo. You couldn’t trust the telling person either. Even if they claimed to hand over all that they knew, they only conveyed the part that they liked or especially hated. Being told—it was not the way to find anything out.

Buenas noches, mis compatriotas americanos. Daré instrucciones en español inmediatamente después de esta versión en inglés. Pero esta noche, y sólo esta noche, presionen uno para inglés.

Good evening, fellow Americans. At the beginning of this century, extra-national terrorists hijacked our own airplanes to rupture the Pentagon and destroy the World Trade Center. More recently, in 2024, our vital internet infrastructure was cataclysmically paralyzed by hostile foreign powers.

Modern warfare comes in many guises.

During this past week, our nation has once again been under attack. No towering skyscrapers have tumbled. Both the physical and digital systems on which we depend continue to function. Yet the attack we are currently sustaining is potentially no less devastating than nuclear missiles hurtling toward our cities.

What has been targeted is the very medium through which we trade with other nations and conduct commerce with one another—the medium through which our labors are rewarded, our debts are repaid, our tables are laid, and our children are secured medicines for their ailments.

What is at risk is no less than the almighty dollar itself.

Coordinating their chicanery, countries that wish this nation ill have played on the cowardly compliance of our allies. In the last ten days, a sequence of carefully timed financial dominoes were toppled—designed to raise the cost of financing our national debt, which would translate into you the American taxpayer keeping less of your hard-earned income. Our currency was also sabotaged on the international exchange markets. Most perfidiously of all, world leaders who resent the power, prestige, and success of our great nation have cobbled together the so-called “bancor”—an artificial, pretender currency with no history as legal tender.

Make no mistake. The bancor is not intended as a harmless alternative to the dollar. It is meant to replace the dollar. In a move every bit as threatening as raising a gun to our heads, we have been informed that the crops and raw materials on which we rely for our daily lives and livelihoods must now be traded internationally in bancors. A gesture of exceptionally high-handed insolence: the United States Department of the Treasury has also been apprised that American bonds held by foreign investors must henceforth be redeemed in bancors, at an unfavorable exchange rate capriciously chosen by an International Monetary Fund gone rogue. American bonds sold to foreign investors must henceforth be denominated in bancors—which is a challenge to our very sovereignty as a nation.

Ironically, the parties behind this organized fiscal coup immediately suffered from it. The American dollar is the lifeblood of international banking, and the backbone of financial markets around the world. That is why, as most of you know, we suspended trading on the New York Stock Exchange last week to prevent precipitous loss of wealth. But trading has also been halted in the wake of the same shock to the system in London, Paris, Berlin, Moscow, Hong Kong, and every other major stock exchange across the globe. International finance is holding its breath. As with every other crisis for more than a hundred years, the world waits for America to act. And this brave country never sustains insult without reply.

Right before addressing you, the American people, this evening, I convened an emergency session of Congress. Almost unanimously, your representatives passed a bill deeming that, until further notice, for American citizens to hold bancors, either onshore or within the confines of our financial system, shall from this point onward be considered an act of treason. In the interest of preserving not only our present prosperity, but our future prosperity—in the interest of maintaining our integrity, our capacity to hold our heads high as a nation—Americans and American entities are also forbidden from trading in bancors abroad.

For the time being, and only for the time being of course, capital above the amount of $100 is not to leave the country. These controls are temporary, their duration destined to be brief, and they will be lifted the moment that economic order is safely and securely restored.

As with military confrontations, fiscal warfare demands weaponry, and the fashioning of weaponry requires sacrifice. As we mobilized our forces and our industries to defend the cause of liberty in World War Two, so must we mobilize our resources to defend our liberty today. Rest assured that the greatest burden of this sacrifice will be borne by the broadest shoulders.

Using the powers vested in your president by the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977, I am calling in all gold reserves held in private hands. Gold-mining operations within our borders will be required to sell ore exclusively to the United States Treasury. Gold stocks, exchange-traded funds, and bullion will likewise be transferred to the Treasury. In contrast to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s gold nationalization of 1933, when FDR made his bold bid to rescue our suffering nation from the Great Depression, there will be no exceptions for jewelers or jewelry. All such patriotic forfeitures will be compensated by weight, albeit at a rate that does not reflect the hysterical inflation of gold stocks in the lead-up to this emergency. Hoarding will not be tolerated. Punitive fines of up to $250,000 will be levied on those who fail to comply. Retaining gold in any form beyond the deadline of November 30, 2029, will thenceforth be considered a criminal offense, punishable by no less than ten years in prison.

All gold exports from our shores are henceforth prohibited. In retaliation for outside agitators’ attempts to fray the very fabric of our flag, all foreign gold reserves currently stored with the Federal Reserve are hereby confiscated, and become the property of the American government.

Lastly: it is the intention of a conspiracy of foreign powers to yoke the government of this illustrious land with an intolerable and infeasible encumbrance from the interest on its debt. That debt was borrowed in good faith, and in due course, under any but the most extraordinary circumstances, would have been repaid in good faith. But when our probity is returned with malice and betrayal, continued good faith counts only as credulity and weakness. Both sides need to honor an agreement for any contract to remain in force. What’s more, this great country will not so honor its obligations as to destroy its very existence in the process. A nation conceived in liberty cannot conduct its daily business on its knees.

As of this evening, myself, the secretary of the Treasury, and the chairman of the United States Federal Reserve have declared a universal “reset.” In the interest of preserving the very nation that would meet its obligations of the future, we are compelled to put aside the obligations of the past. All Treasury bills, notes, and bonds are forthwith declared null and void. Many a debtor has wept in gratitude for the mercy of a wiped slate, the right to a second chance, which for individuals and corporations alike all fair-minded judicial systems like our own have enshrined in law. So also must government be able to draw a line and say: here we begin afresh.

Thus let us strike into the future, our step lightened, our hearts gladdened—confident in the endurance of the greatest country on earth. God bless you. And God bless the United States of America. Good night.

The moment it was over, the address was available all over the web, but sometimes too much access discouraged you from taking advantage of it; all urgency evaporated. So Florence was content for Willing to summarize the speech—with remarkable thoroughness for a thirteen-year-old—as she hung out the wash in the utility room off the kitchen. That low-water cycle always left the light loads dingy.

“That’s a lot to digest.” Florence eyed her son, at attention beside the washer, arms straight, hands flat to his sides, dark eyes burning forward, quite the little soldier. She’d no idea how she’d raised such a sober-sided boy, ready to take on the weight of the world at a scant eighty-six pounds. “You’re not worried, are you? You look worried.”

“I’m worried,” he reported.

“Listen.” Abandoning the socks in the drum, Florence knelt more than need be with his height at last shooting up. “From what you’ve told me, we’ve nothing to worry about. You see any gold lying around that we have to give the government? Even if we had some, they’d pay us for it, that’s what you said.”

“If the government can make us give them anything they want, what else can they make us give them? If they said they need all the dogs, would I have to give them Milo?”

She laughed. “President Alvarado is never going to take Milo. He’s a nice man. Esteban and I voted for him, remember? And that newfangled money, well—I wouldn’t know a ‘bancor’ if it bit me on the butt. Do we ever take ‘bancors’ to Green Acre to buy cereal? No. So no one’s going to arrest you, or Esteban, or your mother for carrying around some nonsense currency that really has to do with complicated financial dealings between countries. As for this … ‘debt renunciation’?”

“That’s what the commentators called it.”

“Off the top of my head, I bet that ‘reset’ you told me about will keep our taxes down. That’s good for us. That way we keep more of my salary.”

“The president borrowed money from people and now won’t pay it back. That doesn’t seem careless. That seems kind of boomerpoop.”

Florence stood briskly and spanked her hands. “First off, this president borrowed hardly anything. He inherited the debt from other presidents, who couldn’t stop rescuing jerkwater countries that only ended up hating us for our helping hand. Also, most of that money is from the Chinese, who are big cheats, and the real boomerpoops, since they almost certainly knocked out our whole country’s internet five years ago. Fuck them.”

“Nobody caught them. Nobody came up with any proof.”

“That makes the operation even nastier. Not owning up? But you’d have to be an idiota not to know who did it.” Florence caught herself. “Sorry, I didn’t mean you’re stupid.”

“But the Chinese won’t like this. If they could take out the internet before, they could do it again.”

“No, they can’t. All former vulnerabilities have been secured.” Florence was uncomfortably aware of reciting this received wisdom with a slight singsong.

“That’s what people say. That doesn’t mean it’s true.”

“Willing, I’ve no idea how you got to be such a cynic by the age of thirteen.”

He glowered. “They could do worse than knock out the internet.”

“Stop it. You’re letting your imagination run away with you. The point is, none of what you told me the president announced on TV has anything to do with us, okay?”

“Everything has to do with everything else,” he announced grimly.

“Where did you get that?”

“From the universe.”

“Jesus, my son’s become a mystic. Lighten up. Let’s have some ice cream.”

Given that he was eternally free to watch the other two-thousand-some channels streamed en español, Florence knew better than to believe that Esteban was watching the second delivery of the address in Spanish to “maintain his fluency.” Still jubilant over Dante Alvarado’s narrow victory in 2028, he was basking. During this first honeymoon year, for hardcore supporters like Esteban, America’s first Lat president could do no wrong.

The other slightly-less-than-half of the country was if anything more sullen than in 2008, but also more prone to keep their mouths shut. This time around, no dyspeptic “birthers” could object that the Democrat was born outside the country. Its passage greatly assisted by Arnold Schwarzenegger’s failed bid for 2024, the Twenty-Eighth Amendment nullified the arcane constitutional requirement that presidents be born on American soil. (Florence wasn’t the only one who attributed the Terminator’s surprise defeat to the eleventh-hour incumbency gimmick of nominating Judith Sheindlin—a.k.a. “Judge Judy”—to the Supreme Court. The Court’s sessions had been livelier since, and shorter.) Dante Alvarado being unabashedly born in Oaxaca had helped to get him elected. The fact that many DC press conferences and congressional debates were now conducted in Spanish was an enduring source of pride for Esteban’s community. Although some Democrats regarded Alvarado’s decision to deliver his inaugural address in January exclusively in his native language as gratuitously provocative, Florence didn’t care. The broadcast of that soaring, historic speech on the Washington Mall had provided a welcome opportunity to brush up on her own Spanish.

Besides, back in 2024 she’d put herself on notice that Florence Darkly was a racist.

At 5:08 p.m. that fateful Saturday in March, she and Willing had been shopping in Manhattan, taking advantage of the blowout spring sale at the sprawling Chelsea branch of Bed Bath & Beyond. They’d just got through checkout when the store’s lights went off. Out on the street, the sidewalks were jammed with people shaking out fleXes in frustration; checking for connectivity on her own fleX was as compulsive as it was futile. A blackout was one thing—the whole area seemed to have no power—but that didn’t explain the absence of satellite coverage. People poured out of the subway stations; the trains had stopped. The stoplights out, an accident at West Nineteenth Street had brought traffic on Sixth Avenue to a standstill. The cacophony of horns was strangely comforting: signs of life.

Clutching her son’s hand, she hadn’t yet entered the world in which refusing to relinquish their new wicker laundry hamper was ridiculous—though its being weighed down with other bargains stuffed inside made the bulky object especially awkward. As they negotiated their way through crowds milling toward hysteria, her struggling with the white elephant must have been conspicuous. When a muscular Mexican attempted to take it away from her, she assumed he was undocumented and a thief, using the pandemonium to hustle. She yanked the hamper back.

The man promised her in soothingly correct English that he was only trying to help. He said no one he’d spoken to seemed to know why suddenly nothing worked, because the very devices with which you answered such questions had ceased to function. He warned her that, clutching the hamper with one arm and a child with the other, she risked being trampled. He asked where they lived; she was reluctant to tell him, but didn’t want to be rude. He said he also had to get home to Brooklyn. He suggested they take the Manhattan Bridge, whose pedestrian ramp would be less popular than the Brooklyn Bridge one, sure to be mobbed. He hoisted the loaded hamper on his shoulder. At first they didn’t talk. He terrified her. But as he prowed through crowds across Eighteenth Street, then down Second Avenue to Chrystie, she had to admit that she’d never have carried their chattel so far on her own, nor would she have as expertly navigated the most direct route to the pedestrian entrance at Canal Street without an app. He was right about the choice of bridge. They weren’t jostled so badly that they were ever in danger of being pushed over the rail into the East River.

On the ramp, they all agreed that the hardest part was not knowing what had happened. On every side, other pedestrians volunteered their sure-fire theories: Halley’s Comet had hit New Jersey. The government was conducting a security drill. There’d been another terrorist attack. Harold Camping’s notorious prediction that the Rapture would arrive on May 21, 2011, was only off by thirteen years, nine months, and fifteen days.

When they finally curved down the ramp to their borough, she begged to assume the burden and proceed with her eight-year-old’s help. Their Mexican escort claimed to live in Sunset Park, six miles west of East Flatbush, and his continuing in the wrong direction didn’t make any sense—unless he planned to accost her.

Yet by now it was dark, obliteratingly so. Only individual fleXpots penetrated the blackness. Behind them, Manhattan could have been a mountain range. Traffic perfectly gridlocked, since driverless functions and onboard computers relied on the internet, most cars had been abandoned, though families huddled inside a few sedans, doubtless with the doors locked. So the Lat insisted not only on seeing them home, but on depleting his fleX to light the way. By the time the trio was trudging up Flatbush near the park, his fleX went dead, and they had to switch to Florence’s. The avenue was lined with other pilgrims and the waning glow of their small devices, like penitents with luminarias. The whole trip on foot was nearly ten miles and took four and a half hours. So by the time they turned onto Snyder, Florence assumed the hamper and let their protector carry Willing, who fell asleep in his arms. Later the man would explain that of course he’d been scared, as everyone was scared, but that the surest way to keep his head was to concentrate on the safety of these two strangers. His name was Esteban Padilla, and by the time they reached East Fifty-Fifth Street, dog-tired, fully in the dark again because Florence’s fleX was shot now, too, in need of locating candles and matches in the kitchen on their hands and knees, Florence was a lot less of a racist and in love.

Last November’s election meant so much to her partner that she’d kept a slight queasiness about the new president to herself. Oh, she was thrilled by the symbolism; after all the acrimony over immigration, a Lat in the White House was the ultimate emblem of inclusion. Yet the man had a baby-faced softness only emphasized by the palatalized consonants of a Mexican accent, which in Alvarado’s case sometimes seemed a bit put on. (When he spoke to white audiences during the campaign, his pronunciation crisped right up.) It wasn’t only that he was fat—what the hell, three-quarters of the country was fat—it was the kind of fat. He had a momma’s boy puffiness that might make foreign heads of state regard him as a pushover.

Pulling down bowls, Florence debated asking Kurt to join them for ice cream. She was always of two minds about how much to enfold their basement tenant, a part-time florist, into the family’s social life. He was sweet about bringing back aging bouquets that would have been thrown away, cheering their home with freesias. And she liked him well enough, which she wished he would simply register and then relax. After all, he was polite, solicitous, intelligent, well spoken, and eager. (Overeager? And eager for what? To be liked, obviously, and even being liked well enough would have sufficed.) Yet his outsize gratitude for every common kindness was exhausting. The fact that he never complained made their lives easier, but he’d every right to complain. Tall for the low ceiling downstairs, he perpetually hit his head on the crossbeams, which she should have cushioned with foam appliqué. An amateur musician, he would only practice the sax with no one else home, while upstairs, even Willing’s light, stealthy tread translated into elephantine pounding from below. Did Kurt Inglewood even plead with the family to keep the TV low? No, no, no. So what tilted the balance this evening toward three bowls not four made Florence feel sheepish.

Roughly her age, trim and nicely proportioned, with a long, sharply planed face, Kurt should have qualified as handsome. A guy with a middle-class upbringing who’d struggled from one unsatisfying, low-paid job to another just as Florence had, Kurt would have come across as a charming and competent striver waiting for one decent break when he was younger. But one of the corners he’d cut for years was dental care. Decay had blackened an engaging smile into a vampiric leer. Absent fifty grand’s worth of implants, fillings, and bridges, he’d be single for life. Now in his forties with those teeth, he’d tipped tragically, unfairly, and perhaps permanently into the class of loser—an ugly, dehumanizing label that she had narrowly escaped herself. She encountered no end of poor dental hygiene at the shelter, and maybe that was the problem tonight. She wouldn’t have minded sharing ice cream with Kurt-as-Kurt. But it had been a long day at Adelphi, and she simply couldn’t face that smile.

Florence dished up three scoops. Feeling that edgy gaiety of something major having happened even if she couldn’t tell yet if it was good or bad, she impulsively put a chunk of peppermint chip in Milo’s dog dish. They convened in the living room with spoons, and Esteban turned off the TV.

“So what’s your take on the address?” she asked Esteban as they lounged with dessert on the sofa.

“Está maravilloso,” he declared. “Those decrepit Republicans—they’re always carping about how Alvarado is weak and spineless. This’ll show them. Talk about standing up for this country! That’s the nerviest set of policy decisions I’ve heard from any president in my life. They can’t call him a pussy now.”

Florence guffawed. “They might call him some other things. Like a grifter.”

“Only people get hurt deserve it,” Esteban said confidently. “Bunch of Asian assholes. Who gives a shit.”

Densely silent since their conversation in the laundry room, Willing emerged from his stewing with a prize-winning non sequitur: “We could always move to France.”

“Oka-ay …,” Florence said, stroking her son’s neck with a forefinger as he sat rigidly on the floor. His ice cream was melting. “And why would we do that?”

“Nollie lives in Paris,” Willing said. “It might be safer. The president said they won’t let dollars out of the country. He didn’t say they won’t let people out. Yet.”

Florence glanced at Esteban and shook her head like, Don’t ask. “I suppose you might visit your great-aunt someday. You two seemed to get on well during her last trip to New York.”

“Nollie does what she wants. Everyone else does what they’re supposed to,” Willing said. “Jayne and Carter say she’s selfish. That might be a good thing. It’s the selfish people, a certain kind of selfish, who you want on your side.”

Florence assured her son that there were no “sides,” observed that he was overtired, urged him to bed, and finished his ice cream, now turned to soup. After he’d brushed his teeth, she murmured in the boy’s doorway that no one was moving anywhere, and that lots of events that seem strange and scary up close end up looking like the plain ups and downs of regular life later on. The Stone Age seemed like the end of the world, didn’t it? And it wasn’t.

Yet later her own sleep was troubled. The disquiet was subterranean. Bedrock was shifting—what had to stay the same in order for other things safely to change. In 2024, Florence came to appreciate the vast difference between something bad happening and the very systems through which anything happens going bad. Even if the president’s somber decrees had no concrete impact on the day-to-day in East Flatbush, the edicts seemed to challenge her life at ground level—not so much the trifling to-and-fro of what she earned and what she spent, what she did and where she went, but who she was.

Walking to the bus stop the next morning, Florence crossed to drop the Con Ed bill in the mailbox—a payment method that felt as primitive as lighting a fire with flint. So history could reverse. Now that any transaction involving vital infrastructure or finance had to be conducted offline by law, trashy, space-eating paper bank statements and utility bills once again littered domestic tabletops. The checkbook, too, had been salvaged from the dustbin of the past, hairballs and used dental floss clinging between its leaves. But at least the necessity of scrawling on a rectangle “Two hundred forty-three and 29/100s” alone justified mastery of the formation of letters by hand. Close to losing the skill altogether, she’d been forced to void the first Con Ed check at breakfast because it was illegible. So she’d tutored Willing on printing the alphabet, since they didn’t teach handwriting in school anymore. Most of his classmates couldn’t write their own names. This was progress? But that was an old-fashioned concern that kids considered drear.

As the envelope fluttered into the blue maw, she frowned. If “internet vulnerabilities” had been fixed, why did we still have to pay electric bills by check?

The “gentry” encroaching ever farther east into Brooklyn took private transport. As usual the only white passenger on the standing-room-only bus, Florence strained to pick up any reference to Alvarado’s address. The Afri-mericans spoke their own dialect, only partially discernible to honks, infiltrated by scraps of mangled Spanish. Among the Lats, the only rapid urban Spanish she could confidently translate concerned the latest music rage, beastRap, comprising birdcalls, wolf howls, lion roars, cat purrs, and barking. (Not her thing, but when artfully mixed, some of the songs were stirring.) A screeching seagull tune with an overlaid rhythm track of pecking seemed to generate more excitement on the B41 than the wholesale voiding of American bonds. Yet once the news filtered down to the street, gold nationalization wouldn’t go down well with this crowd, many of whose toughs were looped with gleaming yellow chains. It was hard to picture these muscular brothers and muchachos lining up patriotically around the block to deliver their adornments to the Treasury. With the likes of that hulking weight-room habitué looming by the door—were the feds planning to wrestle him to the pavement and yank out the gold teeth with pliers?

A generation ago, this stretch of Flatbush Avenue north of Prospect Park was trashy with the loud rinky-dink of carpet warehouses, discount drug stores, nail salons, and delis with doughnuts slathered in pink icing. But after the stadium was built at the bottom of the hill, the neighborhood spiffed up. The “affordable housing” that developers promised as part of the stadium deal with the city was nearly as costly as the luxury apartments. Flatbush’s rambunctious street feel had muted to a sepulchral hush. Pedestrians were few. The bee-beep of the private vans that used to usher the working class up and down the hill for a dollar had been replaced by the soft rush of electric taxis. The avenue was oh, so civilized, and oh, so dead.

Florence rather relished the fact that the commercial transformation of the once vibrant, garish area must have put the well-heeled new residents to no end of inconvenience. Oh, you could get a facelift nearby, put your dog in therapy, or spend $500 at Ottawa on a bafflingly trendy dinner of Canadian cuisine (the city’s elite was running out of new ethnicities whose food could become fashionable). But you couldn’t buy a screwdriver, pick up a gallon of paint, take in your dry cleaning, get new tips on your high heels, copy a key, or buy a slice of pizza. Wealthy residents might own bicycles worth $5K, but no shop within miles would repair the brakes. Why, the nearest supermarket was a forty-five-minute hike to Third Avenue. High rents had priced out the very service sector whose presence at ready hand once helped to justify urban living. For all practical purposes, affluent New Yorkers resided in a crowded, cluttered version of the countryside, where you had to drive five miles for a quart of milk.

Florence hopped off at Fulton Street and headed east with her collar pulled close. Fall had been merciful so far, and this was the first day of the season the wind had that bite in it, foretelling yet another vicious New York winter. The jet stream seemingly having hove south across the whole country for good, the anachronism global warming had been conclusively jettisoned in the US. She hung a left on Adelphi Street, whose traffic had grown lighter now that the underpass was closed off a few blocks farther up; ever since the horrendous collapse of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway along Hamilton Avenue, not far from her parents’ house, no one was allowed to come near it.

She assessed the intake line as pro forma: about twenty families, the ubiquitous strollers looped with as many bags as they could carry without toppling over. Several adults were smoking. These were some of the last holdouts who puffed on real cigarettes, despite their being far pricier than steamers. Ridiculous, since she’d never been addicted herself, but the sharp, toxic scent of tobacco made Florence nostalgic.

On a leafy street in Fort Greene, the Adelphi Family Residence was formerly a private apartment building willed to the city by a childless landowner—one of a torrent of bequests that had poured into public coffers as well as into private charities from the boomer generation, a hefty proportion of which had neglected to reproduce and had no one else left to be nice to. The tall, tawny-bricked building with period details was a big step up from the much-discredited and now-defunct Auburn shelter in the projects a few blocks away. To accommodate more residents, the apartments had been carved into stingier units with no kitchens and communal bathrooms, but there was also a cafeteria and nominal rec room (whose Ping-Pong tables never had balls). Funny, she and Esteban could never afford this tony a neighborhood in a million years.

Florence waved at Mateo and Rasta, the guards at the entrance, then threw her backpack on the lobby’s security belt and did a stylish twirl in the all-body X-ray. (Mere metal detectors no longer cut it. Plastic gun replicas made from home 3-D printers had improved.) It was too bad that the lobby’s intricate nineteenth-century tiling was obscured by posters—home is where the heart is!; success is just failure tried one more time!—though the cheerful admonishments helped to compensate for the grimmer notice, verbal or physical abuse of staff will not be tolerated.

Adelphi wasn’t the vermin-infested hellhole teeming with sexual predators that her pitying neighbors like Brendon the Financial Clairvoyant no doubt imagined. What depressed Florence about her job, then, wasn’t squalor, or even the poverty and desperation that drove people here. It was the aimlessness. The collective atmosphere of so many people in one place having lost any purposeful sense of traveling from point A to point B—that milling-about-and-waiting-to-die fug that penetrated the institution—disquieted her not for its contrast with her own driving, forward-thrust story, but for its reflection of how she, too, felt much of the time. At Barnard, she’d never have imagined herself mopping up vomit with the best of them, save perhaps in a charitable capacity, in some brave, brief experimental phase before getting on with her career. She didn’t understand how she ended up at Adelphi any more than its residents did. She didn’t know what could possibly lie on the other side of this place for her any more than they did, either. While crude survival from one day to the next might be every human’s ultimate animal goal, for generations the Mandible family had managed to dress up the project as considerably more exalted. Motherhood might have provided a sense of direction, and Willing did give gathering indications of being bright—but the smarter he seemed, the more she felt impotent to do right by his talents. Unlike Avery, she’d no problem with Willing being taught in Spanish, so long as he was taught. Yet every fact he volunteered, every skill he exhibited, either she had taught her son or her son had taught himself. The school sucked.

An armed security guard behind her, Florence assumed the desk in the lobby and processed the morning’s arrivals. As ever, a handful of families imagined they could simply show up at the door and grab a bed. Ha! So she’d send them to the DHS intake in the South Bronx, along with a voucher for the van parked outside. Few would be back. Qualifying as homeless was an art, and God forbid you should mention a great-uncle with a spare room in Arkansas or you’d be on the red-eye bus to Little Rock that night. For the others who’d jumped the hoops, arriving with fattening sheaves of documents in sticky plastic binders, Adelphi had barely enough vacant units, and larger families would be crowded. The shelter operated at maximum capacity because two-thirds of the units were permanently bed-blocked. In theory, shelter accommodation was temporary. In practice, most residents lived here for years.

Florence ushered the new families to their quarters, parents clutching pamphlets of rules and privileges. In the rare instance that the family hadn’t lived in a shelter before, the environs came as a shock. Rooms were equipped with dressers missing drawers and mattresses on the floor, with the odd kitchen chair but seldom a table to go with it. Though Adelphi had a few OCD neatniks, most occupied units were piled thrift-shop high with clothes in every corner, the floors junky with plastic tricycles, broken bikes, and milk crates of outdated electronics.

So the intake always complained: What, you telling me there a shared baffroom? Where Dajonda gonna sleep, she sixteen—ain’t she get a room with a door? What do you mean we can’t have no microwave? Them sheets, they stained. Lady in the lobby say these TV don’t get Netflix! Melita here allergic to wheat—so don’t you be serving us any of that soggy pasta. Not much of a view. From our old room in Auburn, you could see the Empire State Building!

Florence always shimmered between two distinct reactions to this inexorable carping: I know, I would hate to share a bathroom with strangers myself. Being homeless doesn’t mean you don’t value privacy, and if I had a teenage girl in one of these places I’d keep her close. The policy on microwaves is unreasonable, since warming up a can of soup hardly means the room gets infested. Homeless people have every reason to value clean linen, to hope for quality entertainment, and to expect their dietary requirements to be catered to. Me, I hate overcooked pasta. Overall, it makes perfect psychological sense that, brought this low, you would want to firmly establish that you still have likes and dislikes, that you still have standards.

A millisecond later: You are in the most expensive city in the country if not the world. You have just been given a free place to live, three free meals a day, free electricity, and even free WATER, while people like me working long hours in jobs we don’t always like can barely stretch to a chicken. For reasons beyond me, you have seven children you expect other people to support, while I have only the one, for whom I provide clothing, food, and shelter. You may have to share a bathroom, but your old-style torrent of a shower beats my “walk in the fog” by a mile, so put a sock in it.

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.