Читать книгу The Mandibles: A Family, 2029–2047 - Lionel Shriver - Страница 13

I told you I didn’t want to do this.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Not tepid. Violently opposed.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I guess text is something you see.”

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

“Sounds slow,” Lowell said glumly.

“It’s easy. It’s relaxing.”

“They do know how to read.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Who’s coming?” Goog asked.

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

“Oncologist,” Goog corrected scornfully.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yeah. Prolly was.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“So why are you telling me?”

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

“Like the police?”

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

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

“But what about the law?”

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

“Are you hiding any?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“But you should see the scene,” Ryan said. “It’s almost worth the aggravation for the theater. They’re searching every bag, not only the belongings of an unlucky few.”

“Thank God that, ever since the Shaving Cream Bomber, you can’t check luggage anymore,” Avery noted. “Or security could take a week.”

“Right now, the TSA couldn’t care less about bombs!” Ryan said. “But they are checking the inside sleeves of suitcases, and sometimes ripping the linings out. They’re prying into the folds of every wallet. They’re authorized to do hand searches, too; they slide their palms into your pockets, right next to the groin—unsavory, to say the least. You don’t only take off your shoes but your socks. They examine the heels for signs of tampering, and pull out the insoles. You could haul a rocket launcher through Reagan, and nobody would blink. But don’t try slipping out with an extra ten bucks!”

“It’s amazing how many cheats they’re catching,” Lin Yu said gleefully. “You wouldn’t believe how brazenly corporate fat cats are trying to walk onto planes with briefcases bulging with cash. It was so gross. Stacks of thousand-dollar bills everywhere. All these supposedly upstanding citizens, and it looked like a drug bust.”

“Except the bills scattered around the X-ray machine aren’t necessarily illicit,” Tom said. “I mean, we can at least presume that it is their money.”

“We can presume nothing of the kind,” Lin Yu said. “That’s wealth that this entire country helped to create.”

Tom took an it’s-going-to-be-a-long-night breath. “According to that reasoning, no one owns their money. The funds in your bank account actually belong to everybody.”

The pleasantness of Tom’s tone sounded forced. Wearing an outdated suit jacket with a collar, he was a rumpled, easy-going, good-humored man, more inclined to defuse tension with a joke than to ratchet it up by getting personal. Ordinarily, his gentle Maryland accent—that would be Murrelun accent—further beveled his tactful opinions, but events this fall had put even the laid-back on edge.

“Morally, your money does belong to everybody,” Ryan said. “The creation of capital requires the whole apparatus of the state to protect property rights, including intellectual property. Private enterprise is dependent on the nation as a whole for an educated workforce, transportation networks, and social order. No country, no fortune.”

“Yadda, yadda,” Lowell said. “We’ve all read Fair Game.” (Liar. In his resentment of the fuss made over it, Avery’s husband had never brought himself to read past a few pages of the introduction.)

“I’ll grant you this much.” Tom was making an almighty effort to remain affable, for which Avery was grateful. “’Kay, for the last several years inflation has bounced between 3 and 4 percent. I realize that to experts like you folks, I’ll sound dumb as a coal shovel. But the figure I tripped across the other day came as a shock to me: with 3 percent inflation, the dollar halves in value every twenty-three years. That’s from Fed money printing. So when I don’t control what ‘my’ money is worth, maybe it isn’t really mine in the first place. At best, it’s a loan. Which Krugman can zap into ashes while it’s still in my pocket, like a superhero.”

“I’m afraid that’s a layman’s reading, Tom.” When amateurs trod on his patch, Lowell rarely heeded Avery’s admonition that he would better beguile his companions by acting humbly receptive, not haughtily authoritative. “And too simplistic. Inflation has to be kept positive, to prevent deflation, which is the real bogeyman. Most of that 3 to 4 percent hails from rising commodity prices, not loose monetary policy. In fact, increasing the monetary base has had all sorts of benefits for our economy. Everyone got so excitable about quantitative easing back in the teens. What happened? Jack. Most of the cash seeped, profitably for everyone, to emerging markets.”

“Look, I won’t argue about money supply, which is outside my purview.” Tom was now sounding testy. “I was trying to make a point about these airport searches. Because in the olden days, meaning two months ago, you could take what was, by popular conceit, delusional or otherwise, your money out of the country or back in again, as much and as often as you wanted. So I don’t see why y’all are getting het up about these terrible, criminal businessmen”—tear-ble, crimnal bidnessmin—“who have the gall to try and transport their own cash overseas, when in October the same behavior was perfectly legit.”

“I thought there was a limit,” Avery said. “Like on those Customs forms—”

“Lotta people misunderstand that, hon,” Tom said. “Before Alvarado’s Renunciation Address, you only had to report carrying over ten thousand dollars on a FinCEN 105. So long as you declared it, carrying more than ten grand over the border wasn’t illegal, and they sure as hell didn’t take it away from you, either.”

“Hold it—are they confiscating the cash at the airport?” his wife Belle asked in horror—very restrained horror, since Belle Duval would remain contained and understated in the midst of an asteroid collision. Her attire was typically subtle: a creamy faint-pink top with a beige pencil skirt, a thin white scarf adding a subdued dash. Her voice was quiet; her makeup was quiet; her not-quite-blond hair may have been recently touched up with highlights, but the do itself—soft and neat—was quiet as could be. Yet Belle’s was a smart quiet, her reserve an attempt to withhold judgment.

“Yup, all smuggled goods are impounded,” Lowell said. “I gather these confiscations of cash are getting immense emotional, too. Fainting. Shouting matches.”

“Worse,” Ryan said. “One guy lay on the floor and sobbed. They had to carry him out. A woman in front of us—big enough you wouldn’t want to cross her—got into a fistfight with one of the agents. Before they took his wad off him, another guy tried to set the money on fire. Meanwhile someone at the next machine over was ripping up thousand-dollar bills—which is also a federal offense, and just compounded the charges.”

“Anything but let someone else have it,” Lin Yu said. “Gosh, makes you think that wealth doesn’t have an improving effect on people.”

“Currency seizure is making a fortune for the feds,” Tom said. “It’s basically an ‘airport departure tax,’ except they get to charge whatever a passenger is packing. Minus that hundred-dollar allowance, of course. So gracious of them to let you keep a little something for a hot drink.”

Avery basked in Tom’s soothing provincial accent: eh-uh-paht depah-chuh taxes, hunner-dollah allownse. So many Warshingtonians, as Tom would say, were blow-ins from elsewhere that friends born in the region were blessedly anchoring. Tom made her feel she lived somewhere in particular.

“Call it a tax, then,” Lin Yu said. “Probably the first taxes the douche bags have ever paid.”

“You have a doctorate in economics,” Belle said to Lin Yu, politely but firmly. “You must know that’s not likely the case. People of means pay the vast proportion of federal income taxes—”

“I’ve always admired that ‘airport departure’ gambit,” Lowell said, keeping conversation light as he poured another round of wine. “Popular in Africa. You have to pay to be allowed to leave. Like being held hostage. It shows a healthy humility about the state of your nation: ‘We know you’ll fork over just about anything to get out of here.’”

“Pretty soon,” Tom said quietly, “we may be willing to pay just about anything to get out of the United States.”

Sharing her husband’s wish that this early in the evening the gathering not get too dark, Avery intervened. “Think about it: no way are those TSA officers hanging around that much hard cash without picking an occasional twenty off the floor.”

Lowell chuckled. “More than a twenty. I heard the New York airports are feeding frenzies. But what gripes me is that hundred-dollar limit. You can’t get a taxi home from the airport with a hundred bucks.”

“But why are so many people trying to get cash out of the country,” Belle asked, “at the risk of having to forfeit it all?”

“Foreign exchange in the US is suspended indefinitely,” Ryan said. “Since the initial crash, the dollar has been dropping, oh, two-tenths of a percent or so almost every day. The über-rich are frantically trying to bundle their booty to London or Hong Kong—anywhere they can convert it to another currency that will hold its value. Bancors, usually—whose value is going up slightly, to Alvarado’s chagrin.”

“But if the value of the dollar outside the country is so low,” Belle said, “why consolidate the loss?”

“These are greedy people,” Ryan said. “For whom anything is better than nothing.”

“What’s so ‘greedy,’ Tom said, “about wanting to safeguard some tiny fraction of the worth of money you may have worked hard to earn?”

“Oh, please,” Lin Yu said. “Do you know anything about the people we’re talking about? The only ‘hard work’ they do is poke at a fleX to check their hedge funds, or—even more debilitating—transfer the proceeds after some squillionaire parent dies. They’re not digging ditches.”

“It can be a mistake,” Belle said carefully, “to throw the upper middle class and the ‘über-rich’ in the same boat. The moderately well off may not, as you say, dig ditches. But they often put in quite long hours and may still struggle to pay mortgages and tuition—”

“Not the poor little rich people routine!” Lin Yu cried. “I’ve heard the tear-jerk stories—about how all over DC the affluent can’t afford childcare anymore. Well, the nannies are losing their jobs. I know where my sympathy lies.”

“Ever notice, with these folks,” Tom murmured in Avery’s ear, “how injustice only applies to the hard-up? Nothing unfair can possibly happen to you if you own more than one pair of shoes.”

Having recently earned her doctorate, Lin Yu worked at a nonprofit, the Real American Way (on the left and right alike, outfits trying to co-opt patriotism all sounded the same). Alas, the redistributive policies that RAW promoted—vastly higher property, inheritance, and upper-bracket income taxes; a blanket 2 percent wealth tax on all cash, investments, and tangible assets—were the very policies from which anyone in a position to give money away would recoil, and the organization was chronically underfunded. So on her do-gooder salary, Lin Yu was unlikely to have experienced a vertiginous drop in net worth during the last two months. Like Tom, Avery was queasy about these heedless opinions, which applied exclusively to other people and cost their advocate nothing. Those ready refills of imported Viognier notwithstanding, Lin Yu’s hosts were another matter. Oh, Avery had no idea how severely their family’s circumstances had been damaged; with his expertise, obviously Lowell handled that side of things, and she’d been too frightened to ask for specifics. Yet she could still feel the wind in her ears, as if riding an elevator in freefall. Making a note to herself that inviting Ryan and Lin Yu had probably been a mistake, she slipped away to sear the fish.

I was telling Avery earlier this evening how much it breaks my heart to see all these panicking bastards scrambling out at the bottom of the market,” Lowell opined at the head of the table.

“If it’s the bottom,” Ryan countered from the foot of the table.

“That very anxiety is a trap,” Lowell said. “Suckers slosh in when the market’s frothy, and freak when it tanks. The key is to keep your nerve. I’ll want credit for this later, Biersdorfer: the dollar’s going to recover and then some. So will the Dow.”

“A century ago,” Ryan said, “the Dow only returned to its pre-Depression valuation after twenty-six years. In that long, you’ll be in your mid-seventies.”

“I’ve had it up to my eyeballs with this superstition that history is repeating itself at a tidy base-ten interval,” Lowell said. “Whole sectors of the economy are hale, and with the dollar so devalued our exports will undercut Vietnam’s.”

Avery wished her husband wouldn’t stab at his bluefin so distractedly; that ginger dressing had come out smashing. And she thirsted for a change of subject. It was all her patients wanted to discuss as well, or the few who showed up: what had happened to their investments. So drear.

Ryan shook his head paternally. “You’re kidding yourself, Stackhouse. Stocks are only headed further down. It took three solid years of unrelenting decline for the Dow to drop to its nadir in late 1932. From 381 to 41, remember? You should get out while you can still rescue some spare change.”

“Thanks for spreading the gloom, Biersdorfer. It drives prices knee-high, making this the time to buy,” Lowell insisted. “I’m scarfing up every depressed large cap I can.”

Avery’s ears pricked up. “You’re what?”

“Picking up bargains. Nothing you don’t do at Macy’s, my dear.” Macy’s came out with an incipient lisp. He’d had a fair bit of wine. Everyone had. The whole evening had been laced with the End of Days hysteria that drove Avery’s younger brother to a muddy field in Gloversville, but which drove normal people to drink.

“I may not know the fine points of our situation,” Avery said, hardly savoring her own tuna, “but gambling whatever pittance is left on more plummeting stocks is insane.”

From the chair opposite, Belle caught Avery’s eye. Trying times maybe, but it wasn’t seemly to conduct marital spats about money at table.

Avery shot her friend a returning glare. Fuck decorum. She and Lowell had three kids in private schools who would all expect, and had a right to expect, Ivy League educations. The mortgage on this townhouse was massive. All that at stake, and what did her husband do? Act optimistic in order to feel optimistic, as if by playing the Pied Piper of Pollyanna he could lead everybody else, and history itself, into la-la land. Usually, he was determined to be right for the sake of his pride. Now he was desperate to be right for the sake of their survival. But really, really needing to be right rather than merely wanting to be right didn’t affect being right, as opposed to fatally off the beam, by an iota.

“The slide has already slowed,” Lowell told his wife.

“If you’re so sure everything will turn out pink, why’d you order me to Chase in November to clean out our accounts? Remember, when they finally re-opened the banks?”

Lowell blushed. She was embarrassing him, in public, on purpose. “What I remember is you didn’t do it.”

“I wasn’t going to spend all day in the rain in a line that snaked around an entire city block, when by the time I got to the counter they’d be out of cash anyway. But you were the one who made fun of everybody afterwards. The ones who stood outside banks in the rain.”

“I only made fun of the people who lined up to pull out their money after the Fed promised to provide liquidity,” Lowell said coldly. “And after Alvarado clarified that bonds may have been voided, but Federal Deposit Insurance remained in force. Before that assurance, it was rational to worry that some banks would fold.”

“They ‘provided liquidity’ by printing money,” Tom said quietly, to no one in particular. “And they’ll cover FDIC claims by printing more.”

“What I’ve found fascinating,” Belle said, diplomatically directing the conversation elsewhere, “is the difference between the way Americans rallied around FDR, and how the public has responded to the gold recall from Alvarado. People are simply refusing to cough it up.”

“I had one patient so indignant,” Avery said, “that she wanted to go out and buy some gold, under the table, just so she could refuse to hand it over.”

“Fortunately, most compliance doesn’t rely on probity and patriotism,” Ryan said. “ETFs, mining stocks, bullion on deposit—the Treasury neatly commandeered everything on the record in one fell swoop.” He smiled. “Compensation was deliciously risible. A stunning laying of waste to what economic survivalists imagined was the ultimate safe bet.”

“Yes, it was like the Darwin Awards,” Lowell said. “Species eliminates ninnies clutching arcane medium of exchange like teddy bear. Man, that poor fool Mark Vandermire must be busted.”

“On the QT,” Avery asked the table, “anyone here slip a tinkling baggie into the rose bed?”

“Theoretically,” Belle said, glancing at Tom, “I can see why some couples might withhold their wedding rings.”

“I really thought Alvarado should have exempted rings,” Avery said.

With a nod toward Ryan and Lin Yu, Lowell said, “The left would have squawked about sports stars and Wall Street wives keeping engagement rings the size of bowling balls.”

“But all that government propaganda,” Tom said, “’bout how we been ‘attacked’ and we all have to ‘pull together’ and make ‘sacrifices’—it hasn’t worked. I loved the InnerTube video of that sumbitch flinging jewelry off the Golden Gate.”

“Some of the pushback is anti-Lat,” Lin Yu said. “Those videos are always of white people. It’s significant that it’s Alvarado’s policy. They won’t abdicate gold to a foreigner.”

“Americans have despised the federal government since way before Alvarado, hon,” Tom said. “The main difference this time is they got good reason. At Justice, we been charged with going after gold scofflaws, and I got to say I’m uncomfortable with the job. I thought I grew up in a country where you could own gold, or silver, or mud, or bancors—whatever stuff you took a fancy to long as it wasn’t, like, heroin. In a truly free country, you should prob’ly be able to buy heroin, too. This policy rubs me the wrong way. I don’t relish being dragged into enforcing it.”

“The US has confiscated assets en masse since the advent of income tax,” Belle countered reasonably; she’d drunk noticeably less than everyone else. “And never mind lousy old money. Historically, Uncle Sam has taken your sons.”

“Speaking of which, there’s a rumor going around,” Lin Yu said, “and it’s leaking from more than one department. I’ve heard the whole reason the administration has called in the gold is to give it to the Chinese. To buy Beijing off. To keep from having a war. To prevent, you know, even an invasion.”