Лайонел Шрайвер - The Mandibles - A Family, 2029-2047

Willing commissioned a van for a three-pointed round trip. Its first port of call was New York. It picked up Fifa—later she said it was like being kidnapped; Willing preferred the term Shanghaied . The story would come to seem romantic. The van driver scooped up Savannah and Bing, and after a great deal of argument, their older brother. In DC, Lowell staunchly opposed going anywhere until he got word that, after his son’s resignation from the Scab, his lectureship at Georgetown was rescinded. Avery was sad that her Vertical Reconditioning therapy would be superfluous in Nevada, though she was glad of the reason for that. The van returned to Las Vegas by way of Montana. Jayne was terrified, but Jayne was always terrified. Not wishing to repeat the mistake that Nollie had made with their mother, Carter wanted to reconcile with his sister before he died. There was enough room in the van for their caretaker rob and the Mandible silver service, whose restoration to the larger family would make possession of sixteen iced-tea spoons seem much more sensible. It all worked out quite nicely.

The one personal indulgence Willing purchased with Nollie’s treasure was having his chip fried. The procedure was common in the Free State, and safer than surgical extraction: a blast of high-frequency radio waves frazzled the implant’s satellite communications. Though the technology’s inventor had grown wealthy, Willing knew no Nevadans with neutered chips who’d trusted the procedure enough to try crossing into the USA proper. So maybe the process was a load of hokum. But Willing felt cleaner after, like a sexual assault victim having numbly submitted to swabs, examinations, and photographs who was finally allowed to take a shower.

Once he earned a high school equivalency and graduated from college, Willing confirmed the wisdom of having focused his studies on water: he would never lack for work. Yet to avoid becoming a hydrology killjoy, once a year on his mother’s birthday he and Fifa took a gloriously wasteful fifteen-minute shower with the eco-setting disabled. The annual ritual cost over a hundred continentals, and it was worth it. Symbolically, he’d framed the original-issue C-note from the underground silo in Nebraska and hung it over the toilet in the bathroom, where once a year condensation from their sinful shower fogged the greenback’s glass.

As she grew older herself, Fifa softened on shrivs, and her business installing hallway railings and electric stairway lifts achieved a reputation as compassionate. The biggest favor she did the elderly during her installations was to bring along a selection of rambunctious Mandible children—Bing’s, Savannah’s, Goog’s, or their own.

Unfortunately, the excessive water required made the operation economically unfeasible, and Jarred and Bing dolefully allowed their lemon orchard to wither. Jarred was philosophical, reminding his frustrated farm workers that all men were endowed by their Creator with an inalienable right only to the pursuit of happiness. At least they nursed a few potted lemon trees at Citadel Redux, where there were always wedges for tequila shots. Assembling for ritual cocktails on the veranda at sunset, the adults wrangled good-naturedly over who got to drink from the remaining Bountiful House goblet, until Goog’s youngest hellion shattered the legendary keepsake. To quell his temper, Willing remembered what he’d told Nollie about the books that they burned in the oil drum: with objects, you can take the meaning back . Presto, the storied goblet became a crummy old glass. Willing wondered if he should learn to take his own advice more often.

Savannah’s fabric designs grew as renowned as cloth could get in an embargoed state that was mostly desert—which, admittedly, wasn’t very. Avery concocted yet another marginal therapy that attracted scads of cuckoo clients to her practice at Citadel, whom everyone else got to make fun of when they went home. Lowell spent his retirement hunched over another treatise explaining why, with a “medieval” monetary policy, the USN would collapse any day now. Haranguing packed audiences, he became Nevada’s most famous iconoclast, while Jarred embraced the mainstream as a solid, patriotic citizen. For the sheer variety at first, they both seemed to relish swapping roles, though over time Jarred found pom-pomming as an establishment cheerleader who promoted the status quo a little dumpy-feeling. Jayne was disallowed a Quiet Room, even if the sprawling Spanish Modern compound had the space. Though better adjusted, she never stopped mourning Great Grand Man’s sterling asparagus tongs, gifted pointedly, if you will, to an ungrateful house-jacker. Keen to keep himself gainfully occupied in his nineties, Carter started a newspaper. It ran at a loss, but it seems that Nevadans had missed the Las Vegas Sun . Everything in Carter’s newspaper wasn’t accurate, but the odds of a given factoid being at least sort-of-true were better than fifty-fifty, which beat the internet by a yard.

In due course, Kurt limped through Citadel’s gate under his own steam. He’d suffered an industrial accident in Indiana, and wasn’t an appreciable addition to the USN workforce. The Mandibles not only took him in, but pooled their resources to replace his teeth with implants. Perhaps the caprices of kindness were no reliable substitute for a welfare system, but a face-to-face meeting of honest need and spare capacity felt better. Kurt was warmly beholden, not militantly “entitled,” and benevolence freely given was not begrudged.

To start with, Goog successfully applied to become the sole enforcement officer for the USN Revenue Service. His primary remit was to send out effusive yearly thank-you notes to taxpayers considerate enough to file, and generous enough to share the proceeds of their industry with their neighbors. He was also charged with issuing profuse, prostrate apologies—preferably in person, should time and distance allow—for those all-too-frequent instances where the USNRS had miscalculated a tax bill or lost a citizen’s return. Alas, groveling and remorse weren’t Goog’s strong suits. Worse, the legislature in Carson City had issued strict guidelines to his department, admonishing that it mustn’t seek to foster “a social atmosphere of fear, intimidation, and predation,” and Goog’s enthusiasm for his more punitive duties soon lost him the post. He took up coaching the debate team at their local high school, teaching precocious teenagers how to be show-off know-it-alls who tested adult patience. He was very popular with the kids.

In 2057, an immigrant Forty-Niner arrived with the news that Australia had been invaded by Indonesia. The president of the United States sent Canberra a special communiqué to say that he was sorry.

More news: there was finally a Palestinian state, and nobody cared. Russia had annexed Alaska for its natural gas resources. The Speaker of the House pointed out that “Alaska was always pretty far away anyway.”

Nollie lived to 103, collapsing just short of her daily three thousand jumping jacks, which by then she was virtually executing on all fours. Beforehand, she’d written several more novels for a captive audience. Even on http://usn, piracy inevitably grew rife, and most of her readership accessed the books for free. After she died, the University of Nevada library bought the foul matter.

In 2064, Nevada’s flat tax was raised to 11 percent.

Of course.

Lionel Shriver’s novels include Sunday Times bestseller Big Brother , the New York Times bestseller The Post-Birthday World and the Orange Prize-winning international bestseller We Need to Talk About Kevin . Her journalism has appeared in the Guardian and the New York Times , the Wall Street Journal and many other publications. She lives in London and Brooklyn.