Lionel Shriver - The Mandibles - A Family, 2029–2047

“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.