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

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high with clothes in every corner, the floors junky with plastic tricycles, broken bikes, and milk crates of outdated electronics.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 .