The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047

• CHAPTER 1 • GETTING WITH THE PROGRAM

Returning full circle to East Flatbush should have been gratifying. Willing grew up here. His mother had worked hard to buy this house. With ample funds from helping to grow food during what politicians still refused to call a famine in the mid-thirties, she had paid off the mortgage. Legal New York property owners in exile were obliged to press their claims by a certain date, or forfeit title to the state. The state—a cyclone that sucked up houses, trailers, pets, and children in its wake. It was better, he would remain calmer, if he thought of it as weather.

Regaining possession of his childhood home was more complicated than he had anticipated. Years before, Willing had traded his surname, handed down from his grandmother Jayne, for Mandible. The rechristening was a tribute to Great Grand Man—like so many tributes, too late for the honoree to receive the compliment—who had sacrificed so that their exodus from a deepening urban sinkhole might succeed. Yet as far as officialdom was concerned, only Willing Darkly could inherit his mother’s property, and his New York State identity card cited the wrong name. So the headache took patience to sort out. But Willing was patient.

Asserting his claim to 335 East Fifty-Fifth Street also entailed having its current residents evicted. Now paid handsomely in dólares nuevos linked to the mighty bancor, the NYPD undertook such tasks with forbidding relish. To be the instigator of this violent flinging aside was disquieting. His mother had never evicted her own delinquent tenant, but had folded him into her family. Oh, Sam, Tanya, Ellie, and Jake had long ago been replaced by other usurpers. If the condition of the house was anything to go by, recent residents had been less genteel (and he should thank them: ravaging squatters had so depressed the property valuation that it sneaked in just under the backdated cutoff for inheritance taxes). Maybe the benevolence of taking Nollie with him to Brooklyn compensated for the uncharitable expulsion. Eighty-four when they moved back to town and now ninety, she had a horror of nursing homes. Besides, he was not his mother. He was a thief. He had mugged a boy in the street. In 2032, he had raided gardens, pilfered orchards, and held up convenience stores to feed their bedraggled party on the long trek north. He had not been a nice boy. He was probably not a nice man, either.

He had been sorry to leave Gloversville, but by the end, only so sorry. Working the land at Citadel was never the same after the federal government nationalized the farms. The Mandibles were demoted to sharecroppers. They were allowed to retain a small percentage of their yield for private use. The rest of the meat, dairy products, and produce was confiscated by the US Department of Agriculture. There were even rules about which parts of your hogs you could keep: butts, shoulders, cheeks. Farmers were seen as profiteers. As many of them had been. So when it was first brought in, the policy was wildly popular, helping to secure the Democrats a landslide in 2036. It was less popular with the farmers. Many burned their crops and massacred their livestock—anything but abdicate the fruits of their labor to a government that had savaged the economy in the first place. But as public relations, spite in the countryside backfired with starving city dwellers, who had hoped the nationalizations meant Valhalla: well-stocked supermarkets with reasonable prices. Instead, most of the federal agricultural haul was exported. Washington needed to improve the current account deficit, and China wanted pork.

At least Willing’s reasoned intercession successfully discouraged his volatile uncle Jarred from torching his own land. Even so, submitting to Jarred’s rages on a daily basis had been draining. Coal-haired, hollow-eyed, and ferocious, it was Jarred who moved Willing to contemplate the geometrical validity of the political designations left and right. That is, if you turn left, and left, and left again, you end up on the right. Jarred had started out a radical environmentalist, a position only ninety degrees from survivalist. With one small last adjustment in the same direction, he transformed to libertarian gun nut. Willing himself was not very interested in these categories, but they seemed to mean something to other people. What mattered to Willing was that his uncle’s wrath was wasted energy. In each political permutation, Jarred needed, or thought he needed, an enemy. The warring left him spent. Meanwhile the enemy, if there was one, remained unfazed. The enemy did not know that Jarred existed.

Willing was grateful to Jarred. Who had saved his own life, and the whole family. It was a shame that for Citadel’s owner working the farm as a serf of the nation came to feel so mean, oppressive, and embittering. Like Avery when something in her settled, Willing was able to lose himself in hard work—tilling, sowing, and cutting kale. He had never wanted to “be” anything, to “make something of himself.” Why conjure up a fantasy future that was not obtainable? Perhaps he had no ambition by nature, and he could live with that. As an unambitious person would.

He understood that this was a country where individuals were believed to determine their destinies. But a helpless pessimism—pessimism particularly on that previous point, about whether there was anything worth “becoming,” anything worth aiming for, anywhere to go—characterized his whole generation. With the exception of Goog, who was galvanized by malice—Goog had become an utter T-bill—his cousins seemed precociously worn out, almost elderly in their fatigue. Willing’s girlfriend Fifa also—she was languid, slurring, stretched out, sluggish. It was what he liked about her. If there seemed an element of laziness in her flopping over the sad shredded remnants of Great Grand Man’s claret-colored sofa, beneath her reserving and conserving of energy lay something quite other. A belligerence. She said at work she had refined what the old unions called the go-slow. She had calculated the exact pace at which she could not be upbraided. She was doing the job. Just. This digging in of heels was growing commonplace. The countless overlords of your life would take so much, but you would hold something back, or you would not even have yourself. Fifa had herself. If he pressed himself on the matter, Willing liked to believe that he had himself as well. But he was not confident of this. It was possible that he was not here. That he had been stolen.

Which is why resuming residence in his late mother’s house had not turned out to be all that gratifying.

Return to the city necessitated a proper job. Packing up at Citadel in ’41, he already suspected that a job meant being chipped. It was routine; everyone said so. Like applying for a Social Security number. A bureaucratic matter, a relatively painless, pro forma protocol of the modern day. Thus Willing had not considered the inevitability of the procedure with sufficient seriousness. He had been lulled by what was regular, by what was expected and customary. No doubt all ages have their usual things, about which no one at the time thinks twice. Their leeches and bloodletting, their homosexual “cures,” their children’s workhouses and debtors’ prisons. When drowning in the is-ness of the widely accepted present, it must be hard to tell the difference—between traditions like burying your dead and having dinner at 8 p.m. and other, just as mesmerizingly normative conventions that later will leap out to posterity as offenses against the whole human race. Maybe he was letting himself off the hook. He’d had misgivings, after all. Yet it is always challenging to choose otherwise when you are informed in no uncertain terms that there is no choice to make.

When Willing was small, people made a great brouhaha over pedophilia, and sexual abuse of any kind. His mother had taken him aside with a formality that wasn’t like her when he was four or five. She knelt with a maudlin solicitation that made his skin crawl. Her voice dropped into a timbre both stern and over-tender. He should never allow adults to touch him in his “private places.” That expression was not like her, either. She had always been a straight shooter. If she wanted to refer to his dick or his asshole, she called them precisely that. Which is how he recognized that her mind had been contaminated by a communicable virus. The “private places” lecture was repulsive. It made him feel dirty. It made him recoil from his mother in an instinctive dislike that was singular.

In those days, playing outside was forbidden. Employees at daycare centers were required to get criminal-record checks. All scoutmasters were suspect. No one ever seemed to care if you were a murderer. Murderers were let out of prison and blended right back into the neighborhood. They could live wherever they wanted. Sex criminals were marked for life—shuttled from hostels to underpasses, and required to report their whereabouts, which were posted on the web—the better for local parents to start picketing campaigns to have the filth evicted. The no-go radius around schools and playgrounds widened every year. It was worse to be a rapist than a killer. By inference, rather than be raped, you were better off dead.

Willing did not want to return to the preoccupation with “private places.” It didn’t bother him that sex had grown incidental. He and Fifa enjoyed it, but he didn’t see what all the fuss was once about, and most of the time they were too tired. Dispensing with the business in private was more efficient.

Yet long after the larger social conversation had moved on, hovering over new fixations like a cloud shadowing other parts of town, he finally appreciated what they’d been talking about when he was a boy. It wasn’t, probably, as bad as being murdered—though he’d never been murdered so he couldn’t say. But it was horrific all the same. It was like being murdered and living through it. And you could remember not only the violence but the dying part. You have survived your own death but you have still died, whereas usually survival means not dying after all. He was certain this was what had occasioned the hushed tones, the kneeling, the deep warning strangeness from his mother in his childhood. She had kept him safe, for years thereafter, but she was gone now and couldn’t protect him, so that when he was twenty-five it happened and all those teachers and counselors and moderators of school assemblies—it turned out they hadn’t been exaggerating after all: Willing was raped.

That was the only word he had for it, a word he did not, therefore, use to anyone else, not even to Fifa. The very word, as it applied to the experience, in addition to recollection of the experience itself, was stored in a “private place.” The stasis with which he was now afflicted six years later, that pessimism about whether there was even anywhere to go were he to suddenly discover an ambition to get there, this heavy unmoving sameness—he couldn’t help but wonder whether it was all related to having been raped. He wasn’t sure what he’d been like before. Clinically, as reliable biographical information, he could recall a deep sense of belonging at Citadel. The big round-table dinners. The loamy exhaustion after milking cows and slopping hogs. A gathering fondness for a group of people several of whom were very different from him—which made the emotion more of an achievement. A fondness for each person yet also for whatever the combination of them made together, which was more than the sum of parts. Yet since this numbness had descended, he could summon only the fact of the warmth; he could not inhabit the warmth itself.

He tried not to rehearse it (though the memory would intrude, when he was unguarded, falling asleep or not yet woken). He was still more disciplined about not discussing it. Virtually everyone else had been through the same thing. Thus, or so went the reasoning, there was nothing to say. This most minor of medical indignities was less of an ordeal than getting your teeth cleaned. Any expression of his distress would be interpreted as Willing Mandible being a big baby. Indeed, even newborns were now subject to the same procedure within their first hour in the world. Granted, some parents had expressed concern that infants might find the operation painful, traumatizing, a rude introduction. But physicians had reassured the public. The local anesthetic was skillfully targeted. The foreign object was the size of a pinhead. A mere poke would be more painful, a squeeze, even. Parents were far better off anguishing over male circumcision, now roundly discouraged. Willing envied the newborns. The real trauma had little to do with physical torment. A baby’s clean slate would preclude any horror over what the “foreign object” was for.

Since he was eight years old, Willing had understood that most systems worked badly. It was a surprise to discover in his young adulthood that they could also work too well.

He had recently moved back to East Fifty-Fifth Street. Of a lesser order, the return also entailed a violation. The house had been occupied by strangers for nine years. Their alien residue was everywhere—dirty shirts, empty liquor bottles, syringes. More upsetting was the familiar—cups his mother had lovingly washed in gray water salvaged in the plastic tub year after year, now chipped, missing handles. Nary a plate or a bowl he’d grown up with wasn’t broken or cracked. Comically, remnants of Avery’s raids on Walgreens, Staples, and Home Depot remained. He continued to come across the odd packet of L-braces, a half-used bottle of Gorilla Glue, a scatter of multicolored paperclips in the basement. From the ripped-open packaging, he construed that someone had actually availed themselves of the toenail fungus kits. The closets had been rummaged. The few leftover shreds of his mother’s wardrobe were speckled with mildew. Her beloved Bed Bath & Beyond laundry hamper, emblem of Esteban’s devotion, had been moved to the kitchen for use as a garbage pail, and smelled. The cleaning job alone was arduous, and underneath the scum and the dust lurked deeper structural issues. A pervasive dampness was ominous. Oh, Florence Darkly—you and your obsession with shabby waterproofing.

From the start, he knew the variety of employment widely available: home health aide placements, health insurance and billing, design and maintenance of healthcare websites, answering healthcare help lines, medical device manufacture, service of medical devices, medical transport, medical research, pharmaceutical manufacture, pharmaceutical research, pharmaceutical advertising, hospital laundry, hospital catering, hospital administration, hospital construction, and work in assisted-living establishments that served every level of decrepitude from mildly impaired to moribund. Like so many his age, he was a high school dropout. That ruled out neurosurgery.

So Willing found an opening listed online at a nursing home facility called Elysian Fields, a short bike ride away on Eastern Parkway. For the scut work going begging—emptying bed pans, mopping—all they required was able-bodied youth. (Youth was the sole resource his small cohort possessed for which there was a seller’s market.) So during the job interview, his hiring looked to be rubber-stamped, until he mentioned as an afterthought—if it was a problem, best address the matter now—that he hadn’t been chipped.

The news raised every eyebrow in the room. “That’s quite irregular,” one committee member murmured. Another whispered, “Is that even legal now?” He might as well have revealed that he was a carrier of gray-squirrel flu. They instinctively pulled back from their interviewee an inch or two. He was informed that chipping was a nonnegotiable precondition of employment, not only here but anywhere in New York State. If he took care of it—“A five-minute business,” one of them assured him, “bit more of a sting for an adult than for an infant, but you’ll be right as rain by the next day”; another bureaucrat added, “Can get it done in any clinic or ER, on a walk-in basis, and for free! I was an early adopter, and it cost me two hundred nuevos”—he had the job.

Back home, Nollie was staunchly against it—an easy stance for her to take, since citizens over sixty-eight were exempt. “A monstrous idea,” she said. “You’ll be their creature.” But then, the elderly always balked at innovation. Had shrivs stayed in charge, everyone would still be getting around in donkey carts.

Granted, Willing could instead have swept up the house as best he could and sold the disheveled property in East Flatbush under value. He and Nollie could have headed back to Citadel. But Jarred had grown irascible. Though farms were gradually being re-privatized now that the worst of the food shortages had abated, he was livid over being expected to buy back his own property. Of the supportive extended family that had filled his younger days with humor and solidarity, only Kurt remained. Nollie might not have believed it herself, but she needed readier access to quality medical care than Gloversville provided. Resistance to a simple prerequisite of living in the modern world seemed at once childish and old-womanish.

Turning a blind eye, then, to a wadding in his stomach as if he’d eaten a double order of dumplings, Willing strode too casually into King’s emergency room and stated his purpose. “Goodness,” the nurse exclaimed. “You’re awfully old to be a virgin! However have you got by? You’re not one of those strikers, are you? Lolling about on your parents’ sofa?”

“No,” he said. He didn’t care for her ushering touch on his shoulder—the claiming, the corralling, the collusive inclusion, the welcome-to-the-club—but it was too late now. She had literally got her hands on him.

In the simple white room, he was instructed to lie face down while they ran a quick sequencing of his saliva swab; the chip would forever be linked to his DNA. His forehead fit into a padded cradle, while the nurse adjusted the setting screws until each point contacted his head. The brace recalled the abattoir, where Jarred had taken veal calves, scarcely worth raising to mature cows for so little reward: a narrow chute steadied the skull, ensuring the bolt at the temple would plunge home. Willing could not move his head a hair. That was the idea. For his protection, the nurse explained sweetly. Otherwise, the slightest twitch “might leave him a paraplegic.” She laughed.

He did not like lying on his stomach. The position was sexual, a posture of submission. He fought a rising panic as she swung a mechanism behind him and leveled it at the base of his skull—a soft, tender depression, undefended. Glass and chrome maybe, but the device looked like a gun. When she fired it, a white pain flashed up the face of Great Grand Man, gaunt, and pale, and red on one side, before he pitched beside the fire.

Since that afternoon at King’s, Willing’s sense of himself had been small and inert. He felt limp, lackluster, lumpen. Fearful. Figures flickered in his peripheral vision that, once he turned to them, were not there. He went through a period of scouring his nape with a washcloth several times a day. He felt desecrated, and contaminated, and invaded—as if what had connived itself into his neck weren’t a chip but a tapeworm. He felt watched. He felt ashamed. He felt the need to cover himself, even in his old bedroom, on his own. For a time, even Nollie maintained her distance—mumbling, tight-lipped, keeping her thoughts to herself. She asked warily, “Can that thing hear?”

He had never put it to anyone else outright. He had not regarded himself as a seer, a savant. He had not, precisely, been able to forecast the future. But since he was about fourteen, the disparate bits and pieces that he had been collecting, idly, like seashells, had cohered. Facts that others hadn’t fit together would form a pattern. He had known things, and the things he had known had been true, or had come true. Ever since the chipping, the part of his head that perceived so clearly had gone dead.

Oh, it wasn’t that he trusted the fringier theories on the net. He did not believe the federal government controlled his mind. He accepted that the chip performed the functions it was purported to. It registered direct deposits of his salary. It deducted the costs of any products he chose to buy. It debited his utility bills. Though Willing had no experience of either, it recorded investments and received state benefits. It subtracted local, state, and federal taxes, which totaled 77 percent of his pay. It communicated his every purchase to the agency known until 2039 as the Internal Revenue Service—what the item cost, when and where he bought it, and the product’s exact description, down to model, serial number, or sell-by date. It informed the American tax authorities if he bought a packet of crackers. Were the chip to accumulate an excess of fiscal reserves—an amount that surpassed what he required on average to cover his expenses for the month—it would dun the overage at an interest rate of -6 percent. Should the balance cross various thresholds, that interest rate would progress up to -21 percent. (Saving was selfish. Saving was bad for the economy. Negative interest rates also provided Americans a short course in mathematics from which an undereducated public could surely benefit. At -21 percent compounded annually, 100 was worth 30.77 five years later.) Any additional income, including gift coupons for a birthday, revenue from pawned possessions, bake-sale proceeds, and private-party poker winnings, would also register on the chip, and would also be taxed at 77 percent. Chipping solved the problem of the hackable, stealable, long dysfunctional credit card. Chipped, you were a credit card.

Parental protest over the chipping of newborns died down altogether when states began depositing a generous 2,000 “baby bond” in every infant’s chip. To the population at large, chipping was promoted as the ultimate convenience, and the ultimate in financial security. No more having to carry a wallet or device that thieves could seize on the street. At self-checkout, the terminal simply scanned your head. No more PINs or unique twenty-five-digit passwords, with numbers and letters and signs. No more biometric verification—the fingerprints, facial recognition, and iris scans that hackers had learned to duplicate as fast as the novel authentications had been brought in, since anything digitized can be copied. Obviating the bank account, with its erosive fees, your chip had its own website, or chipsite, for arranging monetary transfers. Its calculation of GPS coordinates precise within a millimeter, your chip communed with your very DNA, thrummed to your very pulse. If anyone contacted your chipsite whose distinctive heartbeat didn’t synchronize perfectly with the pounding in your chip, your funds went into lockdown. So no one could pretend to be you, and the account that went everywhere you went was safe from predators. (The feds somewhat oversold this feature in the early versions. In a surge of “chipnappings,” individuals were forced to make online transfers at gunpoint. Updates guaranteed that when the chip detected high levels of stress hormones like cortisol and epinephrine, or even heavy doses of tranquilizers that might suppress those hormones, transfers would not go through. The same bio-sensitivity ensured that gamblers could not place rash bets while drunk, which had a distinctly depressive effect on the casino industry.)

You were safe, of course, from all but one predator. For every transaction, it went without saying, was communicated to the Bureau for Social Contribution Assistance, the rebranded IRS. (Willing didn’t know why they bothered to change the name. If they’d rechristened it the Department of Bunny Rabbits and Puppy Dogs, within minutes the “DBRPD” would evoke the same terror.) The data storage capacity of federal super computers was now so infinite that the old reporting threshold of deposits over $10,000 had come to seem recklessly steep. Tax authorities were now instantly apprised when a six-year-old received the wherewithal from his mother to buy gummy bears. Two bags.

The chipped all seemed thrilled to see the end of tax returns. Rendering unto Caesar was effortless. Though that meant there was no more cheating on their tax returns, either. No furtive rounding up or disguise of personal frippery as business expense. This also went down well politically. For decades, the public had been convinced that a remote elite living the life of Riley paid no taxes whatsoever. Oddly, Willing had never met one of these people. They must have lived somewhere else.

Much the same reasoning had led to the complete elimination of the cash dólar nuevo in 2042. Cash was an antiquated store of value. It created logistical hardship for Main Street small business. It leant itself to counterfeiting. It was the easiest form of wealth to steal. Criminals had long conducted business in banded stacks, in bulging briefcases, in whole suitcases stuffed with greenbacks, and now these cinematic clichés were obsolete. For cash was also one of the only forms of wealth that eluded jurisdiction. Willing remembered the furtive spirit in which his mother had plied the plumber with a rustle of twenties, as if to exchange physical money for services were against the law. Because cash is so hard to track, to trace, to tax, to control, Willing was astonished it took the government so long to get rid of it.

Language, by contrast, did not respond to fiat. Americans continued to communicate with idioms grown insensible. When their chips were down, so to speak, people still claimed to be low on cash. A profitable business remained a license to print money, and its proprietor might make a mint, though all the mints had closed. Fifa continued to offer her laconic boyfriend a penny for his thoughts. A tax refund would have been pennies from heaven had anyone ever got one. Affronted benefactors cut off heirs without a penny, although ferocious inheritance taxes kicked in at such a low level that you were lucky to leave children your button collection. Jarred didn’t regard fully automated farm equipment as worth a plug nickel, though the latest safety features enabled driverless electric harvesters to stop on a dime. Democrats often described the economic stability and political disempowerment of the 2040s as two sides of the same coin.

A few optimists still bet their bottom dollar that the United States would rise again to world supremacy, though a digital construct could not be stacked. The rhetorical convention persisted, but making a bundle was now impossible. A property owner uneasy about a purchaser’s solvency might yet want to see the color of his money; as of 2042, American currency had no color. A unit of one hundred nuevos was a C-note, slang now easily mistaken for an allusion to music. However ethereal the quantity had become, the country’s linguistic Luddites insisted on regarding money as something you could roll in, throw at something, enjoy a sufficient excess of which to burn, or—a disconcerting image even in the days of the paper dollar—pour down the drain.

To Avery’s delight, secure chipping had restored the online marketplace. Exhilarated by the prospect of once more buying a toaster without leaving the house, his aunt was an early adopter. (It was clever, making the first wave of guinea pigs pay for the privilege of implantation. Steep charges turned chips into status items.) Unfortunately for the likes of Willing and his cousins, the rousing return of internet shopping was largely theoretical. They commanded too little discretionary income to buy much. The economy was overwhelmingly powered by the whims of the retired.

Socially, Willing kept any reservations about chipping to himself. Detractors of the liberating fiscal protocol were pilloried as crackpots. Although continuous government access to your exact location might have seemed an infringement of civil liberties, most Americans were long accustomed to having their movements tracked by commercial entities like Google Maps. For decades, bicycles had been chipped. Pets had been chipped. People being chipped seemed inevitable. Buying goods with a mere tap at a terminal went back to smart phones, so the technological leap was minimal, while the security leap was huge. Now no one could appropriate the means of effortless purchase without chopping off your head, and nothing destroyed the functionality of a chip more instantaneously than its host being dead. Yet Willing felt not enough had been made of the chip’s location. Its biological safeguards would have worked equally as well had it been embedded in an upper arm. The purpose of installing the thing right up against your spinal column was to keep you from digging it out. Employing shady surgeons, a few refuseniks had tried. They were recognizable for being paralyzed.

Nollie’s disappointment that her grandnephew had freely become “their creature” was probably harsh. Nollie herself had an old-fashioned bank account, and made purchases with an ancient fleX. (Because it didn’t auto-report, she also had to file old-fashioned tax returns. The dodgy throwback documents were systematically audited with a rolfing thoroughness that led to multiple senior suicides.) But the unchipped constituted a dwindling minority: the elderly, the far-flung and rural, a few expats abroad. Such anachronisms drew an accelerating suspicion and contempt. They couldn’t buy a quart of milk without hauling out some device. Willing had noticed that customers behind Nollie in supermarket lines would fret. The unchipped inspired the widespread impatience that once greeted holdouts who spurned fleXes or their predecessor smart phones. In short order, the whole population would be chipped, and savings, checking, and investment accounts would be eliminated altogether—at which point it would be impossible to buy anything, sell anything, or possess any monetary wealth whatsoever in the absence of a pinhead-sized spy rammed into the back of your neck. That was certainly the plan, and Congress was unapologetic about this intention—a benevolence portrayed as akin to the nationwide polio vaccinations of the 1960s.

Naturally, the web bubbled with the feverish imaginings of paranoid kooks: chips would turn the American people into an army of hollowed-out robs that would do whatever a mad dictator in Washington commanded. True, research was under way to expand the implant’s capacity by directly connecting the brain itself to the internet. This breathlessly anticipated “cognitive access” would obviate the chipsite, allowing you to check your balance by merely calling your bottom line to mind, and to make monetary transfers with a cerebral calculator pad. Perhaps in the near future, then, you would be able to read webzines, play games, and watch cat videos in your very head.

But as things stood at present: after a dip in the thirties, life expectancy had better than recovered. On average, Americans were living to ninety-two. The US sported an unprecedentedly large cohort of senior citizens. In contrast to Willing’s passive generation, typified by low rates of electoral participation, nearly all the shrivs voted, making it political anathema to restrict entitlements. Together, Medicare and Social Security consumed 80 percent of the federal budget. The labor force had shrunk. Dependents—the superannuated, the disabled, the unemployed, the underage—outnumbered working stiffs like Willing by two to one. In concert with linking the dólar nuevo to the bancor, Congress had finally passed a balanced budget amendment. Mind control? No one in DC gave a damn what you were thinking. They just wanted your money.

So perhaps Willing’s fleeing back to Citadel rather than do as he was told on Eastern Parkway would only have amounted to a brief delay. Soon enough being unchipped was sure to be classified as a civil violation if not a criminal offense, at which point even armed mavericks like Jarred would be rounded up and regularized. The picture was vivid: the gangly, wild-eyed iconoclast, tackled to the ground, bound and branded by the state like a steer—Willing could almost hear the mooing, wordless cry of impotent defiance. He would bet, as they say, the farm on it: Jarred would rather die than be chipped.

Nonetheless, Willing had never been certain whether his offbeat first name suggested a character who was abnormally headstrong, or abnormally compliant. Alas, his having walked into King’s ER of his own accord pointed toward compliant.

• CHAPTER 2 • SO TONIGHT WE’RE GONNA PARTY LIKE IT’S 2047

“I’m really sorry,” Savannah apologized on maXfleX. “I feel like such a yunk. He asked what I was up to, and it slipped out. Now he knows Bing and I are coming over, you’ve absolutely got to ask him, too. You don’t want to get on his bad side.”

“No,” Willing said gravely. “I don’t want to get on his bad side.”

The original fleXcreen had worked as well as any personal digital device possibly could. So to keep customers replacing the product with updated models, the manufacturers had resorted to a time-tested solution: they made it worse. A maXfleX was technically capable of unfolding into a screen the size of a small cinema’s. But almost no one used the function, which had necessitated further thinning the molecules. Now a device celebrated for its waddability tended to develop permanent creases. At thirty-five, Savannah was no less vain. She’d not have appreciated the harsh dark line shadowing the side of her nose, which made her look ten years older.

“It’s no joke,” she said. “He could ruin your life. So it’s a small price to pay. You have to invite him to dinner.”

“Can’t we cancel?” Willing pleaded. “The whole night will be splug. He makes everyone nervous. Including me. We’ll only talk treasury.”

“You can’t risk his realizing you called it off because I ran my big mouth, and then you couldn’t stand having to invite him. Hardly a stretch. There’s never been love lost. He already thinks it’s weird you’ve asked me and Bing but not him yet.”

“I have to invite Goog to come Friday,” he told Nollie when he’d signed off.

“Why would he want to come?” she said. “He hates you.”

“He enjoys hating me. And he likes to be in on things. It’s one of the attractions of his job: the inside track.”

“The attraction of his job,” Nollie said, “is throwing his weight around and making everybody sweat.”

Speaking of sweat: she’d just finished her jumping jacks, and was dressed in athletic gear. Another two inches shorter after all that pounding up and down, she was wearing out her third set of knee replacements. The scars on the joints were the only smooth aspect of her spindly, withered pins. Privately, Willing didn’t understand the purpose of his great-aunt’s exercises, commonly pursued to look more attractive. There was little enough chance of that.

“He was such an asslick as a kid,” Willing said.

“He’s still an asslick. I’m sure he brings his minders the limp carcasses of citizens he’s destroyed, like cats bring mice to their masters. As a teenager, he always took the party line. It’s a type. They side with authority and parrot received wisdom.”

“Well, sucking up to the suits has sure worked out for him. One lousy training course. And he makes more money than any of us, by a yard.”

“Does that matter?”

“It is noteworthy,” Willing said, “that it pays so well to work for the Scab.”

“You’d better practice spelling those letters out, and putting the B up front,” Nollie advised. “You know Goog reviles that acronym.”

No one called the Bureau for Social Contribution Assistance anything but the Scab, and the migration of Bureau to the end of its name was so inevitable that the yunks in DC should have seen it coming. “I’m not the one who renamed the IRS after dried blood,” he grumbled.

“Or a strike breaker. But that’s before your time.”

“You know what perplexes me,” Willing reflected, “isn’t the fact that the BSCA is the largest arm of the federal government. What’s perplexing is that it wasn’t always the largest arm of the federal government.”

“Yes…,” Nollie said, squinting. “I see what you mean.”

“I’ve never stood on ceremony myself,” Nollie said that Friday, before his cousins arrived. “But sitting around with communal bowls on the floor—it’s the way you’d feed dogs.”

“No one has ‘dinner parties’ anymore,” Fifa said, draping her long limbs over the sofa. “They’re biggin’ uncruel. Lord, I don’t know how my mother could stand it. All those glasses. All those spoons.”

Willing slopped several cans of kidney and garbanzo beans into a stainless steel mixing bowl and conceded to salt. They would scoop the muck up with flour tortillas and splash vodka into disposable plastic glasses. Grateful as children to be fed anything, Willing’s generation had rebelled against their parents’ bizarre obsession with food. He made sure to slurp the bean liquor messily up the sides of the bowl. Obliviousness to presentation had become a presentation in itself.

He streamed some retrotech for ambience. Only with Nollie’s assistance had he been able to identify the constituent bars of the music, all drawn from the sounds of bygone mechanisms: the sshtick-brrrr of a dial telephone; the EEE-khkhkh-EEE-khkhkh of a connecting fax; the poo-pi-pur-pi-poo-pi-puh… BEE-di-duh-BEE-di-duh… kchkchkchkch of a dial-up internet connection; the oceanic slosh and hum of washing machines that used many gallons of water; the crazed white noise of a boxy cathode-ray TV with no reception; the dementing recording “Please hang up and try again,” over and over, of a landline telephone off the hook. The clap-clap-clap-DING! of a manual typewriter echoed the ting of an opening cash-register drawer, the ping of an arriving text, the doo-di-dring! of an arriving email, and the default marimba ringtone of an iPhone when you didn’t have enough pride to buy something more interesting. Mixed well, the tones fused into a soaring symphonic rush with a staccato under-beat. The sounds were once so blithely integrated into the audio of daily life that few could remember them when they grew extinct, and their interweaving was both catchy and mournful.

Savannah arrived first. Willing did not understand how women had the patience to mummify themselves in the narrow strips of fabric demanded by the latest fashion of “bandaging,” but he had to admit that the gaps where the skin showed through were alluring. The bands across her breasts had an impressive effect on her décolletage. But her choice of red, white, and blue strips could only have been ironic. He’d scheduled this do before he realized “next Friday” was the Fourth of July. A few small towns in the heartland continued to stage fireworks displays for their aging “Old Glories”—throwbacks who burbled about purple mountain’s majesty, the dawn’s early light, glory, glory, hallelujah, liberty and justice for all. In hipper coastal cities like New York, the holiday had become an embarrassment.

In the wake of so many deaths from antibiotic-resistant bacteria—one of whose strains had killed Willing’s mother—social protocols had grown less intimate. Reaching for a handshake was a giveaway that you were a clueless yunk who lived in the past. Pecks on the cheek were equally uncruel, and if you tried to say hello by smacking an acquaintance straight on the mouth they’d probably hit you. Willing touched his cousin’s shoulder lightly, and she his. “You buy those bandages,” he asked, “or do you lie around nights ripping up sheets?”

“I make too much money lying on my sheets to rip them up,” Savannah said, sashaying into the living room with a bottle of Light Whitening. Nostalgia for the crude homebrew that fueled the encampments in the thirties made commercial moonshine chic.

Fifa nodded sleepily from the sofa. She was jealous of Savannah, for whom Willing continued to carry a tiny torch. But Fifa was safe. Oh, he appreciated that Savannah’s work as a “stimulation consultant” was now a legitimate career. While he might have expected to discern a clichéd coarsening in her features, her manner, or her spirit, in truth he detected no such thing. Accredited, registered, regulated, and—most crucially—taxed, Savannah parlayed a respectable expertise. She carried business cards. She didn’t hide behind any euphemistic “escort” nonsense. She was high end. She’d held her own against the robs—increasingly inventive, cheaper, and programmed to swallow at no extra cost. So she was doubtless very good at it. Still. Willing had a conservative side. You couldn’t legislate away that little shiver.

“I think you should take up art again,” he said, knowing he was wasting his breath. “It’s edgier now. The stuff artists made before the Renunciation was treasury. Empty, and a scam. The new stuff—it doesn’t sell for much. But you should see the show on the American slave trade in SoHo. Bigging brutal. And it’s not about the nineteenth century.”

“Yeah,” Fifa said sloppily—she’d already had a shot or two—“ain’t nobody claiming ‘today’s young people’ don’t have shit to say.”

“That doesn’t mean anyone’s listening,” Nollie said, walking in with the beans.

Wizened and no better than four ten, Nollie continued to wear the T-shirts, cut-offs, and tennis shoes she’d worn summers her whole life, and now resembled a gnomish extra from The Hobbit. Willing was glad she’d joined them, of course. He liked her, and he could see through the crenulations to the mischievous, scandalizing provocateur of fifty, sixty years before. But Nollie had had no children, much less had she been put in her generational place by her children’s children’s children. The way she saw herself had never changed. So it would never have occurred to her to leave the “young people” to their own evening.

“Spare us the cheap sympathy, Noll,” Fifa said, with a nasty bite. “Long as we stoop down, turn around, pick a bale a’ cotton, and you get your Social Security checks, and your specially, individually designed chemo drugs like personalized craft beers. Your face replacements, your brain replacements, your desire and drive and love and hope replacements, well—you don’t really care what kind of artwork we make in all our spare time. Honest to God, I get a good laugh when I remember how my dad used to come home from work and go running.”

Fifa worked three jobs. She did housework and cooked indifferent meals for a cantankerous Bay Ridge shut-in. She installed residential shower bars and handrails for a thriving online retailer, stayinyourownhome.com. Three nights a week, she distributed crunchy tomato slices in a Williamsburg sandwich factory owned by a magnate in Myanmar. Unskilled labor had always to undercut the robs, so the pay was appalling. Fifa did the work that foreigners didn’t want.

Yet it was early in the evening for acrimony. The diffident knock on the screen door was opportune.

“Full faith and credit, man,” Bing said, with a biff of solidarity on Willing’s shoulder.

“Full faith and credit,” Willing returned, with a light biff back. The ritual greeting went over the heads of their elders. Whenever older people tried to appropriate the exchange in order to sound cruel, they never got the tone right—the bone-dry straight face, the exquisite subtlety of the underlying sourness.

At twenty-eight, Bing was a big guy, tall as well as broad. The shortages of his pubescent years had left him with a chronic terror of missing a meal, and if he was anticipating another famine he may have over-prepared. Yet he’d taken to farm work at Citadel, and his frame packed plenty of power. Good-natured and generous, he’d never shed his oddly endearing quality of seeming a little lost.

The latest arrival dangled a baggie. “Brought heroin to snort later, if you’re interested.”

“How’d you ever manage that?” Savannah said.

“Walgreens had a Fourth of July sale. I was going to go for blow, but they were out. Christ, you ever hit the ‘More Info’ on your chipsite? The skag itself is dirt-cheap! It’s not the product, it’s—”

“The taxes,” the rest recited in unison.

“I think you should wait till Goog gets here and save it all for him,” Savannah said. “But only if you bought enough for an overdose.”

Bing’s face fell. “Nobody told me Goog was coming.”

“You’d have begged off,” Savannah said. “And with that thug around, I need my protector.”

They settled on the floor, a trendy convention that may have hailed from so few young people being able to buy furniture. The custom was fortuitous. From childhood, Willing had been happiest on the floor.

“Have you thought about renting out the basement again?” Savannah asked.

“I always hated knowing when I walked across the living room I was an elephant over Kurt’s head,” Willing said. “And when you don’t get to keep the rent, really… What’s the point?”

“What about… under the table?” Goog hadn’t arrived yet, and still she whispered. “Do it in bancors.”

“Risky. Get caught, and… I don’t want to think about it. Besides, who’d live in that dank, dark space if they had access to international currency?” Willing’s murmur was instinctive. However seemingly inane, Nollie’s question from six years ago circled back: Can that thing hear?

“You’d be surprised,” Savannah said. “There’s a whole economy out there you don’t know about. How else would I pull off this fashion statement without ripping up my sheets? Anyway, just an idea. I might be able to help. But don’t bring it up on maXfleX, obviously.”

The discussion made everyone anxious. Willing changed the subject. “Nollie’s started writing again. I caught her.”

Nollie glared. “It’s not more of my famous egotism. I’ve nothing else to do.”

“I was glad,” Willing said. “It may be free, but there’s some brutal writing online now. Like the art. People have better stories. ‘Real stories.’ The kind you said you only like when they happen to someone else.”

“Anyone who remembers what one says that verbatim is a menace,” Nollie said.

“I read Better Late Than,” Willing said.

His great-aunt looked discomfited, and pleased. “A pirated copy.”

“Of course. We burned the hardbacks. Some of it was good.”

“I’m overwhelmed,” Nollie said.

He didn’t realize she’d be so touchy. “The story didn’t take place immense long ago. But it felt like ancient history. It was hard to identify with the characters. They live in an economic vacuum.”

“You mean they’re rich?”

“You don’t even know if they’re rich,” he said. “They make decisions because they’re in love, or they’re angry, or they want adventure. You never know how they afford their houses. They never decide not to do something because it costs too much. The whole book—you never find out how much these characters pay in taxes.”

“Great,” Nollie said. “I’ll make my next novel about taxes.”

“Good,” Willing said, turning a blind eye to her sarcasm. He had accomplished something this evening. She would get it later, when she recovered from feeling injured.

“Hey, how’s it going at Elysian?” Bing asked.

“Okay. After all”—Willing nodded at Nollie—“I’ve done geriatric care most of my life.”

“None of your new charges is doing three thousand jumping jacks a day,” Nollie snapped. “You’ve hardly been wiping my butt, kid.”

So predictable. He loved getting a rise out of her. “Yes, Nollie’s what the orderlies call a walking shriv. She can make it to the bathroom, which is all staff at Elysian cares about. Then there are the blithers, who are demented. And the morts—bed-ridden, comatose, vegetative.”

“Not a very compassionate lingo,” Savannah said.

“No,” Willing said. “It’s not.”

“So is it mostly toilet duty, changing sheets?” Savannah was groping. The jobs they all did were dismal and repetitive. It was challenging to express interest in other people’s work when they weren’t interested in it themselves.

“Yes. And cleaning crevices the robs have missed. But the most important thing I do is listen. Especially to the walking shrivs. They seem hungry to talk to someone who isn’t a hundred years old. Just because you’re ancient yourself doesn’t mean you like being around a bunch of relics any more than we do.”

“God, I know what you mean,” Fifa said. “On the bus this week, the biddy next to me started yakking. Grabbed my arm, really sank her claws in. It was like sci-fi, and she was sucking out my life force through her fingernails. I got off, I felt weak.”

“And they stare at you,” Savannah said.

“Because you’re beautiful,” Nollie said, with a rare wistfulness. “Because you’re as beautiful as we used to be, and we didn’t know we were beautiful at the time.”

“I don’t feel beautiful,” Willing said.

“You’re a devastatingly handsome man,” Nollie said. “You should.”

Willing’s cheeks burned. She was his great-aunt, she was ninety years old, and she was flirting with him. “I didn’t realize before this job how many Chinese shrivs have been shipped here. At least a third of the residents are from Asia. It’s cheaper to get Americans to take care of them than to pay the higher cost of labor over there.”

“They have an enormous cohort that’s over eighty,” Nollie said. “Result of the one-child policy. Their age structure looks like a mushroom.”

“They don’t speak English,” Willing said. “But I listen to them anyway. American residents get cross, and demanding—you know, the way younger Asians are now. But the Chinese at Elysian were raised in another time. They’re quiet. They curl up. The problem is, they don’t ask for anything. You have to check, because they’ll sit in their own waste for hours. Last week, one of them died from dehydration. He couldn’t lift a glass by himself, but he wouldn’t ask for a drink of water.”

“Isn’t nursing home work getting chancy?” Bing asked. “All those shootings.”

“Nothing’s happened at Elysian yet,” Willing said. “So their security is lax. No X-rays or searches. But you’re right. It’s a fad. And it’s spreading. How many did that last lunatic in Atlanta take out?”

“Twenty-two residents,” Bing said.

“Twenty-four, really,” Savannah said. “That’s the one where a ninety-something veteran tackled the killer into the hydrotherapy pool, and they both drowned.”

“The shooter did those useless old coots a favor,” Fifa said, “and everyone else.”

“Your girlfriend,” Nollie said, “is a misagenist.”

“Don’t worry, I take precautions,” Willing said. “I don’t advertise it, but I carry the revolver from Prospect Park to work.” Technically, his trusty protection was a Smith & Wesson .44 called an X-K47 Black Shadow. For Willing, it was simply the Shadow. True to its nickname, the classic pistol with an amber grip went everywhere he went. His mother would be horrified. A fact that he rather enjoyed.

“Not rusted out yet?” Bing asked.

“Great Grand Man taught me how to maintain it—after which he showed me how to use it.” Regarding this aspect of their shared past, Willing preferred to be matter-of-fact. GGM had left this world with a selfless act, and wouldn’t want them to avoid its mention. “The real trouble is that I could work at Elysian indefinitely. Same as you guys. We’re all at a standstill. There’s no trajectory. None of us will ever be flush enough to have kids. We could be frozen, in the same moment. We could be dead.”

“Let’s have none of this ‘dead’ business! The United States of America needs its able-bodied to look alive! You’ll report to work every morning if we have to prop up your corpse with a stick!”

With dread, Willing rose to unlatch the door. Most of their contemporaries’ speech was trailing, wispy. Goog’s voice was booming.

“How long have you been eavesdropping?” Savannah asked.

“Long enough to know this is one splug bash. You letting the doomster here prophesy another fiscal Armageddon? When, to our shaman’s dismay, everything’s turning over tickety-boo.”

Goog spurned the floor for the broken-down recliner, the better to hold court. He banged down a bottle of real cognac. The luxury perk would only partially compensate for his demolition of their evening. Willing had wanted to talk further about his sensation of running in place. He’d have liked to canvass his cousins about whether they thought anything might credibly happen to them that wasn’t terrible. Now there wasn’t much point. Everyone would be careful.

“I take exception, Wilbur, to your claim that ‘none of us’ will have kids,” Goog said. “I personally plan to sow the Stackhouse seed. Just haven’t decided between a lab job—blue eyes, high IQ—or the old-fashioned route. No lack of candidates in that department!” Bearded, barrel-chested, and shorter than he struck people at first meeting, Goog was almost good-looking. He only got over the hump when women learned what he did for a living.

“Poor little tyke,” Savannah whispered in Willing’s ear. “I’ve never felt so sorry for someone who doesn’t exist yet.”

“This is new,” Bing said respectfully. “And very exciting. You’re planning a family soon?” He might have been talking to his schoolteacher, not his own brother.

“Sooner the better,” Goog said. “Somebody’s gotta do it. You’re hardly up and at ’em with the ladies. And our sister’s a hole.”

“You know I don’t like that word,” Savannah said.

“I don’t like being called a scabbie, either,” Goog said. “I’ve manned up about it. You can’t honestly expect me to call you a stimulation consultant with a straight face.”

“I have a degree,” she insisted quietly.

“A community college degree in a subject that comes naturally to any slit who can lie on her back. Listen, I know it’s asking a lot, but could I have a real glass?” The rest were passing the cognac. Bing lunged to the kitchen. “Like I was saying. Seems I’ll have to carry the procreative can. And I’ll spring for more than one, too. Because having kids is patriotic.”

“Seriously,” Nollie said. “You’ll have children to improve the country’s age structure.”

“Why’s that so far-fetched?” Goog said. “This generation’s been biggin’ lazy in the reproduction department. The birthrate plummeted in the thirties, fine, but it should have recovered by now. Building into a real problem down the line.”

“Yeah, we’re lazy,” Fifa said. “After fifteen hours of slog on splug jobs, netting the bus fare home for our trouble, we should be fucking all night, just to breed the next generation of little taxpayers.” She was slooped. But even sober, Fifa’s reaction to her own fearfulness was defiance. Willing would need to watch her.

“So what’s up with your parents?” Willing interceded.

“Dad’s two years from sixty-eight,” Goog said. “Then he’ll be sitting pretty.”

People used to dread being put out to pasture. Desperate to qualify for entitlements, these days everyone couldn’t wait to be old.

“Also,” Goog added, “some of those investments he made during the Renunciation, and held on to over my mom’s dead body? They’ve biggin’ appreciated.”

“That’s really great for the country, then,” Willing said.

“Why’s it not great for my dad?” Goog asked sharply.

“Eighty-five percent capital gains.” Willing beamed.

“Yeah, well. Everybody gotta do their fair share, right?”

“Absolutely,” Willing agreed. “Their fair share.”

Goog scrutinized his cousin for signs of irony. Willing’s expression was impenetrably pleasant.

Goog leaned back in the recliner again. “I think Dad’s enjoying being back in the department at Georgetown. Even if it’s an honorary position, and he only lectures one night a week. Trouble is, his area of expertise—debt, inflation, and monetary policy—has been kind of wiped out. Fucking NIMF controls all that now, why they deep-sixed the Federal Reserve. Fucking country doesn’t have a monetary policy anymore—”

“Or debt,” Willing added. “Or inflation.”

“Point is, it’s not his fault—”

“Not his fault having been wrong.” Willing should really keep his mouth shut.

“Not his fault having been overtaken by events,” Goog said.

“If the US had participated in the bancor from the beginning, instead of negotiating from a position of desperation in ’34, we might have avoided the depression.”

“Depression is just a word.”

“I bet for the people who starved to death it didn’t feel like just a word.”

“So Dad likes being back to teaching again?” Savannah said, peacekeeping.

“Yeah,” Goog said, calming down. “I guess you could call the appointment a sinecure. Still, it means something to the guy. This is off the record, but I like to think I had something to do with it. I notified the university that because of certain irregularities in all that foreign financing—joint is all backed by Beijing, why the student body is lousy with platefaces—their tax-exempt status was in peril. Administration fell all over themselves to be of service.”

“You never told me that,” Savannah said.

“I’m telling you that now. But you repeat it, you’ll be audited up the asshole.” Goog’s delivery was jocular. No one else seemed to find the advisory funny.

“And your mother?” Willing had maXfleXted Avery last week. He was plenty up to date on her life. Savannah was right: stick to safe subjects.

Goog rolled his eyes. “Truth is, we don’t talk much.”

“She didn’t want you to join the Scab,” Savannah said.

“No, she didn’t want me to join the BSCA. Which makes her a biggin’ yunk. Best idea I ever had. So much for advice at your mother’s knee. Anyway, you know she got that do-gooding bug. Only got worse after your mother died, Wilbur. Like she had to carry on the same splug tradition. So she’s started some ‘youth food bank’ in the District. Biggin’ wrongheaded.”

“Why?” Savannah asked.

“Demotivates,” Goog said officiously. “Why does she think we eliminated welfare except for the disabled? Half of them are shirkers, too. Sprained their pinkies.”

“The medical exams for disability are pretty grueling,” Nollie said.

Goog waved her off and took a slug from his glass. “I don’t know what we’re going to do about the strikers. Numbers go up every year. Filthy slumbers, too. Makes my blood boil. I’m not saying it should be against the law—”

“You’re just saying it should be against the law,” Savannah said.

“Maybe the Scab should start importing black people from Africa in big long boats,” Fifa said. “There’s enough of them—two and a half billion! No one in Lagos would miss them.”

“You got one serious attitude problem, honey,” Goog said.

“A bad attitude should be against the law, too, I guess,” Fifa said.

“I’m sick of this.” Goog leaned down into Fifa’s face. “America is not a police state. This is a free country, and you can say whatever you fucking well want. I’ve had it up to the gills with people like you, always mouthing off about ‘oppression’ and ‘subjugation’ and ‘tyranny.’ So you’re expected to do your part, to help keep this economy’s show on the road, and what’s wrong with that? Nothing wrong with people over sixty-eight getting medical care, either, or drawing a modest stipend from a retirement system they’ve paid into their whole lives—”

“They didn’t pay enough in,” Fifa said, “to cover sitting around and falling apart for longer than they worked—”

“So just because you have to contribute to the same system,” Goog plowed on, “doesn’t mean you live under the heel of goose-stepping Nazis, got it?”

“Could have fooled me,” Fifa said smoothly. “Didn’t you threaten Savannah with ‘auditing her up the asshole’? So go ahead. Audit my butt off. You won’t find anything kicking around my chip but digital dust bunnies.”

“I could have you re-chipped. On the premise that yours has been hacked—”

“I thought it was unhackable.”

“It can be hacked in the old sense of the word—hacked out. It’s not enjoyable.”

“Ooh, ooh, go ahead,” Fifa said, offering Goog the serrated knife for sawing their stale French bread.

“You’re slooped,” Goog said disdainfully.

“Gloriously,” Fifa said, taking another slug of Goog’s cognac straight from the bottle—hygienically, dead uncruel. “Wanna hear some real freedom of speech? I think strikers are heroes. If I had any guts, I’d stop fetching some Bay Ridge bitch her stinky slippers, layering other stiffs’ miserable sandwiches, and anchoring guardrails for the walking dead. I’d put my feet up, too. Anything but drudge like a dray horse for scabbies like you.”

“The strikers are having the last laugh on you, sister,” Goog said. “They’re not sacrificing for their principles. They’re lounging around their parents’ house and sponging off their grannies’ Social Security. And the more strikers and slumbers? The higher your taxes go. You’re being had.”

“So do you think refusing to work for only 23 percent of your wages should be against the law?” Savannah said.

“Yeah, maybe,” Goog conceded gruffly. “Maybe I do.”

“I’m not sure slumbers are in the same category,” Willing said. “They’ve saved up—though I don’t know how. What little slumbers cost, they pay for up front.”

Just as he didn’t understand why it took so long for the IRS to rise from a beleaguered, underfunded agency to the rechristened behemoth it was today, Willing was also perplexed by why slumbering hadn’t taken off decades earlier. When recreational drugs were legalized, regulated, and taxed, they became drear overnight. Only then did people get wise to the fact that the ultimate narcotic had been eternally available to everyone, for free: sleep. A pharmaceutical nudge into an indefinite coma was cheap, and a light steady dose allowed for repeated dream cycles. Inert bodies expend negligible energy, so the drips for nutrition and hydration had seldom to be replenished (slumbers were hooked to enormous drums of the stuff). The regular turning to prevent pressure sores provided welcome employment for the low skilled. Slumbers didn’t require apartments—much less maXfleXes or new clothes. They needed only a change of pajamas and a mattress. An outmoded designation revived, “rest homes” denoted warehouses of the somnambulant, who were only roused and kicked out once their prepayments were extinguished. Previous generations had scrounged to buy property. Many of Willing’s peers were similarly obsessed with scraping together a nest egg, but with an eye to dozing away as many years of their lives as the savings could buy.

“Slumbers cost in productivity,” Goog said.

“I’ve thought about it, if I could raise the funds,” Willing said. “Maybe a year? Every time my alarm rings at five-thirty, it seems like bliss.”

“Willing, you wouldn’t!” Nollie said in horror.

“I’d rather watch my own dreams,” Savannah grumbled to Fifa, “than another fucking Korean TV series. Separated twins set up housekeeping after unification, and the Northern twin mistakes a hairdryer for a bazooka… Mom and Dad had no idea how lucky they were to watch sit-coms set in Minneapolis.”

“Mom says the physio after slumbering is pretty grim,” Bing said. “Though that new sideline of hers, Vertical Reconditioning, is doing pretty well. Their muscles are jelly. They get rolled out of rest homes on gurneys, like you move bodies from a morgue. Actually being awake can be scary, too. There’s been a lot of suicides. I’d rather emigrate.”

“Like where?” Savannah asked in alarm.

“The Javanese in management at IBM seem civilized,” Bing said. “Maybe I’d head there.”

The Indonesian Business Machines plant in New Jersey where the youngest Stackhouse worked as a manufacturing overseer was producing robs that could be tooled as manufacturing overseers. Willing could see why Bing might be making other plans.

“How are you going to get into Java?” Savannah said. “They don’t give visas to much of anybody, and they really don’t give visas to Americans.”

“There are ways…” Bing shot an anxious glance at his brother.

“Getting into anywhere in Asia illegally is a bastard.” In her determination to dissuade her beloved younger brother from flying the coop, Savannah was oblivious to Bing’s nervousness about Goog. “There’s none of that ‘human rights’ and ‘due process’ and ‘claiming asylum’ treasury. They don’t give you weekly stipends or put you up in public housing with a flabby little advisory that you’re not supposed to work. There aren’t any polite trials with a free lawyer and then when you’re turned down you can appeal, and appeal, and appeal. There’s no forgetting all about you even though you’re not supposed to be there, because they’re too disorganized, and politically ambivalent about their right to throw you out of the country in the first place, and frankly too broke to pay for your deportation plane fare. No, no. They keep track all right, and they never throw you idiotically on your own reconnaissance: oh, it would be nice if you showed up for this court date eighteen months from now. They chuck you summarily in detention, with rats and spoiled food, and when they collect enough of a crowd they don’t even send you back to your own country. They dump you anywhere: Siberia, France, Nigeria. Wherever’s convenient for them. Especially in China, they’re bigging T-bills. You might never get back home.”

“Oh, it can’t be that hard,” Fifa said. “China and India are both awash in illegal immigrants. Lots from Africa, too, and they’re kinda recognizable.”

“But I’ve got to do something,” Bing said mournfully. “Even if they keep me on at IBM, which I doubt, it’s like Willing said about Elysian. I’ll never advance. All the senior positions are filled by Southeast Asians. And it’s not like I don’t want to do my fair share.” As he shot another glance at his brother, his expression curdled like a puppy’s after peeing on the rug. “It’s not that I mind, at all, you know, keeping the economy on the road… I’m glad to help the shrivs—I mean, sorry, Nollie, the long-lived. It’s medical care they biggin’ deserve, right? Still. I don’t get paid much to begin with. When the chip is finished chewing it up, there’s nothing left.” He wouldn’t look at Goog at all now. “At least if I emigrated…”

“Hate to burst your bubble, bud,” Goog said. “But one aspect of the US tax code hasn’t changed since the Civil War. Americans are taxed on their worldwide income, and that includes expats. You get some credit for foreign taxes. But if Jakarta doesn’t suck your chip dry, we take up the slack. So it’s fortunate you don’t mind paying your dues, my brother. BSCA satellites can extract what’s owed if you’re sprinting across the Mongolian tundra. Not that it would ever occur to you to cheat your very own United States government, but now that chipping has taken off internationally? Your ability to get your hands on any readies whatsoever without our knowing about it to two digits after the decimal, well. It’ll be slight.”

“Wow,” Fifa said, flat on her back. “What a great party.”

“What about Mexico?” Willing suggested. “You might move up the ladder there. The manufacturing sector is huge. It’s got a bigger GDP than the US—”

“That’s not saying much,” Nollie quipped.

“But Esteban is doing great,” Willing said. “He runs his own wilderness expedition company now—”

“I don’t know how,” Nollie said. “Mexico doesn’t have any wilderness.”

“Well, nowhere does, Noll,” Fifa said irritably to the ceiling. “Maybe he takes groups to a parking lot where there are still some empty spaces.”

When his much-missed de facto father struck out for the southern border in 2039, Willing had been moved by the depth of the Lat’s reluctance to leave what he regarded profoundly as his country. Esteban was an authentic American patriot. By contrast, in the liberal northeastern tradition, the Mandibles had routinely said mean things about America, as if hating it here made them better. True, Esteban scorned aging honks who were vain about their “tolerance” but who didn’t really want him here. Who missed the old days, when they controlled everything. But he never insulted the country itself—the idea of the country, and the way it was supposed to work, even when it wasn’t working that way (more or less always). Jayne and Carter, GGM, Nollie, and his mother had sometimes seemed to take a savage pleasure in the downfall of the United States. For Esteban, the decline of what he genuinely believed was the greatest nation on earth was solely a sorrow.

Loads of Lats like Esteban had filtered back to the lands of their forefathers. The loss was greater than one of numbers. They’d been American with the zealotry of converts. Emigration being at an all-time high, the US population was contracting for the first time in its history. The remaining public felt trapped, stranded, left behind. These were often the same people who had vituperated about foreigners piling across their borders. Now that outsiders didn’t risk their lives to reach America anymore, the native-born felt abandoned. They missed their own resentment. They felt unloved. Little satisfaction was to be found in clinging to something, holding it close, defending it, when no one else wanted it anyway. Maybe Willing could see how white Americans his mother’s age and older had sometimes felt invaded, or alienated, or replaced—though they’d have felt so much less threatened if they’d only learned Spanish. But clearly there was one situation direr than living in the country where the rest of the world wanted to live also: living in a country that everyone wanted to leave.

Esteban had been loyal in a personal sense as well. He stuck by their family at Citadel—though grubbing the land in Gloversville duplicated the mindless manual labor that his father had done, and his grandfather, which he thought he had escaped. But then, after all they’d been through together, he lost Florence to a cut finger. His son in all but name had come of age. You could hardly call it desertion.

Savannah roused Willing from his reverie. “Why would Mexico be any easier to get into?”

“Esteban got across the border,” Willing said. “He had to hire coyotes, but that was pretty simple. The same guys who ferried Lats to El Norte had started doing the same job in the opposite direction.”

“Esteban slipped across before they finished building the fence,” Savannah said. “Which is electrified, and computerized, and 100 percent surveilled, from the Pacific to the Gulf. Esteban has a pedigree, too. He’d have a chance at naturalizing. They don’t naturalize any ‘non-Lat whites’ down there. We’re a pest species. Even if Bing were miraculously to make it across the Rio Grande, the discrimination is killing. I know what I’m talking about. My clients are a better source of information than the web. As Ameri-trash, Bing would be treated with bigging contempt. Worse, remember that old slag, mexdreck? Try yankdreck. That’s what they call us. It’s comical, considering the likes of Fifa here is working three jobs, but they think we’re lazy. And they definitely think we’re stupid.”

“To have that much power and let it go?” Nollie said. “That is pretty stupid.”

“It always goes,” Willing said. “Whether or not you let it.”

“Having that much money and letting it go, then,” Nollie revised. “Having that much money and still spending more than you’ve got. I call that stupid.”

“That’s the most fatuous version of the last twenty years I’ve ever heard,” Goog said.

“Can we not?” Savannah said. Teasing out what had happened, why it happened, to whom it had especially happened, and what it meant was a running conversational obsession everywhere you went. Willing could see how she might be tired of it.

“I’m still shredded we didn’t do anything when China annexed Japan,” Bing said sadly. “I always liked Japanese people for some reason. With their special ways of doing things. Everything just so. I felt sorry for them.”

“When they sank that Chinese destroyer, the Japanese did pick the fight,” Goog said, paraphrasing what the president had told the American people at the time. “I think they wanted to be invaded. They were going down in flames anyway. It was one big hari-kari kamikaze go-ahead-and-shoot-me-already.”

“It’s true, the whole Japanese race has practically evaporated,” Savannah said. “So I found the elbow-room argument pretty convincing. With that deluge from Africa and all those refugees from the Water Wars, China’s bursting.”

“Still, you can’t help picturing how badly that fleet would have got it in the neck if the Chinese had gone for an American ally when we were kids,” Goog reminisced fondly. “I’m biggin’ sorry to have missed that ballyhoo. We’d have buried Beijing so deep that the watchtowers of the Forbidden City came poking out the other side in Omaha.”

“Treasury,” Savannah differed. “If we’d intervened, we’d have made a mess of it, as usual. Same goes for Taiwan. Thank fuck we finally couldn’t afford it.”

“After so many fiascoes—Vietnam, Iraq, New Zealand—I’d expect to agree with you,” Nollie said. “But our sitting idly by, and making excuses for sitting idly by… I thought it was a disgrace.”

Nollie’s sense of shame was widely shared by her whole generation, and most of Florence’s, too. But Willing did not have strong feelings on this point. Around the time that the American money in his pocket disintegrated to so much Kleenex, he deftly decoupled something. The abstraction into which he’d been drafted by dint of having arbitrarily been born here no longer seemed to have anything to do with him. He was American as an adjective. He was no longer an American as a noun. He saw no necessity in taking the US demurral from declaring war on China personally. If it meant that he himself hadn’t been forced to become a paratrooper billowing onto the rooftops of skyscrapers in Chengdu, this was a good thing. Otherwise, if he were to feel powerless, the source of the sensation would be closer to home: he was obliged to have a cousin to dinner whom he did not like. That was impotence. But he did not feel implicated by Taiwan or Japan. His country did not help because it could not help. It did not have the money. That was relaxing. This must have been what it had felt like to live in most countries, when the United States was sending bombers and ships and troops and airlifts whenever something went wrong. If there was genocide in Madagascar, they didn’t beat themselves up for not doing anything about it in Argentina. That was better life. When Willing was young, it was common to despair that a person had “no boundaries.” Friends who had “no boundaries” were embarrassing. They had no sense of what to keep to themselves. So maybe one merit of being in a country at all was its boundaries. They drew a line around what was your business. They helped to maintain the existence of such a thing as your business.

“Listen, have you guys seen that glass house that’s gone up on the site of Jayne and Carter’s in Carroll Gardens?” Savannah brought up. “It’s some Vietnamese palace. Garish beyond belief.”

“Well, that’s all of Brooklyn for you,” Goog said. “Half the brownstones have been razed. Platefaces don’t have a preservational bone in their bodies.”

“Goog, your pejorative is passé,” Savannah chided. “You do realize that women like me are going under the knife to get narrower eyes and flatter noses?”

“I talked to Carter and Jayne last week,” Nollie said. “Jayne is still fomenting over not getting the insurance payout. But that couple from Hanoi paid a fortune for the land—more than enough to make up for the fact that, between inheritance taxes and back maintenance fees, my mother’s co-op wasn’t worth reclaiming. They could still buy what they wanted—or thought they wanted. Maybe that’s the problem.”

“They’re pretty old to be holding down a ranch in Montana by themselves,” Bing said. “At least I helped them choose a caretaker rob. Except with the top-of-the-line kind they got, the conversation is splug. The cheaper ones keep picking up on the wrong key words. They’re hilarious, and a lot more fun.”

“Problem with robs?” Fifa said. “Hurl a skillet at one, and you’ve only wrecked your own pricey appliance. My Bay Ridge Bitch could afford a primo caretaker rob five times over. But then she wouldn’t be able to drive it crazy, or ruin its day.”

“I guess I can see how, after living cheek by jowl at Citadel, they craved solitude,” Nollie said. “But Jayne was practically a normal person by the time they left the farm. Now their whole acreage is one big Quiet Room. She’s back to being a nut. And Carter’s regressed, too. Jesus, I thought we hashed it out at Citadel. But now he’s worked himself into a lather again about the ‘lost years’ with Luella that give him flashbacks. I swear, couples cooped up one-on-one are deadly. There’s not enough to talk about. So you go back and mine horrid, selfish Enola over and over, if only to keep from going for each other instead. You can’t eat all day, so you feast on umbrage between meals. Honestly, our conversation was barely cordial. And after I didn’t put up a stink, at all, about those two helping themselves to the whole Bountiful House silver service. I didn’t ask for one butter knife.”

“If you’d stopped by Carroll Gardens more often back then,” Willing said, “you’d realize why a little silverware can’t begin to compensate.”

“I couldn’t stand it,” Nollie admitted.

“No one could stand it,” Willing said.

If Jayne really was backsliding to neurosis and Carter was grudge-farming, that made them quite the exceptions. Across the nation, Americans’ mental and physical health had vastly improved. Hardly anyone was fat. Allergies were rare, and these days if people did mention they avoided gluten, a piece of bread would probably kill them. Eating disorders like anorexia and bulimia had disappeared. Should a friend say he was depressed, something sad had happened. After a cascade of terrors on a life-and-death scale, nobody had the energy to be afraid of spiders, or confined spaces, or leaving the house. In the thirties, the wholesale bankruptcies of looted pharmacies, as well as a broad inability to cadge the readies for street drugs, had sent addicts into a countrywide cold turkey. Gyms shut, and personal trainers went the way of the incandescent light bulb. But repairing their own properties, tilling gardens, walking to save on fuel, and beating intruders with baseball bats had rendered Americans impressively fit. Sex-reassignment surgery roundly unaffordable, diagnoses of gender dysphoria were pointless. If a woman leaned toward the masculine, she adopted lunging, angular movements and crossed her ankle on her knee; everyone got the message, and the gesturing was more elegant. As dreaming beat drugs, sexual fantasy had always been a cleaner, sweeter, not to mention cheaper route to gratifying a whole host of wayward inclinations, in contrast to the crude, painfully imperfect experience of acting the fantasies out. No one had the money, time, or patience for pathology of any sort. It wasn’t that Americans had turned on oddity; they simply didn’t feel driven to fix it anymore.

“Hey, Willing,” Bing said. “You’re always reminiscing about how brutal it was at Citadel. If Elysian is splug, why not go back? You took to that farm treasury more than most of us did.”

“I’d consider it,” Willing said. “But I haven’t been able to contact Jarred for months. I finally fleXted Don Hodgekiss at the property next-door. He says Jarred cleared off. Left Citadel to the feds. Jarred’s gone dark.”

“Where do you figure he went?” Bing said.

Nollie rolled her eyes. Savannah intently swabbed a last tortilla around the bean bowl.

“How should I know?” Willing didn’t meet anyone’s gaze. He was careful both to not look at Goog, and to not seem to be not-looking at Goog.

“It’s obvious, isn’t it?” Goog said. “You don’t all have to play innocent. Who’s the real nut in this family? Who’s naturally seditious? Who’s the asshole renegade, with no respect for authority? Who was opportunistically price-gouging all through the thirties? Who completely ignored the weapons amnesty in ’38?”

“He didn’t completely ignore it,” Bing said. “When they canceled the Second Amendment—”

“No one canceled the Second Amendment, you yunk,” Goog said. “It was clarified. Modern constitutional scholars now believe it was never meant to apply to individuals in the first place. A ‘well-regulated militia’ means the police and the armed forces. Not some lunatic with an AK in a shopping mall.”

“Jarred did turn in a pistol or two for appearances’ sake,” Bing said. “And everyone ignored the amnesty. All those from-my-cold-dead-hands stand-offs—”

“Also, who regarded his dopey farm as a ‘citadel’—a fortress and a territory apart?” Goog carried on. “Who has no sense of loyalty to this country, and who has doubtless suffered the consequences?”

“We can’t be sure of where he went,” Savannah mumbled. “Besides, that rumor about the self-destruct in the chip. I’ve never been sure it’s true.”

“Oh, it’s true,” Goog said ominously. “Believe you me.”

Willing almost blurted that, as far as he knew, Jarred wasn’t chipped. Which would have precluded the back of his head exploding like a shot-gunned pumpkin the moment a Scab satellite detected that he’d set foot where he wasn’t supposed to. Willing managed to keep his mouth shut. The information might have denied his cousin a malevolent satisfaction, and it was not in their interest to deny Goog Stackhouse satisfaction of any sort.

“I heard they live like, you know, animals there,” Bing said. “No internet. So it’s like the Stonage, forever. People live in mud huts, or teepees or something. No electricity, no TV, not even any radio, ’cause the US jams it. There’s lots of webzines say they have nothing to eat, and the whole place is into cannibalism.”

“It has to be a shit hole,” Goog said. “It’s completely cut off from world trade. Violating US sanctions lands you in prison for so long that even off-chip dirtbags won’t risk smuggling. The only country that’s recognized the USN is Eritrea. Even if you could get past the guards and mines at the border, which you can’t—defection to those subversive wackos is classified as treason. Which is the only crime left on federal statute books that’s still a capital offense. So I hope none of you ever get as restive as Jarred seems to. A whole BSCA unit with maximum-security clearance has been deputized with the authority to press the button.”

Willing would obviously feign disinterest around Goog. Yet like most people, he was intrigued by the United States of Nevada, incorporating several Indian nations as well as the original polity, colloquially the Free State (causing much resentment in Maryland, which had laid claim to the moniker since 1864). How could you not be fascinated by such a black box, a trapezium that nothing and no one got out of and nothing and no one, at least officially, got in? Ever since the state’s secession in 2042, any information about the breakaway republic had been shut down as soon as it went up. The NSA must have installed internet filters, since to do a search on the fledgling confederacy you had to use coy, constantly reconfigured euphemisms like “high-stakes gamble,” which would also cease to work within days. Willing was glad there had been no second Civil War. He was glad that the same public enervation, sovereign destitution, and sour-grapes excuse-making that had kept the US from coming to the rescue of Japan had inclined Congress to write off the ungrateful western dustbowl with a sneering good riddance. (America now conducted livelier commerce with Cuba than with a no-go hole in its own interior. In modern maps of the US, Nevada was spitefully blank.) True, national borders could mercifully exclude as simply immaterial all that lay outside them. Yet the United States of Nevada still seemed to have to do with him. Assuming his uncle had not been shot on the American side while trying to penetrate its notoriously militarized perimeter, he had no doubt that this was where Jarred had fled. The moments the USN crossed his mind were the only instants in his day when Willing felt awake.

It was probably true that the borders were uncrossable. It was probably true that your chip was programmed to blow your head off in the unlikely event that you succeeded in crossing anyway. Nevertheless, Nevada was the sole exception to Goog’s assertion that there was no getting away from the Scab. It was the one place on earth where millions of Americans weren’t paying federal taxes. Accordingly, mere mention of the traitorous malcontents drove Willing’s most influential dinner guest into a rage. It would be prudent to change the subject.

“So how’s it going at the Bureau, then?” Willing asked Goog brightly.

“What’s this,” Goog said suspiciously. “Interest in my work?”

“Everyone in America is interested in your work.” Willing had perfected this poker face in adolescence. His ridicule and sincere esteem were indistinguishable.

“Since you asked,” Goog said, “we’re bringing in some new reporting requirements that are bound to affect you, Nollie. After all, it doesn’t seem fair that most of the country sends in so much data on income and expenditures, while outliers can operate under a cloak of secrecy and obfuscation, does it?”

“Yes, my keeping a purchase of incontinence panty shields to myself seems a rank injustice,” Nollie said.

“Starting in January next year”—Goog’s voice rang with relish—“the unchipped will be legally obliged to file a same-day report on every purchase and deposit. We’ve already designed the online forms, and they’re quite extensive: address of vendor, federal tax ID number, time and date, serial or product number, purpose of purchase—”

“You mean the federal government needs to know why I bought incontinence panty shields,” Nollie said.

“Best of all, the forms don’t accept cut-and-paste.” Goog simply could not stop smiling. “You may find that remaining outside the system will cost you rather a lot of toil and trouble.”

“That’s harassment,” Nollie said.

“Looked at one way,” Goog said blithely, “all of government is a form of harassment. But you wouldn’t want to look at it that way, would you?”

Savannah puzzled, “Why not just make the shrivs get chipped like everyone else?”

“Coercion is crude, and invites tantrums,” Goog pronounced. “This way, the long-lived are persuaded to embrace chipping as a welcome salvation from the paperwork equivalent of Abu Ghraib. Think about it: if I wallop you with a cudgel, you’ll get mad, and you might even hit me back. If I prick you over and over with a straight pin, you’ll thank me when I stop.”

“You’re diabolical,” Nollie said.

Goog accepted the compliment with a gracious nod. “Oh, and we’ve also started digging into old files, now that Congress rescinded that random seven-year limit on our curiosity. Lotta irregularity in the thirties. Like those Tax Boycott crybabies, who refused to file returns in some boo-hoo over having been bankrupted by ‘their own government.’ With compounded interest and fees, those chiselers will lose everything. It’s complicated, converting dollars to nuevos, but we’ve worked out a formula.”

“Toward the end, the value of the dollar was changing every day,” Willing said. “Every hour, even. So your formula must be terribly sophisticated.”

“It works out roughly to our advantage, if that’s what you mean,” Goog conceded.

“Yes,” said Willing. “That is what I meant.” He took care to add, “More patriotic that way. Better for everyone. For the country as a whole.”

Goog studied his cousin again, searching for mockery. But he must have been accustomed to civilian pandering. Willing’s was pro forma.

“So it turns out other folks were under the yunk impression that they could deduct losses from voided Treasury bonds,” Goog continued. “Or they had the impudence to subtract the difference between what they were compensated for gold and its grotesque over-valuation on the open market. Like Dad always said, it’s a moronic investment, so they deserved to take a hit just for being nitwits, if you ask me.”

“I don’t know how foolish an investment it’s turned out to be,” Willing said, keeping his tone companionable. “Anyone who kept hold of all that glitters in ’29 would turn a handsome profit today—even after 85 percent capital gains.”

“They’d earn nothing but a prison sentence,” Goog said sharply. “Any gold in this country remains the property of the US government. You wouldn’t happen to know anyone who’s still hoarding?” Hoarding remained a synonym beloved of bureaucrats for retaining your own assets.

Willing bore up with a bashful smile. “I was being theoretical.”

In the face of the kind of grueling interrogation once reserved for terrorists and now exclusively practiced on alleged tax cheats, the suspect’s most commonplace mistake was to assume a range of high-intensity emotions: indignation; flopping, tearful contrition; wrath. Yet the most effective defense against Goog had always been bland geniality. An unruffled happyface drove the scabbie insane, but he couldn’t object to it.

“Though if gold is such a yunk investment,” Willing added politely, “why does the government want it?”

“The US didn’t set up the terms of the bancor,” Goog said with contempt. “Speaking of which—I got an advance tipoff on a revolution in the works that’s gonna make our lives at the Bureau biggin’ easier. The administration’s been lobbying for years, and the decision’s finally gone our way. So you heard it here first: the NIMF is going to eliminate the cash bancor.”

Nollie crossed her legs on the sofa with a demure femininity out of character. Savannah blanched, barely able to get out, “Why?”

“Use your head,” Goog said. “The entire black market is conducted in bancors. But the cashless economy is catching on the world over. Pretty soon you won’t be able to stash liquidity in a shoebox anywhere. Being off-chip will be the same thing as being flat broke. The complete elimination of cash internationally will dispatch corruption, tax evasion, racketeering, and misconduct of virtually every sort.”

“I wonder…,” Willing mused, as if having only just thought of this, though he and Jarred had discussed the matter at length. “What do you make of the proposition that the definition of a truly free society is a place where you can still get away with something?”

“I’d say that’s a treacherous definition of freedom, Wilbur. The law is the law. You obey it, to the letter. Freedom is what’s left over. If the law doesn’t say you can’t do it, then you can.”

Willing put on a confounded expression. “I’m not sure freedom works for me as a remnant. Like the snippets of material left over when my mother made curtains. Isn’t freedom a sensation? After all, you don’t have to exercise a freedom to possess it. I don’t have to get up for a drink of water. But knowing that I could get up, it changes the way it feels to sit, even if I stay sitting.”

“You’re talking treasury, kid,” Goog said. “You were obviously claiming that in a ‘free’ society everybody gets to break the law and not face the consequences. So in your deviant little mind, liberty is just another word for rampant criminality.”

“Sometimes I cross the street against the light.” Willing could have let it go, but he didn’t feel like it. All the pleasantness had been exhausting. “When no traffic is coming. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think that’s a misdemeanor. I haven’t hurt anyone, or violated anyone’s right of way. But I have broken the law. Being able to cross the street against the light is important to me.”

“Jesus, Wilbur,” Goog said. “That’s fucking sad.”

“If you take that away from me, and every other opportunity to not quite toe the line,” Willing said, “then however many amusing things I’m at liberty to do, I don’t feel free. If I don’t feel free, I’m not free.” I don’t feel free, Willing did not add, and I have not felt free since you and yours jammed this fleck of metal into my neck.

“Why should the US government give a shit about your feelings?” Goog charged.

“Why should it care about anything else?” Willing countered. “If it feels splug to live here, what are we preserving and protecting? What is the country for?”

“That is the dumbest question I’ve ever heard,” Goog said. “This bash has seriously deteriorated. I’m going to push off.”

“But the bancor,” Savannah said. “When does it go cashless, exactly?”

“The announcement’s next week. Be a happy day, in our office. Champagne and cake.”

“So does the cash become worthless overnight,” Savannah said, “by decree?”

“Same as when the dólar nuevo was brought in. Folks will have a month to convert. After which, yeah, cash bancors won’t be legal tender—anywhere. It’s bound to be fascinating. All these funds suddenly popping up on the chips of the erstwhile strapped. Between the fees, the fines, and the back taxes, this is an epic windfall for the Bureau. Or, as Wilbur so nobly observed, for everyone. For the country.”

“But why would anyone chip black-market bancors,” Savannah said, “if you guys will take it all?”

“Because they might get to keep a teeny tiny bit of it as opposed to losing the whole whack, and in my professional experience, you lowlife taxpayers are greedy fucks who’ll paw after whatever you can get,” Goog said. “But why are you so interested?”

“I’m not!” Savannah bound her arms across her cleavage.

“Plenty of big-spending foreigners roll into this town, looking for entertainment,” Goog said. “You wouldn’t sometimes be paid in international currency, would you?”

“Well, if I were, ever, of course I’d chip the cash immediately!” Savannah looked as if she could hardly breathe. She was a dreadful liar.

“I bet you do,” Goog said. “I get paid okay, but it’s 100 percent on the record. Where I work, not only do I have to be squeaky clean? My whole family has to be squeaky clean. So I’m putting an alert on your chip. Any sudden spikes in income, we’ll be watching.”

On that happy note, Goog left the party. He took the last of the cognac.

• CHAPTER 3 • RETURN OF THE SOMETHINGNESS: SHOOTING SOMEBODY, GOING SOMEWHERE ELSE, OR BOTH

Cleaning up after a bowl-on-the-floor party took five minutes. Fifa was out cold on the rug. Willing draped her with a blanket. She had to be up in three hours to install shower grips in Windsor Terrace.

“You went quiet. After Goog left,” Willing said.

“Mm,” Nollie grunted, drying the stainless steel mixing bowl.

“Going back to when you first arrived in East Flatbush. I’ve never known you to run out of money.”

“Mm,” she grunted again.

“I did some research,” he said. “Your other books did so-so. But Better Late Than sold millions.”

Not even a grunt. The bowl got very shiny.

“You brought back bancors, from France,” he said. “That ‘old boyfriend’ you visit in Flushing. Whoever it is, he or she trades currency on the black market.”

Nollie stopped drying and glared, eyes popping.

“It can’t hear!” Willing exclaimed. “I’ve experimented! I’ve said aloud in my bedroom, ‘I have secret sources of income that the Scab doesn’t know about,’ and nothing happened!”

“Very well,” she said reluctantly. “But my finances are private.”

“I’m only trying to help. Whatever you’ve got left—if you deposit it, they’ll tax it to the wall, and they’ll ask questions. You could be open to prosecution. Holding bancors is legal now. But when you brought those bills through Customs, their possession was criminal. They could use that pretext to confiscate the lot. On the other hand, if you don’t deposit it, you heard Goog. A date will come and go, and the cash will convert to confetti overnight.”

“So, what, I should use it to line a hamster cage? Insulate the attic?”

“I know this violates all your instincts. But the new reporting requirements on off-chip expenditures don’t come in until January. So before the public announcement about the bancor going cashless, which is going to flood the economy with bancors, and depress the exchange rate for cash transactions—you have to spend it.”

Nollie put the bowl down at last. “I’ve dodged them at every turn. Now I feel cornered. You’re not the only one who cherishes getting away with something.”

“Spend it on getting away with something, then.”

Nollie dried her hands on the dishtowel with an anxious twist. “Young people want money to buy things. Not only clothes and jewelry, but experience, thrills. Old people want money for one reason and one reason only: to feel safe.”

“You can never have enough money to be safe,” he said gently. “Money itself isn’t safe. We should know.”

“And how,” she seconded. “But then, life isn’t safe, at ninety years old.”

“Exactly,” he said. “The illusion of wealth is that it can buy what you want. Which it can, but only if you want, like, a pretty dress. You don’t want a dress. You want not to be old. We haven’t talked about it much, but don’t you wish one of those hothead boyfriends of yours had stuck around? Maybe you want to still be a famous writer, and you can’t buy that, either; there are no famous writers. Or you want to write with the same fire that lit you up when you started Better Late Than—the kind of fire that hardly anyone gets to keep. You want the thicker hair in your old snapshots. You pretend you don’t, but you want people to like you. You want not to get cancer. What threatens everything that’s important to you isn’t a cashless bancor, or currency depreciation, or debt renunciation, or economic collapse, but your own collapse. Other than being able to pick up, you know, a nice bottle of wine, or maybe a chicken, you can’t buy anything you want.”

“You kids think all we boomers have lived in a delusional bubble,” she returned. “Think it’s come as a shock I’ve got old? I’m not an idiot. I’ve been reading since I was your age about ‘elderly women’ raped and robbed in their homes, and in the back of my head I’ve heard a whisper: ‘Pretty soon, honey, that’s gonna be you.’ I’ve always anticipated becoming a target—defenseless, weak, and on my own. Maybe my parents had a premonition. Ever work it out? Enola is alone spelled backwards. So there was a discrete period in my forties when I had the opportunity to salt away some reserves, in preparation for a rainy day that might last decades—a monsoon—my own personal climate change. In my mind’s eye, I was stockpiling a veritably physical fortification. If I bricked the bills high enough, the barbarians couldn’t climb over. Less metaphorically? Maybe I could pay them to go away.”

“But that is delusional,” Willing said. “At your age, the main menace isn’t rapists and robbers, or waves of marauders in a second Dark Ages—or anything else from the outside. Every day, you face down the enemy within. So the one commodity that you bigging can’t buy, more than any other, is safety. Why doesn’t that release you? From trying to protect what you’re going to lose anyway? It should make you feel brave.”

“You’re one to talk about brave,” Nollie said bitterly, and her tonal turn injured him; he’d put a big effort into that soliloquy, which he thought had come out rather well. “Were you talking trash, for fun? Or have you seriously considered slumbering?”

“Yes,” he said. “I have.”

“So if I offered to spend the bancors on putting you into a self-induced coma for five years, you’d take me up on it.”

In truth, the proposal was immediately tempting. “You say that with disgust. But would five more years of ass-wiping at Elysian Fields improve on sleep? I love to sleep.”

“Willing.” Arms folded, she confronted him square on, her back to the counter, trapping him against the stove with that look. She was so much shorter than he was; he was damned how she managed to seem daunting. “I don’t often play the elder, and deliver judgment from on high. So hear me out this once. All through the early thirties, you were sly. Resourceful. Inventive. Disobedient. Impossible to intimidate. I used to love watching you stand your ground with that cretin Lowell Stackhouse, though he was three times your age. There was a somethingness about you. Sorry. I’m not as articulate as I used to be. Too many brain cells down. Too much homemade hooch. But the somethingness, it’s what fiction writers like me—former fiction writers like me—it’s what we always try to pin to the page. We always fail. That doesn’t mean it isn’t out there, only that it’s impossible to capture, like those tiny, nefariously evasive moths you can’t grab from the air. Even at Citadel. You worked so hard. You savored the effort. You were tilling fields like an ox, and the somethingness only thrived. But ever since the chipping, you’ve gone gray. You seem like other people. The boy I knew in 2030 would never have squandered his great-aunt’s resources on sleep.”

“The chip,” he said. “I doubt it’s messed with my mind in the way you’re implying. They’re not that clever. It probably is merely a means of accounting. Though a means of accounting that won’t let me cross the street against the light.”

“Cheating,” Nollie agreed, “is restorative. It maintains your dignity. Breaking a rule a day keeps the doctor away far better than a fucking apple.”

“In the fields at Citadel,” he went on, “we had plenty of time to talk. Avery told me about how hard it was for cancer patients when they got better. She said that when you’re bigging sick, making it to the next day is a victory. When you’re well again, being alive isn’t a triumph anymore. She said patients often got depressed not during chemo, but after it had worked. For me, the thirties. They were exciting. Our whole family—over and over, we almost died. When the fleX service went down on the trek to Gloversville, and we had to rely on Esteban, and on the paper map I stole from a recharging station—there was no guarantee we were going to make it. It was a miracle the recharging station even carried a paper map to steal. Carter could barely walk, because of his knees. Bing had something like trench foot, from his shot-out shoe and wet socks. And then we got to that narrow, unpaved drive and found the tiny label on the mailbox, CITADEL? We cried. But now. It’s this grinding in place. No horizon, no direction, and no threat. We may not keep much of my salary, but we’ll probably be all right, even without your bancors. That’s part of the problem. The okayness. The nothing but okayness. So chip or no chip. It’s not exciting.”

“Well, then,” Nollie announced decisively. “We won’t buy safety. We’ll buy excitement.”

Willing discovered the very next afternoon, as he had as a boy, that the most exciting excitement is free.

Nollie frowned. “You’re back early. Were you fired?”

“I fired,” he said, his breath quick. “It’s not a passive construction.”

“What?”

“I never really expected it at Elysian,” he said, pacing. He was probably disheveled. The way you look after you’ve squeezed into a linen cupboard. “Nothing happens there. Even when people die, it’s more nothing-happening. It’s expected. Or not-dying. That’s expected, too. I carry because I always have, since I was sixteen. Call it a fetish. A dependency. And I’m not the only one. You need money to feel safe, but I don’t trust money. After our whole family was forced from this house at midnight in the rain, I need a gun. I like the fact that, like you said, it’s against the rules. For most people, packing is a bigging bad idea. The Supreme Court was right. But it’s not a bad idea for me.”

“Unfortunately, that’s what everyone thinks,” Nollie said. “Now, stop. Organize yourself.”

“I have no idea whether I killed him.”

“An excellent first line for a short story. But even a story would have to back up.”

“I don’t know the guy well.” Willing bombed onto the sofa, to force himself to sit still. “Little older than me, maybe thirty-five. He’s on staff—was. Since even if he makes it, well—Elysian definitely has grounds for dismissal now. Always looks under-slept. Probably has a night job, too. I talked to him last week, at lunch. He supports his sister, who’s a striker. He tops up his younger brother’s slumber account, because it’s cheaper to keep the brother in storage than to support him if he’s unemployed. This guy, Clayton. His wife got pregnant. They both wanted the baby. Badly. But there was no way they could afford to keep it. She’d just had an abortion. He seemed pretty shredded about it. Looking back, I guess he was twitchy. But those ‘warning signs’ you’re supposed to look out for. They only seem obvious in retrospect. In the present—stressed, angry, having money problems, expressing resentment of shrivs—they apply to everyone I know.”

“Your friend Clayton shot up the nursing home.”

Nollie was hardly psychic. The protocol had become such a cliché.

“I don’t know where he got the gun, but that amnesty in the thirties was a farce.”

“Any idea of the body count?”

“Not really. He started with the morts, so that would have upped the numbers. I’m sure you could go online and find reports of casualties anywhere from ten to a hundred and forty. The usual.”

“You took him down.”

“Does that impress you?” In truth, Willing was in shock. For fifteen years, the Shadow had been a mere mascot—part companion, part lucky charm, a metal version of Milo. He’d almost forgotten what it was engineered to do: something a bit more drastic than “sit.”

“I’m impressed that you didn’t let him go at it. Your mother told me you advocated ‘shooting’ Luella well before my father did the honors. She worried that having said that might have made you feel bad later.”

“It didn’t,” Willing said.

“Fifa will disapprove. She’ll think you should have joined in.”

“I had a clear line of sight from the cracked-open door of the closet where I was hiding. The chance wasn’t going to last. I had to make a split-second decision. I think I only hit his shoulder. An orderly pinned him when he dropped. I slipped out in the pandemonium. The trouble is—”

“You’re more energized than I’ve seen you in years.”

“So that’s the answer. To my malaise. Shoot people.”

“Seems a start.”

“I might have been seen. That orderly could have noticed it was me.”

“But you’ll be a hero.”

“I don’t want to turn in the Shadow. I shouldn’t have given away that I have it.”

Nollie squinted. “We could hide it. You could claim to have thrown it in the East River in some PTSD revulsion. We could make up a story about how you’d found it in the house, how it was left behind by squatters. How you’d always planned to turn it in. But look at you. Just now, your face fell. You don’t want my good excuses. You miss urgency. You like the idea of having to leave. Of being on the run.”

She knew him well. And he knew her. So they began talking about what they had been talking about since the previous night, without ever saying so outright.

“I have enough bancors to buy an extremely nice car,” Nollie said. “This time, we wouldn’t have to walk.”

Virtually no one bought a car anymore. Major American cities like New York bore more resemblance to mid-twentieth-century Shanghai than to the whizzing futuristic metropolis of The Jetsons. In eerie silence, multitudes of electric bicycles swarmed single public buses like bees around a queen.

“I’m chipped,” he reminded her. “They can track where I am.”

“If they care. That is, if you were the mass murderer at Elysian and you’d escaped, you’d have a problem there. But you were the good guy. As I understand it, too, the police have to appeal to the Scab to use their satellites, and scabbies are proprietary.”

Granted, despite Fifa’s conviction that they lived in a police state, the powers of the police per se were surprisingly restricted. The FBI was little more than a website. Movie buffs who watched classic thrillers like the Bourne trilogy must have been disconcerted by this mythically demonic organization called the CIA, whose sticky fingerprints no longer stained assassinations and coups all over the globe, and whose Langley headquarters, according to Avery, had been taken over by a discount grocery chain from the Punjab. (In a flurry of films and series from abroad in the thirties, Americans were popular villains: schemers from the Federal Reserve out to defraud innocent investors with sales of bonds they knew full well would soon be worthless, or wicked financiers who escaped the economic depredations of the era by absconding with ill-gotten gains. But in the Korean and Vietnamese entertainment of this decade, American characters were mostly walk-ons—incompetent or hapless buffoons played for laughs.) The powers of the Scab, by contrast, were very real, and veritably limitless.

“Is it even possible?” he asked. “To just—not show up for work, and—go? Wherever you want? Without asking, or filling out a form, or notifying some official?”

Nollie’s smile was pained. “People used to pick up and drive across the country for weeks at a time. Stopping where they wanted. Doing what they wanted. Generally this was called a vacation. Back when wage earners got vacations. But the fact that young people like you think you need permission to careen into the horizon, think it must be against the law to quit a scurvy job without asking—that alone is reason to go.”

“But if it’s true. About the chip. You might get through. For me, it would be suicide.”

“So you can sleep or ass-wipe your life away, or you can take a chance. Which I rate at about fifty-fifty. Sixty-forty maybe,” Nollie said, reconsidering.

“Which direction?”

“Does it matter?”

“I’ll have to ask Fifa to come, too.”

“Of course. Although—well, she talks a good game…”

“I know,” Willing said sadly.

“Let’s get out of here. We have a car to buy. Meanwhile, if anyone comes nosing around looking for the savior of Elysian Fields, you’ll be out.”

Statistically, most people anguish longer over the purchase of a pair of shoes than over whether to buy a house. In kind, two of the biggest decisions of Willing’s life had been dizzyingly expeditious. It took under a second to determine whether to stop a fellow staff member from putting more residents out of their misery and instead to put Clayton out of his. It took less than five minutes to resolve to commit treason.

On the way back from the dealer, they swung by Fifa’s house. Typically, she lived with her parents. Willing had arranged to meet between her railing installations and her shift at the sandwich factory that night (the holiday weekend being extinct). She’d been relieved to hear from him. The shooting at Elysian was already on the news—though the reporting was blasé, nursing home melees having become so commonplace. To give them privacy on Fifa’s stoop in Brownsville, Nollie stayed in the Myourea—Thunderbird in Khmer, a much-coveted import from Cambodia. Its sweet hydrogen lines combined with a 1950s teal-and-cream two-tone drew admiring onlookers.

“You mean, practically right now,” Fifa said incredulously after hearing him out. Her face was ashen, and she needed a shower. She looked hung-over.

“Tomorrow,” he said. “We have to throw some things together. I doubt we’ll head out of town until afternoon.”

“Oh, well, that’s different,” Fifa said caustically.

“This isn’t out of the blue. We’ve talked about it before. You thought it would be so cruel. The final frontier, we said. Becoming modern-day homesteaders.”

“We’ve mused about it. But you’ve no idea what it’s like there. Accounts on the web all contradict each other, and you never hear from people who actually live in the Free State. If anyone lives there. The whole population could’ve sunk into the desert from another round of A-bomb tests at Yucca Flats and nobody would know about it here.”

“I love not knowing,” Willing said. “Our future in the old United States is too known. Most of what I know I don’t like.”

“You’re not being practical. I’ve seen pics of the border. It’s worse than Mexico’s fence along the Rio Grande. The walls are massively high, and massively thick, and bristling with guns and soldiers. How would you get across, even if you successfully tippy-toe through the minefield leading up to it?”

“I’ll find out when I get there. Any armor has a chink. And there’s supposedly an underground railroad.”

“Willing, most of what’s on the web is fantasy! Have you ever met a real person in this ‘underground railroad’?”

“All right, no.” He added staunchly, “But other people have made it.”

“All you can be sure of is that other people have disappeared. You can disappear without popping up somewhere else. Have you ever heard from Jarred?”

“No, but they stop communications from getting out. I doubt he’d be able to sail a paper airplane in my direction, much less a fleXt.”

“And you’re assuming that the chip’s self-destruct is treasury. Why would it be? You heard Goog. A whole unit at the Scab, he said. And doesn’t it sound like exactly what they’d program your chip to do, if you had the impertinence to throw down your cotton hoe, and the ingratitude to walk away from the greatest nation on earth? These people are motherfucking T-bills! Seems biggin’ likely to me that instead of allowing you to throw off your chains, they’d rather you be dead.”

“I would rather be dead,” he said, surprising himself, “than stay here. It’s not only the taxes. It’s what I was trying to explain last night. A heaviness. I feel watched. I pay up, as if I have any choice. It’s splug how little is left, but that’s not what gets me down. I feel like a criminal all the time. When I think about it, I’m doing everything I’m supposed to. It’s what my mother told me it was like going through airport security—though I’ve never been on an airplane myself. She said you always felt like you were doing something wrong. Even when you took off your shoes, and removed your ‘laptop,’ and raised your arms in a full-body scanner, like surrendering when you’re under arrest. But I feel that way walking down the street.”

“Of course you do,” Fifa said impatiently. “It’s called terrorism. Which isn’t only the ploy of religious lunatics. It’s a tool of the state. It works by making examples of a handful of people, and then there’s a multiplier effect of scaring everyone else shitless. Terrorism is a money saver. The Scab is a terrorist organization, but so was the IRS—the old initials just didn’t have the resources to stick an emotional cattle prod up your ass on the same scale. Nothing’s changed.”

He took a different tack. “But all the companies are owned by foreigners. Even the old national parks. Elysian Fields is owned by a corporation in Laos. Unless you’re a doctor, or a pharmaceutical researcher, the only jobs available are the drear ones you and I do now. What can we look forward to? And then the likes of my aunt Avery and uncle Lowell—you know, like your parents—all they do is talk about how great everything used to be and how splug it is now. So why not come with me? If only for an adventure. The worst that could happen is we get there, we can’t get in, and we come home.”

“That’s not the worst that can happen. They can throw you in jail for trying to defect. And talk about working for foreigners—all those commercial prisons are also owned by Asians, and they drive you like dogs, not for 23 percent of your pay, but for dick. You’ve no idea what you’re risking.”

Fifa’s defiance had always rung hollow. But they’d seen each other for three years. His impassioned appeal was an obligation, and so was hers.

“The shooting at Elysian,” she said. “It’s left you rattled. That makes sense. Having a brush against… Well. It makes you take stock. I’m glad you’re okay, though Nollie’s right: I think you should have let him finish what he started. He was doing God’s work. But that scene having fucked your head up doesn’t mean you should do anything crazy—”

“Agency,” Willing said. “That’s what I discovered this afternoon. That I could do something. In the United States, doing something generally means either shooting somebody, or going somewhere else. I’m a dropout. I don’t know much American history. Still, I do understand that a long time ago we ran out of new land, and the space program was too expensive. It’s never been the same here since there was nowhere to go. But it’s possible to get somewhere else by going backwards.”

“Brutal,” Fifa said. “First, you’re planning to get shot climbing over the wall into the USN. Now it’s time travel.”

“Yes. I’m not sure, but I think Nevada is time travel.”

When they parted, he pressed a set of keys into her palm. “Take the house.”

“What happens if you wise up and do a U-turn a hundred miles short of Vegas?”

“Then I’ll move back in, you can stay, and we’ll find out whether misery really does love company.” He kissed her. “I’ll miss you.”

“Not as much as you think,” Fifa scoffed, offhand. “I’ve always played second fiddle to your real girlfriend.”

“Like who?”

“That shriv in shades sitting in the sharp car.”

“What’s he doing here?” Nollie said irritably.

In the rare warmth of mid-summer, they’d once more thrown the front door open, with only the screen door latched. After serial declarations of martial law in the latter thirties, American cities had restored the protection of property rights and imposed civic order; New York had a surprisingly low crime rate. For most of the public, the miscreants who posed any serious danger were over-zealous keepers of order—one of whom was standing on their stoop.

Goog could see them through the screen, stacking luggage in the living room. They couldn’t pretend they weren’t home. Refusing to invite an immediate relative inside would seem weird.

“Going somewhere?” their visitor asked, scanning the bags.

“Taking a tour,” Nollie said briskly. “Seeing our nation’s sites. Inspired by the Fourth of July.”

“What sites?” Goog asked skeptically. “Platefaces bought most of them up.”

“They haven’t put coolie hats on Mount Rushmore. Yet.”

“So what’s up?” Willing asked, trying to sound casual, which never worked.

“Heard about that ruckus at Elysian,” Goog said. “Seems some valiant, self-sacrificing employee intervened, or the carnage would have been worse.”

“I wouldn’t know,” Willing said. “I spent the whole time crouched in a closet. Made a run for it as soon as the shooting stopped.” Irksome, playing to Goog’s contemptuous opinion of him, but he’d no reason to care what his cousin thought.

“Funny,” Goog said. “The home’s administration must have been misinformed, then. Because however grateful those poor souls cowering in Elysian might have felt, seems our Good Samaritan was carrying an illicit handgun. So the NYPD put in a request to the Bureau for tracking. I recognized your name.”

“Barking up the wrong coward,” Willing said, milking the false humility a bit.

“I’m doing you a favor, bud. Thought we might keep this all in the family. Turn in the sidearm—and we both know we’re talking about that forty-four you were always waving about Citadel whenever some skinny wayfarer came near your precious potatoes. What with your benevolent intercession and all, I bet I can get the cops to drop it. They just want the gun.”

Nollie’s story about the weapon having been left behind by squatters would never wash with Goog, who was present in Prospect Park when the Shadow notched its seminal two fatalities. Nor would he believe his annoying cousin would have pitched his protection into the East River. Willing was debating the best method of stonewalling when Goog’s eye was drawn by a battered carton on the floor.

“Foul matter,” Goog read from the carton’s side, and something clicked. “Only times I’ve seen you drag along that grubby box, Auntie, are when you’re planning a one-way trip.”

“I’m old,” Nollie said. “Getting dotty. Sentimental. Some writers travel with lucky fountain pens. I need my printouts.”

“This is way too much crap for Mount Rushmore,” Goog said. “And that new Myourea out front. Yours?”

“Getting rash, too,” she said. “You know those dementia sufferers. Irrational. Impulsive. Can’t be trusted with money.”

“Speaking of money: where’d it come from?” Goog never left his work at the office.

“I earned it,” Nollie said with fervor. “I got a good idea, I worked very hard to realize it, I paid taxes on the rewards of my labor—rather high taxes, or so I imagined at the time—and however improbable you may find this now, afterwards I had two cents to rub together.”

The entire scenario was bound to strike any scabbie worth his salt as highly irregular. But for once Goog Stackhouse’s imagination was inflamed by something other than fiscal malfeasance. “You could hop a U-pod for a fraction of the price. Old ladies don’t buy state-of-the-art hydrogen sedans to play tourist for a few days.”

“Last I checked, it was legal to drive across the land of the free without getting a permission slip from your own grandnephew.”

“It’s legal with one exception. If I even suspect an intention to defect to the USN, you two aren’t going anywhere.”

Willing was a master of the impassive. Nollie was less adept. It didn’t help, either, that her fleX was stiffened on the coffee table, its open GPS app already programmed for the route to Reno. Pity she didn’t do updates. In current versions of Google Maps, a search on “Nevada” brought up the name of a street in Greenwich, England. The state itself was missing.

“Wilbur, aren’t you the type,” Goog said, after a victorious glance at the fleX. “Intoxicated by an idea of yourself as having a direct line to Jesus, or whoever’s voices you’ve been hearing since you were a maladjusted kid. Just the sort of loser who used to sell his soul to Scientology—since the so-called Free State is just another fringy, goofball cult. And always so cozy with that fruitcake rabble-rouser Jarred. Makes perfect sense you’d snuffle the wacko’s trail, searching for the pothead at the end of the rainbow. Sorry to poop your pipe dream, but I’ll be flagging your chip. Drones from the Bureau will descend from the sky the moment you leave the tri-state area. As for you,” he told Nollie. “Conspiracy to defect to the USN is one of the few statutory justifications for forced chipping. So you might start shaving the back of your neck.”

“How convenient,” she said. “Its hairs are already raised.”

“Later, you’ll both thank me,” Goog said. “No nonagenarian with writer’s block would ever have scaled a considerable improvement on the Berlin Wall. And your head, Wilbur, would have splattered over the sand like a busted watermelon the moment you crossed the border.”

“Really? I guess we’ll find out.” Willing had to admit he felt yunk, pointing an X-K47 Black Shadow at his cousin. It simply didn’t feel serious. All the same, in seconds he had ratcheted up the stakes of this encounter in a manner that was difficult to ratchet back down. When you’ve pointed a gun at someone, you pretty much have to keep pointing it. You can’t put it back in your pocket and return to calm, interested discussion of your travel plans.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Goog said, with a quaver in his voice. “I’m not only your cousin, which obviously doesn’t mean much to you—”

“Or to you,” Willing said.

“I’m also a Scab agent.” Interesting slip. “Any idea what happens to you if you shoot one of us?”

“Nothing worse,” Willing calculated easily, “than if I don’t shoot you. The difference between drudging at Elysian for next to nothing and drudging at an outsourced prison for absolutely nothing? Negligible.”

“I came here to be nice,” Goog hissed.

“You came here to be disarming,” Willing said. “It always pissed you off that Jarred didn’t trust you with the guns.”

“But what are we going to do with him?” Nollie said.

“We could tie him up,” Willing supposed. “But there’s food and water to consider. Unlikely, but he might do something resourceful. And this is the last housewarming present I’d want to leave Fifa.”

“Nuts,” Nollie said. “You mean we have to bring the prick along. And I had been looking forward to this trip.”

• CHAPTER 4 • SINGIN’ THIS’LL BE THE DAY THAT I DIE

“They only include a manual setting for emergencies,” Willing advised.

“Remember what I told you about preserving your dignity by breaking the rules?” Nollie said, struggling into what no one even called the driver’s seat anymore. “That goes double for driving your own fucking car.”

“People your age insisting on controlling the vehicle are the only reason anyone has accidents anymore. It’s two and a half thousand miles.”

“You want to drive?”

“I don’t know how.”

“No one does. It’s pathetic.”

Willing had always liked his aunt for her obstinacy. So he couldn’t object when she wouldn’t comply with his wishes, either. He suppressed a tremor of trepidation in the seat beside her. This whole venture was a suicidal careen toward a sheer cliff. If they slammed into an interstate meridian midway, the truncated expedition would simply be more efficient.

They set off with their reluctant passenger in the backseat, de-fleXed, wrists duct-taped graciously in his lap rather than uncomfortably behind his back. They allowed Goog to expend his vexation by listing the many crimes they were committing: abduction, false imprisonment, obstruction of the official duties of a federal employee. Yet as they retraced the route their family had trod in the cold, wet spring of ’32—east on Atlantic Avenue, over the Brooklyn Bridge, up West Street—even the captive got caught up in reminiscence. Its personnel much reduced, the second Mandible migration was blindingly swift in comparison to the one on foot. Oh, mobes in gang formation did veer into the road with no warning (crazed blithers on motorized trikes having long ago replaced the comparatively anodyne cyclist as the New Yorker’s anathema). Yet a shrunken, flat-lined GDP had done a spectacular job of thinning vehicular traffic. After its fifty-some years of snotty road-hoggery, only grinding poverty coast-to-coast had put the kibosh on the hulking sports utility vehicle by about 2040. When Willing pointed to one up ahead, the sighting was rare. “Still chugging!” he said. “It beats me where they get the gas.”

“Man, the SUV was one of the cruelest American inventions of all time,” Goog said. “I fucking loved my mom’s Jaunt. When it went out of production, I was all set to snag the latest model.”

“Bullying, brutish, and plug-ugly,” Nollie quipped. “Guess people recognize themselves in cars same as they do in dogs.”

On the GW, the metal grates of the surface rattled, the bridge itself lurching with a subtle sway. “I get the willies crossing these things,” Nollie said.

“No kidding,” Goog said. “This rusted contraption hasn’t had any serious maintenance since the 1990s.”

“According to Avery, the federal buildings in DC are just as dilapidated,” Willing said. “She said the ‘White House’ is a misnomer. Congress, the Lincoln Memorial—they’re all a dingy yellow dripping with black streaks. She said chunks of the Washington Monument keep falling off. After a girl was killed by one, you can’t get within a hundred yards.”

“My mom is biggin’ exaggerating,” Goog sneered. “I looked up pics of the Mall online. Pristine.”

“That’s because it’s cheaper to post old photographs than to pay for steam cleaning,” Willing said.

They curved on I-95 and bumped onto I-80 in Teaneck. Willing’s mood began to lift. He’d only been to New Jersey a handful of times, mostly with Jarred to plow rapidly inflating profits into hard-asset farm equipment. Besides New York, this was the only state of the union in which he’d set foot. As soon as they hit Pennsylvania, it was a brave new world. If these truly were the last days of his life, they’d be interesting days.

Nollie plugged her fleX into the sound system, cranking up the harmonies of her youth: “Hotel California,” “The Weight,” and some of the yunkest lyrics Willing had ever heard in a song called “A Horse with No Name.” She played Don McLean, JJ Cale, and Fleetwood Mac, until Goog exclaimed, “Christ, Nollie! This is like Tunes of Cro-Magnon Man. What’s next, Vivaldi?”

“I’m bankrolling this operation. This is my car, and my road trip,” she declared. “Ergo, my music. You’re a hostage, remember? Act like one.”

In truth, the moldy soundtrack grew on them. By the time they’d hit Stroudsburg on the Pennsylvania state line, both Willing and Goog were driving their Chevies to the levy at the top of their lungs.

With the late start, the first day was short. Nollie drove manfully—and pointlessly, since the Myourea could have done the job by itself—until 9 p.m., when they pulled into a rundown motel in Dubois. The proprietor was none too happy about Nollie’s being unchipped—since a chip would have automatically covered him for losses if his ninety-year-old guest went berserk on Jack Daniel’s and trashed the room. But he accepted a fleX payment because his operation was clearly hard up.

Nollie sent Willing across the way to fetch takeout. Goog lobbied for a proper restaurant meal, but they didn’t want to have to explain a taste for bondage in a diner banquette. He wheedled for them to please cut the duct tape so he could eat without making a mess, and it took discipline to resist his imprecations. Likewise, Willing took no pleasure in binding his ankles to the bedstead in the room they all shared.

For Goog had so entered into the spirit of the adventure that it was hard to remember he was being coerced. Only that afternoon, he’d threatened to restrict Willing’s movements to the tri-state area with militarized Scab drones and menaced Nollie with compulsory surgery. Granted, he often made cheerful allusions to the doom awaiting at their destination. So perhaps he’d decided to enjoy the ride, confident that he’d have the last laugh: Willing’s brain would fry; Nollie would be picked off by a border-guard sharpshooter. At the least, the duo would be drably arrested, and Goog would figure out how to take the credit.

Be that as it may, Goog’s travel history was also provincial. He claimed to have attended a Bureau conference in Cleveland, but being on the outs with Avery, he hadn’t even returned to Washington since his parents moved back in ’44. Alone of the cousins, he could have afforded to explore beyond his tight New York orbit. But theirs was a crimped, wary, stinting generation, and travel is an acquired appetite. Maybe it never occurs to you to go anywhere in particular on a given weekend when you don’t ever feel you’re going anywhere in a larger sense.

So with the promise of wider horizons farther west, even Goog the ultimate T-bill seemed energized. His work must have been boring—totals, percentages, and occasional deviations from the norm. He was powerful, but wielded only the clenched power to ruin people’s lives, as opposed to the looser, open-palmed power to improve them. Everybody with whom he came in contact hated him, and had to pretend they didn’t. A few days’ unofficial vacation from being an asshole must have been welcome.

As they rolled through the Alleghenies and entered Ohio the following day, Willing continued to be astonished that this journey was possible. No drone descended and fastened itself to the roof of their car with gecko-like suction cups because he hadn’t reported to work at Elysian that morning to do his fair share. The chip at the base of his neck didn’t glow and heat as it sensed his growing geographical distance from the means of making a social contribution.

While the wooded hills rolled past his window and Nollie played the contented la-la-laah-laah of “Our House,” Willing considered all that data pouring into federal supercomputers. He had previously conceived of the central network as an omniscient, all-seeing overlord, which sorted and stored every minute detail to perfectly reconstruct the smallest infringements of each American citizen. But perhaps instead the data fed a bloated, overloaded behemoth choking on its own information excess and suffering from a sort of digital obesity. Woozy from gorging on a smorgasbord of similar tidbits, maybe the monster was helpless to know where to stuff the fact that Willing Mandible nee Darkly of East Flatbush, NY, had bought a packet of soda crackers for 2.95.

In any event, nothing and no one seemed to care that Willing and Enola Mandible, and even Goog Stackhouse—who might not be as important at the Bureau as he pretended—had gone AWOL. It was exhilarating.

Nollie’s having plotted their course with her fleX GPS turned out to be unnecessary. The directions all the way to the Nevada border at Wendover, Utah, came down to: “cross George Washington Bridge, then turn right.” To Willing’s amazement, I-80 stretched in a virtual straight line across the continent from Teaneck to San Francisco. Granted, the tarmac was degraded, and he felt wistful about those apocryphal days when one could smooth along this route at 85 mph, in which case they might have made this whole trip in a mere three days instead of five. Willing was a fairly proficient economics autodidact, but knew soberingly little else about the country.

Because Nollie claimed that “children in the backseat need toys,” they disabled the personal communications on Willing’s maXfleX, password-protected the settings, and let Goog play with it. Big on showing off his general knowledge as a kid, he enjoyed pitching out factoids: “The interstate highway system was initiated in 1956. I-80 took thirty years to complete. It closely approximated the route of the Lincoln Highway, the first road across America, and also duplicates much of the Oregon Trail and the Transcontinental Railroad.” Clearly, this uncompromising streak of roadway gouged remorselessly through boulders and mountain ranges was a staggering feat of engineering. Willing had harbored a variety of emotions about the United States over his short life: disappointment; anxiety, even fear; incomprehension; a whole lot of nothing. Pride was new. It was nice.

To pass the time, Nollie regaled them with reports from her friends in France, who said Americans’ reputation abroad was looking up. The arrogant, loud, gauche, boastful stereotype was obsolete. The few of their compatriots who ventured to Europe were widely regarded as modest, deferent, deflective. They were increasingly renowned for a sly acidity, dry self-deprecation, and black humor. No one tossed off clichés about Americans having “no sense of irony” when their entire country had become an irony writ large. And Yanks told great stories. In Paris, it had grown fashionable to invite lively American raconteurs to dinner parties, much as one might previously have invited the Irish.

Yet as the Myourea sped through Indiana and Illinois, the landscape was blighted on either side with huge, warehouse-style manufacturing plants. These would be abundantly automated and 100 percent foreign-owned. Locals were glad for the few low-level jobs that real people who would work for peanuts could do so cheaply that it wasn’t worth the capital expense of buying and tooling up robs. The US had become a popular location for foreign investment: the land was ample and economical. If income taxes were fiendish, DC was desperate to raise the employment rate, and corporate tax rates were trifling. Undereducated, true, the workforce was also cowed, biddable, and grateful. A higher than average incidence of workplace shootings was unfortunate, but Americans mostly killed each other, and the casualties were easily replaced. Willing had recently heard from their old tenant Kurt, who after Jarred went dark had ended up in one of these sprawling, single-story factories in the Midwest. Kurt said employees slept in dormitories—more like mausoleums than the kind that housed college students. By day, you could walk for half a mile along the shop floor without coming across another human being. It was lonely work, which Kurt said was worse than the boredom.

Their progress moderately impaired by Nollie’s insistence mornings on doing her jumping jacks, they struck Iowa on the third day. Fields of corn stretched to the horizon, rarely interrupted by a farmhouse. The region had always been the country’s breadbasket. Now it was the rest of the world’s. The harvest also mechanized, nearly all this grain was for export. Two years ago, the global population had crossed the ten billion mark earlier than expected. Disappearing for decades, family farms like Citadel had now been swallowed altogether by single concerns with holdings so extensive that they could have become independent countries. Companies from China and India had colonized American agriculture with a sense of entitlement and no small hint of self-righteousness. Feeding ten billion was supposedly a great achievement. Presumably feeding 10.5 billion in three or four years’ time would be an even greater achievement. Willing couldn’t see the satisfaction himself. Maybe they’d even succeed in feeding twelve billion, but then what did you have—that you didn’t have before? He’d rather build an interstate.

Throughout, the housing stock was a disconcerting patchwork. Disheveled clapboards with blistered paint and broken porch railings sat side-by-side glassy, impeccably kept retirement communities with tennis courts and pools. But plenty of smaller outposts along this route were ghost towns. He wondered where everyone had gone.

It was on the fourth day, in Nebraska. At their motel on the outskirts of Omaha that morning, they’d forgotten to fill up the water bottles. Nollie declared she was parched. (She could have been closer to insane, or hypnotized anyway. Between Lincoln and Grand Island, I-80 was so straight you could have used the roadway for a ruler, the land so flat you could have used the prairie for an ironing board. Mr. Expert in the backseat verified that the route didn’t vary in its relentless, perfectly western direction by more than a few yards for seventy-two miles. For once Willing and Goog agreed on something: Nollie’s refusal to put the Myourea into automatic along this mind-numbingly monotonous passage was yunk.) She pulled off onto an unlabeled side road that soon gave way to dirt.

“No way you’re going to find a minimart here,” Goog said. “Turn around.”

She might have, had Goog not opened his big mouth. Nollie never took directions from their hostage. “Maybe not, but even Nebraska isn’t depopulated. Americans can’t be so far gone that they won’t give a stranger a drink of water.”

The track ended at a low-lying building they almost missed, since it was camouflaged by dust, and banked with windblown sand. A few exposed streaks revealed a surface the dun color of the landscape, as if it were designed to be missed. The hockey-puck structure was round, with a flat top and no windows. The featureless dwelling had only one door, which yawned open.

“Looks deserted,” Goog said. “Let’s go back. This place is weird.”

For Willing, unease battled curiosity, and curiosity won out. He stepped gingerly over the sand-mounded threshold. “Hello!” he called, and there wasn’t even an echo. “Give me my maXfleX,” he told Goog. “It’s dark.”

Willing struggled with the screen for a moment. The old fleX rolled neatly into a flashlight in a trice, but the new and improved conversion was awkward. Even when he got the tube rolled, the beam splayed asymmetrically to the left.

The immediate interior was also full of dirt, with the odd empty vodka bottle on top: they weren’t the first to discover this place. Willing swiveled the beam. It found more dirt, a smooth interior black wall, and a hole in the middle: a spiral staircase, with no direction to go but down. The entrance had once been protected by a hatch cover, which leaned at a dysfunctional tilt. Someone had jimmied it up. A smell rose from the opening—stale and dry, with an undertone of corruption. The impression of desolation was absolute. No one was here.

“What is this, Indiana Jones?” Goog whined. “We should get out of here.”

“I’m surprised at you,” Willing said. “There might be something down there you could tax.”

“Ha-ha. But I’m not setting foot in that pit with my hands taped.”

Actually, they’d grown pretty casual about the tape. It hadn’t been replaced since the day previous. Goog could probably have twisted free if he’d tried.

“He can stay up here, then. I locked the car,” Nollie assured Willing. “He’s not going anywhere. I want to check this out.”

As he and Nollie cautiously descended the gritty obsidian stairs, Willing glanced enviously at her older fleX. The roll was sweet, the light beam clean. Though the afternoon sun of the Nebraska plains was baking outside, the stairwell was cool. The foul taint in the air grew more intense.

One flight down, Willing swept his fleXpot to the side. It struck, of all things, a dusty treadmill. Behind it, the wall was lined with metal dumbbells of ascending size. A few feet to the right sat a cross-trainer, and next to that a rowing machine. He had no understanding of why anyone would bother to build a gym underground.

“Stop,” he shouted sharply to Nollie behind him, embarrassed by the pound of his chest and the bile that rose in his throat. “If you’re at all squeamish, or easily spooked, you should go back up.”

“You can’t imagine I’m ‘squeamish,’ much less—” She dropped the complaint cold.

Willing’s fleXpot was trained on the stationary bicycle. Rather, on its rider. Slumped over the digital readout as if having set the machine for an overambitious hill climb, the figure was draped in a dusty tracksuit. Skulls always appear to be grinning, though this one had enough leathered skin stuck around the mouth to convey more the grimace of exertion. One of the arms had fallen off.

“This guy’s been dead a long time,” Willing said. “That probably makes us lucky.” Were he pressed to theorize: what made corpses horrifying was moisture. The completely alive and the completely dead, fine. The in-between was the problem.

“You up for one more level?” Nollie gestured to the staircase, which wound farther down. “I’m intrigued.”

“Take my hand.” She seized it. He wasn’t sure who was comforting whom.

The floor below contained an elaborate kitchen: convection oven, microwave, slow cooker, a KitchenAid mixer with a clatter of attachments. Finely tooled ash with stylish brass fixtures, the cabinet doors were flung open. Whatever ruffians had rifled the larder were not culinarily inclined. They’d left behind the bread maker, pasta machine, and food processor, while julienne slicers and olive pitters littered the linoleum. Though the floor was sticky from broken bottles of evaporated goo, several shelves were lined with cocktail onions, caviar, artichoke hearts, anchovies, hazelnut oil, and preserved lemons. What struck Willing about this buried Dean & Deluca Christmas basket was that there wasn’t merely one jar of Seville marmalade with Glenlivet. Like all the other chichi comestibles, there were dozens of marmalade jars—foreshortening two feet deep.

He picked up a jar of candied kumquats, and brushed it off. Mumbling, “My mother didn’t believe in sell-by dates,” he slipped it into his belt pack.

Nollie was panning her fleXpot over the contents of an open chest freezer, six of which lined a whole quadrant of this level. Poking at the contents with a long-handled barbecue spatula, she read from the labels. “Sea bass, filet mignon, duck breast, quail, foie gras, smoked salmon—”

“Eat your salmon,” Willing remembered.

“I don’t think so.” The airless plastic packets were uniformly an evil black.

Opposite the kitchen, a curved dining table of an exotic wood traced the circular wall of the silo. Three of its residents were propped in chairs. They looked hungry.

“The circulation system must have kept working for quite a while,” Willing supposed. “Or the smell in here might be unbearable. What do you say—one more?”

They curled a third flight down—which entailed nudging one of their worse-for-wear hosts out of the way, about whom they became blasé with unnerving rapidity. Willing would have predicted this: a floor-to-ceiling wine cellar in the round. Or that’s what he inferred, though it was here that previous tourists had concentrated their pillage. Most of the bottles were missing, and those that remained were empty: drained fifty-year-old Bordeauxs lay amid discarded cardboard canisters of Talisker and elaborate wooden corks of top-shelf cognac.

“I know something about French wine,” Nollie said, raising a broken bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape. “This was a good year.”

“If we’re going to rule out a virus, that was their mistake.” Willing pointed to a break in the grid of cubbyholes: a tall, empty cabinet whose open glass door nonetheless sported a sophisticated lock. Inside, the sections were long and vertical.

The next floor down was an entertainment center, where three corpses were riveted by a cinema screen of a size that a maXfleX could now duplicate in any teenager’s bedroom. Below that, a lounge area, where several socializers seemed a bit too relaxed. The two floors thereafter were all residential units, each with a private sitting room and bath. These, too, had been ransacked, the dresser drawers yanked out, the mattresses flung. If the scavengers had been searching for valuables—jewelry, gold—Willing bet they scored handsomely. But they hadn’t bothered to take the cash, scattered willy-nilly around the bedrooms like discarded candy wrappers. He picked up a $100 bill, an original-issue greenback—too small to blow your nose in, not absorbent enough to clean your glasses. When the dollar was replaced by the dólar nuevo, like most people he’d been glad to see the back of the old currency, and hadn’t thought to save a sample as a memento. The distinctive flannel texture, the painfully pompous engraving, triggered an unexpected nostalgia. He pocketed the bill.

Including an enormous backup water tank, the bottom level was for storage. Looters had disregarded most of the contents: gluten-free pasta, running shoes, joint supports, and sea-salt truffles, one of whose assortments Willing opened; the glaucous chocolates were brittle and encrusted, like barnacles. Here also was the trash compactor. The dense, variegated cubes stacked beside it numbered under a dozen. This underground summer camp hadn’t lasted long.

On the way back up, Nollie spotted a glint amidst the discarded bottles in the wine cellar, and rescued a magnum of champagne, its foil intact. “Whole reason we came here,” she said. “I’m thirsty.”

When they emerged, Goog was grumpy, and, after their detailed lowdown, jealous. Before sliding into the driver’s seat, Nollie popped the cork. “Can’t remember the last time I needed a drink more,” she said, and took a slug.

“If you’re going to hit the bottle, you have to put the Myourea in automatic.”

“Willing, you’re such a pussy drag.” But she conceded, and once she bumped back to the mesmerizing straightaway on I-80 put her feet up. Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska played for atmosphere while they round-robined the warm champagne.

“So was that some nuclear bunker, then?” Goog asked.

“I checked the dates on the food,” Willing said. “It was all bought in ’33. So they were hiding from worse than nuclear holocaust: other people. Unfortunately for them, they let some of the other people inside.”

“Were they attacked, then?” Goog wondered. “Robbed?”

“Nah,” Willing said. “This is America. There was a gun cupboard. Better than even odds they killed each other.”

“Lived high beforehand, though,” Nollie said.

“They were rich,” Willing said. “And they were old.”

“Rich, obviously,” Nollie said. “But how can you tell if a corpse is old?”

“By their products thou shalt know them,” Willing intoned. “The exercise equipment is a generational giveaway. The bathrooms were stocked to the ceiling with anti-aging creams, tooth-whitening gel, and caffeine shampoo. Medication for hypertension, cholesterol, erectile dysfunction—and not only a vial or two. Hundreds. Wish I could have told Great Grand Man—we finally found out who cornered the national market on laxatives.”

“And your poor mother,” Nollie said to Goog, “hoarded Post-it notes.”

Rumors had long circulated about the “über-rich.” In folklore, these pampered fiscal vampires had retreated to fortified islands of sumptuous abandon, paddling in pools, propping piña coladas, while their countrymen starved. To discover that they hadn’t all escaped unscathed—that, if nothing else, they may not have escaped one another—was satisfying.

Attempting to cross into the Free State on I-80 seemed a little obvious. Opting for the road less traveled by was the whole reason they’d chosen a northerly entry point into Nevada in the first place: most subversive emigrants would take I-70 to Las Vegas. If the degree of fortification along the border varied, Immigration and Customs Enforcement would surely concentrate its discouragements near the renegade state’s largest and most famous city in its far south.

So Nollie exited the interstate for the secondary parallel roadway, US Route 58, which led into the town of Wendover, whose original municipal boundaries straddled the Utah-Nevada border. At first glance, Wendover seemed buzzier than similar communities en route. Hitherto, motels had been ramshackle, with bedraggled bedspreads and cracked, recycled plastic glasses. Here, more upscale hostelries looked new, with names like Pilgrim’s Rest, Pilgrim’s End, and Pilgrim’s Pillow. They didn’t seem to be referring to religious refugees in wide-brimmed hats. As their party drew farther into town, gaudy restaurants, casinos, and shops proliferated: The Turncoat Inn, The Deserter Sands, and Traitor Joe’s. Multiple establishments made droll allusions to what visitors like Willing most feared: Fission Chips, or Chip Off Ye Olde Block. The Last Chance Bar advertised concoctions christened Brain Freeze and Stroke in a Glass.

Goog mewled that he was famished. They all were.

“What about his hands?” Willing asked his great-aunt.

“This town is so barmy,” she said, “nobody’s going to look twice at duct tape.” Goog’s titular bondage was already loose enough to qualify as a bracelet, and Willing had seen him more than once shove the stretched bangle back on.

So they stopped at a family restaurant called Final Feast. In reception, a five-year-old was whooping it up in a replica of an electric chair, which gyrated and vibrated and shot real sparks. The menu was designed around the last meals requested by inmates on death row. The John Allen Muhammad: chicken with red sauce and strawberry cake. The John Wayne Gacy came with KFC (Korean Fried Chicken) and shrimp. Or you could choose lighter fare: the John William Elliot was a cup of hot tea and six chocolate chip cookies; the James Rexford Powell, one pot of coffee.

“This is completely tasteless,” Nollie said, surveying the entrees.

“How can you tell without ordering something?” Goog said. She rolled her eyes.

“I’m going for the Ron Scott Shamburger,” Willing determined: nachos with chili, jalapeños, picante sauce, grilled onions, and tacos. “This guy cut out in style.”

“Howdy!” Like her coworkers, their waitress was kitted out like a prison guard, with a shiny badge on her breast that said BETSY. “What can I get you?”

“I’ll start with a Lethal Injection,” Goog said.

“Great choice!” Betsy exclaimed, though the brandy, moonshine, and grenadine drink sounded vile. After taking the rest of their order, she asked companionably, “You folks defectors?”

“If we were,” Nollie said, looking at the girl askance, “why would we tell you?”

“Only making conversation, honey. Don’t you notice,” Betsy directed to the men, “how these old dears tend to get paranoid?”

“Is there any good reason to be paranoid?” Willing asked.

“I know what you’re asking, sweetie,” Betsy said. “It’s what you all want to know. But the crossers never come back. Make of that what you want. We do get repeat customers, but it’s mostly folks who got cold feet at the last minute. Sometimes puts them in a right pickle, ’cause they’ll have used up the reserves on their chip in a big casino blowout. You see them on the street, panhandling for chip transfers to get back home.”

“You get a lot of these defectors?” Goog asked suspiciously, like the scabbie they sometimes forgot he still was.

“Oh, the pilgrims have really picked up the economy round here! I’ll be right back with your grub.”

After their late lunch, they returned to the highway and then pulled over. About a mile down 58, straight like the interstate it paralleled, Nollie’s fleX indicated the border with Nevada. Sure enough, some sort of edifice rose at the end of the road—it was hard to tell from here how high, or to discern whether guards with snipers’ rifles crouched atop it. Willing and Nollie agreed that getting any closer in a populous area was a mistake. Better to steer farther south on small, local roads, and explore the nature of federal defenses in the middle of nowhere.

“Look, I know we haven’t always got along,” Goog told Willing from the backseat, as dust rose around the car. “That doesn’t mean I want your brain to burn out like a light bulb. Can’t we call a truce? This trip has been a hoot. Turn around, maybe we can dip into Colorado on the way back. I’ll even pay the larcenous fee the platefaces charge to see the Grand Canyon. Really, it’s on me, for all three of us. I promise I won’t turn you guys in. I won’t report the abduction. I’ll even let you keep your yunk pistol.”

“That’s incredibly generous,” Willing said.

“I can never tell when you’re being sarcastic,” Goog snarled. “Listen, why risk mental meltdown? The US—it’s not so bad!”

“Isn’t that what the founding fathers had in mind,” Willing said. “A country that’s not so bad.”

“Not so bad is better than splug!” Goog implored. “I know it’s rough going for a while, but once you hit the age of sixty-eight it’s a free ride! Just put in your time!”

“Why don’t you come with us?” Willing said.

“No way,” Goog said. “You don’t know the Bureau like I know the Bureau. These guys are not joking around. You think they wouldn’t stroke out noncompliant taxpayers? In a heartbeat. Hell, it’s amazing they’re not already staging public executions. And not because we’re goons. The regular public—they’ve got no appreciation for how desperate things are. The budget. It’s a biggin’ catastrophe. A miracle we can keep the Supreme Court in sandwiches.”

After they’d traveled far enough out of town, Nollie cut west again. The pitted dirt road resembled the one that had led to the underground silo. Associations: not good. Goog made unfunny cracks about Nollie’s homing instincts for corpses.

Yet as they approached what the GPS identified as the end of the world as they knew it, no Great Wall rose up to meet them. Their vehicle did not explode from tripping a landmine. Where Nollie stopped the Myourea and they all got out, two strands of rusted barbed wire stretched limply across the road between listing, poorly anchored posts. The fence continued along a north–south axis in both directions. On the other side, a hand-lettered sign read, “Welcum to the United States of Nevada.”

Hands on hips, Goog surveyed the notorious border with disgust. “I can’t believe this.”

“That fence,” Nollie said, “wouldn’t keep chickens out.”

Ten yards beyond the barbed wire sat a small red clapboard house. On the porch, an old man tilted back in a rocker, smoking. Rarer these days than an SUV, his rollie looked like a real cigarette. Willing waved. The old man waved back.

Willing advanced to the right-hand fence post. The ends of the wires were looped, and hooked around up-tilted nails.

“STOP!” Goog shouted, as his cousin reached for a loop. “It makes total sense to me now! They’re happy to let unchipped shrivs like Nollie totter out of the country. Grateful, even. They cost a fucking fortune. But as for all-give-and-no-take taxpayers like you, Wilbur—there’s only one possible reason there’s no wall, and no guards, and no mines: they don’t need them. If you want iron-clad evidence I’m right about the self-destruct, this sad-ass fence is it.”

Willing unhooked both wires and walked them out of the way of the car—staying in the US of A. Nollie resumed what she insisted on calling the driver’s seat, glided into the land of treachery and secession, and parked.

The line was now drawn literally in the sand. A dare.

By God, it was touching: Goog covered his face with his hands. “I can’t watch this.”

With no further ceremony, Willing stepped into the Free State.

• CHAPTER 5 • WHO WANTS TO LIVE IN A UTOPIA ANYWAY

The loud cackle from the red clapboard’s porch was startling. Willing had been fairly sure, but that wasn’t the same as certain. So he had stood there for a moment, sizing matters up, doubtless wearing the expression of patting his body down after an accident: being here, and continuing to be here, with an intense awareness of one point in time connecting to the next that one seldom appreciates. Maybe from the outside it looked funny.

The old man slapped his thigh. “I swear,” he cried, “no matter how many times I watch, it still cracks me up.”

Despite protestations that he didn’t want his cousin’s head to detonate, Goog looked consternated that it hadn’t. “Okay, then,” he said, only two feet away but still in the USA, “what about the cannibalism?”

Willing nodded at the old man. “That guy doesn’t look like he’s about to eat me. Now are you coming?”

“I can’t.” Goog looked shredded. “Where you just stepped—it’s the new Wild West. Whatever it’s like, it has to be primitive. And I have a good job—”

“I wouldn’t call it a good job.”

“A lucrative job, then. Perks. Nothing to complain about. And over there—they must lynch people like me.”

“What’s the young man do?” the old man shouted. He was eavesdropping.

“Scabbie,” Willing shouted back.

“Tell him he’s right!” the old man said.

Ceremonially, Willing took out his pocketknife and severed the sagging duct tape looped around his cousin’s wrists. He rooted in a pocket for Goog’s commandeered maXfleX, and fetched a bottle of water from the car. “If you really have to go back,” he said, handing over Goog’s survival kit, “there’s an airport a few miles from here. You could probably walk.”

“It’s hot,” Goog grumbled. The fetching of a second bottle didn’t matter. He’d meant, It’s lonely.

“Tell Savannah, Bing, your parents, and Jayne and Carter I said good-bye. And spread the word that this border scare is treasury.”

“Nobody would believe me,” Goog said glumly. He was probably right.

They knocked each other’s shoulders with rare warmth. Willing restored the two barbed wires to their nails. With a wan wave to Nollie, Goog slouched off toward Wendover, where perhaps another Lethal Injection could dull his disappointment—in his country. In himself.

Meanwhile, Nollie was shooting the breeze with the man on the porch. His old-timer folksiness seemed hyped for effect. He’d got plenty of sun, but up close looked perhaps only a few years older than Lowell, which these days was nothing. The denim overalls were too crisp to be anything but an affectation, and the floppy hat looked crushed on purpose. Given the fields planted behind the house and the cattle beyond, he didn’t spend all day jawing with new immigrants. Sitting sentry at this entry point must have been what he did for fun.

“According to our friend here,” Nollie told Willing, “that big barricade on US 58 is only plywood.”

“The town can’t have tourists dancing back and forth over the border in plain view and their heads don’t blow up,” the codger explained. “Ruins the mythology. Which is a money-spinner. Nobody’s ordering a gi-normous final feast at lunch if they’re planning on supper.”

“If I wanted to find someone over here,” Willing asked, “what’s my best bet? Vegas?”

“Where most folks head. Save yourself some trouble, try the internet.”

“I thought you people didn’t have any internet.”

He chuckled. “Got our own server. Oh, the Outer Forty-Nine block us from the world-wide-whatever. Don’t think you’ll get all of Google books. But there’s plenty local advice on growing alfalfa. Sites for finding loved ones. If they want to be found.”

As Goog had warned, the technology was primitive. Their adoptive homeland provided neither satellite connection to http://usn nor the public radio-wave access that blanketed much of the US—a country whose territory began a few yards from here, but which Willing was already starting to think of as far away. Their good-old-boy guide was kind enough to provide the password for his private Wi-Fi. It was unbearably slow.

“Got it,” Willing announced after an excruciating five minutes. “Jarred Mandible, 2827 Buena Vista Drive, Las Vegas. That was easier than I expected. Though I don’t understand the site I found him on. Something about cheese.”

“It’s after four o’clock,” Nollie noted restlessly, “and Vegas is three hundred miles from here.”

“Before you two hit the road,” the geezer said, with a glint of mischief in his eye, “might try a local parlor game while you’re still by the border.”

Curious, Willing followed the gatekeeper’s instructions, extending his maXfleX over the barbed wire into the land of his old life. The device could immediately contact http://www.mychip.com again. Once more, the codger hooted. “What’s it say?”

“Zero-zero nuevos,” Willing read. “And zero-zero cents.”

That earned a second thigh-slap. “Another drama I never get tired of! Only part of that fairy tale about the chip that’s dead on. But they don’t suck the life from your head. Put one foot in the Free State, they suck out the money instead.”

“Displays a certain grim consistency,” Nollie said.

“Don’t matter,” the man said. “Nobody use a chip here anyways. Think of it as shrapnel from the Income Tax Wars. But better get used to it, kid: you’re broke.”

“What about bancors?” Nollie asked warily.

“The USN don’t trade, with nobody,” the man said, enjoying himself. He had a sadistic streak. “Part philosophy, part practicality—’cause ain’t nobody will trade with us. So if you can’t make it, mine it, fix it, grow it, or invent it in Nevada, you can’t get it. Which means, ma’am, a bancor is about as useful for the purchase of provisions as a drowned rat.”

“Do Nevadans use money at all?” Willing asked.

“What do you think, we use beads? We’re not savages. Carson City issues continentals. First currency of the original thirteen colonies. But it went to hell pronto in the late 1770s. ’Cause it wasn’t backed by nothin’. We fixed that.”

“Don’t tell me,” Willing said. “You’re on the gold standard.”

“Ain’t you quick! Before we cut loose, the Free State produced the majority of American gold anyways. But supply of continentals is real restricted. Learned our lesson from the thirties. Everybody round here pretty much agree that on the face of it the gold standard’s dumb. Arbitrary, the governor calls it. Not much to do with the stuff but wear it around your neck. Can’t eat it. But for currency, it works. Even if we don’t quite know why. One continental buy you a whiskbroom today? One continental buy you a whiskbroom tomorrow. So it’s not that dumb.”

“Well, thanks for the advice,” Willing said, by way of getting a move on.

“I don’t recall dishing out any advice,” the man objected. “Though I worry you’re not focused on your sichiation. You got no money. Even if you do find refueling stations for that fancy jalopy of yours, how you going to pay? Here’s your advice, and I hand it out free to all the dewy-eyed newcomers who duck through that fence: Nevada ain’t no utopia.”

“Did I say anything to imply I thought it was?” Willing asked.

“You all think so,” the man dismissed. “But your friend there. A lovely lady, I’m sure—”

“Watch who you’re calling lovely,” Nollie barked.

“But she ain’t exactly fresh off the conveyor belt,” he went on. “You bring in old people, you pay for old people. No Medicare here. No Social Security. No Part D prescription drug plans. No Medicaid-subsidized nursing homes. No so-called safety net. Every citizen in this rough-and-tumble republic gotta walk the high wire with nada underneath but the cold hard ground. Trip up? Somebody who care about you catch you, or you fall on your ass.”

They struck out on the two-lane US 93. The land was flat and dry, with a rumple of low mountains on the horizon. Tufts of scrub pilled the plain like the puff of cumulous clouds overhead, the terrain a perfect reflection of the sky.

“You seemed pretty confident, when you crossed the border,” Nollie said.

“More than your 60 percent confident anyway,” Willing said. “When Goog talked about the condition of the Washington Monument, something fell into place. It’s more economical to monitor photographs online than to clean the buildings in real life. So when I saw the fence, I got it. They don’t have dogs, or sharpshooters, or a huge concrete barrier around the entire perimeter of Nevada. But not because the chip is coded to self-destruct. They’re too cheap.”

Nollie chuckled. “Same reason they weren’t interested in fighting another Civil War in the first place.”

“Rumors are free. They spread themselves. Hiring people to post a lot of nonsense about the USN costs next to nothing. It’s what Fifa said about state terrorism. Policing by propaganda is a money saver. And honestly, Noll,” Willing added as an afterthought. “It’s the United States. It’s not what it once was. But they still don’t assassinate you for tax evasion.”

They got their first lesson in Nevadan brass tacks that very night. They were running low on natural gas, and wouldn’t make it to Vegas without refueling. While the small town of Ely did have a motel and a diner, they hadn’t the money for either. So they pulled off 93, locked the doors, and wrapped up in the sweaters that only Nollie had thought to pack in July. After sundown in the desert, it got cold.

Willing didn’t care. He’d been colder. During the winter of 2031–32, when his mother wouldn’t set the thermostat above forty-three—barely high enough to keep the pipes from freezing. Hunkered down in a trickling culvert on the way up to Gloversville, unable to sleep, waiting for the sun to rise. Freezing his fingers on the handlebars as he pushed the bike up weedy riverbanks, struggling to keep the cycle upright, Nollie’s and Carter’s boxes making the load top-heavy. The tacos from Final Feast may have run out long ago, but this was hardly his first skipped meal. Avery had taken a year or two to disentangle luxuries from requirements. Willing knew the difference as a kid.

He hit the pavement early, and offered to fry up short orders at the diner. Begrudgingly, the proprietor agreed, but only through the breakfast rush. He heard mutterings about “illegal immigrants”—a slightly bent usage, since what made Willing and Nollie illegal wasn’t being denied permission to enter this new country, but being forbidden to leave their own. After also cleaning the bathrooms, he earned his first continentals—their arcane colonial design in sepia even hokier and more retro than the old greenbacks.

Were the prices on the menu any guide, his wages were splug—lower than his post-tax pay at Elysian. Yet it felt better to make less money and keep all of it than to net more money after the income had been plundered. The fact that the diner’s owner didn’t request the web address of the metal in his neck was heady. These were his first earnings in six years that hadn’t been automatically reported to, and neatly evaporated by, the federal government. Dear Goog, Wish you were here.

Next, he collected dried cowpats to be sold as manure for a ranch near the highway. He spent the afternoon mending the rancher’s fences—the very quotidian chore that killed his mother. Willing took care to wear gloves, even in the heat. The work gave him flashbacks: Florence’s forefinger, at first merely sausage-plump, with a halo of red around the cut. She tried to be mindful, soaking the laceration in warm salt water, which afterward the doctor said was futile. Within two days, the hand ballooned into an unmilked udder, and red streaks striped her sturdy forearm. Supposedly, the result would have been the same had they whisked her to the hospital the moment the finger began to swell. “Drugs that don’t work,” the internist announced forlornly, delivering the respectfully folded bandana like a miniature American flag at a military funeral, “don’t work early any better than they work late.”

Meantime, Nollie did jumping jacks beside the car, earning no end of rubbernecking hilarity from passing locals. Willing would never have called it to her attention, but her form had decayed. Her hands no longer met overhead, but rose only as high as her ears, then descended to the level of her waist. The result was a weak, dying-butterfly motion. The jumps, too, were ineffectual. She used to click her heels. Now her feet lifted off and dropped in the same place, about shoulder width. When briefly airborne, she hovered only half an inch from the ground—you could hardly even call it a jump. The deterioration pained him. The lunatic regime always had a comical side, but this feebler version would only amuse strangers.

Even Enola Mandible couldn’t do calisthenics all day, however lamely articulated. By their second day, she was scavenging for odd jobs herself: shelving canned goods in the minimart, swabbing floors. After which, back aching, she didn’t need to do jumping jacks.

It was a poor area, made poorer because tourists from the likes of Boise and Portland were no longer passing through on the way to Vegas. Worse, like Willing, soon after secession the state’s entire population—albeit with an unchipped sector vastly larger than the national average—had their chips zeroed by Scab satellites. Nevadans dubbed this punitive farewell fleecing “the Petty Larceny.” The cumulative extraction was not insubstantial. The term alluded less to meager takings than to small-mindedness.

As the pittances locals could pay their migrant visitors added up, the community’s hostility broke down. Willing worked hard and well. He kept his mouth shut. By the end, more than one Ely native had invited them both for a meal. After five days of living out of the Myourea, they rustled up enough spare continentals to refuel the car.

Nevada had always been a magnet for kooks. Misfits, outcasts, miscreants, mavericks—the malcontents, the fantasists, the seekers of shortcuts. Born of mining boom and bust, the economy was founded on vice: prizefighting, loose women, drunkenness, gambling, and marital fecklessness. Even before going it alone, the state was an outlier, making it all too easy to get married, easier still to divorce. Alcohol was plied twenty-four hours a day. A lenient relationship to prostitution well predated the era in which Savannah was able to earn an accredited community college degree in stimulation therapy. Real cigarettes—or giant smelly cigars, for that matter—were legal in casinos. A prohibition against state income tax was enshrined in its constitution. In 2042, Nevadans had merely formalized that they were a people apart. Thus the mutinous new nation-within-a-nation was tailor-made for Willing’s eccentric, ceaselessly outraged uncle. But with what or whom would an iconoclast shadowbox here? The image was discordant: Jarred Mandible, perfectly happy.

Willing had known his mentor as a far-sighted landowner, who had appreciated before the rest of the family the primacy of the need to eat. He always pictured Jarred in muddy gumboots, with a shovel. Surely in the USN Jarred would already have procured a farm—Citadel resurrected, liberated from the humiliating requirement to sell nearly all its meat and produce, at scandalously low fixed prices, to the US Department of Agriculture. Yet the urban address on http://usn should have challenged this rosy, pastoral vision of his uncle’s circumstances.

Willing couldn’t suppress a bubble of excitement as Nollie crossed the Las Vegas city limits. He had never been interested in gambling—with money, that is. More broadly, he was very interested in gambling. He was gambling now.

Besides, he instinctively responded to the city’s reputation. Its wildness, abandon, and incaution naturally called out to a young man whose childhood was constricted by wariness and vigilance. The institutionalized recklessness of a town where many an individual blew the entirety of his assets in a single whirl of the roulette wheel couldn’t help but appeal to a chronically parsimonious Brooklynite who had measured out exact three-quarter cups of rice for his mother, that the bag might last the week. He savored the city’s obliviousness to the tut-tutting opprobrium it had always attracted from the tight, the prim, the rectitudinous. It cared nothing for virtue. It was crass, it was loud, it was heathen. It was silly, and it was fake—honestly, admittedly fake, which gave it a genuineness of a sort. It did not apologize for itself. Over time, the city had made scads of money for its residents on the very back of what was wrong with it.

Las Vegas was the Anti-Willing. Everyone is drawn to what they are not.

Yet as the sun began to set and Nollie drove past the storied strip, his heart fell. Casinos like the Wynn, the Venetian, the Bellagio, and the Singapore were hulking and dark. The fabled main drag had grown funereal. A sprinkling of neon spangled only farther out. More traffic coursed the freeway than in Manhattan, but the preponderance of vehicles were haulage trucks; extravagant motors like their own were scarce. The immediate touch and feel of downtown was disappointingly serious.

Jarred’s address was located on the very outskirts in the far southeast. As they drew from the center of town, sprawling white stucco ranch houses with manicured cactus gardens gave way to smaller, cheaper-looking dwellings with no landscaping—rows of identical homes plunked on barren red dirt. Jarred’s development, Aloe Acres, had been left half-finished. Terra-cotta roof tiling its sole cursory nod toward Spanish Modern, the bleak white house numbered 2827 was surrounded by abandoned, partially built rectangular walls rising waist-high. They’d either run out of money, or the developers had hightailed it when the famously renegade state grew more insubordinate than investors were prepared for.

Jarred was not expecting them. He answered the door wearing boxers and a rifle.

“Christ Almighty, it’s my right-hand man! And one of the only old ladies I can stand!” Abjuring social protocol, Jarred threw medical caution to the winds and embraced them both in a bear hug, the rifle cutting uncomfortably into Willing’s chest. “Full faith and credit, mi hermano y mi tía! I was hoping you’d make it! And what do you make of that treasury at the border, huh? I actually bothered to kayak across the Colorado, when I could have driven the fucking pickup on I-70 without so much as a wave good-bye. Felt like such a yunk! Come in, come in.”

Inside was stark: a small laminated table, two straight-backed chairs. Everything but the concrete floor was white, and nothing hung on the walls. As the last of the crimson sunset winked through a stingy window, Jarred switched on a dangling bare bulb. His wild black curls were if anything longer, escaping a careless ponytail. Before his uncle left to throw on a robe, Willing noted that at fifty-three Jarred had finally grown a potbelly. Whatever he was up to, it wasn’t tilling, planting, and slopping out hogs.

As if realizing what Willing was thinking, Jarred said on return, “Man, you’ve got even skinnier.”

“Slavery is slimming,” Willing said.

Jarred fetched a plastic stool, a bottle of tequila, and three mismatched glasses. “Smartest self-starter around here is the guy who decided to plant blue agave after secession,” he said, pouring. “No good having Patrón headquartered in town if they’re cut off from their Mexican suppliers. Now this local harvest stuff is all over the Free State, and the guy who makes it is stinking rich. Cheers! To the indomitable Mandibles, may we forever flourish!”

“So there are rich people here?” Nollie asked.

“Better believe it,” Jarred said. “This state needs practically everything. Figure out what hole to fill, and you can make a killing. What’s more, you keep it. Flat tax of 10 percent. And that’s not 10 percent plus sales tax, property tax, state and local, Medicare tax, and Social Security. Ten percent, period. Fucking hell, nobody even resents it.”

“I can’t picture you, my boy,” Nollie said, “not resenting anything. You must be desolate.”

“I could always resent,” Jarred posited, “not resenting anything.”

“Do some people not pay the 10 percent?” Willing asked.

“Oh, probably. But the police force is biggin’ small, overstretched, and easily annoyed. I wouldn’t cross them. Justice is pretty rough. They’d probably show up at the door, take whatever continentals they could find, and beat you up. If only for being a nuisance. With no, I mean no, welfare—no unemployment checks, no disability payments, no aid to dependent children, zip—there are some seriously down-and-out lowlifes in this town, and the crime rate is monumental. Hence the rifle at the door, sorry. You still have that sexy little Black Shadow?”

“Naturally,” Willing said, patting the pack on his hip.

Nollie looked edgy. “It’s sounds as if we shouldn’t leave our things in the car.”

Willing frowned. “There’s not much out there that’s worth anything.” He didn’t want to immediately pile their luggage into Jarred’s house, as if they were moving in—especially if that’s just what they were doing.

“Maybe not to you.” Nollie scuttled out the door. She returned laboring with a box, and Willing leapt up to take it from her.

Jarred guffawed. “Not the foul matter!”

He didn’t want it to be true, but Willing worried that his great-aunt was starting to lose it. Yes, the elderly had their attachments. But she had dragged those old manuscripts into every hotel room on the road trip here. She’d plunked the box beside her in the booth when they ate at Final Feast. She’d even kept it beside her doing odd jobs in Ely, where she’d also arrived at locals’ houses for dinner, arms wrapped around its failing cardboard like a toddler clutching a stuffed bunny. Fair enough, the documents were totems of her lost life as a professional author. Yet the ferocity of the clinging was off. Willing and Jarred locked eyes with shared embarrassment.

After breaking out corn chips and salsa, Jarred extended the bottle for refills, and Willing put a hand over his glass. “Since when are you so abstemious?”

“I’m not. I’m sentimental.” Willing unzipped an outer pocket of his belt pack. Delicately, he withdrew a bundle of fabric. He unwound the sock. It was the same knee sock he had once packed with coinage, and used to threaten the red-haired boy into abdicating his fatty ground beef. Willing placed the object inside daintily on the table. “Pour the next shot into that.”

“Hey, I recognize that!” Jarred exclaimed. “It was my sister’s, God rest her. She had a fucking fetish about those things. Biggin’ unlike her, too. Charming, in fact. Don’t take this wrong, but your mother could be a drear. For her to be infatuated with one pair of thingamabobs that were frivolous, and fancy-schmancy, and preposterous—it was a huge relief.”

Even in the crude glare of the bare bulb, the cobalt stem gleamed like the windows of a cathedral. The tiny cup was warm and loving. “I always meant to give it back to her,” Willing said. “I was keeping it safe. This is all we’ve got left of Bountiful House. It’s our inheritance.”

Jarred poured, and they toasted: “To our inheritance!” Hygiene be damned, Willing insisted that they all have a sip from the goblet, which passed between the three like a Communion cup. The ritual sanctified the evening. It seemed to bind them in a pact of some sort. To do what wasn’t clear.

To crown the festivities, Willing brought out the ridiculous candied kumquats. When you saved symbolic gestures for too long you could miss your opportunity. If they did not eat the goofy fruits now, he might own the pointless jar in perpetuity. He explained its provenance.

“Now I believe in fairies. You found a colony of the über-rich!” Jarred said. “I always figured the feds promoted the myth of this loaded elite to justify draconian tax rates. Presidents always rail against ‘billionaires and trillionaires,’ and then the top bracket conveniently kicks in, not at a billion, but 250K.”

“They’re not fairies,” Willing said. “More like an endangered species.”

“Say, your mother was right about those sell-by dates.” Nollie licked her fingers. “Little sweet for me. But not bad.”

“So do you know what it was like here,” Willing asked his uncle, “when the USN declared independence? After the border last week, I don’t trust anything that was on the news in ’42. The massacres, the anarchy. The paramilitary confrontations between patriots and secessionists. Was any of that real?”

Jarred loved to pontificate. He’d only vanished from Citadel six months ago, but that was ample time for Jarred Mandible to become an expert on a new country—if his authoritative air was undermined somewhat by the bathrobe and the plastic stool.

“That was all CGI,” he declared. “There were no paramilitary battles—because there weren’t any ‘patriots.’ Everybody had fucking had it with DC, and anyone feeling swoony about America the Beautiful was welcome to leave. From what I’ve been told, ’42 was the most graceful revolution in history. Municipal governments were already in place, and they stayed in place. Ditto the state government—which simply became the national government, bingo, overnight. So people woke up. Sun rose. They went to work. Nothing changed. After all, ever think about what the federal government does? Takes your money and gives it to somebody old. That’s about it. Oh, and then the feds do expend an awful lot of energy interfering with anything you want to do. Really miss that.”

“There’s the Census Bureau,” Willing said. “I don’t know how much good they do, but it’s pretty benign.”

“The American Battle Monuments Commission!” Nollie posited. “Harmless.”

“The Coast Guard,” Willing remembered victoriously. “Actively good.”

Jarred laughed. “Okay, I’ll give you the Coast Guard.”

“Remember back when Republicans had the numbers to let Washington run out of funding?” Nollie said. “The federal government pulled down its shutters, and nobody noticed.”

“Only one thing made folks cross,” Jarred remembered. “The closing of national parks. And now the feds have sold off Yellowstone. So much for that.”

“Hey, what’s happened to the Las Vegas Strip?” Willing asked, hoping to pull his uncle out of an all-too-familiar sourness. “I’ve seen pictures of that neon boulevard all my life. Now it’s dark.”

“Well, early in the Renunciation,” Jarred said, “Vegas made a killing. Foreign tourists swamped the casinos. With the exchange rate in their favor, drinks, hotel rooms, big shows, and buffets were practically free. Trouble was, at the tables, all you could win was dollars. Alvarado wasn’t letting more than a hundred bucks out of the country, so you couldn’t take the cash back home. And even if you spent it, in situ? Once inflation took off in earnest, in no time a big win wasn’t worth any more in real terms than the stake you’d started with. Didn’t make for a satisfying experience. Ironically, with all its early associations with the Mafia, Vegas stayed safer than most American cities in the thirties. The flood of foreign money seeped through the cracks and damped down desperation. So what really destroyed the Strip wasn’t mayhem. It was order. The sort of order that fired that lump of tin into your neck, you poor bastard.”

“The windfall tax of ’37,” Nollie recalled. “It applied not only to property sales, but to gambling earnings.”

“Ninety percent,” Jarred said. “So a two-to-one win nets a tenth of the bet. The risk-to-benefit ratio went to hell. All very well, long as Uncle Sam was relying on your upstanding character to report that bucket of nuevos from the slots. But then they brought in chipping, and taxing at source at the casinos, even for foreigners. For the pros, it was a death knell. No one could make a living, even if they were biggin’ sharp. Then the kibosh: they eliminated the cash nuevo. The feeling of physical money—being able to thumb a stack of hundreds, or heft five pounds of quarters from a one-armed bandit—it’s always been crucial to the whole gaming gestalt. When you only got credit in abstraction, most of which was immediately extracted… Well. It was the end of fun. If you want a single explanation for secession, that was it. Locals say the public outrage was so palpable that the air turned red.” Jarred sounded wistful. He’d missed the party.

“Their motto, as I recall,” Nollie said, “was No Taxation. That’s all. They didn’t give a shit about representation. Feisty buggers. I was impressed at the time. Like Hungary rising up against the Soviets. Not an auspicious analogy, either.”

“By and large, I think Nevadans were relieved not to fight a civil war,” Jarred said. “But they would have put up a fight. Nobody but nobody in this state handed in their arms after the reinterpretation of the Second Amendment.”

“The Strip could have revived after independence,” Willing said.

“Not with the embargo,” Jarred said. “The big casinos could never survive on locals, who are mostly low-stakes players. They need tourists. That’s been the biggest blow to this economy: no more tourists. Only a steady stream of strapped wetbacks like us. Washington won’t grant Nevada-bound planes the right to enter American air space. I hope you realize the scale of what you’ve done. There’s no air travel in or out. And while it may be dead easy to get into the Free State, I’m pretty sure they do arrest you if you go back. At the least, they do you for back taxes—with interest and penalties, compounded; so in either a real prison or a de facto debtors’ prison, it’s a life sentence. Especially if you’re chipped, Willing—this Brigadoon is for keeps.”

“So are there any casinos left?” For Willing, it was a matter of atmosphere. He wasn’t yearning to play craps. But he didn’t want a city for which he’d permanently sacrificed his house, most of his extended family, and a far-better-than-serviceable girlfriend to be just like everywhere else.

“The old downtown dumps like the El Cortez are limping along. Hate to admit it, but I’ve been hitting their tables myself. I don’t know how else I’ll amass any capital. You remember those long cold nights at Citadel: I’m ace at blackjack.”

“Have you won big, then?” Willing said.

“Haven’t lost much,” Jarred grunted. “An achievement.”

Nollie crossed her legs and propped her feet on the foul matter box.

“DC has clearly expected,” Jarred said, “that by choking off trade, collapsing tourism, blocking communication and transport links, and throwing a state notoriously short on water totally on its own devices, they’ll bring the USN to its knees. So the parallel is less Hungary than the Siege of Leningrad. Thirsty, poor, isolated, and frantic for fresh peaches, Nevadans will beg to be let back into the union—or so goes the theory. Meantime, the Army doesn’t have to fire a shot. No one in Washington had the appetite for American troops mowing down other Americans on maXfleX. As a strategy, it’s canny, frugal, and politically cunning. The Chelsea Clinton administration quietly assumed that the USN would crumple into a whimpering, remorseful heap within months if not weeks. Except it’s been five years. Nobody’s crying.”

Jarred exuded an infectious local pride that he may have caught from his neighbors. Yet there was a conspicuous disconnect between Jarred’s gung-ho and this dismal, Spartan dive. Willing hadn’t noticed any transport parked in Jarred’s drive. The bare bulb glared, and Willing was preparing for another night in the Myourea. The corn chips and kumquats were finished, and he wasn’t counting on more to eat.

“Is this so-called country working?” Willing said tentatively, trying to be tactful. “Or are people here just bigging stubborn?”

“This state is a riveting social experiment, and maybe the vote’s still out,” Jarred said with gusto. “All Western social democracies have traveled the same arc. They start out decent and quiet and kind of careless, but eventually they get puffed up with their own virtue. Infatuated by fairness. Of course, in a perfectly fair world we’d all have a big, malicious house and mounds of food. Unlimited access to state-of-the-art medicine, free childcare, biggin’ brutal education, and plumped pillows for the long-lived—”

“Fresh flowers every morning,” Nollie added. “A cup that infinitely runneth over with tequila.” She held up her glass for a refill.

“Exactly,” Jarred said, obliging with another shot. “All in exchange, it goes without saying, for doing dick. Socially? An easy sell. Economically? Bit tricky. So the state starts moving money around. A little fairness here, little more fairness there. But it’s like shuffling cargo in the hold, and you have to keep shoving trunks left and right, the boat always lurching in one direction or the other. Eventually, social democracies all arrive at the same tipping point: where half the country depends on the other half. It becomes an essentially patrician funding system. It’s no longer contribute—” Jarred had had his share of tequila, and stumbled. “Contributory. Which is divisive. Everybody’s unhappy. The lower half don’t get flowers. The patricians feel robbed. And all that fairness, all that shifting cargo, the taking from Peter to pay Paul—”

“High transaction costs,” Willing donated.

“Right. So what started as a reasonable, straightforward arrangement, whereby everyone throws in a little something to cover their modest communal requirements, like roads and a cop on the corner—it’s morphed into one of those complex systems you’re always harping on about, Noll, the kind that courts ‘catastrophic collapse.’ Government becomes a pricey, clumsy, inefficient mechanism for transferring wealth from people who do something to people who don’t, and from the young to the old—which is the wrong direction. All that effort, and you’ve only managed a new unfairness.”

“I don’t see why you wouldn’t have the same problem here,” Willing said.

“Lotta shrivs—sorry, the long-lived—left at secession. Couldn’t face life without Medicare. And I’ll be honest with you, Noll. The oldsters who’ve stuck it out—usually native-born Nevadans; the blow-in retirees fled in droves—well, they’re getting sick. Nevada doesn’t have any pharmaceutical plants, and the drugs ran out years ago—for hypertension, cholesterol, angina. So they’re dying sooner. I’ve seen it plenty on an anecdotal level, but if anyone bothered to assemble statistics here I bet you’d find a sharp drop in life expectancy. I’m not sure that’s such a bad thing. An opinion broadly shared in this part of the world, but scandalous in the Outer Forty-Nine. If you’re frail or ailing in Nevada, you have to rely on someone else, and I don’t mean collectively, on an institution. A relative, or a neighbor.”

“Isn’t it interesting that seems so weird,” Nollie said.

“The Free State is an experiment in going backwards,” Jarred said. “Even technologically—there don’t happen to be any rob plants within its borders, yet. So as the existing robs break down they’re replaced by human employees. It’s not an answer in the long run—someone’s bound to manufacture the bastards in due course—but in the short term, loss of automation has really helped the labor market. You’ll see, there’s plenty of work here. Though it’s either biggin’ low skilled and often physical, or it requires a level of education you and I, Willing, don’t have anywhere near.”

“We’ve gone to some trouble to get here,” Nollie said, glancing around a room far more depressing than the cozy home in East Flatbush they’d left behind. “I want to be optimistic. But what makes the USN so much of an improvement?”

“It’s what I said to Goog on the Fourth of July,” Willing said. “Freedom is a feeling. Not only a list of things you’re allowed to do. I feel better.” He might have just taken his own temperature. “I feel better already.”

“Tax forms in this state, believe it or not,” Jarred said, “are one page long. That’s pretty much the way it is with everything. You don’t get a business license or a marriage license, an entertainment license or a liquor license. You do business, get married, entertain yourself, and drink.”

“However,” Willing said. “Nevada is not a utopia.”

“No, no, no!” Jarred agreed vehemently. “It sure isn’t. This town is filthy with losers and T-bills, scammers and swindlers. And people really do starve. Nobody helps you here unless they want to, and what’s worse they have to like you. Just being needy doesn’t cut it. Native Nevadans are apt to give each other a hand, but we interloping Outer Forty-Niners are on our own. Nobody asked us to come here, so we’re expected to make ourselves useful or go away. Right at secession, folks were worried only the hardcore would stick it out, and the state would rapidly depopulate until it wasn’t viable. Now the prevailing fear is just the opposite: that refugees from Scab persecution will pour into the Free State in quantities Nevada can’t absorb. That’s a big reason people don’t try harder to get word out that it’s not so bad here.”

“So maybe some of the more outlandish rumors in the USA,” Nollie said, “about cannibalism and genocide, are actually propagated by the USN.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Jarred said. “I’m getting reluctant to spread the gospel myself.”

“But if everyone here is a maverick,” Willing said. “Doesn’t that make you a conformist?”

“Very funny,” Jarred said. “Problem is, mavericks rarely get on with other mavericks. And you’ll find out soon enough how much stuff you simply can’t get: replacement parts for your maXfleX. Lemons. Realize how few dishes you can make without lemons? The Chinese takeout is splug, because there aren’t any more water chestnuts, or bamboo shoots, or shiitakes—not even in cans. You’re entirely dependent on some entrepreneur who’s had the bright idea to manufacture wooden salad bowls, or you can’t get wooden salad bowls unless you carve them yourself. Nevada has started to generate its own media—TV shows, movies—which sounds cute, but they all suck. People write their own books, but they’re awful.”

“Glad to hear it,” Nollie said. “No competition.”

“I can’t overemphasize, though,” Jarred said, “how leery locals are of new arrivals. They’re not touched by your eagerness to convert. They’re not impressed by your bravery in coming here. Obviously, a lot of Lats drained south of the border when Mexico’s economy went ape shit. After secession, Nevada lost a fair number more. With all the holdout Republicans around Reno and Carson City, Lats were edgy that an independent state would turn into a racist repeat of the Confederacy. Well, everyone needs a cat to kick, and that’s us. We’re the new undocumented workers. Forty-Niners show up with unrealistic expectations, no education, and worst of all, no assets. They get chip-stripped at the border. You’re unusual; most of us don’t realize we could have brought in a car.”

“Most of us wouldn’t have cars,” Willing reminded him.

“I kick myself for not crossing in the pickup. I’ve been getting around on a ramshackle bicycle that isn’t even electrified. In the heat of summer, it’s insufferable. As for this place, I know it’s not much to look at. But it’s a miracle I have somewhere to live. Plenty Forty-Niners are homeless. I only stopped dozing in doorways at the beginning of May.”

“What kind of work are you doing here?” Nollie asked.

“I work at a cheese factory,” Jarred announced shamelessly. “Separating curds and whey—the whole Little Miss Muffet nine yards. Nevada’s had a dairy industry for ages, but they didn’t make much cheese. Couldn’t top a taco anymore, and everyone freaked. The market for Monterey Jack is biggin’. Casa de Queso is thinking of expanding into a knockoff Parmesan. I know guys who are quasi-suicidal because they can’t get Parmesan.”

“It’s crazy,” Willing said, “but I pictured you owning another farm.”

“How would I do that? No capital, mi amigo. You’ll see. I mean, you and Nollie are welcome to crash here. But even in the land of self-reliance with a negligible flat tax, it could take you a while to swing your own place.”

“I’d hate to part with it,” Willing said. “But selling this goblet might raise enough for a security deposit on a small apartment. The top part is solid gold.”

“But what you complained to me about, when you moved back to Brooklyn?” Jarred said. “The no trajectory problem? Here, in that respect, nothing’s changed. Man, this is the first time in my life I wish I’d earned a degree. Nevadans don’t really need another fifty-something yunk to press, cut, and schlep cheese. They need chemists, and engineers.”

“What would you do,” Nollie said, “if you did have capital?”

“Waste of time to fantasize.”

“Wrong answer,” Nollie said.

Jarred indulged her. “I’d build a gigantic greenhouse. I’d grow lemons.”

“That’s better,” she said, turning to Willing. “What would you do with capital?”

This house was ugly. With its partially constructed rectangles of waist-high walls, the whole development was ugly. But the sunset had been stunning. On the drive into Las Vegas, looming red mountains to the west were impervious to whatever government came and went. The cityscape was goofy; the land on which it sat was austere. The balance was good. A lightness leavened Willing’s body that hadn’t percolated through his limbs since before the Stonage. He personified a favorite chocolate bar when he was small, its muddy cocoa solids pipped with hundreds of air bubbles, so what had been heavy and indigestible became fluffy and almost weightless. He didn’t know what he was doing tomorrow, and he liked that.

“I would earn a degree in hydrology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas,” Willing said. “I would research how people like Jarred can grow lemons without the USN siphoning so much water from the Colorado River that Arizona brings in the National Guard, and Mexico’s objections to reduced flow over the border create a diplomatic crisis. Only five million people lived in Nevada before secession. Washington can live without the tax take. What will endanger the USN’s independence is water. Tensions with adjacent states over drainage of Lake Tahoe, the Humbolt River, and Lake Mead.”

“My,” Nollie said. “You’ve thought about this.”

“I’ve thought about this,” he said. “I would find some way of contacting Fifa, because it can’t really be that hard. I would get her, and Savannah, and Bing to emigrate here, too. Maybe even Goog, who wouldn’t be such a T-bill if he didn’t work for the Scab. We would live together with Jarred, like Citadel in the old days. But it would be big and airy, not tight and frightened, the way it was in the thirties. Savannah would go back to being an artist and stop being a prostitute. She’d find a man who’s more attractive than I am, and I’d feel jealous. Bing would discover some other calling aside from being a nice guy. Avery and Lowell could retire from Washington to a separate cottage on the same compound. Economists like Lowell don’t believe the USN can work. It would be very enjoyable to watch Lowell live in a place that’s impossible. Jayne and Carter would come down from Montana. Jayne would stop being crazy, because she thinks she wants solitude and really she wants companionship. You would have your private office. Where you can write new books for other people to read because otherwise it could start to get boring here. Then you would die. I would be sad. It would be a good sadness, because it’s not-being-sad when someone dies that’s sad. I would marry Fifa. We would plan to have three children but not be very careful and end up with five.”

“Right answer,” Nollie said, lifting her feet from the box. She peeled off the tired packing tape, folded back the flaps, and removed the top stacks of banded printouts to the floor. She fingered up a pool of candied kumquat drool from the laminated tabletop and moved the Bountiful House goblet out of the way. Struggling even using both hands, from the middle of the carton she withdrew a boxed manuscript titled Better Late Than. When she plunked it on the table, the tequila glasses rattled. She slipped off the top of the mimeo-paper box and removed about fifty pages. “There,” she said. “Capital.”

The box was filled with gold bars.

“I thought you only brought in bancors,” Willing said.

“I didn’t have such unfettered faith in a new currency,” Nollie said. “Any currency. I learned from my father to diversify. I backstopped with precious metal in 1999. The yellow stuff was down to $230 an ounce. You must have some appreciation for what’s happened to the price since.”

“That looks like a large enough trove to interest the USN mint,” Willing said. “The population is rising from refugee Forty-Niners. Larger gold reserves will allow Nevada to gently expand its monetary base without inflation. But I don’t understand how you got this through JFK in the first place.”

“The feds had just nationalized gold,” Nollie reminded him. “No one in their right mind was bringing it into the US. So Customs wasn’t looking for it.”

“The house-jacking,” Willing said. “Now it makes sense. You gave Sam some mouth, but otherwise you were cowed. It wasn’t like you.”

“Took some powerful self-control,” Nollie said. “But I had to get the box out; it was worth far more than Florence’s house. Still, ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’ played in my head the whole walk to Prospect Park.

“Now, my only condition is that you remember this is not manna from the sky. I earned it. By staying up late at a keyboard when my friends were carousing in bars. By reading the same manuscript so many times—in multiple edits, copyedits, first, second, and third passes, and galleys—that I came to hate the sight of my own sentences. By appearing in public events and saying the same thing over and over until I was senseless with self-hatred. By catching seven a.m. flights to literary festivals when I’d rather have slept in. Remember, too, that if I’d not already paid taxes on that metal, there would be twice as much of it. But what’s left I would like you to have. It should stake you for an education, and a home, and a marriage—with enough left over for lemon trees.”

Since he was a boy, Willing had been very interested in economics and not very interested in money. When he learned the value of his great-aunt’s gift in continentals, he was abashed.

He considered what Jarred had said about fairness. His uncle seemed to imply there was no such thing. There were only competing unfairnesses. As Nollie charged him to remember, she had worked hard—harder than some people. So even a one-for-you-and-one-for-me fairness wasn’t exactly fair. The Mandible fortune once destined for his grandfather Carter, and presumably for Nollie as well, though she clearly didn’t need it—that wasn’t fair, either. Which meant the fortune’s evaporation in 2029 wasn’t unfair. Though not-unfair was not the same as fair. So perhaps his endowment from his great-aunt was not-unfair.

In his embarrassment, all he came to understand was the one reliably sound thing to do with money: spend it on someone else. Nollie had enjoyed bestowing her assets on her nephews. His great-great-great-grandfather Elliot, toward the end of his life, would also have husbanded his resources to hand them on.

Willing had rescued the Mandible clan once. It could get to be a habit.

There was indeed an underground railroad—which was neither a railroad, naturally, nor a sequence of safe houses. It was a hodgepodge of unaffiliated freelancers: unchipped codgers in Nevada who knew how to drive—since locals believed, not without reason, that the guidance systems of vehicles set on driverless automatic could be taken over by satellites. Carrying fuel and provisions for the journey, the codgers did runs across the continent for a price.

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.