Thus Willing continued to go to school because his classmates were excellent sources of information. Their parents would be alarmed to learn it, but kids blabbed. They couldn’t keep from boasting about the family stash. Thanks to other students’ bluster, he knew the Rosangels on Tilden had laid in two cases of Goya coarse-ground cornmeal. Having run out of room owing to repeated shopping bonanzas, they stacked the boxes on the back patio: easy pickings. The Browns opposite, gentrifiers who’d yet to relinquish vanities like being “lactose intolerant,” kept a bottomless supply of Trader Joe’s vanilla-flavored rice milk in their basement. Its small upper window over the washer was never locked. The Garrisons on the corner had salted away hundreds of cans of garbanzo beans in a backyard tool shed. The padlock was decent, but the door’s hinges were on the outside. Tapping them out was a cinch. Best of all, once the hinges were tapped back in, no sign remained of invasion. As for the Doritos and other salty snacks that lined the average cellar, Willing let them be. The bags crackled, and would give him away.
Naturally his mother had taught Willing not to steal. So inclined, he might have contrived a host of rationalizations for his foraging. In their panic, most families had overstocked. Poorly protected provender fell prey to rats and insects. After a power outage in March, the streets of East Flatbush were lined with trashcans full of reeking meat from overloaded freezers. He never pillaged in quantity; the judicious disappearances were less theft than tax.
But Willing felt no need for rationalizations. He was refining a skill, like purifying water and building a fire—one that would later come in handy when thou-shalt-not-steal joined anachronisms like lactose intolerance. If Willing’s descent to thievery signaled a broader corruption of the American moral order, the moral order would decay with or without him. The degradation of his mores was merely a matter of keeping up to date, like downloading the latest operating system on his fleX.
So far, his mother hadn’t queried where the mysterious additions to her pantry hailed from. Everyone was pitching in, and she wasn’t about to look a gift bag of Carolina long-grain in the mouth. She must have known, really. It was called disonancia cognitiva. No one else paid any attention when Señora Perez floated the concept in Social Sciences, but Willing liked the fact they’d given lying to yourself a fancy name.
Other people focused on their wretchedness. But Willing knew that these were the good times, that they were shy of something. And he liked having so much to do. It was useful that he was still, at fifteen, slight, and naturally watchful. Made for stealth, he could penetrate fences and slit window screens in silence. (It was horrifyingly easy to gain access to pretty much any house, especially since the one implement he selected for himself when Avery went on her rampage in Home Depot was a glasscutter.) Besides, much of what he scavenged was from Dumpsters and trashcans. He kept the house supplied with fabric for ass napkins. He scoured as far away as Prospect Park for sticks and small logs, so they could have barbecues out back and also keep warm while they ate, the better to save on natural gas. When his mother decided to plant vegetables in the backyard that spring—nothing pointless and watery, like radishes and lettuce, but crops that provided real sustenance, like squash—he had to remind her that the tiny plot had been used as a latrine. So he spent a solid week filling his bike panniers with dirt from Holy Cross Cemetery and emptying them in the garden, to build a six-inch upper layer uncontaminated by human waste—after which he implored everyone that during a dryout they had to use a pail. He planted the seeds and watered the rows. According to a news report, residential yards were being converted to vegetable gardens all across the nation. Pre-Renunciation, lawn grass was the largest crop in the US—three times bigger than corn, covering an area the size of New York State. But you couldn’t eat it. The trend toward beets instead was eminently sensible.
It was an energizing time, an industrious time. It was better than it would be later.
Meanwhile, the news itself made for fascinating study. For months now, anchors had referenced the present with nouns like crisis, catastrophe, cataclysm, and calamity, and they were running out of C-words. They’d already used up the D’s, like disaster, debacle, and devastation. Terms like hardship, adversity, tragedy, tribulation, and suffering didn’t mean anything anymore—they didn’t work; they seemed to allude to experiences that were no big deal. The English language itself was afflicted by inflation, and when everything got ten times worse the newscasters would be stymied. There would be no words left to call the next phase. Maybe CBS News would take refuge in understatement: what had happened to America was a pity, a bit of a shame, rather a waste, pretty unfortunate, or something of a disappointment.
There were already difficulties, of course. When his mother scored a quart of fresh milk, she insisted on reserving it for whitening tea—that’s the way she liked it—but she kept it so long that most of it curdled. When the lumps bobbed to the top of her cup, she cried. Bing stole food in the house, quite a different matter from foraging elsewhere, and the pilfering was increasingly obvious because the twelve-year-old was the only member of the household gaining weight. Lowell did nothing all day but hammer in the basement on his fleX, writing his “treatise,” and Willing was beginning to wonder if his uncle was insane. Esteban had grown surly; standing around hiring himself out for casual labor was too much like what his father did. He didn’t kiss Willing’s mother as often, or hold her at the sink. Kurt was in such terror of being any trouble that he absented himself most of the day; he came back looking cold and drawn. Aside from spending hours at a time standing on line for food trucks, he probably did nothing but walk around. There was a lot of that. There was a lot of walking around.
Goog and Bing weren’t benefiting much from classes taught in Spanish, but going to school did provide the theater of normalcy. Though scornful back home, in school Goog relied on “Wilbur” to translate for him, a dependency he detested. There were more honks in Obama High now, since many other families could no longer send their precious white kids to private schools, but if you didn’t speak Spanish, you were going to get beaten up. Willing tried coaching Goog on a few verbs, but his cousin clung to German as his second language, which was immense dumb because to communicate even in Germany you were better off learning Turkish.
Poor boneheaded Bing made himself a further mark by toting his violin to play in his middle school’s small, tuneless orchestra. The afternoon on which the usual well-wishers had thrown the instrument over a hedge and broken its bridge, Willing pressed his youngest cousin: “But why study the violin, when the best violinists have already been recorded playing everything?”
“Well,” Bing said thoughtfully. “Someone might write something new, and then they’ll need somebody to play it.”
“But a computer could play it,” Willing said. “Better than you ever will, if your practicing is anything to go by.”
Bing began to whimper. Sighing, Willing found one use for Avery’s Gorilla Glue and repaired the bridge, though he wasn’t really doing Bing any favors.