He could feel her relenting. He was relieved. He didn’t want to take the cartons by force.
“My father would be horrified by your proposition, you know. Book burning is antithetical to everything the Mandibles stand for.”
“But everything important about those books is safe,” he said. “The words don’t burn. They live forever on the internet.”
“So long as there is an internet,” she countered.
They thought the same way. They both lived in a world that was provisional. The ground was forever soft. For Willing, flux kept him supple. It toned his balancing muscles. It was like having sea legs on land.
“Besides, you’ll die,” he said. “When you’re not here, you won’t care whether anyone reads your work. You won’t care whether they used to read your work even when you were here. That’s the great thing about nonexistence. It’s not that you don’t care, either. It’s not as if you still feel, but you feel apathetic. You can’t care. There’s nothing to do the caring. So you won’t care about ‘the Mandibles,’ or what they stood for. The Mandibles will be the same as every other family. The same as rocks, or dust particles, or the Taj Mahal, or the Bill of Rights, or the Pythagorean theorem. Because you won’t be a ‘Mandible’ anymore, and you won’t know what a ‘Mandible’ is.”
Somehow he’d turned the key. “You’re right,” she said flippantly. “Once I kick it, these boxes are more trash to dispose of, oui?”
“Oui,” he said. “But now they can serve a purpose.”
“Only one condition,” Nollie said, hoisting a carton labeled “The Ecstatic, MM PB, Hungarian” in a show of strength. “Don’t touch the foul matter.”
When he informed the rest downstairs that Nollie would sacrifice the books for cooking the evening meal but insisted on reserving the loose manuscripts, Avery and Florence fell over each other laughing. Jokes were hard to come by.
“Can you believe,” Avery said, training her voice low enough that she wouldn’t be heard in the attic, “she’s still holding out for her papers to be bought by some highfalutin university library? I mean, what university library? What university? They’re all going down the tubes! Just goes to show,” she added, with a pointed glance at her husband, “the last thing to go is ego.”
Bundled glumly in a blanket in the kitchen, Lowell shot his wife a black look. “It’s still vital to maintain top-flight scholarly research facilities. Her protection of those manuscripts would be more than justified, if only the beastly woman were any good.”
The books burned well, though they made a lot of ash. Nollie soon came downstairs and firmly removed the task from Esteban, who was displaying an undiplomatic relish, and insisted on feeding paperbacks to the oil drum herself. Once she got into the swing of the occasion, she seemed to enjoy it. There must be something exhilarating about immolating your own attachments. Trial by fire. That was an expression. When you make glass very hot, it gets stronger. Willing assessed his great-aunt, her face red from the flames. She looked excited. She was having a tempering tantrum. This was real exercise, better than jumping jacks. By the time she finished tossing Gray, The Stringer, Ad-Out, Cradle to Grave, The Saint of Glengormley, and Virtual Family into the drum, she would be stronger.
As dirt clods flickered in the light of the fire, Willing cast a mournful eye at the waste ground of their poky backyard, trying to learn the same lesson. Throughout the spring and summer, he had tended their small crops—potatoes, tomatoes, onions, string beans. He eked out just enough water on the plants during dry spells that the produce wouldn’t cost more to raise than it was worth. He had allowed himself affection for the infant vegetables as they developed: as a rule a mistake. Aside from a single tomato and one pot of beans, the harvest was stolen. A gang rampaged through the garden late at night and trampled the plants. The destruction was deliberate. He suspected someone at school. He still attended Obama High to glean intelligence—the spy kind. Other students must have been sniffing around for scuttlebutt also. He may have mentioned the garden once, and should have known better.
No one gave a shit about Christmas. For his sixteenth birthday in January of ’32, his mother made Willing a cake out of cardboard.
It was shortly thereafter that he came upon his mother, bowed over her dresser upstairs. She had already been on a rampage in the kitchen.
Before the Great Renunciation, many were the evenings that his mother or Esteban had despaired that there was “nothing to eat.” Willing had always known what they meant: Esteban had forgotten to thaw the chicken burgers. Or after a draining day at Adelphi, his mother was running short on ideas for a meal they hadn’t already eaten three times that week. But this time, no cans of pineapple in sugar syrup lurked at the back of the pantry; no peeled plum tomatoes lay at hand for a meatless Bolognese. There wasn’t a half-used, iced-up bag of corn in the far corner of the freezer, or a long-spurned package of desiccated pork sausages whose packaging had torn. The canisters beside the stove no longer brimmed with flour and sugar and cornmeal. The cabinets were bare of rice and couscous and kasha. His mother had ceased disposing of foodstuffs beyond their “sell-by date,” a policy she now ridiculed. So it wasn’t a matter of overcoming a reluctance to open a can of stew beyond its prime. There was no stew. Willing felt partially responsible—his quiet thieving through the neighborhood had netted little of late; in the current climate of mistrust, property owners had improved security—but there was no food in the kitchen, at all, anywhere, of any sort.
A matter different but hardly unrelated, there was no money, either. It was the end of the month; per custom, they’d already spent his mother’s paycheck. Nollie was meeting an old boyfriend in Queens, and his mother refused to rummage through her aunt’s things looking for cash. That would be stealing. Esteban hadn’t picked up work as a day laborer for weeks. Thus far, Avery hadn’t been able to interest their neighbors in buying or trading her stockpiled toenail fungus kits, replacement door hinges, or window-screen spline—in a variety of widths.
Of course, for professional traders on the stock exchange, money had always been imaginary—just as notional, just as easy come and easy go, as the points in a video game. Wage earners like Willing’s mother thought money was real. Because the work was real, and the time was real, it seemed inconceivable that what the work and the time had converted into would be gossamer. They had been promised that they could store the work and the time, later to exchange it, if only for other people’s work, and other people’s time. But money was just an idea, and most people did not understand that natural forces also acted on the abstract: evaporation; flood, fire, and erosion; seepage, leakage, and decay. Most people liked the prospect of justice, and confused what was appealing with what was available.