As Willing told it later, in his Oyster Bay heyday the Mandible patriarch had socialized with the hunting and skeet-shooting set, and was no stranger to firearms. In the flicker of their campfire that evening, Douglas had asked to see the protection for their travels that Willing had secured that morning, the better to ensure that his great-grandson understood the safety catch and how to load the weapon. It happened in a trice: Douglas shot his wife in the chest, and himself in the head. At the sound of shots, even Deirdre Hesham opposite simply battened her shutters.
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 Oh, Sam, Tanya, Ellie, and Jake had long ago been replaced by other usurpers.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.