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.”