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.”