“Problem with robs?” Fifa said. “Hurl a skillet at one, and you’ve only wrecked your own pricey appliance. My Bay Ridge Bitch could afford a primo caretaker rob five times over. But then she wouldn’t be able to drive it crazy, or ruin its day.”
“I guess I can see how, after living cheek by jowl at Citadel, they craved solitude,” Nollie said. “But Jayne was practically a normal person by the time they left the farm. Now their whole acreage is one big Quiet Room. She’s back to being a nut. And Carter’s regressed, too. Jesus, I thought we hashed it out at Citadel. But now he’s worked himself into a lather again about the ‘lost years’ with Luella that give him flashbacks. I swear, couples cooped up one-on-one are deadly. There’s not enough to talk about. So you go back and mine horrid, selfish Enola over and over, if only to keep from going for each other instead. You can’t eat all day, so you feast on umbrage between meals. Honestly, our conversation was barely cordial. And after I didn’t put up a stink, at all, about those two helping themselves to the whole Bountiful House silver service. I didn’t ask for one butter knife.”
“If you’d stopped by Carroll Gardens more often back then,” Willing said, “you’d realize why a little silverware can’t begin to compensate.”
“I couldn’t stand it,” Nollie admitted.
“No one could stand it,” Willing said.
If Jayne really was backsliding to neurosis and Carter was grudge-farming, that made them quite the exceptions. Across the nation, Americans’ mental and physical health had vastly improved. Hardly anyone was fat. Allergies were rare, and these days if people did mention they avoided gluten, a piece of bread would probably kill them. Eating disorders like anorexia and bulimia had disappeared. Should a friend say he was depressed, something sad had happened. After a cascade of terrors on a life-and-death scale, nobody had the energy to be afraid of spiders, or confined spaces, or leaving the house. In the thirties, the wholesale bankruptcies of looted pharmacies, as well as a broad inability to cadge the readies for street drugs, had sent addicts into a countrywide cold turkey. Gyms shut, and personal trainers went the way of the incandescent light bulb. But repairing their own properties, tilling gardens, walking to save on fuel, and beating intruders with baseball bats had rendered Americans impressively fit. Sex-reassignment surgery roundly unaffordable, diagnoses of gender dysphoria were pointless. If a woman leaned toward the masculine, she adopted lunging, angular movements and crossed her ankle on her knee; everyone got the message, and the gesturing was more elegant. As dreaming beat drugs, sexual fantasy had always been a cleaner, sweeter, not to mention cheaper route to gratifying a whole host of wayward inclinations, in contrast to the crude, painfully imperfect experience of acting the fantasies out. No one had the money, time, or patience for pathology of any sort. It wasn’t that Americans had turned on oddity; they simply didn’t feel driven to fix it anymore.
“Hey, Willing,” Bing said. “You’re always reminiscing about how brutal it was at Citadel. If Elysian is splug, why not go back? You took to that farm treasury more than most of us did.”
“I’d consider it,” Willing said. “But I haven’t been able to contact Jarred for months. I finally fleXted Don Hodgekiss at the property next-door. He says Jarred cleared off. Left Citadel to the feds. Jarred’s gone dark.”
“Where do you figure he went?” Bing said.
Nollie rolled her eyes. Savannah intently swabbed a last tortilla around the bean bowl.
“How should I know?” Willing didn’t meet anyone’s gaze. He was careful both to not look at Goog, and to not seem to be not-looking at Goog.
“It’s obvious, isn’t it?” Goog said. “You don’t all have to play innocent. Who’s the real nut in this family? Who’s naturally seditious? Who’s the asshole renegade, with no respect for authority? Who was opportunistically price-gouging all through the thirties? Who completely ignored the weapons amnesty in ’38?”
“He didn’t completely ignore it,” Bing said. “When they canceled the Second Amendment—”
“No one canceled the Second Amendment, you yunk,” Goog said. “It was clarified. Modern constitutional scholars now believe it was never meant to apply to individuals in the first place. A ‘well-regulated militia’ means the police and the armed forces. Not some lunatic with an AK in a shopping mall.”
“Jarred did turn in a pistol or two for appearances’ sake,” Bing said. “And everyone ignored the amnesty. All those from-my-cold-dead-hands stand-offs—”
“Also, who regarded his dopey farm as a ‘citadel’—a fortress and a territory apart?” Goog carried on. “Who has no sense of loyalty to this country, and who has doubtless suffered the consequences?”
“We can’t be sure of where he went,” Savannah mumbled. “Besides, that rumor about the self-destruct in the chip. I’ve never been sure it’s true.”
“Oh, it’s true,” Goog said ominously. “Believe you me.”
Willing almost blurted that, as far as he knew, Jarred wasn’t chipped. Which would have precluded the back of his head exploding like a shot-gunned pumpkin the moment a Scab satellite detected that he’d set foot where he wasn’t supposed to. Willing managed to keep his mouth shut. The information might have denied his cousin a malevolent satisfaction, and it was not in their interest to deny Goog Stackhouse satisfaction of any sort.
“I heard they live like, you know, animals there,” Bing said. “No internet. So it’s like the Stonage, forever. People live in mud huts, or teepees or something. No electricity, no TV, not even any radio, ’cause the US jams it. There’s lots of webzines say they have nothing to eat, and the whole place is into cannibalism.”
“It has to be a shit hole,” Goog said. “It’s completely cut off from world trade. Violating US sanctions lands you in prison for so long that even off-chip dirtbags won’t risk smuggling. The only country that’s recognized the USN is Eritrea. Even if you could get past the guards and mines at the border, which you can’t—defection to those subversive wackos is classified as treason. Which is the only crime left on federal statute books that’s still a capital offense. So I hope none of you ever get as restive as Jarred seems to. A whole BSCA unit with maximum-security clearance has been deputized with the authority to press the button.”
Willing would obviously feign disinterest around Goog. Yet like most people, he was intrigued by the United States of Nevada, incorporating several Indian nations as well as the original polity, colloquially the Free State (causing much resentment in Maryland, which had laid claim to the moniker since 1864). How could you not be fascinated by such a black box, a trapezium that nothing and no one got out of and nothing and no one, at least officially, got in? Ever since the state’s secession in 2042, any information about the breakaway republic had been shut down as soon as it went up. The NSA must have installed internet filters, since to do a search on the fledgling confederacy you had to use coy, constantly reconfigured euphemisms like “high-stakes gamble,” which would also cease to work within days. Willing was glad there had been no second Civil War. He was glad that the same public enervation, sovereign destitution, and sour-grapes excuse-making that had kept the US from coming to the rescue of Japan had inclined Congress to write off the ungrateful western dustbowl with a sneering good riddance. (America now conducted livelier commerce with Cuba than with a no-go hole in its own interior. In modern maps of the US, Nevada was spitefully blank.) True, national borders could mercifully exclude as simply immaterial all that lay outside them. Yet the United States of Nevada still seemed to have to do with him. Assuming his uncle had not been shot on the American side while trying to penetrate its notoriously militarized perimeter, he had no doubt that this was where Jarred had fled. The moments the USN crossed his mind were the only instants in his day when Willing felt awake.