The Mandibles: A Family, 2029–2047

“But if the value of the dollar outside the country is so low,” Belle said, “why consolidate the loss?”

“These are greedy people,” Ryan said. “For whom anything is better than nothing.”

“What’s so ‘greedy,’ Tom said, “about wanting to safeguard some tiny fraction of the worth of money you may have worked hard to earn?”

“Oh, please,” Lin Yu said. “Do you know anything about the people we’re talking about? The only ‘hard work’ they do is poke at a fleX to check their hedge funds, or—even more debilitating—transfer the proceeds after some squillionaire parent dies. They’re not digging ditches.”

“It can be a mistake,” Belle said carefully, “to throw the upper middle class and the ‘über-rich’ in the same boat. The moderately well off may not, as you say, dig ditches. But they often put in quite long hours and may still struggle to pay mortgages and tuition—”

“Not the poor little rich people routine!” Lin Yu cried. “I’ve heard the tear-jerk stories—about how all over DC the affluent can’t afford childcare anymore. Well, the nannies are losing their jobs. I know where my sympathy lies.”

“Ever notice, with these folks,” Tom murmured in Avery’s ear, “how injustice only applies to the hard-up? Nothing unfair can possibly happen to you if you own more than one pair of shoes.”

Having recently earned her doctorate, Lin Yu worked at a nonprofit, the Real American Way (on the left and right alike, outfits trying to co-opt patriotism all sounded the same). Alas, the redistributive policies that RAW promoted—vastly higher property, inheritance, and upper-bracket income taxes; a blanket 2 percent wealth tax on all cash, investments, and tangible assets—were the very policies from which anyone in a position to give money away would recoil, and the organization was chronically underfunded. So on her do-gooder salary, Lin Yu was unlikely to have experienced a vertiginous drop in net worth during the last two months. Like Tom, Avery was queasy about these heedless opinions, which applied exclusively to other people and cost their advocate nothing. Those ready refills of imported Viognier notwithstanding, Lin Yu’s hosts were another matter. Oh, Avery had no idea how severely their family’s circumstances had been damaged; with his expertise, obviously Lowell handled that side of things, and she’d been too frightened to ask for specifics. Yet she could still feel the wind in her ears, as if riding an elevator in freefall. Making a note to herself that inviting Ryan and Lin Yu had probably been a mistake, she slipped away to sear the fish.

I was telling Avery earlier this evening how much it breaks my heart to see all these panicking bastards scrambling out at the bottom of the market,” Lowell opined at the head of the table.

“If it’s the bottom,” Ryan countered from the foot of the table.

“That very anxiety is a trap,” Lowell said. “Suckers slosh in when the market’s frothy, and freak when it tanks. The key is to keep your nerve. I’ll want credit for this later, Biersdorfer: the dollar’s going to recover and then some. So will the Dow.”

“A century ago,” Ryan said, “the Dow only returned to its pre-Depression valuation after twenty-six years. In that long, you’ll be in your mid-seventies.”

“I’ve had it up to my eyeballs with this superstition that history is repeating itself at a tidy base-ten interval,” Lowell said. “Whole sectors of the economy are hale, and with the dollar so devalued our exports will undercut Vietnam’s.”

Avery wished her husband wouldn’t stab at his bluefin so distractedly; that ginger dressing had come out smashing. And she thirsted for a change of subject. It was all her patients wanted to discuss as well, or the few who showed up: what had happened to their investments. So drear.

Ryan shook his head paternally. “You’re kidding yourself, Stackhouse. Stocks are only headed further down. It took three solid years of unrelenting decline for the Dow to drop to its nadir in late 1932. From 381 to 41, remember? You should get out while you can still rescue some spare change.”

“Thanks for spreading the gloom, Biersdorfer. It drives prices knee-high, making this the time to buy,” Lowell insisted. “I’m scarfing up every depressed large cap I can.”

Avery’s ears pricked up. “You’re what?”

“Picking up bargains. Nothing you don’t do at Macy’s, my dear.” Macy’s came out with an incipient lisp. He’d had a fair bit of wine. Everyone had. The whole evening had been laced with the End of Days hysteria that drove Avery’s younger brother to a muddy field in Gloversville, but which drove normal people to drink.

“I may not know the fine points of our situation,” Avery said, hardly savoring her own tuna, “but gambling whatever pittance is left on more plummeting stocks is insane.”

From the chair opposite, Belle caught Avery’s eye. Trying times maybe, but it wasn’t seemly to conduct marital spats about money at table.

Avery shot her friend a returning glare. Fuck decorum. She and Lowell had three kids in private schools who would all expect, and had a right to expect, Ivy League educations. The mortgage on this townhouse was massive. All that at stake, and what did her husband do? Act optimistic in order to feel optimistic, as if by playing the Pied Piper of Pollyanna he could lead everybody else, and history itself, into la-la land. Usually, he was determined to be right for the sake of his pride. Now he was desperate to be right for the sake of their survival. But really, really needing to be right rather than merely wanting to be right didn’t affect being right, as opposed to fatally off the beam, by an iota.

“The slide has already slowed,” Lowell told his wife.

“If you’re so sure everything will turn out pink, why’d you order me to Chase in November to clean out our accounts? Remember, when they finally re-opened the banks?”

Lowell blushed. She was embarrassing him, in public, on purpose. “What I remember is you didn’t do it.”

“I wasn’t going to spend all day in the rain in a line that snaked around an entire city block, when by the time I got to the counter they’d be out of cash anyway. But you were the one who made fun of everybody afterwards. The ones who stood outside banks in the rain.”

“I only made fun of the people who lined up to pull out their money after the Fed promised to provide liquidity,” Lowell said coldly. “And after Alvarado clarified that bonds may have been voided, but Federal Deposit Insurance remained in force. Before that assurance, it was rational to worry that some banks would fold.”

“They ‘provided liquidity’ by printing money,” Tom said quietly, to no one in particular. “And they’ll cover FDIC claims by printing more.”

“What I’ve found fascinating,” Belle said, diplomatically directing the conversation elsewhere, “is the difference between the way Americans rallied around FDR, and how the public has responded to the gold recall from Alvarado. People are simply refusing to cough it up.”

“I had one patient so indignant,” Avery said, “that she wanted to go out and buy some gold, under the table, just so she could refuse to hand it over.”

“Fortunately, most compliance doesn’t rely on probity and patriotism,” Ryan said. “ETFs, mining stocks, bullion on deposit—the Treasury neatly commandeered everything on the record in one fell swoop.” He smiled. “Compensation was deliciously risible. A stunning laying of waste to what economic survivalists imagined was the ultimate safe bet.”

“Yes, it was like the Darwin Awards,” Lowell said. “Species eliminates ninnies clutching arcane medium of exchange like teddy bear. Man, that poor fool Mark Vandermire must be busted.”

“On the QT,” Avery asked the table, “anyone here slip a tinkling baggie into the rose bed?”

“Theoretically,” Belle said, glancing at Tom, “I can see why some couples might withhold their wedding rings.”

“I really thought Alvarado should have exempted rings,” Avery said.

With a nod toward Ryan and Lin Yu, Lowell said, “The left would have squawked about sports stars and Wall Street wives keeping engagement rings the size of bowling balls.”

“But all that government propaganda,” Tom said, “’bout how we been ‘attacked’ and we all have to ‘pull together’ and make ‘sacrifices’—it hasn’t worked. I loved the InnerTube video of that sumbitch flinging jewelry off the Golden Gate.”

“Some of the pushback is anti-Lat,” Lin Yu said. “Those videos are always of white people. It’s significant that it’s Alvarado’s policy. They won’t abdicate gold to a foreigner.”

“Americans have despised the federal government since way before Alvarado, hon,” Tom said. “The main difference this time is they got good reason. At Justice, we been charged with going after gold scofflaws, and I got to say I’m uncomfortable with the job. I thought I grew up in a country where you could own gold, or silver, or mud, or bancors—whatever stuff you took a fancy to long as it wasn’t, like, heroin. In a truly free country, you should prob’ly be able to buy heroin, too. This policy rubs me the wrong way. I don’t relish being dragged into enforcing it.”

“The US has confiscated assets en masse since the advent of income tax,” Belle countered reasonably; she’d drunk noticeably less than everyone else. “And never mind lousy old money. Historically, Uncle Sam has taken your sons.”

“Speaking of which, there’s a rumor going around,” Lin Yu said, “and it’s leaking from more than one department. I’ve heard the whole reason the administration has called in the gold is to give it to the Chinese. To buy Beijing off. To keep from having a war. To prevent, you know, even an invasion.”