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But they’d both been dealt hands from the same deck. Avery had decided to marry a somewhat older intellectual heavyweight who was now a tenured professor in Georgetown University’s Economics Department; to co-purchase a handsome DC townhouse that had already appreciated in value; to establish a lucrative private practice; and to raise three bright, gifted children whom they were able to send to top-flight private schools. Meanwhile, Florence had decided to cohabit with an undereducated Mexican tour guide; to buy a tiny, ramshackle, but larcenously overpriced house in a Brooklyn neighborhood notorious when they were growing up for murderous turf wars between crack dealers; to raise a single kid born of a one-night stand who got sent to a public school where all his classes were taught in Spanish and who by the by was turning out a little strange; and professionally to plump pillows for schizophrenics. Avery wished desperately that her smart, savvy, ferociously hard-working sister—who was the real survivor of the family, not Jarred—would find a calling that put her talents to better use, and at least Esteban seemed a stand-up guy. But Florence’s dismal situation—particularly awkward for the eldest—still wasn’t Avery’s fault. Surely circumstances Avery had gone to great efforts to arrange for herself shouldn’t oblige her to feel so guilty every time they talked.
Yet the diversionary topic she raised next proved anything but neutral. “Hey, did you hear about the country-code kerfuffle?”
“Yeah, all the staff at the shelter thought it was hilarious that anybody cares. Though I’m sure this could keep Fox News foaming at the mouth for the rest of the year.”
“Well, the country code for the States has been one ever since there were country codes, right?” Avery said. “For some people, it’s symbolic.”
“Symbolic of what? We’re number one? If it means anything at all, the very fact we’ve been one forever is reason to give the dopey code to someone else for a while.”
“You sound pretty exercised, given this is an issue that you supposedly don’t care about. And it must mean something to the Chinese, or they wouldn’t have put up such a stink about swapping codes.”
“Sometimes the best thing to do when one party flies into a snit,” Florence said, “is to give them what they want. Especially if it doesn’t cost you anything but banging a few digits into a computer. This is the kind of concession you can make for free and down the road trade for something that matters.”
“Or it’s the kind of concession that sets a precedent for a whole bunch of other concessions down the road, in which case it does matter. One patient today said she felt ‘humiliated.’”
“Most Americans live in America,” Florence said. “They hardly ever enter their own country code. So unless she fleXts home from abroad all the time, your patient is never going to be actively ‘humiliated’ in the course of an ordinary day. It’s just like that hoo-ha about press two for English. Is it any harder to press two than one?”
“Let’s not get into that again. You know I thought reversing that convention was outrageous.”
“It was a generous gesture that once again cost nothing. For Lats, that two represented second-class. It was a small change that made immigrants and their descendants feel included.”
“What it made them feel is triumphant—”
“Watch it,” Florence said. “There are red lines.”
Florence’s living with a Real Live Mexican had given her airs. She was now an honorary member of a minority so enormous that it would soon lose claim to the label. A watershed to which Avery was greatly looking forward. In her practice, she urged all her patients to embrace a sensation of specialness—but that very strong sense of identity, of belonging, of proud laying claim to one’s own remarkable, particular heritage, was specifically denied the majority in this country, with a conspicuous host of achievements to be proud of. So maybe when white folks were a minority, too, they’d get their own university White Studies departments, which could unashamedly tout Herman Melville. Her children would get cut extra slack in college admissions regardless of their test scores. They could all suddenly assert that being called “white” was insulting, so that now you had to say “Western-European American,” the whole mouthful. While to each other they’d cry, “What’s up, cracker?” with a pally, insider collusion, any nonwhites who employed such a bigoted term would get raked over the coals on CNN. Becoming a minority would open the door to getting roundly, festively offended at every opportunity, and the protocol for automated phone calls would get switched back.
Esteban exclaimed off-screen, “What did I tell you? Should have opened the flood gates while we had the chance!”
Florence shouted over her shoulder, “Willing! Go to Green Acre and grab all the bottled water you can! Esteban will be right behind you—and bring the cart!”
“Okay, okay,” the boy said behind her. “I know the drill. But you know I’ll be too late. Everybody with a car is faster.”
“Then run.”
“Not another one,” Avery said.
Florence turned back to the screen with a sigh. “The worst thing about a dryout is never knowing how long it will last. The water could be back on in an hour, or it could be off for a week. At least we’ve installed some rain barrels out back. The water’s not potable, but it helps with the toilet. I’ve got some used bottles filled with tap, but it gets awfully stale. So I hope Willing and Esteban score. It’s always such a free-for-all in the water aisle. We’re lucky it’s on the late side. Some people won’t have noticed yet. Fuck, I hate to say it, but Esteban was right. I haven’t had a shower in eight days. Should have grabbed one when I got home.”
“Is it any clearer what the problem is? Not bloggy speculation. Real information.”
“Real information, what’s that?” Florence snorted. “Though even the bonkers-osphere doesn’t contest that out west the problem is drained aquifers and drought. Here, it’s more up for grabs. There may be supply problems upstate. Obviously, the Caliphate’s sabotage of Tunnel Three hasn’t helped. Lots of people claim it’s decrepit infrastructure, massive leaks. And you know what I think it is.”
“Yes, I know what you think it is.” Being on camera, Avery suppressed an eye roll. It was fashionable to observe that in an age absent rigorous investigative reporting people believed whatever suited them. Their father made this clichéd point incessantly. Yet as far as Avery could tell, people had always conceived an opinion first and assembled supporting evidence at their leisure, as they might purchase an outfit and later acquire accessories to match. So naturally Florence blamed fracking. It suited her.
The front door slammed. “Hey,” Lowell said.
“Hey! I’m talking to Florence.”
“Well, wrap it up, would you?”
He was routinely self-important, but the irritability was odd. “When I’m good and ready!”
“That’s okay,” said Florence. “I’ve got to haul rainwater to the toilet. Bye, puppet.”
Alas, at forty-eight her husband’s quarter-inch stubble no longer looked hip but seedy, and his longish graying hair cut in once-trendy uneven lengths now made him appear disheveled. Avery should think of a way of telling him so, if not in so many words. For an economist, he’d always been flashy and downtown—a snappy, daring dresser with a loose-limbed swagger that attracted acolytes at Georgetown. That sleek dove-gray suit was cutting-edge—cuffless and collarless, with high-waisted slacks and a long tunic reaching just above the knee. His shoes this evening were bright pink. But it was risky to style your image around being young. Lowell looked like someone who thought he was young, and wasn’t.
“Mojo, yo, turn on the TV!” Lowell commanded. The voice-activated household management system had recently developed a glitch, and was forever informing Avery they were out of milk. Before she disabled the function, the program had kept ordering milk from the supermarket until they were drowning in it. Now the system was getting flakier still: after Lowell’s instruction, she heard the dishwasher come on in the kitchen.
“Notice how everything goes wrong at once?” Lowell despaired. “It’s what I was just explaining to that pea-brain Mark Vandermire. Same thing happens in economics. Little crap imploding all over the place at the same time makes it seem as if the failures are connected. But they aren’t necessarily. It’s just some sort of karmic … clumping.”
“You may have another paper there. Karmic Clumping is catchy.” She handed him the dusty television remote. “Fortunately we can override. Ellen’s Mojo down the street won’t switch to manual, and when it goes freaky they can’t even boil water.”
Lowell plopped despondently onto the sofa. Rather than turn on the news, he tapped the means for doing so against his knee.
“Want anything to eat?”
“Glass of that wine you’re drinking. But I’m afraid if I ask Mojo for a BLT, it’ll turn on the sprinklers. Or set the house on fire.”
When she handed him the glass, he asked, “So—you up on the latest?”
“In that I don’t know what you’re referring to, probably not.”
“The bond auction this afternoon.”
“This is France again?”
“No, US Treasury. Look, I don’t think it’s a big deal. But the bid-to-cover ratio was weirdly poor. Roachbar, in fact: 1.1. And the yield on a ten-year note went to 8.2 percent.”
“That sounds high.”
“High? It doubled. Still, all I see is an accidental confluence of arbitrary forces.”
“Karmic clumping.”
“Yeah. You’ve got France unable to completely roll over a tranche of maturing debt—but Germany and the ECB swept in right away, so it’s not as if they’re about to close the Eiffel Tower for lack of funds. Messed with some heads, that’s all. As for Barclay’s in the UK, the official word is that Ed Balls’s government can’t bail them out this time, but that’s a strategic pose. I bet they find enough ten-P pieces tucked into the crevices of Downing Street sofas to keep the bank from going to the wall. Then yesterday a couple of skittish hedge funds in Zurich and Brussels reduced their dollar positions to basically zero and moved into gold. Let them. They’ll be using shiny rocks for paperweights when gold drops right back down.”
“It’s up?”
“For now! You know gold. It’s always ping-ponging all over the place. Unless you’re really canny about playing the highs and lows, it’s a ludicrous investment.”
“Why do I get the nagging impression that you’re not having this conversation with me? You keep arguing, one hand clapping. I’m not arguing back.”
“Sorry. I did get into an argument, with that boomerpoop Vandermire. Because, okay, the bond auction today, it’s—unfortunate. At the moment, foreign demand for US debt is low—but there are completely unrelated reasons for backing off US debt instruments in a variety of different countries that just happen to be coinciding. Here, the market is hopping; investors can find higher yields in the Dow than in dumpy Treasury securities. Interest rates aren’t likely to stay anywhere near 8.2 percent and this is probably a one-time spike. Jesus, in the 1980s, Treasury bond interest careened to over 15 percent. Bonds paid over 8 percent as recently as 1991—”
“That’s not very recent.”
“My point is, there’s no reason to get hysterical!”
“Then don’t say that hysterically.”
“It’s the panic over the interest-rate spike that’s the problem. Imbeciles like Vandermire—oh, and guess where he was headed when I ran into him in the department? MSNBC. He’d lined up back-to-back interviews on all the main stations—Fox, Asia Central, RT, LatAmerica …”
“You jealous?”
“Hell, no. Those shows are a pain in the butt. With hyper-res, they slather on the makeup an inch thick. They can’t wipe it off completely, and it stains our pillowcases. Besides, you never know whether under pressure you’ll misremember a statistic and never live it down.”
“But you’re great at it.”
His posture straightened on the sofa: compliment received. “The fear Vandermire will have peddled all night—it becomes self-fulfilling. Though he hardly sounds afraid. He’s having the time of his life. It’s like what you always say, right? This apocalyptic set—”
“I don’t ‘always’ say anything. We had that one conversation—”
“Don’t get your back up when I’m trying to agree with you. It’s just, these people forecasting the end of the world, they never seem upset by the prospect, do they? Invoking ruin, heartache, and devastation, they can barely disguise their delight. What do they think actual collapse is like, a kid’s birthday party where everyone dances in a circle singing, ‘Ashes! Ashes! We all fall down’? And they seem to assume that they themselves will be immune, sunning by the pool while cities burn on the horizon. They’re would-be voyeurs. They regard the fate of millions if not billions of real people as entertainment.”
Lowell had that look on his face of wanting to write that down.
“Florence and I are worried that Jarred’s going down a similar route. I think he’s more into eco-horror, but same idea. Although to be fair I’d hardly characterize Jarred as delighted. He’s been pretty morose.”
“Well, Vandermire is ecstatic. He loves the attention, and he’s on a high of having been supposedly right all along. ‘Unsustainable! The national debt is unsustainable!’ If I heard him say the word unsustainable one more time this afternoon I’d have punched him in the nose. The functional definition of unsustainable is that-which-is-not-sustained. If you can’t keep something up, you don’t. After all that noise twenty years ago about the deficit, the melodramatic shutdowns of government over raising the debt ceiling, and what’s happened? Nothing. At 180 percent of GDP—which Japan proved was entirely doable—the debt has been sustained. It is therefore, ipso facto, sustainable.”
“Don’t let Vandermire get to you, then. If he’s off the beam, he’ll soon look as dumb as you think he is.”
“His sort of loose, inflammatory talk is dangerous. It undermines confidence.”
“Confidence, shmonfidence. What’s it matter if a few rich investors get edgy?”
“Money is emotional,” Lowell pronounced. “Because all value is subjective, money is worth what people feel it’s worth. They accept it in exchange for goods and services because they have faith in it. Economics is closer to religion than science. Without millions of individual citizens believing in a currency, money is colored paper. Likewise, creditors have to believe that if they extend a loan to the US government they’ll get their money back or they don’t make the loan in the first place. So confidence isn’t a side issue. It’s the only issue.”
The trouble with being a professor is that when you pontificate for a living it’s hard to cut the crap once you get back home. Avery was used to it, though she didn’t find Lowell’s rants quite as enchanting as when they first got married.
“You know, most of the other doom mongers like Vandermire are also gold bugs,” Lowell resumed. “Honestly, hanging on to a decorative metal as the answer to all our prayers, it’s medieval—”
“Don’t start.”
“I’m not starting. But I don’t know why Georgetown hired that jackass. He’s meant to be a token of the faculty’s ideological ‘breadth,’ but that’s like claiming, ‘We have academic breadth because some of our professors are smart and the others are nitwits.’ The gold standard was put to rest sixty years ago, and nobody’s missed it. It was clunky, it constrained the tools available to central banks to fine-tune the economy, and it artificially limited the monetary base. It’s antiquated, superstitious, and sentimental. What the gold bugs never concede? Now that the metal has almost no real utility in and of itself, it’s therefore just as artificial a store of value as fiat currencies, or cowrie shells.”
Avery studied her husband. Maybe he’d refrained from turning on the news because he was afraid of encountering his bête noire Mark Vandermire. Or maybe he was afraid of the news itself. “You seem worried.”
“All right—a little.”
“But I know you. So here’s the question: are you worried about what’s actually happening? Because I think you’re more worried about being wrong.”
Kicking himself for that third glass of wine with Avery, Lowell got an early start the next morning with a muddy head. Skipping his usual compulsive glance at the one news website he marginally trusted, he decided to grab coffee at the department—even if it was mostly a sassafras-pit substitute; in Lowell’s private view, the biggest agricultural catastrophe in recent years wasn’t soaring commodity prices for corn and soy but the widespread dieback of the Arabica bean crop, making a proper latte the price of a stiff Remy. Driven more than ever to advocate for educated, creative, modern economics now that the likes of Vandermire would have everyone trading wampum with an abacus, he wanted to make progress on his paper on monetary policy before his 10 a.m. course, History of Inflation and Deflation. The class had hit Industrial Revolution Britain, nearly a century of persistent deflation during which the blasted country did nothing but prosper, which always put Lowell in a bad mood.
On his walk to the Metro, the sidewalks of Cleveland Park were busy for such an early hour. Though the sky at sunrise was clear, pedestrians had the huddled, scurrying quality that crowds assume in the rain. One woman quietly crying didn’t surprise him, but two did, and the next weeper was male. While Lowell didn’t by policy wear his fleX while strolling a handsome city whose sights he preferred to take in, his fellow Washingtonians routinely wrapped theirs on a wrist or hooked one on a hat brim. Yet it was very odd for so many pedestrians to be conducting audio phone calls. True, since the Stonage a handful of purist kooks had boycotted the internet altogether, and that atavistic bunch jabbered ceaselessly because talking was the only way those throwbacks could communicate. For everyone else with a life, the phone call was by consensus so prohibitively invasive that a ringtone was frightening: clearly, someone had died.
As he descended the long gray steps of his local station, the faces of scuttling commuters displayed an unnervingly uniform expression: wrenched, concentrated, stricken. He squeezed into the train as the doors were closing, barely wedging into the crowd. For pity’s sake, it was only 6:30 a.m.
Here, too, everyone was talking. Not to each other, of course. To fleXes. How low is it now? … Well, in London it’s only … Hitting margin calls … Buy Australian, Swiss francs, I don’t care! No, not Canadian, it’ll get dragged … Bet POTUS has already been roused from his … Stop-loss … Crossed stop-loss two hours ago … Stop-loss …
Even by Washington standards, Lowell Stackhouse was exceptionally averse to getting news everyone else was in on already, and after thirty seconds of this murmurous churn he’d heard enough. He whipped the fleX from his pocket, stiffened it to palm-size, and went directly to kind-of-trustworthy Bloomberg.com: DOLLAR CRASHES IN EUROPE.
chapter three
Waiting for the Dough
In the most ordinary of times, Carter Mandible would drive up to New Milford debating to what degree he felt guilty about dreading a visit with his own father. Why, most people his age would strain to extend themselves to the rarefied realm of ninety-seven, even if Douglas Mandible didn’t subject his son to the additional trials of feeblemindedness. Rather, Carter sometimes wished that his father showed more signs of mental fatigue, which might excite his sympathy, and lay grudges to rest. One of those grudges being first and foremost that the old man was still alive.
Oh, Carter never actively wished that his father would die. He was entirely sure—he was fairly sure—that when the time came he would be felled by the customary measure of filial grief. Friends had warned that the loss always hits you harder than you expect. But that was a discovery for which he’d been more than ready for fifteen years.
It was also standard on the two-hour trip from Brooklyn—this leafy section through Connecticut was pleasant—for Carter to question his motivations for these visits. With an eye to the long view, you naturally dote on an elderly parent as a subtly selfish prophylactic: to be able to assure yourself, on receipt of that fatal phone call, that you’d been devoted. Sometimes being a shade more attentive than you’re quite in the mood for can prevent self-excoriation down the line. After all, old people have a horrible habit of kicking it right after you ducked seeing them at the last minute with an excuse that sounded fishy, or on the heels of a regrettable encounter in which you let slip an acrid aside. To be dutiful without fail is like taking out emotional insurance.
Yet in Carter’s case, the self-interest was crassly pecuniary. Did he keep in his father’s good graces with monthly runs to the Wellcome Arms only to safeguard his inheritance from, say, a rash or spiteful late-life impulse to endow a chair at Yale? He’d never know. Worse, his father would never know, and might not ever feel confidently cherished for himself. A family fortune introduced an element of corruption. While Carter might sentimentalize the ideal world in which he spent as much time as possible with Douglas E. Mandible because he loved his father, and enjoyed his father’s company, and was resolved to make the most of his father’s blessedly extended lifespan while he still could, the money was an inescapable contaminant, and it wasn’t going to go away.
Or in theory it wouldn’t go away.
For this was not the most ordinary of times.
While it was certainly usual for Carter to chafe that by the time he came into the legacy he’d be too old to spend it, this afternoon that exasperation rose to a frenzy. He and Jayne still lived in the same modest, increasingly disheveled Carroll Gardens row house—brick, not brownstone. It was finally paid off, but for years the mortgage was a stretch. He and Jayne did get to Tuscany in 2003—a first proper vacation, in their early forties! But they’d always planned on Japan. Now that Jayne was so fearful that she’d rarely leave the house, adventures farther afield than Sahadi’s on Atlantic Avenue were out of the question. On one charge, newer cars would make it to Canada; this ten-year-old BeEtle couldn’t get past Danbury. Once he got that post at the Times he was already sixty, by which time America’s shrinking “paper of record,” having already stooped to selling creative writing courses and colonial knickknacks, was snarfing up desperate aging journalists for pocket change. His pension was farcical. If they might free up some equity by downsizing in the brief window during which their youngest had pretended to leave home, that meant finding someplace smaller and meaner and more depressing. Great.
Yet a breezy, no-cares existence had been in the pipeline all his life. The money was stuck further up the system, like a wad of the disposable diapers you’re told never to flush. Meanwhile, awaiting his birthright had suspended him in an extended adolescence. This state of decades-long deferral presaged when his real life would begin. He was sixty-nine. Real life would be short.
What Carter craved was not so much furniture and electronics, cruises and wine-tasting tours—whatever he might buy—but a feeling. A sensation of ease and liberation, of generosity and savor, of possibility and openness, of whimsy and humor and joy. Granted, he expected too much from mere money, but he’d be happy to find that out, too. Relieved of this endless waiting, he would embrace even a reputably adult disillusionment. Because he still felt like a kid. And now that theoretical Valhalla in which he and Jayne could leave the heating jacked up to sixty-eight the whole night through, or make an airy fresh start on a wide-skied ranch in Montana where Jayne might get over the terror she associated with Carroll Gardens, well—in the last few days, that future had, very probably, gone to hell.