TO BRADFORD HALL WILLIAMS.
Although you had little time for fiction,
you’d have liked this book.
Who would have imagined that a cantankerous
misanthrope would be so fiercely missed?
Collapse is a sudden, involuntary and chaotic form of simplification.
—James Rickards, Currency Wars
Contents
Praise for The Mandibles: A Family, 2029–2047
Chapter Three: Waiting for the Dough
Chapter Four: Good Evening, Fellow Americans
Chapter Five: The Chattering Classes
Chapter Six: Search and Seizure
Chapter Seven: The Warrior Queen Arrives in Carroll Gardens
Chapter Eight: The Joys of Being Indispensable
Chapter Ten: Setbacks Never Bring Out the Best in People
Chapter Eleven: Badder Bitter Gutter
Chapter Twelve: Agency, Reward, and Sacrifice
Chapter Thirteen: Karmic Clumping II
Chapter Fourteen: A Complex System Enters Disequilibrium
Chapter One: Getting with the Program
Chapter Two: So Tonight We’re Gonna Party Like It’s 2047
Chapter Three: Return of the Somethingness: Shooting Somebody, Going Somewhere Else, or Both
Chapter Four: Singin’ This’ll Be the Day That I Die
Chapter Five: Who Wants to Live in a Utopia Anyway
Don’t use clean water to wash your hands!”
Intended as a gentle reminder, the admonishment came out shrill. Florence didn’t want to seem like what her son would call a boomerpoop, but still—the rules of the household were simple. Esteban consistently flouted them. There were ways of establishing that you weren’t under any (somewhat) older woman’s thumb without wasting water. He was such a cripplingly handsome man that she’d let him get away with almost anything else.
“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned,” Esteban muttered, dipping his hands into the plastic tub in the sink that caught runoff. Shreds of cabbage floated around the rim.
“That doesn’t make sense, does it?” Florence said. “When you’ve already used the clean, to use the gray?”
“Only doing what I’m told,” her partner said.
“That’s a first.”
“What’s put you in such a good mood?” Esteban wiped his now-greasy hands on an even greasier dishtowel (another rule: a roll of paper towels lasts six weeks). “Something go wrong at Adelphi?”
“Things go nothing but wrong at Adelphi,” she grumbled. “Drugs, fights, theft. Screaming babies with eczema. That’s what homeless shelters are like. Honestly, I’m bewildered by why it’s so hard to get the residents to flush the toilet. Which is the height of luxury, in this house.”
“I wish you’d find something else.”
“I do, too. But don’t tell anybody. It would ruin my sainted reputation.” Florence returned to slicing cabbage—an economical option even at twenty bucks. She wasn’t sure how much more of the vegetable her son could stand.
Others were always agog at the virtuousness of her having taken on such a demanding, thankless job for four long years. But assumptions about her angelic nature were off base. After she’d scraped from one poorly paid, often part-time position to another, whatever wide-eyed altruism had motivated her moronic double major in American Studies and Environmental Policy at Barnard had been beaten out of her almost entirely. Half her jobs had been eliminated because an innovation became abruptly obsolete; she’d