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.
For this last week was the most historically savage of his experience, and that was counting 9/11 and the Stone Age. As for the latter, sure, the power went out, and there was looting of course, including of Jayne’s chichi delicatessen on Smith Street, from whose gratuitous destruction she had yet to recuperate. Traffic lights going black resulted in a host of dreadful pile-ups. He could skip rehearsing all those airline disasters again, the train wrecks, the poignant human-interest packages about cardiac patients whose pacemakers began beating double-time, like an invigorating change-up in a Miles Davis recording. Parts of the country had no water, though that was good practice for the dryouts to come. Telecommunications and national defense systems ceased to function, even if in Carter’s view America’s vaunted “defense” had long put the country in the way of more munitions than it deflected. Understandably, then, for Florence, Avery, and Jarred, 2024 constituted the direst of calamities. But Carter hailed from a different generation—one raised locating phone numbers in scrawled paper diaries and tracking down zip codes in fat directories from the post office, painstakingly diluting encrusted Liquid Paper with plastic pipettes from tiny overpriced bottles of thinner and later upgrading with outsize gratitude to the self-correcting ribbons of IBM Selectrics, flicking through yellowed rectangles in the long wooden drawers of card catalogs and looking up articles in the Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature in the library. There was only so gravely he was likely to rate going without the internet for three weeks.
Albeit eerily invisible, eerily silent, this last week’s turmoil was of another order. The Stone Age produced immediate, palpable consequences: the lights wouldn’t go on, food rotted in the fridge, and none of the few stores remaining open carried milk. Throughout this latest mayhem nothing changed. A conventional number of cars on I-84 were doing the usual five miles per hour over the speed limit. The sky was mockingly clear. Exiting for a recharge, Carter didn’t have to swerve around bodies littering the ramp, or duck to avoid gunfire. Its lot half-full, Friendly’s was continuing to sell maple-walnut cones and SuperMelts. Strolling between chargers and convenience stores, none of Carter’s fellow motorists appeared hurried or flustered. This whole placid commercial stretch testified to the fact that the folks most affected by the week’s historical bad weather weren’t temperamentally inclined to pitch rocks through plate glass. One such under-violent character was bound to be his father.
If you believed its literature, the Wellcome Arms was the most luxuriously equipped assisted-living facility in the United States. The high-tech gym was really a come-on for prospective tenants, promising retirement as renewal, as the unfettered free time to step into the trim, fit incarnation you’d always been too busy to manifest—until the shine wore off and residents were confronted with the odious exertion of using the machines. The joint actually kept horses, though Carter had never seen anyone ride one. Replete with water therapists and massage jets, the pool saw more traffic, since a proportion of the residents could still float. It went without saying that the home provided the medical facilities of a top-flight private hospital; given Wellcome’s astronomical charges, it was worth the institution’s while to keep its clients, however nominally, in this world.
Although Douglas Mandible would not commonly be parted from his fleX before the 4 p.m. close of the New York Stock Exchange, pulling into Visitor Parking, Carter spotted his father on the nearest tennis court. Douglas was once a hard-hitting, cutthroat singles player, who would risk stroke or seizure to retrieve a skittering down-the-line—in the same fashion that as an equally cutthroat literary agent he had pulled out all the stops to score celebrated novelists. Yet in advanced age he’d refined a very different game, whereby he ran this much-younger opponent (late seventies, Carter guessed) from corner to corner. Barely returning the shot, the other guy would blob his own right to Douglas’s feet, and Pop could keep the ball in play without moving more than five inches in any direction. It was the same hyper-efficient, energy-conserving manipulation that Douglas could employ to effortlessly control his family without leaving his chair.
With a wicked crosscourt sharding out of the service box, Douglas dispatched the point in the spirit of simply having had enough. Carter didn’t flatter himself that his father had cut the point short because he’d spied his son in the parking lot. Having given notice of this visit, Carter was right on time. Had Pop given a damn about not keeping his son waiting, he wouldn’t have been playing tennis in the first place.
Douglas made a show of mopping his face and waved at Visitor Parking with the towel. His figure was closer to scrawny than sleek, but his bearing remained debonair. The mane of blazing white hair was more spectacular than the younger auburn version. In October, he sported a leathery tan. While spinal compression had shaved a good two inches off his height, that still left the patriarch a touch taller than his only son. Age had scored his long face with an expression of drollery once fleeting and now ceaseless. He would look dryly amused in his sleep.
“Carter!” The pumped joy in his voice was heartening, even if Douglas lavished the same elaborate glad-to-see-you on everybody. “I’m going to grab a shower. Meet in our library, shall we?” That trace of British inflection—lie-bree—was always deft enough that you couldn’t quite accuse him of affectation.
Back in the day, Douglas Elliot Mandible had been an illustrious bon vivant and raconteur. Since Carter could remember, his father had been able to summon the names of obscure, long-dead authors and to reel off multiple lines from Philip Roth or William Faulkner verbatim—a facility the man had cruelly neglected to hand down to his son, who was more apt to launch into a point about some latest movie and then spend five tedious minutes trying to remember what the film was called. As a child, Carter took his father at face value: the literary eminence was fully formed, a given. But by adulthood, the sheer A-to-B of his father’s flamboyant persona had grown confounding. How did anyone start out as a callow, superficially educated, and surely in any important sense rather stupid young man, and then ugly-duckling with no noticeable transition into a suave, lively, charming adult to whose parties celebrities and intellectual heavy hitters alike would eagerly flock? For not once had any of Douglas’s copious, well-connected acquaintances ever taken Carter aside and shared, “For years, your dad would tell anecdotes in company that fell flat as pancakes. You don’t slide into that kind of style like slipping on a jacket. You have to practice.” So had Douglas sequestered himself behind closed doors for weeks on end memorizing long witty passages, the better to unspool them over the rims of two-onion martinis? Really, how did you make the journey from mouthy, naive, full-of-shit Yale undergraduate to one of New York’s Great Characters, who could wear an ascot every day of his working life without looking ridiculous? Though perhaps the more pressing question now was how a redoubtable Manhattan mover-and-shaker had borne the indignities of extreme old age without appearing to have been humbled in the slightest.
Carter signed in at the office, whose Doric columns and classic New England white clapboard were meant to evoke a timelessness at odds with a clientele whose time was conspicuously running out.
“Your daddy gonna live forever, sí?” the portly receptionist quipped, to which Carter responded distractedly, “Yeah, afraid so.” She shot him a look.
In truth, his natural impulse in encounters with strangers the last few days was to powwow over this “bancor” business and press them on what they presumed the game plan was in DC—since that’s what happened after 9/11, wasn’t it? All the social barriers fell, and you found yourself having heart-to-hearts with the clerk scanning your pretzels. We’re all in this together, that was the conceit. Except we weren’t all in this one together, and Carter stopped himself. A Lat minding the desk at an old folks’ home was just the sort to have floated obliviously through the crisis, perhaps blissfully unaware that there was a crisis: no assets.
Douglas and his hapless
