Men are always ashamed of the women they love.
The ebony doors part with a pleasant chime, and Katya tentatively steps into Osmond Ripple’s domain. She and her brother-in-law are not exactly friends. Back when she and baby Dunky were learning English together from the talking giraffes on the KinderSpeak, she heard Osmond refer to her as “aphasic,” and he sometimes still speaks in Cockney rhyming slang just to exclude her from conversations. She retaliates by spreading rumors among the servants about the unseemly origins of his rosacea and night terrors. Still, they’re family.
“Osmond?” she calls, stepping onto an elaborate Oriental rug that depicts a monkey and a bird quarreling amid cherry blossoms. He answers from the upper stacks with a lengthy coughing fit. She scales the spiral stairs two at a time. “Osmond, are you all right?”
When she reaches him, Osmond is waving smoke from in front of his face, an elaborate bronze hookah towering on the floor beside him. One blue-and-gold tube still lies in the crook of his arm. He appears to be rereading Back There Again, a book he pressed on Dunky repeatedly throughout childhood.* An ermine throw covers his lap, half hiding the bald tires of his wheelchair. The air reeks of loam.
“Sick again,” Katya observes, not unkindly.
“It is a fine disease, and I am its finest symptom.” Osmond pounds his chest. He’s dressed in a kimono today, the frizzy strands of his gray hair pulled into a messy topknot.
“Osmond, I need your help.”
“And I need my privacy, you trespassing strumpet. Put some clothes on. If I want to see you naked, I’ll go online.”
“Dunky is still missing.” Katya pauses as Osmond draws another lengthy, burbling pull from the hookah tube. “I hoped that you could find him.”
“I will say this slowly. A genetic predisposition to bewilderment is rarely overcome. As the biologists say, when a penguin makes for the mountains, he can’t be stopped.” Osmond exhales a floating zero, then an exclamation mark. “All I expect to find today is a brief respite from my suffering. Now, get out of this library before I retrieve my thwacking canes.”
“You don’t understand. Humphrey won’t call the police—”
“Pardon?” Osmond fingers the joystick of his wheelchair, rolls backward several inches. His nostrils flare; his bristly jaw juts forward like the underbite of an angered boar. “Could you repeat that immense presumption, please?”
“Humphrey won’t—”
“You told me I didn’t understand. You told me I didn’t understand. Who are you to tell me what I understand?”
“Osmond, I—”
“Dislodging a Ripple heir from the humid jungle of your loins does not, I am afraid, qualify you to perform psychological examinations.”
“I only want—”
“In fact, I understand the situation full well. Your mentally disabled son has wandered off, no doubt to squander his inheritance copulating with machines and submitting to a vast array of brutal muggings. You beseech me to save him from himself. And I ask you, simply, to leave me to whatever chemical tranquility these weak herbs can achieve.”
Katya crosses her arms over her pasties. “I will not leave until you promise to help.”
“And I will not help until you promise to leave.”
“Done.”
She extends her hand to shake. He waves her away.
“Spare me the formality, gigolette. Any moisture on those palms is suspect. Now, how do you propose I accomplish this daunting task?”
“Do you remember when we had Dunky microchipped?”
“He howled inconsolably for days, as I recall, dramatically clutching his negligible incision. And then wept when the stitches were removed to reveal no scar. Tell me again, what medical practitioner condoned you bringing the pregnancy to term?”
“All little boys want scars, Osmond. They think it makes them brave. There was a time, I think, when you wanted one yourself.”
Osmond snorts. “You’re doubtless unaware that the BlackBean is not a tracking device. Its sole use is as an identifier of the amnesiac and the dead. A face tattoo for your boy would have been cheaper and more efficient.”
“That isn’t true, Osmond. A BlackBean shows up on scans. Remember when the fire department burned, and they scanned the ruins for the fire chief’s Bean? They’ve done it with others too—that Laidly brother, the Tangs’ last nanny…”
“But that’s preposterous. We have no idea where he is. I would have to cruise a low-flying craft over the whole of Empire Island and the outlying environs, touching down to investigate every blip on the viewscreen.” In the cloudscape of his drowsy eyes, a spark catches, ignites. “It would be…a quest.”
So Katya sounds the call once more: “Will you please find my son?”
“Very well. But you must do me a favor in return.”
“Anything, Osmond.”
“Fetch me a smoked porter from the icebox.” He pats the armrest of his wheelchair. “Since you’re already up.”
Katya’s demeaned herself enough for one afternoon, but she smiles placidly just the same. “Bring my son home, and I’ll fetch you anything you want.”
* * *
A ceiling of electric white. Rats with eyes like blood drops. Tile everywhere, gleaming. The People Machines have caught Abby. They have beamed her up into their Contraption and will never bring her home. They watch her through their one-way glass. They think she cannot see them, but she can: their bleached robes are half-materialized ghosts haunting her reflection.
As Abby gazes into the mirror, she sees too that they’ve turned her small again. They’ve taken her back in time to the days before the moon blood came, before her hair grew long enough to tangle, before words even, when she was just a wisp of herself, a soul awaiting a woman’s body.
Abby hears footsteps in the hall, shouts, crashes, rodent squeaks. Abby hears, and she feels fear, because this has all happened before. Someone is coming for Abby—more than one Someone. And the Lady is with them.
“Ow! Abby, what the snuff?”
Abby and Ripple are wrapped in the old green coat, zipped up together, and he’s grabbing her hands to keep her from punching him. Feathers erupt from a new rip in the jacket’s shoulder as she twists and squirms.
“Sorry, sorry,” she pants. She snuggles against his chest. Her heart is still jumping.
“You really got my bad arm there.” Ripple unzips them, sits up. They’re spending the night camped out on the Pier, a stack of busted packing crates near the water’s edge; a cool breeze makes the air smell almost clean. Or maybe, after ten days and nights, Ripple is just getting used to it. He gently prods his bandage to gauge the damage. “Fuuuuck.”
“Sorry.” Abby clumsily drapes the jacket around his shoulders. “I didn’t mean it.”
“Nah, I know. It’s cool. I’ll shake it off.” He squints at her. “What was up with that anyway? You OK?”
She nods. “Bad dream.”
“I figured.” He pauses, watches, as Abby scoots to the edge of the pier and dangles her legs off. “I used to have some scary ones when I was a kid. Like I had this one that the dragons burned down our house and Hooligan—he’s my dog—was running around with his fur on fire, and everyone was like, ‘Dunky, save him, save him, you have to save him!’ And I woke up, and my mom was all, ‘Pro, you wet the bed,’ and I was like, ‘Oh yeah? One minute ago you were calling me a hero.’ ”
Abby gazes off across the waves, at the distant lights of the Electric City. The ripples on the water distort them, mix them with the moon.
“Get it? It’s a joke. Because I had to pee on him to put out the fire. I didn’t actually wet the bed.” Ripple stretches. His recappers out in the Sprawl were always talking about how funny he was, but you’d never know it from this audience. “Stop being so quiet. It bugs me.”
“Dunk?”
“Yeah?”
“Will you go back to the city?”
“Uh…I hope so. I mean, I guess it just depends.”
“Depends?”
“You know, on if I get rescued or not.” Ripple picks at an insect bite on his thigh. “Were you having nightmares about how it would be if I left? Because I’d understand if you were. I’m the best thing that’s ever happened to you, I get that. With great power comes great responsibility. Like, I own you, you know?”
Abby leans her head on his shoulder. “You own me.”
“Achievement unlocked.” Ripple fondles her breasts. “Mmm. You’ve got such primo ta-tas. They’re, like, exactly the same size.”
“Dunk?”
“Yeah?”
“When you get rescued, will you still own me?”
“Sure. I own you forever.”
“So you’ll come back?”
“Yeah…or…” He hesitates, glances around. There’s Cuyahoga, some yards away, perched sleeping on a hat rack like a huge feathered chapeau; there’s a mound of broken bottles, glinting in the moonlight. Amid the trash dunes there is stirring, but nothing human—no sign of visitors from land or sea. No witnesses. “Or maybe I’ll take you home with me.”
“Home? To the Electric City?”
“Why not? I have a ball pit in my bedroom. You’ll like it.”
“I don’t know…”
“Relax, it’s never going to happen. Just let me have my fantasy.”
“What’s a fantasy?”
“Something so sweet and weird, it could never ever happen.” Ripple contemplates this. “Like being stranded here with you.”
Abby grabs him by the ears and pulls him into a kiss. Ripple pushes her onto the pier and puts a hickey on her collarbone. They’re deep into the making out when Ripple hears something—a grumbling in the distance. He freezes.
“What was that?” he whispers. They lie still. Abby gazes past him, wide-eyed. Her lower lip trembles.
“The People Machines,” she whispers. “They’re coming.”
“Who?”
“The People Machines.” Abby starts to cry. She smacks her head. “The Lady warned me. She sent me the scary dream.”
“Fuck that.” Ripple rolls off of her, knots the jacket like a loincloth around his waist. The grumbling noise is louder now. He squints up into the night sky. “I’m gonna flag them down.”
“Dunk, no!”
“Don’t daunt me.” He grabs a splintery plank with nails stuck in it and brandishes it, caveman-style. “I got this.”
Ripple scrambles up over a mountain of disassembled refrigerators and past a leaning tower of truck tires. Abby whimpers. The grumbling noise is overpowering now, more thunderous than the voice of God. Then, descending through the low-hanging violet clouds, it emerges: an enormous, darkly gleaming craft, all curves and chrome and circular headlights. It is shaped like the body of a spider, armored in a carapace of black steel. Smoke pours from it, and Abby can feel the heat of its churning engines from the ground. A yellow beam sweeps the garbage dunes, searching, searching. Abby cowers in the shadows of the pier. She hears Ripple yelling, but his words are consumed by the roar of the Contraption and her own white-hot terror.
Abby shuts her eyes. Her heart is thudding in her ears. Images flash through her mind without sense or reason: the Lady’s tattoos of a pillar of cloud and a pillar of fire; the dead, jellied eyes of a killed fish; the endless letters of her name, jumbling together, too fast, one after another after another. Someone is coming. Then she sits bolt upright, gripped with sudden knowledge. The only thing worse than being taken is to be left behind.
Abby is shaking, but she wobbles to her feet and creeps through the garbage dunes. Like a giant crab, the shiny black craft squats on six legs. A creature has emerged from a hatch in its underside. From the waist up, he is a man, gray-haired and grizzled. But from the waist down, he is made of wheels, new rubber and metallic spokes: a People Machine.
Abby half hides behind a drawerless chest of drawers. Ripple and the People Machine are talking to each other. Ripple is explaining quickly, using his hands. Some part of her still wants to run, over the rusted springs and gooey puddles, to a secret place in the Island’s rotting heart. But when Ripple glances over his shoulder nervously, her eyes meet his, and she knows what she must do. His face is so beautiful. She steps into the unnatural light and stands there, naked and blinking, offering herself to the electricity like a sacrifice.
* This classic epistolary novel is written in the form of a letter from an uncle to his young nephew, recounting the tale of the uncle’s long-ago adventures in a mythic land located “halfway between the Realm of Dreams and the Empire of Light.” Though the uncle encounters a multitude of beasts and monsters, underground caverns and dark forests, in the end he identifies the ultimate threat to heroes like himself as something much more prosaic: forgetfulness. In the concluding passage, the uncle tells his nephew that, though the boy himself is not a hero, he is faced with an even greater task. “True power lies not with the hero, however quick his sword, for one day he will surely fall,” the uncle writes. “True power lies with the one to whom he tells his story, for it is only this Rememberer who can grant immortality. He is the lord of us all.”
5
SNAPDRAGON
Getting teeth pulled never bothered Swanny much. She didn’t hate the sting of the Novocain needle, and before she got old enough to drink with her mother in the evenings, nitrous offered the only thrills she got. Sometimes, breathing through the mask, she would squeeze her eyes shut to see points of light that, with only a little effort, she could reshape into the city’s dazzling fires.
Swanny kept these pulled-out teeth in a Bakelite jewelry box, which played “The Way You Look Tonight” whenever she opened the lid. Sometimes she would arrange the incisors on the velvet cushion into little smiles. Sometimes she would balance a single molar on one finger, a pearl solitaire. The box began to fill, her mouth was full already, and still new teeth kept coming. She got to know the feeling of teething well, the vampirish taste of her own blood, the perversely pleasant itch of bicuspid breaching gum. And after the dentist did his work, it amused her to poke at her own cheek as though it were a stranger’s skin, to feel pins and needles on her tongue, to watch her lip droop like a stroke survivor’s, to slur her words. She loved ice cream, and brie, and foie gras, and flan, and the invalid treatment she got after an extraction: dinner brought to her in bed on a domed tray, her mother worrying aloud about dry sockets and her bite. She was almost thirteen before it occurred to her that it had all gone on much too long.
Swanny’s own body was a mystery to her. Her late father’s study had an extravagant library, but the medical textbooks she had glimpsed on the highest shelf as a child disappeared by the time she was permitted to use the ladder. What little she could perceive down her throat and between her legs indicated only that the inside of her was very dark. Her illnesses were strange and sudden: a sharp jab in her side; an ache in her ribs. They subsided without ever seeming to completely go away. Once, when she dared to ask her mother what caused them, Pippi replied tersely, “Growing pains,” and strode briskly from the room. A few minutes later, Swanny heard the furious sounds of Pippi’s Contrology workout video echo through the house.
The medical textbooks were off-limits, but the other books weren’t, and between her lessons in elocution and tap Swanny liked nothing more than to laze on the gray velvet fainting couch, one finger in her mouth, a book propped up against the cushions before her. She loved descriptions of parties, loved the way a passage of dialogue could sparkle like a flowing river or glitter, cold as frost. She learned that the words “wit” and “intrigue” on a dust jacket signaled the presence of great things. In a single, dizzy night she read the entirety of Canfield Manor, anxiously cutting a new tooth on a sterling napkin holder all the while; in the end she wept, not for the drab little heroine, but for the passing of a world. The characters were figures upon the deck of a fabulous cruise ship, laden with stores of crumpets and conversation, receding endlessly into the horizon, and Swanny stood on the do
ck alone with only a broken Champagne bottle in her hand.
The women in the books sometimes had mysterious ailments, treated with laudanum or heated water; they went mad, drank poison, bungled abortions, and went to the countryside for their health. Sometimes they drowned: seaweed mingled with their hair in thick, dark strands while their eyes gazed on, sightless and knowing; sometimes they wasted away. More than one coughed blood into a handkerchief. More than one owned a pearl-handled revolver. But in none of the books did a woman have thirty-two teeth in her head, seventy-four more in a box, and a new one on the way. In none of the books did a woman have a dentist living in her house.
Swanny convinced herself that she was dying. The idea suited her. She thought to ask for a quilted dressing gown for her birthday, but her birthday was three months away. By then, she thought dolefully, it would be too late. It irritated her that her mother, the dentist, and Corona were all keeping the news from her, as if she were an infant. She was no infant; she was a woman, a perishing one.
Gazing into the abyss made her sultry with wisdom. She posed in front of the full-length mirror, dressed in a gauzy slip, practicing for when she would be a ghost. She took sumptuous baths. However, early one morning, when she woke up to find her white monogrammed sheets soaked in blood, she started screaming and wouldn’t quit.
“I’m dying, I’m dying,” she wailed. “Make it stop.”
Pippi pounded on the outside of her door. “Unlock it this instant.”
“I can’t.” Swanny pounded the mattress with her fists. “I’ll never rise again.”
Over the noise of her own sobs, Swanny heard the sound of the heavy key ring jangling to the floor, her mother’s curses, the key clanking in the lock. Then Pippi was in her room. Her shoulders were high; her dark eyes smoldered. She strode across the seal pup rug. In a sudden fit of terror, Swanny clutched the blankets to herself. Pippi wrenched them from her hands and cast them aside. Both looked at the purplish-red stain spreading from the seat of Swanny’s silk bloomers to the Egyptian percale.
The Sky Is Yours Page 6