Best regards,
Dad
* * *
“Only child,” Ripple, sprawled out for his afternoon nap, scoffs at the LookyGlass. “Yeah right, Dad. Like you’d want your only child to be a girl.”
Even if Ripple’s father doesn’t understand him at all, at least he appreciates having a son to buy things for. The proof’s everywhere in Ripple’s room, a whole fleet of merchandise modeled on the stylized-violence-and-weaponry aesthetic, not least of all the berth where he’s currently reclining au naturel. The Slay Bed, as Ripple calls it, is a twelve-foot, thousand-year-old warrior grave boat with a king-sized mattress in the hull, where once lay the funeral pyre of some unwashed pro named Reldnach the Irresponsible. The craft was sent out to sea in flames, but it didn’t stay lit. The Super Bitch had other ideas. She’s the figurehead of this vessel, a snake-haired lady on the prow screaming to scare off sea monsters. Or, maybe now, in her new incarnation as furniture, to keep bad dreams away.
Humphrey got the Slay Bed as a surprise for Ripple when Ripple was eight, the year the Museum of Human History auctioned off their permanent collection. The price was right. Tourism in the city was way down and the curators were eager to off-load the treasures before they went up in smoke. Uncle Osmond called it a “fire sale,” chuckled ruefully, and passed out at the dinner table. Humphrey called it an “investment.” Ripple didn’t care, it was awesome. At least he and his dad could agree on that.
Now the only thing that could make the bed more epic would be to have a naked damsel in it—but oh wait, Ripple’s got that covered. This afternoon, Abby lies bare across the pillows, chin on palms, head tilted intently, as she watches old episodes of his Toob series on the 3-D projection screen that covers the entire opposite wall, all the way up to the twenty-foot ceilings. They’ve started on Season 4 and at the moment Ripple’s prepubescent likeness is getting hauled off to the headmaster’s office for starting a food fight in the cafeteria.
“BLEEP lima beans!” he yells, devil-horning his fists for his cheering classmates as the vegetable-splattered double doors slam shut behind him.
“They were always trying to get me to settle down and pay attention,” Ripple explains, absently kneading her ass cheek. “But I was like, ‘No. I’m the star. Pay attention to me.’ ”
She doesn’t seem as turned on by this as he would have expected. In fact, the last twenty-four hours have been the most terrifying of Abby’s entire existence, and she’s currently in a state of shock.
Earlier That Day…
Abby’s dumbfounded, self-obliterating awe at her first close-up sight of the dragons had an almost religious quality, as if a portal to eternity had opened in that window’s shatterproof plexipane. But she didn’t have time to linger for long in the knowledge of her own cosmic insignificance, because close to a minute later, she was summoned for an audience with Ripple’s father in the Lap Dance Room.
It was not Ripple himself but his mother who materialized to escort her on this unwelcome venture. In the morning light, Katya appeared somewhat faded, platinum-haired in a wispy shift—the mind’s eye afterimage of the angel whose nurturing touch had coaxed Abby back from the brink of madness the previous night, diminished now, in the face of brighter horrors.
“It isn’t properly called the Lap Dance Room,” explained Katya, leading Abby by the hand down the grand stairs to the first-floor hall, “he calls it the Man Cave. But that makes it scary, don’t you think? In my village back home, we had a man cave, all darkness with drips of stone like teeth. Animals painted on the walls, running for their lives—how do you call them? Mammoths.”
“I don’t want to go to the Man Cave.”
“Don’t worry, it will be over soon. How did you meet my son? Forgive me, I still don’t understand.”
“God sent him to me.”
Katya nodded; she seemed to know what Abby meant.
“You must love him very much,” Katya said. “To leave your home behind.”
“I have to go where he goes. I’m his.”
The Lap Dance Room housed a chrome pole on a raised platform, the spine of a machine displayed like an altar of worship. Above a sunken bar in the room’s far corner, a sign blazed with the likeness of an incandescent bottle of lightning juice: EL SEGUNDO LAGER—2ND TO NONE! Nearer to the door, in a tilted box on stilts, a maze of electricity imprisoned tiny metal orbs under a ceiling of glass. The room hummed; Abby could feel the humming through the whole house. But it was strongest here.
Humphrey Ripple sat before her on a throne of tanned animal hide, with a smaller furry pelt slung across the baldness of his head. When he stood, she was relieved to see his legs were legs, not wheels like the other one’s. He extended his hand. Abby grasped it in both of hers and gazed up at him imploringly.
“Have mercy on me,” she pleaded.
“No need for any formalities.” Humphrey glanced at Katya nervously, extracted his hand, and wiped it on his pants. “Annie, is it?”
“No. Abby. Like Abracadabra.”
“Your name is Abracadabra?”
“No…”
Humphrey cleared his throat. “Well, let’s get down to it.”
He spoke then, at some length, about the nature of Reality and certain Arrangements that had been made, and about how the nature of Reality, like the terms of those Arrangements, was fundamentally unalterable, no matter what ideas teenagers might have in their heads. Fame, and hormones, and frankly, inflated self-perception, might make a young person think that anything was possible, but his son was not prepared to run his own life successfully and he, Humphrey, was not prepared to watch him run it into the ground. Humphrey didn’t care if it made him the Bad Guy to say so, because it was nothing personal; he was simply stating the laws of Reality, which, like the laws of Nature itself, could not be bent or broken simply because of human desire. His son could not fly; he was subject to Gravity just like the dumb rock he frequently resembled, and in the same way, his son could not break the laws of Reality, since such an act, like Gravity, would send him crashing to the ground without a net to break his fall. Humphrey thought past precedent had established as much.
“Do you understand?” he asked her.
“No,” said Abby.
At this point, Humphrey sighed and lifted an enormous black plastic garbage bag from behind the chair—garbage, yay!—and Abby embraced it, tears of relief springing to her eyes, before he pulled apart the drawstrings at the top and revealed the contents to be not trash, that glorious variegated amalgam of rot and rinds and coffee grounds, but identical stacks, each bundled smartly with an elastic band, of green-and-white rectangular paper slips that smelled of nothing but ink and linen and, faintly, greed.
“No!” cried Abby.
“Huh.” Humphrey squinted at her. “I suppose you want me to believe you’re above all that. Well, if you want to take the high road, what do you say to this?”
At that point, he removed a square of black glass from his pocket, tapped its surface, and aimed it at the pole-stage. A whirring orifice on the edge of this mysterious device shot out a beam of light. In it swayed a shimmering emissary from the spirit realm, its substanceless form constantly disrupted with flurries and jolts of electricity. Dimly, Abby realized it had once been a girl, one not so unlike her, though plusher and with a strange, false affectation of manner. Yet Abby could also see through her, as through a smog, to the pole and the wall beyond it. The ghost-girl bent over some sort of strange instrument, also translucent, a complicated system of valves and lung-like protrusions, which emitted odd, cloying tones at the prodding of her chubby fingers.
“All the tales of old, all the stories told of a gem both rare and fine,” the flickering specter sang. “No diamond’s sweet as when two hearts meet, and call each other mine. A treasure to have and hold: love’s a dearer thing than gooooold.”
Humphrey tapped the surface of the black glass again, triumphantly this time, and the stage was dark and silent once more. “Now
I’m sure you understand.”
“Yes. You’re a wizard who steals girls’ souls.”
This exhausted the remaining store of Humphrey’s patience. He shouted that he would not be insulted in his own house, and that Abby should consider herself lucky to get anything at all, since she didn’t have so much as his son’s signature on a cocktail napkin, let alone Right of First Refusal, which the girl from the Hollow Gram was entitled to under the law. Abby tried to protest or apologize, but the words jumbled together with the sobs that reshaped her language into a dialect of sorrow, until at last Katya stepped from the shadows to insist, “You are frightening her, Hummer!” at which point Abby bolted from the Man Cave back into the hall, where Duncan leaned against the wall under a torchiere, cleaner than she’d ever seen him, waiting for her.
“So how’d it go?”
She was so relieved to find him, she almost fainted.
“I guess you need some breakfast.”
Abby clung to him, eyes half shut, as he led her through various corridors, into an echoing chamber made of cold metal and tile. Two men in white smocks stood at a slab of wood, hacking the wings off the plucked carcasses of birds and tossing them into a steel bowl. It was as though she had stepped into a dream. A ceiling of electric white. Rats with eyes like blood drops.
“Where have you taken me?” she whispered, digging her fingers into Ripple’s arm.
“Uh, it’s just a kitchen. Don’t let the village idiots bother you. Pros, do you mind?”
The wing cutters glanced at each other; one of them rolled his eyes as they exited through a door marked THE HELP.
“Zero privacy, seriously. What do you want to eat?”
“Um…”
“I know how to make toast.”
“OK.”
Ripple produced a spongy loaf sheathed in a rainbow-colored plastic sleeve. Abby had seen such bags on the Island, but every one of them was filled with a chunky, moldy, vile-smelling gruel that even she considered inedible. She watched with interest as he removed two unblemished slices and placed them in the matching slots of a chrome box in front of him on the counter. “So what exactly did my dad say?”
“He showed me the girl from Hollow Gram.”
“Yeah, I probably should’ve told you about her. Are you mad?”
Abby gazed down into the chrome box. Inside each slot, around each slice of bread, tiny metal coils were glowing orange though untouched by flame. The heat was coming from somewhere, it had to be; in some far-off place, the heat had separated from its source and traveled here, lost, on the wires of forgetting. Electricity: it stole life from nature and brought it inside. “Who is she?”
“Some random GEP from Wonland. My dad picked her, not me. I’m trying to get out of it.”
“Gep?”
“Genetically engineered princess. You know how an Old Mom gets pregnant, right? A turkey baster and a trait menu. And she definitely ordered Swanny well done.”
The slices of bread, so near to the chrome box’s nexus of unholy power, had begun to smolder, releasing thin tendrils of smoke as their surfaces browned and cauterized. Yet still the coils warmed. “Swanny? Is that her name?”
“You should see this fem’s test scores, it’s unnatural. If I was selecting for shit, ‘looks good naked’ would be way higher on the list. Maybe it just wasn’t in the genes. You can’t express something that’s not there.”
“She sang to me.”
“Yeah, that’s one of her ‘accomplishments.’ My sex life is a talent show, apparently.”
The bread was burning, trapped in the torture box of tongueless flame. Abby could see it, could feel it, on her skin and in her core. Where did these machines come from? Who made them? What were they for? The Lady had warned her, but she had not listened; she had left the Island where she was safe, and now she was damned. The wires were all around Abby, pulsing with energy. She was the bread in the toaster. She was the bread in the toaster. It was too much to bear, and she felt something inside her on the brink of snapping until, instead, the bread leapt up, entirely of its own volition, scorched beyond all recognition, and she screamed, “It’s ALIVE!”
* * *
Ripple thought some toast and fucking would calm her down, but nope: Abby’s still pretty tense. He can’t tell if the fucking made things better or worse. One thing’s for sure, she is not a fan of toast.
“Ever watch Toob before?” it now occurs to him to ask. “When you were a little kid or anything?”
Abby shakes her head. “I don’t remember anything before the Island.”
“Do you like my show?”
“It’s OK. Can they see us?”
“Who?”
“The people on the screen.”
When Ripple was a kid, he once saw a Toob exposé about these special new hybrid “poochi-poo” dogs that turned out to be sewer rats on steroids. It was creepy, though, because in the video coverage they looked so plainly undoglike—their twitchy eyes, their overbites, their warty faces and muscly backs, even their wiggling, hairless tails. Ripple slowly removes his hand from where it rests on Abby’s ass and looks her over carefully, trying to reassure himself that she is not a human poochi-poo. Lots of hot girls pretend to be dumb, he knows that.
But what if she’s so dumb, so ignorant, it’s impossible for her to understand him? What if she’s a different kind of creature than he thought?
“Fem, that’s me up there,” he instructs her, carefully. “Me and my parents and everyone I know.”
“How…” She trails off.
Is it even legal to date a poochi-poo?
“It’s a recording of my life. Like, drawing a picture to remember something. Only with cameras.”
“So we’re looking into the past?”
Ripple breathes a sigh of relief. “Yeah, you got it.”
“When did you come back?”
“From where, underschool?”
“When did you come out of the light and become human again?”
Ripple opens his mouth and just leaves it open while he tries to figure out how to respond. Fortunately, he doesn’t have to. With an obtrusive metallic trill, a LookyChat opens at the lower left-hand corner of the projection screen, containing a real-time capture of his friend Kelvin, waving his arms.
“Maximize me, urgent, urgent! We need to parlay!”
“Kelvin, fuck yeah! So good to make contact!”
Ripple met Kelvin Tang the first day of underschool, more than twelve years ago now. At Chokely Bradford, you got to know the other kids’ last names before their first ones, on account of the family crests embroidered on the Kevlar vests they wore as part of their uniforms. At six years old, Ripple still didn’t read too good, or at all, but he knew to keep an eye out for the phoenix and pandas. According to his dad, the Tangs were the only family in the city richer than the Ripples, and he wanted to size up the competition. It was during the first season of his show, and the videographers edited it like he was spoiling for a fight. “Will Duncan finally…meet his match?” the voiceover intoned during the teaser for the next week’s episode.
Their first encounter was during recess in the courtyard, a square of lush photosynthetic green that the classrooms and dormitories surrounded like a fortress. Kelvin sat alone on the swing set, urgently mashing the buttons of his Boy Toy handheld, sonically sequestered in a pair of headphones as big as earmuffs. Ripple had to smack him on the shoulder to make him look up.
“I challenge you,” Ripple said, like he’d practiced, “to a battle of laser blades.” As the camera crew encircled them, he offered Kelvin one of the two light-up fencing swords he’d brought from home.
Much to Ripple’s surprise, Kelvin was awesome. He kicked Ripple’s ass at laser blades (the motion-sensor hilts kept score) but by the end of the duel both boys were laughing too hard to care. After that, they were best friends. They ate each other’s paste during art class, snuck to each other’s suites after lights out, and shared all the passwords to their g
aming platforms. They were the most popular guys in underschool, hands down, but although the other students clustered around them at mealtimes or Holosnapped their antics for posterity, at heart they were blood brothers and that shit was exclusive. Ripple had met his match, and it ruled.
He made Kelvin famous; Kelvin helped him understand stuff the night before exams. Ripple thought that was a fair deal. But that all changed in season twelve, when the showrunner, tiring of the endless pranks and unfilmable stroke-off sessions, determined it was high time to inject the series with a note of romance. Humphrey, sensing the probable necessity of an arranged marriage for his son in the near future, nixed this as far as Ripple was concerned. So it was Kelvin who chastely dated an “intern” hired by the videographers—really a twenty-nine-year-old YA impersonator named Cheryl—for fourteen weeks, almost a whole season, during which time Ripple had the unpleasant experience of feeling like a subplot in his own episodes. The ratings eventually tapered off and they fired Cheryl, but he and Kelvin weren’t quite as solid after that.
Now Kelvin is all like, “I do not need an eyeful of your unsheathed katana, pro.” Trying not to seem too interested: “Who’s she?”
“You said they couldn’t see us,” Abby cries, diving under the blanket.
“A lot of things have changed around here.” Ripple wriggles into his boxers, trying to keep the triumph out of his voice. “I have a scar now too.” He flashes the wound wrap like a badge.
“Right. Tell me straight, was this a brand-building exercise? Because a lot of us seriously thought…”
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