“I wouldn’t fake my death without warning you.”
“Whatever.”
“No, I’d make you the prime suspect or something.” Ripple feels magnanimous. He’s got nothing left to prove. “You’re a main character in my life, Tang. You’re my best supporting actor.”
“Maybe not for too much longer.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Not everybody got the man-child stamp of incompetence on graduation day.”
“My diploma says ‘For Entertainment Purposes Only.’ There’s nothing on there about incompetence.”
“What I’m saying is, my dad wants me to work for him back East. Overseas.”
Ripple blinks. He knows Kelvin’s been taking Wunderkind-level classes for a while now to proficiency out of overschool. But entering the workforce? What, like adults? “That makes no sense. You live here. Your stuff’s here. You went to school here.”
“I have dual citizenship. I’ve got family over there, the company’s based there. And business works the same everyplace. Except here, where it doesn’t.”
“Just tell your dad you’ll ruin everything.”
“He won’t believe me.” Kelvin looks off-camera sheepishly. “He said I make him proud.”
Not acceptable: “Uh, Late Capitalism’s Royalty, remember? Our families own half the city. We’re supposed to party on like kings.”
“Half of nothing is still nothing.”
“No, it’s infinity. ∞”—Ripple draws the shape in the air with his finger—“isn’t that what you get when you twist a zero around its middle?”
Kelvin isn’t buying it: “Nope, Rip, it’s nothing.”
Ripple doesn’t care to take this lying down, but he doesn’t feel like getting up either. All of a sudden, he’s drained. “It’s like you want to go.”
“There’s no future here, Ripple. Empire Island is over. Maybe you forgot, they shut down the fire department six months ago. Water and power are probably next. If you knew what was good for you, you’d be bailing too.”
As if Ripple could pass an immigration test. Or hold a job. Getting stranded on the Island was one thing, but he can’t imagine a life outside his parents’ mansion, where he would have to meet anyone else’s minimum standards. “No fucking way. I’m sticking around to protect my assets.”
“And I want to live somewhere that isn’t a total wasteland. No offense.”
Ripple asks it nonchalantly: “When do you leave?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?!”
“Pro, I sought your input. You were unreachable.”
“But you would’ve gone no matter what.”
“Well, yeah.”
Ripple doesn’t feel like talking anymore. “Clobber Mechs or Skyscreamers?”
“Skyscreamers.”
“Team or battle?”
“C’mon. You know I’m always on your team.”
* * *
The last leg of the journey to the Ripples’ mansion is the steepest. The Heights, a mountainous outcropping at the city’s northern tip, was once an exclusive enclave, a promontory from which the then-teeming entirety of Empire Island could be seen and observed, and upon which one’s own edifice stood as a monument, dwarfing those below. As the hired car progresses along the Lionel Roswell Expressway, Swanny cranes her neck, but can only glimpse a sheer, vertical sheet of rock, richly embellished with graffiti and the chiseled initials of the long dead. Atop this pedestal, her husband dwells. The hired car takes the next exit, into a tunnel encircled with spray-painted script and watched over by the peeping eyes of a faded leggy snake.*
Here the darkness is complete, the stillness perfect except for the clomping of the oxen’s hooves, until the driver flips on his grumbling generator and ignites the buzzing halogen brights he’s affixed to the limo’s grille. Then the tunnel reveals itself, a concrete cave with burnt-out sconces on the walls. Rats skitter across the pavement; a crumpled bag of BacoCrisps crunches under the wheel. Swanny holds her breath. Beside her in the darkness, Pippi seems to expand, to exert a gravitational pull the way objects do in the cold void of space. The two have never sat together so silently. The road tilts up beneath them. When Swanny speaks, her voice sounds disembodied.
“Mother? What if he doesn’t like me?”
“Then he’ll get used to you, darling.”
When light pours in the windows again, it is as though a night has passed.
Forty-eight high-definition face-recognition security cameras are positioned at various locations on the outside of the Ripples’ mansion, courtesy of HomeShield, the private security firm that monitors the property remotely. Some cameras stare out from the mouths of gargoyles, some perch atop the battlements, some crouch at ground level, behind the tough iron lattices that line the basement windows. As the hired car pulls up to the barred entrance to the grand inner courtyard, all forty-eight cameras swivel furiously in its direction. And when the Baroness Swan Lenore Dahlberg rolls down her window and presents her round, uneasy visage to the crisp autumn afternoon air, all forty-eight cameras beep and click and whizz and scan in a flurry of electronic desperation until, at last grudgingly satisfied, they confirm the arrival of the family’s honored guest to the staff, the Locksure alarm system, and the robotic hinges of the impenetrable metal gates, which regally, deliberately, swing inward. The Dahlbergs park and disembark in the circular drive.
The Ripple mansion is a medieval castle with a spaceship crashed into it. The east wing is gothic, all spires and flamboyant arches, windowpanes the colors of gemstones, flying buttresses ornately carved in bas-relief. The west is Romanesque, fortressy and unadorned, almost surly beneath its battlements. But the central façade and entryway is an angular, crystalline entity: all jutting steel and planes of glass slicing like merciless razors into the stones of the past, mirrored sharply in the courtyard’s limpid, silvery reflecting pool. It takes Swanny’s breath away. Pippi frowns up at it, putting on her oversized suncheaters to get a better look.
“Generations of bluebloods, and yet they build like this. Money doesn’t care whose pocket it’s in.”
Swanny couldn’t disagree more: “It’s bold. And modern.”
“Post-modern, darling.” Pippi turns back to the limo for her crocodile briefcase.
“Mother, the driver wants his tip.”
Pippi pats the pockets of her fox fur coat for change. But the moment is already past: a stream of butlers is issuing from the spaceship’s portal, uniformed and white-gloved, to seize the Dahlbergs’ luggage.
“Just charge it!” Pippi calls airily, and then she’s hustling Swanny inside.
Once in the lobby of the Ripple mansion, Pippi Dahlberg shrugs off her fox fur and lets it fall unhindered to the floor. She drops the hatbox she has tucked under one arm and strides toward the visitor desk, where she immediately presses the large gold buzzer, despite the fact a butler is already stepping forward to man the station.
“We are the Baroness Swan Lenore Dahlberg,” she explains, gesturing vaguely behind her. “We have arrived.”
Swanny stands back awkwardly, uncertain if she should be embarrassed or relieved that she apparently won’t be doing any of the talking. It’s difficult even to think: the entry hall is working its spell on her. The ceiling is so high, she doesn’t feel like she’s inside of anything. The stone floor rings beneath her feet. Before her, a grand two-sided marble stairway swoops upward, half-encircling an indoor fountain of a naked male colossus, stabbing the belly of a kraken with his trident. Here, as in the reflecting pool outside, the water has a metallic gleam, which Swanny realizes now comes from money: the water shimmers with tossed coins. Spent wishes. But here in the Ripple mansion, what need would one have to wish for anything at all?
Beneath the vertex of the staircase, an elevator chimes open, revealing an unlikely trio: one fat man in an obvious hairpiece and a sweatsuit; a second, fatter man in a wheelchair, guzzling a viscous, night-dark elixir from a tulip glass
…and the tallest woman Swanny’s ever seen, whose sequined minidress does little to conceal the skyward ascent of her endless golden legs.
“Mother,” says Swanny, interrupting Pippi’s litany of requests to the butler as the strangers make their way toward them across the lobby’s vast expanse. Pippi turns and her expression of momentary irritation transforms into a starburst of ecstatic delight.
“Hum-phrey!”
And before Swanny can even recoil in horror, her mother and the first fat man are embracing. He swings her through the air in a half-circle; her witchy stilettos punctuate the air with little kicks.
“Pippi,” he says, flushed, straightening his skull merkin. “There’s a portrait of you rotting in an attic somewhere.”
“No, wrong pact: I promised my firstborn instead. Speaking of which—” She grips Swanny’s shoulder through the soft gray fur of her coat. “Darling?”
“The pleasure’s all mine.” Swanny curtseys.
“Enchanté,” says the second fat man around a burp. He grabs Swanny by the hand and drags her toward his wheelchair to kiss her wetly on the knuckles.
“And this must be your daughter,” Pippi tells Humphrey. She laughs uproariously; shrill echoes hail from the vaulted ceiling. “Oh, you scandalous rascal, wherever did you find her?”
“I first traveled to this city with my modeling company,” Katya says stiffly.
“Why, of course you did. I’m absolutely famished. Could we sneak a bite before dinner, something very light, don’t trouble yourself.”
Katya glances at Humphrey, who makes shooing motions.
“I’ll ask the kitchen,” she says.
It’s Pippi’s favorite subject: “You must be firm with your waitstaff or they’ll absolutely walk all over you. I remember my first round of firings, when we still lived in the city. It was unpleasant for a day or two, but then you forget what the old ones looked like.”
“Where’s Duncan?” Swanny asks. Everyone turns in her direction.
“He’s upstairs, no doubt, frolicking in the bedroom,” grumbles the man in the wheelchair.
“Always a good sleeper,” says Katya. Her mouth smiles; her eyes don’t. “A restful boy. I’ll see about those sandwiches.”
“May I take your coat?” Humphrey asks Swanny.
“Oh, thank you, no, I feel a chill.” Swanny smiles and resettles the fur around her shoulders. He may be heavier than she is, but he’s still not going to see her arms. “I would like to meet Duncan, if he’s awake.”
“He’s awake all right. I’ll show you.”
“Osmond…”
Humphrey’s tone is a warning, but the man in the wheelchair zooms away. His engine has surprising pickup for a medical aid. Swanny has to scurry to keep up. He backs into the elevator smoothly, then beckons with a wink: “Going up?”
Swanny resists the urge to glance back toward her mother for reassurance and steps inside the little gilded chamber. The door slides shut.
“You’re Duncan’s uncle Osmond?” she asks as they glide up into the house.
“Forgive me, yes. My manners have atrophied, along with my withered loins.”
“What a horrifying image,” Swanny says. She perches on the edge of the small ruby-colored bench. The gray curls of Osmond’s topknot look like frayed electrical wires. She has a funny urge to touch them. “Do you speak to all of your nephew’s guests so outrageously?”
Osmond regards her in the mirrored wall as he slurps his brew.
“Paralysis of the body is no disadvantage compared to paralysis of the mind,” he says. “Sometimes it takes a shock to reinvigorate a dying muscle.”
“Perhaps I flatter myself, but I don’t believe I’m in need of shocking.”
“My nephew seems to think otherwise.”
“If the family resemblance extends to repartee, I’m sure I’ll be all right.”
The elevator doors open. A bamboo cane emerges from beneath the folds of Osmond’s cape. He swings it recklessly, giving directions: “End of the hallway, last door on your left. You won’t miss it.”
Swanny steps into the hall. “Shouldn’t you accompany me? As a chaperone?”
Osmond almost spews imperial porter on her. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. He’s still chortling when the door slides shut again.
The only sound in the hallway is the eternal humming of a fully automated house. There are no windows, only a row of closed-shut doors appearing on either side of a carpet that flows in patterns like calligraphy beneath Swanny’s feet.
Ever since she first heard the name of her intended, a picture of Duncan Ripple has been forming in her mind. She has seen all of his Holosnaps (albeit usually in static two-dimensional thumbnails on her mother’s obsolescent machine), has memorized them, but in her mind’s eye he is not posed, grinning, in the driver’s seat of a HowFly, or sporting the Kevlar vest and mortarboard that signify his graduation from underschool. She imagines him instead in the most erotic pose imaginable: propped up in bed, one hand supporting his well-hewn jaw while the other leafs lazily through the pages of a book. He is a scholar in an unbuttoned shirt, with the torrid, brooding gaze of a pirate. She already plans to encourage his growing a beard.
Swanny walks down the hallway, trying to impart, as her mother always urges, some natural grace into her step. She passes an end table, where a celadon vase full of begonias fills the hallway with its scent. She hopes he doesn’t read mysteries, or those cheap spy thrillers where black-clad assassins fire stun darts from their cuff links. It would be utterly dull to discuss, hour upon hour, characters who are distinguished only by their motives to kill. Perhaps he prefers poetry—that would be refreshing. The door of his room is labeled clearly enough: ersatz caution tape zigzags across it, instructing the visitor DO NOT ENTER. How droll. She places her hand on the knob, then hesitates, half-frightened, half savoring the moment. She can already feel his caress on her cheek, his hot breath in her ear: “Swan Lenore Dahlberg, you strange, otherworldly thing—let me love you.” The years with her mother in the cold schoolroom, learning how to sit, how to speak, how to laugh, what to know, who to be, are now concluded. This is the moment before the test, and she is entirely prepared. With an anticipatory shiver, she twists the knob and enters.
A gust of air-conditioning buffets her, as though she’s opened the door onto a windy cliff. The ceiling is much higher than in the hall, and the walls are papered with a minute repeating pattern of blue and red robots shooting each other in the face. The plush blue carpet is strewn all over with toys: nunchucks, a plastic shirtless man with articulated muscles, a crossbow with foam darts, a jetpack, a giant melodica keyboard, model HowFlys with their bellies popped open, revealing empty sockets for battery packs. A vast aquarium blurps and bubbles, seething with minute crustaceans, and a seafaring death pyre somehow appears to be functioning as a sperm-splotched, unmade bed. Explosions detonate on a massive projector screen.
They say the instant before one dies lasts for all eternity. Perhaps the same also applies to the instant before one’s heart breaks in two.
A ball pit, almost overflowing with rainbow-colored plastic orbs, sunken into the floor: in it sit Duncan Ripple and a young woman, topless.
Swanny considers resorting to an old comfort. Screaming has not solved many of her problems in the past, but in this case she thinks it best. However, when she opens her mouth, nothing comes out except for a garbled croaking, at which point her betrothed and the young woman turn in her direction.
“Whoa,” says Ripple. “You’re early.”
“I am the Baroness Swan Lenore Dahlberg,” Swanny says, as if to remind herself. Her voice sounds foreign, uncharacteristically high and tremulous.
“Shit, pro,” says a disembodied communicant, speaking through the projector’s sound system—how many strangers are observing Swanny’s humiliation? “Is that your wife?”
“Gotta log off, Kelvin.”
“Fuck that, I need you to pierce this freighter
before it deploys its drone hull. I am destroying on defense, back me up here.”
Ripple sighs. With a rapid fumbling of buttons, he executes a move that results in a giant fireball annihilating all other images on the projector screen.
“Boom! You’re the abuser!”
“Do a save. You should be OK on single player for the rest of the level.”
“Eh, I’ll start a new game.”
“Have a nice trip.”
“Have a nice marriage.”
“Have a nice career.”
“Let me know if you ever need one. I’m a job creator now, I’ll find you something cushy.”
“Yeah, in the boringest place on Earth. Thanks but no thanks.”
The projector screen clicks to black. Without the celestial inferno of its dreamscape, the capacious room seems far too small for three.
“What did he just call you?” Swanny asks, icily. She’s taken hold of herself again.
“Who? Kelvin?”
“You didn’t bother to introduce us.”
“Uh, sorry…”
“He called you ‘the abuser.’ ” Swanny moves to the lip of the ball pit and stares down at Ripple, as though her gaze could melt and boil the plastic immersing him. He is the same as always—the same face, the same name—but the meaning is entirely different, like a word in a foreign tongue that she has always misunderstood. La Diabla. She does her best to ignore the girl.
“Oh, right. Because I tore that freight ship a new one. I was dominating.”
“Doesn’t the term ‘abuse’ generally refer to domestic situations?” Swanny removes her fur coat and defiantly drapes it over one arm. I could knock him out with these arms, she thinks. He may be stronger, but I have the element of surprise.
However, Ripple is onto her. “Better dress for dinner,” he mumbles, hoisting himself (clad in boxers, thank God) out of the ball pit, leaving the topless young woman half-submerged, anxious and alone. It is now, only now, that Swanny trains her gaze on this competitor—a starved and fragile beauty with luminous, frightened eyes. She has the same look as a half-grown rabbit caught in one of Corona’s traps.
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