“Are you scared of the dark, Duncan?” A switch flips: Swanny sounds automated again.
“No, but if you could sneak up on us, somebody else could too.” He doesn’t specify, but they’re all thinking the same thing. Even Swanny noticeably sobers.
“So what do you propose?”
“Dunk wants to find my people,” Abby explains. “He says they’ll give him a reward.”
“Ah, so there’s a warrant for her arrest? What’s the charge, indecent exposure?”
The thought of Abby’s family cheers him a little. “She doesn’t know who her parents are, but they’ve gotta be out there, trying to find her. So we’re taking her someplace to get her Bean read. You know, ‘When you’re burned beyond all re-re-recognition?’ ”
Far from cracking a smile, Swanny quakes again. She looks away from him into the darkness.
“Good luck,” she says. “But if you truly believe that any of us will see our parents again, I fear you’re sorely mistaken.”
“You said my parents were safe.”
“Mother said they locked themselves in a room. I didn’t take pulses.”
“Listen, my dad knows how to handle this sort of thing. He might not have saved your mom, but normally he’s…” Ripple trails off. What is it, exactly, about his dad that protects him, shields him from all harm? “My dad’s the boss.”
“Tell yourself what you must. Perhaps your fortune will remain intact too.” Swanny sighs. “You may arrange my supplies in a pile, with the foodstuffs furthest from the ground. I’d appreciate your lending me the rucksack too, as I have no means of carrying them otherwise.”
Ripple knows he doesn’t really have a choice: “Come on. We’re not leaving you here.”
“You’d rather leave me somewhere else?”
“Yeah, actually.”
“I’m not about to go out of my way to assuage your conscience, Duncan.”
Abby touches the diamond brooch on Swanny’s lapel. “What’s this say?”
Swanny slaps her hand away. “ ‘Eat shit and die!’ ” She brushes it off to dislodge Abby’s germs. “It was the last thing my mother gave to me before she was murdered.”
* * *
The four of them—three teenagers and a dog—walk for what feels like hours. Ripple leads the way, holding the light as they follow the forking tracks. This is what the world is to them: this little space of enlightenment, this tiny roving circle of the known. This is what it is to feel lost, if not be lost: to walk into nothing on a path that vanishes behind you. In this sunless place, where the air is still, their bodies keep the only time. Blood pulses, the dog’s tongue ticks wetly, panting. The hour of Not Anymore, Not Yet.
On the ground, near the platforms especially, they step over strange reminders of the life these tunnels once had, back when the city was well: turnstile tokens, a headless Glitter Gal princess doll, a crumpled wad of currency, a broken umbrella, a bucket drum. The Black Line. All around, the spray-painted signatures of the dead vie for space on banished, unseen walls. Could a train travel out of the past to run them down? Ripple can almost feel its rumble under his feet, its engine’s hot breath like an underground dragon’s, but he tries not to think about it. They’ll be outside soon, in the sunlight, in the city. He tries not to think too hard about that either.
They almost walk right past the emergency exit. The sign is small, the metal rungs easily missable where they protrude from the concrete wall. Ripple glances at the girls and Hooligan, then clicks off the flashlight and starts to climb, lifting himself foot by foot into what could just as well be a boundless, starless sky—the universe before God turned on the lights.
PART TWO
KNIGHT IN SHINING ARMOR
* * *
Everything is gonna burn. We’ll all take turns. I’ll get mine too.
—the pixies
15
THE DEAD PARENTS
This is a story of what it is to be lost in a very large world.
Ripple survived the perils of a trip downtown just once before, when he was a little kid. His dad had some business at Laidly Bros., one of the last financial firms still holding on to office space in the city, and for reasons Ripple still can’t quite fathom, he chose to bring his son along to the meeting. On the flight there, in the family HowLux—the one so completely done up in brown leather upholstery it felt like being inside a wallet—Humphrey called the bankers he was on his way to see “old men,” “geezers,” “worm chow,” and “cremains.” But when he parked on the roof of the building, he spent an extra minute retaping his hairpiece down in back before opening his door, and Ripple knew for once without being told that it was Best Behavior time.
Frailty and wealth make a strange combination: it is as though power is transferred, particle by particle, to an inanimate medium long before death itself arrives. The old men—and they were old—sat in a dim room hot from the whir of laser printers, murmuring commands into invisible skull-hewn headsets, their eyes no longer strong enough to bear a LookyGlass’s radiance. The many overhead fans gave their papers the rustling sound of dry leaves in late autumn. The shades were drawn, and with each tap of the pull cord against the glass, Humphrey twitched visibly in the direction of the nearest fire exit. When he met with the oldest of the old men, a lipless, spidery-fingered creature who sat in a corner office with windows so darkly scorched they were in no need of any covering, Humphrey allowed Ripple to climb into his lap, where Ripple pressed his ear to Humphrey’s chest to hear the desperate negotiations of his father’s clogged and fumbling heart.
They left without any papers being signed. Ripple knew then that to live and work downtown, amid the ashes, was to become a different kind of being, a thing no longer entirely in the world—untorchable, supernatural—a feat his father both feared and grudgingly admired. When they got back in the HowLux, Humphrey went straight for a vertical ascent without bothering to taxi.
“Don’t tell your mom,” he said, popping open a tallboy as he flew, and as a bribe he offered the can to Ripple for a sip—his first.
Ripple hasn’t thought about that day for years, but now, as he crawls out of the manhole onto a deserted crosswalk, a vortex of gritty wind smarting his eyes, the memory comes back to him in an overwhelming sensation, a truth too large to articulate in words.
“Fuck,” he announces to no one in particular, “this place is dead.”
As Hooligan and the girls hoist themselves through the manhole and onto the pavement, Ripple sizes up the surroundings. They’re at an intersection, a complicated three-way juncture of one-way streets, edged in by oddly angled towers, gray geometric compromises spruced up with pillared facades and ragged flags with faded, ghostly insignias. Ripple always thought of skyscrapers as soaring, but these buildings are so looming, so crammed in, looking up feels claustrophobic. The asphalt is strewn with ancient pages, yellowed tatters that gust to and fro, a literate tornado. They’re on the steps of the Metropolitan Library.
“Good lord,” says Swanny, stooping to pick up a desecrated binding from where it lies on the pavement. Only a few pages are left inside; the wind has ripped the rest away. “Who is responsible for this?”
“That’d be Rudy,” says a voice. The three teenagers turn to see a wizened baba, some yards away, perched on the steps next to an overturned book-deposit bin, which she’s converted into a sleeping nook. The woman wears a filthy lavender cowl, and dozens of pigeons perch on her shoulders and lap. The area around her is so stained with their excrement, it appears to have been whitewashed. She laughs—caws, almost—which doesn’t unsettle the pigeons in the slightest. Hooligan races over to the periphery of the flock, but when the birds don’t budge, he commences with sniffing their butts. “He gets all sauced up, that Rudy, till you wouldn’t know his right age. Pulled his shoulder out of joint knocking that thing down, but he got me a warm place for napping. Lovemaking too.” She smiles flirtatiously. Her two front teeth are brownish, and one is considerably longer than th
e other.
Ripple has a sudden urge to leap back down the manhole, but Abby is going up to the woman, gently toeing her way through the sea of sky rats.
“I like lovemaking and birds!” says Abby, sitting down beside the old lady. A pigeon flutters into her lap. Abby strokes it affectionately. “What’s this one’s name?”
“I call him Stumpy, ever since Chompy chewed his foot clean off. See Chompy over there? The one with blood on his beak?”
“He’s beautiful.”
“Might I ask,” says Swanny, with a modicum of condescension, “why you don’t sleep in the library proper? It seems needlessly destructive to upend that structure when there’s an entire abandoned building right there.”
“Sleep in the library?” the bird lady crows. “Now, do I look old enough to pass for a Librarian? Don’t answer that, love, you’ll break my heart. The Librarians have camped out in the stacks since forever. They’re a bunch of old shushers and killjoys, if you’re asking me.”
Ripple sets down his bag, pulls out his LookyGlass. He considers opening a LookyChat, then texts instead:
TO: D. Humphrey Ripple IV
CC: Katya Ripple, Osmond Strangeboyle Ripple
SUBJECT: u ok?
i know u r mad but let me know
Swanny stares at the hulking stone gryphons on either side of the building’s entrance. “So the Librarians spend all their time reading? But however do they survive?”
“Well, the long and short of it is they don’t. The library is where folks go to die—a certain type of folk, that is. Short-tempered daydreamers who don’t much like the world outside their own brain cage. So many’ve passed on from there, they say it’s gotten to be haunted.”
Ripple looks up from his device: Swanny is taking the stairs two at a time. An angry blur of chinchilla, thrust forward by rage alone.
“Wench, where are you going?!”
She doesn’t answer him, drawn into the word cathedral by some inexorable magnetism.
“Literotica,” Ripple mutters, returning his eyes to the LookyGlass screen. He opens a LookyChat with the Metropolitan Police Department. “Hi, I’m calling to complain.”
The heavy iron library doors slam shut behind Swanny; Abby looks down at her dirty bare feet. “She’s sad,” she tells the bird lady. “Maybe I should be her friend.”
“That’s all right, she seems snooty anyhoo.” The baba pinches Abby’s cheek. “Now, would you like an eggy-wegg, pretty girl?”
Inside, Swanny’s eyes adjust to the shade. The building’s electricity must have shorted out long ago, because although the many arched windows fill the scholarly sanctuary with the weak light of the afternoon, the light fixtures hang spent and useless from their ceiling chains. Here and there, glowing on the tops of long oak tables, are votive candles, and before them, bent over their books like supplicants at prayer, are the Librarians.
These are real Gray Ladies, and Gray Men too, tenuous creatures from which life has leached all color. Swanny’s old deck of paint samples would have called their wisps of hair Downy Owl, Whispering Spring, Misty Morning. Some heads are paler still: Linen, Baby’s Breath, Cream, Snow, Chantilly Lace. Striding past them, which she tries to do briskly, silently, is like fording a bank of clouds, the smoky exhaust of the past.
The stacks are labyrinthine, and she sometimes has to step over the body of a fallen Librarian, asleep or even deeper gone into the central fold of a tome. Swanny runs her fingers over the spines, with titles that read like clues—Lost Children, The Inner City, Swimming the Lethe, The Collected E. Hamish Plumbrick, Necessary Evils, The Magician Is Dead—until, with surprising ease, she finds it, the book she’s looking for: Power Suit by Chet Dahlberg.
“Your father, the poet.” Pippi mentioned it just once before that fatal night, some years earlier. Swanny thought then that it was a joke, since they’d drained the vermouth on their last round of martinis and Pippi was shrieking with laughter as she spoke. “Every morning to his secretary—‘Miss Langley, take a poem!’ The poor child would have preferred a pay cut, I’m sure.” Swanny checks the copyright page: PRINTED ON DEMAND. He really was an author, one the public clamored for. Who better to offer Swanny some solace, some instruction, at this trying time?
Outside, on the steps, Abby and the bird lady are eating soft-boiled pigeon eggs; the bird lady makes Hooligan perform tricks for the shells.
“Sit,” instructs the bird lady.
—spin around? bark?
—I’m not giving you a hint, Hooli!
—just kidding. so smart.
The apehound sinks back on his haunches, tongue lolling. The bird lady throws a yolky glob in his direction, but a pigeon pecks at it first. Angrily, Hooligan throttles its feathered throat. The pigeon coos in terror.
—Stop it. Remember what happened last time?
—not same. not magic. not friend.
“Put down my Lulu,” the bird lady orders sternly. “Bad dog. Give me the bird.”
—oh! know this one.
Hooligan drops the pigeon and joyfully flicks her off with both hands.
Meanwhile, Ripple is getting nowhere fast with the police department as represented by a tiny mustachioed visage on his screen, low resolution by design. “Pro, what do you mean this was the jurisdiction of a private security firm? Like, what does ‘jurisdiction’ mean?”
“We can’t issue reports on incidents from outside the district we police.”
“Who does police it, then?”
“Your father contracted a private security firm called HomeShield to monitor your property. When he signed the enhanced user agreement, he waived his rights to emergency services from the Metropolitan Police Department. By law, we’re not obligated to police parts of the city with that level of private coverage.”
“Seriously? My dad got house bouncers because you suck at law enforcing, and now you’re saying no cops even went to check it out? My mother-in-law’s dead!”
“Congratulations?”
“Too soon, doughnut patrol. You need to send your guys up there pronto. I’m not joking around. You’re going to hear from my lawyers about this.”
* * *
Swanny sits on the library floor, her back against a shelf of books as she reads. The text, though set in type, is printed in such an informal, whimsical sans-serif style Swanny feels as though her father might have lettered it himself.
The Love Song of C. Norman Dahlberg
Let us go now, you and I,
Where, like some seraph fallen from the sky,
My wife lies etherized upon a table.
For you’ll have time
To repair a face to greet the faces that you greet;
You’ll have time to murder and to birth
To burn a name upon the earth
To live a lifetime full of changes which a scalpel will reverse.
In the clinic, the women come and go,
Bitching about rhinoplasty.
The yellow smog presses its palms against the windowpanes
The yellow smog taps its fingers on the windowpanes
The yellow smog curls up before the hearth of a burning skyscraper,
Warms its thin hands, and falls asleep.
I have been here before; I know it well.
Hours in this waiting room are hell,
Measured out in cheap coffee, imagined crises,
Hellos to other husbands one scarcely recognizes.
In the clinic, the women come and go,
Bitching about rhinoplasty.
Then, at last, an audience with the wife,
Who smiles knowingly, without a sound,
As if to say, “I am Eurydice, come back from deep underground,
Which is why the light bothers me
And that’s absolutely the only reason I’m wearing wraparound sunglasses.”
It’s been worth it, after all,
The operations have rubbed out the marks of all her days
Except the hands, twis
ted with veins and knots,
Dotted with freckles and old age spots,
and plenty of fine lines and wrinkles.
So the yellow smog will have time
To seep in through these windows, to cloud our gaze,
To mellow the antiseptic air to a nostalgic haze.
For I have known these hands already, known them well:
Known them mornings, evenings, afternoons,
A pair of ragged claws clamped upon my arm,
Or scuttling a Rolodex of names to harm.
Such claws!
The siren crab that closes on the ankle, beneath the waves,
And pulls us all to our watery graves.
“Good lord, he loved her?” Swanny murmurs. Imagining her mother clutching a man by the arm, much less entertaining one from that most vulnerable of places, a post-op hospital bed, is like seeing a familiar face grinning out from a carnival cut-out board. Corona had a photograph of herself in one of those, her plain, maternal visage mismatched with a mermaid’s sensual frame. But this new picture of Pippi as siren crab is even more incongruous. And Swanny can’t see her father at all: no matter how far back she reaches in her childhood memory, he’s still only a silhouette, a contorted shadow puppet moaning behind bed-curtains. She flips ahead, past poems with indecipherable titles (“Vasovagal Syncope, or: The Bradley Method”) and ones with words scattered like vase shards all over the page. But she audibly gasps when she sees the title of the last verse in the book, doggerel this time.
Apology to My Daughter
We fucked you over, your mom and I
We have only ourselves to blame
We should’ve had the tact to die
And finish off the Dahlberg name.
But as old people past our prime
We saw in you a hopeful chance
To change the world one last time
And see the future in advance.
We left to you a burnt-up city,
The Sky Is Yours Page 20