The man who’s summoned her here is swarthy, Swanny thinks, a word that feels especially apt because of the strong association she makes between it and fictional characters who carry knives in their teeth. He’s not holding a knife that she can see, but he is wearing a golden fang on a chain around his neck, and there’s no telling what’s concealed beneath the pinstripes of his capacious zoot suit. He seems to have materialized from a villainous antique engraving. Black body hair crosshatches him, shades his face and neck, the top of his chest and the back of his hands, all to different degrees. Even sitting down she can tell he’s a very short man, gnomish, but in a strange way that contributes to the power he exerts: the risk of him isn’t just physical violence, but something sorcerous and delusive, something that can’t be undone.
“You got a name?” he asks.
“I’m the Baroness Swan Lenore Ripple, née Dahlberg,” she says.
“That’s a mouthful.”
“You may call me Swanny, if you like.” Swanny strains to get a look at the driver, but she can’t make out much more than a broad-shouldered, nearly neckless silhouette beyond a divider of reinforced mesh.
“Don’t worry. Duluth won’t bother us.”
“So tell me, do you have a name?”
“Sure.”
“May I ask what it is?”
“Sure.”
“Well?”
“Maybe you can guess.”
“I’m afraid I can’t. I’m not from around here, you see.”
“That makes two of us.” He extends his hand, hot, hairy, and dry, with black under the nails. “Eisenhower Sharkey.”
“Pleased to make your acquaintance.” They shake with an odd finality, as if agreeing upon something; Swanny wishes she knew what. “What brings you to the city, Mr. Sharkey?”
“I’m from the city. Just a different neighborhood. Sometimes I like to come up here and see the sights.”
“I wish I shared your enthusiasm. But it seems to me that there’s lamentably little worth seeing around here.”
“You don’t know how to look, is all.”
“I’d be delighted if you’d instruct me.”
“First you need a drink.” He opens a cabinet in the paneling and removes from it a vacuum flask and two teacups. He fills them both with a thin red liquid and hands one to Swanny.
The teacup is fragile bone china, almost translucent, featuring an intricate repeating pattern of humanoid figures with animal heads practicing the most exotic contortions. Steam rises from the top.
“What’s in this?”
“Hot water. Mostly.” Sharkey sips his, pinkie finger extended. So it must not be poisoned. “Good for what ails you.” He’s still chewing, even while he drinks.
Swanny takes a taste. It isn’t alcohol, but it’s a different kind of strong: herbal, almost medicinal, with a woodsy aftertaste.
“Black forest?” she wonders aloud. She isn’t sure why she says it. She doesn’t mean the cake. She feels as though she’s walking on a twisted, shady path, and the trees are moving behind her to conceal it. Soon she won’t be able to find her way back. She drinks again and surprises herself by finishing the cup.
“Now, look out the window,” says Sharkey.
Swanny obeys. Through the dusky glass, she sees a street much like the one she just left behind. Yet something is changed. The buildings, vacant shells which before inspired nothing but a quickening of pace as she attempted to get past them to somewhere, anywhere at all, now vibrate with meaning. These are things men have made. The fact that they’re beyond repair, deserted, with exploded windows and blackened walls and steel beams rustily exposed to the elements, only intensifies her identification with them. She has never been here before, but this is where she lives: condemned but not demolished.
“See that one there?” asks Sharkey, pointing to a curving cylindrical colossus of red enamel and steel, now as used up as a drained Voltage can. “That’s the Lipgloss Building. It was the first one They hit.” He says the pronoun with a capital letter, as if he’s referring to the gods. “Fifty years ago now, and it’s still standing. All those little people, jumping out the windows. Their best thinking got ’em there. Offices up in the sky no better than a prison. A fuckin’ kiln. And the only view was down. Makes ya think. I wasn’t even born yet, old as I am. Up there, people thought they were living in the future. But they were living in the past. We’re living in the past too, you and me. That’s why it’s good to pay your respects. Take note of what’s come before, because pretty soon, somebody’s coming after you.”
Swanny gazes at a fallen column of imperial granite lying on the curb. “Was there a great deal of screaming, do you think?”
“Screaming? Oh, sure. Lots of screaming. It’s a natural response to untold horrors. Close your eyes and scream. No seeing, no hearing. Gives you a little relief. Relief, not release.”
Swanny holds out her cup as Sharkey refills it. Her eyes cling to the building as it slips out of view. “I feel somehow that they’re screaming still.”
“Once something’s happened, it’s happened for all time. These things don’t just go away. You’re a very voluptuous young woman. What are you doing walking the streets alone?”
Swanny blinks rapidly, refocusing her attention to the inside of the limo, where Sharkey might be exuding an ectenic force on the rhythm of her heart.
“I’m exploring,” murmurs Swanny.
“You’re a long way from Wonland County.”
“How do you know I’m from Wonland?”
“Maybe you haven’t heard my name. But I’ve heard yours.”
“How…?”
“Ain’t your ma some kind of boss?”
Reflexively, Swanny touches the EAT SHIT & DIE pin on her lapel; beneath her fingers, the diamonds feel like an irregular scab covering a recent injury.
“Whassa matter, did you run away from home?”
“My mother is dead,” Swanny says. It doesn’t seem fair that she always has to tell everyone. She feels obscurely disgraced, the object of a bon mot from some timeworn farce: To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness. “I’m an orphan, you see.”
“That’s a shame. Must’ve been some real pros, took her out.”
“They weren’t ‘pros,’ either in terms of professionalism or in the colloquial sense of the word. They were torchies.”
“Torchies?” Sharkey looks amused. “That what you call ’em?”
“Prison colony escapees, if you prefer.”
“I always liked ‘untorchables,’ myself. ’Course, that only applies to them that live.”
“I saw her die,” says Swanny. “She was gunned down in front of me, in my husband’s house.”
“You see the guys who did it?”
“No…I couldn’t…”
“Good. Some faces ain’t worth the mental space.”
“I didn’t see them because I ran away,” Swanny confesses. She stares into the teacup. “I was unarmed. Defenseless. But I won’t make the same mistake again.”
“You won’t, huh?”
“I intend to get revenge.”
Sharkey lazes back on the banquette. He sucks saliva through his teeth. His eyes are coals, black but still burning inside. “I had a dream I was gonna meet somebody like you today. Not a dream, exactly. A premonition.”
“What did it foretell?”
“That I’d meet a woman who knows what she wants. And I’d help her get it.”
* * *
Pippi had a great fear of general anesthetic, so she always opted for the local when the surgery would permit it. The thing that frightened her most, she once confided to Swanny, wasn’t actually death but the lack of awareness, the yawning swoon of the soporific into her blood, and then the moment when things were being done to her body that she could not control, things that might be done wrong. Unconsciousness: it was a curious fear for a petite woman who put away half a liter of gin or vodka nightly. But Pippi reigned over hers
elf even then, brooding before the fireplace, wrapped tightly in a stylish shawl as she gripped the stem of her martini glass like a hard-won scepter. She never dozed off on the couch, or in the bath, at least to Swanny’s knowledge. And only when Swanny was sick did Pippi decline to tuck her in. Every other night, without fail, she would appear in Swanny’s doorway at the appointed hour, framed in the darkness of the hall, and pause with her finger on the switch.
“Say your prayers,” she would intone just before lights-off, and in their godless house, the words had the menacing ring of a femme fatale’s.
But unlike her mother, Swanny craves oblivion—she always has. Food or drink, sobs or laughter, the ultimate end of any bodily sensation is that aching fall, back into the bottomless liquid depths of the ocean from which all consciousness rises. She’s having trouble following what Sharkey says. It’s so sleepy in here.
“I don’t understand,” she tells him, finishing yet another cup of tea. She couldn’t be relied upon to count how many she’s had. “You came from the prison colony? But I thought no one was permitted to enter or leave.”
“I don’t ask permission. I go where I like.”
“So you’re an inmate?”
“I’m a native. I was born there. What’s the crime in that?”
“I apologize if my tone seemed accusatory. But it’s always been my understanding that the corrupting influence of the locale bends everyone’s nature toward its cruelest ends.”
“I hear Wonland County’s got a lot of snobs.”
“What is it that you do in Torchtown, Mr. Sharkey?”
“I run a little shop down there.”
“And you’re suggesting you can help me find my mother’s killers?”
“I can get you close. If you come and work for me.”
“In the shop?”
“In the shop.”
Swanny can imagine stepping out of the limo, meandering through the empty streets again. She can’t imagine summoning the energy. “I suppose I don’t have anywhere else to go.”
“One thing first.” Sharkey spits into his empty teacup, sets it aside. “Lemme see your teeth.”
Swanny feels the same flash of panic as if he’d pressed a pistol to her temple, as if he’d told her to remove her clothes. The tips of her fingers go cold. The gum around her newest tooth pulses. Her diagnosis has followed her here. “Excuse me, what?”
“Show me your teeth.”
“Why?”
“You got something to hide? Open up.”
As she submits to the examination, Swanny thinks of her old dentist: his gloved fingers massaged her gingiva, worked clove-drenched gauze into sockets charged with pain; with his tiny mirrors, he saw parts of her she’s never even glimpsed herself. It isn’t the first time her jaw’s laid bare. Yet there’s no comparing the situations. By nature of his work, the dentist was a strange, parasitical creature who found his living in her mouth. In this act, she’s applying to become Sharkey’s.
“Wider. Pull back your cheek, lemme see on the side. Yeah. Other side.” Sharkey places his thumb on her lower incisors and eases them downward; she feels her temporomandibular joint click, another point of dysfunction. “You chew?”
It sounds so much like a transcribed sneeze, for a moment Swanny doesn’t understand what he’s asking.
“Do I…?”
“You chew?”
“I don’t take my meals through an intravenous drip, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“Cute. But you know what I’m talking about.”
Swanny slides her own finger into her mouth, almost involuntarily, checking to make sure everything is still there.
“You know what I do,” says Sharkey. His own teeth are dark, wet stones in the cave of his mouth. For the first time, she notices the smell of his breath: chemical but strangely pleasant. Intoxicating.
“I suppose you’re a chawmonger,” she hears herself say. “And you want to know if I’m an addict.”
“That’s right.”
Swanny yawns, longer and deeper than she can ever remember doing before. Corona used to say that a yawn meant one’s soul was trying to escape from one’s body. But Swanny’s isn’t going anywhere. “Forgive me. I’m afraid this has been a very long, very strange day.”
“Forget about it.”
“I didn’t sleep at all last night.”
“You can shut your eyes.”
“Thank you,” says Swanny, though of course she doesn’t need his permission. Her lids are hardly down before she begins to dream.
Swanny dreams that the limo drives out of the dead city, north, into timberlands. A black forest, where yellow eyes glow in the sylvan gloom. It’s as though they’re driving into midnight, the hour when one day becomes another and everything changes. Werebeasts roam this country. Their new selves rip them apart from the inside and transform them into something terrible and unrecognizable and strong. Swanny knows, because the moonless wood is morphing her too, and the feeling fills every crook of her body like a profound knowledge, a knowledge that is beyond fear. Her muscles ache. She yearns to roam, to hunt, to sink her teeth into flesh, to howl at the uninhabited sky. She is hungry for vengeance.
In Swanny’s dream, the limo rolls to a stop in a clearing. All around, the branches reach their fingers toward the car windows. Then Sharkey presses the button on a remote control, and the ground itself begins to crack, crack and split apart, until the car is on a narrow shelf of earth that lowers into the ground like an elevator. As they descend, Swanny watches the soil turn to rock, and the rock to lava. At the heart of the planet, people are made of magma, dissolving and consuming one another constantly. It is a sea of fire, and seas are full of life. The car door opens and they carry her into Torchtown.
18
FACE TO THE NAME
INT. RIPPLE MANSION—DAY.
DUNCAN RIPPLE (age 16) and HUMPHREY argue in front of the Concentration Station in the third-floor library. From the outside, the soundproof study pod resembles a sensory deprivation chamber. DUNCAN apparently doesn’t want to go inside.
DUNCAN
It’s about self-respect. You say you want me to learn stuff, but I already know how to read. The world isn’t just a bunch of books. The world is on fire. And the real men are trying to stop it. That’s why you need to let my exemption expire. I want to learn to be a man.
HUMPHREY
Your uncle and I are men too, but that doesn’t mean we needlessly endanger ourselves.
OSMOND (O.S.)
Not anymore!
DUNCAN
I’m not like you, though.
HUMPHREY
Oh, you’re not?
DUNCAN
You’re always saying I’m so stupid—
HUMPHREY
Underachieving. (directly to camera) I never called him stupid.
DUNCAN
But maybe I’m stupid for a reason. Did you ever think of that, huh? Maybe it’s because I’m chosen. And whatever I’m chosen for (he gestures at the Concentration Station), I’m pretty sure it’s not in there.
* * *
Ripple is good at video games. He always has been. But he never thought that could seriously serve him in any realm outside the virtual. Fighting the fire is like the time sinks in Sword Crystal Prophecy III: The Dwarvening, the parts where you have to farm or forge shields or one-hit kill entire armies of clattering skeleton warriors: it’s simple and repetitious but weirdly satisfying, even without a progress bar to mark the time well spent. Insulated inside the Tarnhelm, Ripple blasts a path forward with his hose, plowing into the heat yard by yard, mowing down the field of flames. He literally thought he couldn’t do this, but it turns out he can. Maybe he was onto something without even knowing it, all those times he argued with his dad on the show. Maybe he’s destined for this. He loses track of everything besides the crackling, the sloshing of the water tank on his back, the threat of danger right in front of his face. He writes his name in water, and it rises up to the
sky in dank black smoke.
“That was awesome!” Ripple yells, once the roof of the library is puddled and steaming. He strides over to high-five Leather Lungs. “Wooot, we did it!”
Leather Lungs ignores his hand but nods appreciatively. “You did your duty, son. That collar can come off now.”
“Sweet, thanks.” Ripple had forgotten about that ring of electrified steel encircling his larynx; the adrenaline and endorphins have lifted him out of his body almost. “Can we take the masks off too? Is it safe?”
“It is for you,” Leather Lungs says.
Ripple peels back the Tarnhelm; the cooler air feels great on his sweaty skin. He scans the sky for dragons, but there’s nothing there: not a cloud, not a bird. It’s suddenly a beautiful day.
“Ditch the mask, pro! What, are you hiding out from the cops?”
“That would make it tough to work for them, wouldn’t it?” Leather Lungs pulls out a ring of keys and unshackles the claw from around Ripple’s neck. “You’re free to go.”
Ripple rubs his chafed Adam’s apple. “Yeah, but seriously. You’re just going to keep walking around like that?”
No response. They go back inside the building. Leather Lungs pushes the hot-dog cart back into the elevator. He pulls out a weathered logbook, jots down a few quick notes in pencil, then returns it to his slicker pocket. Ripple scrutinizes him.
“Who are you, anyway?” Ripple asks. It’s starting to bug him now. “Special Officer, they said. But Special Officer what? What’s your name? Why did the police department hire an independent contractor anyway?”
“I’m just a man who cares about the fate of this city.”
“But you work alone, wear a mask…and your identity is secret?”
“That’s right.”
“Whoa.” Ripple heard about pros like this—vigilantes, superheroes—but up till now, he never totally believed in them. Like the dragons, they don’t seem really real until you see one up close.
Leather Lungs loads the tank-backpacks into the hot-dog cart. “You did a fine job out there today. I’m sorry the fire department shut down before you had a chance to join. With a little training you could have been one of the greats.”
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