“Under the City, within the cave,
Dwarves mine and hoard what all men crave.
The great Machines hunger for fuel:
An ugly ore, Earth’s darkest jewel!
The dwarves carve out the space below
Another city, one hollow.
Above, mills whir, furnaces roar
Beneath, dwarves near the molten core.
Horrid beasts lurk in tunnels deep
Who, once awakened, never sleep.
They crack through the land’s thin, frail crust,
Reduce all they see to ash and dust.
Oh men of Earth, do hide and flee!
Our race’s time has ceased to be.
Leave Fallen City far behind,
Lest like Uncle here, you lose your…miiiiiiiind…”
Though applause might not have shocked him at the end of his performance, he could not be more surprised to hear the response his serenade does receive: an astonished shriek from above the manhole.
“Uncle Osmond! You’re alive?”
* * *
It takes some convincing to lure Duncan down into the sewer, but once he descends Osmond does his best to make him comfortable. He lights another lantern and offers his nephew his new gondoliering cloak, an ingeniously constructed fleece blanket—with sleeves!—which he won in a riddling competition against one of yesterday’s patrons.
“And I thought Hoover Island was bad,” Ripple observes, taking in his surroundings. He’s changed since they last saw each other. His face, once characterized only by the untroubled serenity of the developmentally delayed, shows signs now of existential consciousness, even humanity. Also, he’s acquired the musculature of a male ecdysiast. Perhaps he’s followed in his mother’s footsteps these last weeks? But one does what one must to survive, Osmond reflects, regarding his own unnaturally tautened biceps.
“I didn’t know there were enough people left in the city to make all this ass fudge,” Ripple adds.
“Fewer than there used to be.” Osmond uses his oar to tap a high-water mark on the curving wall of the pipe, several feet above the current flow. “Once upon a time, these pipes gushed with the man mud of millions, perilous yellow-water ‘crapids’ that required a speedboat to subdue. Alas, that mighty tide has weakened to a trickle.”
“Too bad, I guess.”
“I find it difficult to cultivate much nostalgia for the bowels of strangers, now that our entire family is dead. You do know that our family is dead, don’t you?”
“Yeah. I didn’t really believe it till I saw the house.”
“The same fate awaits us all. We are but tinder, burning in the fires of time, one generation after the next. Which reminds me: after you come into your inheritance, we’ll need to discuss the terms of my bequest. As I recall, your father left you everything with the explicit stipulation that I live out my later years in the comfort and splendor of my ancestral home. Clearly that ship has sailed.”
“I can’t believe this is happening.”
“A cosmic irony, yes. Sometimes evolution selects the non-breeding male.”
“I don’t think evolution’s got anything to do with it.”
“What are you insinuating?! In my darkest hours, I will confess, the thought of fratricide did at times dangle, a bauble for the jealous mind. But I always knew that without Humphrey’s sanity and protection, I would fall prey to my own worst impulses—be made to wander the Earth decrepit and alone. And so it shall ever be. Meanwhile, the thought of expending a murderous effort on your mother is patently absurd; even if I’d wanted to, she was adept at a sexy array of ninja kicks and ate next to nothing, which rules out poison. Show me a single profit I’ve made from their demise—then and only then I’ll dignify your accusation with a response.”
“Uh, I didn’t mean you killed them. It would be pretty dumb for you to burn down our house.”
“Of course.” Osmond colors slightly, the shameful warmth of guilt alive and spreading under his skin.
“I mean the whole situation,” Ripple continues. “It wasn’t supposed to be like this. I don’t think I could even keep going if I didn’t have a goal.”
“A goal?”
“I’m gonna take out the dragons,” Ripple explains, by all appearances entirely serious, “and I need your help.”
“Oh, no, no, no, no, no. I’ve trod this path before, nephew.”
“You don’t get it. There’s this command console that can tell the dragons what to do. All we need to do is find it and figure out how it works. We can tell them to kill themselves. Maybe there’s even a Self-Destruct button on there.”
“Ah, the fabled ‘operations transmitter’?”
“You know about it?”
“It’s an old, old chestnut—an urban legend, if you will. There’s no such thing.”
“Nuh-uh. I heard the city hired this one guy to look for it.”
“And where did you hear that?”
Ripple looks at him steadily—clever, no, but eerily sentient. Humorlessly sober too. “I’m going to do something. I’ve got to.”
Osmond reaches under his captain’s seat for the tackle box he keeps hidden there, flips back the lid, and strikes a match. Ripple cringes as the flame illumes.
“Pro, don’t keep lighting lamps, I don’t really want to see…what the snuff, you do drugs down here?”
“The change of scenery has worked no wonders for my affliction,” Osmond exhales, offering Ripple a puff on a one-hitter cunningly devised from an upcycled spigot. His nephew hesitantly accepts.
“Don’t get me too swamped, though, I still have to explain my plan.”
“You’ll have time to murder and to birth / To burn a name upon the earth, as the poem goes,” Osmond consoles him. “Besides, some chemically enhanced fortitude may be required for you to endure the rest of this discussion.”
“Huh?” Ripple coughs. “Oh fuck. This is worse than the first time I smoked. I have been, like, loam revirginated.”
“I’m speaking of your parents’ suicides.”
“Wait, what?”
“If you will recall, your sudden departure coincided with a violent home invasion—one our private security firm failed to contain, most likely because they were either bribed or had other plans that night.” Osmond tokes again. “Your father, watching on the panic-room monitors, concluded our cause was lost once the marauding crew broke out the gasoline.”
“So it was the cyanide pills.” Sobriety and reason drain from Ripple’s features like dirty bathwater; he’s a mental incompetent again, but a heartbroken one this time. “What about Mom?”
Katya’s suffered the last of Osmond’s bon mots: “Loyal to the end.”
The two men pass the spigot back and forth in sympathetic silence as the docked boat rocks on putrid waves. A gator drifts by, a floating log of malice. In the lantern’s flickering glow, the domed ceiling of the pipe crawls with spidery shadows, a phantom forest of night branches, grasping.
“But,” says Ripple, with some apparent effort, his eyes completely crossed, “I still don’t understand how you got out alive.”
“If vengeance is your aim,” Osmond smoothly elides, “there’s no cause to despair. A handful of Torchtown brigands will be far less daunting foes than the dragons. And they are, of course, the ones entirely responsible.”
“Take revenge on the torchies.” Ripple unhappily contemplates. “Thanks, but no thanks. I don’t like killing people. I’m never doing it again.”
Osmond notes the “again,” but decides not to inquire. “Never say never, my boy.”
“No, I mean it. It just isn’t…me, you know? Not the way I want to be remembered. Next time, I’d rather just die.” He looks like he might cry, but instead he shakes his head and changes tack: “Besides, Swanny probably took care of that already.”
Osmond chuckles. “Oh, did she now?”
“She was headed there the last time we talked, all powered up for a rampageathon, so yeah, probably
…Stop laughing like you know something I don’t. What’s this pink fuzzy thing in front of my face?”
“That would be your nose. Young Duncan, believe it or not, down here your old uncle is privy to channels of information undreamt-of in realms above.”
“The sewer made you smarter?”
“What I’m referring to is the connection between these subterranean but nonetheless lawful waterways and the forbidden plumbing of Torchtown. It’s all supposed to be quite closed off and inaccessible, but nothing stays sealed forever. Pollution seeks its own level, you know. At any rate: I now redeem my prescription”—he indicates the tackle box—“from a commuting loam bearer by the delightfully mercantile name of ‘Mart.’ His primary occupation is to hawk his wares to one client and one client only: the infamous chawmonger of Scullery Lane.”
“So that’s why it’s so strong.”
“Stay with me, kinsman. Mart journeys weekly from an Upstate marsh farm, down through our gondoliering canals, and then farther south still, to passages unbeknownst, where he plies his narcotic trade. The life of a traveling salesman is a solitary one, no matter how convivial his wares, and I’ve found him most talkative on a variety of subjects. Including his eccentric patron. It seems that the aforementioned chawmonger has, through some unsavory means, lately acquired that rarest of possessions: a young lady of breeding and refinement, with whom, one must assume, he takes the most ferocious liberties. Mart tells me that she’s battered about the face, marked with love bites, dizzy with chaw at all hours of the day—yielding and compliant to the monger’s roughest touch. Wait, here, I have some extrapolations I’ve sketched out based on what he’s described.”
Ripple flips open the composition notebook that Osmond hands him to a random page and reads aloud: “He thrust deeper, pushing her to another brink. ‘Spit in my mouth when you climax,’ she whimpered greedily, ‘that nectar of drug and tongue is the only taste sweeter than your—’ ”
“Never mind that.” Osmond snatches the folio back. “Have you guessed why I’ve relayed the matter to you in such detail?”
“You’re lonely?”
“Because I’m speaking of your bride. The Baroness Swan Lenore.” Osmond waits a beat for this to sink in. “The torchies haven’t just driven your parents to suicide, Duncan. They haven’t just burned down your house. They’ve taken your wife, and their leader has her still.”
“No way. It can’t be the same fem.”
“The baroness is a witch’s cauldron of mingled passions, nephew. Rage and lust, fury and desire. It surprises me not at all that she’s succumbed to sensual depravity in the arms of a swarthy crime boss.”
“Pro,” Ripple is shaking his head, “pro, she would never.”
“Then go to Torchtown and prove me wrong.”
“Look, the first thing I need to do is slay the dragons, then I can start worrying about…”
“Forget your fairy tales, errant knight! No man can slay the dragons. No man can ‘save the day,’ as goes the tired phrase—minute by minute, it falls away from us, regardless of our best intentions. But there is ‘something you can do’—something that requires little more than a venturesome spirit and an indomitable will. A feat for which intelligence is hardly a prerequisite.”
“What’s that?”
“Love.”
“Uh…”
“Come now, I refuse to believe you’re still tampering with that dead-eyed wretch you found in the waste yard. You’re like an infant who prefers a soiled diaper pail to any of his toys.”
“We broke up, actually.”
“What a terrible shame, I hope you’ll stay friends. But for the purposes of our discussion here, a useful tidbit to consider. Now, back to your wife—”
“Swanny doesn’t want me back.”
“You have no way of knowing that.”
“I’m not even famous anymore. And I’m homeless. And”—he stares at his hands with mingled shame and fascination—“and anyway, she’s frigid.”
“That’s not what all of Torchtown’s been hearing in the middle of the night. Besides, she’s in grave danger, surviving daily at the pleasure of the psychopath directly responsible for the deaths of all your parents! You married this woman, you clumsily deflowered her, I’m assuming, you abandoned her for a soup-brained temptress, you forsook her in her hour of need—and now you’re concerned about your penis? Duncan, I’ll never have a son, as any spinocologist would gleefully report, but looking at you I feel nothing but unqualified relief. I cannot imagine the disappointment your father would be experiencing right now, or rather I can, and it—GGAAACCCK, he’s choking me, he’s coming up from the inside—” Here Osmond slumps forward for several seconds, until Ripple touches him lightly on the shoulder in concern, at which point he sits bolt upright and stares vacantly, hollowly, like one hypnotized, into the middle distance. “Duncan?” His voice is crisp and assertive. Executive, even.
“Uncle Osmond?” Ripple whispers, definitely spooked.
“There’s no one here by that name.”
“Pro, this better not be a joke.”
“I don’t have all day for this. Let’s ‘parlay.’ Now, from what I hear, son, you’re in the process of shirking your last responsibility to any other living being on the face of the Earth.”
“Yeah, Abby took Hooli with her when she left.”
“That dog is a money pit, forget him. You need your wife. She’s intelligent and sensible and she’ll make sure you stay alive. I’ve done the diligence on her, just trust me on this one. Offer whatever you have to, to keep her on your team.”
“But what if…” And here, for a moment, Ripple’s face takes on the aspect of one far older and wiser, pained and haunted beyond his years. “What if she won’t forgive me?”
“You’re the hero. You figure it out.”
Osmond slumps backward in his seat, tongue sagging dramatically out the corner of his mouth, eyes gaping blindly. He makes a great show of slowly regaining his senses.
“Where am I?” He fans himself. “How much time has passed? Oh, what a relief to be back in this crumpled envelope of flesh!”
Ripple scrutinizes Osmond. “Do you seriously not remember what just happened?”
“Test me.”
“Talk like you’re impersonating my dad.”
“That’s utterly impossible, my voice can’t sink to that register. Only by surgical implant could such a thing be accomplished.”
“Whoa. Then maybe his spirit really did possess your body.”
“Good Lord! What did he say?”
“Set a course for Torchtown, and pronto.”
* * *
Ripple is passed, prow to prow, port to port, down the line. Processed through the city’s intestine. Seven hours pass. In the winters, his mom used to wear a helmet with lights on it to trick her brain into thinking sunshine. Osmond always called it her “miner’s cap of the soul.” Ripple could use one of those now. When he sees the sky again—if he sees the sky—he’s going to feel reborn.
What would his mom think about all this? She liked Abby better than Swanny. Abby and Katya were more alike—even kind of looked alike—Ripple doesn’t want to dwell on that. But his mom never saw Abby turn the lights off with her mind. Something happened in that moment that Ripple can’t describe. It was as if Abby changed somehow, as if she stepped through the wall into fourth-dimensional space and came back…not evil, but reversed, maybe? Initiated, into some sphere he can’t wrap his brain around? Ripple doesn’t know. But when he saw Abby walking away from the ruins of the mansion with his dog and her rat, vanishing into the drizzly fog, he did know for sure that she was headed somewhere he didn’t belong.
You have to do what you think is right.
That was one of the last things his mom told him. And it’s the truth. He has to go with his instincts.
Which apparently means saving Swanny from the best sex she’s ever had.
Ripple doesn’t know if he should even buy his uncle�
�s story, though. Drugs or not, he can’t imagine Swanny nudifying for her mom’s killer, unless she planned to stab his torchy neck when he went to unzip his pants. What could be in this for her? Nothing. Nothing. Yet Ripple does remember what she said on their one and only date: We all have our urges. What are Swanny’s? She made him read that weird antique book, the dialogue so stilted it was like a foreign language…but it occurs to him now that maybe he should have paid attention, that the key might have been hidden in there somewhere, sneakily encrypted inside all those words….
Does he even want her back? He tries to think of her beauty, or at least her tits, but she refuses to coalesce into an object in his memory. Always she is in motion: sulking, petulant, snarking, in tears, her voice and mannerisms actressy and insincere, her ulterior motives obvious or puzzling but seething visibly in every pose, every moue, every cutting aside. He isn’t sure he even likes her, and yet here he is, riding sewer gondolas on waves of diarrhea farther and farther downtown to wrest her from the torchies. And what’s the plan after that? They live happily ever after? No, his marriage is going to be full of screaming fights and silent treatments, conciliatory chocolates and diamonds. He’ll probably have at least one more affair, maybe more, which she’ll blow all out of proportion, exiling him to a separate bedroom until menopause strikes, at which point she’ll get horny for the first time in thirty years, hot-flashing as she straddles him in an orthopedic bra, thanks a lot, Swanny. Picturing the whole thing makes him so annoyed he’s about to tell the sludge-cabbie, “Turn us around, I’m headed Upstate,” when it occurs to him to imagine his life without her.
The feeling is a trapdoor opening under his feet.
You need your wife.
“Are you married?” Ripple asks his final gondolier, who has the long, knobby fingers and deep-hooded eyes of a giant who forgot to grow to his full height. His hairless pate gleams in the lantern light—seamed across the top, as if once shattered and glued back together again.
“I was once,” he says, and smiles with crooked yellow teeth.
The Sky Is Yours Page 40