“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.
“Any advice?”
“Don’t let her play with gators.”
“Thanks, that’s…um…specific.”
The pro drops the anchor, a cinder block on a chain. The entire tunnel vibrates when it hits the metal floor. “End of the line.”
“Wait, what? You’re supposed to take me to Torchtown.”
“Those routes are forbidden. The city could take my medallion.”
“You’re a sewer gondolier! There’s no way you’re allowed to be down here in the first place.”
“Tell that to the Public Hire Transport Authority.”
“That’s not even a real thing.”