The morning after Swanny first tried chaw, she had her one and only bout of withdrawal. Her heart rattled the bars of its rib cage. Her gums bled and swelled, no longer numb. And light—light was needles in her eyes, pure silvery pain. She wanted to crawl into a coffin and never emerge. Sharkey was gentle with her then, bringing her breakfast in bed along with her next dose, as if her body were incubating his child in the form of this new addiction.
“You got it bad, huh?” he asked sympathetically. Though she didn’t have any basis for comparison beyond her own experience, she nodded. She couldn’t possibly imagine it being worse. They’d stayed in his den all night—postcoitus, he’d unfolded the couch so she could stretch out—but the room had changed around her. “It was rough for me my first time too. Old Jawbone used to say it rewrites your DNA. Leaves a big blank spot for cee, aitch, ay, ’n double-you.”
“Do you mean I’m going to have to chew all the time? Forever?” She was already doing just that, gnashing her teeth on the plugs of Widow’s Peak he’d brought her on a saucer, ignoring her bacon and eggs.
“You don’t have to do anything. But if you let it get outta your system, this’ll happen every time you use. And you’re gonna use it again.”
“You sound awfully certain of that.”
“I’m just being realistic.” He held out his I HATE MONDAYS mug—for her to spit in, she realized, and did. “You want to. And you’re used to getting what you want.”
It’s been a month since Sharkey first possessed Swanny, a month since he first entered her and first tainted her with his chaw. A month of countless intimacies, both erotic and otherwise. A month since she’s been sober. She has changed in that short time, she knows, yet the sight of her in the Chaw Shop, perched upon her stool, scribbling figures in a notebook, is still enough to stop his heart. Stop his heart. She’s never felt so powerful, or so powerless, in her life.
Swanny hefts her klangflugel, sealed in the blue velvet of its hard-shell carrying case. It isn’t the instrument she used that first night; that was lost in the fire, along with the rest of Nick’s. Sharkey gave her this one a few evenings later, when she was finally up to going out again. She doesn’t know where it came from, though she sometimes imagines, without meaning to, that it once belonged to another Wonland girl even unluckier than herself, a dutiful, diligent musician who spent her last hour practicing scales while outside, the raiders cut her gate chains. Swanny loves it, though: the mother-of-pearl keys, the blood-red bellows. She can’t help loving it.
Every day that she chews, the drug works faster, fades faster, and Swanny fades in and out with it. She wants Sharkey now, before this ache turns back to pain and she has to leave her body again. She steps down from the stage, floats into the darkness of the cabaret, toward the booth where she last saw him. But he isn’t there. Another man—shirtless, scraped up, cradling a live chicken, one of those awful inbred fowls the locals love to tend and devour—has taken his place.
“I got you a present,” he says, holding out the hen, who bawks and flusters, and it’s only then that she recognizes him.
“What…are…you…” Swanny’s voice, so entirely at her command just moments earlier, croaks and stutters away from her. “Duncan?”
“It’s great to see you too.”
The chicken flies up between them for an instant before succumbing to gravity. Feathers molt into the air. Swanny steps around the bird and takes a seat across from him in the booth.
Duncan Humphrey Ripple V. The very same, and yet…He looks to have lately submitted to a vast array of brutal muggings, but it isn’t just that. His face is more masculine, somehow, or at least more adult—the grin less dopey, the eyes less dreamy, the forehead contoured with telltale signs of worry, suffering, thought. A Duncan Ripple reduced to thinking and feeling like an actual human being. What sorrows have brought him to this pass?
“You must leave at once,” she says, regaining the capacity for intelligible speech. “For your safety, and for mine.”
“Listen, I know you’re mad, but I’ve changed. I don’t have a girlfriend anymore.”
“Duncan, you need to go back the way you came. Immediately.”
“No can do. I’m incarcerated.”
“What?”
“Life sentence, fem. I turned myself over to the authorities.” He takes her pale clean hand in both of his, which, she observes, are bloody, begrimed, and minus a wedding ring. (She’s never bothered removing hers; champagne diamonds are so very rare.) “Now I’m turning myself over to you.”
Swanny wonders if the drugs are impinging on her ability to follow the conversation—if in fact this entire scene, husband, chicken, and all, is nothing but a hallucination. Her too-brief euphoria is dwindling with every word he says. “You’re an inmate? What on earth did you do?”
“Let’s not talk about the past, let’s talk about the future. You do know how to get back into the main city, right?”
The shadow of a tall hat falls across the table. “Is this man bothering you?”
Swanny yanks her hand away from Ripple’s. “Howie. This is my—husband. Duncan Humphrey Ripple the Fifth.”
“Hi, Howie.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“Duncan,” she quickly adds, “this is my lover, Eisenhower Sharkey.”
“That little guy? He’s the chawmonger?”
Sharkey’s wordless chewing is worse than a threat. Swanny imagines the moment’s tableau immortalized in the form of a cautionary etching: D is for Duncan who was eaten by Sharks.
“Howie, please be nice,” she murmurs.
Sharkey slides into the booth next to her, setting their hooch jars on the table, draping his arm around her shoulders. She cuddles up to him gratefully. His zoot suit smells like fireworks and psychedelics, gunpowder and molasses, and for a second, as she shuts her eyes, as their mouths meet, they are alone at the table again, burning together, lost at the very bottom of the world.
“Look, if this is supposed to be payback time, you’re doing it wrong. I never made out with Abby right in front of you.”
“Duncan, why are you still here?”
“I thought we were having a conversation.”
“It seems to me that she ain’t in the mood for conversation.” Sharkey takes out his chaw wallet, removes a plug for himself, and offers some to Swanny. He’s packed her favorite flavors, LONELY MOUNTAIN’S HEART and QUEEN OF THE NIGHT. She takes a penny of each, chews up a juice, and spits it in her hooch glass. Chaw, teething blood, and alcohol mingle and swirl.
“Wow, that’s really gross.” Ripple seems almost impressed.
“I like to mix them.” Swanny sips, then offers him the jar. “Care for a taste?”
“Uh, I’m good.”
“What exactly brings you down to our realms below, Mr. Ripple?” Sharkey asks, returning the chaw wallet to his pocket. “Come to see the sights?”
“I need to talk to my wife.”
“Nah, you’re talking to me now.”
“She can speak for herself.”