“She did. She told you to get lost.”
“Pro, don’t fuck with me. I killed a man.”
Ripple tenses and for an instant, more than the spoiled heartthrob of his Holosnaps, he resembles that marble statue in the lobby of his mansion, the gladiator battling the Kraken, girded for battle in only a loincloth. Sharkey just chuckles, but Swanny is strangely moved.
“Whom did you kill?” she asks softly.
“Remember that guy with the gas mask?”
“The one who attached a shock collar to your neck and led you off like some kind of debased subhuman beast?”
“That’s the one. It was self-defense, pretty much.” He shrugs. “Killing him was the only way I could get free.”
“But now you’re imprisoned.”
“Right.”
“Why?”
“This is really awkward, with your boyfriend sitting right there.”
Swanny chews. These chaws taste of stone and starlight, mist and night-blooming cactus. She knows them both by heart. “We have no secrets from each other.”
“Swanny, he’s your drug dealer, and your boss, and…he killed your mom. I mean, you know that, right?” Ripple glances at Sharkey, then back to Swanny again. “I assume that’s what ‘no secrets’ means.”
“You have no idea what you’re talking about,” says Sharkey, each word punched into the air like a typewritten killing offense.
“Uh, sorry, pro, but I got this on pretty good authority, actually.”
Swanny is so shocked to hear the truth spoken out loud, she feels almost sober. It isn’t a secret, of course it isn’t. But it’s the one thing they never speak of—never, never—the one thought she forbids herself, even when she’s alone. Don’t go poking your head in where it doesn’t belong. Her cheeks flush. Behind her eyes, some ice is melting that these Torchtown fires never touch.
“On whose authority, Duncan?”
“Uncle Osmond…”
“Osmond Ripple?” The one individual whose high opinion of her she’d like to maintain, the only true intellectual she’s ever known—her beloved officiant. She can see him now, his tasseled caftan, his hair like silver wires, his eyes trained on her behind a pair of opera glasses, judging her every lurid sin from an impossible distance. The humiliation is worse, so much worse than she could have ever imagined.
“He heard all about it from this loam hawker, Mart or somebody.”
“Mart?” Swanny remembers a preternaturally laid-back young man in a red fez, whom she found conferring with Sharkey in the dining room during small hours one morning. She wanted Sharkey to come back upstairs, rather badly, in fact, but he invited her to sit on his lap instead and watch as they weighed out the bricks of loam. She gamely blew on the scale weights for luck, as on a gambler’s dice. She enjoyed being shown off.
“Mart.” Sharkey cracks his knuckles thoughtfully, swills his hooch. “Huh.”
“But—wherever did they meet?”
“Down in the sewer. Osmond’s a gondolier now.”
“Whaaaa—” But Swanny doesn’t have the fortitude to pursue that line of inquiry at present. “What’s your point, Duncan? You thought you’d come here with these startling revelations, and I’d—what? What did you think I’d do?”
“I want to…save you?”
“Save me? You save me?” Her laugh comes out like a little scream. He always does this to her, always. “How dare you? How dare you come to my home, and—and—” The words won’t come, but the ashes do, falling down all around her. And not a moment too soon. She chews harder, wills the chemicals speedier passage into her blood. Soon, soon she’ll be released again. Before she loses herself completely, she throws her drink in Ripple’s face.
Sharkey’s hand is on his shoulder holster, as casual as reaching for a billfold to pay the check. She hears the safety click off. “So if we’re all finished here…?”
But right now she just wants away from them both. “Howie, please, just leave it, this is none of your affair. Excuse me, I think I’d better dance now.”
Sharkey slides out to let her leave the booth. Swanny makes for the dance floor, where a thin crowd of revelers bop unenthusiastically to the tinny stylings of the resident gramophonist. She kicks the chicken out of her way.
“I better make sure she’s OK,” Ripple says, still dripping chaw-infused hooch, starting out of his seat.
“Don’t. She wants to be alone.”
“She’s on drugs. She doesn’t know what she wants.”
“Let me tell you something about your wife. When she’s on drugs, she knows exactly what she wants.”
You can’t argue with the voice of experience. Ripple stays where he is. Across the room, Swanny is moving with her eyes closed, letting impulse and gravity take turns with her limbs.
Ripple wonders what would have happened if there had been no HowFly crash, no Abby in his ball pit when Swanny first arrived. Would Swanny have climbed into the bed boat beside him, awkwardly toggled the joystick on his game controller? Let him steal a kiss before her mother burst in to chaperone? Would he and Swanny have held hands during that walk around the house, made fun of the portraits of his grandcestors and daydreamed themselves into the world behind the picture frames—inventing, in lieu of sweet nothings, a multitude of former lives, alternate histories in which they loved and betrayed and forgave each other before dying of old age, getting reborn, and doing it all over again? They were both only children—only children, without siblings, without pasts. It would have been so easy to become everything to each other.
“I wish I had a Rewind/Erase button,” Ripple says out loud. “Do you think she’ll always hate me?”
“Since we have this chance to talk, maybe I should make a few things clear,” says Sharkey. “I’m not your buddy. I’m not your dad. I don’t have any sympathy with you. I’d kill you soon as look at you. The only reason I don’t is for her. Everything I do, I do for her. I’m a big flashing neon sign from on high that says, ‘The world ain’t all about you.’ And you have to live with that. You’re on my streets now. Every day you stay alive, you thank God for her, because she’s the only thing between you and total annihilation. Am I making myself understood? You killed a man. That’s cute, it really is. What’d he do, put the weapon in your hands? Let me tell you a secret. That’s not how it works around here. Not for you. I’ll kill you with your pants down, trying to crap in a trash can. I’ll cut you open and leave you for the rats. I’ll throw acid in your face, then salt, then acid again, till your eyes drip out their sockets and your lips can’t form words, ’cause that’s where it hurts the most. Those top millimeters of skin. Me sitting here, having a civil conversation, it’s taking all kinds of considerable effort. So next time you talk to Swanny—which is never, by the way—tell her you saw me be nice.”
“I better go.”