Abby shuts her eyes. Her heart is thudding in her ears. Images flash through her mind without sense or reason: the Lady’s tattoos of a pillar of cloud and a pillar of fire; the dead, jellied eyes of a killed fish; the endless letters of her name, jumbling together, too fast, one after another after another. Someone is coming. Then she sits bolt upright, gripped with sudden knowledge. The only thing worse than being taken is to be left behind.
Abby is shaking, but she wobbles to her feet and creeps through the garbage dunes. Like a giant crab, the shiny black craft squats on six legs. A creature has emerged from a hatch in its underside. From the waist up, he is a man, gray-haired and grizzled. But from the waist down, he is made of wheels, new rubber and metallic spokes: a People Machine.
Abby half hides behind a drawerless chest of drawers. Ripple and the People Machine are talking to each other. Ripple is explaining quickly, using his hands. Some part of her still wants to run, over the rusted springs and gooey puddles, to a secret place in the Island’s rotting heart. But when Ripple glances over his shoulder nervously, her eyes meet his, and she knows what she must do. His face is so beautiful. She steps into the unnatural light and stands there, naked and blinking, offering herself to the electricity like a sacrifice.
* This classic epistolary novel is written in the form of a letter from an uncle to his young nephew, recounting the tale of the uncle’s long-ago adventures in a mythic land located “halfway between the Realm of Dreams and the Empire of Light.” Though the uncle encounters a multitude of beasts and monsters, underground caverns and dark forests, in the end he identifies the ultimate threat to heroes like himself as something much more prosaic: forgetfulness. In the concluding passage, the uncle tells his nephew that, though the boy himself is not a hero, he is faced with an even greater task. “True power lies not with the hero, however quick his sword, for one day he will surely fall,” the uncle writes. “True power lies with the one to whom he tells his story, for it is only this Rememberer who can grant immortality. He is the lord of us all.”
5
SNAPDRAGON
Getting teeth pulled never bothered Swanny much. She didn’t hate the sting of the Novocain needle, and before she got old enough to drink with her mother in the evenings, nitrous offered the only thrills she got. Sometimes, breathing through the mask, she would squeeze her eyes shut to see points of light that, with only a little effort, she could reshape into the city’s dazzling fires.
Swanny kept these pulled-out teeth in a Bakelite jewelry box, which played “The Way You Look Tonight” whenever she opened the lid. Sometimes she would arrange the incisors on the velvet cushion into little smiles. Sometimes she would balance a single molar on one finger, a pearl solitaire. The box began to fill, her mouth was full already, and still new teeth kept coming. She got to know the feeling of teething well, the vampirish taste of her own blood, the perversely pleasant itch of bicuspid breaching gum. And after the dentist did his work, it amused her to poke at her own cheek as though it were a stranger’s skin, to feel pins and needles on her tongue, to watch her lip droop like a stroke survivor’s, to slur her words. She loved ice cream, and brie, and foie gras, and flan, and the invalid treatment she got after an extraction: dinner brought to her in bed on a domed tray, her mother worrying aloud about dry sockets and her bite. She was almost thirteen before it occurred to her that it had all gone on much too long.
Swanny’s own body was a mystery to her. Her late father’s study had an extravagant library, but the medical textbooks she had glimpsed on the highest shelf as a child disappeared by the time she was permitted to use the ladder. What little she could perceive down her throat and between her legs indicated only that the inside of her was very dark. Her illnesses were strange and sudden: a sharp jab in her side; an ache in her ribs. They subsided without ever seeming to completely go away. Once, when she dared to ask her mother what caused them, Pippi replied tersely, “Growing pains,” and strode briskly from the room. A few minutes later, Swanny heard the furious sounds of Pippi’s Contrology workout video echo through the house.
The medical textbooks were off-limits, but the other books weren’t, and between her lessons in elocution and tap Swanny liked nothing more than to laze on the gray velvet fainting couch, one finger in her mouth, a book propped up against the cushions before her. She loved descriptions of parties, loved the way a passage of dialogue could sparkle like a flowing river or glitter, cold as frost. She learned that the words “wit” and “intrigue” on a dust jacket signaled the presence of great things. In a single, dizzy night she read the entirety of Canfield Manor, anxiously cutting a new tooth on a sterling napkin holder all the while; in the end she wept, not for the drab little heroine, but for the passing of a world. The characters were figures upon the deck of a fabulous cruise ship, laden with stores of crumpets and conversation, receding endlessly into the horizon, and Swanny stood on the dock alone with only a broken Champagne bottle in her hand.
The women in the books sometimes had mysterious ailments, treated with laudanum or heated water; they went mad, drank poison, bungled abortions, and went to the countryside for their health. Sometimes they drowned: seaweed mingled with their hair in thick, dark strands while their eyes gazed on, sightless and knowing; sometimes they wasted away. More than one coughed blood into a handkerchief. More than one owned a pearl-handled revolver. But in none of the books did a woman have thirty-two teeth in her head, seventy-four more in a box, and a new one on the way. In none of the books did a woman have a dentist living in her house.
Swanny convinced herself that she was dying. The idea suited her. She thought to ask for a quilted dressing gown for her birthday, but her birthday was three months away. By then, she thought dolefully, it would be too late. It irritated her that her mother, the dentist, and Corona were all keeping the news from her, as if she were an infant. She was no infant; she was a woman, a perishing one.
Gazing into the abyss made her sultry with wisdom. She posed in front of the full-length mirror, dressed in a gauzy slip, practicing for when she would be a ghost. She took sumptuous baths. However, early one morning, when she woke up to find her white monogrammed sheets soaked in blood, she started screaming and wouldn’t quit.
“I’m dying, I’m dying,” she wailed. “Make it stop.”
Pippi pounded on the outside of her door. “Unlock it this instant.”
“I can’t.” Swanny pounded the mattress with her fists. “I’ll never rise again.”