Ripple rubs condensation from the driver’s-side window with his sleeve and squints down at the dragons. The two creatures move in tandem. The green one spews out unending ropes of cursive flame, the yellow one shorter blasts, as if punctuating. Printed in bling. Down there in the streets, the fires seem random—unnatural disasters, crap luck. But from way up here, the fires look like graffiti.
Ripple cranes his neck, moves his lips to sound out the words. Who do these poon loogies think they are anyway? They can’t even spell. He twists the knob of the HowFly’s stereo. Thrumming bass fills the cabin of the air car. He’ll show them how a man leaves his mark.
BOOM. BOOM. Wicca wicca whoo. BOOM. BOOM. Wicca wicca whoo.
Ripple pumps his fist. His knuckles graze the HowFly’s padded roof as his song pounds out of the speakers.
The name is Ripple—fuck with me, I’ll fuck you up triple
Any torchy lookin’ twice end up cripple
Think I don’t own you?—Yo’ girlfriend showed me her nipples
Nasty-ass slag that she is with her pimples
Cock pocket, you think I’m just drunk
Drunk, yeah with power—that’s why they call me the Dunk
Fuck with me, you end up in the trunk, punk
This city is mine, that’s one test you can’t flunk
When the female vocalists come in for the chorus, he sings along.
Ohh I’ll lick you up and down
Cuz I’m the Dunk
Ohh I’ll lick you up and down
Cuz I’m the Dunk
Ohh…
His parents commissioned it from his favorite artist, DJ S-Carggo, almost three years ago for his sixteenth birthday, and he’s never gotten tired of it. Now he pulls up on the throttle. The music is giving him an idea. He toggles the steering, presses the gas. A bag of bacon crisps tips over onto the HowFly’s floor mat; his LookyGlass slides off the dashboard. Ripple ignores it, checks the rearview scope, the pale exhaust streaming in his wake. Nobody can stop him from being famous. He’ll write his own name in the sky.
Ohh I’ll lick you up and down
Cuz I’m the Dunk
Ohh…AAAH!
Ripple shrieks, still in falsetto. He desperately slaps at the various levers surrounding the steering column as first one pigeon, then another, then a third, splatter against his windscreen: a red, feathery Rorschach blot he can barely see past. He finally flips a switch marked VIB, and the glass rumbles, shaking the bigger chunks loose. Ripple peers through the bloodstained glass, the light in the HowFly strangely rosy now. The left engine gulps and belches black clouds, tail feathers.
“Rut-row,” Ripple wheezes. The cabin fills with the fumes: it’s a smell somewhere between burnt hair and roast turkey. He paws at the ignition switches, finds the knob, and kicks the left engine off. It blows a prolonged metallic raspberry. The HowFly lists to the right, but stays in the air. Next time he takes this rattletrap up, he’s bringing the manual.
The HowFly is a recent purchase, an early wedding present from his parents, and maybe a consolation prize of sorts. Ripple is still working out the kinks. One thing for sure: the commercials get it wrong. Since he was a kid, he’s been watching the gleaming images of candy-colored HowFlys zooming up, past the deserted cranes, the sooty streets, the cracked and blackened windows of skyscrapers, and then into a clear blue, oddly dragonless sky. As the ad-world HowFly emits its trail of exhaust in a clean white line, CGI clouds shape a heavenly city around the vehicle, one with intact bridges and a puffy amusement park in the place of Torchtown. The view cuts to a close-up of the windscreen: “Rise above,” whispers a throaty blonde, her head sliding down into the lap of the contented driver, a handsome youth about the age Ripple is now. He’s seen it all a million times on the Toob, enough times to make it seem as real as his own heavily edited life.
But what the ads don’t say, and what Ripple now knows, is that a HowFly can go only so far in taking him away from it all. There’s nobody up here to come pounding on his door, demanding that he turn down the woofers, but there’s also bug guts on the windscreen and crunched-up Carbon8 cans on the floor and the constant bleeps and whirs of the control system where something’s always flashing EMPTY. And worst of all there’s a notable lack of anybody to blow him; he’s probably even farther from the nearest damsel here than back in his room. It’s a sweet ride, but he’d rather be parking.
What the commercials also don’t say, but what everyone knows, is that only the very rich even bother with HowFlys anymore. Their slogan—“The Sky Is Yours”—got outdated at least two decades ago, when it became apparent that the dragons actually owned the shit out of the available airspace. Since then the brand has acquired an air of willful disregard, of proprietary eccentricity, as during the celestial registry boom a few years back, when it became chic to buy up the stars. Ripple usually takes his wealth and privilege for granted—he saves the bragging for his fame. But taking off in his HowFly from the mansion’s sixth-floor battlements, his parents below waving goodbye, he felt, for the first time, something suspiciously like family pride. It occurred to him then that everything—the city, the sky—belonged to the rich, not just because they were born powerful but because they’d die before they’d give it up.
Of course, technically the Ripples don’t stake a claim on the city itself. They live to the north of Empire Island, just out of the danger zone, on a cliff overlooking the city’s trashed splendor. The best views, Ripple learned early on, are from the greatest Heights.
He pulls up on the throttle again, feels his ears pop as the HowFly zooms above the clouds. When he’s gained altitude, he shifts to HOV and gropes around on the cabin floor, tossing aside empty Voltage bottles, a muscle pump, and a pair of Hotfoot thermal protection sneakers before he finds it: his LookyGlass. He tilts it against the steering column impatiently as the images scroll past: Hooligan, his German apehound, napping on the treadwheel; twelve pictures of doorknobs from the first night he smoked loam with his uncle; an action shot of his friend Kelvin taking a lance to the teeth at the Power Jousting tournament. And then, the Pic, with its box of text over to the side:
Dear Monsieur & Madame Ripple:
I hope this won’t seem too forward at this stage of our negotiations, but I’ve taken the liberty of attaching here a pertinent “Skin Pic,” taken by my mother on the occasion of my Legal Endowment to the rights and privileges of my title (18 yrs). I humbly urge you to see the merits of our offer, and to execute the contracts with the due haste I know you know they require.
At your service always,
The Baroness Swan Lenore Dahlberg
She’s a little chunky, there’s no getting around that, and the outfit she chose—black bustier, ruffled half-apron, white knee socks, black patent-leather shoes, feather duster—brings to mind a corseted penguin more than a chambermaid, sexy or otherwise. But she’s half-naked, and the contracts are signed. What choice does he have? Ripple slides a hand down his pants—he still has on his pajama bottoms—and gives himself a tug.
“Rise above,” he mutters.
* * *