“Only child,” Ripple, sprawled out for his afternoon nap, scoffs at the LookyGlass. “Yeah right, Dad. Like you’d want your only child to be a girl.”
Even if Ripple’s father doesn’t understand him at all, at least he appreciates having a son to buy things for. The proof’s everywhere in Ripple’s room, a whole fleet of merchandise modeled on the stylized-violence-and-weaponry aesthetic, not least of all the berth where he’s currently reclining au naturel. The Slay Bed, as Ripple calls it, is a twelve-foot, thousand-year-old warrior grave boat with a king-sized mattress in the hull, where once lay the funeral pyre of some unwashed pro named Reldnach the Irresponsible. The craft was sent out to sea in flames, but it didn’t stay lit. The Super Bitch had other ideas. She’s the figurehead of this vessel, a snake-haired lady on the prow screaming to scare off sea monsters. Or, maybe now, in her new incarnation as furniture, to keep bad dreams away.
Humphrey got the Slay Bed as a surprise for Ripple when Ripple was eight, the year the Museum of Human History auctioned off their permanent collection. The price was right. Tourism in the city was way down and the curators were eager to off-load the treasures before they went up in smoke. Uncle Osmond called it a “fire sale,” chuckled ruefully, and passed out at the dinner table. Humphrey called it an “investment.” Ripple didn’t care, it was awesome. At least he and his dad could agree on that.
Now the only thing that could make the bed more epic would be to have a naked damsel in it—but oh wait, Ripple’s got that covered. This afternoon, Abby lies bare across the pillows, chin on palms, head tilted intently, as she watches old episodes of his Toob series on the 3-D projection screen that covers the entire opposite wall, all the way up to the twenty-foot ceilings. They’ve started on Season 4 and at the moment Ripple’s prepubescent likeness is getting hauled off to the headmaster’s office for starting a food fight in the cafeteria.
“BLEEP lima beans!” he yells, devil-horning his fists for his cheering classmates as the vegetable-splattered double doors slam shut behind him.
“They were always trying to get me to settle down and pay attention,” Ripple explains, absently kneading her ass cheek. “But I was like, ‘No. I’m the star. Pay attention to me.’?”
She doesn’t seem as turned on by this as he would have expected. In fact, the last twenty-four hours have been the most terrifying of Abby’s entire existence, and she’s currently in a state of shock.
Earlier That Day…
Abby’s dumbfounded, self-obliterating awe at her first close-up sight of the dragons had an almost religious quality, as if a portal to eternity had opened in that window’s shatterproof plexipane. But she didn’t have time to linger for long in the knowledge of her own cosmic insignificance, because close to a minute later, she was summoned for an audience with Ripple’s father in the Lap Dance Room.
It was not Ripple himself but his mother who materialized to escort her on this unwelcome venture. In the morning light, Katya appeared somewhat faded, platinum-haired in a wispy shift—the mind’s eye afterimage of the angel whose nurturing touch had coaxed Abby back from the brink of madness the previous night, diminished now, in the face of brighter horrors.
“It isn’t properly called the Lap Dance Room,” explained Katya, leading Abby by the hand down the grand stairs to the first-floor hall, “he calls it the Man Cave. But that makes it scary, don’t you think? In my village back home, we had a man cave, all darkness with drips of stone like teeth. Animals painted on the walls, running for their lives—how do you call them? Mammoths.”
“I don’t want to go to the Man Cave.”
“Don’t worry, it will be over soon. How did you meet my son? Forgive me, I still don’t understand.”
“God sent him to me.”
Katya nodded; she seemed to know what Abby meant.
“You must love him very much,” Katya said. “To leave your home behind.”
“I have to go where he goes. I’m his.”
The Lap Dance Room housed a chrome pole on a raised platform, the spine of a machine displayed like an altar of worship. Above a sunken bar in the room’s far corner, a sign blazed with the likeness of an incandescent bottle of lightning juice: EL SEGUNDO LAGER—2ND TO NONE! Nearer to the door, in a tilted box on stilts, a maze of electricity imprisoned tiny metal orbs under a ceiling of glass. The room hummed; Abby could feel the humming through the whole house. But it was strongest here.
Humphrey Ripple sat before her on a throne of tanned animal hide, with a smaller furry pelt slung across the baldness of his head. When he stood, she was relieved to see his legs were legs, not wheels like the other one’s. He extended his hand. Abby grasped it in both of hers and gazed up at him imploringly.
“Have mercy on me,” she pleaded.
“No need for any formalities.” Humphrey glanced at Katya nervously, extracted his hand, and wiped it on his pants. “Annie, is it?”
“No. Abby. Like Abracadabra.”
“Your name is Abracadabra?”
“No…”
Humphrey cleared his throat. “Well, let’s get down to it.”
He spoke then, at some length, about the nature of Reality and certain Arrangements that had been made, and about how the nature of Reality, like the terms of those Arrangements, was fundamentally unalterable, no matter what ideas teenagers might have in their heads. Fame, and hormones, and frankly, inflated self-perception, might make a young person think that anything was possible, but his son was not prepared to run his own life successfully and he, Humphrey, was not prepared to watch him run it into the ground. Humphrey didn’t care if it made him the Bad Guy to say so, because it was nothing personal; he was simply stating the laws of Reality, which, like the laws of Nature itself, could not be bent or broken simply because of human desire. His son could not fly; he was subject to Gravity just like the dumb rock he frequently resembled, and in the same way, his son could not break the laws of Reality, since such an act, like Gravity, would send him crashing to the ground without a net to break his fall. Humphrey thought past precedent had established as much.
“Do you understand?” he asked her.
“No,” said Abby.
At this point, Humphrey sighed and lifted an enormous black plastic garbage bag from behind the chair—garbage, yay!—and Abby embraced it, tears of relief springing to her eyes, before he pulled apart the drawstrings at the top and revealed the contents to be not trash, that glorious variegated amalgam of rot and rinds and coffee grounds, but identical stacks, each bundled smartly with an elastic band, of green-and-white rectangular paper slips that smelled of nothing but ink and linen and, faintly, greed.
“No!” cried Abby.