“Yeah, in the boringest place on Earth. Thanks but no thanks.”
The projector screen clicks to black. Without the celestial inferno of its dreamscape, the capacious room seems far too small for three.
“What did he just call you?” Swanny asks, icily. She’s taken hold of herself again.
“Who? Kelvin?”
“You didn’t bother to introduce us.”
“Uh, sorry…”
“He called you ‘the abuser.’?” Swanny moves to the lip of the ball pit and stares down at Ripple, as though her gaze could melt and boil the plastic immersing him. He is the same as always—the same face, the same name—but the meaning is entirely different, like a word in a foreign tongue that she has always misunderstood. La Diabla. She does her best to ignore the girl.
“Oh, right. Because I tore that freight ship a new one. I was dominating.”
“Doesn’t the term ‘abuse’ generally refer to domestic situations?” Swanny removes her fur coat and defiantly drapes it over one arm. I could knock him out with these arms, she thinks. He may be stronger, but I have the element of surprise.
However, Ripple is onto her. “Better dress for dinner,” he mumbles, hoisting himself (clad in boxers, thank God) out of the ball pit, leaving the topless young woman half-submerged, anxious and alone. It is now, only now, that Swanny trains her gaze on this competitor—a starved and fragile beauty with luminous, frightened eyes. She has the same look as a half-grown rabbit caught in one of Corona’s traps.
“You’re the dead girl,” she tells Swanny now.
Swanny laughs. The sound is like glass breaking. It feels like shards in her throat. She thinks of Etta from Canfield Manor, the scene in which she succumbs to the hysteria that “bubbled up from some deep internal spring,” but the thought only makes her laugh harder. “Is that a threat?”
“I…I saw your ghost on the stage. You sang…”
“Are you Duncan’s ex-girlfriend?” Swanny inquires.
“Ex?”
“Perhaps you don’t know. Duncan and I are to be married tomorrow.”
The girl draws her knees protectively to her chest. They emerge, bony islands in the plastic sea.
“Does that make us sisters?” she asks.
“No,” Swanny says sweetly. “That makes you dispensable. Redundant. Do you know what those words mean?”
“Um…”
“He’s going to toss you out with the garbage.”
The girl nibbles her lip. Her bite is uncorrected, with protruding central incisors and diastema. Swanny has read that such flaws are a sign of an oral fixation, or poor breeding, or both. Her own mouth itches with its unborn tooth.
“I like it here,” the girl murmurs. She doesn’t sound too sure.
“How very inconvenient for you.”
Back out in the hallway, Swanny closes the door behind her and pauses for a moment, thinking, before starting the long walk back toward the golden elevator. She has met her husband. The house still hums. She passes door after door; her stride quickens; the carpet patterns blur beneath her feet.
The celadon vase doesn’t break the first time she smashes it into the end table. But the second time, it does. And then the crunch of ancient china and flower stems is so satisfying as she stomps them into the carpet. In fact, she is so focused on grinding each shard of pottery into absolute dust that she does not even notice the elevator door has pinged open until Osmond Ripple, still aboard, clears his throat.
“Pardon me.” Swanny retrieves her fur coat from where she dropped it on the floor. “I seem to have had a little accident.”
“I can see that.” He closes the book he holds on his lap and beckons. “Well, no matter. The whole house will be yours soon enough. Perhaps you’ll do us all a favor, demoiselle, and burn it to the ground.”
* A ubiquitous graffiti tag in the burning metropolis, the two-headed wingless dragon—or leggy snake—pictured Empire Island’s nemeses rendered cageable and earthbound, fused to each other as if by a nuclear explosion, weeping tears of blood. It was widely regarded as a symbol of hope.
10
COURTING DISASTER
When Ripple was a kid, he and his pooch Hooligan used to spear-hunt big game in the wilds of the imagination. They were stouthearted slayers with their foam harpoons and shrapnel-grade pith helmets (rare gifts from Uncle Osmond, who bopped them both on the head and warned them—with a wild gleam in his eye—to watch out for snarks). They tromped through the underbrush, sniffing bent branches, measuring rogue footprints in handspans; they tuned their ears to crackles and thuds below the range of ordinary perception. Nothing escaped them. In the darkest jungle, Ripple often thought to himself, the fiercest predator is me.
Which was probably true in the darkest jungle where they ever went exploring, because that jungle was the greenhouse in the heart of the mansion, where trees grew up to three stories, straining toward the geodesic glass of the skydome. There, the air hung moist, stinky with leaf breath and aflutter with twelve nonindigenous species of trapped butterflies. Even though it was still, technically, inside, the space felt more outdoors than outdoors, overgrown and maybe even a little bit treacherous: unlike the other rooms in the house, with their Sorcerer’s Apprentices and semiholographic Toob screens, which gave up their mysteries at the push of a button, the greenhouse kept its secrets well. It seemed possible for almost anything to be lurking there, under the green prehistoric light that filtered through the fronds. But Ripple didn’t have any doubt in his mind that when he found the beast in question, he’d vanquish it, uffishly and with maximum flair.
Today, though, knowing the foe he seeks, he isn’t so confident of his success. Ripple powers through the groundcover, cursing and swatting away the little monarchs and Caligula thibeta that beat the air around his face. On the scent. When he parts the dense vegetation—he’s in the area packed with neck-high bulrushes—he reveals his quarry, hulking on a stone bench barely four feet away, all decked out in ruffles and lace, pouting beside the artificial pond.
Like it or not, he has to bring this one back alive.
“Wench, they sent me to find you. Soup’s on.”
Swanny doesn’t turn around to look at him. Her voice is brittle and aggrieved: “How can you think of food at a time like this?”
“Because it’s dinnertime.”
Swanny tosses a pebble at the water. It banks off a lily pad and disappears without a splash. “So. Who is she?”
“Who is who?”
“You know exactly whom I mean.”
“She’s—” Ripple isn’t even sure what the honest answer would be. He doesn’t want to explain, and he definitely doesn’t want to apologize. “She’s just a friend.”
“Do you invite all of your friends to your…ball pit?”
He does, actually, but it sounds dirty the way she says it. “Listen, I’m not some no-pubes grail boy. I’m a man. I do what a man does.”
“Please. You’re a child.”