“You long for truth and beauty.”
“Both.”
“I saw it from the first—a kindred spirit.” Osmond wheels back into the bookshelves. “There is one remedy for our torment,” he calls down.
“There is? Whatever can that be?”
“Companionship!”
Osmond reappears with what looks like a blown-glass didgeridoo.
“And, of course, good conversation,” he continues, opening a nearby dictionary. A great quantity of loam is pressed between the pages. He sweeps it into his hand and tamps it neatly into a protrusion at one end of the colossal bong. “Please, join me.”
On rainy afternoons in Wonland County, marooned between novels and bored beyond measure, Swanny has browsed idly through her mother’s old overschool philosophy texts, and in their brittle highlighted pages, she has read about the dualism between mind and body. Yet only at this moment, as Osmond’s library fills with smoke, does the issue press upon her with the full weight of its importance. Swanny feels that her mind and body are not only separable but separated, as when her childhood stereoscope ceased to align its two images properly and its scenic postcards became depthless and blurred.
“Good God,” Osmond sighs, “you’ve gone cross-eyed on me.”
“Oh yes, of course.” Swanny blinks until her vision clears and settles back onto the worn leather fainting couch, amid the bundled papers. “Excuse me, you were describing…”
“The tragedy of my paralysis could hardly be expected to hold the attention of your addled young mind. I’ll recount it another day.”
“Uncle Osmond, please, I was quite fascinated.”
“As I was saying, when military intervention failed, the days of the Challenges began. At that time, I was fifteen, and the dragons were celebrating their second anniversary in our skies. Though as an athlete, I remained untried, I was something of an expert in ancient lore and, the despised younger son of an exacting tyrant, I grew convinced my destiny lay somewhere loftier than the prescribed avenues of business and academics—to be precise, in the soaring battleground of the city’s firmament.” His voice rises sharply. “You’re sleeping.”
“I’m not,” says Swanny around a yawn. She’s tucked her legs up under her and is resting her head on an encyclopedia.
“It was that day I learned firsthand the truth of the old ballad’s sad refrain: ‘Dragons live forever, not so little boys.’?” Osmond steers his chariot to the wall and presses on one of the lower bookshelves. It springs open, revealing a knee-high refrigerator stocked with bottles. “Though I did, against all odds, escape with a faint pulse and provisional custody of my mortal soul, this living death is no exception to their rule. The creatures know no mercy. It wasn’t just victory that eluded my grasp. Even the glory of a martyr’s sacrifice was denied me.”
“Wait.” Swanny props herself up on an elbow. “You fought the dragons?”
“I challenged them, yes.” He pops the cap off a stout, tastes it, and hands it to her, then selects a doppelbock for himself. “I’d tell the tale at length if you’d so much as bother feigning interest.”
“But I needn’t feign it, Uncle Osmond.” The “uncle” slips out quite naturally this time; even when she’s sober, Swanny suspects she’ll be hard-pressed now to call him anything else. “The dragons have always held the greatest fascination for me, ever since I was a child. They’re terrible, of course, but the nobility and valor, not to mention eleventh-hour excesses, that have sprung up in their wake—it’s all ever so romantic.”
“That was what I once believed, my lark, before a monstrous skyward trouncing robbed me of all sensation in my lower extremities. In retrospect, I believe I’d prefer the type of romance that includes the physical act of love.”
“Oh! So that’s how you were mutilated.” Swanny’s gaze trails down to his little feet, lifeless in their woolly socks. “Do you ever regret it?”
“Erotic indignities aside, the paralysis has left me prey to a host of grisly co-morbidities, including my recent bout of Shivering Kidney. And it would be pleasant to kick your husband’s mongrel in the ribs. But I have my thwacking canes. I soldier on.”
“Why did you do it—fight the dragons?”
“To properly understand, you’ll have to allow me to begin at the beginning.
The Noble but Tragic Tale of Osmond Ripple and the Dragons, as Related by the Man Himself “Our father always preferred Humphrey. As eldest, my brother was his namesake and rightful heir, and from earliest childhood, I can recall the blatant favoritism, which he made no attempt to hide. The two would trundle off to gawk rubeishly at aerocar shows or the metallic carnage of the robotics coliseum with alarming frequency, while I lingered at home with our mother, a delicate contessa whose paranoid agoraphobia confined her to a single floor of the house. Together, she and I would play a great number of games which I even then suspected were not devised for my entertainment, such as Name That Sound and Are All the Windows Locked?
“The root cause behind our father’s preferential treatment was, I think, Humphrey’s innate and puzzling enthusiasm for business. The essential talent there is not intelligence, in which I outpaced him handily from my first burblings, but the ability to ask the right questions of the world. While Humphrey made the mechanistic inquiries best suited to a future grease monkey of industry—How does this work? How may it someday work for me?—I posed to our father the philosopher’s riddle, why: What’s all the fuss? Why even bother? A reasonable concern, I felt, since we already had a greater fortune than we knew what to do with. I don’t exaggerate. My father’s philanthropic efforts bore little resemblance to genuine altruism. They were the desperate measures of a man bailing out the hull of a ship rapidly filling beyond its capacity. As preeningly self-important as he was, the fact was that his fortune would continue compounding itself eternally through accrued interest, without anyone’s interference. We were all now superfluous to it. Particularly him.
“But I digress. Though the Scheherazade unfurling of our mother’s neurotic prophecies proved diverting for a time, as I surged toward manhood I realized that I would not remain content waiting—and dreading—for something to happen to me. I yearned to take action, to claim a starring role in a story myself. Luckily (or rather, unluckily, as experience would prove) a true epic was playing itself out in the air right above our heads.