Duncan is in there now: he has entered the machine, become of it. His body is made from points of light. She sees, but she does not understand. She wonders if the next time he slides his tongue into her mouth, she’ll feel only a spark of static and then, emptiness. She wonders if there will be a next time. She knocks her fist against the screen, but he doesn’t turn, not even when she calls his name.
He is burning in there. He is changing.
Pop up, up, out of this toaster full of souls!
Somewhere beyond the mansion’s roof in the city below, the dragons scream through the sky. She cannot see them, but she can hear them in her head, a sound so faint and faraway it is a whispered wail, a shrilling in her ears. Aaaaaaaaa…
The animals of our city are deeply confused, and most of those animals are us.
13
FAIRY-TALE ENDING
“Etta,” came a voice at that moment near her. Startled, she turned, the throatlash of the bridle still heavy in her hand. It was Bertrand. At once, the color rose to her cheeks. He was still dressed for the ball, his finest frockcoat newly brushed, and yet here he stood, amid the horsey musk of her father’s stable.
“Etta—” He spoke her name again, and the solemn timbre of that most familiar utterance moved deep within her, stirring sensations of such naked tenderness as could not be clothed in words. “Etta. I wish to engage you for the first two dances.”
“Be still, Bertrand.” She touched the mare’s velvety flank with a soothing hand. “Emmelina is skittish—she has come unshod.”
“And I say, damn her, damn the whole vexatious torment of the last fortnight. Let the world come unshod. Damn my poor station and your father’s mad impa—imper— What the snuff’s this say?”
“Sound it out.”
“Im-per-cations?”
“Im-pre-cations.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Curses.”
“What, he called this guy a turd-gurgling son of a snake? I’d like to find that part.”
“I believe he cast aspersions on the Portsmouth family name.”
Ripple puts the open book over his face and slumps deeper into the ball pit. Plastic spheres jostle around his neck. This evening is not going as planned. After dinner, the adults shooed Swanny and him up to his room with a bottle of Champagne. He hoped one thing would lead to another, but Swanny was in a vile mood right from the beginning, demanding to know when the bed boat sheets were last washed, tossing clothes off the hangers in his closet to make space for her wedding dress. He told her it wasn’t like she was moving in, and she burst into tears.
“No separate bedrooms,” she said. “No twin beds. You asked for it in the contract. You asked for it, not me.”
In retrospect, he probably should have said something like, “Don’t weep so, my lark,” maybe with a lordly accent, then lip-locked her like his life depended on it—he might have stood a chance. But instead he said, “Uh, maybe that was my dad?”
Now she’s slipped into something more comfortable, but she’s acting even less so. She keeps rubbing her cheek like she has a toothache, and already took a wee fistful of little yellow pills for an “excruciating” migraine she was “seeking to prevent.”
He flips ahead in the weighty tome. “How much more of this do we have to read before you get turned on?”
“It works better when I’m alone,” Swanny says gloomily. She perches on the edge of the pit, dangling her bare feet daintily in. The lacy fringe of her negligee is barely visible behind her tightly folded arms. “At this rate, it may take all night.”
Here’s an idea: “I have, like, four hundred hours of adult content on my ThinkTank.”
“Your saying that somehow doesn’t help matters.”
“I wasn’t saying we should discuss it, I was saying let’s watch it.” Ripple feels an eagerness he hasn’t all day. “I got all kinds, I don’t discriminate.”
“Clearly not.”
Ripple tosses the book aside and grabs the controller. A huge menu of programming appears on the projector screen; he starts rapidly scrolling through it. “There’s Fem on Fem; Hot for Creature; Uncensored Surveillance Footage Vol. 6: Caught with Their Pants Down; Pirates and Barmaids; Pleather Yourself; Co-Ed Naked Wrestling; Co-Ed Naked Rodeo; Co-Ed Naked Bouncy House; Dungeon Master; Siamese Twincest; Big Red Son; Mary O’Nette and the Real Mouth Puppets; Coma Vixen: She’ll Sleep When She’s Dead; Homeless and Helpless; The Aristocrats!; Sexual Harassment in the Workplace; Swab My Folds; Ride the Worm; Revenge of the Slave Babes; Cheerleaders and Mascots; Breast Pump Infomercial; Loveseat or the Curious Couch…”
Ripple has a long, intense history with porn, or whatever might pass for it; by now, he’s opinionated and he’s in a position to judge. Because what is porn? Performance sex. And if there’s one thing he understands, it’s the Performance Lifestyle?. Ripple’s always related to his favorites, humping away onscreen; he understands it isn’t as easy as it looks, feeling everything in front of a camera. He thinks a lot about what kind of stars they turn out to be, in the long run: auteurs or sellouts or one-hit wonders. Heroes, villains, or losers.
Creating an image is a life’s work. You can’t just fuck around.
Of course, Ripple’s fame today isn’t exactly assured. But he can’t imagine living the rest of his life cut off from reality. He clicks down the familiar list, staring at the screen. He’s going to go back there someday.
“Duncan, I don’t know, and I don’t care to know, what any of those phrases mean.”
“Why don’t you just pick a category and we can narrow it down from there.”
“I’d really rather not.”
He stops scrolling. “I thought you were into fantasy.”
“Whatever gave you that idea?”
“Isn’t that the same point of your literotica? So you can stroke off?”
“What an insulting misapprehension.”
“It’s exactly the same. Only your porn is boring.”
“It isn’t the same, Duncan. The characters in a work of literature—they’re not bodies. They’re souls. Alive and complex as you or me.”
Duncan looks at her carefully. This is reminding him of Abby’s fevered rants about the People Machines. “Uh, they’re not real.”
“Perhaps not, but they speak truths to us nevertheless.” She tosses her hair. “I could never be aroused by mere entertainment.”
Like Abby, only worse: at least Abby never tried to convert him to her weird religion. He feels a twinge of longing for that lithe, golden damsel, almost always topless, who listened so wide-eyed to the sound of his voice—not even the words, just the sound. Sometimes she’d press her head to his chest to hear her own name reverberate there. It sucks that he doesn’t have any of that on tape; it gives him a hard-on just thinking about it. “What do you want to do, then?”
“I propose we get a good night’s sleep, in hopes that this appears less insoluble in the morning. Counseling may be an option in the long term.” She begins to heft herself to her feet. Ripple grabs her ankle. She looks down at him in surprise.
“Hold on. What about the consummation clause?”