This is a story of what it is to be lost in a very large world.
Ripple survived the perils of a trip downtown just once before, when he was a little kid. His dad had some business at Laidly Bros., one of the last financial firms still holding on to office space in the city, and for reasons Ripple still can’t quite fathom, he chose to bring his son along to the meeting. On the flight there, in the family HowLux—the one so completely done up in brown leather upholstery it felt like being inside a wallet—Humphrey called the bankers he was on his way to see “old men,” “geezers,” “worm chow,” and “cremains.” But when he parked on the roof of the building, he spent an extra minute retaping his hairpiece down in back before opening his door, and Ripple knew for once without being told that it was Best Behavior time.
Frailty and wealth make a strange combination: it is as though power is transferred, particle by particle, to an inanimate medium long before death itself arrives. The old men—and they were old—sat in a dim room hot from the whir of laser printers, murmuring commands into invisible skull-hewn headsets, their eyes no longer strong enough to bear a LookyGlass’s radiance. The many overhead fans gave their papers the rustling sound of dry leaves in late autumn. The shades were drawn, and with each tap of the pull cord against the glass, Humphrey twitched visibly in the direction of the nearest fire exit. When he met with the oldest of the old men, a lipless, spidery-fingered creature who sat in a corner office with windows so darkly scorched they were in no need of any covering, Humphrey allowed Ripple to climb into his lap, where Ripple pressed his ear to Humphrey’s chest to hear the desperate negotiations of his father’s clogged and fumbling heart.
They left without any papers being signed. Ripple knew then that to live and work downtown, amid the ashes, was to become a different kind of being, a thing no longer entirely in the world—untorchable, supernatural—a feat his father both feared and grudgingly admired. When they got back in the HowLux, Humphrey went straight for a vertical ascent without bothering to taxi.
“Don’t tell your mom,” he said, popping open a tallboy as he flew, and as a bribe he offered the can to Ripple for a sip—his first.
Ripple hasn’t thought about that day for years, but now, as he crawls out of the manhole onto a deserted crosswalk, a vortex of gritty wind smarting his eyes, the memory comes back to him in an overwhelming sensation, a truth too large to articulate in words.
“Fuck,” he announces to no one in particular, “this place is dead.”
As Hooligan and the girls hoist themselves through the manhole and onto the pavement, Ripple sizes up the surroundings. They’re at an intersection, a complicated three-way juncture of one-way streets, edged in by oddly angled towers, gray geometric compromises spruced up with pillared facades and ragged flags with faded, ghostly insignias. Ripple always thought of skyscrapers as soaring, but these buildings are so looming, so crammed in, looking up feels claustrophobic. The asphalt is strewn with ancient pages, yellowed tatters that gust to and fro, a literate tornado. They’re on the steps of the Metropolitan Library.
“Good lord,” says Swanny, stooping to pick up a desecrated binding from where it lies on the pavement. Only a few pages are left inside; the wind has ripped the rest away. “Who is responsible for this?”
“That’d be Rudy,” says a voice. The three teenagers turn to see a wizened baba, some yards away, perched on the steps next to an overturned book-deposit bin, which she’s converted into a sleeping nook. The woman wears a filthy lavender cowl, and dozens of pigeons perch on her shoulders and lap. The area around her is so stained with their excrement, it appears to have been whitewashed. She laughs—caws, almost—which doesn’t unsettle the pigeons in the slightest. Hooligan races over to the periphery of the flock, but when the birds don’t budge, he commences with sniffing their butts. “He gets all sauced up, that Rudy, till you wouldn’t know his right age. Pulled his shoulder out of joint knocking that thing down, but he got me a warm place for napping. Lovemaking too.” She smiles flirtatiously. Her two front teeth are brownish, and one is considerably longer than the other.
Ripple has a sudden urge to leap back down the manhole, but Abby is going up to the woman, gently toeing her way through the sea of sky rats.
“I like lovemaking and birds!” says Abby, sitting down beside the old lady. A pigeon flutters into her lap. Abby strokes it affectionately. “What’s this one’s name?”
“I call him Stumpy, ever since Chompy chewed his foot clean off. See Chompy over there? The one with blood on his beak?”
“He’s beautiful.”
“Might I ask,” says Swanny, with a modicum of condescension, “why you don’t sleep in the library proper? It seems needlessly destructive to upend that structure when there’s an entire abandoned building right there.”
“Sleep in the library?” the bird lady crows. “Now, do I look old enough to pass for a Librarian? Don’t answer that, love, you’ll break my heart. The Librarians have camped out in the stacks since forever. They’re a bunch of old shushers and killjoys, if you’re asking me.”
Ripple sets down his bag, pulls out his LookyGlass. He considers opening a LookyChat, then texts instead:
TO: D. Humphrey Ripple IV
CC: Katya Ripple, Osmond Strangeboyle Ripple
SUBJECT: u ok?
i know u r mad but let me know
Swanny stares at the hulking stone gryphons on either side of the building’s entrance. “So the Librarians spend all their time reading? But however do they survive?”
“Well, the long and short of it is they don’t. The library is where folks go to die—a certain type of folk, that is. Short-tempered daydreamers who don’t much like the world outside their own brain cage. So many’ve passed on from there, they say it’s gotten to be haunted.”
Ripple looks up from his device: Swanny is taking the stairs two at a time. An angry blur of chinchilla, thrust forward by rage alone.
“Wench, where are you going?!”
She doesn’t answer him, drawn into the word cathedral by some inexorable magnetism.
“Literotica,” Ripple mutters, returning his eyes to the LookyGlass screen. He opens a LookyChat with the Metropolitan Police Department. “Hi, I’m calling to complain.”
The heavy iron library doors slam shut behind Swanny; Abby looks down at her dirty bare feet. “She’s sad,” she tells the bird lady. “Maybe I should be her friend.”