“G?”
Humphrey’s embarrassing wife, a masturbation fantasy he had to introduce to colleagues, once upon a time. His embarrassing brother, an invalid-carriage loaded with druggy contempt for the world of the waking. Both of them avoiding the most embarrassing topic of all: the embarrassing disappearance of his embarrassing son. i know u r mad but let me know. As if Humphrey would ever dignify that with a response, even in the best of times. He feels old and depressed. As a young and then not-so-young zillionaire playboy, he always thought that someday he would get around to ruining himself, before anyone else could do it. He would bet wrong on purpose. He would burn through his net worth in a single day. He would prove to everyone that he didn’t need the money, the mansion, the name, and he would vanish into legend. But then, somehow, he’d had a family instead. What had he been thinking? If only he’d lost it all when he had the chance. Then it would be his forever.
“Kindred, I beseech you, spare us both this bimbo abecedarian’s recitations and throw your postiche into the ring. I’ll play you three out of five.”
“This is no time for word games, Osmond,” says Humphrey, pale in the doom screens’ glow.
“Our world is ending and there’s nothing we can do about it. This is precisely the time for word games.”
Humphrey taps one of the monitors with his finger, as if it might startle the figure there out of what he’s about to do.
“What’s happening here?”
The Ripples watch as the invader splashes the Hall of Ancestors with a jagged zigzag of liquid from a gas can. They watch as the invader lights a match.
“That’s it. Get me the Dignity Kit,” says Humphrey.
“I refuse to indulge such blatant hypocrisy from the likes of you. As a brother of mine once said, ‘I’m here to talk you out of killing yourself.’?”
“You didn’t listen to me either.”
“Hummer,” murmurs Katya, “isn’t there still a chance we can get out alive?”
“For once, I agree with your temptress bride. If we survive, we’ll still have the fortune to rebuild this estate twice over, and with adequate soundproofing this time. Our corpses will be charred either way—why not try leaping through the flames?”
Humphrey turns back toward the monitors, a worshipper at a radiant shrine. The fire spreads from panel to panel. Soon it will be inside the walls of the house.
“I want my Dignity,” he says.
Humphrey twists the combination lock—it’s the Empire Island area code, 777—and opens the lid of the heavy black box. Inside are a bottle of pills, some golf pencils, and a pad of End-of-Life Checklists. He ticks off his “Reasons Why” (ruin, check; imminent destruction, check; loss of loved one, check), initials the bottom, and opens the pill bottle.
“I’d offer you something to wash those down,” grumbles Osmond, “but I don’t want to waste a perfectly good bottle of Gulden Draak.”
“I’ll take them dry.” Humphrey shakes two tablets into his hand, then offers the bottle to the others.
“Not my drug of choice.” Osmond’s voice is an un-Dignified croak.
“You go first,” Katya says quietly.
The Ripples watch as Humphrey swallows the pills. They watch as he slumps back, his mouth filling with blue-green froth, pop-eyed and surprised by the death he explicitly requested.
“Now all is revealed.” Osmond raps Katya on the thigh with a thwacking cane. “We needn’t have secrets from each other any longer, Wundelsteipen. You never wanted to admit you were after his illustrious fortune, but now I know that you’re willing to risk immolation to have a chance at it. Ha! I thought I would be repulsed when I learned for certain how base and crass your motives always were, but now that the truth is out, I find I actually sympathize. Because you and I are the same. Selfishness alone sustains us, and such selfishness is a curse, an insomnia of the soul that holds eternal rest forever out of reach, though we go mad with dreamlessness. Because we cannot bring ourselves to die. Not even when all is lost. Not even for a reason.”
“You don’t know me,” says Katya. She reaches for the pill bottle. “You’ve never known me at all.” She knocks back the pills, then studies Humphrey’s suicide memo. “Who was the ‘loved one,’ do you think? Was it Pippi? Or his son?”
“If I knew the answer, I wouldn’t tell you.” Thus spake Osmond Ripple, watching his sister-in-law die.
17
THEM THAT LIVE
It never occurred to Swanny that the city would be empty. Pippi’s accounts of mayhem, riots, and looting always made her picture a carnivalesque atmosphere, one where, as in the days of old, the rich and poor could mingle freely, masked in the darkness of the hour. Swanny imagined streets firelit and full of secret hideouts, lovers coupling in doorways, and sweaty, jaundiced druggers succumbing to madness in wildly quotable blank-verse soliloquies. Since girlhood she’s concocted intimately detailed narratives about the life and times she would have in such a place, the way she would conduct her business and her passions. Now, as she trudges the empty skyscraper canyons, staring down at slippers soaked through with mother blood and bird excrement, begrimed with chalky ash, the full weight of Duncan’s duffel bag digging into her shoulder, she wonders if anything ever existed at the other end of her pining, anything at all. She is the child bride of a gone world.
In the dwindling warmth of late afternoon, Swanny sits down on a bus-stop bench and exhaustedly pats the seat beside her. Hooligan stands up on his hind feet and sits down like a human, roguishly crossing his legs. He rests his hand on her knee. She slaps it away, scanning the street for imaginary traffic. Swanny has never before in her life suffered the indignity of walking for too long, and what’s more, she has absolutely nothing to show for it. She hasn’t even had a chance to sell the dog.
Then she notices the limo. It’s the same model as the one she and Mother took from the service, or nearly, but this one has its engine still intact, purring with the gluttonous consumption of fossil fuels: a sleek, sated beast. Swanny watches it roll up the deserted street, between the hollow dioramas of gutted storefronts and the scraps of man-made detritus—newsprint, fabric, cellophane—that litter the pavement, foliage from a different kind of fall. The limo eases to a halt right in front of where she’s sitting, and one tinted window in the back yawns down.
“Here’s a tip,” the man inside says. His voice is raspy, abrasive, more personality disorder than accent. But she can barely see him there, ensconced so deeply in the limo’s dusky cavern. “That bus ain’t coming.”
“I know that. I’m only resting for a moment. To get my bearings.”
“Good thing. They’d never let you take that mutt on board.”
“I thought you said the bus wasn’t coming.”
The pause that follows is all the more troubling, accompanied as it is by a lapping, wettish sound Swanny at last identifies as the man’s chewing.