But Humphrey didn’t budge. He stayed with Osmond till the small hours, trying to talk him out of it. The next morning, of course, when the camera crew returned, Osmond went up in the fateful HowTank anyway. He ignored his brother’s advice and attempted suicide—he would have said “bravery” at the time, but the difference is semantic. Now Humphrey’s done the same. But like everything else in life, he succeeded where Osmond failed.
And Katya too. In her negligee, she looks like the star of a pornographic snuff film. Bride of the Necrophiliac. The ultimate trophy to Humphrey’s acquisitive machismo—the very sort of prostitute he’d so prophetically described in his sales pitch for survival, though he uttered those words over a decade in advance of her birth. She lived the life of a consumer product, a fully functional machine, with features to be road tested on command: toning an ab, birthing a child, performing a strip show for her own birthday party. She even had an off switch.
Osmond gazes into those glassy blue eyes, now fixed and dilated. Is he looking into the perfect sky of her irises, or into a contact lens? Was she even a natural blonde? Katya existed as a sort of human pet, engineered like an apehound for the connoisseur buyer. She repulsed Osmond in life, but in death, she touches him. The single-mindedness that her last act implies! The clarity of thought! If action is character, she loved Humphrey more than Osmond did—loved selflessly, against her own best interest. What must that have felt like? All of Osmond’s feelings are nonsense and confusion. Bound unambiguously to nothing, his logic is free verse.
“I’m having one of my attacks,” he tells the panic room, trying to focus on his surroundings. The space is no bigger than a butler pantry—they never thought they’d have to use it—and no servants were invited to join them here in the holy of holies. That now strikes Osmond as a crucial omission. No family and no help. The world is a desolate place indeed. He presses the Call button on the console.
“Room service? Housekeeping? Poison control?” But it’s too late for all that. The house is an unmanned vessel on a sea of fire. Osmond turns his gaze to the monitors, to watch the engulfing tide of flames.
Except the tide is going out. The torchies didn’t go about their arson properly, Osmond starts to see that now. They didn’t account for the stubborn retardant—fucking retarded—in the paints and carpets. They’d allowed gasoline to puddle on the floor and burn itself out. They didn’t bother to disable the sprinkler system, and when it kicks on late, a belated baptism, it washes out what’s left of their crude approximation of hell. The fire sputters out without ever reaching the second floor.
“Never invest emotionally,” Humphrey told Osmond long ago, when they were only children. Humphrey had just returned from an afternoon’s excursion with their father to one of the city’s exchanges, and Osmond was jealous and annoyed, building castles with his blocks. “Never dump shares in a panic. The market is volatile, but we don’t have to be. Sometimes it’s helpful to imagine it’s all happening to somebody else.”
Humphrey has died over a level of property damage he could have paid for out of pocket. And Osmond, who’s never affected calm or detachment for any reason, who in infancy made a habit of knocking down even his most elaborate block structures in a rage, sees no reason to stand—or more accurately, sit still—for it any longer. He punches in the code, unseals the panic-room door, and rolls into the hall.
Osmond has never before been alone in the home he’s occupied since birth. Emptied of waitstaff—chambermaids, footmen, sommelier—the mansion feels not just abandoned but meaningless, a body without a soul. His wheels glide over carpets, rumble across a wood floor, round the corner toward the elevator that mutely offers passage to realms below: Going down? We believe that we love the places where we live, but this is only an illusion. It is never a place we long for, but a time.
The best accelerants aren’t splashed on the floor. They’re released miasmic into the air; Osmond has read enough on the subject to know that much. It isn’t the first time he’s considered cranking up the gas and punching holes in the copper pipes that line the house’s walls, a delicate plumbery of toxin. It is, however, the first time he’s acted on the impulse. The dullness of the premeditative grunt work almost numbs him into boredom: he proceeds first to the boiler room, then to the utility closets one by one, twisting gears and blunting hacksaws until every room is filled with the whistling promise of oblivion. Humphrey believed the mansion would incinerate them all. For once, Osmond will prove his brother right. He lights candelabras and votives, every one a fuse. And then he waits.
Or tries to…but as the seconds tick on, an intense need grips him, a bodily embarrassment more difficult to ignore than the demands of his stomach, bowels, or bladder. He remembers it well, from those lifeless beeping days, when he lay in a hospital bed, drifting from blinding agony to coma and back again; from an unpleasant weekend he spent, post-paralysis, devouring first sleeping pills and then emetics in doses for the record books. Osmond suffers from the worst condition of all, one nigh well impossible to relieve, despite his most sincere intentions. It is the will to live. It beats in him like a stupid bird against a windowpane. Fly away, away, away.
He is too weak to die.
Osmond takes the elevator to the ground floor, hyperventilating, a thousand breaths for every lighted number clicking past. He shifts his motorized chair into S for SPORT as the doors part with a ping. He burns rubber across the lobby’s gleaming floor. Literally: the tracks left by the wheelchair’s tires ignite in his wake, and he hears an unmistakable roar behind, the throaty bellow of flashover. As his invalid carriage rams through the double doors, into the courtyard, the Ripple mansion explodes. BOOM! Crazed glass rains down from above as Osmond skids into the reflecting pool and hurtles facefirst into the basin filled with water and silver wishing coins, the last of the Ripples’ liquid assets.
Heroism once almost killed him, but it is the coward’s curse to survive.
22
WEAPON OF CHOICE