Trank and Ripple approach a blanket covered with leather sheaths in a variety of ominous shapes. “What can I suit you for?” asks the proprietor, a guy wrapped in graying bandages that look to conceal more than heal.
As Trank and Holster Hal talk prices, Ripple, bored, wanders away into the crowd—not much of a crowd, really, no more than forty or fifty people tops, but more faces than he’s seen together in one place since crawling out of that manhole. Maybe this is a sneak preview to the future, when the dragons follow orders and the city fills back up again. If so, it could be a pretty friendly place to live.
There’s a food truck parked at the edge of the market, and Ripple goes over to check it out. The menu looks decent: carbonated gazpacho, anti-griddled frozen “waffles,” spherical egg salad. Local, schmocal—whoever’s cooking here has an out-of-town ingredients supplier. It’s the sort of thing Ripple used to eat back at home all the time, that he never really appreciated. After weeks of total junk, though, he’s starting to get the appeal. He thinks of Swanny, savoring every morsel of their rehearsal dinner, and wonders if she’s OK. He shouldn’t have let her slip away like that. Did she actually go to Torchtown? Or did she find her way back to his parents so she could enjoy the finer things again? It’s a toss-up: that fem loves her crème fra?che, but there’s also a heaping dose of murder rage squeezed into those ruffly plus-sized outfits.
“Duncan?”
For a second, Ripple doesn’t recognize his old molecular gastronomist sans toque. The guy behind the window of the truck is scruffier than he’s ever seen him, with a new half-grown beard and his usually immaculate chef’s whites splattered and unwashed. But he gapes at Ripple for so long, with such intensity, that Ripple finally puts it together.
“Hey pro, it’s good to see you too. What’s up with the new business? Did you finally get sick of truffling my dad’s frittata?”
“I thought you were dead. I thought you all were dead.” The cuisinier is, inexplicably, tearing up. “I thought I was the only one who survived.”
“What are you talking about?”
“After the invasion—the fire?”
“Huh?”
“Your mansion. It burned to the ground. Don’t you know that?”
“No. The MPD went and checked it out. Everything was fine. Everybody was OK. Except Mrs. Dahlberg, but hey, win some lose some.” Ripple knows what he’s saying is true, but the gastronomist has a look on his face like Ripple is falling and falling and the world is rushing up to meet him. “Seriously, I know what I’m talking about, pro.”
“You should look at this.” The molecular gastronomist reaches through the window and hands Ripple a LookyGlass.
As the video fitfully streams, the images come to Ripple in starts and stutters. The Ripple mansion, gouged and smoldering, filmed through the locked gates; a lone searcher with a BeanReader, plodding through the wreckage; old Toob clips of Ripple’s mom and dad, labeled with dates and RIP; a picture of Ripple’s own face, then Swanny’s, each with a question mark superimposed; a tweaked logo for Late Capitalism’s Royalty, bling wreathed in mourning black. Ripple can’t process it. It looks like reality. But it can’t be.
25
NO-MAN’S-LAND
When does all of this begin?
It begins in the bullet shop.
It begins in Torchtown, where Swanny frets on a street corner, gazing remorsefully at the sign she’s seen on her limo rides so many times before: BULLET RETRIEVAL, REFURBISHMENT & RESALE.
It begins in the wee hours of the morning when Swanny lies in bed in the Chaw Shop attic, thinking of her mother, and of Sharkey. Swanny once inhabited Pippi in the form of phantom pains; poltergeist disruptions of the bladder, stomach, and intestine; toxemia; and gestational diabetes. In lightless secrecy, Swanny’s embryo feasted, fiendish, on the Old Mom’s tired blood. What could inspire greater loyalty than that? But it’s Sharkey’s body that nurtures her these days: the hot, dark hair that sprouts from his shoulders, the muscles of his jaw as they work his morning chew. The smell of the calming poisons, leaking through his skin. She hates herself for the attraction, and yet, even now, some small, dangerous part of her wants to fall on his chest and offer her forgiveness like a confession. She wonders if he’d kill her—if he’d ever trust her again. But of course the point is moot. She knows what she must do.
It begins two weeks and four days ago, with a young man whose freshly scabbed back wound will never have the chance to heal. A name written there in pain that will never be erased.
It begins nineteen years before that, during the Siege of Wonland County, when Eisenhower Sharkey, separated from the rest of his raiding party, finds himself in a dark wood, far from the world he knows. Somewhere in the distance, land mines explode in the backyard of a house. He freezes beneath the crooked trees and feels himself disappear into the silence. He learns for the first time that he is edible, marooned, a creature of the indoors. This is no-man’s-land. The sky is full of stars. The night is full of eyes.
It begins with Pippi Dahlberg filling out the Voluntary Retirement form in longhand, triplicate, checking the box marked “Medically Inadvisable Pregnancy” under “Reasons Why.”
It begins on a Wednesday, forty-three years ago, with an unwanted Torchtown rape baby squalling in the gutter, premature but viciously alive, ripping a plastic trash bag off his sticky red face like a caul. Unnamed: Eisenhower Sharkey will name himself.
It begins with the installation of the barbed wire, of the machine-gun turrets, atop Torchtown’s concrete walls, with the first irredeemables lowered down into its streets in shark cages, to find their fortune there.
It begins with the dragons.
It begins, as all endings do, in the beginning, in the code that underwrites the whole of our experience, that first microscopic enchantment that brought the world to life. But for our purposes here, it begins in the bullet shop.
The bullet shop is semi-underground, the only floor remaining of a decimated brownstone. Uneven brickwork, leftover from the annihilated ground-floor walls, rings its ceiling like the battlements of a castle half-swallowed by the earth. Swanny regards it miserably from across a cobblestoned alleyway pale with morning dew, then steps off the curb, directly into the shadow of a dragon. She pauses in midstep as its killer darkness ripples over her. She shuts her eyes. It’s the green one—she can tell without looking up, from its frilled silhouette, the shape of the frisson it leaves behind. Amazing that such a brief eclipse can so chill the air. A few seconds later, she hears the screams a block away and the crackling whoosh, quite familiar now, that can only mean the end of one thing, the beginning of another.