In fact, Ripple has never met any of his fans; he’s actually never met anybody who wasn’t part of his family, his staff, or his underschool. One time a blind beggar lady came to the door of his parents’ mansion with a message for him, but he only saw her later, on the security footage, after the guards turned her away.
His fans are out there, though. At the height of his popularity (ages fourteen to sixteen), his Toob series reportedly reached millions of unique viewers, though very few in the metropolitan area. Sure, some were the Empire Island unevacuated, the Survivors still waiting perilously in their flammable apartments or toting their portable electronic devices through the burnt-out streets, tilting them skyward for whatever faint rays of infotainment the battered monopoles could provide. A few were even like him, the city’s owners, sticking around to protect their properties and their turf, their presence a symbol to ward off urban decay: the Tangs and the Liddells and the Lowries, each with a full staff, commercial real estate holdings, a mansion the size of a city block. Even with the decades-long exodus provoked by the dragons, their city was still among the most populous in the country during the run of his show. So the local market wasn’t one Ripple could ignore. That might be different if the show were airing today—in the last six months, with the fire department’s mutiny and the shutdown of public transportation, the local max cume has taken a major dive.
But even in those better times a couple of years ago, Ripple’s core audience was out there in the hinterlands, farther away than even Upstate or Wonland County, dwelling in unaffected areas as if no giant monsters had ever risen up out of the seas. Having never seen the rest of the country, Ripple learned his geography from viewership regions, ratings, and demographics. Turned out he was big in the Sprawl, that expanse of asphalt, mini-malls, corporate farms and their subsidiaries that stretches from the Huckleberry River to the Inhospitable West. Sometimes in his heyday, when he was having trouble sleeping, he would contemplate those likely recappers and tuners-in, snug in their single-family dwellings, tooling around via ground transportation, purchasing items in their unlooted stores, and wonder why they would spend their evenings chilling to the Very Special Episode when he had his first wet dream:
RIPPLE (age 12)
It’s like I just became a man. A desperate man.
Ripple never did figure it out, but his uncle Osmond, who considered himself an expert on the genre of reality, was eager to explain. He said that the dragons had hollowed out the city’s center, its stabilizing core, and now all that was left were the high and the low, the opulent and the destitute, the chosen and the damned, those incarcerated by misfortune or the state—and those trapped in gilded cages of their own making. Against such a backdrop, according to Osmond, even the misadventures of a prurient youth such as Ripple seemed of mythic consequence. Ripple thought about the Sprawl and agreed that it did sound super boring where those people lived. By comparison.
“Fems usually just call me the Dunk,” Ripple tells Abby now.
Of course, Ripple doesn’t really know any girls his own age either, unless you count his fiancée, and he’s pretty sure her mom has been writing those letters for her. They have a lot of references to his “boyish good looks” and the need to get documents notarized pronto.
“Dunk?”
“Yeah.”
The girl giggles. “Dunk.”
In the awkward pause that follows, Ripple goes for another sporkful of stew, but half misses his mouth. The girl licks the drips from his stubbly neckbeard. Ripple grabs his hoodie from where it lies crumpled on the floor and casually arranges it in his lap.
Back in the dorm at underschool, when he and Kelvin used to look through Skin Pics together, they always picked out their favorite damsels, and the nasty-ass slags. Of the nasty-ass slags, they always said, “I’d never do her. Well, maybe on a desert island.” Sometimes Ripple has even daydreamed about this nasty-ass slag island scenario, about how the nasty-ass slag would be crying in her shark-bitten tube top, and he’d say, real offhandedly, “This can be our little secret, my videographers drowned,” and then he’d bang her in the sand and afterward she’d be all grateful and dance for him in a coconut bra and serve him mai tais and stuff. Now Ripple’s on a desert island with a near damsel in real life, zero cameras present, and he’s shunning her worse than a nasty-ass slag. Of course, it smells like a diaper pail, and his arm is probably infected, and there’s no hope of rescue, and a bird of prey is giving him the evil eye, but how often do chances like this come along? Hey, she even tended his wounds. That’s basically foreplay. He takes a deep breath and tries the yawn move with his good arm. The girl sniffs his armpit and smiles.
“Time to feed Cuyahoga!” she says.
“Oh boy,” says Ripple. He feels himself blush.
The girl crosses the trailer and the vulture flaps once, hopping from the phrenology head up onto the girl’s shoulder.
“Pretty, pretty,” the girl coos. She reaches into her pocket and pulls out another dead mouse. Ripple balances the spork on the rim of the cauldron. He’s lost his appetite.
“You like Cuyahoga,” the girl announces. It’s not a question.
“Uhh…sure.”
The girl holds out the mouse by its tail. “Your turn.”
Ripple gets up and edges toward the vulture. Cuyahoga’s black eyes gaze unblinking at the blood spots on his bandage.
“Easy girl,” he says. He takes the mouse; between his fingers, the tail feels rubbery, boneless. “Here you—aah!” Cuyahoga snaps her jaws quick, nearly taking off the tip of his thumb.
The girl smooths the vulture’s breast feathers. The vulture pecks her scalp. “Friends.”
“I dig.” Ripple notices the phrenology head is balanced on a stack of ancient VD cassettes. The one on top shows a buxom blonde with a sputter gun, straddling a cannon amidst blowing sands. Pre-dragons, definitely—probably not a ThinkTank left in the world could read that data. “You must get really lonely around here, huh?”
The girl twists a finger in her ear. “Not anymore.”
Ripple grins. This is the opening he’s been looking for. Awkwardly, he cups his hand around her shoulder, knobby even beneath that puffy coat. “And what do you do when you get lonely? At night?” His voice sounds low and sexy, like that narrator from the cat-food commercials (“Feeling Feisty??”). “When you just can’t stand it anymore? Huh, fem?”
“Sleep?”
“Oh…OK…”