The Sky Is Yours

by Chandler Klang Smith

  “But we would not be human if we did not summon monsters into our midst. Today, young Duncan will devour the baroness whole, and he will die of her poison. In their place, a two-headed creature will emerge, new and strange and born of blood, and we will call this creature ‘Ripple.’ Birth and death, birth and death. And so it shall be until the final reckoning. Swan Lenore, will you allow this?”

  She almost misses her cue: “I will.”

  “And you, Duncan?”

  “I…do?”

  Osmond throws back his hood and, with flaming eyes, states the benediction: “Let the fusion begin.”

  * * *

  After the final initialing of the contract, the party decamps to the Hall of Ancestors, where Ripple’s portrait is to be unveiled. Champagne corks pop like gunshots. Swanny, her mother’s words in mind, has slammed back two flutes before the velvet curtain falls.

  The family gathers in front of the painting. The videographers film the tableau of their clustered backs, the canvas they partially obstruct.

  “He didn’t put my face in it,” Ripple says. His voice cracks with disappointment like a little boy’s.

  Ripple’s likeness is the only one in the hall with a title: Wanderer Above the Sea of Smog. In it, he stands on a parapet of the mansion roof, looking down from the Heights onto Empire Island below. He faces away from the viewer, his brown hair tousled in the wind, his right hand jaunty on his hip: a hero’s pose. But the artist has dwarfed him into insignificance. The city spills out before him. Wreathed with smog, marred skyscrapers jut up like knives; smaller ruins—townhouses, apartment buildings, theaters and libraries and museums—smolder in their shadows, barely visible. A distant new fire, zigzag-shaped like a Z, slashes near the middle of the canvas, electric orange, as if the artwork itself has been defaced. Torchtown? From it pours a blacker, fresher smoke, which mixes with the rest, becoming one at the horizon with the stormy sky.

  Most shocking, though, are two shapes, smudges, really, high above the wanderer’s head, near the top of the frame. Yellow and green, only implied—they could be mistaken for HowFlys or birds. But no. No. They are dragons. They are here at Ripple’s wedding. How well, he wonders, can this bode?

  “Well, I hate it,” says Pippi. “How very grim. Whyever would someone paint such a thing? If it were a window, I’d draw the shades.”

  * * *

  Nothing live—no band, no chanteuse. If Swanny wants to hear a human voice raised in song, she’ll have to go find the klangflugel and bang the tunes out herself. Of all the things, why did she agree to economize on this, the music at her reception? As dreadful recordings play, decades-old earworms bereft of vital force or meaning, Swanny slumps next to Katya at the banquet table, morosely eating marzipan roses off the three-tiered cake. Swanny felt less alone in childhood, taking imaginary tea with her taxidermied rabbits.

  “Were you a mail-order bride?” she inquires of her new mother-in-law, leaning over to pluck another rose.

  “No. Humphrey and I met at work.”

  “You worked together?” Swanny stifles a melancholy laugh. “Were you a receptionist?”

  “We met at my work.” Katya delivers the information robotically. “Not his.”

  “Oh.” Swanny’s read enough erotica to fill in the blanks. Katya herself is a blank: a sexual tabula rasa upon which the worst conclusions are easily drawn. Swanny changes the subject: “Well, you’re certainly rich now. That must be a relief.”

  “Is it for you? Are you glad to take my son’s money and have the run of his household?”

  There’s no challenge in Katya’s inflection, but the words are clear enough. Swanny goes on the offensive. “I am, actually. He’s a worthless human being, but it would have been a shame to let an opportunity like this go to waste.”

  Katya smiles, vaguely, and rises from the table. “Have a nice wedding night.”

  Swanny watches her stride long-leggedly away, a formula of perfection fantasized into existence—36-24-36. She names the Day-Glo magenta hue of Katya’s dress like a curse: Hot Lips, Fashion Doll, Dragonfruit.

  To know what a man expects of women, look no further than his mother.

  “A perfect wife,” Swanny observes aloud. “Have you ever met someone so unnervingly polite? It’s as though she’s been lobotomized. I consider myself quite the feminist, but perhaps some of us weren’t made to advance. It’s like they say about genes: you can’t express what isn’t there.”

  “She has her moments, but on the balance—she’s a mindless automaton,” Osmond agrees, splashing more End of History in the general direction of his glass. “That’s why Humphrey’s in love with your mother.”

  “What?”

  Osmond nods in the direction of the dance floor, where Ripple moons around for the videographers, a skeleton crew from his old Toob series doing this family memento work-for-hire as “mostly a favor.” They’ve been checking their watches for the last forty-five minutes. In the background, Humphrey and Pippi are swaying cheek-to-cheek.

  “How horrifying,” Swanny murmurs.

  “Oh no. I didn’t mean to subject you to another punishing realization.”

  “But it can’t be reciprocated. It can’t be. She’s still in love with Father.”

  “Hasn’t he been dead for twenty years?”

  “Nearly seventeen. But Mother always says she ‘will never love again.’ She says it very sternly. I never thought to question it.”

  “Far be it from me to sow the seeds of discord; I have no notion what lurks in her inscrutable heart.” Osmond burps, 55 percent ABV. “Most likely, she’ll play out the flirtation until it no longer benefits you. Then she’ll shatter my brother’s hopes and they’ll settle into their natural roles as archenemies. I’m eager to observe, at any rate. Your mother is terrifying, but at least she’s alive.” He raps his fist twice on his insensible thigh. “Which is more than can be said for some of us in this house.”

  Swanny turns to him with sudden intensity of feeling. “Uncle Osmond, you have the warmest heart of anyone present. You’re my only friend in this godforsaken place.”

  Osmond takes this statement very seriously. “You know,” he says, gazing at the ancestral tablecloth, stained now from the joyless festivities, “if I had had a wedding, it would have been very much like this.” He fervently clasps Swanny’s small, pudgy hand in his small, pudgy hands. “Only, I would have adored you.”

  Swanny begins to cry.

  “Is it really so obvious to everyone that Duncan doesn’t love me?”

  “Of course it is, my child. And hardly unexpected, considering the lout in question. He didn’t appreciate the caviar at dinner either.”

  “But—but—” Swanny blinks back inky tears, dabs at them with her cloth napkin. “I thought I was irresistible.”

  “Swanny, no one can resist you forever. And ‘forever’ is the term on the contract you just signed. I should know. I notarized it.”

  * * *

  Forever. Upstairs in the Guest Room, Abby is learning the meaning of the term. That is how long she has been stranded here, how long she’ll be alone. She’s been watching the wedding proceedings for the last six hours; they livestream from the videographers’ cameras to the house’s Toob sets, with automated dubbing in a strange foreign language for the staff.

  She’s seen so much now, so much she can’t unsee. Yet she fears she never will understand this world of people—of her people, she reminds herself, of human beings just like her. Why are they so strange? She misses walking naked on the beach, feeding cockroaches to the ducks, shitting in a cardboard box. Here her body stays confined to a single room. Her mind is meant to wander on without it, into the glow worlds of the Toob.

  Duncan is in there now: he has entered the machine, become of it. His body is made from points of light. She sees, but she does not understand. She wonders if the next time he slides his tongue into her mouth, she’ll feel only a spark of static and then, emptiness. She wonders if there will be a next time
. She knocks her fist against the screen, but he doesn’t turn, not even when she calls his name.

  He is burning in there. He is changing.

  Pop up, up, out of this toaster full of souls!

  Somewhere beyond the mansion’s roof in the city below, the dragons scream through the sky. She cannot see them, but she can hear them in her head, a sound so faint and faraway it is a whispered wail, a shrilling in her ears. Aaaaaaaaa…

  The animals of our city are deeply confused, and most of those animals are us.

  13

  FAIRY-TALE ENDING

  “Etta,” came a voice at that moment near her. Startled, she turned, the throatlash of the bridle still heavy in her hand. It was Bertrand. At once, the color rose to her cheeks. He was still dressed for the ball, his finest frockcoat newly brushed, and yet here he stood, amid the horsey musk of her father’s stable.

  “Etta—” He spoke her name again, and the solemn timbre of that most familiar utterance moved deep within her, stirring sensations of such naked tenderness as could not be clothed in words. “Etta. I wish to engage you for the first two dances.”

  “Be still, Bertrand.” She touched the mare’s velvety flank with a soothing hand. “Emmelina is skittish—she has come unshod.”

  “And I say, damn her, damn the whole vexatious torment of the last fortnight. Let the world come unshod. Damn my poor station and your father’s mad impa—imper— What the snuff’s this say?”

  “Sound it out.”

  “Im-per-cations?”

  “Im-pre-cations.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Curses.”

  “What, he called this guy a turd-gurgling son of a snake? I’d like to find that part.”

  “I believe he cast aspersions on the Portsmouth family name.”

  Ripple puts the open book over his face and slumps deeper into the ball pit. Plastic spheres jostle around his neck. This evening is not going as planned. After dinner, the adults shooed Swanny and him up to his room with a bottle of Champagne. He hoped one thing would lead to another, but Swanny was in a vile mood right from the beginning, demanding to know when the bed boat sheets were last washed, tossing clothes off the hangers in his closet to make space for her wedding dress. He told her it wasn’t like she was moving in, and she burst into tears.

  “No separate bedrooms,” she said. “No twin beds. You asked for it in the contract. You asked for it, not me.”

  In retrospect, he probably should have said something like, “Don’t weep so, my lark,” maybe with a lordly accent, then lip-locked her like his life depended on it—he might have stood a chance. But instead he said, “Uh, maybe that was my dad?”

  Now she’s slipped into something more comfortable, but she’s acting even less so. She keeps rubbing her cheek like she has a toothache, and already took a wee fistful of little yellow pills for an “excruciating” migraine she was “seeking to prevent.”

  He flips ahead in the weighty tome. “How much more of this do we have to read before you get turned on?”

  “It works better when I’m alone,” Swanny says gloomily. She perches on the edge of the pit, dangling her bare feet daintily in. The lacy fringe of her negligee is barely visible behind her tightly folded arms. “At this rate, it may take all night.”

  Here’s an idea: “I have, like, four hundred hours of adult content on my ThinkTank.”

  “Your saying that somehow doesn’t help matters.”

  “I wasn’t saying we should discuss it, I was saying let’s watch it.” Ripple feels an eagerness he hasn’t all day. “I got all kinds, I don’t discriminate.”

  “Clearly not.”

  Ripple tosses the book aside and grabs the controller. A huge menu of programming appears on the projector screen; he starts rapidly scrolling through it. “There’s Fem on Fem; Hot for Creature; Uncensored Surveillance Footage Vol. 6: Caught with Their Pants Down; Pirates and Barmaids; Pleather Yourself; Co-Ed Naked Wrestling; Co-Ed Naked Rodeo; Co-Ed Naked Bouncy House; Dungeon Master; Siamese Twincest; Big Red Son; Mary O’Nette and the Real Mouth Puppets; Coma Vixen: She’ll Sleep When She’s Dead; Homeless and Helpless; The Aristocrats!; Sexual Harassment in the Workplace; Swab My Folds; Ride the Worm; Revenge of the Slave Babes; Cheerleaders and Mascots; Breast Pump Infomercial; Loveseat or the Curious Couch…”

  Ripple has a long, intense history with porn, or whatever might pass for it; by now, he’s opinionated and he’s in a position to judge. Because what is porn? Performance sex. And if there’s one thing he understands, it’s the Performance Lifestyle™. Ripple’s always related to his favorites, humping away onscreen; he understands it isn’t as easy as it looks, feeling everything in front of a camera. He thinks a lot about what kind of stars they turn out to be, in the long run: auteurs or sellouts or one-hit wonders. Heroes, villains, or losers.

  Creating an image is a life’s work. You can’t just fuck around.

  Of course, Ripple’s fame today isn’t exactly assured. But he can’t imagine living the rest of his life cut off from reality. He clicks down the familiar list, staring at the screen. He’s going to go back there someday.

  “Duncan, I don’t know, and I don’t care to know, what any of those phrases mean.”

  “Why don’t you just pick a category and we can narrow it down from there.”

  “I’d really rather not.”

  He stops scrolling. “I thought you were into fantasy.”

  “Whatever gave you that idea?”

  “Isn’t that the same point of your literotica? So you can stroke off?”

  “What an insulting misapprehension.”

  “It’s exactly the same. Only your porn is boring.”

  “It isn’t the same, Duncan. The characters in a work of literature—they’re not bodies. They’re souls. Alive and complex as you or me.”

  Duncan looks at her carefully. This is reminding him of Abby’s fevered rants about the People Machines. “Uh, they’re not real.”

  “Perhaps not, but they speak truths to us nevertheless.” She tosses her hair. “I could never be aroused by mere entertainment.”

  Like Abby, only worse: at least Abby never tried to convert him to her weird religion. He feels a twinge of longing for that lithe, golden damsel, almost always topless, who listened so wide-eyed to the sound of his voice—not even the words, just the sound. Sometimes she’d press her head to his chest to hear her own name reverberate there. It sucks that he doesn’t have any of that on tape; it gives him a hard-on just thinking about it. “What do you want to do, then?”

  “I propose we get a good night’s sleep, in hopes that this appears less insoluble in the morning. Counseling may be an option in the long term.” She begins to heft herself to her feet. Ripple grabs her ankle. She looks down at him in surprise.

  “Hold on. What about the consummation clause?”

  She obviously didn’t expect him to mention that. Her eyes narrow. “How do you know so much about the contract all of a sudden?”

  “I remember that part. I signed it, same as you.” Back when they were writing the contract, he even tried drafting his own version of the clause—more like a checklist, really—but the lawyers scrapped that in a hurry. In his opinion, it’s the only part of the document that matters. The whole point of getting married is to guarantee sex. If he isn’t going to be a porn star, at least he can be a husband. Ripple looks at his watch. “It’s 11:36. So technically we’ve got until midnight, right?”

  “Perhaps we can text your father for an extension.”

  “If you were so jealous of Abby, you should be thankful with the way things turned out. She’s gone. Now I’m all yours.” He indicates an area of plastic balls directly above his lap.

  Swanny slides her pinky into her mouth. When she draws her hand away, there’s blood on her fingertip. “My God, I need a dentist. I need one today.”

  Is she trying to turn him off? It’s gross, but he’s seen worse. On the garbage island he and Abby once banged a
top clear transparent bags of liposuction. “We can do oral later.” He squeezes her heel.

  Swanny kicks her foot away from him. She scoots backward, then to her feet, with a laugh that’s half shriek. “I detest you,” she says. Another laugh comes, more like a hiccup this time. “I detest you, and that doesn’t make the slightest difference.”

  Ripple shrugs. If she wants to feel sorry for herself, fine, but she’s not going to get any sympathy from him. He clicks on HOT FOR CREATURE and opens one of the many video files inside. On some distant mountaintop a blond and elfin waif, clad in a bikini of primitive rags, hesitates at the mouth of a cave. Her wrists are tied: a sacrifice. “You want an annulment, be my guest”—he glances at his watch—“11:38.”

  “It appears you’ve given me no choice.”

  “Not so fast, you actually have to say yes. It’s in the rules. It has to be consensual to count.” Ripple dimly remembers his dad warning him about sexual assault penalties: fuck if he’s falling for that.

  “Fine. Yes. I consent.”

  “Sorry, you’ve gotta be more enthusiastic than that.”

  Her eyes flare. “My desire for you is—indescribable. Beyond the imagining of either God or man. There, are you happy?”

  Ooh, she’s mad: that’s a flavor he hasn’t tried before. Feelin’ Feisty. He smirks. “Not yet.”