No, what worries Katya is the possibility of an accident, up there in the sky. When she first arrived in the city, she didn’t know what to make of the dragons. They looked beautiful to her then, the sort of danger, vital and carnal, that spoke in the voice of poetry, nothing like the file-cabinet bureaucracy that reduced her face to the sum of its angles and her waist and hips to their ratio. But death is death is death. Motherhood has taught her there is no poetry in that.
Katya picks up a tallboy and presses the cool aluminum can to her forehead. To her, things are very simple. When your child is missing, you find him and bring him back. She remembers following Dunky’s damp footprints through the hallways of their house, when he was small and naked and refusing to wash himself; coaxing him back inside when he went out on the roof to pet the gargoyles. This situation is the same. But Humphrey doesn’t think Dunky is a missing child—he doesn’t think Dunky’s a child at all anymore. He thinks that Dunky is a man, and that it’s high time for him to start acting like one. Which means it’s up to Dunky to find himself. No matter how lost he gets.
Doesn’t Humphrey know that problems like this don’t just go away on their own? Sometimes Katya thinks her husband is a little boy too, stubborn and sulky. Maybe no one born into this family ever chooses to grow up.
Katya leaves the fridge, holds the beer out to one of the dishwashers in the kitchen, a wide-eyed youth not much older than her son. His resemblance to the men of her hometown is no accident. All the members of the house’s staff are imports from her village, cousins and the offspring of cousins, the stepchildren of former friends, charity cases and bastards sent over by packboat at her request. She once believed that surrounding herself with them would bring her comfort, make her feel that this was at last where she belonged, but nothing could be further from the truth. The servants’ quarters make a new village here, a wing of rooms and hallways not so different from the cottages around the ancient square, but she has barred herself from entry. To these maids and underbutlers, she is a lady of this city now; through their eyes she is foreign even to herself. The native words fall leaden from her tongue: “My husband asked for this. See that he gets it.” The young man nods mutely, and wipes sandwich grease from his hands onto his apron before reaching for the can.
Katya skips the stairs and takes the elevator to the sixth-floor library: between her pole dancing and the morning’s session on the mechanical equicizer, she’s gotten her exercise for today. Besides, the elevator is one of her favorite rooms in the house. Lined with gilt-edged mirrors, a sumptuous ruby carpet underfoot, it’s modeled after the dressing room at Fiona Tres Belle, where Humphrey took her at the start of their second date, after he explained that her bra top and tramp pants were most likely verboten at the four-star restaurant where he’d made reservations. It was then that Katya truly realized he was serious, not just out for a good time.
Men are always ashamed of the women they love.
The ebony doors part with a pleasant chime, and Katya tentatively steps into Osmond Ripple’s domain. She and her brother-in-law are not exactly friends. Back when she and baby Dunky were learning English together from the talking giraffes on the KinderSpeak, she heard Osmond refer to her as “aphasic,” and he sometimes still speaks in Cockney rhyming slang just to exclude her from conversations. She retaliates by spreading rumors among the servants about the unseemly origins of his rosacea and night terrors. Still, they’re family.
“Osmond?” she calls, stepping onto an elaborate Oriental rug that depicts a monkey and a bird quarreling amid cherry blossoms. He answers from the upper stacks with a lengthy coughing fit. She scales the spiral stairs two at a time. “Osmond, are you all right?”
When she reaches him, Osmond is waving smoke from in front of his face, an elaborate bronze hookah towering on the floor beside him. One blue-and-gold tube still lies in the crook of his arm. He appears to be rereading Back There Again, a book he pressed on Dunky repeatedly throughout childhood.* An ermine throw covers his lap, half hiding the bald tires of his wheelchair. The air reeks of loam.
“Sick again,” Katya observes, not unkindly.
“It is a fine disease, and I am its finest symptom.” Osmond pounds his chest. He’s dressed in a kimono today, the frizzy strands of his gray hair pulled into a messy topknot.
“Osmond, I need your help.”
“And I need my privacy, you trespassing strumpet. Put some clothes on. If I want to see you naked, I’ll go online.”
“Dunky is still missing.” Katya pauses as Osmond draws another lengthy, burbling pull from the hookah tube. “I hoped that you could find him.”
“I will say this slowly. A genetic predisposition to bewilderment is rarely overcome. As the biologists say, when a penguin makes for the mountains, he can’t be stopped.” Osmond exhales a floating zero, then an exclamation mark. “All I expect to find today is a brief respite from my suffering. Now, get out of this library before I retrieve my thwacking canes.”
“You don’t understand. Humphrey won’t call the police—”
“Pardon?” Osmond fingers the joystick of his wheelchair, rolls backward several inches. His nostrils flare; his bristly jaw juts forward like the underbite of an angered boar. “Could you repeat that immense presumption, please?”
“Humphrey won’t—”
“You told me I didn’t understand. You told me I didn’t understand. Who are you to tell me what I understand?”
“Osmond, I—”
“Dislodging a Ripple heir from the humid jungle of your loins does not, I am afraid, qualify you to perform psychological examinations.”
“I only want—”
“In fact, I understand the situation full well. Your mentally disabled son has wandered off, no doubt to squander his inheritance copulating with machines and submitting to a vast array of brutal muggings. You beseech me to save him from himself. And I ask you, simply, to leave me to whatever chemical tranquility these weak herbs can achieve.”
Katya crosses her arms over her pasties. “I will not leave until you promise to help.”
“And I will not help until you promise to leave.”
“Done.”
She extends her hand to shake. He waves her away.
“Spare me the formality, gigolette. Any moisture on those palms is suspect. Now, how do you propose I accomplish this daunting task?”
“Do you remember when we had Dunky microchipped?”
“He howled inconsolably for days, as I recall, dramatically clutching his negligible incision. And then wept when the stitches were removed to reveal no scar. Tell me again, what medical practitioner condoned you bringing the pregnancy to term?”
“All little boys want scars, Osmond. They think it makes them brave. There was a time, I think, when you wanted one yourself.”
Osmond snorts. “You’re doubtless unaware that the BlackBean is not a tracking device. Its sole use is as an identifier of the amnesiac and the dead. A face tattoo for your boy would have been cheaper and more efficient.”