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By Root 480 0

she talks to the cameras about her invented origins in the magical past and the mercenary future, people respond in kind, via e-mail and chat lines, asking her to elaborate, pretending to be good witches or nefarious Imagineers or trickster trendspotters. In that little room, reality for Ivy has become something entirely malleable under the force of her will. All she has to do is imagine something, and people around the world will strive—whether out of sympathy, or for the sake of amusement, or for the sheer drama of the thing—to make it so. In her debut performance she requested money, and now, three days later, she has money: half a million in small bills, scattered on the bed and all over the floor. This money came from Chas, who apparently got a fraction of it from his personal accounts and the rest from James T. Couch, in the form of a business loan. The gambit seems to be paying off: Ivy’s viewership has already gone up a hundredfold. At any given moment a little box at the top of the screen counts the audience: 140,209 people watching her kick up clouds of tens and twenties as she skips around her room; 140,214 people examining the delicate tracework of pink scars on her thighs, forearms, and belly; 140,200 people unable to touch her—she’s untouchable, too beautiful to touch, all pixels and light—140,211 people touching themselves instead, and discovering that they actually prefer it this way.

Ursula watches Chas watch Ivy, feeling her own eminently touchable, demonstrably unbeautiful flesh hanging from her like a weighted net, while the heaviest weight of all, the one in her chest, becomes more and more unbearable.

“I assume you’ve come to hand in your resignation?” Chas says.

“That’s right. I’m quitting,” she says.

“Whatever. You guys time it or something?”

“What do you mean?”

Chas reaches into his top drawer and pulls out a piece of stationery covered, she sees, with Javier’s unmistakably ornate, almost calligraphic handwriting. He leans back in his chair and begins to read it aloud.

“ ‘Dr. Lacouture: In light of the recent yak yak yak, I feel I must protest the yak yakity yak and the future of etcetera in particular the yakity yakity the children of the world yak yak I am personally ashamed to have yakitied sincerely, Javier Delreal.’ ”

Listlessly, he crumples it into a ball and tosses it in a lazy arc across the room, then goes back to watching the screen.

“You got that today?” Ursula asks.

He nods.

“Was there a return address? Was there a postmark?”

“Mid City. He’s still here somewhere.”

He’s still here, she thinks with relief. It’s not too late. She can still find him.

Chas leans in closer to the screen.

“There. Watch,” he says.

To the right of the window containing Ivy’s image, between flashing banner ads for a porno site and an on-line brokerage above and below, a message begins to scroll and repeat:

Ivy needs more money

to complete her mission.

Become one of Ivy’s Friends

with a donation of any size.

Donate with your credit card

on our secure server.

Or send a check

or a money order.

Ivy will thank each donor

with a personalized blessing.

“That’s it,” Chas says quietly. “The perfect demonstration of post-irony.”

“You actually think people will send money?” Ursula asks.

He nods wearily, massaging his temples. “That’s my professional opinion.”

“Why? You’ve filled her room with money. Why would people send her more?”

“Well, you’ve just asked two questions, the first being why I think they will, and the second being why on earth they would.” He leans back in his chair again, stroking his goatee. “The answer to the first question is that it’s a well-documented phenomenon. Which is why at Caesars Palace in Vegas they roll the house’s winnings across the floor in a giant glass tank on wheels. They do this every night at midnight, when most of the people there have been gaming and losing for hours. It’s counterintuitive. You’d think they wouldn’t want to rub the losers’ noses in it. But when those gamblers see this huge tank full of the profit they’ve helped create, you know what they