He follows us into Costuming and chats up Simone while helping her pack away her tail. Do I tell him to get lost? No. Do I knock him into a planter to remind him just whose wife Simone is? No. I go out and wait for her by Loco Logjam. I sit on a turnstile. The Italian lights in the trees are nice. The night crew’s hard at work applying a wide range of commercial chemicals and cleaning hair balls from the filter. Some exiting guests are brawling in the traffic jam on the access road. Through a federal program we offer discount coupons to the needy, so sometimes our clientele is borderline. Once some bikers trashed the row of boutiques, and once Leon interrupted a gang guy trying to put hydrochloric acid in the Main Feeder.
Finally Simone’s ready and we walk over to Employee Underground Parking. Bald Murray logs us out while trying to look down Simone’s blouse. On the side of the road a woman’s sitting in a shopping cart, wearing a grubby chemise.
For old time’s sake I put my hand in Simone’s lap.
Promises, promises, she says.
At the roadcut by the self-storage she makes me stop so she can view all the interesting stratification. She’s never liked geology before. Leon takes geology at the community college and is always pointing out what’s glacial till and what’s not, so I suspect there’s a connection. We get into a little fight about him and she admires his self-confidence to my face. I ask her is that some kind of a put-down. She’s only saying, she says, that in her book a little boldness goes a long way. She asks if I remember the time Leon chased off the frat boy who kept trying to detach her mermaid hairpiece. Where was I? Why didn’t I step in? Is she my girl or what?
I remind her that I was busy at the controls.
It gets very awkward and quiet. Me at the controls is a sore subject. Nothing’s gone right for us since the day I crushed the boy with the wavemaker. I haven’t been able to forget his little white trunks floating out of the inlet port all bloody. Who checks protective-screen mounting screws these days? Not me. Leon does when he wavemakes of course. It’s in the protocol. That’s how he got to be Subquadrant Manager, attention to detail. Leon’s been rising steadily since we went through Orientation together, and all told he’s saved three Guests and I’ve crushed the shit out of one.
The little boy I crushed was named Clive. By all accounts he was a sweet kid. Sometimes at night I sneak over there to do chores in secret and pray for forgiveness at his window. I’ve changed his dad’s oil and painted all their window frames and taken the burrs off their Labrador. If anybody comes out while I’m working I hide in the shrubs. The sister who wears cateye glasses even in this day and age thinks it’s Clive’s soul doing the mystery errands and lately she’s been leaving him notes. Simone says I’m not doing them any big favor by driving their daughter nuts.
But I can’t help it. I feel so bad.
We pull up to our unit and I see that once again the Peretti twins have drawn squashed boys all over our windows with soap. Their dad’s a bruiser. No way I’m forcing a confrontation.
In the driveway Simone asks did I do my résumé at lunch.
No, I tell her, I had a serious pH difficulty.
Fine, she says, make waves the rest of your life.
The day it happened, an attractive all-girl glee club was lying around on the concrete in Kawabunga Kove in Day-Glo suits, looking for all the world like a bunch of blooms. The president and sergeant at arms were standing with brown ankles in the shallow, favorably comparing my Attraction to real surf. To increase my appeal I had the sea chanteys blaring. I was operating at the prescribed wave-frequency setting but in my lust for the glee club had the magnitude pegged.
Leon came by and told me to turn the music down. So I turned it up. Consequently I never heard Clive screaming or Leon shouting at me to kill the waves. My first clue was looking out the Control Hut porthole and seeing people bolting towards the ladders, choking and with bits of Clive all over them. Guests were weeping while wiping their torsos on the lawn. In the Handicapped Section the chaired guys had their eyes shut tight and their heads turned away as the gore sloshed towards them. The ambulatories were clambering over the ropes, screaming for their physical therapists.
Leon hates to say he told me so but does it all the time anyway. He constantly reminds me of how guilty I am by telling me not to feel guilty and asking about my counseling. My counselor is Mr. Poppet, a gracious and devout man who’s always tightening his butt cheeks when he thinks no one’s looking. Mr. Poppet makes me sit with my eyes closed and repeat, “A boy is dead because of me,” for half an hour for fifty dollars. Then for another fifty dollars he makes me sit with my eyes closed again and repeat, “Still, I’m a person of considerable value,” for half an hour. When the session’s over I go out into the bright sun like a rodent that lives in the earth, blinking and rubbing my eyes, and Mr. Poppet stands in the doorway, clapping for me and intoning the time of day of our next appointment.
The sessions have done me good. Clive doesn’t come into my room at night all hacked up anymore. He comes in pretty much whole. He comes in and sits on my bed and starts talking to me. Since his death he’s been hanging around with dead kids from other epochs. One night he showed up swearing in Latin. Another time with a wild story about an ancient African culture that used radio waves to relay tribal myths. He didn’t use those exact words of course. Even though he’s dead, he’s still basically a kid. When he tries to be scary he gets it all wrong. He can’t moan for beans. He’s scariest when he does real kid things, like picking his nose and wiping it on the side of his sneaker.
He tries to be polite but he’s pretty mad about the future I denied him. Tonight’s subject is what the Mexico City trip with the perky red-haired tramp would have been like. He dwells on the details of their dinner in the catacombs and describes how her freckles would have looked as daylight streamed in through the cigarette-burned magenta curtains. Wistfully he says he sure would like to have tasted the sauce she would have said was too hot to be believed as they crossed the dirt road lined with begging cripples.
“Forgive me,” I say in tears.
“No,” he says, also in tears.
Near dawn he sighs, tucks in the parts of his body that have been gradually leaking out over the course of the night, pats my neck with his cold little palm, and tells me to have a nice day. Then he fades, producing farts with a wet hand under his armpit.
Simone sleeps through the whole thing, making little puppy sounds and pushing her rear against my front to remind me even in her sleep of how long it’s been. But you try it. You kill a nice little kid via neglect and then enjoy having sex. If you can do it you’re demented.
Simone’s an innocent victim. Sometimes I think I should give her her space and let her explore various avenues so her personal development won’t get stymied. But I could never let her go. I’ve loved her too long. Once in high school I waited three hours in a locker in the girls’ locker room to see her in her panties. Every part of me cramped up, but when she finally came in and showered I resolved to marry her. We once dedicated a whole night to pretending I was a household invader who tied her up. In my shorts I stood outside our sliding-glass door shouting, “Meter man!” At dawn or so I made us eggs but was so high on her I ruined our only pan by leaving it on the burner while I kept running back and forth to look at her nude.
What I’m saying is, we go way back.
I hope she’ll wait this thing out. If only Clive would resume living and start dating some nice-smelling cheerleader who has no idea who Benny Goodman is. Then I’d regain my strength and win her back. But no. Instead I wake at night and Simone’s either looking over at me with hatred or whisking her privates with her index finger while thinking of God-knows-who, although I doubt very much it’s me.