by David Miller
I can’t stand Leon. On the wall of his office he’s got a picture of himself Jell-O-wrestling a traveling celebrity Jell-O-wrestler. That’s pure Leon. Plus he had her autograph it. First he tried to talk her into dipping her breasts in ink and doing an imprint but she said no way. My point is, even traveling celebrity Jell-O-wrestlers have more class than Leon.
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 Sub-quadrant 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 priv
ates with her index finger while thinking of God-knows-who, although I doubt very much it’s me.
At noon next day a muscleman shows up with four beehives on a dolly. This is Leon’s stroke of genius for the Kiper wedding. The Kipers are the natural type. They don’t want to eat anything that ever lived or buy any product that even vaguely supports notorious third-world regimes. They asked that we run a check on the ultimate source of the tomatoes in our ketchup and the union status of the group that makes our floaties. They’ve opted to recite their vows in the Waterfall Grove. They’ve hired a blind trumpeter to canoe by and a couple of illegal aliens to retrieve the rice so no birds will choke.
At ten Leon arrives, proudly bearing a large shrimp-shaped serving vat full of bagels coated with fresh honey. Over the weekend he studied honey extraction techniques at the local library. He’s always calling himself a Renaissance man but the way he says it it rhymes with “rent-a-dance fan.” He puts down the vat and takes off the lid. Just then the bride’s grandmother falls out of her chair and rolls down the bank. She stops faceup at the water’s edge and her wig tips back. One of the rice-retrievers wanders up and addresses her as señora. I look around. I’m the nearest Host. According to the manual I’m supposed to initiate CPR or face a stiff payroll deduction. The week I took the class the dummy was on the fritz. Of course.
I straddle her and timidly start chest-pumping. I can feel her bra clasp under the heel of my hand. Nothing happens. I keep waiting for her to throw up on me or come to life. Then Leon vaults over the shrimp-shaped vat. He shoos me away, checks her pulse, and begins the Heimlich Maneuver.
“When your victim is elderly,” he says loudly and remonstratively, “it’s natural to assume heart attack. Natural, but, in this case, possibly deadly.”
After a few more minutes of Heimlich he takes a pen from his pocket and drives it into her throat. Almost immediately she sits up and readjusts her wig, with the pen still sticking out. Leon kisses her forehead and makes her lie back down, then gives the thumbs-up.
The crowd bursts into applause.
I sneak off and sit for about an hour on the floor of the Control Hut. I keep hoping it’ll blow up or a nuclear war will start so I’ll die. But I don’t die. So I go over and pick up my wife.
Leon wants to terminate me but Simone has a serious chat with him about our mortgage and he lets me stay on in Towel Distribution and Collection. Actually it’s a relief. Nobody can get hurt. The worst that could happen is maybe a yeast infection. It’s a relief until I go to his office one day with the Usage Statistics and hear moans from inside and hide behind a soda machine until Simone comes out looking flushed and happy. I want to jump out and confront her but I don’t. Then Leon comes out and I want to jump out and confront him but I don’t.
What I do is wait behind the soda machine until they leave, then climb out a window and hitchhike home. I get a ride from a guy who sells and services Zambonis. He tells me to confront her forcefully and watch her fall to pieces. If she doesn’t fall to pieces I should beat her.
When I get home I confront her forcefully. She doesn’t fall to pieces. Not only does she not deny it, she says it’s going to continue no matter what. She says I’ve been absent too long. She says there’s more to Leon than meets the eye.
I think of beating her, and my heart breaks, and I give up on everything.
Clive shows up at ten. As he keeps me awake telling me what his senior prom would have been like, Simone calls Leon’s name in her sleep and mutters something about his desk calendar leaving a paper cut on her neck. Clive follows me into the kitchen, wanting to know what a nosegay is. Outside, all the corn in the cornfield is bent over and blowing. The moon comes up over Delectable Videos like a fat man withdrawing himself from a lake. I fall asleep at the counter. The phone rings at three. It’s Clive’s father, saying he’s finally shaken himself from his stupor and is coming over to kill me.
I tell him I’ll leave the door open.
Clive’s been in the bathroom imagining himself some zits. Even though he’s one of the undead I have a lot of affection for him. When he comes out I tell him he’ll have to go, and that I’ll see him tomorrow. He whines a bit but finally fades away.
His dad pulls up in a Land Cruiser and gets out with a big gun. He comes through the door in an alert posture and sees me sitting on the couch. I can tell he’s been drinking.
“I don’t hate you,” he says. “But I can’t have you living on this earth while my son isn’t.”
“I understand,” I say.
Looking sheepish, he steps over and puts the gun to my head. The sound of our home’s internal ventilation system is suddenly wondrous. The mole on his cheek possesses grace. Children would have been nice.
I close my eyes and wait. Then I urinate myself. Then I wait some more. I wait and wait. Then I open my eyes. He’s gone and the front door’s wide open.
Jesus, I think, embarrassing, I wet myself and was ready to die.
Then I go for a brisk walk.
I hike into the hills and sit in a graveyard. The stars are blinking like cat’s eyes and burned blood is pouring out of the slaughterhouse chimney. My crotch is cold with the pee and the breeze. The moon goes behind a cloud and six pale forms start down from the foothills. At first I think they’re ghosts but they’re only starving pronghorn come down to lick salt from the headstones. I sit there trying to write Simone off. No more guys ogling her in public and no more dippy theories on world hunger. Then I think of her and Leon watching the test pattern together nude and sweaty and I moan and double over with dread, and a doe bolts away in alarm.
A storm rolls in over the hills and a brochure describing a portrait offer gets plastered across my chest. Lightning strikes the slaughterhouse flagpole and the antelope scatter like minnows as the rain begins to fall, and finally, having lost what was to be lost, my torn and black heart rebels, saying enough already, enough, this is as low as I go.
A REAL DOLL
A.M. Homes
A.M. Homes (b.1961) was born in Washington DC. She studied with the writer Grace Paley at Sarah Lawrence College. Her novels and stories have been described as controversial, but that has not stopped her work being awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and, most recently, the Women’s Prize for Fiction for May We Be Forgiven, in 2013. “I think fiction can help us find everything. You know, I think in fiction you can say things and in a way be truer than you can be in real life and truer than you can be in non-fiction. There’s an accuracy to fiction that people don’t really talk about – an emotional accuracy.”
I’m dating Barbie. Three afternoons a week, while my sister is at dance class, I take Barbie away from Ken. I’m practising for the future.
At first I sat in my sister’s room watching Barbie, who lived with Ken, on a doily, on top of the dresser.
I was looking at her but not really looking. I was looking, and all of the sudden realized she was staring at me.
She was sitting next to Ken, his khaki-covered thigh absently rubbing her bare leg. He was rubbing her, but she was staring at me.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hello,” I said.
“I’m Barbie,” she said, and Ken stopped rubbing her leg.
“I know.”
“You’re Jenny’s brother.”
I nodded. My head was bobbing up and down like a puppet on a weight.
“I really like your sister. She’s sweet,” Barbie said. “Such a good little girl. Especially lately, she makes herself so pretty, and she’s started doing her nails.”
I wondered if Barbie noticed that Miss Wonderful bit her nails and that when she smiled her front teeth were covered with little flecks of purple nail polish. I wondered if she knew Jennifer colored in the chipped chewed spots with purple magic marker, and then sometimes sucked on her fingers so that not only did she have purple flecks of polish on her teeth, but her tongue was the strangest shade of violet.
“So listen,” I said. “Would you like to go out for a whil
e? Grab some fresh air, maybe take a spin around the backyard?”
“Sure,” she said.
I picked her up by her feet. It sounds unusual but I was too petrified to take her by the waist. I grabbed her by the ankles and carried her off like a Popsicle stick.
As soon as we were out back, sitting on the porch of what I used to call my fort, but which my sister and parents referred to as the playhouse, I started freaking. I was suddenly and incredibly aware that I was out with Barbie. I didn’t know what to say.
“So, what kind of a Barbie are you?” I asked.
“Excuse me?”
“Well, from listening to Jennifer I know there’s Day to Night Barbie, Magic Moves Barbie, Gift-Giving Barbie, Tropical Barbie, My First Barbie, and more.”
“I’m Tropical,” she said. I’m Tropical, she said, the same way a person might say I’m Catholic or I’m Jewish. “I came with a one-piece bathing suit, a brush, and a ruffle you can wear so many ways,” Barbie squeaked.
She actually squeaked. It turned out that squeaking was Barbie’s birth defect. I pretended I didn’t hear it.
We were quiet for a minute. A leaf larger than Barbie fell from the maple tree above us and I caught it just before it would have hit her. I half expected her to squeak, “You saved my life. I’m yours, forever.” Instead she said, in a perfectly normal voice, “Wow, big leaf.”
I looked at her. Barbie’s eyes were sparkling blue like the ocean on a good day. I looked and in a moment noticed she had the whole world, the cosmos, drawn in makeup above and below her eyes. An entire galaxy, clouds, stars, a sun, the sea, painted onto her face. Yellow, blue, pink, and a million silver sparkles.
We sat looking at each other, looking and talking and then not talking and looking again. It was a stop-and-start thing with both of us constantly saying the wrong thing, saying anything, and then immediately regretting having said it.