The Virtual Swallows of Hog Island(3)

About me, Klaus was right and wrong. I hadn’t f*cked any celebrities in the gaming room, but I had in fact rendered myself and my wife, Evangeline. She was very scientific about the miscarriages. She mourned the first, but then explained the statistical frequency of miscarriages with the second. After the third, she decided it was better to shut things down for a while, a fallow fields approach. She didn’t mourn at all, or not in front of me. She said that each time she started to express her sadness, it was as if she gave me permission to be sad, and my sadness was too much for her to bear. “This is simple biology,” she kept explaining. “This is just how the body works. You can’t take it personally.” I imagined the small fetuses in their watery worlds, drowning, and how I couldn’t save them. What kind of father could fail, so consistently, at saving his children from drowning? Of course it was personal. Failure usually is.

It was after the second miscarriage that I created a game where Evangeline and I would simply walk around Hog Island in Muscongus Bay, an Audubon nature camp. I decided to mourn here, with her but apart. It’s where my parents took my brother and me before my folks got divorced. It had only a few buildings and modest lodgings—wool blankets, cots, communal meals. I remember being windblown and sunburned, picking mosquito bites so they scabbed up on my legs. I kissed a girl on the ferry there, my first kiss. I rode my hand quickly up her sweatshirt to cop a feel, but she caught my wrist and gave me a look.

I remember my father on those trips. He wore a skimpy European bathing suit. It was so tight and rubbery that it looked like that part of his body was made of seal. He was fit in a way that embarrassed me. I was chubby and slightly knock-kneed; still am. I remembered how another guest picked a fight with him one night at the communal dinner, questioning my father’s masculinity because he had a soft spot for puffins. “Evolution!” the guy shouted drunkenly. “You can’t coddle a species. Not even our own.” And he stared at me. I was what coddling would lead to, a fat kid who looked boiled.

My brother ignored it all, dipping a roll into sauce.

My mother picked up her plate and took it to the kitchen to scrape it into the garbage.

My wife and I have never been to Hog Island IRL. She’s having an affair with a soccer player on my indoor league now. His name is Victor but his nickname on the team is Vic-turbo. I never call him Vic-turbo. We live very far from Hog Island, like seventeen hours by car.

When I looked through Klaus’s footage, I realized very quickly that it was all at least ten years old. He was about twenty pounds trimmer. He wasn’t sausaged into his suit jacket and his hair was thicker, though equally dark, what with his frequent self-administered dye jobs. Basically, unlike his promotional photo, I could tell it was Klaus, and maybe that’s what he wanted: younger but recognizable.

“He’s making a play for Helen Viorst,” I said out loud to no one. “That rogue.”

I thought about what he’d do if I refused to do the coding. I imagined the bulk of him—so hunting-lodge cocky. He didn’t smell like money, by the way. He smelled like a man, like cigars, though I’d never seen him smoke, like a forest filled with bears. Squat as a discus thrower, he always gave the threatening impression that he could put you in a headlock and choke you out.

He’d fire me.

Evangeline would take issue. She works longer hours as it is and makes far more money. She’d say, “If I ever get pregnant, how will I be able to be at home with the kid? And now you’re unemployed?”

We’ve been trying to have a baby for years. We now see an obstetrician who specializes in preventing miscarriages. But do you want to know my deep-down fear? It’s that I’m the problem somehow, and if she were to get impregnated by someone else—for example, the guy on my indoor soccer league, Vic-turbo—the pregnancy would go perfectly, producing a very athletic baby. Vic-turbo’s from Belgium. I imagine them having sex and eating waffles and chocolates, drinking beer and solving mysteries. That’s the sum total of my associations with Belgium.

I flipped to the most recent session between Klaus and Helen. He’s using his therapeutic monotone, explaining how the next level will work. “Your goal is simple: Get one of the cookies.” But the sub-goal, of course, was to listen to her parents say the cruelest things to each other but for Helen not to absorb them. “Stay on task,” Klaus told her. “You are in it for yourself. You are your own protector. Get the cookie and get out.”

“What about Duchess?” she asked.

Now, this was the part where Klaus lost his footing. He didn’t always understand such sentimentality. “Duchess?”

“My dog.”

“Yes, the dog. I think you need to let Duchess go.”

She stared at him blankly, took a deep breath, and clutched her hands together.

As soon as I uploaded a fully rendered version of her as Self and of Klaus, ten years younger, he sent me a quick face message. “Nice render! Thanks for being so fast, Archie.” He was lying on his stomach, his face cupped in a massage parlor’s padded face-holder, his cheeks and moustache stretched wide.

That boorish f*cker, I thought.

*

I went on a tear as any good workaholic would, running through job after job.

I invented a level for a highly celebrated, high-ranking war hero who’d attempted suicide. He was a Child. It was summer. He ran through a sprinkler that shimmered in sun, over and over.