The Souvenir Museum by Elizabeth McCracken (acx book reading txt) 📕

to drink as much as you liked, for instance: the studies were just coming out, then, suggesting in utero alcohol was a bad idea. (So why, he imagined her saying now, surveying the Schlitterbahn crowds, did children ever since seem to be getting stupider?) She was the author of most of Bruno’s opinions. Holding them was his way of keeping her alive; not insisting on them was his way of doing the same for himself. She had started to lose her memory. Could be early Alzheimer’s, her doctor said, or arteriosclerosis, or more likely alcoholic insult to the brain, and Bruno hadn’t cared: you don’t worry about arson or faulty wiring till after the structure has fully burned to the ground. She’d died in the swimming pool at their apartment complex, drowned, full of vodka and valium, she who’d once swum laps for an hour every morning. Maybe she’d forgotten how many pills she’d taken. Maybe she’d merely remembered the full measure of what she’d lost. You must have known, said Ernest, when they fell in love a year later, you knew all along about yourself, you liked men. Bruno could only say, I was waiting for you.

He and Eleanor had been married in a sad ritual. Her parents were dead; his mother, who was only ten years older than Eleanor, had hated her immediately. Eleanor had bought a white dress, because Bruno had told her that his mother cared about such things. His mother had laughed in her face. “Well,” said Eleanor, afterward, “we’ll never do that again, thank God.”

The current picked up. The banks of the river were made of tile. The palisades were tiled as well, and studded with more bored lifeguards, standing like unemployed goats. He looked up and longed for the pelicans of the morning, their competence and precision. His biceps ached from holding on. He couldn’t see Cody’s face. At the next turn, a young park employee stood up to his waist in the crashing water. His job was to catch inner tubes as they threatened to bash into a wall, to send them in the right direction. How could so badly designed a thing exist at a place meant for children? Bruno paddled his feet. He wanted to avoid the guy, but instead they knocked right into him. “Sorry!” he shouted, and then they were shoved away, in the opposite direction, in front of the wave machine.

Now they were surrounded by loose boys and empty bobbing inner tubes. “Hold tight!” he commanded Cody, as he heard a wave behind them. A woman in a neon pink swimming dress clung to a single inner tube. Clawed at it. They hadn’t seen this stretch of river from the bridge. Every few seconds some hidden mechanism slapped out a wave, which then lifted the flotsam—people, tubes, goggles, swim shoes—and dropped the flotsam, and smacked the flotsam on the head. Even artificial rivers are careless, Cody.

Survivors of the Whaleship Essex at the Waterpark. The Lusitania at the Waterpark. The Poseidon Adventure at the Waterpark.

He’d thought he hadn’t wanted children because Eleanor hadn’t wanted them. He hadn’t wanted them for that reason. Eleanor was already forty when they’d married and she’d convinced herself she was too old. Perhaps he was too old, too, but here was his heartbreaker, screaming as they bounced along.

“Are you all right?”

The boy nodded the back of his head. You could hear the waves from the wave machine behind you before they lifted you up. That was good. They were just one turn from the beach. Now Bruno was holding Cody’s right wrist to the starboard handle of the inner tube. Every wave threatened to scupper them. What would happen then? Would it jolt a lifeguard into action? Would the boy be picked up by the passengers of another tube? Sucked into the filtration system? Bruno thought of Ernest drinking at the swim-up bar, Ernest who would never forgive himself, though he would forgive Bruno, and that would be the worst thing that could ever happen to either one of them. No, not the worst thing.

A bullying wave pushed the edge of their raft, tipped them, rushed overhead, and swept Cody away.

Above the river the burghers of Schlitterbahn saw the flash of pale flesh, the hair that streamed behind as though a cephalopodic defense, Stay away. The last inhabitant of the lost city of Atlantis, washed into the waters of Torrent River—that was its name. A little boy, surrounded and then eclipsed by the bigger boys, the wild boys of the German-themed waterpark. “Look out!” shouted a blue-tongued woman from the bridge, but she was drunk, and already the other people doubted what they had seen, and besides, so what? Those feral boys would take him in. They never went home, those boys; they lived here, they circled and circled, howling and laughing and dreaming of home.

“Cody!” Bruno shouted. “Cody!”

The boys found the body, and lifted it up, and then there was his own child’s stunned face, one hand out, and Bruno snagged it, and they were back in each other’s arms, bumping up onto the incline of the concrete beach. Cody coughed. He was alive. Not a lifeguard had shifted. They were surrounded by wild delight, shrieking, flesh, stove by a whale, but safe.

When they had staggered out—not onto dry land; there was nothing, nothing, nothing dry in all of Schlitterbahn—Bruno realized that the water had stripped the swimming tights right off, that Cody now stood naked, just as God had made him—though God hadn’t been anywhere near Cody’s conception, an event Ernest called a miracle. Quite the opposite, Bruno had thought. Ordinarily he hated God getting credit for Science’s good work. Yet here the boy was, the narrow naked awkward miracle.

“Jesus,” said a voice. A man, this new model they now made, tremendously fat from the hips up, an epidermic barrel, skinny as a kid from the hips down, such a precarious construction it hurt Bruno to look at him. “Cover that