Acts of Contrition
Chapter One
There are any number of perfectly acceptable things Simon Camden might be thinking about as he pilots the car around the curve—topics that range from what he'll have for dinner to Cecilia—but as it happens he is thinking of the time when he was twelve and Lou (who more or less was his dad's boss, after God) jerked him off in the backyard under the basketball hoop. One moment he is dwelling on what he privately thinks of as the day it all went to hell and the next moment he is in hell and hell is a place of flying bicycles and hollow crunching sounds and blood. And Simon will remember this for the rest of his life, because there is a circle in hell for fornicators and a circle for fat bald child rapists but the center of hell is for murderers.
There is blood on the windshield (which has cracked into a mosaic of red and crystal, but has not given way) and there is blood in his mouth where he bit his tongue, and blood on his forehead where he hit it on the steering wheel trying to stop in time. Assuming that is what he was trying to do, because he thinks he remembers seeing the boy straight ahead and pressing down on the gas pedal, but he stopped trusting his own memory a long time ago. And there is blood in the road in a spreading, thickening pool like a plague in Egypt. And Simon, are you okay, but he will never be okay again and he wasn't okay before.
In the hospital he lies on his back and stares at the dome of the MRI conveyer belt and he remembers how Lou's hand felt, how it took him a long time to get Simon hard, how afterward Lou came in his pants without even touching himself. And he remembers that Jesus died without sin, and he thinks he remembers seeing the boy in his rearview mirror and backing up to hit him again. In the ambulance they told him over and over again that it was okay but then again people have been lying to him his whole life and he can't wait until they tell his father about this.
Simple Simon, Simon Says, maybe I have amnesia, or what does it mean if they give you someone else's memories in place of your own. And Jesus Christ, Simon, just grow up everyone else is over it already except the kid you killed and the family of the kid you killed and the friends all of whom will have a giant kid shaped hole in their hearts for the rest of their lives. Isn't it enough you ruined your own life do you have to drag your whole family down with you. And what about Lou the man has a family (decent moral upstanding Christian) and it's funny how one minute it's a little kid on a bicycle and the next he's a man on a motorcycle but the word Murderer is never funny.
And you put lives at risk when you drive like this. Because you might have bled when Lou shoved his penis up in you but you didn't bleed like deadboy. Is there some reason that (whole parts of your life seem to happen off camera) this seems to be happening to someone else? S is for Sainthood it's good enough for me. I there is no I in teamwork, M for murder and O for O God why have you forsaken me but even Simon can't imagine what N was for. They told him the kid died instantly but Simon will hear that scream in his head for the rest of his life. Sometimes he remembers things that didn't happen, but he's not sorry.