The View from the Balcony

Edwardo Lambego stared down from the faux Italianate 19^th century balcony that he’d spent the better part of the summer tearing down and rebuilding over and over again to appease the measured, insistent voice of the Italian tour guide AI that had gone all viral and infected his middle ear when he’d engaged in unprotected phone sex over a low-grade connection.
Served him right, he guessed, relieved to at least be able to understand his own thoughts for the first time in what seemed like weeks. Before that, it had been all Italian, all the time, like having a Fellini themed call-in show lodged in your frontal lobes.
There was a tear in his eye, which was a surprise as his parents had sold a kidney and both his tear glands to cover his high school tuition, all to train him to work as a dealer in one of the many casinos that littered the California coast north of San Francisco. Gradually, it occurred to him that it was actually the inferno’s fumes, now all black and toxic after they engulfed the illegal Sanrio factory down the block. Edwardo stood there, the flames of real-life anarchy coming ever closer to his mostly-pretend sanctum. Perhaps he should have listened to the fire crews as they advised him to get out of town. They should know. They were evacuating as well.
The impending chaos disturbed him down to the essential nature of all that is or ever will be Edwardo Lambego: from the whip-smart line of his raven black slicked back hair to the crisp white shirt with the sleeves rolled up ever so perfectly to highlight the forearms that no man with his level of intellect and breeding had any right possessing. It sent a shiver down his back and put a nervous twitch into the baby blues that People magazine once called “the most envied peepers in the civilized world” which made his insurance rates go right through the roof.
Enough of this nonsense. It was down to just him and the packs of feral children long abandoned by vacationing parents over the years. The city fathers had looked upon the practice with a mix of nostalgia, no telling how many of them had come to the streets of Perdition Bay the exact same way, and pragmatism, as the city really needed the income from the tourists.
There were lovelier places on the California coast to visit, heaven knew, but most of those places required parents to leave with the same children they had arrived with. Here, as long as you left with the same number of tots, everything was, in a strictly legal sense, fine. Sort of like a “take a penny, leave a penny” tray you used to see in stores before people started complaining of copper-based allergies.
Perhaps if he could harness the anger and energy from those children, keep them from wasting it in riots and satanic rites, he could stop the destruction and perhaps make something of this two camel town. But deep down he knew that better men and women had pondered the same thing to little avail, and, while he tended to be amusing and occasionally surprising, he certainly wasn’t a better man.
Besides, the little fuckers had it in for him. One of the camels had told him so in a dream.