“Always best to keep busy. I’m gonna try moving it. What time’s your appointment? Do you want me to come with you?”
“No need. There’s a small bus that comes right to my house. The driver’s a bit of a talker. Hates his wife. Complains about her the whole time. For his sake I pretend I’m married to an awful woman too.”
“Why can’t you tell him you’re a widower?”
“That’s boring. Plus it makes most married men envious. No one wants to hear good things about other peoples’ lives, Hazel. If I have any aged wisdom to impart to you, it’s that.”
“I like hearing good things about you, Dad,” Hazel said, because she felt like she should. But she couldn’t remember ever hearing something good about her father.
“You might not want awful things happening to your loved ones, sure. But what if I’d been a super-brilliant guy and you’d followed your same trajectory of flunking out of a mediocre college? If you hadn’t married up to the financial stratosphere afterward, of course. Wouldn’t you have wished I were less of a superstar? Wouldn’t my fame have made you feel insignificant?”
She’d never thought of this. Byron’s fame hadn’t made her feel jealous as much as defective for not being able to like the guy. “I don’t know, Dad. I think I would’ve been proud.”
“Huh. Well, that kind of makes me feel like shit, Hazel. Sorry I wasn’t more impressive.”
“Come on.” Hazel resisted the temptation to add, Then maybe put your sex doll away during breakfast hours, or cover up her face and cleavage with a birdcage drape at the table.
“I’m pulling your chain. But I’ll be honest; it was hard for me, a little bit, to see you so high up on the hog. That sounds awful, but I’m too old for secrets anymore. You having all that money, it made me feel like I’d only been your dad by accident. Like you’d gone and left us for your true people.”
She knew what he meant, actually; she’d found it hard to bring any piece of her old life with her into her new one, and vice versa now that she’d returned. The Hub was like a portal that immediately shut behind her so no aspects of her previous self could follow.
“Well, you’re officially my dad again. I wouldn’t have a roof over my head if it weren’t for you.”
“That makes me nervous for different reasons, but okay. Let’s have a moment.” He held his arms up limply and rotely, as though readying to be lifted into a bath by a caregiver, but Hazel understood to go in for a hug. Her whole life, he’d always seemed afraid to deliver too much pressure, which made the end result feel halfhearted, like he was worried she might be about to throw up on him. But this one was more extended than she remembered his hugs being in the past, and that balanced out its featherweight grip and almost made it seem like her father wanted the embrace. It was an improvement—if he’d been practicing on Diane, it was helping.
“Diane’s staying home with me, I assume?”
“Correct. She and I haven’t been out on the town. Not sure that’s in the cards for the future either. Man, would the bus driver love to get a look at her plumbing though.”
Her plumbing? Hazel felt excited about taking a peek when he left. Was looking unethical? Like a form of snooping since Diane wasn’t hers? “Do you mind taking her to the bedroom and tucking her in, Haze? I should go wait out front. These appointments are a whole-day production. When I get back I’ll probably be ready to drink some gravy and hit the hay.” Hazel hoped he was using “gravy” as a euphemism for alcohol. She glanced at the contents of the open pantry. Unfortunately, he seemed to mean actual gravy.
“Sure, Dad. Have a good one.” There was the sound of her father whistling over the Rascal’s electric motor as he wheeled toward the door, then silence.
Now that they were actually alone together, Hazel felt too shy to look between the doll’s legs, particularly if Byron did have surveillance in the house and was watching. No—she’d be professional, like a nurse’s assistant.
“Hello, Diane,” Hazel offered as she fixed the doll’s face. “Guess I’m going to put you down for a nap now.”
First she tried a “bride-across-the-threshold” carry, but the doll weighed more than Hazel expected. It felt a little mean, but because the doll was so top-heavy, Hazel had to tip her forward and hold her by the waist, then drag her toward the bedroom. If she gave it the right context, it actually wasn’t hard to think of Diane as human: Diane was a friend who’d had way too much to drink, and now Hazel was helping her to her room. Once she got Diane situated beneath the blankets, her head atop the pillow, Hazel could also think of Diane as a long-term coma patient, except without the sadness—it didn’t have to be tragic that Diane would never wake up since she’d never been awake.
Even the comical portal of Diane’s open mouth began to seem okay now that Hazel had gotten used to it. It was just an exaggerated expression. Diane was really surprised, that’s all. Making a face like she couldn’t believe what she was hearing.
Hazel remembered a fund-raiser she and Byron had attended where she was in the bar line next to a woman wearing a pair of Gogol concept shoes—they were wedges whose platforms digitally displayed her weight and BMI on the left foot, and the number of steps she’d taken that day alongside the number of calories she’d hypothetically burned on the right; whenever her weight decreased more than a tenth of a pound, the shoes would start flashing and emit celebratory bursts of pink LED light for twenty seconds. The woman had asked the bartender for another glass of a very specific wine, and when the bartender told her they were out of it, she’d made a face not unlike Diane’s current expression. Finally the woman’s shoes had started blinking, which broke her out of the trance; she looked down at them, reading the numbers, then shot the bartender a different horrible look. “Apparently,” she said, “disappointment is great for my metabolism. So I suppose I should actually thank you for ruining my night.” Hazel had watched her blink off into the distance, then wanted to try to cheer up the bartender. “Jeez,” she’d said to him, “what’s her problem?” But he wasn’t rattled. “What did she say?” he asked. “I didn’t hear her. I was staring at her chest.”
Hazel had nodded and fielded a question to him. “If women could either be exactly like they are now, or you could turn us all into giant breasts, every single one of us becoming just a giant breast and nipple that doesn’t talk or think or eat, we just roll everywhere and leave a silicone slug trail in our wake, which would you prefer?” The bartender’s eyes had started scanning the room for an answer, as though he might see a woman standing against the wall next to a giant breast, therefore having a convenient visual guide to help him compare and make his decision. “Where does the slug trail come from?” he’d asked. “What’s lubricating it? Is there still a down-there?”
Since the bartender was occupied in thought, Hazel had grabbed a liquor bottle and begun making herself a drink while she spoke. “Well,” Hazel said, “let me elaborate. Say there’s a port the size of a standard vacuum cleaner tube on the side of the breast. That way the breasts can stop at silicone stations, which are just like gas stations basically, and get pumped up with more silicone. The bottom of the breast is porous, allowing microdroplets of the silicone to ooze out throughout the day and make a greasy path for us to slide across. It’s all the mobility we have.”
“So this port though. That’s, like, where men can put it in?” Hazel had taken a small sip of liquor and tried not to cough. “Of course,” she finally responded. “Without arms or legs it would be hard for us to stop you.” He’d clapped his hands together. “Brilliant. Done. Let’s make it happen.”
Now, looking at Diane’s mouth, Hazel thought of this port. She had an urge to see what the doll’s mouth felt like inside. While the opening was wide, when Hazel squinted one eye and tried to see down it, the interior looked snug. Which she guessed was what people were paying for.
To ease her guilt about violating the doll’s mouth with her hand, Hazel decided to pretend Diane might be choking on somethin
g. “This has nothing to do with sex!” Hazel began, in a series of verbal assurances that were as much for herself as for the possible Byron-cam. “I’m just making sure you don’t have anything lodged in your throat after breakfast. No precaution is too great for your safety, Di.” The mouth accommodated Hazel’s first four fingers, but getting her thumb inside took some convincing. Finally her hand was in (“Say AHHH, Diane! I feel like a dentist!” Hazel joked), and then her forearm.
For whatever reason, her limb being engulfed felt soothing. It was like her hand was being held in an advanced way. A nontechnological way? As if Diane had placed Hazel’s hand not inside her throat but on her abdomen, and then bent over, folding herself around Hazel’s fingers and wrist and elbow, the most committed handshake ever. It felt almost intimate, until Hazel pushed a little farther and realized she was feeling the back of Diane’s head from the inside.
Then the sensation of Diane’s rubber lips squeezing tightly around her forearm got uncomfortable. Hazel thought about the automatic blood pressure cuffs at the pharmacy in her childhood, how she used the machine every time she went, but every time was certain, at least for a moment, that the machine had finally gone haywire—had constricted far too firmly and wasn’t going to loosen fast enough for her limb to maintain its necessary blood flow.
Then she thought about the giant snakes she’d seen on the nature channel whose jaws unhinge to make way for whole pigs and other large meals. What if Hazel woke up in the middle of the night on the porch feeling like her legs were bound, but when she lifted the covers, what did she see beneath them but Diane? Who had slithered into the bed and was in the process of ingesting Hazel whole, legs first? Diane, who would be able to turn real and come to life as long as she ate a living woman once a month to sustain her? Though Hazel hoped her father wouldn’t sacrifice her for the sake of giving his love doll sentience, she couldn’t say for sure. Hazel imagined him entering the room in the final moments of her consumption, Diane’s lips having crossed the Rubicon of Hazel’s collarbone so that only her head remained unswallowed, to say good-bye and apologize. Sorry, kiddo. The gal’s gotta eat. Maybe he’d pat Hazel on the forehead, the same way he used to at bedtime when she was a little girl, before giving her one last reassurance: “Don’t worry; I’ll make sure you’ve fully liquefied inside her before Diane and I get intimate. You don’t want paternal moans of intercourse to be the sound track to your death, or for Diane to be in motion so the stomach-acid bath of your final demise is violently sloshing around as you suffocate. No, you’re entering the undertow of calm waters now. We’ll take it easy while she digests. Just close your eyes and pretend you’re out camping underneath the stars, getting zipped up inside a warm, full-body sleeping bag that stings a little and wasn’t constructed from a sufficiently breathable fabric.”
It was this thought that made Hazel begin to actively recoil. Then she had a worse thought, triggered by childhood Halloween party games where she’d had to reach into bowls and jars she couldn’t see the inside of to feel things that mimicked the texture of certain organs—how often did her father clean Diane? Were her fingers beginning to get sweaty inside the constricted space, or had they stumbled onto moisture?
She forcibly pulled back, so hard that Diane’s upper body lifted upright in a startling manner; Hazel screamed, thinking for a second that Diane had come to life and was attacking her.
But Hazel was controlling Diane’s movements. They were still connected. Hazel stood and Diane lurched forward, hanging like an oversize ventriloquist’s dummy that had been improperly placed upon its operator.
Hazel’s arm was stuck. The bedside clock read 11:10 AM. If Byron was sending a surprise for her at noon, the timing was not convenient.
8
JASPER WOKE FROM A DEEP SLEEP JUST IN TIME TO CATCH THE nightly eleven o’clock local news, which he was featured on.
“It was like a pietà,” an elderly woman told the camera. She held out her arms in a reenactment of Jasper emerging from the water. “Just like one. If Mary were Jesus and Jesus were a dolphin. This guy was a dead ringer for Jesus!” In the background an intoxicated tourist eating an ice-cream cone yelled, “I am on the TV!”
Jasper cursed. Though given the circumstances, he knew he had a lot to be grateful for. No one had followed him back to his old motel room after that afternoon’s incident (if you wanted to slip past a horde of people, setting down a living bottlenose dolphin was apparently a pretty good distraction). Despite his legs shaking from exertion, he’d managed to sprint off the moment he’d placed the creature on the sand; everyone had gathered around it and assumed Jasper was sprinting off to get help.
Just one stoner-voiced bystander had called out; his concern seemed heartfelt but not flaring with altruism. “Hey, man!” he’d said. “You need a lift to the, I guess, ocean creature clinic? I got my beach cruiser; I’ll just need a few bucks for gas!”
And all the news outlets were reporting the dolphin in good health—they said it had gotten lost from its pod and might’ve stranded itself farther down the shore had the “unidentified male being termed ‘Dolphin Savior’” not helped out. All the news stations were using this nickname. It seemed he’d become an Internet sensation in the past few hours. A photo of him holding the dolphin with the words NO BIG DEAL superimposed at the bottom was now a widely circulating meme; a posted five-second video clip of him holding the dolphin and saying this phrase already had millions of views.
He hadn’t been identified yet, but people wanted to know his name. He looked good in the photo with his wet shorts clinging to his body. “He’s a bit sexy!” one news anchor exclaimed, a woman with a British accent that delighted Jasper. A less-hot female commentator gave a more elaborate compliment: “Maybe I’ll put on a dolphin costume and hit the beach this weekend. Undercover investigative journalism, right? Will the Dolphin Savior appear like Batman if I pretend to be in trouble in the water?” The woman’s blond cohost was on board with this idea. “Right, pretend to stop breathing! See if he’ll do dolphin CPR and give you mouth to mouth!” The camera panned to a smirking male producer wearing a headset mic. “All right, you two,” he said. “I’m going to stop this before the blowhole jokes start!”
What in the exact hell was wrong with every person on earth? Jasper wondered. It was a riddle he knew he’d never solve, so he decided to get some more rest. Tomorrow’s incognito relocation would mean a busy day.
THE NEXT MORNING JASPER LIFTED THE SLEEVE OF THE HOTEL BATHROBE to trace his fingers along the raised scabs of the dolphin bite. He needed to be sure to wear sunscreen over the next several months to minimize scarring. The needle-nose teeth had sunk in so deeply that hard tissue formation was inevitable; there would be a series of tiny firm beads beneath the skin. The flaw would be visual and textural.
Jasper sighed. A bad mood was coming on. At least he was alive? But he thought of all the wrist-snap exercises he completed so diligently each week. He had such nice flexor muscles. And now this.
It was still fresh. It would probably fade. He was not his father, and his arm was not his father’s ugly spider-bite leg. But beauty was security, Jasper knew that much. His father repeatedly fell in love with beautiful women who left. They had power because men desired them. This had been an epiphany for Jasper in his late teens—that he should start working out and investing in his own appearance too. He’d figure out how to live in a way that guaranteed he’d always be the one to leave and not vice versa.
Jasper started the coffee and as an afterthought opened his door to grab the paper. He read the headline and dropped the paper, then bent over and grabbed it and shut the door to his room as quickly as he could.
“Curious Nation Seeks Identity of Dolphin Savior.” Jasper looked to see which local paper he was holding, but it was national. Syndicated. Coast to coast, people were waking up to Jasper’s photo and asking themselves if they’d ever seen or known anyone who looked like him. His anonymous code had been breached.
Th
is was a red alert that required immediate action. It meant his hair had to go.
“I can do this,” he whispered, though he didn’t quite believe it. He’d heard a story about a man who’d had to amputate his own stuck limb to get to safety. The autoamputee had distracted himself with inspirational thoughts of family. Jasper no longer considered himself to have a family. If his father was still alive, they wouldn’t recognize each other; Jasper was scrawny and seventeen when he left the house and he’d never looked back. What did he find inspirational? Money, sex, flattery. All of which his hair had helped him get in abundance. Shaving it was somehow going to feel like wounding his penis. He couldn’t explain it but it just would. It was going to hurt all over. He’d likely have phantom pains afterward too, still feel it whipping around when he drove his convertible.
He let paranoia motivate him as he turned on the shaver: If he didn’t act fast there’d be a knock on his door at any moment, some crackerjack journalist whose unfulfilling childhood gave him a need for relentless success. Probably a whole crew of them. They’d likely already found and interviewed Moley E. and were en route to his hotel. He needed to have convincingly altered his appearance by the time they found him. The hair would be enough to raise a little doubt and let him escape while they rechecked their facts.
His goatee was easier to part with—he trimmed that frequently, sometimes incredibly short. It felt nice to have more of his face shine through. Perhaps cutting his hair wasn’t going to limit his pickup numbers at all; it was just going to shift their demographic. Over the next year’s regrowth period, he’d exclusively target women who preferred their men clean-cut. He could invent a military background.
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