“I’m not a violent person,” Jasper said. Tiny’s eyes glanced down at Jasper’s bare crotch again, just for a second. Jasper wished he didn’t have so many sores and abrasions from the chafing rubber pants.
“You’re not going to harm me?” Tiny asked. “In any way? Bad-touch categories included? Any touch at all from you right now would be a bad touch, to clarify.”
Jasper began putting his pants back on. It was easier to take another man’s word at face value when he was wearing pants. “Of course I’m not going to harm you.”
“Okay, good,” Tiny said. “So let’s move forward. You’re definitely fired. I’ll just tell everyone I caught you stealing cleaning supplies—this is for my sake, not yours; I don’t want to have to rehash this. But if you do something insane like put me down as a reference for another job, I will not blink twice before I tell them I caught you trying to have conjugal relations with a dolphin.”
“I wasn’t going to do that,” Jasper said quietly. “I was just going to touch it to the side of a dolphin.”
“I’m going to have to burn sage here,” Tiny said. “Everywhere you patrolled actually. I am going to really have to smoke it out.”
ON THE DRIVE BACK TO HIS STUDIO, JASPER FOUND HIMSELF CAREENING in and out of lanes as he wept. His modified station wagon now ferried a sizable cooler that did not feel empty at all but filled with Jasper’s dead dreams.
He wanted to drive the car straight onto the beach and into the ocean but knew that would result in an anticlimactic shutdown of the vehicle before its back tires even got wet; he’d also receive a hefty fine from beach patrol, who would ask him for identification, and given his current luck, the license would probably come back as being stolen. He’d probably been about to get fired for fraud anyway.
Tonight really had been his one chance. He’d blown it.
Pulling up at his shit-hole apartment only emphasized this. He’d told himself that living in misery was going to be such a fleeting means to an end. He remembered reading an interview with the CEO of Gogol, the company that made all the phones and gadgets and other stuff that everyone was hooked on in their daily lives. The one whose professional-grade microcameras were responsible for all the photos and videos of Jasper holding a dolphin on the beach. In the start-up days, the CEO said he’d just moved into an office space and worked on the floor in the corner—hadn’t even bought furniture!—because he was so driven that creature comforts were the least of his concerns. Jasper had told himself this was what he was doing too; he’d had tunnel vision because nothing mattered but getting Bella.
Now it was time to go inside and make a decision. Would he drive to the paid-for house with the pool that represented all the planned joy he wasn’t ever going to have? Would he go to another city, where he still wouldn’t be able to sleep with women and therefore couldn’t make decent money, especially if he wanted to work under an alias? His real name wasn’t safe; exes he’d conned whose parents or relatives had deep pockets probably also had private detectives who’d figured out his identity and were salivating, in wait for him to reappear.
Stepping indoors, he saw the outline of his blow-up mattress in the efficiency’s corner. It was covered with various plushy-dolphin stuffed animals he’d brought home from the Oceanarium gift shop and used in shameful ways. He’d been meaning to take them to the Laundromat but worried about someone seeing him washing a load of dolphin stuffed animals and making a call to the police based on a general hunch of something’s-weird-ness.
The apartment’s walls were haphazardly decorated with ripped-out print images he’d found, mainly in children’s activity books. One was a connect-the-dots illustration of a dolphin that he’d hung up right above his pillow. At the time he’d felt it was almost like a cave drawing, a symbolic representation made all the more meaningful by its crudeness: it was the lowest-passing image that could attempt to summarize the greatness of this creature. And in terms of his thoughts and feelings toward interspecies romance, he was a bit Paleolithic in a first-responder, early-on-the-scene type of way—sure, most people who heard about his plan would want to discuss reasons why he should not attempt to seize a dolphin from corporate ownership and pursue domestic cohabitation with the mammal, but the first guy who discovered fire probably had a lot of naysayers too. That’s how Jasper had felt these past few months—like a chosen pioneer. After all, he hadn’t asked for this attraction. He hadn’t been born with it. It had struck him, seemingly literally; dolphin cupid had hit him with cone-tooth-shaped arrows and he hadn’t lusted for a human being since.
But it was clear to Jasper now that natural selection had not called out his name. The roster had been posted. He hadn’t made the team.
He walked into the bathroom and looked at the tub he’d prefilled for Bella that morning.
That was the closest he was going to get to Bella now—the bathwater he’d intended for her to be in.
Tiny had ruined Jasper’s shot at not becoming a Shakespearean tragedy. Maybe, Jasper thought, he should just embrace it. If the dolphin that attacked him on the beach had wanted Jasper to meet his end in a watery grave, well, it was about to get its wish.
He’d had a good run. Jasper, you scoundrel, you’ve had a good run—he thought this and looked in the dark bathroom mirror and gave himself a congratulatory wink. He could go live it up first with the cash he had left—the life earnings of all his cons, the nest egg he was going to use to fund his life with Bella. But live it up how? The only things he enjoyed were sex and conning people out of money (by having great sex with them), and he couldn’t do the latter anymore, and with the former he couldn’t cover any new ground unless he had a live dolphin, and he didn’t.
He could leave a note identifying himself as the true Dolphin Savior. Who knew if anyone would believe it, but he could try. To add validity to this claim, he could put his stockpiled money in a bank account and leave a list of all the women he’d conned—he’d do his best, anyway, to remember—along with the Dolphin Savior note. Jasper could pretend he was riddled with guilt about what he’d done to the women. He could write that seeing another man being a fraud in public made him realize what a fraud he was himself, and that he wanted his victims to divide up the money in whatever way seemed fair.
But ultimately he didn’t have the energy. It was time to move on. Jasper felt the familiar antsy feeling, centered in his gut with twitchy roots moving down into his crotch and thighs, that preceded all of his relocations, except magnified to a degree he understood as being the actual end.
He didn’t just need to leave the town or the state this time. He had to go Elsewhere, forever.
JASPER DRAINED THE TUB AND REFILLED IT WITH WARM WATER, climbed inside, and placed a razor on the nightstand. He wanted to do the cutting underwater. It could get all red and cloudy and feel like an attack, which was what had started this nightmare. He’d been attacked and it had left him a different person, and he did not care to go through life being that person. With Bella, with the ability to feel satisfied, he could’ve done it. He’d been excited to try at least. Though that would not have been a very carefree, easy sort of life to maintain. It might have gone down in flames in a far worse way than this.
And he had won so often, for so long. He’d known it wasn’t possible to win forever. Jasper hadn’t expected his streak to end this soon, or to end in such a weird way. But since it had, here he was.
Just to make sure he had enough motivation to go through with it—he didn’t want to have second thoughts halfway—he grabbed the Gogol tablet he’d permanently borrowed from one of the Oceanarium’s educational classrooms and pulled up the Dolphin Savior’s hit song.
As the song began playing, an ad popped up in the corner of the screen: a bikinied woman was giving him a seductive wink. Her face reminded him a bit of a former con’s—Nele? Christina?
Maybe it was a sign. He clicked on the ad and decided to try one last time to get aroused by a human woman. Life or death.
; The bikinied woman leaned forward to speak, her lips hovering just above her cleavage. “Complex, individual problems require customized solutions,” she said, shaking her hips a little. “Solutions as unique as the individuals who need them.” The sound of hopeful string music began to play.
Jasper lowered the volume. The ad’s content wasn’t as sexy as he’d hoped. But her body was great—that’s what he needed to focus on.
“We work one-on-one with people whose wishes can’t be answered by mainstream technology,” the woman continued. He had to stop himself from staring at the water, watching it ripple.
He realized he was hoping a dolphin might appear.
Sighing, Jasper watched as another bikini-clad woman pushed a quadriplegic male amputee several decades her senior down the beach in a wheelchair. Two more women—also bikini clad but wearing safety goggles and unbuttoned white lab coats—were approaching. They were carrying something together, balancing it on their right shoulders. Was it a kayak?
It was not. They stopped and stood it upright in the sand. It looked like the back half of a rigid wet suit. Together, the three women picked the man up and snapped the suit around the back of his body like a cell-phone case.
And just like that, he was standing upright. The man let out a high-pitched whistle and an unmanned Jet Ski came bounding across the water at high speed. It stopped at his feet like a well-trained dog, idling. The man climbed onto the Jet Ski. How old was he, exactly? Eighty-two? The bikini-clad woman who’d been pushing his wheelchair then climbed onto the Jet Ski, and he lowered himself down so she could climb atop his shoulders. The other women joined too, stepping out of their lab coats, tossing their safety goggles to the sand, wrapping around the man in a big sandwich. They Jet-Skied off into the water and somehow even over the motor, even as they receded farther into the distance, the sound of them giggling together was very clear.
“The possibilities of tomorrow can be yours today,” the voice-over encouraged. “Come to Biotech Medical and let the future help you. Biotech, a subsidiary of Gogol.”
13
HAZEL MOTORED INTO THE HOUSE TO FIND HER FATHER SITTING BETWEEN Diane and his newest doll, also a redhead. “Knock first!” he yelled.
“You could also lock the door, Dad.” Hazel stood and turned around, surreptitiously taking the brick of cash out of her pants, then placed it on the coffee table. “Here’s some cash. It’s about a year’s rent. But I have a better proposal—I’m taking you to Gogol’s medical facilities. I appreciate it that you didn’t want to tell me, and if you want, we don’t have to talk about it at all. You can just pack a suitcase and we’ll get into a cab. The whole way there, we can talk about the weather or baseball or make a ranked, ordered list of the ways I’ve most disappointed you. I won’t bring up the cancer. I’ll come spend each day there with you too, or if you’d rather be alone that’s fine. I’ll visit as much or as little as you’d like. You can call all the shots.”
“I know I can call the shots, Hazel. It’s my damn life.” Looking at him nestled there between Di and the second doll, what struck Hazel was how the dolls’ expressions stayed unchanged and bubbly no matter what words were said around them. It was as if they were in a country where they didn’t speak much of the language and had misinterpreted the conversation as a lighthearted one, or were willfully trying to keep the party going despite a developing scuffle. Maybe she could talk to Byron about this. Gogol surely could make a sex doll whose face was appropriately responsive to conversational stimuli. Then again, that was probably a terrible idea. Hazel felt a pang of nausea imagining the customers who’d be delighted to have a doll whose face looked worried when yelled at, or a doll who cried.
“I agree; it is your life. So let’s go save it.”
He slid his glasses down to the end of his nose and squinted, which was what he did when super-perplexed. As a teenager she’d called it his “Chancellor Moleman” expression. He looked like an underground creature who’d had to surface for a practical errand, to file some sort of paperwork on behalf of his species, and was repulsed by everything he saw in the daylight.
“That’s why I didn’t bring it up, Hazel. I knew you’d want me to go to some crackpot laboratory. I didn’t want you to take it personal, kiddo. It’s not like if we got along better I’d want to try to live forever. I’m done with treatment.”
“What you’ve tried is basic compared to what’s possible. You can’t just give up and die.”
He smiled, which to Hazel hurt more than anything. She wanted him to yell and tell her it was none of her business, or say that he probably got sick in the first place from worrying about all her bad decisions. He could even tell her she was such a failure that dying would give him some peace. Anything to keep some distance from this gruff man she’d always cared about despite herself.
Distance had always been their agreement. It was how he’d been able to go his way while she went hers. This smile that drew her closer was not something she could protect herself from. “Hazelbear,” he said. She felt ill. When had he last used that name? “Too much of anything is torture. I’ve seen the movie. I know how it ends and I don’t need to sit through it again. I’d hoped you’d be moving along about the time the going gets rough. I don’t know how much longer that will be, but I wanted to spare you. How’d you find out?”
Hazel considered lying: she wanted him to believe she’d figured it out by herself, through her very own cleverness.
“Byron. This Sleep Helmet I wore. It diagnoses illnesses in those around you.”
He made the Chancellor Mole face again. “Do you see what I mean? It’s my time. The world that made sense to me has retired.”
“Don’t end your life over a stupid helmet invention.” Hazel wanted a reason for his giving up that she could accept, and she hadn’t heard it yet. “Is it because of Mom? What you saw when she did the treatments?”
“It’s because I’m done. And I want to spend the short time I’ve got left in my own home surrounded by beautiful women. Or replicas of them. Whatever. I’ve never been picky.”
“Okay,” Hazel said. She let out a long exhale. Despite what this meant for his health, she had to work not to smile. She felt so relieved that she didn’t have to go back to The Hub. “Well, I’m here for you. I’ll be here with you till the end.”
Her father shook his head. “I appreciate that, Hazel. I don’t think it’s wise though. You always have a hard time staying out of trouble, but the stench of crisis on you now is at an all-time high.”
“Dad, don’t die alone.” Also, don’t kick me out, she thought.
“Hazel.” He took Di’s left hand and the other doll’s right hand. “I won’t be alone. That’s what the gals are for. Meet Roxy. Also, I think we should all be drinking.”
“Are you worried about the gross parts? Don’t be. I’m so glad you’re not a machine! Bodies breaking down . . . that’s what Byron wants to stop, but there’s something special about it. ‘Special’ is the wrong word. Correct? Orderly? Maybe even benevolent? The fact that we end. A body that’s in the woods long enough will deteriorate into nothing. We’re guests that clean up after ourselves. That’s, like, a sign of our goodness in a way? Our cells if not us? I don’t want you to feel embarrassed. I’m sure you never thought about me having to change your diaper or something. But to me it’s like, you’re real. You’re separate from things that are manufactured.”
“Jesus Christ, Hazel. Byron really did a number on you, didn’t he?”
He did. Hazel walked over to the mirror on the wall and stared. Looking at herself meant that in several hours she’d be looking at Byron.
It was possible that her father would change his mind when the going got tough. She could keep working on him. But he was stubborn, and for the moment wouldn’t budge, so she decided to take the opportunity to tell Byron to go to hell since she’d hopefully be begging for his forgiveness soon, calling to tell him they’d had a change of heart and were ready to be picked up. “Byr
on,” she said aloud, “he doesn’t want the help. But thank you for the offer.” In the background reflection, Hazel saw her father’s eyes go wide.
“Who the hell are you talking to?” Then he smiled and in a half-joking voice asked, “That mirror’s not some kind of spy camera, right? Byron hasn’t been watching us?”
Hazel could only imagine what living room ménage à trois antics her father and crew had performed.
“Don’t worry, Dad. When you’re alone, you really are alone. At least I think you are. I’m a different story.”
“Huh? Hazel, you’re not making any damn sense.”
“I’m just kidding,” she said. “Forget it.”
Part of Hazel wanted to go down to the bar to meet Liver, but then she had an image of him gravesitting for her father’s own grave and she decided to just take the night off everything. Instead she’d go out back to the porch and sleep in the casket box while her dying father slept in the next room with two women who were never alive.
In the morning she’d try to decide what the hell to do. If it was better, after her father was taken care of, of course, to live out her days inside Byron’s spyglass. Or if it was preferable to take herself out and make Byron’s screen go black.
It was nighttime, and now that she didn’t have to sleep next to Byron she felt a little like masturbating. But then he would see it and know all the embarrassing scenarios she thought of to help her orgasm. He’d hear her come. Her mind thought forward: as she got older and softer and probably more out of shape, he’d see her naked body and its sagging contours, intimate sights meant to be viewed through a loving lens. He’d see them all. And if she one day found a significant other, everyone she met and cared about, actually—he’d see them too.
Made for Love Page 18