Jasper began to smile his old smile, the smile that came at the successful end of a good con. A smile from his former self.
It didn’t feel the slightest bit familiar, though. Everything about him felt replaced and new.
JASPER WATCHED VODA EAT SEVERAL POUNDS OF SHRIMP BEFORE deciding to stand on the opposite end of the room and eat a lot of shrimp as well. Everyone except Jasper was wearing a lab coat. They’d placed him in a nondescript gray sweat suit.
When the soiree began to break up, Jasper wondered why he wasn’t taken with the urge to try to leave—was he free to go?
“Well, well,” Voda said, walking over. “It all came together. It’s so exciting when something surprises you. Perfection isn’t the norm in experimental neurosurgery.”
“That was fun,” Jasper said. He meant it. Then he realized this was something people said, with sincerity, at the end of actual dates that they had enjoyed. Through the years, with many a con, he’d been forced to watch lots of romantic comedy films where this happened.
Was there something he liked about Voda? They had just slept together, though he didn’t feel like they had. The dolphin imagery had been that real. But hypothetically, that could explain whatever sense of fondness he was currently feeling. Couldn’t it? His cons always seemed more wrapped up in him after the relationship got sexual, even though he himself had never felt that way.
Was he feeling something?
“It was fun for me too, Jasper. Few of my career wins have had such a pleasurable physical dimension. And you’re in pretty good shape.”
He nodded, wanting to return the compliment.
“You’re a lot more energetic than I expected. Especially for smoking so much.”
“I do all right for having had cancer twenty-eight times.”
Jasper choked on his shrimp a little. He’d made small talk at plenty of happy hours but had never heard that one. Regaining his composure, he said, “Well, you look great, all things considered.”
“Sounds worse than it is. We nip it at the nanophase. The procedure’s less invasive than a dental cleaning.”
Jasper scratched his head. “That’s um . . . an option?”
“Not for many. Say, Jasper, I saw where you’re living. Not personally, but I got the idea. I have a big house and I’d like to keep an eye on you for a bit. Do you want to stay with me for a while?”
Jasper found himself nodding. He didn’t ever want to see that efficiency again, or any person or part of any of his old lives. Any of them. What would be better than a nice place where he could hide away from the world?
He knew his old self would be freaking out right now. Cohabitation with a strange woman he’d just met! But something about Voda felt familiar. Felt great, actually. He was looking forward to spending more time with her.
III
IT’S SO FOOLISH TO LIVE (WHICH IS ALWAYS TROUBLE ENOUGH) AND NOT TO SAVE YOUR SOUL.
—WILLA CATHER
16
JASPER’S YEARS OF SWINDLING HAD MADE HIM AN IDEAL HOUSEGUEST: very tidy, overtly accommodating. Not that there was anything to clean. Everything cleaned itself. His days were spent like the most Zen security guard ever, strolling the home’s vast interior grounds, stopping to appreciate the koanlike stillness of the machines’ various hums. In any given room, he had no idea where the control boxes and panels were stored. They were hidden from surface view, tucked away like sleeping animals.
The only place off-limits to him was Voda’s home office. There were several surveillance cameras in front of it, but the largest was programmed to detect and follow motion. Jasper liked to do really slow dance moves in front of it and make its eye follow his limbs around.
He also still enjoyed looking at his reflection. Almost every surface in Voda’s house was reflective; it was like he’d moved into a house made of mirrors. Which was something he used to daydream about.
His days of relative freedom gave him lots of time to contemplate various ironies. Foremost, Voda was the richest woman he had ever met, let alone slept with. But he couldn’t swindle Voda. Somehow she knew everything about him; there didn’t seem to be much that she didn’t know everything about. But he also didn’t have the urge to swindle her.
Not once had he come close to falling in love with any of the women who’d fallen in love with him. And Voda wasn’t falling in love. She really liked having sex with him, despite knowing he was visualizing a dolphin. But then she’d go work, or exercise or read or watch something, and how he spent his time didn’t seem to matter to her.
Jasper understood that he hadn’t gotten his sea legs yet when it came to morality, so when he did finally work up the courage to approach the subject, he did so with caution. “I guess I notice that you don’t love me,” he said.
She looked up from her book, interested. If she was interested, it meant he was speaking about something related to her work. Knowing this caused Jasper to feel a little awful. It was a new feeling. He seemed to be having foreign sensations all the time now, living and being with Voda. He might liken this one to someone crumpling up a large piece of paper inside his stomach.
“Are you saying you love me?” she asked. “How certain are you?”
“Totally certain,” he answered, surprising himself. “I know that I love you. I think about you all the time. I hate being apart from you. I’ve never had that before, with anyone.” His former self would’ve felt so defeated by the situation. In a twofold way: defeated to have this feeling, and defeated to be honestly admitting it. But it felt good to get it off his chest. And since so many women had loved him, it didn’t seem far-fetched to hope the one woman he turned out to love might feel the same.
Except she didn’t. “You’re young and handsome,” Voda said. “But you’re right; I don’t love you.” She exhaled and sat back in her seat. Her posture made it look like the chair was moving forward at a great speed: her legs were spread wide, sticking out of the bottom of her white lab coat; her small feet were extending outward to form a large V. Voda was always in a lab coat, except when they went to bed; then she changed into a nightgown that looked a lot like a lab coat, except instead of buttons the front clasped together with a magnetic strip.
“Do you think you could ever grow to love me?” Jasper felt his voice crack. He sounded like his father. Once that would’ve devastated him, but now he felt hard-pressed to care.
“Don’t worry about me,” she told him. “I don’t have time for dating. You’re in no danger of being replaced.”
He’d been good at pretending to love people, and now he decided to try to simply reverse course and pretend he was loved. It wasn’t that difficult because Voda liked to be touched. In his previous relationships, he’d cuddled and spooned and massaged and neck-nibbled to give his cons a false sense of security. His body language with them had been genuine in terms of arousal, but the implied affection was a lie. Now he was doing all the same things with Voda, but with her his touch spoke the truth. He’d developed a fondness for everything about her. Even the aged crepe of her skin. He loved running his hand down the length of her sprawled body again and again, like he was brushing the fur of an anesthetized leopard.
Guilt about his previous life was hitting him hard, though. When she wasn’t home, he’d begun spending more and more time crying in Voda’s atrium, which had a haunting, glazed feel to it. All the plants were faux succulents made of porcelain. She’d had living ones once but said her smoking had killed them all no matter what she’d tried. He was pretty sure she saw everything he did during the day, or could see it if she wanted to, but he did his best to hide these crying spells until he couldn’t.
One evening he lost track of time, became so melancholy that he didn’t realize the sun had set and he was weeping in the dark. Jasper heard the pack of vaccu-dogs coming down the hallway, smelled Voda’s fog of nicotine. When she entered and the lights came on, he was sprawled out on the floor in the center of the room next to a large ceramic fern. “I’m sorry,” h
e sobbed. “Please don’t kick me out. I promise I’m not as awful a person as I used to be.”
“You’re feeling a toxic amount of empathy,” Voda said. The cloud of smoke she exhaled fell flat with gravity; instead of hanging atop her head it sank in the air, almost like a dirty car window being rolled down. He looked up to see Voda’s forehead wrinkling with worry. “You’re going through empathy puberty. It’s all coming in at once and overwhelming you. I didn’t mean for that to happen. Not to this extent.”
Jasper swallowed. “What did you mean to happen?” He suddenly felt guilty that he’d estranged himself from his father, that he’d never contacted his mother after she left.
He had a vague memory of his mother telling him that she didn’t sleep through a single night until he was three years old; every few hours she’d keep getting seized with the fear that he’d stopped breathing and go check on him. He thought about this a lot after she left. If that was true, how could she move out when he was still a kid?
But what did he know about her life outside him, really? He’d left his father too. When she left, it had felt like solidarity with his dad for him to refuse his mother’s calls and return the mail she sent. He’d been so mad. But even mad this had been hard to do. There was a game he and his father used to play where they would come up with worst-possible-life scenarios for his absentee mother to be living out at that very moment. Maybe she’s dating a circus clown, his father would say, and she’s severely allergic to the greasepaint he wears and it never fully washes off him, so she’s always broken out in terrible rashes. And all they eat is circus food because they sleep in the back of a van that they drive from show to show and don’t have a refrigerator to store meat and produce. Plus they get a discount at the circus concession stand, which they need because they’re so poor. Seniority wise this guy is the most junior clown and he also gets the least laughs from the audience each night so management keeps paying him less. And for months all he and your mother have eaten are cotton candy and elephant ears. Her teeth are rotting out and she’s gaining weight even as she’s becoming malnourished. She’s gotten so unattractive that the clown has started cheating on her with one of the trapeze artists because he feels that infidelities that take place in midair don’t count. Then his father would look to him for a contribution. Well, the clown snores, Jasper would add, and his dad would nod and say, Nice, but think of something bad about her life related to the circus. So Jasper would think and say, Maybe there are cages with lions and tigers that always get set up next to where their van parks at night. Their van gets boxed in by the lion and tiger cages in every town no matter how hard they strategize. And she’s so scared of the lions and tigers and hates walking by the cages so much that most of the time instead of getting out of the van to go to the bathroom she pees into one of the concession stand fountain drink cups and then pours it out the van window. Except the smell of fresh human urine makes the lions and tigers go crazy, so they roar and growl all night and she’s either wide awake and terrified or asleep and having nightmares to a sound track of wild cats snarling inches away. And his dad would say, Good. That’s a bad life.
In hindsight, as an adolescent it was kind of a bad life playing that game with his father. It was kind of a bad life the way they stopped using the word “mom” after Mom left and started using the word “she,” and “she” meant “absent mom” until his dad began dating and sometimes marrying a new woman, who got to have a name while she lived in the house but relinquished it upon her exit and became the new “she.”
“I meant for you to fall in love with me so you’d live here and I could keep having sex with you,” Voda said. “I’m busy and this is a convenient arrangement. I wasn’t trying to turn you into a Boy Scout. I thought full-throttle sympathy stimulation on your brain would be like throwing a paper towel into a volcano. But look at you—a full month post-op and you’re spewing regret everywhere! You’re feeling a level of guilt that’s . . . admirable.”
What she was saying about his conscience was true. He could feel it growing steadily no matter what he did, as painful and insistent as hunger. “Damn it,” Voda added, then she picked up a clay rhododendron and hurled it against the wall. It shattered and the robot vacuums momentarily circled the carnage like buzzards, adjusting their internal settings to the specifications of the spill before zooming forward to eat up the shards. Jasper suddenly had the clearest, most frightening image in his head: his own bisected corpse on the floor, the skin of his chest peeled back like opened curtains, the pack of vacuum robots feasting on the mess of his organs.
“Would they eat a person?” Jasper asked. “Like what if I tripped and fell by accident?”
“If you feel up for intercourse, we can have one last go. Otherwise I think our cohabitation experiment has concluded. There’s a guest casita out back you can sleep in for a few days if you’d like, but tomorrow you’ll need to leave.”
THE WALLS OF THE CASITA’S BEDROOM WERE A PINKISH PLASTER that looked indistinguishable from spread frosting. He found himself briefly fantasizing about fantasizing. In his old life, he’d be imagining that he was waiting inside a giant cake right now—that soon, wearing an edible loincloth, a slice of the wall would be removed via forklift, and he would exit out into a giant reception hall where hundreds of newly divorced women were celebrating the end of their nuptials, ready to use his body to make their dirtiest rebound fantasies come true.
Instead he found his morning erection a tiresome presence; he was too wracked with guilt and sadness to want to think about dolphins or Voda or anything. His new brain seemed to be forcefully devoting him to redemption.
But maybe some part of him had always wanted that? Staring up at the ceiling fan, he thought about something Voda had told him one night. They’d been watching a show called Definitely Cheating where suspicious partners brought camera crews home to interrupt their spouses’ acts of adultery.
Jasper was shocked to find himself outraged. He was flooded with an unfamiliar attitude of How could they? and mentioned this to Voda. He also found it surprising that every accused partner was, in fact, definitely cheating. Not once did the camera crew burst in to find the other spouse baking a chicken or doing sit-ups or grouting some tile.
Voda had shrugged. “People are obsessed with the concept of free will,” she’d said. “But from a neurochemical standpoint I think that’s insane. Hormones, genetics, experience—our choices aren’t that independent. Why is everyone so afraid of letting science help? If a couple wants to guarantee they stay faithful to each other, I could actually do that. It’s still too risky an operation to put into common practice, but pretend the procedure is harmless. A lot of people would balk and tell me that renders fidelity meaningless, because free will is what makes it count. But you can’t depend on free will. To say to someone else, ‘I won’t cheat because I decided to make myself incapable of arousal outside our relationship’—isn’t that a much deeper commitment?”
Jasper had shifted in his chair. If Voda was a little insane, he told himself, that wasn’t a huge problem. As long as she didn’t do more operations on him. “They couldn’t get aroused with someone else? Or they just wouldn’t want to?”
“It wouldn’t work to make them physically incapable of fulfilling desires they still had. That would breed unhappiness—discord between the mind and the body. It’s the urge to be unfaithful that gets removed. Why is that bad? They voice a desire for fidelity, so I silence a lesser desire that might get in the way of it. They choose what gets privileged in their brains.”
Jasper hadn’t desired empathy. But if Voda had “privileged” it for him, didn’t that mean it had to have already been there? The tiniest pilot light? It was easier to accept the fate of having to begin doing right by others if it felt like it was actually coming from him. Even a really small part of him that he would’ve formerly ignored every time.
There was a knock on the door and Jasper fell out of bed in his rush to answer; he half-crawled and h
alf-ran because surely Voda had changed her mind about him leaving. Maybe she’d even performed surgery on herself (could neurosurgeons do that, he wondered, the way tattoo artists could?) and now loved and desired him in the same way that he ached for her—they could be a force of altruism together, an unlikely union devoted to the good of all humanity!
But the woman standing at the door was not at all Voda. She was much taller, and wearing a plastic rabbit mask. “Hello,” she said. She held a small device in front of her lips that changed her voice to make it sound like a chipmunk’s and was carrying a refrigerated lunch pail. “May I come in?”
“I guess,” he said. “This isn’t my house.”
She entered and took a seat on the sofa. Jasper could tell that if she were to take the mask off, she’d be very attractive. She had that confident movement, that specific ease of being in the world. “You don’t know me,” she said.
“I’ll have to take your word for it,” he answered. “What’s with the mask?”
“Voda and I are close,” she replied. “Colleagues, confidantes. What she did to you is messed up, in my opinion. That’s nothing I haven’t said to her face, by the way. And now she’s making you leave.”
“Oh,” Jasper said, scratching his leg. “You’re like the person who comes with a box and makes sure I get my things from my desk without making a scene. If I worked here and had a desk and possessions, I mean. I don’t. Let me grab my car keys and flip-flops.”
“No, wait. I have a proposal for you.” The rabbit woman opened the cooler and held up a syringe. “Voda told me you’re burdened with a swollen conscience. You’re driven to be a do-gooder now, right? I know how you can begin. It’s very risky. I feel that to adequately repent for past wrongs, to do it in a way that matters, you have to put your life in danger. Do you feel that way?”
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