“Absolutely not!” Jasper yelled. But then he took another look at Liver and put on the turn signal to exit.
19
JASPER WAS NOT SURE ABOUT CRITTER OR SPLEEN OR WHATEVER the man’s name was. Hazel had admitted she’d only known him for a few weeks, alleged they’d met by chance at a bar.
What if it wasn’t by chance? What if the guy was working for Gogol?
Jasper wished for the scenario to be closer to what he’d envisioned signing up for in the first place—just him and a de-chipped Hazel, making their escape.
Instead he now found himself blindfolded between two sex mannequins, listening to Liver narrate about some friend of his who owned a manure farm with forty acres of forest behind it. “Essentially a Bermuda triangle of undiscovered evidence. Chippy keeps to himself down on the farm,” Liver stressed. “And due to the property’s remote location and odor, his privacy is universally respected.”
Jasper didn’t want to have to trust another person—Liver was already one more than he’d been planning on—and he tried to voice this protest in the politest way possible. “It’s just that if he sees me and Hazel and then later gets offered a persuasive bribe, say . . .”
“Chippy won’t know you’re there,” Liver said. “I’m going to stay behind and make sure your tracks are covered. You’ll be long gone before Chippy would get wind of it. That’s what I’m telling you. It’s the place.”
THE PLACE, OFF AN OVERGROWN TRAIL INSIDE A SERIES OF DENSE woods, was essentially a parallel universe. Its fauna looked like crude near-replicas of living things. All the plants’ evolution seemed to have been dependent on retainer trays they’d been too lax about wearing and their biological design had therefore slipped back a few hundred centuries. The bark of the pine trees was coated with a powdery orange spice. Liver and Jasper somberly carried the cooler with the air of two pallbearers, one on each side, while Hazel carried Liver’s rucksack and the shovel.
The tall grass was waxier and more juice-filled than Hazel was used to grass being. It made her feel squeamish, like she was stepping on bugs.
Jasper looked like he was having a breakdown. His eyes were watering; he’d put his shirt over his nose and mouth to provide a thin filter for the smell. “I just don’t want to die out here,” he said again. He’d said it a few times since they’d arrived. “I feel like we should get moving soon. It would be an irony, right, to get found and killed because we stopped to have a funeral.”
“Sorry,” Hazel said. “I need to.” She had a lot of sympathy for Jasper. It was generous of him to be risking so much for her. In the car he’d talked about a woman he was in love with, a woman he was never going to see again. It’s almost like she died, he said.
Not being Byron’s wife anymore, if the chip deactivation worked, meant the rest of Hazel’s life would be as if she’d died too. That would be the perception of everyone. That Hazel was gone, forever.
“I think here will work,” Liver said. “Lots of trees and shrub cover. This spot okay?”
Hazel nodded and they set down the cooler; Liver enlisted Jasper to go back to the car with him and get Di and Roxy, and Hazel was left alone with dusk drawing near. She felt exhausted and still a little drugged and sat down on the cooler without thinking for a moment, then remembered its contents and stood back up. She was thirsty and looking at the cooler felt strange. Her brain kept telling her to open the lid, insisting it had to be filled with drinks. Why couldn’t that miracle happen—why couldn’t she peer inside and find that her father’s body had been transformed into rows and rows of frosted beer bottles?
Jasper was heading down the trail with Roxy, carrying her via piggyback to better bear the load. Liver came into view on the path a few minutes later ferrying Di. Hazel hadn’t thought to put them into more modest clothing before they’d left the house. Di had on a sequinned tube top and an orange miniskirt; Roxy was wearing a bikini top and spandex underwear that read CELEBRATE across the backside. They placed a doll on either side of the cooler and all gathered in front of it.
“Should we all say a few words?” Liver asked.
“He was dead when I met him,” Jasper said.
“I’m sure he didn’t mean anything personal by it,” Liver answered. A natural moment of silence followed. “I noticed he spoke his mind,” Liver said. “That can be a good quality. Well, sometimes.”
Hazel thought for a moment. What had she admired most about him? There were a lot of things he managed not to get addicted to, which she thought was impressive if someone lived to old age. He never tried, to her knowledge, to ruin anyone’s life on purpose. “Sometimes he made me laugh,” she said.
“Should we have the dolls pretend to say something?” Jasper asked. “We could do voices for them.” Hazel saw Liver’s face start to twitch. “Like they were in love? I know I mentioned that I recently fell in love, for the very first time. Things didn’t work out though. Oh well. It sort of feels like being buried alive, actually. In a way. I can’t get out from underneath it to think about anything else. Ha! It’s like it’s pinning me down every moment.” He started to cry a little, which Hazel thought was actually good, even though the tears weren’t technically for her father. It was a funeral and any tears counted.
Liver placed his hand on Hazel’s shoulder. “Do you want some time alone with him?”
She shook her head. If the chip was still working, time alone with him wasn’t even possible. “What’s the plan for the body?”
“Can Hazel and I have a moment?” Liver turned to Jasper. “Why don’t you wait in the car? She’ll be down soon.”
Jasper nodded eagerly. “I’ll have the engine going.”
Hazel reached out and gripped Liver’s hand. She couldn’t tell if he liked this or merely tolerated it. He wasn’t big on reciprocal touch, but he didn’t pull away either.
Now she felt the urge to weep building up inside her too, followed by a sense of shame that her own tears weren’t for her father either. She’d nearly gotten Liver killed once before; she should be the one insisting that he stay far away from her. But seeing him again after she thought he was dead might have been the one thing that happened in her life where the reality of things turned out to be better than she expected. The time she’d spent with him had felt like she was making new memories. Everything besides Liver seemed like nothing more than dealing with her past mistakes.
Liver was squinting toward the sunset. His wrinkled eyelids looked like glossy walnut shells. “Hey now. Let’s pack up the tears. You’re better off with me not coming. I stick out in certain situations. I’ll handle burying your dad.” He didn’t seem able to take his eyes off the sky. Was he also tearing up a little? It looked like he was reading words off a giant teleprompter in the clouds. “I’m going to nestle some explosives in the cooler with him. If anyone tries to disturb his peace, boom. And I’ll sit with the grave for a while. It’s what I do. If your brain turns out to be fixed, maybe we’ll see each other again sometime.”
He kissed her and Hazel felt more tears come. She was sad she’d given up a normal life for a chance at a special one with Byron and it hadn’t turned out to be special at all. Before him, back when she’d planned on having a somewhat regular existence, it was probably love that she’d wanted most out of life. She’d really thought love would develop. It didn’t.
Love hadn’t developed with Liver either, but she had a fondness for him and it felt horrible to let it go.
“Are you going to bury the three of them together?” Hazel asked. “A mass grave?” Watching Roxy’s hair flutter in the wind, it seemed strange to put the dolls underground. Even motionless they looked full of vitality and spirit, far more than she or Jasper or Liver did, ready to go let loose on a dance floor or grab front-row seats on a roller coaster. “On second thought, maybe Dad wouldn’t want that. He’d probably tell me to make sure they went on and had the time of their lives. Maybe they could stay with you?”
Liver winked. “I’ll try to show them a
good time then. Hope to see you again,” he said. “I don’t say that much.” He turned and began wheeling the cooler off the path. Hazel started walking in the other direction, straight toward the sun. It felt like it was burning her tears out. When she got to the end of the trail and had to turn to the car, she looked back for one final glimpse. Liver was hoisting one of the dolls up into his arms, carrying her tenderly, as though she had broken her foot. Then he disappeared into the brush.
20
HAZEL WAS FLIPPING THROUGH RADIO STATIONS WHEN JASPER SUDDENLY hit the brakes and twisted the dial to shut the music off. “Sorry,” he said. “I can’t take that ‘Saving You Saved Me’ song. It’s a long story but that music gives me thoughts that bring on strange feelings.”
Now Jasper looked even more motionless than Di and Roxy had been capable of—he seemed to have been taxidermied in the blink of an eye. There was something off about his posture—he was trying to cover up his lap. Oh, Hazel realized. It could be a stress response, maybe. A fear erection? She wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt. For some reason it seemed more hopeful than creepy, like a divining rod pointing to a better tomorrow for both of them.
It was actually difficult not to stare at his lap. He was an attractive man; there was no doubting that. But she didn’t know anything about him and felt overcome by a desire to keep it that way. He was really starting to make her wonder.
And they hadn’t discussed what she was going to do or what he was going to do if her noon download happened tomorrow. Did he have a backup strategy? Hers was round two of the pill bottles. She’d brought several with her, an arrangement Jasper might want to get in on.
Hazel put her hand on his arm as it gripped the steering wheel, then took it away. With his obvious arousal, no matter where she put her hands on his body she felt like she was touching his penis.
If the chip hadn’t deactivated, this could be her last chance ever to sleep with someone. Though it was probably best not to make Byron want Jasper dead even more than he already would. Bad enough that she’d just considered it.
“Do you think we should split up soon?” she asked. “If the chip’s still working, it’s better for you if I don’t know where you are.” She checked her watch—7 PM. Jasper had nearly seventeen hours to get as far away as possible. “If you go now, you could be on the other side of the world by download time.”
“Let’s get you a little farther away first.” He shifted in his seat; he seemed to be trying to get his condition under control. “Where should I drive you?”
Hazel had no idea. “Just away, I guess. If you asked me where I don’t want to go I could tell you. I only seem able to wish for things through a process of elimination. It can only be ‘I guess I want this because I don’t really really not want it.’ Like I hate pain, for example.”
“Well, for money I used to pretend to love people,” Jasper said. “So I can’t really offer you wisdom about yearning and its ideal state.”
Hazel looked out her car window, and considered. “I sort of pretended to love someone for money too. I mean, it wasn’t my idea. To date or marry him. But when it fell into my lap, it was hard for me to conceive of a scenario where I turned down a multimillionaire’s marriage proposal.” Byron really hadn’t seemed horrible at first, just strange. And who wasn’t? Though she hadn’t tried very hard to look for something horrible. It would’ve needed to be pretty glaring, though. “Marry me and then don’t worry about anything ever; be relatively immune to the vast majority of life’s material consequences” was an easy sell. “I really planned on it being a marriage, though. You know how when you learn to ride a bike? How you’re being pushed or supported or whatever but then it’s all you? I thought I’d train myself to love him. I’d never been in love but it seemed easier than a lot of things people train themselves to do. I don’t know, like bodybuilding. Though I’ve never done that either. But romantic love seemed very ‘how hard could it be?’-ish. At the very least I thought I could reach a point of stasis. You know, ‘this is good enough; this is void of acute suffering.’” Jasper guided the car onto the freeway, which made Hazel think of cameras, tollbooths, roadblocks. But they could just as easily be trapped and ambushed on a rural dirt road. “You never accidentally fell in love?” she asked. “The pretending never led to something more?”
“No,” he said. “I never felt like I was in the risk group for that.”
Hazel studied Jasper’s face. “What’s it like to be so good-looking?”
“I’m just driving, by the way. I have no idea where I’m going.”
“That’s fine. I just wondered if you’ve always been really attractive.”
Aimless driving was the way she and her friends would hang out without being supervised in high school. They’d circle the same blocks for hours, listening to music and smoking pot and making out and swearing. They drove around for so long they could’ve left town and gone somewhere interesting and gotten back by curfew, but nothing seemed like it would be more fun. Hazel couldn’t decide whether this was an example of contentment or of failure of imagination. Odd, Hazel realized, that those nights were probably the safest she’d ever felt in her life: as the backseat passenger in a car piloted by a stoned teenage driver who maybe only had his learner’s permit. But she’d been away from the critical eye of her parents, away from any form of obligation, away from any feelings that weren’t numb giggles.
“I was sort of goofy in middle school,” Jasper said. “I didn’t get hot until later.”
Maybe she was hitting on him; she couldn’t decide. It did seem dumb not to sleep together if they were both about to die. That sentiment was the most famous joke ever, wasn’t it? We’re gonna die so let’s do this? What was true of her in high school was probably true of her now, and maybe just as sad: if presented with a variety of options and activities, what she’d choose to do, always, was whatever promised the greatest reprieve from loneliness. She could be dead in a few hours, and she couldn’t think of anything she wanted to do more than feel less alone.
“I have a sort of brain chip too,” Jasper blurted out. “A modification. I should tell you this. It’s kind of dishonest not to, and I was a dishonest person for a long time. I’m only attracted to dolphins. So I got a procedure done that lets me feel like I’m sleeping with a dolphin when I sleep with a human. If I close my eyes it’s a perfect simulation.”
“Oh,” Hazel said. She looked at the radio. “That song earlier. You mean that turned you on?”
“It led to thoughts that did,” Jasper said. “Anyway, just so you know. I can sleep with women physically but for the mental part of it I go somewhere else.”
“I can actually relate to that,” Hazel said. “My life has been a failure in terms of human connection.” There wasn’t anyone she felt she had to see before her life ended, which made her feel sorry for herself. Even more than Byron’s oddities and cruelties coming forward, and even more than the shock that an incredible amount of money could make things worse instead of better, more perilous instead of more secure, the biggest surprise for her to come out of marriage was how lonesome it was. Byron worked constantly of course, which she’d been prepared for—it was when the two of them were together and she felt alone, more so than when he wasn’t even there, that was dejecting to the point of suffocation. Part of her excitement about marriage, one of its elements that had seemed innate to her, was its supposed guarantee of companionship. “I mean, it’s also a failure in all the other usual aspects. But that one’s, you know, the real bummer.”
“For me too,” Jasper said. “I did not make loads of friends.”
Hazel started crying, but not in a dramatic way. It was subtle, like sweating while lying out in the sun. She felt she needed to think about things in a metaphorical fashion that would take the existential pressure off, and she decided to visualize a box of damage. She had this box that she was carrying through the world, and it was filled up with all the broken things about her and all the bad and shamef
ul choices she’d ever made, and she had to carry it around until she died, because that was how things worked, but that was all she had to do. Exist while holding her box of damage for as long as she could survive. She could do that, couldn’t she? And if she did it mindfully, maybe some absolution for past ways in which she’d failed to be brave or aware was built in.
“I’m sorry about your dad,” Jasper said. “Truly. Before, that was something I’d say to be polite, but due to brain adjustments now I really am sorry.”
“Thanks,” Hazel said. “I loved him as my dad and all. But it was never great being with him. Or my mother. I think it doesn’t say nice things about me that I don’t have a burning wish for them to come back to life so I can hang out with them again. Or that my husband wants me dead, even though he’s evil. I mean, here are three people I was supposed to be really bonded with. My relationships with all of them were a disaster.”
Jasper nodded. “I don’t speak to my parents. It happens, I think. I mean, I know that it does because it happened to me.”
“You don’t feel guilty, though? I was always like, Be more tolerant, Hazel! Be more tolerant! But I never could be. They annoyed and bored and enraged me, each of them, to the end. When I went to college I felt like I was escaping. And then I had to escape from my marriage. I have no idea how to live in a place I don’t want to run away from.”
But right now, all they had to focus on was running away. Assuming everything had worked.
21
A FEW VEHICLES BEHIND THEM AT THE STOPLIGHT, THE PASSENGER-SIDE window of a minivan filled with middle-aged women rolled down. A woman with a bad haircut, the sort done at a walk-in chain that advertises with Sunday mailer coupons, leaned out of the vehicle. Jasper winced. He almost wanted to talk to her about her hair, in a kind way. Could that be a new form of charitable service? Had she ever, for example, thought about getting a haircut at a nice salon every other month instead of getting a haircut at a terrible salon every month? Not spending a dollar more and looking better, even during the month of split ends, than she looked with regular but uninspired trims?
Made for Love Page 24