Made for Love

by Alissa Nutting

  On television, a TV program was re-creating the graphic skiing death of a famous actress; they’d rigged a crash-test dummy upright onto a motorized sled, and were showing a montage of the mannequin crashing into a tree with such force that the cap and wig they’d outfitted it with flew off. The camera zoomed in when it landed in the snow, perfectly somehow, spread out as though a living woman had just melted in that very spot.

  A light switch came on in Jasper’s brain. Why didn’t he go somewhere colder? The same things he loved about beach communities—seemingly designed for transient living and those who preferred to stay anonymous, in addition to having a guaranteed population of working professionals and wealthy residents—possibly went for winter-weather resort areas as well. He’d grown up in the South and had never dreamed of leaving the humid heat, but maybe a break from the heat was just what he needed. Particularly after Elizabeth. With that one, simply crossing the state line might not be enough for her to lose his scent.

  He scratched gently at his balls; he hadn’t shaved them for a few days, not since the breakup. They always caused a pleasant response in women. “So soft!” Moley E. had exclaimed the first time. “I didn’t know they were like that without hair. I always thought balls felt more like elbow skin.” She’d pinched his scrotum between her thumb and middle finger, rolling it like satin finery. “It’s like your balls are made out of rose petals.” This exclamation had made him feel sad for her somehow, like he was spoiling her forever. In a few months, when she’d somewhat recovered from the shock of loss—both of her money and of her illusion of love—and found a new boyfriend, Jasper supposed that boyfriend would have hairy balls. Unusually hairy, even. It seemed fate was like that. It would be a tough transition for her, though maybe, Jasper had reasoned, that would be for the best. Maybe from now on, hairy balls would feel like safety to her. Maybe anything that wasn’t smooth would. Maybe she’d purposely start to buy low-thread-count sheets that scratched, single-sheet toilet paper with no quilting. In fact, before they’d even finished having sex the very first time, Jasper had already begun to decide it was Elizabeth’s fault that she didn’t realize what a foreshadowing his smooth balls were—that she couldn’t see it was all going to slip through her fingers so easily.

  JASPER HAD BEEN IN THE SAME LARGE BEACH TOWN FOR NEARLY A year now, and in his line of work that was too long. For a few years he’d been uncharacteristically diligent at holding himself to a six-month deadline then relocating. Self-control didn’t come naturally to him; he found schedules boring, but the money responded well to this routine—it was eerie how he was able to chart out the courtship, the committed and loving relationship, and then the con into three symmetrical parts, like acts of a play. The formula paid off but it grew dull. Eventually he noticed he was staying longer, letting things get more heated, thinking about trying to fit in a second con with those who seemed particularly gullible.

  Instead he’d kept up the same pace but had dropped more lines into the water, and clearly he was getting distracted—Moley E. finding him was proof of that. He’d grown sloppy. A year in the same city was careless, which was why it had been exciting.

  He needed to go. He’d take in one last sunset by the ocean and pack up.

  The sun was sliding low, toward the waves, seemingly melting down a little smaller and thinner as it went, but the day’s heat was still tightly packed in the air; someone needed to lift a giant lid off the sky. He walked farther and farther into the water until the waves crested up against his shoulders and chin, then he relaxed and went limp, floating. Soon there were only the ocean and the sun, the unmoving heat and the endless drum of the water. He closed his eyes and felt flattened between these two forces. He loved the lobotomized feeling he got from putting his ears beneath the water, hearing nothing of the world. His groin began to swell with a halfhearted erection.

  Then something struck Jasper in the face. Hard. So hard his entire body slammed down beneath the water and hit the ocean floor.

  He should panic, he knew. But moving wasn’t easy. In his head he heard an affectless female voice, a somewhat arousing one, begin saying the word “suffocation,” repeating it with clear enunciation, like a word in a spelling bee. He could imagine that might be death’s style—to talk in a sexy voice that made people want to give up and quit fighting.

  Gradually his limbs came back online, tingly and a little painful, as though they’d all fallen asleep. He managed to sit up and push himself to the surface. Jasper took a few relieved breaths. What the hell was all that?

  Then the water next to him parted with an unexpected ripple; his eyes startled open and were hit with saltwater from his drenched hair. The stinging blindness that followed brought true fear.

  Had she followed him to the beach?

  “Elizabeth?” he called out worriedly. His stomach was churning. “Honey, I’m so glad you’re here. You’re right, we need to talk.” He tried to scan for threats with his cloudy vision, but the motion of the waves made it impossible to tell in what direction he should look. Then he felt an unmistakable thigh graze: something was moving in the water around his legs.

  Jasper stumbled back. Dread and self-pity were knotting in his chest. Something had just nosed his groin. He pictured Elizabeth in scuba gear, kneeling on the ocean floor holding a length of piano wire. About to attempt castration.

  He needed to get to shore.

  Jasper started pumping his arms, then the sensation of being painfully and forcefully goosed came over him. Something launched his body several feet forward in the water; his head submerged. He came up coughing. “Moley E., please!” he howled, then howled again in raw distress—he had accidentally cried out her secret-joke name.

  If she hadn’t been certain whether or not she was going to go through with it and actually take his manhood, now he had convinced her. It was coming any instant. Then he’d have to end his life in a eunuch suicide, all because of his big mouth. If only he’d said, Liz, please, instead. If he’d just said it tenderly enough to her, he probably could’ve turned things around.

  He felt himself pulled beneath the water again. This time weighty, repetitive thrusts striking across the sides of his torso kept him there. Nearly a minute passed before his mind decoded the culprit—it was a giant fish? Lack of oxygen was dimming his vision to pale pink at the edges. But he could see that his assailant wasn’t Moley E. or a shark or some similar monster from the depths. No, it was a dolphin. He was sure of this on a visual level—definitely the exterior of a dolphin—but why was it assaulting him? He was being gyrated to death.

  The first effects of asphyxia began setting in, and Jasper welcomed them—he needed a break. With fondness, he recalled an ample-chested dental hygienist who’d helped him into a nitrous oxide mask a few years ago. He’d been practicing his career for about three and a half years at that point and told himself he couldn’t afford to be giving someone whose degree came from a vocational college a second look (You are limiting your income! was the exact thought-phrase of how he liked to scare himself away from such temptations), but she’d grabbed his bicep with her hand and had a firm confidence about her, and this had kicked off a pleasantly indulgent line of thinking on his part: wouldn’t it be nice, just as a quick detour, to be with someone who took charge of everything and gave him a break from running his acted show? She’d bent in closer to him, close enough that he could smell cigarette smoke beneath her mint gum and jasmine perfume, and said, Breathe in deep and have fun with this. It’ll take you on a mini vacation. He’d breathed as deeply as he could and felt himself smiling, chuckling, grabbing her arm, saw her lifting up his mask just a little so he could speak, saw her tongue draw across her lips to moisten them as she smiled back, all expectation, heard himself ask, in a slightly too-high-pitched voice, How much do you earn a year? After taxes? I don’t think you make enough for me to flirt with. She’d placed the mask back down over his mouth, roughly, and that had been the end of their dalliance.

  Jasper felt
his lungs spasm; his eyes seemed blinded by the overbright light of the lamp above the dental chair beaming down. A wave crashed.

  He shook his head and realized a dolphin was circling around him in the water. Its scary hyena chatter reminded him of the Wicked Witch of the West.

  Think, he told himself. He had great expertise in sneaking off while paramours were sleeping or distracted. But the moment Jasper began to move, the dolphin stopped its idle swimming and righted its body in his direction like a compass needle. He yelped and fell backward as it moved toward him at full speed, its bottlenose ramming into Jasper’s solar plexus. This happened a few times, each bumper-car–style collision a little more painful than the last, until a new variation occurred: as the dolphin neared him its mouth opened. Jasper shielded his face with his hands—though he wasn’t sure if he was going to escape the encounter alive, protecting his moneymaker at the expense of his limbs seemed like a no-brainer choice—then moments later came the rough scrape of its tongue upon his arm, the tearing pinch of its teeth playfully needling him. When he peeked through his arms, watching the dolphin turn around and get ready to return to him for another swipe, there was a moment when the creature’s impish eye locked with his own.

  It was only a second, but it was unmistakable. He knew that look. This dolphin wanted to have sex with him.

  This understanding disarmed and even touched Jasper in a way he wouldn’t have thought possible moments earlier—they were more similar than different, two lotharios of nature out for an afternoon swim. This ironically led him to his next epiphany: he could hit the thing, they could compete! Why hadn’t he tried that? Because avoiding conflict was his overall nature. The reason he excelled at his job and at pretend relationships in general.

  And because Jasper had never been in a physical fight before. This would be an embarrassing public admission. But he had worked out (a whole lot!) at the gym, and he’d always felt like time spent lifting weights was sort of a flex credit in terms of sparring and masculinity; working out and fighting both earned qualifying points in the same requisite category. There was probably some conversion chart detailing how he could cash in several thousand reps of barbell dead lifts for having landed punches in alcohol-infused bar altercations, the I think you bumped into me type. He regretted steering clear of contact sports now. He could’ve done some of those martial arts classes, jujitsu and Muay Thai and all of those. Why hadn’t he? His doll face, he reminded himself. Those frightening cauliflower ears would not vibe well in his profession. There were easier ways to maintain abs.

  The dolphin lunged toward him and he readied his fists, letting out a yell that sounded higher and more panicked than Jasper would’ve preferred, and brought his fist down across the dolphin’s head. But the creature dodged the punch. It locked its jaw down around Jasper’s wrist, attempting to pull him underwater.

  Now Jasper was grateful for the athletic digression his mind had just taken—if a beating wouldn’t work, he’d wrestle the thing. He managed to put it in a headlock, at which point it went still with confusion and they surfaced together, his left fist clamping its bottlenose shut. It was an interesting position. He remembered a propaganda cartoon from the Cold War era of a soldier riding a giant missile like a mechanical bull.

  How could he escape? The thing was frisky! Letting it go seemed like giving it the green light to come back stronger and destroy him. He wondered if he could choke it out. Was that possible with a dolphin? Maybe then when it went limp, he could push its body behind him in one direction and charge toward shore in the other.

  Jasper took a breath and held its chest in tight against his torso, readying to squeeze tighter still, but then the dolphin stopped flailing. It went completely still and silent, like a car that had just been turned off.

  Tell me I did not just kill a dolphin? Jasper thought. Having killed a dolphin felt like a very creepy thing to him, even if it was unintentional and totally in self-defense. That had to bring some type of curse. Other people wouldn’t know, but nature would. In the mornings there would always be tons of bugs on his car or something. Dolphins were like what—alpacas? In that violence against them was weird. He didn’t know if people went to jail for killing dolphins, but if he were to stand in front of a judge and explain he’d had to, he figured the essence of the judge’s response would be very Dude, really?

  Jasper wondered how often the dolphin’s blowhole needed to be above water. He’d never paid attention in science classes, except on days when they got to use fire or watch sex-ed videos. Because of education budget cuts, these movies were always outdated by at least fifteen years, and there was a fetishistic quality to the actors having clothes and hair and makeup from another decade—he and his friends called the erections they got when they watched them “time-machine boners.” There was a poster of an artist’s reconstruction of a female hominid hanging up on the wall in class that aroused Jasper too. He’d joked to himself that these were also time-machine boners, if he went back in time so far that there were no other people there to stimulate him, just the apelike mammals that served as genetic precursors to the human species. But he was never able to think up a term clever enough to allow confessing this fantasy to his peers. “Extreme time-machine boners” sounded like it wasn’t just that the amount of time travel in this scenario was way more intense but also his erection, etc.

  He looked again at the dolphin, at its eye, and was relieved to see a flutter of movement. He was not a murderer! But it did look unusually sleepy, in a bad drugged-out way. He tried to pull up all his mental-pictorial references of dolphins—the real, the cartoon, the sand sculpture. He’d never seen one looking so drowsy. The thing was in trouble. Maybe it was at its end. Or maybe there was a more hopeful explanation. Did it just need a nap? Did dolphins nap? He tightened his grip upon it, awkwardly holding it like a guitar that was too heavy to play, thinking he could sway back and forth with it in his arms in a type of infant bedtime maneuver. Then when it dozed off he could let go and the dolphin could float out to sea like an unmanned surfboard. Maybe.

  “Wait,” Jasper said. “No. No!” Somehow he hadn’t noticed until now—if it hurt, he wasn’t feeling it—but his wrist was bleeding. In a gross horror-movie way. Cone-shaped tooth marks were delivering endless bright blood from his skin. Their punctures seemed bottomless.

  Maybe he himself was in trouble, and not only because of the wound. After all, why had the dolphin come at him like that in the first place? Did dolphins get rabies? Did they carry STDs in their saliva?

  A brown recluse spider had bit Jasper’s father once, just after his mother had left them when Jasper was in junior high. They hadn’t thought to worry about preserving the specimen. His father had performed a vigor killing on the spider, giving it several deaths, then had used its juices on the bottom of his shoe to draw a wet smiley face on the cement floor of their garage. It was around 8 AM on a Saturday morning in late spring. His father was eight beers deep and shouting along to Christmas carols on the record player while they changed the oil in his sedan: Jingle bells! Fuck you, Denise! The whole town knows you’re a tramp! Oh what fun . . . Jasper, are we having fun yet? By noon they were both lying down inside the car listening to the country music station, his father passing in and out of consciousness. Jasper was pretty buzzed himself, having realized about two hours into the marathon of songs that if he opened a beer his dad wasn’t going to stop him.

  He felt drunk enough to go try and talk to one of the neighbor girls, Savannah, who was always in her front yard in a bikini, usually with another bikinied friend, tanning or play fighting her friend with a hose. It’s like that girl isn’t allowed in the house, his mother said once. Now Jasper’s mother wasn’t allowed in his house, which was strange. He’d looked over at his father in the car, wondering if he should try to set up a fan to blow in on his dad’s head before he left, then saw that his father’s calf had quadrupled in size and turned a mottled, vascular blue. A living nexus of sweat was moving across his d
ad’s face; his body smelled like a ripened wet dog.

  At the hospital it turned out to be a big deal that they didn’t know what had bitten him. Nurses tried showing his intoxicated father different pictures of spiders, but he wasn’t helpful. (So my wife left me, he’d say. So she’s not coming back.) The flesh necrotized further than it had to while they experimented. The next day the physician came in to lecture: “If you’d been able to get the specimen into a jar, that would’ve helped. Also if you hadn’t been drunk.” A third of his dad’s calf looked like it had been eaten away. A close-escape cannibalism type of thing.

  Now Jasper thought he felt the dolphin peeing on him. The creature had certainly relaxed.

  He looked toward the shore. It would not be prudent to let a dolphin who may have just swapped pathogens with him go, particularly an aggressive-acting dolphin. The creature had to be tested. Who knew what it might’ve given him? He could put it in the trunk of his car? Tie it to the roof with a rope? Head straight to the emergency room?

  Today had been strange. His karma, were he to buy into that for a moment, was not at its brightest because of the whole Moley E. encounter—it seemed like his crime had not been breaking her heart or stealing her money but seeing her afterward at the motel; that had made him feel poorly, and now this dolphin thing. The sooner he reached land, the sooner another day could begin and he could wake up and feel lucky like always.

  Getting the thing to the shore turned out to be the workout of a lifetime. He had to groan a lot. It felt impossibly heavy, and he was very tired from their battle, which had gone on for how long? He had no idea. Jasper shuffled and looked down.