“So you’ll want me to move back to The Hub. Right?”
“That would make the most sense. If we’re together then your father is my family and I’d do anything possible to help him.”
“I see. But the father of your estranged wife whose brain you microchipped . . .” Hazel knew she shouldn’t push it. She should give in without protest, recite a canned statement of thanks about how much she appreciated his willingness to help.
“Now you’re describing a situation where it sounds like I’m unwanted,” he said. “And that elderly man, in that case, I would not feel duty bound to assist, no.”
“I’ll come back home, Byron. Let me go talk to him. I’ll call you tonight?”
“Until then.”
Hazel started to turn back around, but stopped. She was crying, but the reasons behind the tears seemed like the wrong ones—she was sad about her father, yes, but she was also thinking about all the petty, weird things about living at The Hub that she hated, like how the purified air in their house smelled like pencil lead.
She turned the Rascal’s lever full throttle and decided to complete the mission before heading back to her father’s. She could still get the experience of pawning Byron’s goods. It could be a memory for her to cherish in her older years when she was sitting in a Gogol edema-reducing Masostimulation Recliner.
There were two young children outside the store, facing each other and standing about three feet apart. Each held a water gun, and each was using it to soak the crotch of the other’s pants.
“Are you two the owners of this fine establishment?” Hazel asked. “Could one of you please open the door for me?”
“Are you handi-crapped?” the farther one yelled. The nearer one did agree to hold the door for her; in exchange for his humanity he was rewarded with the other heartily soaking the anal area of his shorts while his back was turned.
“Quit giving me butt water,” he protested.
Hazel scooted inside to the nearest associate. She pulled the beach towel off the Rascal’s basket to reveal the safe and handed over the plastic bag of goods. The clerk let out a long whistle. “You’ve got some top-of-the-line stuff here.” His eyes did a once-over on her DROPOUT sweatpants. “Is it stolen?”
“They were gifts.” The boys’ parents were on the other side of the store, their faces adult versions of their sons’. The couple was looking at sound systems. “I want something where, like, if a house is getting shot up on TV, it sounds like my house is getting shot up,” the father explained.
Byron always focused on the ways that nature was unpredictable, but often it wasn’t. In Byron’s world, deviation, mutation, and evolution were all negatives; anything unexpected was unwanted. With technology too—this is what he felt, how his brain worked—even happy tech accidents, ones with results that were ultimately beneficial, still implied that the programmers had failed to make an adequate prediction. Having a product respond in a way it wasn’t asked to hinted toward powerlessness.
This was part of why Byron would never abide her leaving him.
“Gifts, wow. Assuming the serial numbers don’t come back hot, you can trade this up for some really primo product. What can I interest you in? You might have enough here for a virtual-reality pod. We don’t get those in here often but I’ve got one in the back today. Seriously exquisite. Have you ever tried it? You lie down like you’re in a tanning bed, except when the door closes over you all your simulated dreams come true. No UV rays either.”
“No thanks. I just want money.”
The clerk gave Hazel a confused frown. “But what for? Any electronic device you’d spend it on we can get you here. If we don’t have it in stock, we’ll order it.”
“I need it to pay legal fees,” Hazel lied. “I’m kind of in a hurry. Can we just do this and be done?”
“Ah. Are you familiar with our strategist software? A lot of people use it as a mid-range option for legal defense. You give it the details of your case, and it searches a comprehensive database of similar cases where the defendant achieved a desirable outcome. Then it generates a report on how to make their arguments work for you. It’s cheaper than a traditional attorney, so you can get a public defender and use the printouts. Or if there’s something specific on which you keep encountering problems with the law, perhaps I could interest you in one of our antidetect products?”
He held a scanner to the first item she was selling and let out a giddy yell. “Man!” he exclaimed. “You said these were gifts? Does the person who gave them to you, like, work for Gogol? Pretty high up I mean? These are embargoed. That is so cool.”
Hazel removed her hands from the Rascal’s controls; she could feel a hot wash of anger beginning to move through her and didn’t want to be tempted to drive through the storefront’s glass window. “You mean he made it so I can’t even sell them?”
“No, we can totally buy them—in fact, they’re worth a lot more than they would be otherwise. Embargoed stuff is, like, customized. Either it has features on it that the general models don’t . . . features that haven’t been released yet? Or it has information that might be sensitive. If it’s embargoed, then when it’s returned to Gogol, we get, like, three times as much money because they don’t want it circulating on the street.”
Hazel shuddered to think what surveillance “enhancements” had been made to the gifts Byron had given her. The safe of tech goodies was an egg-shaped Trojan horse.
She emerged from the store with a brick of cash she stowed inside the band of her sweatpants. She didn’t know what treatments Gogol was going to give her father. But she was picturing the following Thanksgiving at The Hub’s expansive stainless-steel dining table: her father bald, Diane without a wig, Hazel with a shaved head, all three of them in chemo-treatment solidarity, and Byron in front of a screen at the other end of the table doing remote work on a million things as he ate and they all ignored him.
Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad.
12
FEBRUARY 2019
JASPER HAD NEVER BEEN WITHOUT A PREPARED GETAWAY BAG, JUST in case a con or a loved-one-of-a-con became homicidally obsessed once things went sour. It included the stolen driver’s license and social security card of a man named Larry Winkler. He didn’t look like Jasper but had the baldness and the whiteness, so it was more or less believable that Larry had just gotten really in shape. After the Taser incident with Calla, Jasper had followed the coast northward for a few states then used these IDs to secure a custodial position at the Oceanarium, which owned five dolphins. One of whom, the one who somehow seemed up for the most fun, was Bella.
He’d been at this job for over a year, and was planning a jailbreak. He and Bella were going to share a life. It was just a matter of time.
There was the interspecies thing, and she’d need to stay in water, but he was convinced the courtship could be emotionally profitable for both of them. He wasn’t sure whether or not actual sex would happen—he wanted it to, but didn’t need for it to. That would depend on her, was what he decided was ethical. If she tried things like the dolphin in the ocean that day had, he’d let it happen, and even if that meant drowning, it would probably still be great for him. Any dolphin did it for him, but he’d felt a sort of relief when he’d begun to fixate on Bella and the narrative of their future relationship started playing in his mind. He knew the sexual affinity that had overtaken him was bizarre, so he supposed he appreciated how the context of a monogamous life partnership made him feel less deviant. With Bella, at least he could pretend the affliction was specific: he loved her.
The truth was that every dolphin now aroused him to a medically improbable degree. Doing cons, he’d made a living for over a decade by getting turned on—having sex in which each performance was good enough to convince the other party they were soul mates. But he’d never felt anything like this. He couldn’t trust his body at work; beneath his uniform he wore constrictive briefs that were designed to be worn to dance clubs. They helped conceal erecti
ons, and Jasper further layered these with a plastic liner. It wasn’t comfortable.
But it was temporary. He had a plan.
Paying cash, he’d bought a large, nondescript station wagon and removed all the backseats. Bella’s height and weight measurements were posted in the informational section by her tank, and going by them, he’d bought an elongated tailgating cooler made for roughly sixty to eighty partygoers from a local fraternity’s annual yard sale. It wasn’t ideal transport; she wouldn’t have room to swim, but she’d be submerged until he could get her back to the studio apartment’s bathtub, and then they’d have a honeymoon night together before leaving for the country rental. This was in the middle of nowhere, with a screened-in pool and a very hands-off landlord he’d already met once in person to give a deposit and a year’s rent up front, also in cash. He’d worn a prosthetic nose and chin that didn’t pass for real, but the landlord didn’t ask. Jasper had gotten the man’s number off a pawnshop flyer. Its fine print suggested that people hiding out from significant tax collection, an amount they did not intend to pay in their lifetime, might enjoy this rental. It wouldn’t be permanent—maybe, for the rest of his life, no residence would. But he was already used to this pattern. They could stay there until he found the next suitable temporary home, then repeat.
But, God. The waiting was getting to him. The Oceanarium was a double-edged sword for Jasper. It was where he got the most stimulation, but it was also where he was reminded of all the stimulation he could hypothetically be getting and wasn’t, yet. He knew he’d do something insane if he didn’t get to touch Bella soon. And if the game plan in order to not go crazy was stealing a dolphin, Jasper supposed the crazy option would be pretty dark.
“Winkler!” Tiny called. Jasper had gotten better about responding to his alias, but it still took him a moment. His boss Tiny was a middle-aged hippie, but because of his height and size and penchant for macabre medieval costume jewelry, he always looked ready to terrorize or kill. His frame stretched T-shirts in a way that made short sleeves disappear; on Tiny the Oceanarium-issued V-neck looked like a cutoff. Tiny’s shoes perhaps were the scariest thing about him; he wore only Birkenstock sandals, but custodial employees of the park had a closed-toe shoe rule to abide by, so Tiny had gotten a kind of metal sandal cage custom made. Sometimes during school class visits Tiny gave talks about the importance of maintenance and cleaning at the Oceanarium. After his speech, when he opened things up to the kids for questions, the first two were always along the lines of “Are you a giant or some other close-to-but-not-quite-human variant?” (No really, the kids would beg, you can tell us, we will keep your secret), and “Why do you have to wear those scary shoes?” They assumed the footwear was part of some court-enforced punishment Tiny was serving, and they hoped this sentence hadn’t been imposed on him for life.
“Is there any way you could work late this Saturday, buddy?” Tiny’s eyebrows’ unchecked overgrowth cast a shadow that made him look like he was scowling even at his happiest. As he focused his eyes on Jasper and his hand went into his pocket, any bystander would guess Tiny was about to produce a switchblade, but his fingers uncurled to reveal a fistful of sunflower seeds. Tiny’s wide, flat teeth were always crunching something.
Working late meant there was an after-hours event that required cleanup; sometimes it took until morning. If the soiree was in the park’s main convention hall, Jasper could potentially have a lot of quiet time near Bella’s tank until the party ended. But if it was a performance in the auditorium, the shift would be a slice of torture; the dolphins would be moved into their nighttime tank after the show. He’d be cleaning up in front of an empty pool of expectant water that would lap in the wind and force him to look up just in case the impossible had happened and Bella had escaped from her holding tank to come greet him.
“I probably can—what’s going on?” He’d do it no matter what of course; Jasper wanted Tiny to feel like he owed him in case any favors were needed down the line. Plus work was a useful distraction. Jasper’s studio apartment was the equivalent of an oversize video booth at a seedy porn store, except the props were more National Geographic than Penthouse.
“That clown Dolphin Savior is having a concert in the amphitheater. They’re choreographing some special dolphin performance to go along with it.”
Jasper felt a voodoo harpoon stab through his heart. Special performance?
It was enough that Bella had to parade her wares daily in front of ungrateful families, the children stuffing their faces with orange corn puffs and blue slushies, overlooking the great beauty before them or finding it underwhelming. Half the brats in the crowd were playing on some sort of Gogol device during the show, screaming murder if a drop of water got on the screen despite the various splash warnings plastered all over the amphitheater walls. One of Jasper’s jobs was to empty the amphitheater comment box each night (it got emptied straight into the garbage), and occasionally he’d read them and feel a molten rage: Put funny hats or costumes on the fishes. Fishes! Make dolphins jump higher or come down through the stands on a zip-line thing.
This was the gratitude Bella received for her performative slavery. And now she was being forced to learn another routine for a concert?
He knew some guy had come forward as the Dolphin Savior, as him, Jasper, pretending he was the man who’d rescued the dolphin in the now-famous beach video. The guy was a struggling musician, but after saying he rescued the dolphin and writing a song about the incident, he was topping the charts.
Jasper hadn’t been able to make himself listen to the song yet. And he’d been busy setting things up for his new interim life. At the end of the day he was just grateful that no one was looking for him. “What style of music is it?” He tried to seem disinterested but felt his voice shake a little.
“I can’t believe you haven’t heard of this guy; he’s everywhere. Have you been living under a rock?” Tiny began pulling up a video online.
No, Jasper thought, just inside the claustrophobic bubble of a vulgar sexual interspecies obsession. “I don’t get out much,” he summarized.
“I guess not. I know you’ve heard the song, though. They play it in the park at least fifteen times a day.”
Ah—pop music. Even sadder. Jasper started to head toward his personal locker, where he kept a tube of numbing cream he’d once used to delay ejaculation with cons. Now, due to the constrictive shorts he had to wear, he used it to dull the aching throb of his chafed genitals. He tried not to let the balloon of melancholy inside him well up large enough to pinch his organs and make breathing difficult.
Yes, he had fallen. Yes, his life had become very, very different. But he was working toward a better day. Mourning the loss of his human playboy era was useless. The glories of his former self were now the currency of an overthrown country. He’d tried everything.
“Remember how the Internet went crazy when this guy rescued a distressed dolphin last May?”
Jasper snapped out of his mournful thoughts and swallowed. When he turned his head, he was horrified to find Tiny staring straight at him, expressionless, his face unmoving except for the hairs across his Cro-Magnon brow, which danced to life for a second each time the breeze from the oscillating desk fan hit them. Jasper felt like he’d been placed into a vacuum chamber, as if all the air in his lungs was being sucked out and breathing in was impossible. Was Tiny messing with him—did Tiny know? Jasper wanted to choose his next words carefully. But all that came out of his mouth was a dry, squeakish “Not really.”
“What? It was like the story of the summer! This guy carried a lost dolphin that needed help to shore then just ran away and disappeared, like he didn’t want the fame and stuff. So this national search was on and tons of people were coming forward saying they were him. Different women were on every TV channel saying they knew the guy and he’d dated them and taken their money and all this stuff, but it was never the same guy, always different names and similar looks but not quite.” Here Jasper couldn
’t help but feel a little pleased. Maybe all this time he’d been safer than he thought—he looked too much like himself to actually be himself, apparently. “Anyway, finally the guy comes forward—says he got a concussion on the day of the accident that gave him temporary amnesia. It took him a while to remember what had happened. But when he did, he wrote a song about the experience. He hadn’t planned to share it with anyone . . . he’d been trying to make it as a singer/songwriter for years but sometimes wrote personal things that didn’t go into his repertoire, and this was one of them.”
Jasper wanted to scream. Why couldn’t he have been born gullible? Why were his shoulders a custom-fitted resting place for the burden of cynical reality? Where others saw an inspirational story, he correctly saw bullshit. Why couldn’t everyone realize what a con this was?
On the computer screen, the music video began with a song titled “Saving You Saved Me.” A CGI dolphin was lying asleep in a hospital bed with gauze across its head and several IVs coming out of its left flipper; the camera panned out to reveal the dolphin in the operating theater of a large hospital, with surgical staff moving around its bed. The opening bars of music played and Jasper recognized them as a tune he’d often heard playing over the loudspeakers in the Oceanarium food court; he’d never listened to the lyrics, though, or imagined that any top 40 song had to do with dolphins. Especially not from an artist pretending to be him.
In the video, the Dolphin Savior entered wearing surgical gear, except the top of his scrubs was more like an open vest that he was bare-chested beneath, and oiled. He began singing a dramatic ballad as he put on a headlamp and approached the bed, holding out his hand to receive a scalpel.
“He’s not going to put on gloves first?” Jasper asked. Offscreen, a fan was blowing DS’s hair back off his shoulders in a way that made it easy to imagine what he’d look like riding a very fast horse.
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