Made for Love

by Alissa Nutting

  Dolphin Savior then cut a long slit down the chest of the dolphin, and when he opened it, a glowing heart made of red crystal was inside. He reached in, removed it, and held it up to the light—there, in the center of the heart, was an image of him holding the dolphin in his arms.

  “For Christ’s sake!” Jasper exclaimed. He felt his face bloom red with malice as the song reached the chorus. The singer and the dolphin were flying through white clouds together, riding a gigantic life preserver magic carpet–style.

  This guy, this Dolphin Savior, used Jasper’s dolphin rescue to springboard his singing career into a hit song, and now he was going to have Bella learn a special performance for his concert? They were probably going to let him don a wet suit and enter the water with her, do the photo opportunity from the aquatic-show routine where a member of the audience comes up and a dolphin is signaled to put its nose against the person’s cheek while the camera flashes.

  “Yeah, the whole thing is so cheeseball,” Tiny said. “Guess it was too much to ask for a video that hey, I don’t know, addresses the environmental destruction that’s threatening the dolphin’s natural habitat or something.”

  Sure, Tiny, Jasper thought. No topic makes a song climb the charts faster than environmental destruction. He appreciated Tiny at least not fawning over the music, but why couldn’t people see that it was all artifice? Dolphin Savior hadn’t rescued anything except his failed career. He probably didn’t have an overwhelming appreciation for dolphins as a species. Yet there he was, getting to have a design team bring Jasper’s wildest fantasies to life.

  When the video continued on to the next verse, the dolphin was sticking its head and dorsal fin out of the third-story window of a burning building; Dolphin Savior showed up in fire pants, boots, red suspenders, and a hat but nothing else, and climbed a ladder to do a rescue. The song’s conclusion had him provide a moral redemption for the dolphin rather than a physical one: the dolphin was seen at a casino craps table making bet after bet and losing everything, then it passed out in an alleyway with an empty syringe sticking out of its pectoral fin. Until Dolphin Savior came along and handed the dolphin a Bible (at this offering, the dolphin just opened its eyes and looked at DS with gratitude; the video cut to a new scene before it showed the creature attempting to accept a book but not having any arms to do so); in the final shot DS and the dolphin were seated together in the front pew of a church dressed in their Sunday best.

  “So wait, is this video about Dolphin Savior being an attractive guy people want to have sex with? Or about him spreading the word of God?”

  “Well, he’s a physically attractive Jesus figure. That’s like his whole thing.” That was sort of my whole thing! Jasper wanted to scream. “His fans call themselves melon heads. Melon, like the forehead of a dolphin? And he calls them his ‘followers’—it’s all got this religious twist. In my opinion it’s becoming a cult. People are giving up their jobs to follow this guy along the coast to all his concerts. Their whole thing is finding stuff to save. Which, I mean, noble goal and all, especially if you’re well-organized and well-funded and addressing true community needs. But it seems like they’re all on recreational drugs and just scrounging for things to save—saving garbage by hoarding it in their vehicles? Saving bugs by capturing flies and mosquitos and stuff in jars and releasing them out in the country where people will be less likely to kill them? Saving time by not bathing?”

  “I’d better get to work,” Jasper said. He needed to figure out the remaining obstacles in his plot to rescue Bella immediately, before the weekend and Dolphin Savior’s show, before that fraud ever got to lay eyes upon his woman.

  All this news made Jasper feel better about his condition though. He’d been seeing his new sexual affliction as a social handicap, but in reality it was a gift. People were idiots. Opting out of the human race to live with another species on the periphery of society was probably the best thing he could do.

  This belief was affirmed for him as he walked past the Dolf and Fina exhibit. They were Gogol robots built to look like dolphins; their vocal software could “hear” and respond to questions about aquatic biology. They were capable of fielding them in over fifty languages. The weird part to Jasper was that the Oceanarium put bathing suits on these dolphin robots. Dolf was in a pair of trunks, while Fina wore a bandeau bikini. Jasper sometimes worried that the swimwear might ignite his own affliction in others. Seeing that had to be confusing for hormonal teenagers, he thought. Hormonal anyone. Really mixed messages.

  As if on cue, he watched a male adolescent leave his group of friends, approach the female robo-dolphin, and yell, “Take off your top!”

  JASPER BEGAN FILLING HIS APARTMENT’S BATHTUB, THE SITE THAT would become his and Bella’s first-ever watery nuptial bed by nightfall. It was the final item on his preparation checklist, and the most satisfying, a reward he’d saved for the end of a long morning of groundwork. The filled cooler was in the back of the station wagon (he tried not to think about how, since he’d removed the anterior two rows of seating and placed the enormous cooler in lengthwise, the inside of the car now looked a lot like a hearse). He’d be wheeling Bella from the pool to the parking lot inside a transporter sling used to lift dolphins out of the water for medical procedures; it was kept in the park’s veterinary center, which he had custodial keys to in the office. He planned to place a large tarp over the top of the sling on the way to the car and avoid security cameras when possible. When impossible, it would hopefully just look like he was wheeling out trash or defunct equipment—he’d be in his Oceanarium uniform, after all.

  The plan required him waiting until the end of his shift, which had been made slightly easier by Tiny calling in with car trouble. Jasper hadn’t been sure about the best tactic to take with Tiny. He’d debated dropping a piece of false information to throw the cops on the wrong trail the next day when the dolphin was found missing—hint to Tiny how much he found himself thinking about taking a trip to Mexico. Or he could go the flattery route: tell Tiny what a great boss he was, ask him if he’d ever done something bad. Say how terrible he feels for the dolphins in captivity and that lately he’d been thinking how sometimes the right thing to do was one that few people would understand. Maybe then Tiny would have his back for a little bit once the investigation started.

  But now the time for setup was over. A large amount of the custodial work was done in the morning, so security would assume any tasks he’d neglected that evening were going to be done the next day—he just had to hide out before and during their final sweep-through at closing. The night security guard only did two regularly timed perfunctory walk-throughs. He would not stop to count the dolphins.

  AT CLOSING JASPER APPROACHED ONE OF THE PARK’S OVERSIZE SEA-COW–shaped trash cans, removed its heavy lid, and climbed inside. All the tops of the waste bins were painted to look like the heads of manatees. To dispose of waste, visitors pushed against a black circular flap that appeared to be the creature’s open mouth. (What exactly was this teaching children? Jasper wondered. Why were they being encouraged to force-feed garbage to an endangered species?)

  The inside of the can smelled worse than he’d hoped; he hadn’t counted on disposable diapers or the contents of sweepers. Some errant reward sardines from the show had apparently found their way to the park grounds—birds often stole them—and they’d been baking for several hours. Jasper switched to mouth breathing. This was for Bella, he reminded himself.

  He’d essentially climbed into a manatee-shaped solar tin oven. Five minutes into the wait he was already drenched in sweat, nauseous, mildly dizzy. This worried him—he’d need his full reserves of strength to get Bella into the cooler in his car. But he could hydrate at one of the sinks in the medical center.

  Jasper had bought a watch with an alarm in case he happened to fall asleep in the container—of course he now realized this was impossible, but losing consciousness due to heatstroke was not. He hoped that if he passed out, a persistent Casio beep wo
uld be enough to nudge him back into reality, and that he’d have enough fumes left in his tank to lift his wilted body from the can.

  The whole experience was anxiety producing. There was a sudden motion near his shoulder that he thought was a pigeon or a rat, or perhaps a hybrid pigeon/rat species indigenous only to that particular trash bin. It turned out to be a chili-stained hot dog riding the hydraulic lift of a crumpled soda can. There were several times when his eyes started crossing and inner-barrel stains in the metal appeared to be taking on the shape of a two-inch cockroach. But once he was dehydrated enough for a reel of daydream footage to thread itself and begin spinning through his brain, things got much better.

  When the watch finally beeped, he was imagining himself asleep and bobbing on an inflatable raft in the outdoor pool at his rental house, his hair magically grown back to its previous length, Bella waking him up by pushing the thick lock that had fallen across his cheek and eyes back with her cold wet nose, and why not, giving his nipple a playful nudge before she swam away, inviting him into the water to join her.

  IN THE TWILIGHT HOURS, THE AQUATIC MAMMAL-CENTRIC EQUIPMENT inside the Oceanarium’s medical center made Jasper feel like a human slave escapee running through the main village hospital in a Planet of the Apes–style world ruled by dolphins instead of primates—on the walls, the anatomical diagram posters were of dolphins, not people; instead of examination tables there were recessed bathtublike rectangles in the ground with drains and overhead faucets.

  Jasper had never been into BDSM. He had little tolerance for physical discomfort on the masochistic side, and the sadistic side went against all his con instincts: he derived power from treating people far better than he felt they deserved, with an amount of care and tenderness that made them assume he liked or even loved them way more than he did. But he supposed in this parallel universe, if he’d just escaped from the Homo sapiens’ holding tank and was trying to hide from his dolphin pursuers, there would be delicious suspense in waiting for them to find him, and probably even in the way they tortured him when they discovered him.

  He finally found the sling, tucked back into an alcove instead of in its usual spot. He good-naturedly wagged a finger at it, like it was a relative with Alzheimer’s who’d inadvertently wandered off, then began to gather the rest of the necessary items.

  The sling collapsed for transport and storage into a shape that looked like a folded ironing board with wheels. He wrapped the top of it with a sheet, disguising its metal frame and bright blue fabric holster, then he wrapped himself, covering each arm and leg with a separate sheet so he’d still have full range of motion—complete mummification except for his eyes and nose, which would be facedown anyway. What he figured would be best in terms of the cameras was to make one quick motion at a time, followed by a minute of complete stillness, each motion taking no longer than a blink. He cracked the outer door just enough to slide the sling’s frame out sideways, wheels to the wall, then counted to sixty and as quickly as he could turned it over flat onto the ground. After another minute, he moved through the door and stood flat against the building itself, feeling his stomach leap as he heard the cracked door close. He was back outside in a land of surveillance now.

  A minute later was the squat down. A minute after that he was lying flat upon the ground completely. Then the finale: kicking off from the medical center’s door, he rolled the frame surfer-style beyond the entrance video camera’s line of sight, then finally stood up in order to de-sheet himself and reassemble the sling in the shadows. He barely registered the rest of the journey pushing the sling along the tree line to the auditorium: suddenly he was in the holding-tank room. The dolphins were asleep and silent in the water.

  The image was almost more than he could stand—his beloved’s vulnerable, dreaming face.

  Jasper had befriended the daytime security guard in order to get as much info as possible. He’d brought him coffee, listened to him retell the jokes he’d heard that week from his fellow bowling leaguers (“What did one butt cheek say to the other? Together we can stop this shit!”), fraternally grabbed the guy’s shoulder as he leaned forward and laughed and got good long looks at the security camera’s range for each control-panel screen. The holding tank had a blind spot thanks to remodeling. A new section of the tank whose extended lip was out of sight on the security camera was where he’d draw the dolphins over to him with sardines and place the sling on Bella while they were distracted in a feeding frenzy. He had no idea if this would go smoothly or be an arduous process; he just needed to get her inside the sleeve—once she was out of the water, his car wasn’t more than a three-minute run away, though her four-hundred-pound frame wouldn’t be easy to push. The sling included a muzzle, which he hated to use (he wondered if he could simply continue feeding her for the duration of the trip to the car in order to keep her quiet?), but until they were safely back at his apartment, discretion was essential. There he’d lined the walls of the bathroom with sound-capturing foam and invested in a number of Gogol noise machines, whose ambient static would hopefully drown out any cries of confusion or alarm.

  But his plan hadn’t taken into account the beauty of her sleeping form. In repose, Bella’s eye seemed shut in an act of pleasure, the mild curve of her nose a gracious smile she was making as a lover worked upon her. Jasper’s arousal was throbbing and immediate, which he’d expected, but its persistence was what threw him for a loop—his body failed to understand, the dolphins bobbing there like permissive apples, why it couldn’t be satisfied when the additional time this would take was inconsequential. Jasper attempted to ignore it. He went to the cooler, filled up large buckets of treat fish and placed them down on the sling’s rolling platform. But walking was difficult. Was it silly to try to enact his plan when he was so handicapped by attraction, particularly when the cure was such a simple and obvious one?

  Yes, he thought, in an ideal world he and Bella would be getting out as quickly as possible. But why not take a quick minute to relieve himself? With the dolphins this proximal, without any sort of glass between them, it would be as quick as a sneeze. Jasper climbed the tank’s steps for a better look (which he nearly had to do on all fours; his entire lower torso had effectively shut down), and found that the decision seemed to have been made for him—a dolphin (not Bella, Sven—in Sven’s biographical wall in the halls of the auditorium, his personality was described as “pensive”) was sleeping just below the tank’s lip like a docked submarine.

  In the months after his mother’s abandonment, there was a brief time when Jasper’s father had attempted a salve of religion. They went to church frequently, and now Jasper remembered the parable of the ill man who’d touched Jesus’s cloak as he passed by and had been instantly healed thanks to faith. Here, with Sven, Jasper realized all he’d have to do to be cured was touch the tip of himself against Sven’s blubber.

  “Are you kidding me?”

  The voice was coming from nowhere and everywhere all at once—it had to be God.

  He’d creeped out God. At no point in his deceptive philandering had he appalled God enough to make an appearance. But apparently, Jasper thought, he had finally crossed the line.

  Then he realized the lights had come on. For a moment his brain had to reboot, like a copy machine warming up; all he could think of or see was the shock of brightness. But when the realization hit him, it was very bad news. Oh dear. It was Tiny.

  On anyone else, Tiny’s tie-dyed shirt would’ve been a signal of pacifism, but stretched across his broad chest, particularly with his current facial expression, it made him look like a bad man with supernatural powers. The twisting red pattern didn’t seem to be a shirt at all so much as muscles forming a central wormhole in the middle of his stomach. Jasper almost expected balls of fire to shoot from it.

  Tiny was gripping a long wooden flute like a police nightstick. “I understand people can resent the creatures they’re employed to care for,” he said. He stepped closer, repeatedly striking the flute
against the palm of his hand in controlled slaps. “And that’s okay. All feelings are valid. But actions are different. All actions are not okay, and you have trespassed into a very not-okay place. You aren’t the first of my workers to act out. Once a guy drew a swastika on the forehead of the ceramic beluga in the marine gardens. But urinating into the blowhole of a dolphin is not just a pubescent stunt. That’s a form of torture. Do you know what that would feel like to one of these innocent creatures who arguably already lives a pretty sad, imprisoned life? It would feel like waterboarding. And I mean, as far as I’m aware, even when our own government resorts to horrific and illegal acts of barbarism like this, they use water rather than their own urine. To my knowledge. So if you think about it, that makes you more depraved than the U.S. government. I get how harsh that statement must feel, but I have to tell you, from one living organism to another, I think you need a wake-up call. The Oceanarium has a psychologist on retainer. If you agree to see him—”

  Jasper stood up and Tiny’s eyes bulged wide. He stopped talking. Jasper looked down and saw his unbuttoned pants had fallen to the ground. His physical excitement was visible. “I love dolphins,” Jasper managed to say.

  “I’m going to ask you to put your pants back on,” Tiny said. His voice was filled with caution and a little fear—he seemed to doubt Jasper would oblige. “Security knows I’m here,” Tiny continued. “It was altruistic concern for your safety that brought me up here tonight, man. You forgot to kill the lights and lock the door in the maintenance office—I mean that’s what I figured had happened when they did their check and found it open and lit up, but since you don’t have a cell phone I worried I should make sure, just in case, that you hadn’t knocked your head and passed out cold in the chum tank or something. Yeah, I happened to walk in on a situation you wish I had not walked in on; we’ve got some common ground there for sure, but good intentions were what brought me here tonight. You do not want the karma of hurting someone who was operating in your best interests, right? What I just saw indicates to me that you’ve got challenges in your life already; crosses are being borne. You don’t need things getting more effed up for you. And I think I can say, because it’s objective and I am indeed humble, that karma is sort of my copilot. Karma is that loyal dog that would sleep on top of my grave each night should I die. I think it would really sink its teeth into the flesh of anyone who did me wrong, especially if I myself were unable to seek justice on my own behalf, because I was, say, dead.”