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.