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 Because of education budget cuts, these movies were always outdated by at least fifteen years, and there was a fetishistic quality to the actors having clothes and hair and makeup from another decade—he and his friends called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 dad’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.
The creature’s back was glistening like a mirror, so much so that Jasper found he could see his reflection in its gray flesh. With his grimaced face, his mouth open in a labored breath . . . Jasper recoiled. He looked old.
So old that it couldn’t be his reflection: he was actually seeing his future. It was right there beneath the surface of the dolphin’s slick sheen. It was a troubling revision of the ever-young self-portrait that his mind held fixed inside his ego. Despite the creature’s weight and his bleeding wrist, Jasper felt compelled to stare for a while longer.
Why was he seeing this? Was it some kind of message? What did it mean?
When he did finally look up, he and the dolphin were no longer alone. In front of him was a wall of people lining the shore, all of whom were holding out an arm, extending hands upward and toward him.
Each hand held a Gogol cell phone, snapping photographs and taking videos. “You saved the dolphin!” a woman cried out.
Jasper felt his brow grimace, his shoulders tense. “No big deal,” he said.
5