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.
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.