“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.