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 would 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.