But his plan hadn’t taken into account the beauty of her sleeping form. In repose, Bella’s eye seemed shut in an act of pleasure, the mild curve of her nose a gracious smile she was making as a lover worked upon her. Jasper’s arousal was throbbing and immediate, which he’d expected, but its persistence was what threw him for a loop—his body failed to understand, the dolphins bobbing there like permissive apples, why it couldn’t be satisfied when the additional time this would take was inconsequential. Jasper attempted to ignore it. He went to the cooler, filled up large buckets of treat fish and placed them down on the sling’s rolling platform. But walking was difficult. Was it silly to try to enact his plan when he was so handicapped by attraction, particularly when the cure was such a simple and obvious one?
Yes, he thought, in an ideal world he and Bella would be getting out as quickly as possible. But why not take a quick minute to relieve himself? With the dolphins this proximal, without any sort of glass between them, it would be as quick as a sneeze. Jasper climbed the tank’s steps for a better look (which he nearly had to do on all fours; his entire lower torso had effectively shut down), and found that the decision seemed to have been made for him—a dolphin (not Bella, Sven—in Sven’s biographical wall in the halls of the auditorium, his personality was described as “pensive”) was sleeping just below the tank’s lip like a docked submarine.
In the months after his mother’s abandonment, there was a brief time when Jasper’s father had attempted a salve of religion. They went to church frequently, and now Jasper remembered the parable of the ill man who’d touched Jesus’s cloak as he passed by and had been instantly healed thanks to faith. Here, with Sven, Jasper realized all he’d have to do to be cured was touch the tip of himself against Sven’s blubber.
“Are you kidding me?”
The voice was coming from nowhere and everywhere all at once—it had to be God.
He’d creeped out God. At no point in his deceptive philandering had he appalled God enough to make an appearance. But apparently, Jasper thought, he had finally crossed the line.
Then he realized the lights had come on. For a moment his brain had to reboot, like a copy machine warming up; all he could think of or see was the shock of brightness. But when the realization hit him, it was very bad news. Oh dear. It was Tiny.
On anyone else, Tiny’s tie-dyed shirt would’ve been a signal of pacifism, but stretched across his broad chest, particularly with his current facial expression, it made him look like a bad man with supernatural powers. The twisting red pattern didn’t seem to be a shirt at all so much as muscles forming a central wormhole in the middle of his stomach. Jasper almost expected balls of fire to shoot from it.
Tiny was gripping a long wooden flute like a police nightstick. “I understand people can resent the creatures they’re employed to care for,” he said. He stepped closer, repeatedly striking the flute against the palm of his hand in controlled slaps. “And that’s okay. All feelings are valid. But actions are different. All actions are not okay, and you have trespassed into a very not-okay place. You aren’t the first of my workers to act out. Once a guy drew a swastika on the forehead of the ceramic beluga in the marine gardens. But urinating into the blowhole of a dolphin is not just a pubescent stunt. That’s a form of torture. Do you know what that would feel like to one of these innocent creatures who arguably already lives a pretty sad, imprisoned life? It would feel like waterboarding. And I mean, as far as I’m aware, even when our own government resorts to horrific and illegal acts of barbarism like this, they use water rather than their own urine. To my knowledge. So if you think about it, that makes you more depraved than the U.S. government. I get how harsh that statement must feel, but I have to tell you, from one living organism to another, I think you need a wake-up call. The Oceanarium has a psychologist on retainer. If you agree to see him—”
Jasper stood up and Tiny’s eyes bulged wide. He stopped talking. Jasper looked down and saw his unbuttoned pants had fallen to the ground. His physical excitement was visible. “I love dolphins,” Jasper managed to say.
“I’m going to ask you to put your pants back on,” Tiny said. His voice was filled with caution and a little fear—he seemed to doubt Jasper would oblige. “Security knows I’m here,” Tiny continued. “It was altruistic concern for your safety that brought me up here tonight, man. You forgot to kill the lights and lock the door in the maintenance office—I mean that’s what I figured had happened when they did their check and found it open and lit up, but since you don’t have a cell phone I worried I should make sure, just in case, that you hadn’t knocked your head and passed out cold in the chum tank or something. Yeah, I happened to walk in on a situation you wish I had not walked in on; we’ve got some common ground there for sure, but good intentions were what brought me here tonight. You do not want the karma of hurting someone who was operating in your best interests, right? What I just saw indicates to me that you’ve got challenges in your life already; crosses are being borne. You don’t need things getting more effed up for you. And I think I can say, because it’s objective and I am indeed humble, that karma is sort of my copilot. Karma is that loyal dog that would sleep on top of my grave each night should I die. I think it would really sink its teeth into the flesh of anyone who did me wrong, especially if I myself were unable to seek justice on my own behalf, because I was, say, dead.”
“I’m not a violent person,” Jasper said. Tiny’s eyes glanced down at Jasper’s bare crotch again, just for a second. Jasper wished he didn’t have so many sores and abrasions from the chafing rubber pants.
“You’re not going to harm me?” Tiny asked. “In any way? Bad-touch categories included? Any touch at all from you right now would be a bad touch, to clarify.”
Jasper began putting his pants back on. It was easier to take another man’s word at face value when he was wearing pants. “Of course I’m not going to harm you.”
“Okay, good,” Tiny said. “So let’s move forward. You’re definitely fired. I’ll just tell everyone I caught you stealing cleaning supplies—this is for my sake, not yours; I don’t want to have to rehash this. But if you do something insane like put me down as a reference for another job, I will not blink twice before I tell them I caught you trying to have conjugal relations with a dolphin.”
“I wasn’t going to do that,” Jasper said quietly. “I was just going to touch it to the side of a dolphin.”
“I’m going to have to burn sage here,” Tiny said. “Everywhere you patrolled actually. I am going to really have to smoke it out.”
ON THE DRIVE BACK TO HIS STUDIO, JASPER FOUND HIMSELF CAREENING in and out of lanes as he wept. His modified station wagon now ferried a sizable cooler that did not feel empty at all but filled with Jasper’s dead dreams.
He wanted to drive the car straight onto the beach and into the ocean but knew that would result in an anticlimactic shutdown of the vehicle before its back tires even got wet; he’d also receive a hefty fine from beach patrol, who would ask him for identification, and given his current luck, the license would probably come back as being stolen. He’d probably been about to get fired for fraud anyway.