Tonight really had been his one chance. He’d blown it.
Pulling up at his shit-hole apartment only emphasized this. He’d told himself that living in misery was going to be such a fleeting means to an end. He remembered reading an interview with the CEO of Gogol, the company that made all the phones and gadgets and other stuff that everyone was hooked on in their daily lives. The one whose professional-grade microcameras were responsible for all the photos and videos of Jasper holding a dolphin on the beach. In the start-up days, the CEO said he’d just moved into an office space and worked on the floor in the corner—hadn’t even bought furniture!—because he was so driven that creature comforts were the least of his concerns. Jasper had told himself this was what he was doing too; he’d had tunnel vision because nothing mattered but getting Bella.
Now it was time to go inside and make a decision. Would he drive to the paid-for house with the pool that represented all the planned joy he wasn’t ever going to have? Would he go to another city, where he still wouldn’t be able to sleep with women and therefore couldn’t make decent money, especially if he wanted to work under an alias? His real name wasn’t safe; exes he’d conned whose parents or relatives had deep pockets probably also had private detectives who’d figured out his identity and were salivating, in wait for him to reappear.
Stepping indoors, he saw the outline of his blow-up mattress in the efficiency’s corner. It was covered with various plushy-dolphin stuffed animals he’d brought home from the Oceanarium gift shop and used in shameful ways. He’d been meaning to take them to the Laundromat but worried about someone seeing him washing a load of dolphin stuffed animals and making a call to the police based on a general hunch of something’s-weird-ness.
The apartment’s walls were haphazardly decorated with ripped-out print images he’d found, mainly in children’s activity books. One was a connect-the-dots illustration of a dolphin that he’d hung up right above his pillow. At the time he’d felt it was almost like a cave drawing, a symbolic representation made all the more meaningful by its crudeness: it was the lowest-passing image that could attempt to summarize the greatness of this creature. And in terms of his thoughts and feelings toward interspecies romance, he was a bit Paleolithic in a first-responder, early-on-the-scene type of way—sure, most people who heard about his plan would want to discuss reasons why he should not attempt to seize a dolphin from corporate ownership and pursue domestic cohabitation with the mammal, but the first guy who discovered fire probably had a lot of naysayers too. That’s how Jasper had felt these past few months—like a chosen pioneer. After all, he hadn’t asked for this attraction. He hadn’t been born with it. It had struck him, seemingly literally; dolphin cupid had hit him with cone-tooth-shaped arrows and he hadn’t lusted for a human being since.
But it was clear to Jasper now that natural selection had not called out his name. The roster had been posted. He hadn’t made the team.
He walked into the bathroom and looked at the tub he’d prefilled for Bella that morning.
That was the closest he was going to get to Bella now—the bathwater he’d intended for her to be in.
Tiny had ruined Jasper’s shot at not becoming a Shakespearean tragedy. Maybe, Jasper thought, he should just embrace it. If the dolphin that attacked him on the beach had wanted Jasper to meet his end in a watery grave, well, it was about to get its wish.
He’d had a good run. Jasper, you scoundrel, you’ve had a good run—he thought this and looked in the dark bathroom mirror and gave himself a congratulatory wink. He could go live it up first with the cash he had left—the life earnings of all his cons, the nest egg he was going to use to fund his life with Bella. But live it up how? The only things he enjoyed were sex and conning people out of money (by having great sex with them), and he couldn’t do the latter anymore, and with the former he couldn’t cover any new ground unless he had a live dolphin, and he didn’t.
He could leave a note identifying himself as the true Dolphin Savior. Who knew if anyone would believe it, but he could try. To add validity to this claim, he could put his stockpiled money in a bank account and leave a list of all the women he’d conned—he’d do his best, anyway, to remember—along with the Dolphin Savior note. Jasper could pretend he was riddled with guilt about what he’d done to the women. He could write that seeing another man being a fraud in public made him realize what a fraud he was himself, and that he wanted his victims to divide up the money in whatever way seemed fair.
But ultimately he didn’t have the energy. It was time to move on. Jasper felt the familiar antsy feeling, centered in his gut with twitchy roots moving down into his crotch and thighs, that preceded all of his relocations, except magnified to a degree he understood as being the actual end.
He didn’t just need to leave the town or the state this time. He had to go Elsewhere, forever.
JASPER DRAINED THE TUB AND REFILLED IT WITH WARM WATER, climbed inside, and placed a razor on the nightstand. He wanted to do the cutting underwater. It could get all red and cloudy and feel like an attack, which was what had started this nightmare. He’d been attacked and it had left him a different person, and he did not care to go through life being that person. With Bella, with the ability to feel satisfied, he could’ve done it. He’d been excited to try at least. Though that would not have been a very carefree, easy sort of life to maintain. It might have gone down in flames in a far worse way than this.
And he had won so often, for so long. He’d known it wasn’t possible to win forever. Jasper hadn’t expected his streak to end this soon, or to end in such a weird way. But since it had, here he was.
Just to make sure he had enough motivation to go through with it—he didn’t want to have second thoughts halfway—he grabbed the Gogol tablet he’d permanently borrowed from one of the Oceanarium’s educational classrooms and pulled up the Dolphin Savior’s hit song.
As the song began playing, an ad popped up in the corner of the screen: a bikinied woman was giving him a seductive wink. Her face reminded him a bit of a former con’s—Nele? Christina?
Maybe it was a sign. He clicked on the ad and decided to try one last time to get aroused by a human woman. Life or death.
The bikinied woman leaned forward to speak, her lips hovering just above her cleavage. “Complex, individual problems require customized solutions,” she said, shaking her hips a little. “Solutions as unique as the individuals who need them.” The sound of hopeful string music began to play.