“Not for many. Say, Jasper, I saw where you’re living. Not personally, but I got the idea. I have a big house and I’d like to keep an eye on you for a bit. Do you want to stay with me for a while?”
Jasper found himself nodding. He didn’t ever want to see that efficiency again, or any person or part of any of his old lives. Any of them. What would be better than a nice place where he could hide away from the world?
He knew his old self would be freaking out right now. Cohabitation with a strange woman he’d just met! But something about Voda felt familiar. Felt great, actually. He was looking forward to spending more time with her.
III
IT’S SO FOOLISH TO LIVE (WHICH IS ALWAYS TROUBLE ENOUGH) AND NOT TO SAVE YOUR SOUL.
—WILLA CATHER
16
JASPER’S YEARS OF SWINDLING HAD MADE HIM AN IDEAL HOUSEGUEST: very tidy, overtly accommodating. Not that there was anything to clean. Everything cleaned itself. His days were spent like the most Zen security guard ever, strolling the home’s vast interior grounds, stopping to appreciate the koanlike stillness of the machines’ various hums. In any given room, he had no idea where the control boxes and panels were stored. They were hidden from surface view, tucked away like sleeping animals.
The only place off-limits to him was Voda’s home office. There were several surveillance cameras in front of it, but the largest was programmed to detect and follow motion. Jasper liked to do really slow dance moves in front of it and make its eye follow his limbs around.
He also still enjoyed looking at his reflection. Almost every surface in Voda’s house was reflective; it was like he’d moved into a house made of mirrors. Which was something he used to daydream about.
His days of relative freedom gave him lots of time to contemplate various ironies. Foremost, Voda was the richest woman he had ever met, let alone slept with. But he couldn’t swindle Voda. Somehow she knew everything about him; there didn’t seem to be much that she didn’t know everything about. But he also didn’t have the urge to swindle her.
Not once had he come close to falling in love with any of the women who’d fallen in love with him. And Voda wasn’t falling in love. She really liked having sex with him, despite knowing he was visualizing a dolphin. But then she’d go work, or exercise or read or watch something, and how he spent his time didn’t seem to matter to her.
Jasper understood that he hadn’t gotten his sea legs yet when it came to morality, so when he did finally work up the courage to approach the subject, he did so with caution. “I guess I notice that you don’t love me,” he said.
She looked up from her book, interested. If she was interested, it meant he was speaking about something related to her work. Knowing this caused Jasper to feel a little awful. It was a new feeling. He seemed to be having foreign sensations all the time now, living and being with Voda. He might liken this one to someone crumpling up a large piece of paper inside his stomach.
“Are you saying you love me?” she asked. “How certain are you?”
“Totally certain,” he answered, surprising himself. “I know that I love you. I think about you all the time. I hate being apart from you. I’ve never had that before, with anyone.” His former self would’ve felt so defeated by the situation. In a twofold way: defeated to have this feeling, and defeated to be honestly admitting it. But it felt good to get it off his chest. And since so many women had loved him, it didn’t seem far-fetched to hope the one woman he turned out to love might feel the same.
Except she didn’t. “You’re young and handsome,” Voda said. “But you’re right; I don’t love you.” She exhaled and sat back in her seat. Her posture made it look like the chair was moving forward at a great speed: her legs were spread wide, sticking out of the bottom of her white lab coat; her small feet were extending outward to form a large V. Voda was always in a lab coat, except when they went to bed; then she changed into a nightgown that looked a lot like a lab coat, except instead of buttons the front clasped together with a magnetic strip.
“Do you think you could ever grow to love me?” Jasper felt his voice crack. He sounded like his father. Once that would’ve devastated him, but now he felt hard-pressed to care.
“Don’t worry about me,” she told him. “I don’t have time for dating. You’re in no danger of being replaced.”
He’d been good at pretending to love people, and now he decided to try to simply reverse course and pretend he was loved. It wasn’t that difficult because Voda liked to be touched. In his previous relationships, he’d cuddled and spooned and massaged and neck-nibbled to give his cons a false sense of security. His body language with them had been genuine in terms of arousal, but the implied affection was a lie. Now he was doing all the same things with Voda, but with her his touch spoke the truth. He’d developed a fondness for everything about her. Even the aged crepe of her skin. He loved running his hand down the length of her sprawled body again and again, like he was brushing the fur of an anesthetized leopard.
Guilt about his previous life was hitting him hard, though. When she wasn’t home, he’d begun spending more and more time crying in Voda’s atrium, which had a haunting, glazed feel to it. All the plants were faux succulents made of porcelain. She’d had living ones once but said her smoking had killed them all no matter what she’d tried. He was pretty sure she saw everything he did during the day, or could see it if she wanted to, but he did his best to hide these crying spells until he couldn’t.
One evening he lost track of time, became so melancholy that he didn’t realize the sun had set and he was weeping in the dark. Jasper heard the pack of vaccu-dogs coming down the hallway, smelled Voda’s fog of nicotine. When she entered and the lights came on, he was sprawled out on the floor in the center of the room next to a large ceramic fern. “I’m sorry,” he sobbed. “Please don’t kick me out. I promise I’m not as awful a person as I used to be.”
“You’re feeling a toxic amount of empathy,” Voda said. The cloud of smoke she exhaled fell flat with gravity; instead of hanging atop her head it sank in the air, almost like a dirty car window being rolled down. He looked up to see Voda’s forehead wrinkling with worry. “You’re going through empathy puberty. It’s all coming in at once and overwhelming you. I didn’t mean for that to happen. Not to this extent.”
Jasper swallowed. “What did you mean to happen?” He suddenly felt guilty that he’d estranged himself from his father, that he’d never contacted his mother after she left.