He had a vague memory of his mother telling him that she didn’t sleep through a single night until he was three years old; every few hours she’d keep getting seized with the fear that he’d stopped breathing and go check on him. He thought about this a lot after she left. If that was true, how could she move out when he was still a kid?
But what did he know about her life outside him, really? He’d left his father too. When she left, it had felt like solidarity with his dad for him to refuse his mother’s calls and return the mail she sent. He’d been so mad. But even mad this had been hard to do. There was a game he and his father used to play where they would come up with worst-possible-life scenarios for his absentee mother to be living out at that very moment. Maybe she’s dating a circus clown, his father would say, and she’s severely allergic to the greasepaint he wears and it never fully washes off him, so she’s always broken out in terrible rashes. And all they eat is circus food because they sleep in the back of a van that they drive from show to show and don’t have a refrigerator to store meat and produce. Plus they get a discount at the circus concession stand, which they need because they’re so poor. Seniority wise this guy is the most junior clown and he also gets the least laughs from the audience each night so management keeps paying him less. And for months all he and your mother have eaten are cotton candy and elephant ears. Her teeth are rotting out and she’s gaining weight even as she’s becoming malnourished. She’s gotten so unattractive that the clown has started cheating on her with one of the trapeze artists because he feels that infidelities that take place in midair don’t count. Then his father would look to him for a contribution. Well, the clown snores, Jasper would add, and his dad would nod and say, Nice, but think of something bad about her life related to the circus. So Jasper would think and say, Maybe there are cages with lions and tigers that always get set up next to where their van parks at night. Their van gets boxed in by the lion and tiger cages in every town no matter how hard they strategize. And she’s so scared of the lions and tigers and hates walking by the cages so much that most of the time instead of getting out of the van to go to the bathroom she pees into one of the concession stand fountain drink cups and then pours it out the van window. Except the smell of fresh human urine makes the lions and tigers go crazy, so they roar and growl all night and she’s either wide awake and terrified or asleep and having nightmares to a sound track of wild cats snarling inches away. And his dad would say, Good. That’s a bad life.
In hindsight, as an adolescent it was kind of a bad life playing that game with his father. It was kind of a bad life the way they stopped using the word “mom” after Mom left and started using the word “she,” and “she” meant “absent mom” until his dad began dating and sometimes marrying a new woman, who got to have a name while she lived in the house but relinquished it upon her exit and became the new “she.”
“I meant for you to fall in love with me so you’d live here and I could keep having sex with you,” Voda said. “I’m busy and this is a convenient arrangement. I wasn’t trying to turn you into a Boy Scout. I thought full-throttle sympathy stimulation on your brain would be like throwing a paper towel into a volcano. But look at you—a full month post-op and you’re spewing regret everywhere! You’re feeling a level of guilt that’s . . . admirable.”
What she was saying about his conscience was true. He could feel it growing steadily no matter what he did, as painful and insistent as hunger. “Damn it,” Voda added, then she picked up a clay rhododendron and hurled it against the wall. It shattered and the robot vacuums momentarily circled the carnage like buzzards, adjusting their internal settings to the specifications of the spill before zooming forward to eat up the shards. Jasper suddenly had the clearest, most frightening image in his head: his own bisected corpse on the floor, the skin of his chest peeled back like opened curtains, the pack of vacuum robots feasting on the mess of his organs.
“Would they eat a person?” Jasper asked. “Like what if I tripped and fell by accident?”
“If you feel up for intercourse, we can have one last go. Otherwise I think our cohabitation experiment has concluded. There’s a guest casita out back you can sleep in for a few days if you’d like, but tomorrow you’ll need to leave.”
THE WALLS OF THE CASITA’S BEDROOM WERE A PINKISH PLASTER that looked indistinguishable from spread frosting. He found himself briefly fantasizing about fantasizing. In his old life, he’d be imagining that he was waiting inside a giant cake right now—that soon, wearing an edible loincloth, a slice of the wall would be removed via forklift, and he would exit out into a giant reception hall where hundreds of newly divorced women were celebrating the end of their nuptials, ready to use his body to make their dirtiest rebound fantasies come true.
Instead he found his morning erection a tiresome presence; he was too wracked with guilt and sadness to want to think about dolphins or Voda or anything. His new brain seemed to be forcefully devoting him to redemption.
But maybe some part of him had always wanted that? Staring up at the ceiling fan, he thought about something Voda had told him one night. They’d been watching a show called Definitely Cheating where suspicious partners brought camera crews home to interrupt their spouses’ acts of adultery.
Jasper was shocked to find himself outraged. He was flooded with an unfamiliar attitude of How could they? and mentioned this to Voda. He also found it surprising that every accused partner was, in fact, definitely cheating. Not once did the camera crew burst in to find the other spouse baking a chicken or doing sit-ups or grouting some tile.
Voda had shrugged. “People are obsessed with the concept of free will,” she’d said. “But from a neurochemical standpoint I think that’s insane. Hormones, genetics, experience—our choices aren’t that independent. Why is everyone so afraid of letting science help? If a couple wants to guarantee they stay faithful to each other, I could actually do that. It’s still too risky an operation to put into common practice, but pretend the procedure is harmless. A lot of people would balk and tell me that renders fidelity meaningless, because free will is what makes it count. But you can’t depend on free will. To say to someone else, ‘I won’t cheat because I decided to make myself incapable of arousal outside our relationship’—isn’t that a much deeper commitment?”
Jasper had shifted in his chair. If Voda was a little insane, he told himself, that wasn’t a huge problem. As long as she didn’t do more operations on him. “They couldn’t get aroused with someone else? Or they just wouldn’t want to?”