“That’s fine. I just wondered if you’ve always been really attractive.”
Aimless driving was the way she and her friends would hang out without being supervised in high school. They’d circle the same blocks for hours, listening to music and smoking pot and making out and swearing. They drove around for so long they could’ve left town and gone somewhere interesting and gotten back by curfew, but nothing seemed like it would be more fun. Hazel couldn’t decide whether this was an example of contentment or of failure of imagination. Odd, Hazel realized, that those nights were probably the safest she’d ever felt in her life: as the backseat passenger in a car piloted by a stoned teenage driver who maybe only had his learner’s permit. But she’d been away from the critical eye of her parents, away from any form of obligation, away from any feelings that weren’t numb giggles.
“I was sort of goofy in middle school,” Jasper said. “I didn’t get hot until later.”
Maybe she was hitting on him; she couldn’t decide. It did seem dumb not to sleep together if they were both about to die. That sentiment was the most famous joke ever, wasn’t it? We’re gonna die so let’s do this? What was true of her in high school was probably true of her now, and maybe just as sad: if presented with a variety of options and activities, what she’d choose to do, always, was whatever promised the greatest reprieve from loneliness. She could be dead in a few hours, and she couldn’t think of anything she wanted to do more than feel less alone.
“I have a sort of brain chip too,” Jasper blurted out. “A modification. I should tell you this. It’s kind of dishonest not to, and I was a dishonest person for a long time. I’m only attracted to dolphins. So I got a procedure done that lets me feel like I’m sleeping with a dolphin when I sleep with a human. If I close my eyes it’s a perfect simulation.”
“Oh,” Hazel said. She looked at the radio. “That song earlier. You mean that turned you on?”
“It led to thoughts that did,” Jasper said. “Anyway, just so you know. I can sleep with women physically but for the mental part of it I go somewhere else.”
“I can actually relate to that,” Hazel said. “My life has been a failure in terms of human connection.” There wasn’t anyone she felt she had to see before her life ended, which made her feel sorry for herself. Even more than Byron’s oddities and cruelties coming forward, and even more than the shock that an incredible amount of money could make things worse instead of better, more perilous instead of more secure, the biggest surprise for her to come out of marriage was how lonesome it was. Byron worked constantly of course, which she’d been prepared for—it was when the two of them were together and she felt alone, more so than when he wasn’t even there, that was dejecting to the point of suffocation. Part of her excitement about marriage, one of its elements that had seemed innate to her, was its supposed guarantee of companionship. “I mean, it’s also a failure in all the other usual aspects. But that one’s, you know, the real bummer.”
“For me too,” Jasper said. “I did not make loads of friends.”
Hazel started crying, but not in a dramatic way. It was subtle, like sweating while lying out in the sun. She felt she needed to think about things in a metaphorical fashion that would take the existential pressure off, and she decided to visualize a box of damage. She had this box that she was carrying through the world, and it was filled up with all the broken things about her and all the bad and shameful choices she’d ever made, and she had to carry it around until she died, because that was how things worked, but that was all she had to do. Exist while holding her box of damage for as long as she could survive. She could do that, couldn’t she? And if she did it mindfully, maybe some absolution for past ways in which she’d failed to be brave or aware was built in.
“I’m sorry about your dad,” Jasper said. “Truly. Before, that was something I’d say to be polite, but due to brain adjustments now I really am sorry.”
“Thanks,” Hazel said. “I loved him as my dad and all. But it was never great being with him. Or my mother. I think it doesn’t say nice things about me that I don’t have a burning wish for them to come back to life so I can hang out with them again. Or that my husband wants me dead, even though he’s evil. I mean, here are three people I was supposed to be really bonded with. My relationships with all of them were a disaster.”
Jasper nodded. “I don’t speak to my parents. It happens, I think. I mean, I know that it does because it happened to me.”
“You don’t feel guilty, though? I was always like, Be more tolerant, Hazel! Be more tolerant! But I never could be. They annoyed and bored and enraged me, each of them, to the end. When I went to college I felt like I was escaping. And then I had to escape from my marriage. I have no idea how to live in a place I don’t want to run away from.”
But right now, all they had to focus on was running away. Assuming everything had worked.
21
A FEW VEHICLES BEHIND THEM AT THE STOPLIGHT, THE PASSENGER-SIDE window of a minivan filled with middle-aged women rolled down. A woman with a bad haircut, the sort done at a walk-in chain that advertises with Sunday mailer coupons, leaned out of the vehicle. Jasper winced. He almost wanted to talk to her about her hair, in a kind way. Could that be a new form of charitable service? Had she ever, for example, thought about getting a haircut at a nice salon every other month instead of getting a haircut at a terrible salon every month? Not spending a dollar more and looking better, even during the month of split ends, than she looked with regular but uninspired trims?
He leaned into his rearview mirror to make sure—yes, she was wearing a T-shirt with the face of Dolphin Savior on it. I’VE BEEN SAVED! was written across the shirt’s graphic in neon pink cursive lettering. Wow, Jasper thought. How great that that catastrophic event in my life worked out so well for the guy.