Body Surfing

shimmering bands of orange and red and pink that had defied painters’ efforts to do it justice for more than three centuries. To the east the vista was subtler but no less spectacular, an emerald swath of lawn that sloped through a dark copse of oak and maple for nearly half a mile before dead-ending in the black swells of the Hudson. Water-front property along that stretch of the river was a rare commodity, and over the years dozens of strangers had parked their BMWs and Range Rovers behind Van Arsdale’s battered pickup and offered fantastic sums of money for the place. Jasper’s father had managed to hold out so far. “You don’t sell your legacy,” he said to each prospective buyer, and, if he was drunk enough, he’d launch into a long-winded story that had been told him by his grandfather, about how the little stone house had been built by the family’s Dutch ancestors when New York was still New Netherland. He would invite the strangers inside and peel back the kitchen linoleum or the living room carpet (both had long since come unglued) to point out the fifteen-inch-wide planks on the floor. “Solid maple,” he’d tell them, “hand cut,” and he’d stomp to show how well the floorboards had endured three hundred years. If it was summer, he’d walk them into one of the seven-foot-tall fireplaces at either end of the house, where they could look up and see a bright square of daylight. “Now that’s a flue. You can be sure we never smell a lick of smoke in this house.” Never mind that a glass of water left in the midpoint between the fireplaces would freeze in winter, that snow, rain, birds, and raccoons made their way down the chimney (and sometimes into the kitchen): that flue sucked up smoke like a crack whore working a ten-dollar pipe.
    He spoke like a cross between a realtor and a carnie, but the only thing John Van Arsdale ever sold his prospective buyers were his daylilies, maybe one or two bottles of his grandfather’s applejack. The old man had started brewing during Prohibition. Another part of the family “legacy.” In fact the Arsdales were English; John’s grandfather had added the “Van” to throw off the Keystone Kops of the 1920s,which is also when he bought the house. But four generations was still a long time—fifteen more years and they’d’ve qualified for Century Farm status, would’ve gotten another plaque from the state that told the world this piece of property had belonged to the same proud, hardworking American family for one hundred years. John Van Arsdale freely admitted he’d screwed up everything else in his life—hell, he’d drink a toast to it—but the one thing he’d managed to do was hold on to his legacy so he could leave it to his son. Now he lay on the couch at night and stared up at the shadowed dents in the ceiling and imagined the whole place falling down on him, nothing left but that stupid plaque out front. But the house remained standing as it had for more than three hundred years. It was only his son—his real legacy, the one good thing he’d made in this world—that was gone.

2
    M ichaela.
    Explosions in her brain. Images, memories, not her own. Violence, sexual carnage. The smell of flesh in all its violated forms: burning, diseased, rotting, and, most disgusting of all, the reek of its own natural perfume. The genital musk. Warm, wet, salty, with a sharp acidic bite.
    Michaela, it’s me .
    There were a thousand different ways Leo could have destroyed her mind. He could have wiped it clean, or programmed her to run screaming from a random but frequently occurring stimulus—the color blue, the sound of birds singing—or he could have placed a single overwhelming image in her head: a pustuled penis, say, or the sun going supernova, or a little lamb gamboling through a particolored pasture that exploded into 962,347 yellow petals tipped with digitalis that caused the earth to bleed rivers of chocolate and cucumber slices. But he had gone for something more painful. He had crammed Michaela’s mind with millions of memories from all his past hosts, and, to make it especially torturous, tagged them specifically to her senses. Every stimulus Michaela received through eyes and ears and skin unleashed a torrent of mental images that she couldn’t have processed even if they’d come from her own experience. But the fact that they came from thousands of other livesleft her catatonic and quivering with the only emotion that could make