Body Surfing

time for that later.”
    Danny had reached Jasper by that point. She stood there, sober, self-possessed, radiating an otherworldly strength. The spitting image of the person Jasper had met a few hours ago—the sharp-featured face, the high, firm breasts, the pirate patch of hair hanging over one eye—but still, something older and far more serious radiated from the eye not covered by the wedge of hair. It was almost luminous, as if glowing fish were swimming in its depths.
    “Cat got your tongue?” Danny’s laugh was deeper than Jasper remembered, ageless. “Well, come on then. Rise, Pinocchio.” She took hold of Jasper’s arm and hauled him to his feet as though he were a wooden doll.
    Jasper felt as though his body belonged to someone else. He still had no idea what was going on. How he’d ended up here, when the last thing he remembered was being in a car crash on the other side of the river. Maybe he’d been in a coma? He had amnesia? He’d beenwalking around not knowing who he was and now, somehow, his memory had come back to him? Somehow he didn’t think he’d become a minor plotline on Days of Our Lives .
    Danny led him to the river like a mother teaching a toddler to walk, jerked her thumb at the dark water.
    “This should help.”
    Jasper didn’t understand. Did she want him to splash some water on his face? He sank to his knees—God, it felt like he was carrying an extra hundred pounds—cupped two palmsful of freezing water, buried his face in it. But almost immediately, he jerked his hands away. His cheeks felt strange in his hands. Puffy, swollen. Misshapen. Maybe he’d been disfigured in the accident?
    He could feel his heart begin to beat faster. What is happening to me? Slowly, nervously, he separated his hands, waited for the water to still. It was dark and the moon was thin as a fishbone, but there was enough light for him to see that the face staring up at him was…
    was not …
    was not his .
    It was Jarhead West’s.
    Jasper threw himself backward as if he’d seen a shark in the water. He nearly hit Danny, who leapt nimbly out of the way, her laughter echoing across the river.
    “Freaky, right? God, I can barely remember the first time I looked in a mirror and saw someone else’s face. Well, that’s not true. I can remember it perfectly. But still. I’m almost jealous.”
    Suddenly a thousand memories collapsed on Jasper’s fragile psyche. Only they weren’t his memories. They were Jarhead’s. A lot of them involved eating, or drinking, or jerking off. A mother with a lumpy ass and loud voice. A father, rail-thin, a shot glass glued to his right hand. A dining room table on which dishes of moldy leftovers mingled with fresh bowls of spaghetti, macaroni, mashed potatoes—all the colorless starchy foods of the lower classes. The garage smelled of grease and stale beer and a catbox that needed to be cleaned. The bedroom reeked of unwashed clothes and more beer, a single bed, its worn mattress pushed against the far wall. The springs protestedwhen he fell on the bed in a drunken sprawl, then began rhythmically creaking as he reached inside his boxers and—
    Jasper shook his head, but the memories didn’t go away. Instead, more came. Impossibly precise, detailed memories from all the moments of Jarhead’s life. He remembered the sensation of beer in Jarhead’s mouth at Caitlin Reese’s party, felt it sliding down his esophagus, filling his stomach, leaching through intestines into kidneys, liver, bladder. He remembered breaking his wrist in a football game when he was a junior: he’d arm-checked a linesman from Troy and his radius and ulna snapped like a pair of chopsticks. He remembered the sweet fetid smell of the dead mouse that had been in his desk on the first day of fourth grade, remembered a stomach full of mashed apricots and peas when he was eight months old. The warm slide of shit into his diaper, the bright blurry shapes of the mobile hanging above his crib, the terrifying squeeze of the birth canal on his head and the insistent, latex-gloved hands of the doctor pulling him from the safety of his mother’s body.
    He remembered it all, not just at the sensory, but the cellular level. It was as if Jarhead’s body had been digitized and downloaded directly into Jasper’s brain. Except—except he was in Jarhead, not the other way around.
    Jasper opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out. He forced himself to crawl back to the river. Jarhead’s face