Body Surfing

rather, they’re both temporarily hidden behind stronger personalities. Namely, ours.”
    “You’re not Danny?”
    Danny threw back her head and laughed hysterically. “Good God, no. No more than you’re Mason. She’s a nice body to hang out in though.” She ran a finger beneath a breast, then nodded knowingly. “He’s still there, you know. Go on, look.”
    “Look—?”
    “Don’t overthink it. Look .”
    Jasper tried to figure out what Danny meant, but even as he did the answer came to him. Or, rather, Jarhead came to him. It was as though Jasper had flipped a switch in his brain and a darkened room filled with light, and there was Jarhead: sagging jeans, filthy jersey, dopey, benevolent, needy smile. When the light went on, the former linebacker seemed to look directly at Jasper, confusion giving way to delight.
    “Jasper!” he brayed in his deaf man’s voice. “Why is everything so loud?”
    Jasper snapped the light off. He felt an electric shock in his—in Jarhead’s—brain, as though some circuit had been fried beyond repair.
    “He can see me.”
    “Well, you are in his head after all. It only seems fair.”
    “Fair.” As though possessing someone were nothing more than a schoolgirl’s game, hopscotch, tetherball, four square. Was that the right word? Possession?
    “Of course, you can hide yourself from him. Or, more accurately, you can make it so he can’t see you, by turning him off. But that’s likely to do more damage.”
    “Damage?”
    “This is the universe, Jasper, metaphysical or not. The same Newtonian rules apply: for every action, an equal and opposite reaction. You got a second chance in Mason West’s body, but you had to die first. And Mason gets to play host to your psyche, but not without a few, shall we say, residual effects.”
    Jasper shook his head. His host’s head. “I don’t get it.”
    “Imagine Mason’s brain is a forest. His consciousness is like a deer path, a single meandering thread of daylight amidst a world of dark trunks and leaves. Then in comes your consciousness like a bulldozer, widening the path, straightening it, but only by plowing under a significant number of the trees. You’re the bull in the china shop, Gulliver trying to have tea with the Lilliputians: things are gonna get broken. Once you acclimate you’ll realize you can do far more with Mason’s brain and body than he ever dreamed, but when you leave him, well, he’ll find he’s not exactly the person he once was. How different he is will depend on how much crashing around you do in there.”
    Danny paused. The look she gave Jasper had nothing to do with metaphysics or consciousness or deer paths. It was pure sex. The kind of look Michaela had never given him. Jasper thought that if he put his hand on the breast Danny had just touched, she wouldn’t brush it away the way his girlfriend did. She would guide it where she wanted it to go, put her own hands on his body. It was only when he thought of her touching his body that he ran into trouble, because it wasn’t the body he knew. It was Jarhead’s. The thought of Danny having sex with the gas jockey’s lumpy limbs was anything but a turn-on, but it wasn’t quite enough to turn him off either. He almost had to sit on his hands to keep from grabbing her.
    Suddenly a thought came to him. If he wasn’t Jarhead, and Danny wasn’t Danny, then who was she? How did she know all this?
    “How—I mean, well, who are you?”
    “I was wondering if you’d ever ask. My name is—or was, a thousand lifetimes ago—Leo. But you might just want to think of me as your guide. Your Virgil, to lead you through this treacherous passage to safety.”
    “I thought you said your name was Leo.”
    Danny—Leo—rolled her eyes. His eyes? “The Virgil thing was a metaphor? An allusion? What do they teach you in school anyway?”
    “Leo? Like, um, Leonora?”
    Danny shook her head. “Lesson number one, Jasper: genderdoesn’t matter. Not anymore. Who or whatever I am, I’m in this body now. This very lissome young female body. Should you touch me—” she took Jasper’s hand and put it on her thigh “—this flesh is all you’ll feel. And this flesh, I’m sure you’ll agree, is all woman.”
    It was harder for Jasper to take his hand off Danny’s—Leo’s—thigh than it was to bench 225. But he made himself do it, because he sensed there were more important things going on than the throbbing he felt in his—no,