Body Surfing

the fact that not a square inch of the car was undented, undinged, or otherwise undamaged.
    The last picture was of a pair of stretchers on which two lumpy body bags were laid out like a pair of potato sacks, followed by a final message:
    “THE DRIVER HAD HIS DICK OUT!!!! GOD I AM SO TURNED ON RIGHT NOW!!!!”
    Sue snapped the phone closed, shoved it back in her pocket. Before she’d taken two steps her thigh buzzed again.
    “Fuck you, pervert,” she said under her breath. But her leg kept tingling after the phone stopped, and she shook it a little as she walked into the building, to see what Mohinder had found so interesting that he had to call on her day off.

3
    J asper heard every “Fuck” and “Shit” Danny muttered as she ran off. Heard when she stopped and zipped up her pants and then again when she puked halfway up the hill and then finally when she wrenched open the door of her car parked a quarter of a mile away and sped off.
    And yet, as disgusted as he was by what he’d been tricked into doing, his revulsion was mitigated by the sense of wonder he felt from his host. For, locked in a little room in his own brain, Jarhead West was discovering the myriad music of the world for the first time: zippers and car doors, vomiting and birdsong, the endless lapping lull of the river. Jasper could feel him hearing it: the pain at destroying his relationship with Danny mixed with gratitude at his newfound ability to hear. Yes, gratitude. Because somehow, just as Jasper was aware of Jarhead’s presence, Jarhead was aware of his. Knew it was his ol’ buddy Jasper who’d fixed his ears. But as much as Jasper didn’t want to be alone right now, he didn’t want to be with Jarhead even more, and, concentrating, he drew a veil ever more tightly around his host, leaving him not just deaf but blind. Sorry buddy , he thought, and could have sworn he heard a faint answer: It’s okay Jasper. I trust you . It was more than Jasper could say about himself.
    For a long time he just laid there, overwhelmed by his situation. What he wanted to do most was go home. Crawl into bed, hope thatthis whole thing would prove to’ve been some crazy dream born of sexual frustration. But even that simple word brought two conflicting images to mind: first was the little house on the hill above him, dark now, his dad having presumably gone to bed. The second was alien to Jasper, yet somehow more familiar: the trailer on the east side of the river that Jarhead had been living in since his own dad kicked him out halfway through his senior year. The dozens of beer cans strewn inside and out, the dirty clothes and takeout food containers, the sagging mattress laid directly on the floor between two stacks of porno rags grown so high that Jarhead used them as bedside tables. He knew that’s where this body belonged, but he couldn’t bring himself to go there. Jarhead’s flesh might have been his, but he wasn’t ready to take over Jarhead’s life as well. And so he climbed the 492 steps to his own house—his old house, at any rate, the house that had been his when he’d been alive.
    Gunther started barking even before he reached the yard. Jasper tried to shush him but the dog had no idea who he was, and when Jasper stretched his hand out—Jarhead’s hand, he reminded himself—the rottweiler went into a snarling frenzy, hurling his hundred and twenty pounds of dogflesh at the gate of his kennel. Jasper was afraid the dog would rouse his dad, but when he got closer to the house he saw that Van Arsdale’s truck was gone. For a moment Jasper figured his dad was at Cakes’s, but then he realized he was probably at the hospital. Or the morgue. Was the morgue at the hospital, or did it have its own building? He should’ve paid more attention during Law and Order , instead of trying to get Michaela in the sack.
    Then again, perhaps he should’ve turned off the TV and tried harder to get Michaela in the sack.
    The first thing he saw when he opened the back door was the chair he’d knocked over at breakfast, the silly flower on the table looking down on it like a mourner. The bottle of breakfast applejack was still on the counter, empty now; a second stood on the table, already half gone. Jasper could hardly begrudge his dad a drink under the circumstances. He’d’ve poured one himself, but he had no idea what it’d be like getting drunk in Jarhead’s body—until he thought ofit, that is, at which point every drink Jarhead had