Body Surfing

ever swilled passed through his mind. It was as if Jasper had googled the words “drunk off his ass” and gotten 29,761 matches in 0.19 seconds. But the memories were followed by even more disturbing sensations: of his host’s liver, kidneys, and bladder at work, filtering his blood, neutralizing the alcohol—converting sugar to fat, channeling the ethanol into his bladder to be pissed out. Jasper understood exactly how the applejack would be broken down, how he could maximize the alcohol’s effect if he wanted to, or render it harmless. He was so sure of this fact that he picked up the bottle of liquor and swilled it. There was no burning sensation, no coughing, nothing. It might as well have been water.
    Just then a car sped down 9G. Jasper started and nearly dropped the bottle. He’d thought it was his dad for a moment, but then he realized it wasn’t Van Arsdale’s truck, which had a carburetor rather than fuel injection, a worn belt on the alternator that squeaked at a frequency of about fifteen kHz.
    But—but how did he know these things? How could any human being? The answer to that question was scarily obvious: Jasper wasn’t human. Not anymore.
    Jasper’s head—well, Jarhead’s—started spinning. He set the fallen chair upright and sank into it, let Jarhead’s face splat on the table. He could hear his father’s truck in his mind, could hear every single car that had ever driven past him or Jarhead, could measure the difference in volume and timbre between each of them, discern from the smell of the exhaust the type of fuel they were burning and how efficiently. He could tell that the air in the room was three and a half degrees colder around his ankles than it was near his head, that there was a mouse nibbling its way into a bag of flour in the cabinet next to the stove, that the bathroom faucet upstairs was dripping into the sink at the rate of 13.75 drops per hour. But one thought dominated all these others.
    He was dead. He was dead, yet he was more alive than he’d ever been, and it was scary as shit .
    In his frustration he slammed his fist into the kitchen table. It was made of solid oak—no Formica for John Van Arsdale, thank youvery much—but even so, it snapped in half beneath Jasper’s fist. The glass with the flower bounced up like one of those spring-loaded bells at a carnival, but Jasper snatched it out of the air without thinking. He stared at the glass in his hand, dumbfounded. The purple blossoms quivered, orange powder dusted his fingers. Pollen. The plant equivalent of jism. Even plants wanted to have sex.
    “Oh fuck.” Jasper pushed away from the broken table so fast that the legs of his chair snapped off beneath him. He sprawled on Jarhead’s fat ass, his right hand holding the flower up like a lifeguard putting a drowner’s life ahead of his own. “Jesus fuck.” He scrambled to his feet and ran for the back door, which burst from its hinges at his touch. Gunther’s hysterical barking bit at his ears as he ran into the dawn, and he was a quarter mile down the road before he realized he still had the flower in his hand. The purple petals whipped about in the breeze but didn’t separate from the stalk. They clung tenaciously to life, still spewing pollen in the hope that they might breed before finally giving up the ghost. “FUCK!” Jasper screamed one more time, and, clutching the glass like a relay baton with no one to hand off to, he ran blindly into the light of a new day.

4
    1 992.
    Ileana—or Iljana, as she was known then, Iljana Zanic—had been nineteen. Still a child. Still living with her family in a small farmhouse on the outskirts of Bihac, on the border between Bosnia and Croatia. The country was still called Yugoslavia then, though many people sensed this designation was fast losing any real meaning. It had been a decade since the death of Marshal Tito, and the region appeared to be fracturing yet again along the religious and ethnic lines that had riven the Balkans for at least two millennia.
    For weeks she’d listened to the radio for news of the violence exploding across the country. Ileana’s family, like a large percentage of the city’s population, were Croats, having crossed the river a generation ago to work in the factories that had been built in the Bosnian Republic under Tito. Now they listened with trepidation to reports that the republic’s ethnic Serbs had decided to reclaim the city as part of “Greater Serbia.” There had