Body Surfing

biologists attributed them to the same kind of instinct that led a person to jerk his hand from a hot stove. J.D. thought that was a cop-out. Instinct was just a euphemism for thought, and logic implied that if you could genetically encode simple thoughts, then you could encode complex ones as well. Genuine emotions. Ideas even. Memories. Not just your own, but other people’s. The human genome was capable of storing extraordinary amounts of information—as yet we couldn’t even delimit its scope, let alone guess what all was there. So why not your mother and father, your grandparents, the distant relatives who first made the trek out of the African savannah? You’d inherited your body from them, after all. Why not your mind?
    As a grad student, Sue had been enraptured by the notion that her mother and father, both of whom were already dead, were present within her, lending her the benefit of their experience. Seven years at a rural hospital can shatter just about any illusion, but she still remembered that period of her life with nostalgia. Who doesn’t get tired of being alone in their skin? Hasn’t wished for a companion with whom to bond in permanent, perfect union? Is that what Q. was looking for in his nameless nemesis? Someone to be with him, even unto death?
    “Ah, Q.,” she said out loud. “What got into you?”
    Her words echoed around the little room, and Sue sat up with a start. She had the strangest sense that someone was there with her.Not looking at her, but listening. The boy’s paranoia must be infectious.
    She glanced at her watch. Nearly five A.M. She closed the Qusay file and stood up.
    Then she sat down again.
    Her body felt strange. As though she’d been outside in a blizzard, and was now warming up with a hot toddy. The heat traveled down her throat into her stomach, flowed into her small and large intestines, filled bladder and rectum as though they were balloons. Then it was in her veins, heading for her extremities. Arms, legs, fingers, toes. Her head felt as though it was filled with boiling liquid. Her skeleton crackled with electric energy. Sue was more aware of her flesh than she’d been in years, at exactly the moment she ceded control of it.
    Leo was gentle with the woman. Gentler than he’d been with Danny, whom he’d had to take quickly because Jasper had been in such a hurry. Yes, he’d been right about the boy. Such strength, such focus! Such determination! Leo only wished he could’ve stuck around to see how Jasper handled the poor girl, suddenly come back to herself with her fat friend’s flaccid dick in her. He’d find out soon enough, but right now he needed to cover his tracks. It wouldn’t do for Jasper to find out that Leo had been possessing Q. at the time of the accident. It might make his claim to friendship a little difficult for the fledgling to believe.
    In a moment he’d assimilated every one of Sue’s memories from the most trivial to the most traumatic. The time she took the egg from a hawk’s nest and tried to hatch it beneath her pillow, and the time her mother whipped her with a wooden spoon until the handle broke. The time she started crying as a patient detailed thirteen years of methodical sexual abuse at the hands of her father and the time she masturbated to those self-same images. My God, she was a filthy one, this Sue Miller—not just dirty but clever enough to make her boyfriend think he was corrupting her . Leaving her was going to be fun .
    More importantly, Leo now knew everything Q. had told her in their interview. He wasn’t surprised to discover the boy had survivedthe crash—he’d needed to make sure his host remained intact, just in case he mistimed his ejaculation—but the fact that Q. came through without injury was unexpected. Leo must have recalibrated the boy’s nervous system more finely than he’d realized. The boy would live to be 150, barring a plane crash or nuclear war—or, more likely, a shotgun blast to the head, to rid his mind of the guilt that would haunt him for the rest of his life.
    Sue, on the other hand, would not have to forget: Leo would take care of that for her. He wiped the interview with Q. from her memory, then sifted through her mind for anything else that might be relevant. He paused over J.D. Thomas. You never knew with the Jungians. And look at this one. Collective memory! Leo hadn’t come across that old chestnut in years. It bore all the hallmarks of Legion. Sure enough, when he