Body Surfing

sitting beside her. He looked up from the thick silver watch he was winding, saw that she was awake. He smiled, gently, sadly.
    “Do you know who did this to you?”
    She could see the demon’s name in her mind, yet she couldn’t bring herself to think it, let alone say it. Slowly, as if it were an experiment, she opened her mouth. Let whatever would come out come out:
    “Mogran.”

9
    T he gates of Mohammed Qusay Sr.’s riverfront estate were modeled on those of Buckingham Palace, although they weren’t quite as big, or as old. Q.’s dad had built them earlier in the year, after anti-Arabic slurs had been spray painted on his house for the third time since the US had gone to war in Iraq (the local racists apparently being ignorant of the difference between Arabs and Persians). The gold-leafed coat of arms featured a mounted warrior crushing a cobra beneath its hooves. Mr. Qusay had paid a Shia medievalist to design it for him. The warrior carried a scimitar and his shield bore the Islamic crescent and star. If you squinted you could make out a Christian cross on the back of the cobra’s head.
    Jasper didn’t have to squint. He could see the cross clearly, along with the nicks the artist’s chisel had left when it etched the design into the iron, and the microscopic traces of oxidation where the glaze over the gold leaf was patchy. He could even tell from the color of the oxidation that the artist had used ormolu, an alloy of copper and zinc, instead of real gold. One time when Jasper was fifteen and working on a book report at the kitchen table his dad had watched a program about gilding on the Discovery Channel, and the information had lodged in his subconscious, hung out there until he could access it again. Of course, he’d had to die first, but why sweat the small stuff?
    He blinked, refocusing with a mental effort. Even after a day and a half in Jarhead West’s body, he was still adjusting to his new senses. Sometimes he got caught up in the miraculous details available to his eyes and ears, his nose, his skin, would stand slack-jawed in front of a tree trunk like a boy staring at his first pair of naked tits. But he took comfort in these moments too. Knew that the part of him that found his new senses so fascinating was the part of him that was still human. Was still Jasper. Forty hours is a long time to be dead, but it’s an even longer time to live in someone else’s body. Jasper was amazed at how difficult it was to remember who he’d been, before he became whoever he was now. Whatever he was now. A ghost, a wraith, a— Jasper knew the word. He tried not to think it, but thought it anyway.
    Mogran .
     
    After running from his father’s house he’d had no clue where to go. Edwin Crowley, a sometime drinking buddy/moocher acquaintance of Jarhead’s, had been crashing on the latter’s couch for the past three months, which made Jasper loath to return to his host’s trailer. He’d considered going to Michaela’s, but he didn’t know if she’d survived the crash, and he wasn’t sure he could handle it if he found out she was dead. Because if she was dead, then, well, she’d be like him, wouldn’t she? Out there, in someone else’s body, looking for someone to sleep with.
    Someone to fuck.
    Because that was the one thing Jasper did feel: an urgent, almost overwhelming need to fuck someone. Some thing. Any thing, as long as it was warm, wet, alive. It wasn’t lust Jasper felt. He’d been a teenager: he’d lived in a more or less constant state of lust for the past six years. But lust implied an object. A person. Sexual fantasies that involved another body, even if it was only an imagined one. Jasper had none of that now. If he concentrated, he could incorporate Michaela into the feeling. But doing so felt like a violation, because he didn’t want to make love to her. Didn’t even want to have sex with her. Hejust wanted to stick it in her. Shoot inside her. Michaela’s vagina was less a fleshly orifice than a tunnel through which he needed to journey, to get to whatever lay on the other side. And so, after hiding out in the forest and avoiding all human contact for a day and a night, Jasper decided he had to risk talking to someone. It was Q. who came to mind first, even before his dad. Q. had killed him after all. He owed Jasper one. Big time.
    Of course, Jasper had no idea if Q. was any more alive than Michaela, let alone if he’d believe that Jarhead West’s body housed