Body Surfing

never rhetorical. His mind sifted, categorized, and prioritized all of his and Jarhead’s memories, handed him the answer before he could decide if he really wanted to know it: yeah, it had always been like that. The world was pretty much in a constant state of foreplay.
    Whatever. Jasper couldn’t deal with sex right now. Even thinking about it abstractly got his blood pumping. Jasper imagined all the sleeping, comatose or otherwise helpless patients who must lie behind every door. How easy it would be to slip in and take one of them, use her for his needs. No, Jasper thought, he wouldn’t escape like that. He would douse Jarhead’s body with gasoline and light it on fire before he did that.
    Jasper assumed people in comas were treated in the ICU, so he went there first. It was a small ward, hand-lettered nametags on plates outside every door. It turned out Michaela was sharing a room with someone named Patricia Myles. He could see the other woman’s body on the near bed, a rail-thin form that made almost no impression beneath the blue blanket. What little showed above it—two arms the size and color of kindling, a face so hollow the bones were visible beneath the blotchy skin—was covered in tubes and tape and othermedical apparatus. Someone had done the woman’s hair though. Curled, set, and sprayed it into a shiny silver orb that haloed her ravaged face in a gentle sphere. Jasper was happy she had someone who loved her enough to come in and fix her up, but at the same time he wasn’t sad that he didn’t have to go out like that. Give him a quick and painless car accident over the drawn-out decay of cancer or Alzheimer’s or whatever this woman had any day. But he wasn’t there to look at a stranger, he reminded himself. Taking a deep breath, he turned to the bed closer to the window.
    Michaela was even more obscured than Patricia Myles. For one thing, her right arm was in a cast. For another, a large brace immobilized her neck. A plastic mask covered her face as well, fastened there with two strips of adhesive gauze that made a crude X over her nose, and a wad of bandages sat on the left side of her head, covering cheek and eye and ear. And her hair—that big beautiful messy mound of dirty blond hair that she loved to flip and chew and fiddle with—had all been hacked off. All that was left was a ragged fuzz crisscrossed by a half dozen deep gashes, each one jaggedly stitched together with black thread that looked like tiny worms writhing into and out of Michaela’s skull.
    A moan gurgled out of Jasper’s throat. This was Michaela for God’s sake. The person he’d loved so much that when she said “Wait,” he wasn’t even angry, because he knew sex wasn’t the goal of his relationship with her, merely another pleasure they’d have a lifetime to enjoy. He knew everything about her. The way she smiled (the right side curled up tentatively, and then, if she were truly happy, the left followed), the way she ate (staring at her food apologetically, sorry that she had to kill it and grind it up into little pieces between her teeth), the way she yawned (both hands covering her mouth, a remnant of a childhood fear that something might invade her body if she didn’t protect it). The way she walked (one leg crossing over the other like a model on a runway) and then again the way she stood still (weight on the left foot, hip jutting out). His hand instinctively curled itself in the shape of that hip, to rest there, to trace the bare flesh above the waistband of her jeans. But…
    But it wasn’t his hand. It was Jarhead’s. He curled it into a fist, barely managed to stop himself before he slammed it through the door.
    He remembered learning how amputees feel pain in their missing limbs. Invisible arms aching to be stretched, absent calves dying to be kneaded. Jasper could feel the whole of his invisible body. Could map every neural pathway and musculoskeletal millimeter of missing flesh with such microscopic precision that his absent body seemed to pulsate around him like a hologram. But no matter how vivid the mental image, it was still just that: an image. An aura, a shadow. Though he could feel the throbbing need to run to Michaela and hold her in his—in Jasper’s—hands, the only body he could bring to her was Jarhead’s, and this thought kept him on the far side of the door. Kept a pane of glass between him and the girl he loved. Because, though Jasper Van Arsdale would never hurt his