Body Surfing

about.
    “How’d you get that watch, Leo?”
    “Oh right!” Leo bopped his forehead with his zigzag-fingered hand. “You weren’t there. I mean, you were there , but you were dead.” Leo took a long sip of his beer, almost daintily wiped a line of foam off his lip before continuing. “Larry here was one of the paramedics who pulled you and your buddies out of the car. He helped himself to your friend’s watch while he was distracted.” He rapped the watch against the table several times. “He should’ve gone for the cash. Fucker’s cracked. Looks expensive though.”
    Jasper frowned. “That seems, what’s the word? Convenient?”
    “I understand your concern,” Leo said, sounding more and more like a practiced sociopath. “But the whole coming-back thing is influenced to some degree by proximity, to some degree by the people you were close to in life. Most people end up in family members, actually. I guess maybe you weren’t so close to yours?”
    Q.’s question flashed in Jasper’s mind. What would you do if you knew you only had twenty-four hours to live? And his answer: I’d tell my dad I love him .
    Jasper felt a coldness run down Jarhead’s spine like an ice cube slipped inside his shirt. He stared at Larry Bishop’s face, at his eyes, at the Mogran swirling around in their depths. It couldn’t be. But even as he thought that, he remembered the maid’s words from earlier in the day:
    Larry .
    Larry Bishop .
    It’s nice that so many of Master Mohammed’s friends have come round to see him .
    It all added up. Added up perfectly, but still made no sense. Because why had Leo…? Jasper didn’t even know how to finish the question. Didn’t even know how to start it. Why had Leo…? How had Leo…? What had Leo…?
    “Jasper, buddy? You still in there?”
    “I swear to God, if you hurt him—”
    “God?” Leo snorted. He banged the broken Patek on the graffiti’d table. “God? There are a lot of things I’m afraid of, Jazz-man, but God isn’t one of them.”
    Jasper sat up straighter. “How did you know about that name?”
    But Leo just looked at him with that maddeningly impassive expression, and Jasper could tell this was all he was going to get. He struggled for something to say, but only one word came to mind. Well, two:
    “Dude,” he sputtered. “Why ?”
    Leo took another sip of beer. “Why what?”
    “Leo, please. I don’t even know how to ask the right questions. I don’t even know what I’m trying to find out. I just…I’m asking for your help.”
    Jasper searched Leo’s eyes, trying to discern what he was thinking. What he wanted to say. But though he could see Leo glowing behind Larry’s eyes, he couldn’t even begin to guess what was going through the demon’s mind. Finally Leo shrugged, took one more sip of beer. And then, as if were revealing the secrets of Oz:
    “Mashed potatoes.”
    “Huh?”
    “Mashed potatoes.” Leo sipped his beer.
    “Yeah, repeating it’s not really helping.”
    “You like mashed potatoes, right?”
    Jasper rolled Jarhead’s eyes.
    “I betcha Jarhead likes mashed potatoes too.”
    “Look, Leo—”
    “Haven’t you ever wondered if mashed potatoes taste the same to someone else as they do to you? If your tastebuds are recording the same data everyone else’s tastebuds are, and your brain is rendering that data into precisely the same flavors everyone else’s is? Like, say, what if mashed potatoes tasted creamy to you, but to Jarhead they tasted more like a paste? You taste the sugar in the starch but Jarhead tastes the squares of butter he mashes into them with his fork? Or you taste autumn, the colorful leaves on the trees, the playoffs on the tube in the other room, but Jarhead tastes his mom and dad with their faces stuffed full of food so they aren’t yelling at each other or at him?”
    Jasper squinted at Leo. “What’s your point?”
    “My point, Jasper, is that now you can taste someone else’s mashed potatoes. You can see just how similar they taste to yours, yet realize there is a difference. That no two people eat the same mashed potatoes, see the same color blue, hear the same Beethoven’s Fifth. You have a unique privilege, Jasper, to see the world through someone else’s eyes, to realize that it’s a different world than the one you live in—close, but not quite the same thing. Doesn’t that pique your interest? Even the littlest bit?”
    “Say I was curious. What would it matter? I’m about