Body Surfing

human sensation. Jasper saw flesh and bone, the by-now-familiar musculature of his own species. He sensed a dozens points of damage as his consciousness scanned the length andbreadth of his new abode. Fractured fingers, a pulverized diaphragm, a deep puncture in the occipital lobe. The right femur snapped in two places. This body had been through the wringer.
    Suddenly he realized what was happening. He wasn’t dying. He was coming back. He was taking another host, just as he’d taken Jarhead.
    And then: light. Bright white light. Jasper blinked. Felt real eyelids open and close. It was a moment more before he could make sense of what he was seeing. A dirty urinal, a set of metal walls. Sticky floor tiles. The stink of urine.
    He was in a bathroom.
    He heard a moan, looked down to see his own legs, and then another body. Naked. Female. Bloody. Her blond hair lay tangled about her face in clumpy red streaks.
    Even as he reached a hand out to pull the hair from the woman’s face, he saw his own broken fingers. The broken watch.
    Lawrence Bishop’s fingers.
    Q.’s watch.
    As he pulled the bloody hair from Gwen’s face, all of Larry’s memories crashed down on him like the proverbial ton of bricks. In an instant he knew there’d been no mafiosa in Jersey City. That Leo had in fact taken Larry to New York City in order to kill Q., so that Q. couldn’t reveal Leo’s whereabouts to the Legion. Leo didn’t want Q. to tell anyone that Leo had possessed him in order to kill Jasper, so that he could turn Jasper into a Mogran.
    And, as Jasper’s consciousness took full possession of Lawrence Bishop’s half-destroyed body, he knew that Leo had succeeded.
    Jasper stared at Gwen’s bloody body for a long time. Leo had beat the shit out of her, and she lay unconscious beneath him. All the sudden he realized he was still inside her and he stumbled backward so fast he almost broke his leg again. Leo had done an amazing job of setting the femur, but the fractures were far from healed. Gwen moaned and covered her face.
    Jasper turned and limped out the bathroom door before she woke up. As he passed the table he’d shared with Leo—when Leo was stillin this body and he was still in Jarhead’s—he noticed that the graffiti had been changed slightly. “ God is dead.—Nietzsche ” was still there, right above “ Nietzsche is dead.—God ,” but beneath that someone—well, Leo, obviously, though he hadn’t bothered to sign it—had added a new line:
    Nietzsche was Mogran. And so was God .
    Jasper didn’t know what that statement meant, but he knew it couldn’t be good.

26
    J asper?”
    Jarhead West’s voice reverberated painfully in his ears. It sounded like a foghorn blaring in his skull.
    “Jasper? Where are you?”
    “Who’s Jasper?” a voice said sleepily.
    Jarhead started. He realized he was lying on top of a strange girl. His pants were around his ankles and the girl’s mouth was open and hot breaths were panting out of her throat.
    Jarhead threw himself off her, struggled to pull up his pants. The girl sat up, all a-jingle.
    “That was amaz—”
    Without thinking, Jarhead swung. It wasn’t the girl he was hitting. It was her voice. Her shrieking voice, slicing through his head like a bandsaw. Her head snapped sideways and she fell backward on the floor. Her flesh hitting the dirty concrete sounded like a bag of bricks dropped from the top of a building.
    “Jasper?” Jarhead screamed as he struggled to his feet. “Where are you, Jasper?” He ran the length of the strange bar and burst through the front door, nearly fell over as the noise of traffic slammed into his head like a pair of sledgehammers boxing his ears.
    “Jasper!” Jarhead wailed into the night. “Why is everything so loud?”

3
The Hunters’ Psalm
    “Wait, oh wait! There is something yet inside me!”
    —The Thousand Nights and One Night

1
    T he Mogran lies down with the girl.
    Scattered contusions on right hemisphere of brain. Minor swelling inside skull.
    His touch is more intimate than a mother’s, less mercenary than a husband’s. It runs the length and breadth of her body, inside and out and in parts that have neither mass nor measure. He feels the injuries and violations, the pain. Doesn’t remember—or, at any rate, chooses to forget—that he himself is the cause of that pain.
    Three crushed vertebrae in the cervical spine. Pressure on the spinal cord, multiple tears on the cord itself; a swamp of numbness in