Body Surfing

rapist. Oh, and there was Gwen too, a bloody mess on the floor of the men’s bathroom at The Aristocrats. Great, Jasper thought. On top of everything else, he was now a wanted man.
    He took Sue’s Saab. It was less conspicuous than the ambulance, more reliable than Larry’s beat-up Firebird. Ten minutes later he was doing thirty-seven in a thirty-five in an attempt to be as inconspicuous as possible. On the quiet country lane, the car’s headlights—they came on with the car, and couldn’t be turned off—glowed like a beacon. Without taking his eyes from the road, Jasper snapped open the fusebox and pulled the appropriate plug. The car went dark immediately. Larry had only flipped through the owner’s manual once (he’d needed to change a burned-out taillight), but every word and diagram that had flashed by the paramedic’s eyes burned neon bright in Jasper’s mind. He didn’t have time to be impressed with himself though. He forced his pupils to dilate, concentrated on seeing in the darkness. Thank God Larry knew how to drive stick. Both Jasper and Jarhead had only ever driven automatic.
    As he exited the subdivision, his first impulse was to turn right, toward the Rip Van Winkle Bridge and his father’s house. But he found himself turning left instead. Of course. A police station lay less than a mile south of Sue’s house. He got off the main road, navigated the back streets by a combination of his and Jarhead’s and Larry’s memories. At first, he headed back toward the bridge, but then it occurred to him that the police might have put up a roadblock or something. Jesus Christ, Jasper, he told himself. This isn’t The Fugitive or Thelma and Louise . They’re not coming after you with helicopters and a fleet of police cruisers. Even so, he decided not to take the chance.
    He drove Sue’s car to the river to a point about a half mile upstream from his father’s house, ditched it in some bushes. He stripped down to Larry’s BVDs (which weren’t BVDs, but some incredibly embarrassing bikini kind of thing), wadded his pants into a tight ball and shoved them in one boot, stuffed his shirt into the other. He’d pulled Larry’s leather belt from its loops first, and now he fastened it around his waist. Using the laces, he knotted the boots securely to the belt. Clad only in his skivvies, a leather belt, and Q.’s broken $29,000 watch—Jesus, Jasper thought, I look like a fucking gogo boy—he contemplated the river. A chilly breeze blew across his skinand he shivered. Not because he was cold—it would take a lot more than a breeze to make a Mogran feel cold—but because he knew he was pushing it. He had a broken femur and a shattered pelvis, both of which were far from healed. There were still five shotgun pellets buried in his chest, one of them in the lower right lobe of his lungs. But crossing the river here seemed the only way to ensure he wasn’t picked up by the cops. Taking a deep breath, he dove into the frigid water, and then, well, then he was cold.
    “Fuck!”
    For a moment it was all he could do to tread water. His left leg seized up, the muscles barely able to bend after Leo’s artificially induced rigor mortis. The plates of his pelvis shifted around like the pieces of a broken chocolate bar still in the wrapper.
    “Get it together, Jasper,” he said out loud, both to calm himself and to remind himself who he was. Who he really was. He stretched out and began paddling, one arm over the other, his body sluicing across the surface of the frigid water. His arms had to do all the work because he couldn’t kick for shit with his messed-up left leg, and it was hard to cup the broken fingers of his right hand. Jasper could feel the water slipping between his splayed fingers, realized he was listing to the left as a consequence. He adjusted his course to compensate and continued swimming. He allowed himself to note everything that hurt—his leg, his pelvis, his hand, the broken rib, the kind of headache that makes you wish someone would just shoot you (he ignored the fact that someone had shot this particular body only a few hours ago)—and then, having taken stock of everything, he shut down the circuits in Larry’s brain that processed pain. He reminded himself how he’d run forty miles in Jarhead’s fat body without breaking a sweat. You can do this, Jasper, he told himself. Like it or not, you are Mogran. This body is nothing but a set of biological gears and levers, and