In an article about chainsaws, Keith read that engineers used hotdogs to simulate human fingers, because the hotdog shared many of the properties of human flesh. That’s what gave Keith the idea.

Two months previous, Keith, an experienced lifeguard at Stalker Point Beach, saved a girl from drowning. This wasn’t his first rescue, but it was the first time he’d given mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. He’d had an eerie feeling about the girl when he first saw her trudging into the surf. There was a zombie-like grace to her. The gentle but seductive lilt of her buttocks disappearing beneath the calm water almost had him mesmerized. He started swimming after her long before there was any overt sign that she was struggling. In fact, there never was any sign; she just kept swimming, as if she were going to go all the way to Kyoto. Keith didn’t doubt that she needed saving, however; it never crossed his mind how embarrassing it might be if she turned around and started swimming back to shore.

She swam out a long way. Keith, a very strong swimmer, could feel the ache in his arms, but he followed her until she went under. It took him at most a minute to get to the spot, dive, and find her drifting dreamily downward. He pulled her to the surface and was surprised she wasn’t sputtering. Could he have been too late? She didn’t resist being tugged back to shore. Her body was like the water. It took almost all his remaining strength to get her up onto the sand. She didn’t move. Without even checking for a pulse, he started breathing into her.

In a short time a crowd had gathered. “Man, she’s a goner,” one guy said. “Look how white she is.” “Yeah, give it up, man, she’s a deadie.”

Keith persisted. He was sure he could bring her round. He could feel some faint taste of life in her lips, cold as they were. And then it went away. It was as if a spark passed from her body into his. And it was exciting. For that moment he was her. He had an orgasm.

Coming, perforce, affected the CPR. Instead of breathing into her, he was sucking her lifeless tongue, kissing her freshly dead lips, tasting the thrill of her death. Impossibly, a moment later she came to life. Her eyes flickered open. She looked at him. She gave him the saddest smile. And then her eyes closed and she fell into a deep sleep. “Must be on some kind of heavy drug,” one of the paramedics said, before she was rushed away in an ambulance. Keith staggered back to his locker, the flavor of her dead lips still on his, to discover that someone had broken in and stolen his wallet. “Better report the credit cards,” the cop advised him. “And watch out for identity theft.” Keith didn’t have any credit cards, just twelve or thirteen bucks and a driver’s license. And the photograph of his little sister, who’d died of leukemia at the age of eight. The loss of that photo made Keith angry, even though he hadn’t looked at it in months. “Fuck,” Keith said. And then he was ashamed of himself, as if his little sister had heard him say a bad word. He hung his head.

In the weeks that followed, Keith kept an eye out for the girl he’d saved, though he had no reason to think she’d come back to Stalker Point. He hadn’t seen her before that day. But every girl he saw he compared with her. He was on the lookout for someone like her. Someone who would die in his arms.

His girlfriend noticed the change in him. “You’re not the same person,” she told him. “I don’t like it.” Keith insisted he was the same. “But it’s like you’re a million miles away, and you don’t want to make love anymore,” she said. Keith assured her that he did want to make love. But when they were fucking, when she was thrashing beneath him, he looked at her in a way that made her stop. “What?” she asked. “What is it? Am I doing something wrong?” “No,” Keith said, “but maybe if you pretended like you were dead.” That was the end of that relationship.

As the days went by, Keith became more and more morose. He almost wished someone would steal his identity. One afternoon after work he called the ambulance company, and after a bit of a runaround was able to get some information about the girl he’d rescued. He phoned the hospital she’d been taken to, but they wouldn’t give him any information about her. On his next day off, he visited the hospital. He was referred to a records clerk in administration. He told the young woman all the details he had. “I really need to find her,” he said. “It’s like a matter of life and death.” The administration clerk said she was very sorry, but they weren’t authorized to release any information. “But she was here, right? I really need to know. See, I’m the guy who saved her. The lifeguard.” The administration clerk nodded. “Yes, she was here.” To that, Keith said, “But she’s not here now, right?” Again the clerk nodded, then, perhaps as if taking pity, shaking her head and with a sad look, she said, “She’s no longer with us.” Keith tried to absorb this information. He said, “No longer with us? She’s like ... dead?” The clerked nodded without saying anything.

That night Keith dreamed about the girl. He dreamt he was rescuing her. He dreamt he was kissing her back to life. He dreamt he was fucking her back to life. When he had his orgasm, she opened her eyes and smiled at him. Keith hadn’t had a wet dream since his earliest teens. I’m fucking pathetic, he said to himself while showering. As he toweled off, it dawned on him that the girl in his dreams resembled his sister. He tried to remember if the real girl, the one he’d saved, had any resemblance to his sister. Now it was hard for him to keep them separate in his mind.