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  When he finished, Jasper got a wadded-up paper fast-food bag out of the trash and scooped all the hair inside, then put the bag next to his suitcase. He didn’t know what his eventual plans for it would be, but he did want to bury it or cremate it or something. He’d once conned a woman, Lila, whose twin sister had died of cancer when they were teenagers. Her parents had gotten the cremains of her dead sister put into a diamond ring. Had Lila been forced to pawn the sister’s cremains diamond for cash after he’d taken her money? He’d feel bad about that, but he doubted it had happened. What sort of negotiation process with the pawnbroker would that be: Also, this ring has dead-person ashes in it. But maybe that happened all the time; maybe lots of people were walking around wearing diamonds they’d bought at pawnshops that were secretly cremains diamonds. Jasper decided he wouldn’t mind a man ring with the cremains of his hair in it. Maybe it would kind of preserve its power, Samson-style. He thought of all the wins he’d had with that hair, all the women he’d taken money from. His hair’s length was like a ruler by which he could measure his progress as a con artist. He couldn’t get rid of it. Saving it and bringing it with him would make him feel less sad. He could pretend he was going to go to a clinic where it could be reattached someday.

  Things were going to be fine. He still had a tiny knot of unwelcome feelings at the base of his spine, but maybe that would be there for a while, until all this Dolphin Savior business in the media died down. Stepping into the shower to remedy the sadness with a quick orgasm before he got on the road wouldn’t hurt. Then he’d be on his way.

  Jasper’s usual masturbation routine involved a visit to a mental room he’d named the Trophy Museum. There were a few items there that had nothing to do with his conquests—favorite porn clips, teenage hookups, images of asses and breasts and abdomens he’d seen on the beach and admired but whose owners were broke university students or full-time underearners or average workers in debt. These formed the collage of the room’s wallpaper, but the furniture was certainly the women he’d both slept with and gotten money from; it was the combination that made their memory so attractive. Sometimes he wished he could call and tell them this—I still think about you all the time when I jerk off. I’ll think about you when I jerk off until the day I die. Sore feelings would keep the women from being touched by this, but wasn’t it a little nice how he continued to sexually worship them? Wasn’t it evidence that he wasn’t as terrible a person as they probably felt him to be? They likely assumed that, having gotten their money, he’d never give them a second thought. But leaving them, especially with their funds, was an assurance that Jasper would remember them forever. He’d never forget one of his victories.

  Touching himself now in the hotel shower, though, none of these visual images came forth.

  What happened instead felt like a TV broadcast getting pirated. The programming of his usual channel had been replaced with mental footage of the dolphin. A picture of shimmering wet gray skin filled his mind; it looked smoother than any shaved thigh. He had a sort of urge to run his lips across it.

  Jasper stopped, cracked his knuckles, and tried to start again. He told himself to choose a very specific target to focus on. Why not his latest triumph, Moley E., so fresh in his mind and maybe even a little hotter for being so pissed about the whole 401k thing? He’d gotten her good. He thought about the way she used to squat on top of him and move her hips in a slow circle while she tilted her head back and moaned; when this happened Jasper liked to gaze at her various torso moles and draw constellations in his mind between them—he’d find a series that could be connected to form a giant triangle (left shoulder, right underarm, the flattish and broad one below her navel), then would try finding outline points for increasingly complex shapes as she began her long journey to orgasm. Moley E. took forever, and of course not bringing the cons to orgasm was out of the question; even rushing the cons to orgasm was out of the question. This was all right though; he was good at entertaining himself: if he counted the small reddish birthmark between her breasts and adopted a relaxed interpretation of symmetry, a dodecahedron was possible. Recalling the tense, pleasurable build in his groin that swelled deeper and drew taut as she’d ride him, as he’d craft geometries focused around her left breast so that its nipple would be his hypothetical ejaculatory bull’s-eye—this was always a sure thing to help him finish.

  But lust was failing to surge in. He couldn’t force even a light drizzle of ache for that image. Jasper tried moving his hand frantically, tried moving it slowly, tried taking his hand off completely and drumming his fingers on the shower’s tile for a few seconds to let his penis reset. No sexual love at all for Moley E. astride him. Instead, when he reached down and grabbed himself, the moment his fingers applied pressure, what filled Jasper’s ears was the sound of the dolphin’s chatter. This noise overwhelmed him with the needy warmth an amorous feminine moan usually delivered, brought the same quaver as Moley E.’s grinding hips.

  It felt so good that it was hard to take his hands away, despite the disturbing audio. His body felt a need for it that frightened him. Regulation of his lust, particularly his orgasm’s pacing and timing, was the bedrock of his sense of stability in life. Nothing else was fixed or certain or completely in his control, but he was master and commander of that arena. His livelihood depended on it.

  Now, though, he felt helpless: all he wanted was to let the surge of pleasure overtake him, hear that sound, see flashes of the dolphin’s body being slicked over with foaming ocean waves. He held his cock and stood very still. He worried that if he moved his hand at all, even to let go, he’d orgasm. Then he had to stop worrying about that because it was happening no matter what he did. He could hear his disturbed groans, equal parts ecstasy and terror, echo inside the shower.

  He opened his eyes. Jasper felt something drip down from the vaulted ceiling and land on his newly bare scalp, and even though he knew it was his own semen, he had the sensation of having just been shat upon by a bird.

  Jasper exited the shower, made a provisional throne of pillows on the bed, and ordered an erotic pay-per-view movie. He’d had a wacky orgasm but would now set it right with a normal one. A visual aid would help him overcome a case of cross-species sexual jitters.

  He forwarded to the hard-core action scene and let it play for about five minutes before abandoning various forced-denial and positive-thinking rationalizations to panic.

  It wasn’t that he didn’t understand the movie to be arousing—he did. It just wasn’t triggering any sensation. The steamy HD girl-on-girl sequence that evolved into an energetic threesome might as well have been grainy parking lot surveillance footage.

  His swollen penis was languidly stretched out upon his thigh. He was no longer hard, but the size and shape of his erection remained, like an inflated thing slowly losing air. Its look was one of overfed repose. There was something very post-Thanksgiving-meal digestion about it.

  When he closed his eyes, which was how he usually got to the Trophy Museum, what he saw now on the back of his lids was the glistening opening of the dolphin’s blowhole.

  This was uncool. But this silly new fetish could probably be resolved, instantly, by having sex with a woman. He had time for only a quick hookup, someone casual who wasn’t going to don postcoital love goggles. The last thing he needed was someone studying his appearance and realizing, despite his newly shorn locks, that she’d just found the Dolphin Savior. What he needed was a professional—a sexual equal in terms of general attractiveness and the ability to pretend that they themselves were incredibly turned on. He grabbed the phone book and dialed an escort service.

  “Beautiful Girls?” a man answered. “Beautiful Girls?” His intonation made the man sound like a talking bird—Jasper pictured a parrot in a tiny bucket hat on the other line, dangling from the receiver by its claw-foot. A woman would be dispatched to him within the hour.

  Hanging up the phone, Jasper told himself not to panic. He’d had a brutal encounter with a dolphin
and had gotten the sexual wind knocked out of him; he shouldn’t make this a bigger deal than it was. He needed to think of his libido as a scared mouse, curled up into a ball in the corner. It needed pampering and warm, desirable flesh to coax it back out.

  He turned on the TV to take his mind off things while he waited. But the newscaster was interviewing a series of long-haired, bearded men who’d come forward claiming to be Jasper, the Dolphin Savior caught on tape rescuing the creature on the beach. He realized he’d been so preoccupied with his sexual woes that he’d managed to forget about the plausibly far more pressing worry: being found and killed by one of the women he’d wronged.

  Some of the men did bear a passing resemblance to him, prior to his extreme grooming session that morning. Several did not. The man being questioned by the news anchor was perhaps two decades Jasper’s senior. He was missing a lot of teeth.

  “What about the tattoos on your arm?” the news anchor asked him. The screen went to a close-up shot of one of the many cell-phone photos of Jasper holding the dolphin, then zoomed in on his upper torso. “In this picture the Dolphin Savior doesn’t have any tattoos,” the voice-over said.

  “These are brand new,” the man responded. “I got them this morning. I heal quickly and always have. I take an echinacea supplement.” The camera panned to a close-up of his faded tattoo, a scribbly outline of a naked woman wrapped around a giant marijuana leaf.

  Jasper turned off the television. Despite the room’s cranked AC, he was sweating. He pulled the desk chair up to the now-empty minifridge, opened the door, and placed his head inside. The goose bumps that formed on his scalp felt painful.

  CALLA WAS THE REAL DEAL.

  She had a long black braid that hung down to her waist and swung across her butt like a pendulum when she walked. Normally he loved long hair, but he found himself appreciating the fact that it was out of the way.

  Why? he worried. Because dolphins don’t have hair?

  Her naturally curvaceous breasts had been enhanced with silicone, which added a reassuring density and made the implants feel dough-encased. But her ass was the obvious standout: yielding, spongy flesh rested atop the structure of musculature; something about it was reminiscent of wedding-cake tiers. Normally, Jasper knew this would make him feel horny in a way that was indistinguishable from being hungry. But his appreciation for her body wasn’t puppeteering his lust. A vital string between his brain and his crotch had been cut.

  He ran the palms of his hands over the hard tips of her nipples, one of his favorite moves, then frowned at her breasts. They felt as confusing to him as malfunctioning knobs on a kitchen sink: he’d turned them every which way, but no water would come out. “Oh my god,” he muttered to himself. How could this be happening? Why wasn’t he getting hard? “Would you turn around one more time?”

  She obliged, swaying just enough to engage all the right parts of her body in movement, bending over, facing back up to look at him suggestively. He saw her fingers reach up toward her braid to undo it but he stopped her. “Actually, your hair’s great like that. If you could leave it like that? Thank you.” Yes, he was in awe of her physique. It looked remarkable. But what he really wanted to do was open up the screen door and hear the ocean. “Let me go in the shower for a minute,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”

  He turned on the water and closed his eyes, letting it pour down over his face—this action brought an immediate surge of relaxation. He leaned forward so that his entire head was beneath the water, took a deep inhale, and began a count of ten to wait before exhaling.

  Then he heard Calla shriek.

  Were the cops here? A news station? Moley E.?

  He ran into the bedroom wet and naked to find Calla brandishing a pink Gogol Taser gun in his direction.

  “Oh!” Jasper exclaimed. Maybe she’d figured out he was the Dolphin Savior and was about to blackmail him? He nearly groaned with sadness at this thought because even imagining being blackmailed by a beautiful woman, a woman whose ass was authentically worthy of anything that the material world might piece together as an offering, did not turn him on anymore in the slightest. Whatever had happened yesterday in the water had ruined him. “What’s with the Taser?” he finally asked. He sounded annoyed but couldn’t help it. He almost wanted her to shoot him so the pain could momentarily give him something else to focus on.

  But maybe if she shot him in the groin with the Taser he might be stunned back to normalcy . . . an electroshock therapy sort of cure. He reached down and gathered his genitals in his hands.

  “I swear to god,” Calla screamed. “Move again and I will fucking do it!”

  That’s fine, he wanted to say; I don’t think I’ll ever be able to have sex with a human being again, and that’s how I make my living. You’re in a unique position to understand this, given your career, although there are many differences. The fact that you came to my room armed tells me that your job is not as enjoyable as mine. There really isn’t anything I don’t love about what I do. Sometimes the guilt can creep up to a level that’s annoying, but honestly even the guilt is great for my ego because if I weren’t so good at what I do, there wouldn’t be any reason to feel guilty. Do you get what I’m saying? My life has broken somehow; a dolphin was involved and then I had to shave my hair just to keep from being hunted down by past cons due to everyone having cell phones and devices with freaking cameras. I have lost my reason for being. Pretty sure. So accept my apology for not losing further marbles over this new threat of yours that could not possibly take anything away from me that I care about.

  Except cash! Jasper realized.

  “Are you robbing me?” he asked. “Because I don’t have any more money than what I paid you when you arrived. I’ll open the safe for you right now so you can see.” He had a lot more money, but it was not in the safe.

  “I found your sick trophy bag, you freak,” she yelled. She kicked over the opened paper hamburger take-out bag Jasper’s shorn hair was in.

  “Oh that,” Jasper said. How best to explain the situation? One wouldn’t just toss a severed kidney into the trash! he wanted to argue. Spilling out of the hamburger bag, his hair looked like it could start twitching to life any second. If he discarded it, he’d always think of it out there in the world—in a landfill, moving around in a low octopus crawl, disoriented but determined to find him. He could foresee a rainy future night at the house of a new con: the two of them seated on a leather sofa, enjoying a bottle of wine by candlelight, just about to go in for a kiss after he’d professed his love. Then a flash of lightning hits and the woman looks toward the window and screams: a mass of hair has crawled up the glass of the windowpane and is hanging suspended from either side by two tendriled locks. When she runs to the kitchen to call 911, he opens the door, understanding that his former coif has returned. Except in his enthusiasm he’d forget that it had been replaced: his hair has grown back. And when the old hair, which crawled through hellish layers of garbage and overcame innumerable odds to remount Jasper’s scalp and reign again, looks up in the rain and sees the new hair, it would not be fair to blame it for screeching wildly, leaping up at Jasper, and latching onto his face in an attempt to rip the new hair away. It wouldn’t realize its wet torso was cloaking Jasper’s nose and mouth as it waged war upon his present scalp, wouldn’t feel Jasper fall down to the ground. When it finally rendered Jasper bald (the new hair, olive-oil soft, wouldn’t stand a chance against sinewy locks whose muscles had been forged creeping across gravel alleyways in the search for its former host), when it finally slithered back atop Jasper’s head, it might feel such relief to be home at last that it wouldn’t realize it had killed Jasper until it found itself buried alive.

  That mustn’t be allowed to happen. Jasper had always been interested in science fiction—not the books, of course, but films—and the ways it intersected with the supernatural. He wasn’t ultimately sure about what he believed in terms of ghosts and aliens or even God, but here was the thing: why give s
omething rife for haunting an opening? That’s what throwing the hair away would do. The corpse of his former mane would have to be purified with fire, its soul cleanly released into the hereafter, its ashes poured into his next bottle of shampoo except for the small reserve he’d have put into a diamond, or a gemstone. He could find a pawned class ring from a prestigious college and have it applied to that.

  Probably no effective way to explain this to Calla, though.

  Wait, why was she moving toward the bag? Was she going to take it with her?

  “Leave that alone!” Jasper cried; he reached toward it and Calla defensively tossed the bag off into the corner. Jasper chased after it, picking it up and drawing it close to his chest. Then his hands were compacting around the paper bag; they were squeezing it far tighter than his bag of hair should be squeezed. Jasper felt his back arch around a central locus of pain, felt himself begin to shake. The pain in the middle of his back was eating its way through his body; he looked down at his chest expecting to see the protruding tip of a javelin of some sort, but he knew he had not been impaled. Just Tasered.

  “This concludes our erotic session,” Calla shouted. “I’m way not into cops, but I will cheer when they catch you. I’m sure they’ve given you some title that makes you think you’re hot shit, the Sunshine Scalper or something. Well, believe me, you are not on your game.”

  “It’s my hair,” he finally managed to mutter.

  “No. That ain’t man hair,” Calla said.

  Gender bias aside, the compliment pleased Jasper. He was able to smile for a microsecond before another stabbing jolt made him howl.

  II

  THE GIRL’S FACE IS PALE. DEATH IS NOT SO FAR, SHE THINKS. IT IS EASILY ARRIVED AT. LOVE IS FURTHER THAN DEATH.