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.