“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 something 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.
—JOY WILLIAMS,
“THE LOVER”
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