Smoke and Mirrors (29 page)

He masturbated that night for the first time in four days.

He fantasized a schoolgirl in blue cotton panties who changed into a policewoman, then two policewomen, then three.

It didn’t hurt at all until he climaxed; then he felt as if someone were pushing a switchblade through the inside of his cock. As if he were ejaculating a pincushion.

He began to cry then in the darkness, but whether from the pain, or from some other reason, less easy to identify, even Simon was unsure.

That was the last time he masturbated.

The clinic was located in a dour Victorian hospital in central London. A young man in a white coat looked at Simon’s card, and took his doctor’s note, and told him to take a seat.

Simon sat down on an orange plastic chair covered with brown cigarette burns.

He stared at the floor for a few minutes. Then, having exhausted that form of entertainment, he stared at the walls, and finally, having no other option, at the other people.

They were all male, thank God—women were on the next floor up—and there were more than a dozen of them.

The most comfortable were the macho building-site types, here for their seventeenth or seventieth time, looking rather pleased with themselves, as if whatever they had caught were proof of their virility. There were a few city gents in ties and suits. One of them looked relaxed; he carried a mobile telephone. Another, hiding behind a
Daily Telegraph,
was blushing, embarrassed to be there; there were little men with wispy mustaches and tatty raincoats—newspaper sellers, perhaps, or retired teachers; a rotund Malaysian gentleman who chain-smoked filterless cigarettes, lighting each cigarette from the butt of the one before, so the flame never went out, but was transmitted from one dying cigarette to the next. In one corner sat a scared gay couple. Neither of them looked more than eighteen. This was obviously their first appointment as well, the way they kept glancing around. They were holding hands, white-knuckled and discreetly. They were terrified.

Simon felt comforted. He felt less alone.

“Mister Powers, please,” said the man at the desk. Simon stood up, conscious that all eyes were upon him, that he’d been identified and named in front of all these people. A cheerful, red-haired doctor in a white coat was waiting.

“Follow me,” he said.

They walked down some corridors, through a door (on which
DR
.
J
.
BENHAM
was written in felt pen on a white sheet of paper scotch-taped to the frosted glass), into a doctor’s office.

“I’m Doctor Benham,” said the doctor. He didn’t offer to shake hands. “You have a note from your doctor?”

“I gave it to the man at the desk.”

“Oh.” Dr. Benham opened a file on the desk in front of him. There was a computer printout label on the side. It said:

REG’D 2 JLY 90. MALE. 90/00666.L

POWERS, SIMON, MR.

BORN 12 OCT 63. SINGLE.

Benham read the note, looked at Simon’s penis, and handed him a sheet of blue paper from the file. It had the same label, stuck to the top.

“Take a seat in the corridor,” he told him. “A nurse will collect you.”

Simon waited in the corridor.

“They’re very fragile,” said the sunburnt man sitting next to him, by accent a South African or perhaps Zimbabwean. Colonial accent, at any rate.

“I’m sorry?”

“Very fragile. Venereal diseases. Think about it. You can catch a cold or flu simply by being in the same room as someone who’s got it. Venereal diseases need warmth and moisture, and intimate contact.”

Not mine,
thought Simon, but he didn’t say anything.

“You know what I’m dreading?” said the South African.

Simon shook his head.

“Telling my wife,” said the man, and he fell silent.

A nurse came and took Simon away. She was young and pretty, and he followed her into a cubicle. She took the blue slip of paper from him.

“Take off your jacket and roll up your right sleeve.”

“My jacket?”

She sighed. “For the blood test.”

“Oh.”

The blood test was almost pleasant, compared to what came next.

“Take down your trousers,” she told him. She had a marked Australian accent. His penis had shrunk, tightly pulled in on itself; it looked gray and wrinkled. He found himself wanting to tell her that it was normally much larger, but then she picked up a metal instrument with a wire loop at the end, and he wished it were even smaller. “Squeeze your penis at the base and push forward a few times.” He did so. She stuck the loop into the head of his penis and twisted it around the inside. He winced at the pain. She smeared the discharge onto a glass slide. Then she pointed to a glass jar on a shelf. “Can you urinate into that for me, please?”

“What, from here?”

She pursed her lips. Simon suspected that she must have heard that joke thirty times a day since she had been working there.

She went out of the cubicle and left him alone to pee.

Simon found it difficult to pee at the best of times, often having to wait around in toilets until all the people had gone. He envied men who could casually walk into toilets, unzip, and carry on cheerful conversations with their neighbors in the adjoining urinal, all the while showering the white porcelain with yellow urine. Often he couldn’t do it at all.

He couldn’t do it now.

The nurse came in again. “No luck? Not to worry. Take a seat back in the waiting room, and the doctor will call you in a minute.”

“Well,” said Dr. Benham. “You have NSU. Nonspecific urethritis.”

Simon nodded, and then he said, “What does that mean?”

“It means you don’t have gonorrhea, Mister Powers.”

“But I haven’t had sex with, with anyone, for . . . ”

“Oh, that’s nothing to worry about. It can be a quite spontaneous disease—you need not, um, indulge, to pick it up.” Benham reached into a desk drawer and pulled out a bottle of pills. “Take one of these four times a day before meals. Stay off alcohol, no sex, and don’t drink milk for a couple of hours after taking one. Got it?”

Simon grinned nervously.

“I’ll see you next week. Make an appointment downstairs.”

Downstairs they gave him a red card with his name on and the time of his appointment. It also had a number on:
90
/
00666
.
L
.

Walking home in the rain, Simon paused outside a travel agents’. The poster in the window showed a beach in the sun and three bronzed women in bikinis, sipping long drinks.

Simon had never been abroad.

Foreign places made him nervous.

As the week went on, the pain went away; and four days later Simon found himself able to urinate without flinching.

Something else was happening, however.

It began as a tiny seed, which took root in his mind, and grew. He told Dr. Benham about it at his next appointment.

Benham was puzzled.

“You’re saying that you don’t feel your penis is your own anymore, then, Mister Powers?”

“That’s right, Doctor.’

“I’m afraid I don’t quite follow you. Is there some kind of loss of sensation?”

Simon could feel his penis inside his trousers, felt the sensation of cloth against flesh. In the darkness it began to stir.

“Not at all. I can feel everything like I always could. It’s just it feels . . . well, different, I suppose. Like it isn’t really part of me anymore. Like it . . .” He paused. “Like it belongs to someone else.”

Dr. Benham shook his head. “To answer your question, Mr. Powers, that isn’t a symptom of NSU—although it’s a perfectly valid psychological reaction for someone who has contracted it. A, uh, feeling of disgust with yourself, perhaps, which you’ve externalized as a rejection of your genitalia.”

That sounds about right,
thought Dr. Benham. He hoped he had got the jargon correct. He had never paid much attention to his psychology lectures or textbooks, which might explain, or so his wife maintained, why he was currently serving out a stint in a London VD clinic.

Powers looked a little soothed.

“I was just a bit worried, Doctor, that’s all.” He chewed his lower lip. “Um, what exactly
is
NSU?”

Benham smiled, reassuringly. “Could be any one of a number of things. NSU is just our way of saying we don’t know exactly what it is. It’s not gonorrhea. It’s not chlamydia. ‘Nonspecific,’ you see. It’s an infection, and it responds to antibiotics. Which reminds me . . .” He opened a desk drawer and took out a new week’s supply.

“Make an appointment downstairs for next week. No sex. No alcohol.”

No sex
? thought Simon.
Not bloody likely.

But when he walked past the pretty Australian nurse in the corridor, he felt his penis begin to stir again, begin to get warm and to harden.

Benham saw Simon the following week. Tests showed he still had the disease.

Benham shrugged.

“It’s not unusual for it to hang on for this long. You say you feel no discomfort?”

“No. None at all. And I haven’t seen any discharge, either.”

Benham was tired, and a dull pain throbbed behind his left eye. He glanced down at the tests in the folder. “You’ve still got it, I’m afraid.”

Simon Powers shifted his seat. He had large watery blue eyes and a pale unhappy face. “What about the other thing, Doctor?”

The doctor shook his head. “What other thing?”

“I
told
you,” said Simon. “Last week. I
told
you. The feeling that my, um, my penis wasn’t, isn’t
my
penis anymore.”

Of course,
thought Benham.
It’s
that
patient.
There was never any way he could remember the procession of names and faces and penises, with their awkwardness, and their braggadocio, and their sweaty nervous smells, and their sad little diseases.

“Mm. What about it?”

“It’s spreading, Doctor. The whole lower half of my body feels like it’s someone else’s. My legs and everything. I can feel them, all right, and they go where I want them to go, but sometimes I get the feeling that if they wanted to go somewhere else—if they wanted to go walking off into the world—they could, and they’d take me with them.

“I wouldn’t be able to do anything to stop it.”

Benham shook his head. He hadn’t really been listening. “We’ll change your antibiotics. If the others haven’t knocked this disease out by now, I’m sure these will. They’ll probably get rid of this other feeling as well—it’s probably just a side effect of the antibiotics.”

The young man just stared at him.

Benham felt he should say something else. “Perhaps you should try to get out more,” he said.

The young man stood up.

“Same time next week. No sex, no booze, no milk after the pills.” The doctor recited his litany.

The young man walked away. Benham watched him carefully, but could see nothing strange about the way he walked.

On Saturday night Dr. Jeremy Benham and his wife, Celia, attended a dinner party held by a professional colleague. Benham sat next to a foreign psychiatrist.

They began to talk, over the hors d’oeuvres.

“The trouble with telling folks you’re a psychiatrist,” said the psychiatrist, who was American, and huge, and bullet-headed, and looked like a merchant marine, “is you get to watch them trying to act normal for the rest of the evening.” He chuckled, low and dirty.

Benham chuckled, too, and since he was sitting next to a psychiatrist, he spent the rest of the evening trying to act normally.

He drank too much wine with his dinner.

After the coffee, when he couldn’t think of anything else to say, he told the psychiatrist (whose name was Marshall, although he told Benham to call him Mike) what he could recall of Simon Powers’s delusions.

Mike laughed. “Sounds fun. Maybe a tiny bit spooky. But nothing to worry about. Probably just a hallucination caused by a reaction to the antibiotics. Sounds a little like Capgras’s Syndrome. You heard about that over here?”

Benham nodded, then thought, then said, “No.” He poured himself another glass of wine, ignoring his wife’s pursed lips and almost imperceptibly shaken head.

“Well, Capgras’s Syndrome,” said Mike, “is this funky delusion. Whole piece on it in
The Journal of American Psychiatry
about five years back. Basically, it’s where a person believes that the important people in his or her life—family members, workmates, parents, loved ones, whatever—have been replaced by—get this!—exact doubles.

“Doesn’t apply to everyone they know. Just selected people. Often just one person in their life. No accompanying delusions, either. Just that one thing. Acutely emotionally disturbed people with paranoid tendencies.”

The psychiatrist picked his nose with his thumbnail. “I ran into a case myself, couple, two, three years back.”

“Did you cure him?”

The psychiatrist gave Benham a sideways look and grinned, showing all his teeth. “In psychiatry, Doctor—unlike, perhaps, the world of sexually transmitted disease clinics—there is no such thing as a cure. There is only adjustment.”

Benham sipped the red wine. Later it occurred to him that he would never have said what he said next if it wasn’t for the wine. Not aloud, anyway.“I don’t suppose . . .” He paused, remembering a film he had seen as a teenager. (Something about
bodysnatchers?)
“I don’t suppose that anyone ever checked to see if those people had been removed and replaced by exact doubles . . . ?”

Mike—Marshall—whatever—gave Benham a very funny look indeed and turned around in his chair to talk to his neighbor on the other side.

Benham, for his part, carried on trying to act normally (whatever that was) and failed miserably. He got very drunk indeed, started muttering about “fucking colonials,” and had a blazing row with his wife after the party was over, none of which were particularly normal occurrences.

Benham’s wife locked him out of their bedroom after the argument.

He lay on the sofa downstairs, covered by a crumpled blanket, and masturbated into his underpants, his hot seed spurting across his stomach.