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“Why not?” his sister-in-law asked with disappointment.

He picked up the bottle his brother had screwed into the sand and drank. It took him a long time to say he didn't know how to explain it, that if he knew how to explain it she would be walking toward them now, not Hannah. I've divided myself into two people. A cut across worlds. Footfall on gravel, then crushed shells, silence when she reached the sand.

There was the sound of clapping from the condo, and he turned back to see that someone had launched a balloon from the balcony. No, a lantern, an illuminated red paper globe, probably a threat to sea life. It floated slowly past them and out over the water. From their respective present tenses, they all watched the same turbulent point.

*   *   *

The day of the extractions, he had taken the train with Liza to the office on Madison Avenue near Central Park. They rode the elevator to the twenty-eighth floor. He signed in with the receptionist, and he and Liza hung up their coats and sat down in the cramped waiting room. He was embarrassed to admit how nervous he was, but Liza knew it, and reassured him by making gentle fun of him, asking if he had any manuscripts she should burn if he didn't “pull through.”

It wasn't long before a nurse called his name and he passed through the door beside the receptionist and was led to a windowless room. He tried to make himself comfortable in the chair as the nurse took his blood pressure and remarked on the weather and then placed some kind of monitor on his ankle. Soon a muscular male nurse in purple scrubs entered with an IV stand, untangled and attached various wires, and cleaned his arm with alcohol. The dentist appeared, smiled at the IV, and said in his Romanian accent, “Do I really scare you that much.” The male nurse finished setting up the IV, left, and returned with a stand of tools that he wheeled in front of the dentist. The author looked away while the first nurse sank a needle into his vein.

He was in the middle of asking the dentist how long the procedure would take when he realized he was hearing his voice from far away; he left the question unfinished. That was because he was also walking with Liza in the park explaining how he had been right to elect the twilight sedation, late light filtering through the lindens. He knew he was still in the chair and at one point heard the dentist ask, pausing the drill, if he was okay, heard himself grunt affirmatively, but he was also explaining to his mom on the phone that the procedure had turned out to be a nonevent. He was suffused with warmth; the universe was benevolent, the lamp positioned to shine into his mouth was the nourishing sun. He knew it wasn't but it also was, and then the dentist was saying, “All done.” He had no idea if five minutes or an hour had passed. He realized the first nurse was giving him instructions and he became aware of gauze in his mouth when he said, “Yes, yes.” Then he followed her to the waiting room without feeling the floor beneath him and watched but did not listen as she repeated the instructions to Liza, who thanked her and helped him into his coat.

The dazzling sun cleared his head a little, and by the time they were in a cab his sense of time had stabilized, but he was still so thoroughly suspended in the warm glow of the drugs that he experienced the sudden starting and stopping of the taxi while they inched their way east as a gentle rocking motion. He felt no pain, and only the awareness that his tongue was numb was vaguely uncomfortable, reminding him of the wounds packed with gauze. Had Liza been talking this whole time? He turned and faced her as they merged onto the FDR Drive, and she looked beautiful, her arms raised to pull her light brown hair into a ponytail; he watched her chest rise and fall as she breathed, saw the thin gold necklace she always wore against her perfect collarbone. Then without transition he was looking at the skyline of lower Manhattan, the buildings growing larger and more detailed as the taxi approached, though he was not aware of moving. Then he was aware of moving at an impossibly smooth rate, and there was the Brooklyn Bridge, cablework sparkling. Liza was cursing at the little touch-screen television in the taxi, which she couldn't seem to turn off, and he reached out a hand to help her and experienced contact with the glass as a marvel, like encountering solidified, sensate air. Then he was smoothing her hair back and she was laughing at this uncharacteristic intimacy, something he'd done only a few times in their six years. Now the view again, and it occurred to him with the force of revelation:

I won't remember this. This is the most beautiful view of the city I have ever seen, the most perfect experience of touch and speed, I've never felt so close to Liza, and I won't remember it; the drugs will erase it. And then, glowing with the aura of imminent disappearance, it really was the most beautiful view, experience. He wanted badly to describe this situation to Liza but couldn't: his tongue was still numb; he couldn't even ask her to remind him of what the drugs would erase. While he was distantly aware that Liza would tease him for it later, that he was being ridiculous, he felt tears start in his eyes as they merged onto the bridge and he watched the play of late October sunlight on the water. That he would form no memory of what he observed and could not record it in any language lent it a fullness, made it briefly identical to itself, and he was deeply moved to think this experience of presence depended upon its obliteration. Then he was in his apartment; Liza gave him a couple of pills, put him to bed, and left.

He woke around midnight and felt like himself. His jaw ached a little. He pissed, changed the russet-colored, saturated gauze, and took another painkiller with a full glass of water. He texted Liza and also Josh, who had asked how it all went. He smiled at how much time he'd wasted ruminating about the extractions; it was nothing. He streamed an episode of
The Wire
on his laptop and fell asleep.

When he got out of bed late the next morning and had his coffee—iced so as not to disrupt the clotting—he realized: I do remember the drive, the view, stroking Liza's hair, the incommunicable beauty destined to disappear. I remember it, which means it never happened.

THREE

 

 

I arrived at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital in a cold sweat, could actually feel the urea and salts emerging from my underarms and trickling down my ribs. I had been worrying about this appointment for well over a month—ever since it had been scheduled—had worried about it so much and so vocally that Andrews had offered to medicate me; every few minutes riding the train uptown, I patted the inside pocket of my coat to confirm the presence of the pill.

The glass doors slid open to admit me and I walked through the atrium past the Starbucks kiosk to the elevators, which I took to the seventh floor. The reception area into which I emerged was unusually luxurious, more like what I imagined the office of a major executive would look like than what I'd come to expect from medical suites. The series of abstract prints on the wall—faint grids in different colors, Agnes Martin knockoffs—was merely anodyne, but the framing was museum-quality. The receptionist I approached had an easy smile I felt was a little misplaced—the smile of a woman who sold expensive jewelry, as if I were shopping for an engagement ring; there was nothing medical about it. I gave her my name and she entered it into a computer and then printed out a form she told me to take to the floor above me; “They'll take care of you there.”

Before I pressed the up button on the elevator, I saw my reflection in the shiny metal doors and said to myself, maybe even mouthed some of the words: “Take the elevator back down and leave this building and never return; you don't have to do this.” But of course I took the elevator up to what was a much more conventional medical floor, where lab work was done and patients were physically examined, not just consulted about options and their pricing in and out of network.

The receptionist I handed my form to was a young woman—she looked eighteen to me, though surely she was older—who could have been a swimsuit model or hired to dance in a club in the background of a music video. She was not unusually beautiful, but her proportions, visible through her black pantsuit even while she sat, were consistent with normative male fantasy. I thought it was inappropriate to cast her in this role, whoever in human resources was doing the casting, but then felt as awkward about that thought as I did about automatically taking in the dimensions of her body. I found it difficult to meet her eyes and I tried not to blush. To my knowledge, I almost never blush, almost never visibly redden from embarrassment or shame, but trying not to blush is a distinct, involuntary activity for me: pressing, for whatever reason, my tongue against the roof of my mouth, clenching my jaw, shortening my breath—which might, it has occurred to me, cause me to redden just perceptibly. I handed the receptionist the credit card; my exorbitantly priced insurance didn't cover anything.

She gave me a second piece of paper to which she had stapled my receipt and told me to wait until I was called. I managed to look her in the eyes as I thanked her, but the knowledge in hers was terrible, as if to say: Take a good look, pervert. When I sat down, I took the pill from my pocket and was about to ingest it, but then wondered—although it would be unlike Andrews to make this kind of mistake—if it might alter the sample. I was turning it over in my fingers when a nurse called my name and asked me to follow her.

She led me to a separate room and said on its threshold that the only thing I needed to remember was to wash my hands carefully and not to touch anything that could be potentially contaminating. She handed me a small plastic container labeled with my name and various numbers and repeated slowly, as though to a man-child: Make sure your hands are very clean, or you'll have to do it over, and then told me what to do with the container when I finished. She smiled at me without any embarrassment or awkwardness, a charity, and disappeared around the corner. I entered the room and shut the door behind me.

On the one hand I was being medicalized, pathologized, broken into my parts, each granted a terrible autonomy; on the other hand I felt trace amounts of what could only be described as excitement, reminiscent of the first time Daniel lent me, at age eleven, a
Playboy
; the combination made me a little nauseated.

I hung my coat on the metal coat hanger and looked around me. In the middle of the room was something like a dentist's chair, peach-colored plastic upholstery and a strip of medical paper down its middle that the good nurse must replace between patrons, patients; I was not sitting in that chair. In front of the chair was a television with a DVD menu on the screen. Wireless headphones I resolved not to use were on top of the TV. Toward the back of the room was a sink with a dispenser of liquid soap and a little placard reminding me to wash my hands thoroughly. On the back wall was a contraption, vaguely reminiscent of one of those drive-through bank deposit boxes, where I could submit the container, transferring it to technicians on the other side of the wall, who could thereby receive it without our having to face one another. Bank, medical office, pornographic theater—it was a supra-institution. It took me a minute to realize I could hear voices through the wall, make them out clearly: a woman was talking about her daughter's boyfriend, how he was a keeper; a man was on the phone ordering lunch in Spanish, something with white rice, black beans. If I could hear them, surely they could hear me; I resolved to use the headphones.

I went to the sink and washed my hands, then washed them again. Then I walked to the chair, took the remote control from the armrest, and started looking at the menu on the screen. The TV was hooked up to some sort of service where you could select from a huge number of movie titles organized alphabetically, but also by ethnicity:
Asian Anal Adventures
,
Asian Persuasion
,
Asian Oral Fetish
, etc.;
Black Anal Adventures
,
Black Blowjobs
,
Black Cumshot Orgy
, etc., although after the ethnically specific menu you had the option of searching compilations by activity alone:
Best of
whatever.
The Picture of Sasha Grey
flashed before me. I was surprised by the extremity of some of the videos, and surprised to see them indexed racially; I guess I had expected magazines. I was embarrassed to choose, but was not in a position to deny that audiovisual assistance would expedite the process. I looked down at the remote control to see how it worked, exactly, and then remembered: I'm not supposed to touch anything that could contaminate the sample. What could be more contaminating than this remote control, which had been in how many sullied hands?

After a few seconds of panicky deliberation, I just pressed play—which started
Asian Anal Adventures
, even though that's not at all my thing;
not
choosing seemed less objectionable somehow than having to express a positive preference among the available categories—and put the remote control and the plastic container down and walked back to the sink and washed my hands. Then I returned to the screen and undid my jeans and was about to get the whole thing going when I realized my pants were even more potentially contaminating: I'd been on the subway for an hour; I couldn't remember the last time I'd laundered the things. I shuffled back to the sink with my pants and underwear around my ankles and began to worry about how long I was taking, if there was a time limit, if the nurse was going to knock on the door at some point and ask me how it was going or tell me it was the next patient's turn. I did the shuffle back to the screen and hurriedly donned the headphones, but then it occurred to me: contact with the headphones was no different than contact with the remote control. I thought about putting an end to this increasingly Beckettian drama and just trying to go on, but then I imagined getting the call that the sample wasn't usable, and so again shuffled—now wearing the headphones, now hearing the shrieks and groans of the adventurers—back to the sink to wash my hands once more. Above the sink there was mercifully no mirror.