In my letter to the surgeon, I remind him that most of the men who undergo the surgical procedure that I've undergone are old or middle-aged and married, or in some kind of couple; the rhetoric of treatment invokes the "satisfaction" of one loving partner, its highest aim "the completion of intercourse to ejaculation." And by those standards, my operation works; but I have no idea how soon I'll find myself in such a couple, and in the meantime I just want to fuck without worrying about angles and asking for patience. I want the power in bed that I have never had. The surgeon's letter is the last and longest thing I ever write about my disorder until now; as soon as I mail it, I delete it from my computer and tear up the drafts.
     The rest is denouement. I have another operation to replace the reservoir behind my ribs toward the end of my junior year. It works — it works! — but three months after I go home from the hospital, I develop an itch between my penis and my balls, at the spot where the surgeon hid the pump. One day, a pinprick appears in my scrotum; after a few weeks the pinprick widens to a perfectly round, clean hole half the diameter of a match head. I can see the pump, pure white like a tooth. It's summertime. With my family I go to the seashore, I swim as much as possible (saltwater's good for wounds), but the hole keeps getting bigger. When we leave the seashore a week later, the hole is the size of an eyelet on a sneaker. I go back to work at my summer job, on campus, and show the hole to a doctor, who looks grave and sends me to another, even graver-looking doctor, and a few hours later the telephone rings for me at the office. I'm scheduled for emergency surgery that night in Boston. I must look funny on the phone: my boss, the nicest boss I've ever had, loans me a hundred bucks for the train and drives me to the station, no questions asked.
     I ask the surgeon not to tear everything out, just the infected pump, but when they open me up, my dick's rotten with infection. In the morning I'm left with a small, bruised, hollowed-out sock between my legs, which the surgeon urges me to tug as often as possible, on the theory that it might reduce shrinkage, which it does but not entirely. Six months later, in my fourth and final operation, in the fall of my senior year, I'm outfitted with the machinery that's with me still.


If you look closely, you can tell there's a device inside me. When my dick is just hanging there, the unshrinkable inner tubes don't really bend, they fold, and the creases stick out and make two sharp little corners under the skin of my shaft. And if you feel around with your fingers, you can find the thin tube that connects my genitals to their balloon, snaking like a sinew over my pelvis bone.
     If my condition repels the women I've been with, they've kept it a secret from me. When I tell them my story, women often respond by telling me about their own difficulties in bed, as do some of the men I've told. (I used to admire reticence for its own sake; now I wonder, What's the point?) I've slept with women who didn't know I was bionic. Given six seconds of privacy or background noise, I can sneak myself hard — and I've gotten good at collapsing myself with one or two well-aimed, forceful squeezes. I have nodded off during sex. I have come and kept it secret, something that happens less often than, as a virgin, I had thought it would. I have gotten drunk at parties and given myself an erection, just in case. Late at night, I've forgotten to lower myself, or lowered myself partway. When I'm depressed and feel unattractive, I find it cheers me up to walk around with a couple of squirts in me. It's easier for me to come when I'm erect, but usually when I masturbate, unless it's a special occasion, I don't bother.

My accident seems lucky to me now, as if it were precisely the right accident for me to have had. That's egotism for you — whatever makes up our character takes on the color of Providence. It seems lucky, lucky bordering on the magically appropriate, that I have never had what most people would describe as normal sex, that I spent the most promiscuous years of my life hors de concours, that I never learned to date, or talk locker-room talk, that manhood has always been a costume to me, that I spent so long confused about the simplest things. As wretched as my disorder has sometimes made me feel, it has also spared me a certain kind of anxiety, the anxiety that must come with being an ordinary guy. It has made me acquire a taste for thinking and talking about sex. I also suspect it's even gotten me laid.
     When I was twenty, and the first tests came back, I was like some old-fashioned analysand in the grip of his primal scene, my days one long eureka of self-discovery. I imagined my psyche fossilized around the invisible scars in my dick, I referred all my peccadilloes back to them. They were why I neglected my body, why I had trouble distinguishing falling in love from feeling left out, why I did this or that stupid thing — now all of these facts about myself seem more commonplace, less interesting and harder to explain.
     And what's there to say about the significance of my cure? I have new worries. Movable parts always break, sooner or later, and I don't like to think of outlasting mine. I've always been a coward; now in sketchy bars or on empty streets at night, I worry that a dirty kick might jerk a tube out of place or tear a valve, that I'll need further repairs.
     And, yes, when I'm jealous — and who knows? my years of impotence may have reinforced a jealous disposition — I wish I were like other men. When a woman I love has been with another guy, I am sad and fascinated to imagine her pleasure at making him hard, and his pleasure at hers, the whole closed circuit of which I shall never form a link. But why bother? It's as old as Satan in the Garden. We wish we were otherwise, the way we used to be, the way we'll never be, or some combination of the two, some combination well beyond the reaches of medical science. The most jealous I, at any rate, have ever been, since my operations, was of a man who, it so happens, could almost (almost!) never get it up. n°

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