13

“Your problem,” the doctor said, “isn’t uncommon. Fortunately new medicines have been developed—”

“I don’t want medicines,” I interrupted. My anxiety about my condition made me excitable. If I had a routine complaint, such as a sore throat, I would have shown far more deference to the six diplomas hanging on the wall. “I want to get better, be normal. I’ve never had this happen before.”

“A lot of men have it from time to time. It’s part of the aging process, sometimes stress related.”

“I’m not old enough,” I protested.

“There is no single age when sexual function starts to diminish. It has to do with health, genes, circumstances.”

“I’m not even forty.”

He glanced down at my chart. I had found him through the website for my health plan at work. I chose him because his office was close by and he could squeeze me in for an appointment in two days. A tall, lanky man with thinning curls of dark hair and a long white hospital gown, he had deep-set dark eyes that looked intelligent and concerned. I couldn’t understand why my condition didn’t alarm him. Perhaps I should have searched for other doctors or taken more time to study his credentials.

“Let’s start with the examination,” he said cheerfully, rising from behind his desk and opening the door into another small room. “Then we can discuss causes and cures.”

I followed him into the room, which had an examination table with some machines next to it, cabinets on the walls, a small sink, a red wastebasket with “Hazardous” emblazoned on its lid, and a rolling black-seated chair.

“Undress, please, and put on this gown.” He gave me a blue gown that tied in the back. “I’ll be back in a minute or two.”

I shed my clothes and reached behind myself to tie the gown.

Returning, he pointed to a metal stand at the base of the table.

“Step up there,” he said, pulling on translucent rubber gloves that he took from a box by the sink.

I did as he asked. I looked away as one hand moved aside the gown and the other squeezed my testicles.

“Cough, please.”

I coughed. His hand shifted.

“Cough again. Good. Now stroke the penis.”

Taking a firm hold on my penis, I gave half a dozen pulls from bottom to top. He studied the tip when I had finished.

“Okay. Now stand and face away from me. Place both hands on the table and lean forward.”

He took a tube of lubricant from beside the sink and casually smeared a glistening, translucent glob over the middle finger of his rubber-gloved hand.

“Relax. This will only take a few seconds.”

I felt his finger slip inside me. His fingertip pressed in small circles on my prostate. At last he removed his finger, handed me some tissues, and pulled off the glove, which he discarded in the red waste receptacle.

“Nothing wrong there. Of course, we’ll do a PSA, but it’s nice and smooth. Stand and face me,” he said, pulling on a fresh glove and studying my penis again. “That’s fine. Now lie back on the examination table.”

I did, and he pulled out a support for my legs. He brought his chair around to the side of the table.

“This will be a little bit cold. I want to look at your bladder and kidneys.”

He put lubricant on a silver probe attached by a wire to a machine and pressed the cold tip of the probe to one side of my stomach.

“Bladder looks normal,” he reassured me, studying a screen on the machine. “Roll a bit toward me.”

He moved the probe to my left side and then my right.

“The kidneys are healthy.”

He rose.

“Lift up your feet.”

I wanted to ask why, but didn’t. He slid the metal support back into the table, then raised a bar from each side and placed my heels into what looked like stirrups.

“They’ve made tremendous strides in recent years,” he said as I felt the latex gloves opening the cheeks of my buttocks and applying lubricant again. “Astounding treatments, almost beyond belief. Some are experimental, of course, but a limited number of patients are invited into the testing process.”

I could feel a cold, metal object entering me. I wanted to object or question him, but his seamless patter didn’t invite interruption.

“They run a risk. There’s no doubt about that. Perhaps the treatment won’t work. It might even have harmful side effects. But if your condition is incurable, what risk would be too great? None I can think of. Ah, just as I thought. Please hold still a little while longer. Very interesting.”

I couldn’t imagine what could be interesting. In a moment he withdrew the object, pulled out the support again, and took my feet out of the slings in which they had been suspended.

“Please put your clothes back on and meet me in my office. Oh, yes, and bring a urine specimen with you.”

He handed me a plastic cup and left me alone.

“What do you think?” I asked when I placed the half-filled cup on the front of his desk and sat in an armchair facing him.

“It can definitely be treated,” he said. “In fact, you have a variety of options.”

What relief I felt!

“There are several directions we might pursue. It’s a bit like a detective story. We suspect this and then that, but in the end,” he smiled at me, “we always get our man.”

“What do you think caused it?” I asked.

“Simply being human,” he answered.

“What?” This answer caught me off guard. “But we all suffer from that. Why me and not someone else?”

“I mean that humans aren’t angels.”

For a moment I couldn’t speak. The doctor looked perfectly sane. He spoke in a normal way. He had diplomas on his walls.

“Um … ”

Sensing my confusion, he continued: “Angels are immortal and have no need for sexuality. An angel would never come to my office and complain about the loss of sexual function. It would be an absurdity.”

“Do angels come here?” I asked.

“Only with an appointment.”

I smiled dubiously at his joke.

“It’s a mystery, as I said before, and a good detective explores every possibility. What seems improbable at first may lead to the solution.”

“You said you have treatments. What are they?”

“I could offer you a prosthesis. I have a file here with some information.” He pulled open one of the desk drawers and started searching through the papers inside.

“I don’t think,” I said in a chilly voice, “I want a prosthesis. I want to be normal again.”

“Do no harm,” he said. “That is the essence of the Hippocratic oath.”

“That says nothing about curing.”

“Of course, but everything else will be invasive. Even pills in their own way.”

“But … ”

“I can offer you an inflatable insert. It involves a small surgical procedure, and then you’ll be able to use a remote to create erections at will.”

“That’s not what I want.”

“I don’t like it either,” he agreed. “I’m against surgery if it can be avoided.”

“What else?”

“I mentioned the new medicines. They’re getting more and more powerful.”

“I’d prefer not to use pills.”

“But we’re running out of options.”

“There must be something else. Exercises,” I offered, “or meditation?”

“No harm in that,” he agreed, “but no guarantee either.”

“What else?” I asked.

“There’s only one remaining option. It’s in the experimental stage, but I believe I could have you accepted into the program.”

“I’m certainly interested. What would be involved?”

“Pregnancy. New discoveries have proven that this is not only possible but desirable. What you see as a symptom, I see as the beginning of a cure. The very fact that you can’t have erections means you are ready to move beyond that stage of your life. You’re ready to hold a new life that will grow within you. You can cross the boundaries that have contained you for so many years. It’s only natural. We aren’t meant to stay forever the same.”

“I can’t have babies,” I protested quietly.

“Wait, let me find the articles.” He began to rustle through the sedimentation of papers in his desk drawer. “It’s only in the professional journals. The popular media haven’t picked up the story yet.”

“No!” I said forcefully. “I am not having a baby.”

“Calm down,” he said sharply, looking up at me. “Are you so afraid of being a pioneer? They said a sixty-three-year-old woman couldn’t have babies, and now that’s old news.”

“But at least she was a woman.”

He shrugged and asked, “What miracle is greater than birth? Think of the adventure—to be both a man and a mother. Think of the reward of holding within you something tiny, barely existing, and carrying it to term, giving it life from your life, delivering it into the world.”

I shook my head. I should have left earlier, but his enthusiasm cast a spell.

“No,” I said, “that’s not for me.”

“Too bad.”

“So, what can I do?”

“You’ve heard all the possibilities. You have to make a choice.”

“Tell me more about the pills.”

His lips pursed in disappointment. “So you’re determined to be the way you were before.”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“The pills work for most men. I’ll give you a strong dosage. If you have an erection that doesn’t go away in, oh, four or five hours, you should give my office a call. Other side effects might include constipation, fainting, and blindness.”

“Fine.”

He scribbled on a prescription pad and passed the sheet to me.

“Give a call if you have any difficulties.”

“Yes, thanks.”

“And come back in six months for another checkup.”

I rushed to the neighborhood drugstore and waited for the prescription to be filled. Once I had the plastic bottle in hand, I slipped down an aisle to escape the gaze of the pharmacist and swallowed one of the bright-orange pills. At my apartment I locked the door to my bedroom, shed my clothing, and settled into the desk chair facing my computer and the junk with its puffed sails.

Gently I rubbed my inert flesh. I wanted to keep my mind blank, free of distractions and worries. Slowly, more quickly, slowly again, my hand moved and time passed as I worked to raise this ruin to its past glories. Stray thoughts slipped into my mind. Around the globe, at every moment, there must be millions, ten of millions, making a sexual connection. And when those lovers slipped apart, others were entering or being entered, being touched and touching, in numbers beyond counting. My biceps began to burn from the repeated motion, and I looked down at my conscientious objector. What sort of mind did it have? How had it decided to take this leave of absence? Why had it refused to participate?

I stopped and gave my arm a rest. My eyes shifted to the junk, and I began to think of Cheng Ho, vaporous thoughts that rose under a pressure I could hardly describe. He’d been “cleaned” as a boy, relieved of the distractions of his sex to better serve his masters. Presumably he never made love to a woman. What would the purified Cheng Ho desire? Power? That he would have. Wealth beyond measure? That too would be his. But what of sexual desire? Had that been lost to him irrevocably? Or had Cheng Ho’s sexual pleasure become diffuse, spread over all his skin, into his organs, to his bones? The blind hear with such intensity. Wouldn’t the skin of a eunuch be one hundred times more susceptible to pleasure than it was before the cleaning? A simple massage might waken an ecstasy that would spread from skin to organs to bones with a joy that a normal man would never be able to know.

I protectively seized the shifting shape of my testicles in their scrotal sac. What horrid way had Cheng Ho’s balls been cleaned? With a metal device considered a modern innovation at the time? Or with a sharp knife wielded … by whom? A sadist? A bureaucrat? A healer? Imagining being without balls made me grasp my own more tightly, but they shifted away from my fingers like mercury.

Wasn’t the wind that swells the sails of the junk like the swelling of blood that fills the tube of flesh? If such a wind can send a ship from one continent to another, could it stiffen the penis of a eunuch? If not, was he not a he but a hybrid? One who had been a man and not become a woman? A eunuch could take the stiff penis of another in his slippery mouth—or his anus, buttocks slapped to engorge with blood and massaged with scented unguents to let the skinned column enter ever more deeply. Such a eunuch would be receptive, yes, entered, true, but would he have become a woman?

I stopped for a moment and stared at the ship. What if I were both man and eunuch? I would have a stiff, smooth sheath. Wanting to enter myself, I would be willing to be entered—my penis between my lips, my anus ready for my own thrust. To experience both the pleasure of receiving and the pleasure of releasing. And what of the white spurt of sperm? Sent into the beginning or end of the digestive tract, swimming toward an ovum that would be … where? Would the sperm end in the gastric caldron of the stomach? The endless folds of the small intestine? Or cleaned of the literal, would a sort of ectoplasmic sperm swim to the solar plexus, the heart, the missing sack of my genitals, to work the mystery of impregnation and fill me with the growing life the doctor had offered me? Well, he had gone too far. I didn’t want to be a eunuch or an angel. I wanted the familiar, the safely repetitive.

Yet these odd thoughts continued to flood through me. Might cleaning leave a terrible ache like that of an amputee whose lost leg still sends signals from uprooted nerves that say, “I am here. I have never left. Place your weight on me.” But in this case it wouldn’t be a lost leg or a forearm but the spongy globes of my testicles that would be gone. Would the nerves sing the same way, carrying messages of pain or desire to the spine and the brain? Would my balls have a phantom life?

Then I recollected a man, a person I should say, who had the fully developed sexual organs of both a man and a woman. What sensations would such a man-woman be capable of achieving? I never knew this person, but I read his/her first-person story. He/she had no preference with respect to taking the role of man or woman, although being a woman brought presents that he/she liked. Of course there’s more hermaphroditism than I ever realized growing up in a time when the norm allowed only two sexes, not modulations on a sexual spectrum. But could someone have the fully developed organs of both sexes and enjoy sex regardless of the sex of his/her partner? If this could really happen, what if it happened to me? What would it feel like to be not one sex but two, no longer a provincial from the town of man or woman but a cosmopolitan embodying both lover and beloved?

What of the ancient philosophers who speculated that man and woman had once been joined as a whole? The separation of the sexes left each of us searching for a beloved to make us complete. Would possessing both sexes oneself save a person from this search? Or did the philosophers mean that the soul is incomplete? If that’s true, where would such a person search for what is missing? Or, thinking of it another way, if the quest is for a soul mate, then a eunuch would be as whole as anyone else. His ache for a partner would be the same as the soul ache of anyone else. I drifted a bit, like a reader nodding with sleep while the hand continues to turn pages. Gandhi came to mind. Not as the great liberator of India, but for an almost unknown episode that had stayed with me despite my having read of it quite a while ago. From the time of her infancy, Gandhi’s granddaughter had slept with him in his bed. When she reached the age of eleven, Gandhi’s advisors began to warn him against letting the girl continue to sleep with him. They feared that his political enemies would use this to injure his reputation and his effectiveness as a leader. He replied that his sexual life had long been over. In fact, he said, the flesh of his sexual organ had changed in color to gray and its composition had become viscous, nearly solid. Instead of going into the world, the energy of his organ now rose within his spine to roost in his skull. The author then went on to speak of the transforming power of this energy that twists about the spine in upward-rising spirals. Gandhi’s advisors, however, persisted. Finally, despite wanting to continue this closeness with his grandchild, Gandhi agreed to sleep alone.

One disturbing aspect of the story of Cheng Ho returned to me a number of times after I first found him on the computer. In the Ming court, there were always competing factions, one favoring exploration and the other preferring isolationism. After Cheng Ho’s death, an able man came forward and proposed to continue the admiral’s explorations. The new emperor, influenced by his Confucian advisors, who valued tradition, decided against further expeditions. In fact, within a hundred years, overseas trade was forbidden and sailing from China in a multimasted ship was punishable by death. How terrible to want to explore but be limited by others’ fear. Who would Cheng Ho have become if he had never held the rank of admiral of the western seas and commanded his giant junks on their far-flung voyages? Would he have remained forever on the soil of China, on the shore at Nankin, looking to the sea and wondering what might have been?

Staring down at my wrinkled flesh, I didn’t have to wonder what might have been. It was evident enough that the pill had failed. For a time, I might be more angel than man. I didn’t want to visit that crazy doctor again, so I decided to do nothing at all. Do no harm—if ever a phrase lacked ambition … Surely I could aim higher! Or maybe not. Maybe it would be best not to aim. Maybe that would be best.