by Neil Gaiman
“You don’t know, then?”
“Which one it is? Good Lord, no. I’m not even going to try to find out. I’m sending you to a special clinic, which takes care of all of that kind of thing. I’ll give you a note to take with you.” He pulled a pad of headed notepaper from a drawer. “What is your profession, Mr Powers?”
“I work in a bank.”
“A teller?”
“No.” He shook his head. “I’m in securities. I clerk for two assistant managers.” A thought occurred to him. “They don’t have to know about this, do they?”
The doctor looked shocked. “Good gracious, no.”
He wrote a note, in a careful, round handwriting, stating that Simon Powers, age 26, had something that was probably NSU. He had a discharge. Said he had had no sex for three years. In discomfort. Please could they let him know the results of the tests. He signed it with a squiggle. Then he handed Simon a card, with the address and phone number of the special clinic on it. “Here you are. This is where you go. Not to worry—happens to lots of people. See all the cards I have here? Not to worry—you’ll soon be right as rain. Phone them when you get home and make an appointment.”
Simon took the card, and stood up to go.
“Don’t worry,” said the doctor. “It won’t prove difficult to treat.”
Simon nodded, and tried to smile.
He opened the door, to go out.
“And at any rate it’s nothing really nasty, like syphilis,” said the doctor.
The two elderly women sitting outside in the hallway waiting area looked up delightedly at this fortuitous overheard, and stared hungrily at Simon as he walked away.
He wished he were dead.
On the pavement outside, waiting for the bus home, Simon thought: I’ve got a venereal disease. I’ve got a venereal disease. I’ve got a venereal disease. Over and over, like a mantra.
He should toll a bell as he walked.
On the bus he tried not to get too close to his fellow passengers. He was certain they knew (couldn’t they read the plague-marks on his face?); and at the same time he was ashamed he was forced to keep it a secret from them.
He got back to the flat and went straight into the bathroom, expecting to see a decayed horror-movie face, a rotting skull fuzzy with blue mould, staring back at him from the mirror. Instead he saw a pink-cheeked bank clerk in his mid-twenties, fair-haired, perfect-skinned.
He fumbled out his penis and scrutinised it with care. It was neither a gangrenous green nor a leprous white, but looked perfectly normal, except for the slightly swollen tip and the clear discharge that lubricated the hole. He realised that his white underpants had been stained across the crotch by the leak.
Simon felt angry with himself, and angrier with God for having given him a (say it) (dose of the clap) obviously meant for someone else.
He masturbated that night, for the first time in four days.
He fantasised 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 pin-cushion.
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 moustaches and tatty raincoats—newspaper sellers, perhaps, or retired teachers; a rotund oriental 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 sellotaped 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 grey 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 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 neighbours 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. Non Specific Urethritis.”
Simon nodded, and then he said, “What does that mean?”
“It means you don’t have gonorrhea, Mr 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, on his next appointment.
Benham was puzzled.
“You’re saying that you don’t feel your penis is your own anymore, then, Mr 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 any more. 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 externalised 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. ‘Non Specific’, 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 in 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 any more.”
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’ 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 transmitte
d 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 neighbour 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.
In the small hours he was woken by a cold sensation around his loins.
He wiped himself off with his dress shirt, and returned to sleep.
§ § §
Simon was unable to masturbate.
He wanted to, but his hand wouldn’t move. It lay beside him, healthy, fine; but it was as if he had forgotten how to make it respond. Which was silly, wasn’t it?
Wasn’t it?
He began to sweat. It dripped from his face and forehead onto the white cotton sheets, but the rest of his body was dry.
Cell by cell something was reaching up inside him. It brushed his face, tenderly, like the kiss of a lover; it was licking his throat, breathing on his cheek. Touching him.
He had to get out of the bed. He couldn’t get out of the bed.
He tried to scream, but his mouth wouldn’t open. His larynx refused to vibrate.
Simon could still see the ceiling, lit by the lights of passing cars. The ceiling blurred: his eyes were still his own, and tears were oozing out of them, hot down his face, soaking the pillow.
They don’t know what I’ve got, he thought. They said I had what everyone else gets. But I didn’t catch that. I’ve caught something different.
