by Ben Lerner
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.
Why, I wondered as I dispensed yet more soap, would my hands compromise the sample anyway; it’s not as though I’m going to be touching the actual sperm; surely I can just be careful not to introduce my hand in any deleterious way. At this point it was academic: I was finally in a position to proceed directly from cleansing my hands to deploying them—after basically hopping back to the console—onanistically.
It was time to perform, a performance about which I had more anxiety than any actual sexual encounter, which was why Andrews had given me Viagra, which, at that moment, I wished I’d taken. It was too late now; he said it could require hours to take effect and, besides, there was my fear, probably ridiculous, of some sort of chemical contamination. And wasn’t it bad for people with cardiac conditions; had he failed to think of that as well? Doesn’t it induce vasodilation? I felt angry, like an angry old man. But rage at Andrews wasn’t going to help my situation—his face (or his tactically inoffensive abstract painting) wasn’t the right mental image to be conjuring now.
I dreaded the prospect of abandoning the masturbatorium and having to tell the nurse after twenty minutes of self-pollution that I just couldn’t do it, but that dread was of course nothing compared to telling Alex. What would happen then? I would either have to reschedule, the pressure doubled, or back out of the whole project, straining, if not ruining, our friendship, or be forced to have them extract it through some horrible procedure, assuming that’s something they can do. For six weeks I’d talked about my performance anxiety with Jon and Sharon and Alena and they’d laughed at me, assured me I’d be fine. For several days before providing the sample, abstinence was required; during that period Alena, through a carefully calculated configuration of doubl
e entendres and supposedly incidental contact and theatrical smoking, had tried to ensure that I was, as she put it, “primed.”
And, thankfully, I was: the whole thing was over with almost comical speed, the brief experience dominated by the involuntary afterimage of the young receptionist, as the receptionist had, I believed, foreseen. The relief was profound. I dressed and delivered the sample to the other side of the wall and fled the institution as quickly as possible.
Walking west with the park in mind, I tried to imagine the process I’d begun: the lab would evaluate volume, liquefaction time, count, morphology, motility, etc., and report back to me about my viability as a donor. The fertility specialist Alex had consulted had suggested we just skip this part, that, since sperm was specially prepared for IUI, and since we had no particular reason to believe my sperm was abnormal, excepting the fact that I’d never to my knowledge impregnated anyone despite high-risk behavior, we should just proceed to IUI and see if it was successful. But I hadn’t really decided if I was prepared to be a donor or a father, especially since Alex and I were still trying to figure out how much I’d be merely the former or the latter, and this test seemed like it might help the conversation, either by ending it (if my sperm was so dysfunctional as to require male fertility treatments I wasn’t willing to do, for example, or as to render IUI unbearably protracted—it only had around a 10 percent success rate in any particular instance to begin with, given Alex’s age), or by demystifying some of the steps. Trivial as it may sound, I had been so allergic to the idea of actually delivering the sperm that I thought forcing myself to go through the semen analysis would rob that dimension of the process of its psychological significance. I didn’t want to say no to Alex just because I couldn’t face the prospect of jacking off to porn in a medical office. While I tried to figure out if I thought completing the test had actually changed any part of my thinking, I was almost struck by a downtown bus at the intersection of Sixty-eighth and Lexington.
Eventually I reached the park and walked into it only far enough to find a bench and sit down and watch the nannies, all of whom were black or brown, push around white kids in expensive strollers. I imagined trying to explain all of this to a future child, whom I pictured as Alex’s second cousin: “Your mother and I loved each other, but not in the way that makes a baby, so we went to a place where they took part of me and then put it in part of her and that made you.” That sounded okay. I pictured myself beside her bed, stroking her brown hair. “Really,” I would explain, “everyone gets help making a baby, it’s never just a mom and dad, because everybody depends on everybody else. Just think of this apartment where we are now,” I’d say—although I probably wouldn’t live in the same apartment as the child. “Where did the wood come from and the nails and the paint? Who planted the trees and cut them down and shipped the wood and built the apartment, who paid for those things and how did the workers learn their skills and where did the money come from, and so on?” I could have that conversation, I assured myself, as I watched a Boston terrier (originally bred for hunting rats in garment factories, only later bred for companionship) tree a squirrel: I’ll narrate our mode of reproduction as a version of “It takes a village.” But then my voice went on speaking to the child without my permission: “So your dad watched a video of young women whose families hailed from the world’s most populous continent get sodomized for money and emptied his sperm into a cup he paid a bunch of people to wash and shoot into your mom through a tube.”
“Wasn’t the tube cold?” I heard in Alex’s cousin’s voice.
“You’d have to ask her.”
“Why didn’t you two just make love?”
“Because that would have been bizarre.”
“Can IUI be used for gender selection?” Now she sounded like a child actress.
“Sperm can be washed or spun to increase the odds of having male or female offspring, but we didn’t do that, sweetie; we wanted it to be a surprise.”
“How much does IUI typically cost?”
“Great question. According to the rate sheet, and because they recommended some injectable medications for your mom, and because we did some ultrasounds and blood work, probably five thousand a pop.” I regretted saying, even though I hadn’t said anything, “a pop.”
“What was the annual per capita gross national income of China at the time of ejaculation?”
“Four thousand nine hundred and forty U.S. dollars, but I think that’s an unreliable measure of quality of life and I’d dispute the relevance of the fact, Camila.” I had always liked the name Camila.
“What if you have to do IVF to make me?”
“That’s more like ten thousand.”
“Average annual cost of a baby in New York?”
“Between twenty and thirty thousand a year for the first two years, but we’re going to live lightly.”
“After that?”
“I don’t know. Ask your phone.” A teenager had sat down on the bench beside me and was texting; I absorbed her into the hypothetical interrogation.
“How are you going to pay for all of this?” she asked me.
“On the strength of my New Yorker story. You’re overfocused on the money, Rose.” It was my maternal grandmother’s name.
“Is that why you’ve exchanged a modernist valorization of difficulty as a mode of resistance to the market for the fantasy of coeval readership?”
“Art has to offer something other than stylized despair.”
“Are you projecting your artistic ambition onto me?”
“So what if I am?”
“Why didn’t Mom just adopt?”
“Ask your mother. I guess because that’s equally or more ethically complicated most of the time and because, independent of culturally specific pressures, some women experience a biological demand.”
“Why reproduce if you believe the world is ending?”
“Because the world is always ending for each of us and if one begins to withdraw from the possibilities of experience, then no one would take any of the risks involved with love. And love has to be harnessed by the political. Ultimately what’s ending is a mode.”
“Can you imagine the world if and when I’m twenty? Thirty? Forty?”
I could not. I hoped my sperm was useless.
“Cutting and other forms of self-harm and parasuicidal behavior are endemic in my age group.” I pictured the teenager pulling up her sleeve, showing me the red crosshatching.
“You’re misusing endemic.”
“The average cost for a month of inpatient treatment is thirty thousand.” This observation was in Dr. Andrews’s voice.
“She will be surrounded by love and support.”
“How will you work out your level of involvement so that neither I nor Mom resents you for it?” The teen.
“As we go along.”
The conversation didn’t stop so much as recede beneath the threshold of perceptibility. Maybe to distance myself from the morning’s anxiety, I removed the blue pill from the inside pocket of my coat and tried to crush it, which I couldn’t do, but with two hands I succeeded in breaking it in half. I absentmindedly tossed the halves onto the sidewalk in front of me, at which point a nearby pigeon approached it, no doubt accustomed to being fed by tourists from this bench. What is the effect of sildenafil citrate on stout-bodied passerines? I stood and tried to shoo the bird away; it startled, but then turned back and quickly ate a half before I managed to intervene.
* * *
Two days after providing a sample of my reproductive cells for analysis, I was in the basement of the Park Slope Food Coop bagging the dried flesh of a tropical stone fruit, trying not to listen to one of my louder coworkers as she explained her decision to pull her first-grader out of a local public school and, despite the cost and the elaborate application process, place him in a well-known private one.
The Park Slope Food Coop is the oldest and largest active food cooperative in the country, as they tell you at orientatio
n. Every able-bodied adult member works at the co-op for two hours and forty-five minutes every four weeks. In exchange you get to shop at a store with less of a markup than a normal supermarket’s; prices are kept down because labor is contributed by members; nobody is extracting profit. Most of the goods are environmentally friendly, at least comparatively, and, whenever possible, locally sourced. Alex had been a member when I moved to Brooklyn and it wasn’t too far from my apartment so I’d joined. Despite being frequently suspended for missing shifts while traveling, and despite complaining all the while about the self-righteousness of its members, its organizational idiocy, and the length of its checkout lines, I’d remained a member. Indeed, for most of the members I knew except Alex, who rarely complained about anything (“You do my complaining for me”), insulting the co-op was a mode of participation in its culture. Complaining indicated you weren’t foolish enough to believe that belonging to the co-op made you meaningfully less of a node in a capitalist network, that you understood the co-op’s population was largely made up of gentrifiers of one sort or another, and so on. If you acknowledged to a nonmember that you were part of the co-op, you then hurried to distinguish yourself from the zealots who, while probably holding investments in Monsanto or Archer Daniels Midland in their 401(k)’s, looked down with a mixture of pity and rage at those who’d shop at Union Market or Key Food. Worse: The New York Times had run an exposé about certain members sending their nannies to do their shifts, although the accuracy of the reporting was disputed. The woman now holding forth about her child’s schooling was almost certainly a zealot.
And yet, although I insulted it constantly, and although my cooking was at best inept, I didn’t think the co-op was morally trivial. I liked having the money I spent on food and household goods go to an institution that made labor shared and visible and that you could usually trust to carry products that weren’t the issue of openly evil conglomerates. The produce was largely free of poison. The co-op helped run a soup kitchen. When a homeless shelter in the neighborhood burned down, “we”—at orientation they taught you to utilize the first-person plural while talking about the co-op—donated the money to rebuild it.
