Smoke and Mirrors

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 neighbors 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. Nonspecific urethritis.”

Simon nodded, and then he said, “What does that mean?”

“It means you don’t have gonorrhea, Mister 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 at his next appointment.

Benham was puzzled.

“You’re saying that you don’t feel your penis is your own anymore, then, Mister 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 anymore. 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 externalized 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. It’s not gonorrhea. It’s not chlamydia. ‘Nonspecific,’ 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 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 anymore.”

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.