Smoke and Mirrors

He filed it away for later, another masturbatory fantasy.

Simon masturbated a great deal. Every night—sometimes more than that if he was unable to sleep. He could take as long, or as short, a time to cl**ax as he wished. And in his mind he had had them all. Film and television stars; women from the office; schoolgirls; the na**d models who pouted from the crumpled pages of Fiesta; faceless slaves in chains; tanned boys with bodies like Greek gods . . .

Night after night they paraded in front of him.

It was safer that way.

In his mind.

And afterward he’d fall asleep, comfortable and safe in a world he controlled, and he’d sleep without dreaming. Or at least, he never remembered his dreams in the morning.

The morning it started he was woken by the radio (“Two hundred killed and many others believed to be injured; and now over to Jack for the weather and traffic news . . . ”), dragged himself out of bed, and stumbled, bladder aching, into the bathroom.

He pulled up the toilet seat and urinated. It felt like he was pissing needles.

He needed to urinate again after breakfast—less painfully, since the flow was not as heavy—and three more times before lunch.

Each time it hurt.

He told himself that it couldn’t be a venereal disease. That was something that other people got, and something (he thought of his last sexual encounter, three years in the past) that you got from other people. You couldn’t really catch it from toilet seats, could you? Wasn’t that just a joke?

Simon Powers was twenty-six, and he worked in a large London bank, in the securities division. He had few friends at work. His only real friend, Nick Lawrence, a lonely Canadian, had recently transferred to another branch, and Simon sat by himself in the staff canteen, staring out at the Docklands Lego landscape, picking at a limp green salad.

Someone tapped him on the shoulder.

“Simon, I heard a good one today. Wanna hear?” Jim Jones was the office clown, a dark-haired, intense young man who claimed he had a special pocket on his boxer shorts, for condoms.

“Um. Sure.”

“Here you go. What’s the collective noun for people who work in banks?”

“The what?”

“Collective noun. You know, like a flock of sheep, a pride of lions. Give up?” Simon nodded. “A wunch of bankers.”

Simon must have looked puzzled, because Jim sighed and said,

“Wunch of bankers. Bunch of wankers. God, you’re slow . . .” Then, spotting a group of young women at a far table, Jim straightened his tie and carried his tray over to them.

He could hear Jim telling his joke to the women, this time with added hand movements.

They all got it immediately.

Simon left his salad on the table and went back to work.

That night he sat in his chair in his bedsitter flat with the television turned off, and he tried to remember what he knew about venereal diseases.

There was syphilis, which pocked your face and drove the Kings of England mad; gonorrhea—the clap—a green oozing and more madness; crabs, little pubic lice, which nested and itched (he inspected his pubic hairs through a magnifying glass, but nothing moved); AIDS, the eighties plague, a plea for clean needles and safer sexual habits (but what could be safer than a clean wank for one into a fresh handful of white tissues?); herpes, which had something to do with cold sores (he checked his lips in the mirror, they looked fine). That was all he knew.

And he went to bed and fretted himself to sleep, without daring to masturbate.

That night he dreamed of tiny women with blank faces, walking in endless rows between gargantuan office blocks, like an army of soldier ants.

Simon did nothing about the pain for another two days. He hoped it would go away, or get better on its own. It didn’t. It got worse. The pain continued for up to an hour after urination; his penis felt raw and bruised inside.

And on the third day, he phoned his doctor’s surgery to make an appointment. He had dreaded having to tell the woman who answered the phone what the problem was, and so he was relieved, and perhaps just a little disappointed, when she didn’t ask but simply made an appointment for the following day.

He told his senior at the bank that he had a sore throat and would need to see the doctor about it. He could feel his cheeks burn as he told her, but she did not remark on this, merely told him that that would be fine.

When he left her office, he found that he was shaking.

It was a gray wet day when he arrived at the doctor’s surgery.

There was no queue, and he went straight in to the doctor. Not his regular doctor, Simon was comforted to see. This was a young Pakistani, of about Simon’s age, who interrupted Simon’s stammered recitation of symptoms to ask:

“Urinating more than usual, are we?”

Simon nodded.

“Any discharge?”

Simon shook his head.

“Right ho. I’d like you to take down your trousers, if you don’t mind.”

Simon took them down. The doctor peered at his penis. “You do have a discharge, you know,” he said.

Simon did himself up again.

“Now, Mr. Powers, tell me, do you think it possible that you might have picked up from someone, a, uh, venereal disease?”

Simon shook his head vigorously. “I haven’t had sex with anyone—” he had almost said ‘anyone else’ “—in almost three years.”

“No?” The doctor obviously didn’t believe him. He smelled of exotic spices and had the whitest teeth Simon had ever seen. “Well, you have either contracted gonorrhea or NSU. Probably NSU: nonspecific urethritis. Which is less famous and less painful than gonorrhea, but it can be a bit of an old bastard to treat. You can get rid of gonorrhea with one big dose of antibiotics. Kills the bugger off . . .” He clapped his hands twice. Loudly. “Just like that.”

“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 twenty-six, 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.”