Nicholson Baker: The Fermata

“Remind me what MRI is?”

“Magnetic Resonance Imaging.”

“Oh!” I said. “Big time!” Extremely flattered, I said I probably would like to take part. We made an appointment. Then something suddenly occurred to me that I couldn’t resist bringing up.

“What I still don’t understand,” I said, “is why it’s all happening exclusively in my right wrist. Shouldn’t I have a touch of it on the left side?”

“Are you a heavy user of the backspace key?” she asked. “Several of my patients have reconfigured their keyboard so that they controlled the backspace key with their left hands, eliminating that constant reaching up with the little finger as they corrected their typos, and they improved immediately.”

“Interesting. Maybe that’s it,” I said, nodding thoughtfully, signaling that I was thinking of something else. “Maybe that’s it.”

“Well? What were you going to attribute it to?” the doctor asked.

“How shall I put this? The stories I write are quite — they’re pornographic stories.”

She took this in. Her face was sensual and intelligent and canny. “I don’t see why what you write would make a bit of difference to your wrist. A letter f is a letter f to the nerve concerned, no matter what risqué thing it happens to be spelling.”

“That’s right,” I said eagerly, “and yet the letter e is the most frequent letter in English, right? And the letter e is a left-hand letter. So it should be as much a left-wrist problem as a right-wrist problem!”

“That’s why I mentioned the backspace key,” the doctor explained patiently. “Or it could easily be the cursor keys, or the mouse. The mouse gives people terrible trouble.”

“I use hot keys almost exclusively,” I said haughtily.

“All I’m saying is, you have to look very carefully at how you really move at the keyboard and make some subtle changes. People think they can install a wrist pad or do a few exercises and everything will be hunky-dory. It doesn’t always work that way.”

I looked at her name-tag. I liked very much that her first name was Susan. I said, “I’ll do that. But — what just occurred to me is — well — I write pornography. ”

“I know. So?”

“Well, as I write I often find that I get myself in something of a lather. I imagine someone reading it, you know, a female someone reading it, and I find that …” I held my hands out as if what I was going to say was self-evident.

Suddenly she understood and laughed. “Ah, ah, ah. You’re just trying to tell me that you masturbate while you write.”

“Exactly,” I said with relief. “With my right hand.”

“Constantly? Are you constantly masturbating while you write?”

“Not constantly , no. I’ll type, say, a word or a phrase and then masturbate a little, and then another phrase, masturbate a little more, like that.”

“Are these alternating sessions protracted?” asked Dr. Orowitz-Rudman, after a pause.

“Sometimes. I once wrote a story on the hood of a car for twelve straight hours.”

“Masturbating intermittently the entire time? I take it you were in a secluded spot.”

“It’s a spot that’s accessible only to me.”

“Good.”

I gave her an inquiring look. “Is this an area that you would be interested in studying?” I asked her.

She looked skeptical at first, and then more interested. “Well, you know, I have to admit that in the past I’ve had some fleeting suspicions in that direction. I mean, why shouldn’t frequent or prolonged masturbational episodes aggravate, or even cause, CTS? But until now, no patient has spontaneously suggested it as a cause, and I’ve been reluctant to mention it. It’s definitely worth looking into. Perhaps we could scan you as you …”

“Really?” I said. “You’d have me pleasure myself in one of those gigantic magnets? The ones like iron lungs, that take pictures of brain tumors?”

“Well, why not?” she said. “And you’d use our dummy keyboard, too. We’re trying to simulate real-life conditions. We unfortunately can’t use real keyboards, because we can’t have any ferrous metal within the magnet.… Now, you don’t habitually masturbate wearing a studded cock ring or ball separator, do you?”

“God no.”

“Fine, because that might create real problems in a magnetic field of thirty thousand times earth gravity. So — I don’t want to put you on the spot, but are you sincerely interested? I’m thinking out loud now, which I don’t normally do, but my sense is that this could be an important new line of research. Who knows — you might make The New England Journal of Medicine . Anonymously, of course.”

“Well,” I said, pleased, “I suppose if I can be of some small help to others …”

A week later, I showed up at the MR wing of Common-health’s hospital at a quarter to six in the evening, after an untaxing day at an accounting firm. My arm hurt, which pleased me, because I felt that I wasn’t wasting anyone’s time. In a conference room, Dr. Orowitz-Rudman explained in her friendly, faintly ironic way what was going to happen to me: some reference dots were going to be painted on my arm and penis, so that the imaging system could keep a fix on these two elements as I moved. She said she wanted me to type and masturbate just as I would in real life. She got up, and then remembered something.

“One thing I do have to ask,” she said. She looked through some drawers in the back of the room. “I’m looking for something with a particular shape,” she explained. She held up a tongue depressor, but rejected it: “A little unromantic. I should have thought to bring in a prosthetic penis-form of some kind.”

“I could just show you mine,” I suggested.

“No — no — then we have to get observers in here and worry about all sorts of things. Thanks for offering, though. Ah! This will do.” She brought out a stick of lipstick from her purse and handed it to me. “Can you hold that and show me roughly how you masturbate? I realize that it’s a little smaller than you’re used to.”

I held it and stroked it several ways.

“Ah,” said the doctor, “so you use both a fist grip and a finger-and-thumb grip. That’s what I wanted to know.” She tapped her lip, thinking. “I don’t want to prejudice you in favor of either one. I’m going to have to ask you to announce when you’ve switched from one to the other. It will make it easier for us to get the imaging system to keep up with you, and eventually, of course, to isolate which particular grip is distressing your nerve. In fact, do you think you would be able to offer a kind of running commentary as you masturbate? You could tell us what you are doing, what hurts, what doesn’t hurt — whatever’s going through your mind.”

I said that I would certainly try. She led me to an examining room, where I changed into a hospital gown. Two nurses or technicians or post-docs painted rows of silver dots up my forearm. They painted a silver square over the inside of my wrist. Then they lifted my gown.

“Should we trim him a little?” one of the technicians asked the other. She looked at me. She was Chinese. “We’re going to trim your pubic hair.”

I looked down at it. “It has gotten a bit unruly.” I couldn’t remember the last time I had trimmed it; it could have been a decade earlier. They pulled on the thick tufts and snipped them off. Then one stretched my penis and painted a silver dot on its circumcision ridge. Paintbrush hovering, she became uncertain. She called in Dr. Orowitz-Rudman. The three of them conferred in low tones.

The doctor put a hand on my arm and smiled at me. “Will you masturbate just a little now?” she asked. “Don’t go hog wild. We just need you to be fully erect to get the reference dots on your penis spaced properly.”