Ben Lerner - 10:04 - A Novel

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 double 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.”