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anyone in mind?”
    â€œSomeone young—someone beautiful! Why not!”
    â€œSomeone who will hear you and say yes.”
    â€œYes! Why not! It’s insane otherwise! I should have what I want! This is no ordinary life and I am not going to pretend that it is! You want me to be ordinary, you expect me to be ordinary—in this condition! I’m supposed to go on being a sensible man—in this condition! But that is crazy of you, Doctor! I want her to sit on me with her cunt! And why not! I want Claire to do what I want! What makes that ‘grotesque’? To be denied my pleasure in the midst of this— that is the grotesque! I want to be fucked! Why shouldn’t I be fucked? Tell me why that shouldn’t be! Instead you torture me! Instead you prevent me from having what I want! Instead I lie here being sensible! And there’s the madness, Doctor—being sensible!”
    I do not know how much of what I said Dr. Klinger even understood; it is difficult enough to follow me when I am speaking deliberately, with concentration, and now I was sobbing and howling with no regard for the TV cameras or the spectators up in the stands … Or is that why I was carrying on so? Was I really so racked by the proposal I’d made that morning to Miss Clark? Or was the display largely for the benefit of my great audience, to convince them that, appearances aside, I am still very much a man—for who but a man has conscience, reason, desire, and remorse?
    This crisis lasted for months. I became increasingly lewd with the stout, implacable Miss Clark, until finally one morning I offered her money. “Bend over—take it from behind! I’ll give you anything you want!” How I would get the money into her hands, how I would go about borrowing if she demanded more than I had saved in my account, I tried to figure out during my long, empty days. Who would help me? I couldn’t very well ask my father or Claire, and they were the only two people by whom I was willing to be seen. Ridiculous perhaps, given how sure I was that my image was being mercilessly recorded by television cameras and my daily progress publicized in the Daily News, but then I am not arguing that since my transformation I have been a model of Mature Adult Responsible Behavior. I am only trying to describe, as best I can, the stages I have had to pass through on the way to the present phase of melancholy equilibrium … Of course to assist me—to get hold of the money, to make the financial arrangements, either with Miss Clark or, if need be, with some woman whose profession is not circumscribed by a nurse’s ethical outlook—I could easily have called upon a young bearded colleague, a clever poet from Brooklyn who is no prude and whose sexual adventurousness has made him somewhat notorious in our English Department. But then neither was I a prude, and once upon a time I had had a taste for sexual adventure no less developed than my young friend’s. You must understand that it was not a man of narrow experience and suffocating inhibitions who was being tormented by his desires in that hammock. I had experimented with whores easily enough back in my twenties, and during a year as a Fulbright student in London, I had for several months carried on a thrilling, overwrought affair with two young women—students my age on leave together from university in Sweden, who shared a basement bedroom with me—until the less stable of the pair tried halfheartedly to pitch herself under a lorry. What alarmed me wasn’t the strangeness of my desires in that hammock, but the degree to which I would be severing myself from my own past—and kind—by surrendering to them. I was afraid that the further I went the further I would go—that I would reach a point of frenzy from which I would pass over into a state of being that no longer had anything to do with who or what I once had been. It