by Jaime Goh & Henry Sussman

My best friend James once told me that the key to wellness was always being aware you had a hand, a mouth, and an asshole. This was before he had calibrated a moral compass and sworn to live his life by it, at least in public; he had since found his calling as a YouTube influencer dispensing mildly hypocritical advice to clinically insecure preteens. He could not have known that I would cling to this adage years later, or that I would come to view it as my one last hope.

I repeated it to myself while opening the door to the Uber meant to take me across town. As I slipped into the buttery pleather backseat of his KIA Sorento, the Driver—dugong-shaped, ruddy like he’d been day-drinking—grinned lasciviously. He looked not at my eyes but at my nose, which was admittedly already in abnormal range, size-wise, for I had told Father that morning that he was looking vigorous and youthful.

The Driver asked me how old I was.

“Twenty-one,” I said.

My nose extended a notch. The truth was my twentieth birthday had been only a couple weeks ago. I could tell from the intensification of his grin that he had noticed, but out of either courtesy or fascination he didn’t mention it. As he cruised down Central Avenue he prattled on about his alma mater Johns Hopkins, from which he had dropped out two semesters in, and his subsequent side-gigs: camp counselor, substitute teacher, maître d’ at a place named The Pleasure Society on an island a few miles from Chesapeake Bay.

“Beautiful, beautiful place,” he said, one greasy hand off the wheel to gesticulate. “Plump green hills. Majestic sunsets. The lapping of the waves at dawn. Oh, you would fall in love, Pete. The festivities last all night.”

He groped around in the glove compartment, fished a business card from the clutter, and thrust it at me. To avoid conflict I tucked the matte black rectangle—it had an impossible weight, as though vested with magic power, or perhaps a tracking device—into my jeans pocket. He was silent for the remainder of the ride, although we kept making eye contact via the rearview mirror, which just about made me wish I could vomit.

The Grindr guy’s apartment was dingy, minimalist, like he forwent furniture so he could change residences at a moment’s notice. His face was equally unremarkable. He chucked my jacket at the one pitiful ottoman in the corner, missed, aimed for the shelf (to what end?), missed again, then finally surrendered the wad of flannel to the floor and offered me a blunt in consolation. I had to decline, as fire and I didn’t mix.

He took a drag and asked, “So is it true? What you were saying about your schnoz?”

“No,” I answered. Said schnoz rocketed out another inch or so.

He doubled over in stitches. I imitated his hacking laughter despite the fact that I found nothing funny, fundamentally.

“So is it like a cock?” Smoke wafted in my direction. “Like does it mean you’re horny?”

“It means whatever you want it to.”

At this he teared up. “God, you look just like Kiefer Sutherland.”

“So I’ve heard.”

“I used to jerk off to him nonstop.”

“Did you now.”

“I kept a photo of him in my armoire,” he breathed. “It got sticky.”

Foreplay concluded, he stooped to embrace me—on my tippy-toes in four-inch stilettos I stood at five feet—but was stopped short by my nose. Kissing proved inaccessible. We settled vexedly for an insertion of tongue into mouth-groove, which he claimed tasted of barstool. Things progressed in a southerly direction. I began to lie around his shaft—it’s so huge; your pre-come tastes like ambrosia, baby; your voice does not resemble a malfunctioning garbage disposal; et cetera—then the time came for us to assemble into yin-yang configuration, my nose grazing his sun-browned perineum. My mouth-groove was free to resume fibbing, and eventually I could penetrate his anus, eventually I could prod his prostate, whereupon he clenched around me, bleated out Kiefer Sutherland’s full name and spurted, dropping the blunt in the process and prompting an awkward slimy scramble to prevent any flame-spreadage.

I felt numb, lying thereafter under the darkened sheets. He offered to make me a ‘mean pesto basil pasta’ but I already had one foot out the door. The Sorento was still street-side.

*

Back at her apartment, my girlfriend Felicity helped me scrub down the porous inside of my mouth-groove. “So was he gentle or rough this time?”

“Gentle,” I said, and my nose lurched into her forehead.

“Whatever. I’m not allowed to care, right?”

She rose to light some incense, intending to cleanse her abode of my impurity. She fed freeze-dried crickets to her naked mole rats, whose names were Kyle (the larger) and Lyle (the smaller). The half-earless, over-pampered sphynx cat (Gideon) belonging to her own ‘extracurricular activity’ dashed between her legs on its way to scratch my ankles, leaving shavings scattered across her discolored carpet.

“How’s John these days?” I asked in reference to the beast’s master. “Still feigning paraplegia?”

“He’s not feigning—Jesus Hieronymous Christ.” She snorted and tossed luxuriant swaths of aquamarine hair over her shoulder, such that a pygmy might surf across its arc. “Since when are you the jealous type?”

I shrugged into the sofa. I was supposed to move in next week. My toothbrush was here, as well as half my wardrobe. My olive-tinted varnish sat on the vanity next to her makeup. None of our trinity—Felicity-Father-me—harbored much optimism about the event, but it felt like a foregone conclusion, the necessary movement of life’s planer.

She pinioned me to the couch cushion and flicked my nose, by now yard-length. It quivered like a coiled doorstop. “Did it work, the rutting?”

“How could it, darling,” I said sans inflection. “Sugar, sweetie, honey-pie. You’re my soulmate. Don’t you believe in destiny?”

“Like I have a choice.” Her eyes twinkled. After a beat: “I can smell his asshole on you still. I’m going to have to tell James about this. And you know how I feel about James.”

This was her revenge for my so-called ethical non-monogamy. I could hardly complain. My father owed her, so in every way that mattered she owned me—whether she wanted to or not, up until the moment I became human. We were together, partners, because this was the safest option. I hadn’t exactly chosen her, and she hadn’t exactly chosen me. It was simply necessary to be together, for safety.

We adjourned for a shower together, and she squeegeed the grime from my nose, striving to do so sensually, a futile endeavor like meditation or poetry. Following this I buried my nose inside her until I struck cervix and nodded, yes yes yes, again and again, and she came convulsively, gouging grooves with blue acrylic talons between where my pectorals might be.

Once in little-spoon position I said, “You’re not going to like my next idea."

“Then you’d better not tell me,” she said.

I twisted a lock of her hair around my fingers and began to drift. Gideon leapt up to perch on my shrinking nose.

*

On the doorstep of my father’s house waited one James Crick: mop of red hair dappled with freshly fallen snow, in patchy plaid slacks and a coat that dwarfed his stickbug figure. Even at the ripe age of twenty-eight, his scraggly experiments with facial hair only made him look more adolescent. All the better to relate to his online acolytes’ demographic, I guessed, though it granted rival ‘alpha male’ podcast channels more ammunition with which to deride him.

“Jimmy,” I said.

“James,” he replied out of one corner of his mouth, for the other was occupied by an electronic cigarette. Everyone in this city smoked; I had simply chosen hog.

“What brings you by?”

He blew a puff of vapor into my face. “A little birdie warned me of your antics. Should I be concerned?” 

“Piss off,” I said.

“Mission failed, I take it.”

“Don’t say I told you so.”

“I told you so,” he said, louder than necessary. “All sexual activity is immoral. If you’re relying on it for sensation you’ve already failed.”

“Sounds a little like propaganda, I don’t know.” I gestured at the door. “Are you coming in or just casing the joint?”

“No time,” he said. “Grabbing shit from the hardware store, then straight home to clap back at this video one of my nemeses posted. Rating women based on how much their face looks like a quail egg or something.” He squinted, evaluating my skull shape. “You’d be an eleven, honestly. Not that I believe in that as a beauty standard. That’s what my video will go into.”

I wished him luck on his latest venture and we parted ways. Father napped bundled up in front of the television, which was playing a recording of a roaring fire—my only indication that the thermostat was on the fritz again. Every now and again the blankets shuddered with his sleep-coughing. I went upstairs. I shucked off my jacket and my shirt to stare at myself in the closet mirror. James was right. My face did resemble a quail egg minus the mottling. It was all I had going for me. Father did not chisel slabs into my abdomen nor fashion an Apollo’s belt above my groin. My torso he left smooth and cylindrical like a thermos. I was not, after all, designed for that brand of companionship. He clothed me before the shavings were done falling. The only defined features he imparted were my oildrop eyes, my mouth scored in its perpetual curve, and of course the tapered stump that eclipsed so much of my physiognomy.

The eyes, he told me, were the most important: they had to be precisely hewn apertures through which some inner animus could be glimpsed. A soul, one might call it. He had ruined and discarded many a maquette before he finally produced—though actually the term he used was birthed—me. Since then I examined my reflection, in puddles, in glass displays and rearview mirrors, searching for what he had beheld the night he decided, Eureka! This is the one.

Then again my eyes were not made for seeing, at least not the way his were.

*

I arranged my next attempt at arousing any kind of feeling within myself via an underground website (hangingonthewire dot com) and again I had need of cross-town transport. The app elected to send the same Driver, that overripe aubergine of a man, only this time he had company—a sleep-deprived boy, maybe fourteen or fifteen, wearing a sleek pink cat-ear headband that twitched at irregular intervals.

“Who’s that?” I had to ask.

“Oh, him?” said the Driver, evidently taking the scenic route. “Nobody. Don’t worry about it. I have to take him to soccer practice after this. My ex's. Aren’t you, kid?”

The boy in the front seat stared into the shrinking middle distance. His cat ears vibrated as though electrocharged.

“Listen, Petey, think any more about The Pleasure Society? I confess, I was there the other night, and the whole time I was thinking about you. You have the face, the body for it. We get fucking feral, if you’ll pardon my French. Sorry, kid. Does the word orgy mean anything to you? Sorry, kid.”

I felt his card in my pocket, its heft and its oily imprint. I could have sworn I was wearing different jeans. The ugly sound of rubber on slush rumbled through my floorboards.

“Oh, the other thing, Petey. If you want to come, you’ve gotta wear a costume. Something new we’re trying on for kicks and giggles, if you catch my meaning. Preferably animal. Preferably mammal, though we’ve had some snakes before.”

“Understood,” I said. “Just up here is fine.”

“Want a ride back? I can stay here a while if need be. Sorry, kid.”

“No, please." I faced the window so that he couldn't see my nose jutting against the glass. “I have someone else for that.”

When the door opened I skittered away as quick as could be managed, considering the ponderous expanse of ice sprawling miles in every direction. Cold did not mean to me what it meant to others. To them it was the non-feeling among a whole world-order of non-feeling, the stillness among stillnesses. Thus they placed their faith in heat. Sex was heat. Buses were heat. One day heat would descend upon the earth and bake billions alive. But cold for me took on this animating, even progressive quality, for it was only in the cold that my thoughts could swim, breathe, become organic.

Here now stood a frigid husk of a warehouse, the site of our rendezvous. Here would occur unbirth and rebirth. Icicles crashed into the surrounding concrete when I hauled open the plate-metal door. I greeted the young woman inside by her handle, Vesicle, and she greeted me by mine, Cut Strings. We exchanged the necessary semi-pleasantries. At her behest I massaged her swollen marshmallow belly—three months along—with the sanded flat of my palm. She stared at me with her head cocked.

“Something on my face?” I asked.

“Nothing, just…” She smiled self-consciously. From the state of her teeth I deduced past methamphetamine addiction. “You’re the spitting image of Age of Innocence-era Winona Ryder.”

“I get that a lot.”

“It’s a compliment,” she said. She glanced away, still smiling. “Y’know, he would’ve loved that movie.”

I didn’t know. “Get in position,” I said.

She rolled down her slacks. She lay supine on a prepared tarp, propped herself up on a duffel bag, and spread her legs, looking bashful the whole while. I touched the tip of my nose canine-style to the flaring fringes of her vulva.

Try as I might I couldn’t make headway without being interrupted by pained grunts. She was too wound up, her muscles too tense. I wracked my mind for ideas and recalled that the rare few times Felicity faced pushback from Father (for her treatment of me, say, or some reprimand regarding her methods of magic), she’d share a comic anecdote from her youth to manufacture a sense of closeness. I thought that I too might be humorous.

“I was homeschooled,” I said, terminology that wasn't accurate but that people tended to understand.

“Oh?” She craned her neck. “What was that like?”

“I had a lot of free time. In the afternoons I’d go down to the local high school and people-watch. There were these children always playing hooky behind the bleachers. They must’ve been sophomores—old enough to rebel, young enough to posture about it. They let me hang around with them, I think, because I knew where to get the best kush. Really it was via my best friend. But one day they tried something a little harder.”

I heard their voices then as a collective. C’mon Pete, be a sport. You wanna have a good time, don’t you? You wanna feel alive?

“They experienced what I now recognize to be a ‘bad trip’. So they held me down and . . .” I lifted the corner of my shirt, exposing the scorch mark east of where my navel would be. I mimed flicking a lighter.

The woman’s eyes widened. She raised a hand to touch the black stain, then drew back as if stung, and looked at me questioningly. I gestured for her to continue. I didn’t understand why she felt she needed permission. No one had ever asked before touching me before, not Father or Felicity or James.

Her fingers fanned out over the mark, feather-light. She was quiet, and then: “Do you forgive them?”

“Who?”

“Those kids.”

I began to suspect she did not grasp the punchline. But I couldn’t append “it was Guy Fawkes Day!” like James had suggested when we workshopped this, or my nose would grow too rapidly—the opposite of maintaining a ‘straight face’.

“What,” I asked, “is there to forgive?” 

She didn’t elaborate. I deemed her sufficiently relaxed anyway and sallied forth.

“Everything is going to be fine,” I said, and after an adjustment, achieved penetration.

She sucked in a breath. “Maybe some, I dunno, lube? I don’t wanna get a splinter . . . ”

“You won’t,” I said, now close to the opening of her uterus.

In my experimentation I had managed to exert enough control over my outgrowth that the tip could become fine and tough as a graphite pencil. The white-lie refrain—I’ve done this before, this won’t hurt, you’ll be okay—worked wonders as far as creeping forward to pierce the relevant sphincter. I kept a pilot’s calm steadiness through the soft keening whimpers. She hitched and writhed, but never uncontrollably. We were both focused on the surgery.

At last there was a squelch—a breaching of membrane. I wiggled and withdrew. Upon seeing the phlegmy meter-stick protruding from my face she said, “Man, you need a tissue,” and we burst into a cacophony of sighs and shudders: she in helpless relief, I in polite mimicry.

“Thank you,” she said when we’d mopped up the blood and mucus.

“You’re welcome.”

“It’s just hard to get this kind of thing done these days, you know, since the repeal.”

I saw that she was shivering.

“My mother-in-law wanted me to keep it.” She barked a hoarse laugh. “She thought it would be like he was living on, through the baby. But y’know, that’s exactly why I couldn’t go through with it.”

She continued leaking despite our efforts at aftercare. I recommended seeking more professional cleanup. I left her and felt empty. I supposed she did as well.

*

All these years I’d been missing a crucial part of James’ equation. The time had come to rectify that.

“Father,” I said from the top of the stairs the next morning. “I want a hole.”

My father’s heavy brows knitted into a triangle as he peered up at me. “Another?” he asked.

Back when I was new to the world, Father caught me whittling away at my chin with tools I’d snuck out of his workshop. He made me vow never to ‘mutilate’ myself again, as if wood could be desecrated in the same manner as flesh, and then he knelt to sand away the damage. The product of his labor—my mouth-groove—was still far narrower than I’d have chosen, but irony of ironies, I could not voice why. He could have expanded the sliver to encompass my entire face, sculpted a lolling tongue and a vortex of teeth and a cartoonishly bulbous uvula, and I would still have no use for these fripperies. Any modification to my person was pure vanity, the difference between a plank of driftwood and a charcuterie board. I pined anyway.

“I want one lower this time,” I said.

“A belly button,” he said. “I knew this day would come.”

The profound sadness crossing his face in that moment was both familiar and alien, and as far as I could discern, authentic. It had taken me too long to learn that most other people could not command their body language to the degree of which I was capable, and that they seldom needed to. I’d developed a habit: I imagined myself spectating this scene from somewhere to my side. Like a studio audience waiting for a sound cue, I waited for my gut or what passed for it to respond with a twinge of contrition for having unintentionally caused him grief. It didn’t come.

“No,” I said. “I want a hole between my legs."

He started to speak, but a coughing fit overtook him, and he went to wipe his mouth with a handkerchief. “Are you sure, Pete?” he asked somberly. “It’s not a change easily reversed.”

I was sure. I wanted it for storage purposes. He watched my nose carefully, doubtfully. It stayed the same length. After this brief standoff, he put on his glasses and went to his workshop where he kept the power drill. I thought he must have had an inkling as to the nature of the objects I was planning on storing in this cavity, but neither of us saw the need for further discussion.

 He left me to my devices as soon as the deed was done. I flexed my index finger against the smooth interior surface of the hole, then middle finger, then ring, like I was solving a peg puzzle.

*

The christening of my hole warranted a tad more ceremony than a one-night stand. I bribed James with the promise of his favorite diner. Felicity opted to tag along. We huddled in a booth and I watched through the frosted glass facade for the Driver’s sinister Sorento. I had observed it in the interim, hiding in plain sight, monitoring my whereabouts. The business card, always at hand (at least in spirit), did in fact contain some kind of microchip, I was certain now, so I stowed it in some place unspecial.

“Anyone ever told you you look like Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas?” said a waitress as she poured more of the diner’s signature blend.

“That’s a new one,” I said.

James managed to maintain a semblance of propriety and waited for her to leave before dumping a full sachets’ worth of Splenda and hazelnut creamer into both mugs. He inhaled this steaming hypersweetened elixir in a single gulp without once gagging. Felicity gave him a reptilian glower. Her eyes had a cold quality, darting back and forth.

“I don’t know how you can stomach that, and I don’t have a digestive system,” I said. “Can you even still taste the coffee?”

James reached for the other mug. “Does it matter?”

“It’s disrespectful to the bean,” said Felicity.

James glared at her, then turned to me. “Pete, I know they try to upsell you with organic roasted Arabica crap and civet cat shit, but everyone knows the key to good coffee is the additives. Maybe you can’t control the quality of the grounds or the brewing method. But you can control everything else.”

“Enough with the youth pastor parables,” said Felicity. “He’s not one of your two million prepubescent subscribers.”

“Nearly three,” he grumbled.

Though his popularity on YouTube was due in part to his supposed commitment to stoicism, he was nonetheless defenseless against Felicity.

The silence between them lingered until it began to feel a little lethal, so I cut to the chase. “Jimmy, I just got a lead and I want to know if you’ll go along with it.”

“Let me guess: ayahuasca trip?” James arched his eyebrows and lifted his mug to his lips. “You know I never touch that stuff—it’s not heart-healthy. Plus it’d get me demonetized.”

“Does the word orgy mean anything to you?”

James sputtered a little on the mouthful he’d taken. He put his mug down to wipe the dribble off his chin with his sleeve.

“Seriously, Jimmy.” I leaned forward intently. “What does it mean? Is it a medical thing? A position?”

Felicity giggled into her napkin.

“Hell,” he said. “Sometimes I feel like that old man is outsourcing your education to me.”

Haltingly he started to explain, gesturing, sketching diagrams on his napkin as visual aids. I must have asked too many follow-up questions, because he sighed gustily and pulled up the dictionary definition on his phone. He read it aloud, much to the bemusement of the patrons in neighboring booths. My suspicions were proven correct.

“Where did you even hear that word?” James’s disgust was palpable.

“Prude,” Felicity said.

I then revealed the whole palaver with the Uber Driver, his insinuations and invitations, and James decreed all this risky and degenerate.

“Yes, that’s the point. And you’re coming with me.”

James shuddered. “Why not take your girlfriend? Just seems more her scene.”

“That’s why it’s old hat to me,” Felicity said airily. “When you’ve lived as long as me, you come to find such functions tedious. I won’t stop Pete if his heart is set, though.”

“I’ve made up my mind.” I ignored the jab about the heart I did not possess. “I’m only telling you because I know you’d rather be with me than not.” They stared at me blankly for a moment, and I struggled with the words. “I know I must be feeling something about you two, really feeling something, deep down. I just can’t really feel it yet. This is what’s going to fix me. I’m going to do something so drastic, so sensorially intense, that my wooden frame can’t help but receive the sensation. And these problems that you have with me, my blankness, will go away.”

They loved me. I looked into their eyes and knew this as an incontrovertible fact. Felicity didn’t say so because it simply wasn't her way. James said so perfunctorily, because injecting emotion into the words was pointless.

“And I’ll love you,” I went on, “really, truly love you, for the first time. I may not feel the desire, but I know I must have it—I know there’s something more in there, something dormant. Don’t you think it’s worth it? To find out?”

Felicity stood, her tiny indulgent smile answer enough. She kissed my head before she left.

James sighed, conflicted, and chugged the last of the creamer as though it were beer. “I really fucking hate you, Pete,” he said.

I started to respond, but he cut me off.

“All I want is the best for you. All I want is to keep you safe.” He gazed into his empty mug for a long time. “But sometimes, you make it so goddamned difficult.”

*

We stopped by a costume shop in some paper mill town between our city and the coast. The clerk recognized our poverty in a single scornful glance and directed us to the bargain bin, where we unearthed, for James, a cricket ensemble pieced together from military fatigues and cardboard. For myself I found a nightmare mishmash of a pigeon and a scantily clad bumblebee. James ferreted quarters from the crevices of his fanny pack to pay for us both.

I clung tight to his middle as we zoomed over the asphalt on a motorbike, imagining the deathly eschaton of the coast, past which all these tired cycles of my life would decohere and dance and form at last something new, something real. We passed a smattering of eccentric characters on our journey, magicians and mimes and the like, packed into the backs of pickup trucks, tonguing throats at red lights. A slice of moon ascended and seemed to call the tall grass, the audience of our blackened route, to attention: they waltzed joyously, strobing in the wan white beam of the motorcycle’s cyclopic headlight.

We reached the spot where a ferryman would retrieve us, stripped on the muddy shore, and shrugged on our disguises. Up rowed a sallow-faced man in a dinghy brandishing a lamp on a pole. Once closer we could see he was, from the clavicle down, wearing a skintight bullfrog costume. There was no speech, only a trepidatious atmosphere of good cheer. It was, for what felt like hours and hours, void in every direction, pure, totalizing. Then all at once a castle soared from the east.

On its blue-green lawn could be seen maenad revelers swinging in tiki-torch heat, dressed as dolphins, marmots, squirrels, opossums, lemurs, wombats, kangaroos, meerkats, tigers, reindeer, panthers, grizzly bears, lesser bushbabies, all gloriously youthful, all operating with the grace of inebriation. James put on a grin one would have to call naughty. I approximated it by tilting my mouth-groove.

The Uber Driver was there to greet us. He’d gained fifty pounds in the time since I’d last seen him. He’d stuffed it all into a fluffy red panda suit, only it was too red, a deeper crimson than blood. Nearby, shimmering and wriggling across the grass, was a boy who couldn’t have been a lick over sixteen. He was swaddled in a silver-sequined sleeping bag. On either side of his jaw were broad satin flaps that he flared at us by tugging on a drawstring with his teeth.

The Driver clapped James and me on the back. “It begins! The entertainment begins here, you two, and I hope you brought protection. Actually, I hope you didn’t, ha ha.” He looked down at his companion. “You. Fetch my friends some drinks.”

The kid rattled the maraca on the tip of his tail in acknowledgement, before slithering back toward the front door. 

“The hell? That snake-kid looks like he still gets grounded for breaking curfew,” said James with consternation. He peered around as if expecting the Dateline logo to slide across the empty air before us. “I was told there would be an orgy?”

“Want to see something really wild?” The driver crooked a finger. “Follow me.”

We traipsed into the main building. In its tiled foyer was an immense wishing fountain populated by men and women in states of reddened ecstasy, all dripping wet and nude below the neck. On their heads they flaunted great antler crowns, giraffe horns, coiling antennae, and so on—“At least these ones aren’t children,” muttered James. We weaved our way through a hangar-sized banquet hall, past herd after herd of hirsute hedonists snuffling at a table mounded with such medieval delicacies as roast turkey, buttered squash and candied yams. Waiters dressed as albino gorillas dragged their knuckles across the marble floors, on the hunt for guests to serve and obey. James snagged a glass of something bubbly from a passing platter and downed it. It was the first time I’d ever seen him partake of anything illicit in years without first qualifying it with a lecture on appropriate responses to temptation.

The Driver escorted us down a corridor that seemed to lack a far wall. Every other door shuddered with sounds of pleasure or pain or both. He ushered us both into one and it turned out to be sterile as a hospice bathroom, empty except for—and this I could tell was the nail in the coffin for James—a semicircle of wrought-iron cages occupied by people dressed as donkeys. They scrambled toward us on hands and knees, heaving and huffing eagerly.

The Driver bumbled forward to release one. “Hey, Petey, heard you got a brand new asshole. Want to break it in?”

“You got an asshole?” said James, by now green at the gills. “When the fuck did that happen? And how did he know before me?”

“Sure,” I said to the Driver. I dropped to all fours myself, and swiveled my head all the way around so I could witness every second.

The Driver coaxed the donkey’s turgid member out through a zipper. He led them to the appropriate position, slotted them into my new hole, and we were off to the races. They rocked back and forth, in and out, ramping steadily upward in speed and sloppiness.

I looked; James was watching between his fingers.

“Jimmy!” bellowed the Driver. “C’mon, buddy, don’t be such a prude. You want front row seats for this.”

Ignoring James’ protests, the Driver forced him to kneel at our side. The donkey’s rubbery equine head nestled, groaning, into my left trapezius. I sensed only the inexorable march toward climax that was at this point routine.

“Watch!” The Driver removed the donkey’s mask, revealing the overgrown mane of a young man. He swept matted tufts of hair aside till he uncovered skin. Then he bit the donkey’s ear, his human ear, down through the cartilage, and when he pulled away it stretched like saltwater taffy, and blood splashed across my nose, and semen splattered into my anal hollow, all punctuated by a giddy hee-hawing, which blurred with James’ horrified scream and the Driver’s haughty guffaw.

I felt nothing but the vaguest tickle of our scene’s gaudy light in my eyes, and how could I have expected anything more, for after all, this was how I had been made, this was my purpose.

“Now, ain’t that a kick in the head,” the Driver purred. He licked his bloodied lips with relish. “What’d I tell ya?”

James and I struggled back to our feet, and James wasted no time hauling me off to the side. His skin glistened, so clammy and pale his freckles were harsh pinpricks in contrast.

“Pete,” he slurred. “We gotta get out of here. Please, Pete, please can we go home?”

“We just got here,” I said.

“I don’t wanna stay, Pete. Please.”

“Jimmy, we came all this way. I’m so close, I know it. Let’s just try to have a good time, okay? Let’s have a good time.”

He lunged. He grabbed my jaw and fought to wrestle my mouth-groove to his face. He’d never handled me so roughly. I could only presume he was about to bark an order, or seize the leverage to drag me out by force. I was quicker, though, and more coordinated. I kneed him in the chest. He buckled and I wrenched his arm away from me hard enough to dislodge it from the socket.

“Sorry,” I said as he cradled his limp arm, blinking up at me. “I just want to have a good time.”

“Bullshit.” His eyes were wet. “You’re incapable.”

His piece spoken, he slumped into the wall and slid to his buttocks.

The Driver chuckled at the sight. “Looks like your pal’s had a little too much to drink!”

“He can usually hold his liquor.” I swiped at the gluey residue he’d left on my jaw, smearing it across the wood. “And I don’t think he had any liquor anyway, just that tiny flute of champagne.”

“C’mon, Petey,” the Driver said. “There’s so much more I want to show you.”

“What about Jimmy?”

“Aw, he’ll be taken care of.”

The Driver snapped his fingers. A modest warren of chittering bunnymen hopped out from a room behind me, took James by his limbs, and delivered him to places unknown.

*

The Driver led me another city block or so till we came upon a gilded door. Above it a sign read, The Dogfish Lounge. It contained the more sophisticated crowd (that is, they were fully clothed), though they too had an air of gluttony about them, a potential energy, all spread out across one long olive-green booth. We sat between an engorged parakeet and a diseased pug, encircled by old-fashioned kerosene lamps.

The serpent-boy reappeared, effortfully balancing a tray of cocktails. He seemed disappointed that one of us was gone, even more disappointed when I declined his French 75. Had he followed us all this way, on his belly? Had he mixed those drinks himself? He left the tray and slithered off.

The Driver pinched my nose. “This thing, Petey. This is what makes you so special. So exotic. The rest of your life is just a footnote, ain’t it?” He swigged from a glass of fluid that looked like radiator coolant, and met my gaze levelly. “Petey: I want to feel it up my ass. Seems inevitable that it goes up my ass.”

I looked cross-eyed at his fingers. Beside me, the pug sniffed at brandy purely as pantomime.

“C’mon, Petey,” the Driver said. He released me so he could unbuckle his belt. “You’ve gone spelunking before. It’ll be different with me, promise.”

He rolled down his trousers and his skidmarked briefs and assumed the position I knew all too well. What else was left for me? I pressed my face to his starfish and said that I was excited, expecting of course that signature elongation.

It puckered, gaping beyond its physical limits, and swallowed me whole.

There was a spongy suctioning into gaping blackness—though not black for long, for in a second a bulb dangling from the inflamed interior of his digestive tract flickered to life. I could see by its sickly glow a magic eight ball, upon which white letters bobbed against vibrant blue: Reply hazy, try again later. I wriggled and squirmed, but it proved useless. I followed the trail of bicycle tires, sparkly jacks, rotting pomegranates, clumps of spider eggs, melted gel-caps. Close to the core, wrapped in dead tapeworms, was a wine bottle pitched like a tentpole.

I sought to prise myself free of his muscular grip and failed. I got the inclination at once that this must be his crucible, the source of his energy—and here I was, wooden, beginning to burn. I had only one option.

“This too shall pass,” I said. My nose responded.

The gut fauna gathered here, too small to observe with the naked eye, must have been nibbling at me and injecting an occult infection. In my woozy state I thought of Father. He was here with me somehow. He was etched into me, present at times of spiritual duress. He had given me methods and tools and a singular desire to implement them. He was not a moralist, not really. Why did I think of my father now? Did this remind me of the womb that had been his workshop? Did being encompassed in an asshole resemble the feeling of being in his arms?

 I murmured that I loved my father. My nose shot forward a foot and pierced some vital, cholesterol-heavy infrastructure. Muscle rippled and pulsed, alive with a million furious insects—heralds of imminent sepsis. The wine bottle buckled, then fractured all at once in a great icy burst: shards added to the laceration, the red to the burgeoning red, biblical by dint of my limited scope. A muffled wail sounded in the distance. Improperly digested proto-excrement swallowed me for a second, and then I was shedding it, shedding everything, newborn. The Driver sloughed off me like an exoskeleton.

The trance broke. I hurried to my feet and shook off the innards. Two of the kerosene lamps had been knocked to the floor, likely by the Driver’s swooning corpse, and everything was now ablaze. The snake-boy slithered in and saw that the cocktails had fallen over, undrunk. He let out an anguished hiss and recoiled, leaving in the doorway a lone figure—Felicity!

Hovering there swathed in a nimbus of blue light, she surveyed the scene. She strode right over the piles of viscera, her heeled boots never touching the ground. She had swooped down from the ether to save me, I was just sure. Still greasy with the Driver’s offal, I lurched over in her direction, the closest I had ever come to something like pure instinct.

There were flames at either end of my periphery. Kerosene lamps lay prone, leaking their fuel like blood. They were here, big and insistent, and there was no way to stop them. If they penetrated the thin layer of guts that coated me now they would shoot through the dry wood of my interior, and I would be a husk. I thought this quickly, in one continuous stream, as I groped for the safety of my partner’s arms.

“Pete,” she said, at first stern and long-suffering, as if having caught a kindergartener dissecting a squirrel on the kitchen countertop. Then she saw the flames threatening to devour me, and panic edged into her cry. “Pete!”

Her hands fluttered over her head, conducting an unseen orchestra. A queer, all-encompassing sensation overwhelmed me: an antiseptic chill followed by a feverish warmth followed by the first and worst pain I’d ever known. The tongues of flame lapping at my varnished exterior became mere irritants compared to the white-hot neon spiraling through larval canals of which I’d never been aware.

When the smoke cleared I lay among the rubble—feeling, tasting, smelling, as though newly recovered from a long sickness.

*

Felicity insisted on a week of solitary confinement while my body acclimated to the world. I lay bedridden in a marsh of restless discomfort. If I had productive energy I spent it massaging my virginal appendage and its melancholic skin-sack. When I managed an erection—always by accident, some stray jostle, REM-sleep blood-pressure—I measured it with a ruler. It fell at four and a half inches, generously, and in terms of circumference it was wiry and lithe, a gymnast’s dick.

I paced the perimeter of my cell and contrived sometimes to stare through my sole porthole, past the smog-stacks and condominium complexes to the outside world, a scrap of sea like an upskirt flash of reality. One time a plump auburn robin perched on the sill with a cricket mangled in its beak—and this was when I learned that beauty was something to be felt. Beauty was part of the body, an organ adjacent to the soul. I tapped at the glass and tried to produce a similar seductive chitter by suctioning my tongue to the roof of my mouth (how novel! this click click click issuing from my human instrument!), but this too was a waste of energy. The robin flapped madly back into the wind.

*

When Felicity let me out I suspected she had ulterior motives. Before we had even begun a debriefing process she was cupping my crotch, sniffing the crust, an arterial lust governing her every gesture. She undressed me; she took my measurements; she kneaded my testicles; she slapped my shaft back and forth between her palms with childish glee. As the situation progressed the sensory inundation stuttered into pain. Her solar heat started to suffocate. The ferocity with which she smacked and grabbed and suckled at my genitalia only increased, till that little mushroom was swollen red but no less limp, so much so that I wondered whether she'd skimped on the relevant veins.

After thirty minutes she gave up, purple about the face. "You're useless, Pete," she sighed. "Am I not hot enough for you? Is that it?”

"Might I remind you that this is your fault," I said, feigning nonchalance, although of course here came another fresh manipulation of nerves. "Why can’t you alter me just a little more? Make it bigger, for instance."

"Mm, doesn’t work like that, Pete.” She flashed her teeth and kicked her feet up on a pillow. “The forces I fiddle with are fickle beasts. They don’t appear for just about anything. It takes some real stress. Don’t you think I would have changed you earlier instead of waiting till you were on the verge of becoming firewood? No, the problem I think is you’re too frail to get it up. Like a sickly pine.”

Heat rose in my neck. Here was sweat, too, with its evil scent and weight.

“Or you're still upset,” she said, goading. “But why would you be? Isn't this everything you've ever wanted?"

I tugged on the thrifted jeans she had provided to accommodate my newly jiggle-prone posterior. Her hungry gaze crawled over me. At the center of my unease was the most fundamental doubt: Was every crevice of my corpus sculpted to her carnal specifications? Had Felicity created me in her image? Her once-radiant face now seemed demonic in the low light.

“Isn’t it, Pete? I expected a little more gratit—”

She didn’t get to finish. I pinned her to the mattress. Instinct bade me to strike her, and I was powerless under its influence, and when she yelped I felt in that instant of flesh on flesh the raw eroticism for which she, and everyone, was so desperate—the smallest rush of blood.

Gideon watched in silence from the windowsill, naked tail curled around naked paws, his gaze more reptilian than feline. I rose and went to feed him a fish-shaped treat from the jar atop the dresser. Then I wobbled off onto the slickened street, which smelled pure and clean.

*

One October I viewed with James a midnight feature featuring a werewolf transformation sequence: the protagonist’s bones bent backward, his eyes tore open into gaping yellow wounds, his skin shredded itself into coarse hair. The imagery had frightened James, squeamish as he was. My father looked upon my new body as though experiencing a similarly visceral horror. It might’ve been warranted, for within I felt really and truly lycanthropic.

I watched tears dribble down his wrinkled cheeks and tried to conjure up anything but pity. I supposed it was a necessary pang of bodyhood, this guilty contempt for one’s father. It was a queasy sensation, stewing somewhere intestinal. He sagged into his threadbare armchair and mumbled that he only wished he had been consulted—although, sure, he was aware it had been an emergency. (“According,” he added, “to that witch.”). He started into one of his coughing fits, which had increased in frequency and severity since I had last seen him. I realized then that he would one day die. Inside myself I catalogued first dread, then hope, then fear, and finally ambivalence. I was becoming someone new every second.

“How does it feel?” he rasped. “The body? Working all right?”

“I don’t have a frame of reference,” I said honestly.

“Well, who does?”

“Dad,” I said. It was a human word that hadn’t belonged to me before; even now, having tasted it on my tongue, I wasn't convinced it did. “I don’t want to be with Felicity anymore. Can I live here?”

He blinked at me through fogged glasses. What, I wondered, did he see in my eyes now?

“Do as you like,” he said.

He erupted into another bout of coughing, and fumbled for one of his many bottles of pain-relievers. I sat crosslegged on the carpet before him, trying to divine our future from lines and liver spots. He would be dead soon, I suspected. Perhaps within the year.

Love was another thing that lived in the body. Certainly I had never loved while wooden. And our shared history did not have a somatic component, no sense-memory of the ball he’d thrown me to test my mechanics, or of the pressure exerted by his spindly arms upon my chassis when he put me away for the night. These events may as well have happened to a stranger. Was loving thy father something I had learned on TV? If only I still had my nose, I could have asked.

I took his glasses and cleaned them with my shirt. I told him I would stay with him and make him dinner five times a week to make up for the extra strain my stomach would put on his bank account. He managed a brittle smile and looked for a moment like he had an urge to touch me, but then looked the next like the prospect was the most terrifying thing in the world.

*

Despite these recent social severances I found that bodyhood entailed a strong desire to be around others, mostly for the purpose of them seeing my body, judging it, so that I might better understand it myself. I stumbled into bars and parties. No one thought I resembled anyone else. A woman, practically Felicity’s photo negative, lured me somewhere sordid and intimate . . . and failed to summon a vascular response. My impotence was the phantom clink of the fetters from which I’d ripped myself. I was not ‘of’ the revelers. Whom, indeed, was I of?

This mystery, along with a soupy strain of optimism, compelled me to charter a private ferry-trip to the island on which an organization formerly known as The Pleasure Society held its orgies.

The humidity was a dream-fog, dense, dizzying; I couldn’t tell where the air stopped and my skin began. Sweat slopped out of my pores and soaked through my clothes. The spray of sea on my face and the sweet poisonous stench of smoke wisping off the horizon further intoxicated me. By the time I disembarked I was swaying like a wino. I had to pause to vomit (a strangely pleasant sensation), and when I pissed in the dirt it was the amber of Father’s whiskey.

I crested a small hill and spotted the charred wreckage of the castle where the Driver had met his demise. It made me think, somehow, of Vesicle. These were processes of decay, stop-start suffering, booming highs and simmering lows. Life and lifelessness were in perfectly inverse proportion.

At the far coast a semicircle of those bestial residents had assembled to graze. Even with the ears and whiskers they looked so ordinary in the naked light of day, nothing like the bacchants I’d encountered before. A slim red-headed young man with a teenager’s proportions and a rabbit’s long floppy ears loped along the grass, apparently the center of their attention.

There was recognition and then adrenaline. “Jimmy?” I called after him.

He stiffened, ears pricked. He’d heard me. I dashed to the middle of their little gathering, disregarding the brays and mewls of his compatriots.

I gripped him by his shoulders. “Jimmy! It’s me, Jimmy, it’s me Pete. I know I look a little different but it’s me, truly. God, I’m so glad you’re here. Why are you still here? Whatever, doesn’t matter. I never thought I’d see you again.”

“Pete?” He tilted his head.

“Yes, Pete! Come on, Jimmy, I’ve got a nice big boat just over yonder.” I pointed excitedly. “Let’s get out of here.”

“Get—” James wrinkled his nose as if scenting roadkill, backing away. “Get out? Why would I go anywhere with you? I don’t even know who you are. Besides, we’re happy here.”

His companions nodded and blinked with docile equanimity.

I grabbed him by the forearm, and he wrested it from my grip just as quickly (how strong he’d grown!) and shot across the lawn, into the smoking mess of the castle. I gave chase. “Jimmy! Jimmy!” I gasped—the air reeked of fermented matter, as though the whole structure were long dead and rotting from the inside out. He leapt over the jagged black ruins with determination and agility the likes of which I’d never seen, weaved effortlessly around all the litter from the party and ancient-looking scraps of abandoned structures. Somehow he knew the whole monstrous layout like a childhood home.

At one point, he ducked into a tunnel, and I came in after him, and the trail took us down through a stony, cavelike structure. It reminded me of being inside the Driver: no sunlight, only some unnameably terrible odor. Jimmy scampered across the slick reflective rock, far more gracefully than I could’ve hoped to have been. He circled stalactites like a figure skater.

Before, I had been so much faster than him. Now, encumbered by gravity and lactic acid and the need for breath, I couldn’t keep up with his liquid strides. He whipped around corners. I saw flashes of him, between panting. Soon I was back outside on the other end—I had gone from mouth to asshole.

But Jimmy’s spirit was still here, swimming all around. It was entangled with this patch of land. Maybe he had found a home in the cave below the Driver’s island; maybe he had fallen into the ocean and drowned. I would never learn. He belonged to this place now.

I circled around a little longer. The others were also nowhere to be found, returned to their secret burrows. I was starved and parched. I curled up in a little alcove in the shadow of some sundered wall and attempted, unsuccessfully, to pleasure myself. I wanted to gauge the extent of my ability to feel, to see if I had changed, really changed. It was there, however faint. My hand around my penis, feather-light. My restless heart in my chest, beating, beating. It was as though I was returning from some Antarctic expedition and the frostbite was just beginning to thaw. The ferry loomed, floating over the crystal blue, massive as a star.