10 by Ben Lerner

on his laptop and fell asleep.
    When he got out of bed late the next morning and had his coffee—iced so as not to disrupt the clotting—he realized: I do remember the drive, the view, stroking Liza’s hair, the incommunicable beauty destined to disappear. I remember it, which means it never happened.

THREE
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    I arrived at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital in a cold sweat, could actually feel the urea and salts emerging from my underarms and trickling down my ribs. I had been worrying about this appointment for well over a month—ever since it had been scheduled—had worried about it so much and so vocally that Andrews had offered to medicate me; every few minutes riding the train uptown, I patted the inside pocket of my coat to confirm the presence of the pill.
    The glass doors slid open to admit me and I walked through the atrium past the Starbucks kiosk to the elevators, which I took to the seventh floor. The reception area into which I emerged was unusually luxurious, more like what I imagined the office of a major executive would look like than what I’d come to expect from medical suites. The series of abstract prints on the wall—faint grids in different colors, Agnes Martin knockoffs—was merely anodyne, but the framing was museum-quality. The receptionist I approached had an easy smile I felt was a little misplaced—the smile of a woman who sold expensive jewelry, as if I were shopping for an engagement ring; there was nothing medical about it. I gave her my name and she entered it into a computer and then printed out a form she told me to take to the floor above me; “They’ll take care of you there.”
    Before I pressed the up button on the elevator, I saw my reflection in the shiny metal doors and said to myself, maybe even mouthed some of the words: “Take the elevator back down and leave this building and never return; you don’t have to do this.” But of course I took the elevator up to what was a much more conventional medical floor, where lab work was done and patients were physically examined, not just consulted about options and their pricing in and out of network.
    The receptionist I handed my form to was a young woman—she looked eighteen to me, though surely she was older—who could have been a swimsuit model or hired to dance in a club in the background of a music video. She was not unusually beautiful, but her proportions, visible through her black pantsuit even while she sat, were consistent with normative male fantasy. I thought it was inappropriate to cast her in this role, whoever in human resources was doing the casting, but then felt as awkward about that thought as I did about automatically taking in the dimensions of her body. I found it difficult to meet her eyes and I tried not to blush. To my knowledge, I almost never blush, almost never visibly redden from embarrassment or shame, but trying not to blush is a distinct, involuntary activity for me: pressing, for whatever reason, my tongue against the roof of my mouth, clenching my jaw, shortening my breath—which might, it has occurred to me, cause me to redden just perceptibly. I handed the receptionist the credit card; my exorbitantly priced insurance didn’t cover anything.
    She gave me a second piece of paper to which she had stapled my receipt and told me to wait until I was called. I managed to look her in the eyes as I thanked her, but the knowledge in hers was terrible, as if to say: Take a good look, pervert. When I sat down, I took the pill from my pocket and was about to ingest it, but then wondered—although it would be unlike Andrews to make this kind of mistake—if it might alter the sample. I was turning it over in my fingers when a nurse called my name and asked me to follow her.
    She led me to a separate room and said on its threshold that the only thing I needed to remember was to wash my hands carefully and not to touch anything that