10 by Ben Lerner Page A

could be potentially contaminating. She handed me a small plastic container labeled with my name and various numbers and repeated slowly, as though to a man-child: Make sure your hands are very clean, or you’ll have to do it over, and then told me what to do with the container when I finished. She smiled at me without any embarrassment or awkwardness, a charity, and disappeared around the corner. I entered the room and shut the door behind me.
    On the one hand I was being medicalized, pathologized, broken into my parts, each granted a terrible autonomy; on the other hand I felt trace amounts of what could only be described as excitement, reminiscent of the first time Daniel lent me, at age eleven, a Playboy ; the combination made me a little nauseated.
    I hung my coat on the metal coat hanger and looked around me. In the middle of the room was something like a dentist’s chair, peach-colored plastic upholstery and a strip of medical paper down its middle that the good nurse must replace between patrons, patients; I was not sitting in that chair. In front of the chair was a television with a DVD menu on the screen. Wireless headphones I resolved not to use were on top of the TV. Toward the back of the room was a sink with a dispenser of liquid soap and a little placard reminding me to wash my hands thoroughly. On the back wall was a contraption, vaguely reminiscent of one of those drive-through bank deposit boxes, where I could submit the container, transferring it to technicians on the other side of the wall, who could thereby receive it without our having to face one another. Bank, medical office, pornographic theater—it was a supra-institution. It took me a minute to realize I could hear voices through the wall, make them out clearly: a woman was talking about her daughter’s boyfriend, how he was a keeper; a man was on the phone ordering lunch in Spanish, something with white rice, black beans. If I could hear them, surely they could hear me; I resolved to use the headphones.
    I went to the sink and washed my hands, then washed them again. Then I walked to the chair, took the remote control from the armrest, and started looking at the menu on the screen. The TV was hooked up to some sort of service where you could select from a huge number of movie titles organized alphabetically, but also by ethnicity: Asian Anal Adventures , Asian Persuasion , Asian Oral Fetish , etc.; Black Anal Adventures , Black Blowjobs , Black Cumshot Orgy , etc., although after the ethnically specific menu you had the option of searching compilations by activity alone: Best of whatever. The Picture of Sasha Grey flashed before me. I was surprised by the extremity of some of the videos, and surprised to see them indexed racially; I guess I had expected magazines. I was embarrassed to choose, but was not in a position to deny that audiovisual assistance would expedite the process. I looked down at the remote control to see how it worked, exactly, and then remembered: I’m not supposed to touch anything that could contaminate the sample. What could be more contaminating than this remote control, which had been in how many sullied hands?
    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