10 by Ben Lerner Page B

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