Neil Gaiman - FOREIGN PARTS

The VENEREAL DISEASE is disease contracted as a consequence of impure connexion. The fearful constitutional consequences which may result from this affection, - consequences, the fear of which may haunt the mind for years, which may taint the whole springs of health, and be transmitted to circulate in the young blood of innocent offspring, - are indeed terrible considerations, too terrible not to render the disease one of those which must unhesitatingly be placed under medical care.

- SPENCER THOMAS, M.D., L.R.C.S. (EDIN.), A DICTIONARY OF DOMESTIC MEDICINE AND HOUSEHOLD SURGERY, 1882

Simon Powers didn't like sex. Not really.

He disliked having someone else in the same bed as himself; he suspected that he came too soon; he always felt uncomfortably that his performance was in some way being graded, like a driving test or a practical examination.

He had got laid in college a few times and once, three years ago, after the office New Year's party. But that had been that, and as far as Simon was concerned, he was well out of it.

It occurred to him once, during a slack time at the office, that he would have liked to have lived in the days of Queen Victoria, where well-brought-up women were no more than resentful sex dolls in the bedroom: they'd unlace their stays, loosen their petticoats (revealing pinkish-white flesh) then lie back and suffer the indignities of the carnal act - an indignity it would never even occur to them that they were meant to enjoy.

He filed it away for later, another masturbatory fantasy.

Simon masturbated a great deal. Every night - sometimes more than that if he was unable to sleep. He could take as long, or as short, a time to climax as he wished. And in his mind he had had them all. Film and television stars; women from the office; schoolgirls; the naked models who pouted from the crumpled pages of Fiesta; faceless slaves in chains; tanned boys with bodies like Greek gods . . .

Night after night they paraded in front of him.

It was safer that way.

In his mind.

And afterward he'd fall asleep, comfortable and safe in a world he controlled, and he'd sleep without dreaming. Or at least, he never remembered his dreams in the morning.

The morning it started he was woken by the radio ("Two hundred killed and many others believed to be injured; and now over to Jack for the weather and traffic news . . . "), dragged himself out of bed, and stumbled, bladder aching, into the bathroom.

He pulled up the toilet seat and urinated. It felt like he was pissing needles.

He needed to urinate again after breakfast - less painfully, since the flow was not as heavy - and three more times before lunch.

Each time it hurt.

He told himself that it couldn't be a venereal disease. That was something that other people got, and something (he thought of his last sexual encounter, three years in the past) that you got from other people. You couldn't really catch it from toilet seats, could you? Wasn't that just a joke?

Simon Powers was twenty-six, and he worked in a large London bank, in the securities division. He had few friends at work. His only real friend, Nick Lawrence, a lonely Canadian, had recently transferred to another branch, and Simon sat by himself in the staff canteen, staring out at the Docklands Lego landscape, picking at a limp green salad.

Someone tapped him on the shoulder.

"Simon, I heard a good one today. Wanna hear?" Jim Jones was the office clown, a dark-haired, intense young man who claimed he had a special pocket on his boxer shorts, for condoms.

"Um. Sure."

"Here you go. What's the collective noun for people who work in banks?"

"The what?"

"Collective noun. You know, like a flock of sheep, a pride of lions. Give up?" Simon nodded. "A wunch of bankers."

Simon must have looked puzzled, because Jim sighed and said,

"Wunch of bankers. Bunch of wankers. God, you're slow . . ." Then, spotting a group of young women at a far table, Jim straightened his tie and carried his tray over to them.

He could hear Jim telling his joke to the women, this time with added hand movements.

They all got it immediately.

Simon left his salad on the table and went back to work.

That night he sat in his chair in his bedsitter flat with the television turned off, and he tried to remember what he knew about venereal diseases.

There was syphilis, which pocked your face and drove the Kings of England mad; gonorrhea - the clap - a green oozing and more madness; crabs, little pubic lice, which nested and itched (he inspected his pubic hairs through a magnifying glass, but nothing moved); AIDS, the eighties plague, a plea for clean needles and safer sexual habits (but what could be safer than a clean wank for one into a fresh handful of white tissues?); herpes, which had something to do with cold sores (he checked his lips in the mirror, they looked fine). That was all he knew.

And he went to bed and fretted himself to sleep, without daring to masturbate.

That night he dreamed of tiny women with blank faces, walking in endless rows between gargantuan office blocks, like an army of soldier ants.

Simon did nothing about the pain for another two days. He hoped it would go away, or get better on its own. It didn't. It got worse. The pain continued for up to an hour after urination; his penis felt raw and bruised inside.

And on the third day, he phoned his doctor's surgery to make an appointment. He had dreaded having to tell the woman who answered the phone what the problem was, and so he was relieved, and perhaps just a little disappointed, when she didn't ask but simply made an appointment for the following day.

He told his senior at the bank that he had a sore throat and would need to see the doctor about it. He could feel his cheeks burn as he told her, but she did not remark on this, merely told him that that would be fine.

When he left her office, he found that he was shaking.

It was a gray wet day when he arrived at the doctor's surgery.

There was no queue, and he went straight in to the doctor. Not his regular doctor, Simon was comforted to see. This was a young Pakistani, of about Simon's age, who interrupted Simon's stammered recitation of symptoms to ask:

"Urinating more than usual, are we?"

Simon nodded.

"Any discharge?"

Simon shook his head.

"Right ho. I'd like you to take down your trousers, if you don't mind."

Simon took them down. The doctor peered at his penis. "You do have a discharge, you know," he said.

Simon did himself up again.

"Now, Mr. Powers, tell me, do you think it possible that you might have picked up from someone, a, uh, venereal disease?"

Simon shook his head vigorously. "I haven't had sex with anyone - " he had almost said 'anyone else' " - in almost three years."

"No?" The doctor obviously didn't believe him. He smelled of exotic spices and had the whitest teeth Simon had ever seen. "Well, you have either contracted gonorrhea or NSU. Probably NSU: nonspecific urethritis. Which is less famous and less painful than gonorrhea, but it can be a bit of an old bastard to treat. You can get rid of gonorrhea with one big dose of antibiotics. Kills the bugger off . . ." He clapped his hands twice. Loudly. "Just like that."

"You don't know, then?"

"Which one it is? Good Lord, no. I'm not even going to try to find out. I'm sending you to a special clinic, which takes care of all of that kind of thing. I'll give you a note to take with you." He pulled a pad of headed notepaper from a drawer. "What is your profession, Mr. Powers?"

"I work in a bank."

"A teller?"

"No." He shook his head. "I'm in securities. I clerk for two assistant managers." A thought occurred to him. "They don't have to know about this, do they?"

The doctor looked shocked. "Good gracious, no."

He wrote a note, in a careful, round handwriting, stating that Simon Powers, age twenty-six, had something that was probably NSU. He had a discharge. Said he had had no sex for three years. In discomfort. Please could they let him know the results of the tests. He signed it with a squiggle. Then he handed Simon a card with the address and phone number of the special clinic on it. "Here you are. This is where you go. Not to worry - happens to lots of people. See all the cards I have here? Not to worry - you'll soon be right as rain. Phone them when you get home and make an appointment."

Simon took the card and stood up to go.

"Don't worry," said the doctor. "It won't prove difficult to treat."

Simon nodded and tried to smile.

He opened the door to go out.

"And, at any rate, it's nothing really nasty, like syphilis," said the doctor.

The two elderly women sitting outside in the hallway waiting area looked up delightedly at this fortuitous overheard, and stared hungrily at Simon as he walked away.

He wished he were dead.

On the pavement outside, waiting for the bus home, Simon thought: I've got a venereal disease. I've got a venereal disease. I've got a venereal disease. Over and over, like a mantra.

He should toll a bell as he walked.

On the bus he tried not to get too close to his fellow passengers. He was certain they knew (couldn't they read the plague marks on his face?); and at the same time he was ashamed he was forced to keep it a secret from them.

He got back to the flat and went straight into the bathroom, expecting to see a decayed horror-movie face, a rotting skull fuzzy with blue mold, staring back at him from the mirror. Instead, he saw a pink-cheeked bank clerk in his mid-twenties, fair-haired, perfect-skinned.

He fumbled out his penis and scrutinized it with care. It was neither a gangrenous green nor a leprous white, but looked perfectly normal, except for the slightly swollen tip and the clear discharge that lubricated the hole. He realized that his white underpants had been stained across the crotch by the leak.

Simon felt angry with himself and angrier with God for having given him a (say it) (dose of the clap) obviously meant for someone else.

He masturbated that night for the first time in four days.

He fantasized a schoolgirl in blue cotton panties who changed into a policewoman, then two policewomen, then three.

It didn't hurt at all until he climaxed; then he felt as if someone were pushing a switchblade through the inside of his cock. As if he were ejaculating a pincushion.

He began to cry then in the darkness, but whether from the pain, or from some other reason, less easy to identify, even Simon was unsure.

That was the last time he masturbated.

The clinic was located in a dour Victorian hospital in central London. A young man in a white coat looked at Simon's card, and took his doctor's note, and told him to take a seat.

Simon sat down on an orange plastic chair covered with brown cigarette burns.

He stared at the floor for a few minutes. Then, having exhausted that form of entertainment, he stared at the walls, and finally, having no other option, at the other people.

They were all male, thank God - women were on the next floor up - and there were more than a dozen of them.

The most comfortable were the macho building-site types, here for their seventeenth or seventieth time, looking rather pleased with themselves, as if whatever they had caught were proof of their virility. There were a few city gents in ties and suits. One of them looked relaxed; he carried a mobile telephone. Another, hiding behind a Daily Telegraph, was blushing, embarrassed to be there; there were little men with wispy mustaches and tatty raincoats - newspaper sellers, perhaps, or retired teachers; a rotund Malaysian gentleman who chain-smoked filterless cigarettes, lighting each cigarette from the butt of the one before, so the flame never went out, but was transmitted from one dying cigarette to the next. In one corner sat a scared gay couple. Neither of them looked more than eighteen. This was obviously their first appointment as well, the way they kept glancing around. They were holding hands, white-knuckled and discreetly. They were terrified.

Simon felt comforted. He felt less alone.

"Mister Powers, please," said the man at the desk. Simon stood up, conscious that all eyes were upon him, that he'd been identified and named in front of all these people. A cheerful, red-haired doctor in a white coat was waiting.

"Follow me," he said.

They walked down some corridors, through a door (on which DR. J. BENHAM was written in felt pen on a white sheet of paper scotch-taped to the frosted glass), into a doctor's office.

"I'm Doctor Benham," said the doctor. He didn't offer to shake hands. "You have a note from your doctor?"

"I gave it to the man at the desk."

"Oh." Dr. Benham opened a file on the desk in front of him. There was a computer printout label on the side. It said:

REG'D 2 JLY 90. MALE. 90/00666.L

POWERS, SIMON, MR.

BORN 12 OCT 63. SINGLE.

Benham read the note, looked at Simon's penis, and handed him a sheet of blue paper from the file. It had the same label, stuck to the top.

"Take a seat in the corridor," he told him. "A nurse will collect you."

Simon waited in the corridor.

"They're very fragile," said the sunburnt man sitting next to him, by accent a South African or perhaps Zimbabwean. Colonial accent, at any rate.

"I'm sorry?"

"Very fragile. Venereal diseases. Think about it. You can catch a cold or flu simply by being in the same room as someone who's got it. Venereal diseases need warmth and moisture, and intimate contact."

Not mine, thought Simon, but he didn't say anything.

"You know what I'm dreading?" said the South African.

Simon shook his head.

"Telling my wife," said the man, and he fell silent.

A nurse came and took Simon away. She was young and pretty, and he followed her into a cubicle. She took the blue slip of paper from him.

"Take off your jacket and roll up your right sleeve."

"My jacket?"

She sighed. "For the blood test."

"Oh."

The blood test was almost pleasant, compared to what came next.

"Take down your trousers," she told him. She had a marked Australian accent. His penis had shrunk, tightly pulled in on itself; it looked gray and wrinkled. He found himself wanting to tell her that it was normally much larger, but then she picked up a metal instrument with a wire loop at the end, and he wished it were even smaller. "Squeeze your penis at the base and push forward a few times." He did so. She stuck the loop into the head of his penis and twisted it around the inside. He winced at the pain. She smeared the discharge onto a glass slide. Then she pointed to a glass jar on a shelf. "Can you urinate into that for me, please?"

"What, from here?"

She pursed her lips. Simon suspected that she must have heard that joke thirty times a day since she had been working there.

She went out of the cubicle and left him alone to pee.

Simon found it difficult to pee at the best of times, often having to wait around in toilets until all the people had gone. He envied men who could casually walk into toilets, unzip, and carry on cheerful conversations with their neighbors in the adjoining urinal, all the while showering the white porcelain with yellow urine. Often he couldn't do it at all.

He couldn't do it now.

The nurse came in again. "No luck? Not to worry. Take a seat back in the waiting room, and the doctor will call you in a minute."

"Well," said Dr. Benham. "You have NSU. Nonspecific urethritis."

Simon nodded, and then he said, "What does that mean?"

"It means you don't have gonorrhea, Mister Powers."

"But I haven't had sex with, with anyone, for . . . "

"Oh, that's nothing to worry about. It can be a quite spontaneous disease - you need not, um, indulge, to pick it up." Benham reached into a desk drawer and pulled out a bottle of pills. "Take one of these four times a day before meals. Stay off alcohol, no sex, and don't drink milk for a couple of hours after taking one. Got it?"

Simon grinned nervously.

"I'll see you next week. Make an appointment downstairs."

Downstairs they gave him a red card with his name on and the time of his appointment. It also had a number on: 90/00666.L.

Walking home in the rain, Simon paused outside a travel agents'. The poster in the window showed a beach in the sun and three bronzed women in bikinis, sipping long drinks.

Simon had never been abroad.

Foreign places made him nervous.

As the week went on, the pain went away; and four days later Simon found himself able to urinate without flinching.

Something else was happening, however.

It began as a tiny seed, which took root in his mind, and grew. He told Dr. Benham about it at his next appointment.

Benham was puzzled.

"You're saying that you don't feel your penis is your own anymore, then, Mister Powers?"

"That's right, Doctor.'

"I'm afraid I don't quite follow you. Is there some kind of loss of sensation?"

Simon could feel his penis inside his trousers, felt the sensation of cloth against flesh. In the darkness it began to stir.

"Not at all. I can feel everything like I always could. It's just it feels . . . well, different, I suppose. Like it isn't really part of me anymore. Like it . . ." He paused. "Like it belongs to someone else."

Dr. Benham shook his head. "To answer your question, Mr. Powers, that isn't a symptom of NSU - although it's a perfectly valid psychological reaction for someone who has contracted it. A, uh, feeling of disgust with yourself, perhaps, which you've externalized as a rejection of your genitalia."

That sounds about right, thought Dr. Benham. He hoped he had got the jargon correct. He had never paid much attention to his psychology lectures or textbooks, which might explain, or so his wife maintained, why he was currently serving out a stint in a London VD clinic.

Powers looked a little soothed.

"I was just a bit worried, Doctor, that's all." He chewed his lower lip. "Um, what exactly is NSU?"

Benham smiled, reassuringly. "Could be any one of a number of things. NSU is just our way of saying we don't know exactly what it is. It's not gonorrhea. It's not chlamydia. 'Nonspecific,' you see. It's an infection, and it responds to antibiotics. Which reminds me . . ." He opened a desk drawer and took out a new week's supply.

"Make an appointment downstairs for next week. No sex. No alcohol."

No sex? thought Simon. Not bloody likely.

But when he walked past the pretty Australian nurse in the corridor, he felt his penis begin to stir again, begin to get warm and to harden.

Benham saw Simon the following week. Tests showed he still had the disease.

Benham shrugged.

"It's not unusual for it to hang on for this long. You say you feel no discomfort?"

"No. None at all. And I haven't seen any discharge, either."

Benham was tired, and a dull pain throbbed behind his left eye. He glanced down at the tests in the folder. "You've still got it, I'm afraid."

Simon Powers shifted his seat. He had large watery blue eyes and a pale unhappy face. "What about the other thing, Doctor?"

The doctor shook his head. "What other thing?"

"I told you," said Simon. "Last week. I told you. The feeling that my, um, my penis wasn't, isn't my penis anymore."

Of course, thought Benham. It's that patient. There was never any way he could remember the procession of names and faces and penises, with their awkwardness, and their braggadocio, and their sweaty nervous smells, and their sad little diseases.

"Mm. What about it?"

"It's spreading, Doctor. The whole lower half of my body feels like it's someone else's. My legs and everything. I can feel them, all right, and they go where I want them to go, but sometimes I get the feeling that if they wanted to go somewhere else - if they wanted to go walking off into the world - they could, and they'd take me with them.

"I wouldn't be able to do anything to stop it."

Benham shook his head. He hadn't really been listening. "We'll change your antibiotics. If the others haven't knocked this disease out by now, I'm sure these will. They'll probably get rid of this other feeling as well - it's probably just a side effect of the antibiotics."

The young man just stared at him.

Benham felt he should say something else. "Perhaps you should try to get out more," he said.

The young man stood up.

"Same time next week. No sex, no booze, no milk after the pills." The doctor recited his litany.

The young man walked away. Benham watched him carefully, but could see nothing strange about the way he walked.

On Saturday night Dr. Jeremy Benham and his wife, Celia, attended a dinner party held by a professional colleague. Benham sat next to a foreign psychiatrist.

They began to talk, over the hors d'oeuvres.

"The trouble with telling folks you're a psychiatrist," said the psychiatrist, who was American, and huge, and bullet-headed, and looked like a merchant marine, "is you get to watch them trying to act normal for the rest of the evening." He chuckled, low and dirty.

Benham chuckled, too, and since he was sitting next to a psychiatrist, he spent the rest of the evening trying to act normally.

He drank too much wine with his dinner.

After the coffee, when he couldn't think of anything else to say, he told the psychiatrist (whose name was Marshall, although he told Benham to call him Mike) what he could recall of Simon Powers's delusions.

Mike laughed. "Sounds fun. Maybe a tiny bit spooky. But nothing to worry about. Probably just a hallucination caused by a reaction to the antibiotics. Sounds a little like Capgras's Syndrome. You heard about that over here?"

Benham nodded, then thought, then said, "No." He poured himself another glass of wine, ignoring his wife's pursed lips and almost imperceptibly shaken head.

"Well, Capgras's Syndrome," said Mike, "is this funky delusion. Whole piece on it in The Journal of American Psychiatry about five years back. Basically, it's where a person believes that the important people in his or her life - family members, workmates, parents, loved ones, whatever - have been replaced by - get this! - exact doubles.

"Doesn't apply to everyone they know. Just selected people. Often just one person in their life. No accompanying delusions, either. Just that one thing. Acutely emotionally disturbed people with paranoid tendencies."

The psychiatrist picked his nose with his thumbnail. "I ran into a case myself, couple, two, three years back."

"Did you cure him?"

The psychiatrist gave Benham a sideways look and grinned, showing all his teeth. "In psychiatry, Doctor - unlike, perhaps, the world of sexually transmitted disease clinics - there is no such thing as a cure. There is only adjustment."

Benham sipped the red wine. Later it occurred to him that he would never have said what he said next if it wasn't for the wine. Not aloud, anyway."I don't suppose . . ." He paused, remembering a film he had seen as a teenager. (Something about bodysnatchers?) "I don't suppose that anyone ever checked to see if those people had been removed and replaced by exact doubles . . . ?"

Mike - Marshall - whatever - gave Benham a very funny look indeed and turned around in his chair to talk to his neighbor on the other side.

Benham, for his part, carried on trying to act normally (whatever that was) and failed miserably. He got very drunk indeed, started muttering about "fucking colonials," and had a blazing row with his wife after the party was over, none of which were particularly normal occurrences.

Benham's wife locked him out of their bedroom after the argument.

He lay on the sofa downstairs, covered by a crumpled blanket, and masturbated into his underpants, his hot seed spurting across his stomach.

In the small hours he was woken by a cold sensation around his loins.

He wiped himself off with his dress shirt and returned to sleep.

Simon was unable to masturbate.

He wanted to, but his hand wouldn't move. It lay beside him, healthy, fine; but it was as if he had forgotten how to make it respond. Which was silly, wasn't it?

Wasn't it?

He began to sweat. It dripped from his face and forehead onto the white cotton sheets, but the rest of his body was dry.

Cell by cell, something was reaching up inside him. It brushed his face tenderly, like the kiss of a lover; it was licking his throat, breathing on his cheek. Touching him.

He had to get out of the bed. He couldn't get out of the bed.

He tried to scream, but his mouth wouldn't open. His larynx refused to vibrate.

Simon could still see the ceiling, lit by the lights of passing cars. The ceiling blurred: His eyes were still his own, and tears were oozing out of them, down his face, soaking the pillow.

They don't know what I've got, he thought. They said I had what everyone else gets. But I didn't catch that. I've caught something different.

Or maybe, he thought, as his vision clouded over and the darkness swallowed the last of Simon Powers, it caught me.

Soon after that, Simon got up, and washed, and inspected himself carefully in front of the bathroom mirror. Then he smiled, as if he liked what he saw.

Benham smiled. "I'm pleased to tell you," he said, "that I can give you a clean bill of health."

Simon Powers stretched in his seat, lazily, and nodded. "I feel terrific," he said.

He did look well, Benham thought. Glowing with health. He seemed taller as well. A very attractive young man, decided the doctor. "So, uh, no more of those feelings?"

"Feelings?"

"Those feelings you were telling me about. That your body didn't belong to you anymore."

Simon waved a hand, gently, fanning his face. The cold weather had broken, and London was stewing in a sudden heat-wave; it didn't feel like England anymore.

Simon seemed amused.

"All of this body belongs to me, Doctor. I'm certain of that."

Simon Powers (90/00666.L SINGLE. MALE.) grinned like the world belonged to him as well.

The doctor watched him as he walked out of the surgery. He looked stronger now, less fragile.

The next patient on Jeremy Benham's appointment card was a twenty-two-year-old boy. Benham was going to have to tell him he was HIV positive. I hate this job, he thought. I need a holiday.

He walked down the corridor to call the boy in and pushed past Simon Powers, talking animatedly to a pretty young Australian nurse. "It must be a lovely place," he was telling her. "I want to see it. I want to go everywhere. I want to meet everyone." He was resting a hand on her arm, and she was making no move to free herself from it.

Dr. Benham stopped beside them. He touched Simon on the shoulder. "Young man," he said. "Don't let me see you back here."

Simon Powers grinned. "You won't see me here again, Doctor," he said. "Not as such, anyway. I've packed in my job. I'm going around the world." They shook hands. Powers's hand was warm and comfortable and dry.

Benham walked away, but could not avoid hearing Simon Powers, still talking to the nurse.

"It's going to be so great," he was saying to her. Benham wondered if he was talking about sex or world travel, or possibly, in some way, both.

"I'm going to have such fun," said Simon. "I'm loving it already."