They brought me through the control room to the door into the scan room. “Good luck,” said Dr. Orowitz-Rudman, waving. She sat at a table with two monitors on it, a three-ring binder open before her. A window looked through some sort of fine-mesh screen into the room with the magnet in it. The technician stopped me. “Your watch has to come off.” She pointed to a poster with a number of forbidden objects pictured with red bars across them — fire extinguishers, pacemakers, watches, steel skull-plates, anything metallic, evidently.
The scanner stood in the middle of a large empty room. It was an enormous white edifice, like a very thick wall, with a large hole running through it into which patients were slid on a gantry. Something was making a great deal of fairly unpleasant noise. I removed my gown and lay down on the pad. A dummy computer keyboard was placed on my stomach and I was slid headfirst into the bore of the superconducting magnet.
“Can you hear me, Arno?” I heard Dr. Orowitz-Rudman say through the intercom.
I said that I could.
“Good. Give us a few minutes to get things set in here before you start. Are you comfortable?”
“I am. It’s very vaginal in here, doctor, in a smooth-muscle sort of way. Is the magnet on?”
“Yes, it’s always on,” she said.
“I expected to feel claustrophobic, but oddly, I’m not. There was this guy in college … excuse me — I’ll shut up while you get set up.”
“No, go on,” said Dr. Orowitz-Rudman. “The technicians are getting set up — I’m just observing at this point.”
“What is all this tiresome noise?” I asked.
“That’s the coolant. The magnet has to be kept very cool, and the coolant has to be pumped around.”
“I see. Well, there was this guy in college—” There was this guy in college, I said, who used to mime inserting one finger in a woman’s vadge, then two, then four, saying, “Yeah, baby. Really? More?” Then the whole hand would go in, then his arm up to the elbow, then up to the shoulder; then he would slide his other arm in, still saying, “More? You sure, baby? Okay.” He would place his head at the opening of the imaginary vadge and strainingly push up, turning his face, and suddenly his grimacing head would slide in alongside his arms, and finally he would squirm as much of his body into the vaginal canal as he could fit. “I feel a little like I’ve just done that,” I explained. “I’m in this huge electrovagnet. It isn’t womblike,” I babblingly hastened to qualify. “It’s purely vaginal.”
“Interesting,” I heard Dr. Orowitz-Rudman say absently. She hadn’t been listening. She said something I couldn’t catch to one of her associates, then I heard her say, “We are? Okay.” Then she addressed me in her pleasant Susan Stamberg voice: “All right, Arno. First we’re going to get you to use the keyboard a little bit. I’m going to read you a sentence, and you type it. Ready?”
I said I was ready.
“ ‘The cure …’ ” she read.
I typed. “Okay.”
“ ‘… for the greatest part …’ ”
I typed. “Got it.”
“ ‘… of human miseries …’ ”
I typed. “Okay.”
“ ‘… is not radical …’ ”
“Yep.”
“ ‘… but palliative.’ Period. Good. Thanks. That’s our baseline sentence. Now, Arno, I want you to go ahead and use the keyboard for about five minutes to warm up the nerve.”
“Just type anything?” I asked.
“Right,” said Dr. Orowitz-Rudman. “I can read you something if you would like, or you can make it up. It would be nice if it were similar to the typing you normally do, but that doesn’t matter all that much. It has to be in English, though.”
“Why?”
“So that the letter-frequencies are representative.”
“I see. No problem,” I said. I began to type, in the self-conscious way people do when they’re testing typewriters and computers at a store, though in my case the words I was typing were not being recorded anywhere. It’s strange to be typing here in this magnet, I clicked out on the keys. But I kind of like it I’ve never typed supine before. I recommend it to all interested parties. This keyboard has a nice sloppy feel, probably because it’s been messed with inside and doesn’t work. Feels like some of the old Wang keyboards. Since it is dysfunctional, I suppose I can type anything I want. Doctor Susan could possibly follow my fingers on a video monitor to find out what I’m typing, or study the tape later, but I doubt very much she’ll bother. She’s cheerfully all business. She really attracts me. That’s not surprising — it is much more surprising to me when a woman fails to attract me than when she does attract me. Very occasionally I meet a woman and afterward I think, That’s incredible — nothing about that woman attracted me. It almost never happens. All women merit love and constancy. That’s true. All women should be loved by someone good and dependable and honest. I am good, I think, but I am not honest or dependable, so I have to pass lovingly through their lives without their knowing I have been there. Man I like Dr. Susan’s tits under that lab coat, with that name pinned on one. Short funny forty-year-old women with big tits should reign supreme. Or if I could just cycle between silky-voiced tall women with small tits and short happy women with big tits — plus medium-sized affectionately sexy women with medium-sized tits and short women with small tits and southern accents, and medium-sized women with small tits and Hispanic accents — now there would be a life. I like the fact that Dr. Susan doesn’t know that I’m typing how much I’d like her to squat over me and rip open the white cotton crotch of her black pantyhose and grind her salty puss into my face. I stopped pre tend-typing. “Is that enough?” I asked.
Dr. Orowitz-Rudman said, “That’s plenty. We’ve got a good fix on your nerve now. Can you type the reference sentence again? You remember?”
“Sorry,” I said, “I think I forgot it.”
“ ‘The cure for the greatest … part of human … miseries is not radical …’ ”
“ ‘… but palliative,’ ” I finished, eager to prove to her that I was no clerical robot, but rather a typist who reflected on whatever he was asked to type. “Got it.”
“How about pain levels?” she asked.
I snapped my finger several times to test how my wrist felt. “I feel the usual tingling in the base of my palm and some significant forearm involvement.”
“Fine,” she said. “We can go back to the keyboard later if we need to. I want you to put it aside now. Good. Except for your arm pain, are you comfortable? Are you ready to start masturbating?”
I told her I was.
“Okay, in just a minute I’ll ask you to start.”
I lay at peace, with my hands resting on my chest. I heard some more murmured conversation on the intercom, then, “Arno, why don’t you go ahead and start.”
“Can I lift my knees?”
“Can he lift his knees?” I heard her ask. Then: “Better not. We lose you on one of the axial monitors. Is it going to be a problem to proceed with your legs flat?”
“Not at all — it’s fine,” I said. “Can you see me? I mean, not my nerves, but me?”
“Yes. We have several video monitors in addition to the MR image.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Be sure to let us know any changes in the pain you feel,” she said. “Keep a running commentary, if you can.”
I hesitated, then plunged ahead. “The problem is that the pleasure from one source masks the pain from the other source,” I said. “I think that’s part of the reason it’s gotten this bad. But, okay, I’m touching my — penile organ now. I have it, as I guess you can see, in the thumb-and-finger grip that we discussed. We might call it the Kokomo grip. I’m beginning to tug on it slowly, using the Kokomo grip, and at the moment I feel no distinct pain — well, there is a warm twinge, but nothing bad.” Since I had avoided all orgasms for three days, I expected to have little trouble getting hot and nasty, even enveloped as I was in an electromagnetic field so powerful that it could potentially suck oxygen tanks and scissors and other ferrous objects lethally into the chamber with me. When I was fully erect, I held my richard vertically for a moment by its base, wanting everyone in the control room to get an eyeful of it on the monitors.