Smoke and Mirrors

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 . . . ”