The Breast Read Free

days. I’ve been to see you every morning and night. You are getting excellent care and all the attention you require. Right now you’re just being washed with a sponge and some warm soapy water. That’s all. Does that hurt you?”
    â€œNo,” I whimpered, “but where is my face?”
    â€œJust let the nurse wash you, and we’ll talk a little later in the morning. You must get all the rest you can.”
    â€œWhat happened to me?” I could remember the pain and the terror, but no more: to me it had felt as though I were being repeatedly shot from a cannon into a brick wall, then marched over by an army of boots. In actuality it was more as though I had been a man made of taffy, stretched in opposite directions by my penis and my buttocks until I was as wide as I had once been long. The doctors tell me that I couldn’t have been conscious for more than a few minutes once the “catastrophe” got going, but in retrospect, it seems to me that I had been awake to feel every last bone in my body broken in two and ground into dust.
    â€œIf only you’ll relax now—”
    â€œHow am I being fed!”
    â€œIntravenously. You mustn’t worry. You’re being fed all you need.”
    â€œWhere are my arms!”
    â€œJust let the nurse wash you, and then she’ll rub some oil in, and you’ll feel much better. Then you can sleep.”
    I was awakened like this every morning, but it was another week or more before I was sufficiently calm—or torpid—to associate the sensations of washing with erotic excitement. By now I had concluded that I was a quadruple amputee—that the boiler had burst beneath the bedroom of my parlor-floor apartment, and I had been blinded and mutilated in the explosion. I sobbed almost continuously, giving no credence whatsoever to the hormonal explanations that Dr. Gordon and his colleagues proposed for my “illness.” Then one morning, depleted and numb from my days of tearless weeping, I felt myself becoming aroused—a mild throbbing in the vicinity of what I still took to be my face, a pleasing feeling of … engorgement.
    â€œDo you like that?” The voice was a man’s! A stranger’s!
    â€œWho are you? Where am I? What is going on?”
    â€œI’m the nurse.”
    â€œWhere’s the other nurse!”
    â€œIt’s Sunday. Take it easy—it’s only Sunday.”
    The next morning the regular nurse, Miss Clark, returned to duty, accompanied by Dr. Gordon. I was washed, under Dr. Gordon’s supervision, and this time, when I began to experience the sensations that accompany erotic fondling, I let them envelop me. “Oh,” I whispered, “that does feel nice.”
    â€œWhat is it?” asked Dr. Gordon. “What are you saying, David?”
    The nurse began to rub in the oil. I could feel each one of her fingers kneading that face no longer a face. Then something began to make me tingle, something that I soon realized was only the soft palm of her hand slowly moving in caressing circles on that faceless face. My whole being was seething with that exquisite sense of imminence that precedes a perfect ejaculation. “Oh, my God, this is so wonderful.” And I began to sob so uncontrollably that I had to be put back to sleep.
    Shortly thereafter, Dr. Gordon came with Dr. Klinger, who for five years had been my psychoanalyst, and they told me what it is I have become.
    I was washed gently but thoroughly every morning and then smeared with oil and massaged. After I heard the truth about myself—after learning that I live now in a hammock, my nipple at one end, my rounded, bellied underside at the other, and with two velvet harnesses holding my bulk in place—it was several months before I could take even the remotest pleasure in these morning ablutions. And even then it was not until Dr. Gordon consented to leave me alone in the room with the