The Breast (2 page)

The bulk of my weight is fatty tissue. At one end I am rounded off like a watermelon, at the other I terminate in a nipple, cylindrical in shape, projecting five inches from my “body” and perforated at the tip with seventeen openings, each about half the size of the male urethral orifice. These are the apertures of the lactiferous ducts. As I am able to understand it without the benefit of diagrams—I am sightless—the ducts branch back into lobules composed of the sort of cells that secrete the milk that is carried to the surface of the normal nipple when it is being suckled, or milked by machine.

My flesh is smooth and “youthful,” and I am still a “Caucasian.” The color of my nipple is rosy pink. This last is thought to be unusual because in my former incarnation I was an emphatic brunet. As I told the endocrinologist who made this observation, I find it less unusual than certain other aspects of the transformation, but then I am not the endocrinologist around here. Embittered wit, but wit at last, and it must have been observed and noted.

My nipple is rosy pink—like the stain at the base of my penis the night this all happened to me. Since the apertures in the nipple provide me with something like a mouth and vestigial ears—at least it has seemed to me that I am able to make myself heard through my nipple, and, faintly, to hear through it what is going on around me—I had assumed that it was my head that had become my nipple. But the doctors conclude otherwise, at least as of this month. For one thing, my voice, faint as it is, evidently emanates from the flap in my mid-section, even if my sense of internal landscape doggedly continues to associate the higher functions of consciousness with the body's topmost point. The doctors now maintain that the wrinkled, roughened skin of the nipple—which, admittedly, is exquisitely sensitive to touch like no tissue on the face, including the mucous membrane of the lips—was formed out of the glans penis. The puckered pinkish areola encircling the nipple is said to have metamorphosed from the shaft of the penis under the assault of a volcanic secretion from the pituitary of “mammogenic” fluid. Two fine long reddish hairs extend from one of the small elevations on the rim of my areola. “How long are they?”

“Seven inches exactly.”

“My antennae.” The bitterness. Then the disbelief. “Will you pull one, please?”

“If you like, David, I'll pull very gently.”

Dr. Gordon wasn't lying. A hair of mine had been tugged. A familiar enough sensation—so familiar that I wanted to be dead.

Of course it was days after the change—the “change”!—before I even regained consciousness, and another week after that before they would tell me anything other than that I had been “very ill” with “an endocrine imbalance.” I keened and howled so wretchedly each time I awoke to discover anew that I could not see, smell, taste, or move that I had to be kept under heavy sedation. When my “body” was touched, I didn't know what to make of it: the sensation was unexpectedly soothing, but far away, and reminded me of water lapping at a beach. One morning I awakened to feel something new happening to me at one of my extremities. Nothing like pain—rather more like pleasure—yet it felt so strange just to
feel
that I screamed, “I've been burned! I was in a fire!”

“Calm yourself, Mr. Kepesh,” a woman said. “I'm only washing you. I'm only washing your face.”

“My face? Where is it! Where are my arms! My legs! Where is my mouth!
What happened to me?
”

Now Dr. Gordon spoke. “You're in Lenox Hill Hospital, David. You're in a private room on the seventh floor. You've been here ten 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?”

“No,” I whimpered, “but where is my face?”

“Just let the nurse wash you, and we'll talk a little later in the morning. You must get all the rest you can.”

“What 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.

“If only you'll relax now—”

“How am I being fed!”

“Intravenously. You mustn't worry. You're being fed all you need.”

“Where are my arms!”

“Just 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.

“Do you like that?” The voice was a man's! A stranger's!

“Who are you? Where am I? What is going on?”

“I'm the nurse.”

“Where's the other nurse!”

“It'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.”

“What 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 nurse that I was again able to surrender wholly to Miss Clark's ministering fingers. But when I did, the palpations were almost more than could be borne, deliciously “almost”—a frenzy akin to what I had experienced in those final weeks of lovemaking with Claire, but even more extreme, it seemed, coming to me in my state of utter helplessness, and out of nothingness, and from this source dedicated solely to kindling my excitement. When the session was over and Miss Clark had retired from my room with her basin of warm water and the vials of oil (I imagined colored vials), my hammock would sway comfortingly to and fro, until at last my heaving stopped, my nipple softened, and I slept the sleep of the sated.

I say the doctor consented to leave us alone in the room. But how do I know anyone has ever left me alone, or that this is even a room? Dr. Gordon assures me that I am under no more surveillance than any other difficult case—I am not on display in a medical amphitheater, am not being exposed to closed-circuit television … but what's to prevent him from lying? I doubt that in the midst of this calamity anybody is watching out for my civil liberties. That
would
be laughable. And why do I even care if I am not alone when I think I am? If I am under a soundproof glass dome on a platform in the middle of Madison Square Garden, if I am on display in Macy's window—what's the difference to me? Wherever they have put me, however many may be looking in at me, I am really quite as alone as anyone could ever wish to be. Best to stop thinking about my “dignity,” regardless of all it meant to me when I was a professor of literature, a lover, a son, a friend, a neighbor, a customer, a client, and a citizen. If ever there was a time to forget about propriety, decorum, and personal pride, this is it. But as these are matters intimately connected to my idea of sanity and to my self-esteem, I am, in fact, troubled now as I wasn't at all in my former life, where the style of social constraint practiced by the educated classes came quite easily to me, and provided real satisfaction. Now the thought that my morning sessions with Miss Clark are being carried live on intra-hospital TV, that my delirious writhings are being observed by dozens of scientists assembled in the gallery overhead … well, that is sometimes almost as unbearable as the rest of it. Nonetheless, when Dr. Gordon assures me that my “privacy” is being respected, I no longer contradict him. I say instead, “Thank you for that,” and in this way I am able at least to pretend to them that I think I am alone even if I'm not.

You see, it is not a matter of doing what is right or seemly; I can assure you that I am not concerned with the etiquette of being a breast. Rather, it is doing what I must, to continue to be me. For if not me, who? Or what? Either I continue to be myself or I go mad—and then I die. And it seems I don't want to die. A surprise to me too, but there it is. I don't foresee a miracle either, some sort of retaliatory raid by my anti-mammogenic hormones, if such there be (and God alone knows if there are in someone made like This), that will undo the damage. I suspect it's a little late for that, and so it is not with this hope springing eternally in the human breast that the human breast continues to want to be. Human I insist I am, but not that human. Nor do I believe the worst is over. I have the feeling that the worst is yet to come. No, it is simply that having been terrified of death since the age of two, I have become entrenched in my hatred of it, have taken a personal stand
against
death from which I seem unable to retreat because of This. Horrible indeed This is; but on the other hand, I have been wanting not to die for so long now, I just can't stop doing it overnight. I need time.

That I have not died is, as you can imagine, of great interest to medical science.
That
miracle continues to be studied by microbiologists, physiologists, and biochemists working here in the hospital and, I am told, in medical institutions around the country. They are trying to figure out what makes me still tick. Dr. Klinger thinks that no matter how they put the puzzle together, in the end it could all come down to those old pulpit bromides, “strength of character” and “the will to live.” And who am I not to concur in such a heroic estimate of myself?

“It appears then that my analysis has ‘taken,'” I tell Dr. Klinger; “a tribute to you, sir.” He laughs. “You were always stronger than you thought.” “I would as soon never have had to find out. And besides it's not so. I can't live like this any longer.” “Yet you have, you do.” “I do
but I can't.
I was never strong. Only determined. One foot in front of the other. Good grades in all subjects. It goes back to handing homework in on time and carrying off the prizes. Dr. Klinger,
it's hideous in here.
I want to quit, I want to go crazy, to go spinning off, ranting and wild,
only I can't.
I sob. I scream. I touch bottom. I lie there on that bottom! But then I come around. I make my mordant little jokes. I listen to the radio. I listen to the phonograph. I think about what we've said. I restrain my rage and I restrain my misery—and I wait for your next visit. But this is madness, my coming around. To be putting one foot in front of the other is madness—
especially as I have no feet!
This ghastly thing has happened, and I listen to the six o'clock news! This incredible catastrophe, and I listen to the weather report!” No, no, says Dr. Klinger: strength of character, the will to live.

I tell him that I want to go mad, he tells me that it's impossible: beyond me,
beneath
me. It took This for me to find that I am a citadel of sanity.

So—I may pretend otherwise, but I know they are studying me, watching as they would from a glass-bottomed boat the private life of a porpoise or a manatee. I think of these aquatic mammals because of the overall resemblance I now bear to them in size and shape, and because the porpoise in particular is said to be an intelligent, perhaps even rational, creature. Porpoise with a Ph.D. Associate Porpoise Kepesh. Really, it is the silliness, the triviality, the
meaninglessness
of life that one misses most in a life like this. For aside from the monstrous, ludicrous fact of me, there is the intellectual responsibility that I seem to have developed to this preposterous misfortune. WHAT DOES IT MEAN? HOW COULD IT HAVE HAPPENED? IN THE ENTIRE HISTORY OF THE HUMAN RACE, WHY PROFESSOR KEPESH? Yes, it is clever of Dr. Klinger to keep to what is ordinary and familiar, to drone on about strength of character and the will to live. Better these banalities than the grandiose or the apocalyptic; for citadel of sanity though I may be, there is only so much that even I can take.