The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell(2)

“Is there something in particular, some concern?” Dr. Fukomara asked, drying his hands with a coarse brown paper towel.

“I wish there was,” I said. “Something particular, I mean.”

“You won’t have any change in sexual function.” He’d given me the same assurance in our consult. “And you’ll still be able to pee like a racehorse”—as well as the same joke. Dr. Fukomara smiled easily. Humor was his technique to put his patients at ease, a necessity when your specialty involved cutting other men’s scrotums. The week before, when he walked into that same room for my fifteen-minute consult, he’d held a machete and had donned Coke bottle–thick, magic-store glasses. “This won’t hurt a bit,” he’d deadpanned.

“Is it your wife?” he asked. “Is she having second thoughts?”

“Oh no, she’s very sure,” I said, though Eva was not my wife. Eva and I lived together in the house I’d bought two blocks from the church I no longer attended with the steeple bells I no longer heard except at odd moments, like that one.

Eva moving in with me had seemed like a good idea at the time, but as the months had passed, our living arrangement had started to feel like it was more for convenience than love, which, ironically, was how I had pitched her the idea. “You won’t have to pay rent,” I’d rationalized. “And we’ll save on utilities and groceries and other incidentals.” It was all very practical.

“What about your mother?” had been Eva’s reply.

From my mother’s perspective, Eva and I were living in sin. She’d never used those words, but she’d also not set foot in my house from the moment Eva did, and on those rare occasions when the three of us got together, usually for dinner at a restaurant, my mother was cordial but never asked about the details of Eva’s and my relationship. Neither did I. Eva and I had discussed marriage, but always in vague terms that also usually provoked a reference to my mother.

“I won’t get married just to appease her,” Eva had said. “And when I do, it won’t be in a Catholic church, either.”

Eva’s use of the pronoun I as opposed to we was not lost on me. Nor was the fact that Eva always seemed to refer to my mother when the subject of marriage came up and never to us.

Dr. Fukomara smiled and walked closer to the table. “And you?”

“What’s that?” I asked, having missed his question.

“Are you having second thoughts?”

“Do you have kids?” I asked.

“Three boys,” he said. “We sent our last off to college in September. We’re officially empty nesters. We can run around the house naked and have sex in any room.”

“Do you?” I asked.

His smile waned. “How old are your children?”

“I don’t have any,” I said, which seemed to give him pause. He fixed me again with that inquisitive look. I was just thirty-two. Eva was three years older, a pilot for Alaska Airlines committed to her career and uncertain she wanted children, though apparently very certain she did not want mine—hence, my shaved groin and decision to end my chance to be a father.

“And you think you still might want to?”

“I don’t know.” I didn’t think I did. I’d told myself as much for most of my adult life, but now at the moment of decision, I was no longer so certain.

Dr. Fukomara nodded. “Listen, I schedule these at the end of my day. I have another patient in the room next door. Think it over. I’ll be back in forty-five minutes.”

But even after Dr. Fukomara had left the room, I could not think it over, not with my past continuing to invade my present. The first recollection started as a trickle that, as soon as I attempted to block it, found another path to weep through, the way water will always bleed through concrete, no matter how many times you patch it. I was recalling a particular moment on an unusually hot summer day when I’d sat beside my father in the shade of a two-hundred-year-old oak tree. It had become our routine to sit in the shade provided by those gnarled branches and broad leaves, my father listing in his wheelchair. I don’t remember much else about that day or even the topic of conversation, but I do remember his words.

“There comes a time in every man’s life,” he’d said in the halting, ghostly voice his stroke had left him, “when he stops looking forward and starts looking back.”

I recall thinking my father too young to be imparting such wisdom, despite his infirmity, and I too young to be receiving it. Now, sitting in Dr. Fukomara’s office, I wondered if I had already reached that time in my life. The thought frightened me, because I had done very little to leave a mark on this world. My death would be noted with nothing more than a headstone bearing the dates of my birth and my death to let the world know I had been here.

I am the only son of an only son. My father’s lineage will end with me.

And as that thought weighed on me, I decided, for no rational reason, that I hated that room with its mustard-yellow walls and poorly disguised cheap pressboard cabinets. I slid off the table and paced the orange linoleum, imagining what Eva might say when she arrived home from her East Coast flight to find I had changed my mind.

“We talked about this,” she’d say. “We agreed.”

But saying “we agreed” was akin to saying the French and British agreed to give Germany most of Czechoslovakia at the Munich Conference. I had grown weary of Eva’s complaints about how condoms numbed the pleasure for her and how a vasectomy was the least intrusive and most effective form of birth control—for her, certainly. But she was not the one facing the blade, or worse, a possible fire and Dr. Fukomara’s beating fists.