Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer(113)

He used his dry fist, his fist lubricated with: honey, or shampoo, or Vaseline, or shaving cream, or rice pudding, or toothpaste (only once), or the remnants of the tube of A&D that his parents couldn’t bring themselves to throw away, despite being able to throw away everything that actually mattered. He made an artificial vagina out of a toilet paper roll, covering one end with Saran wrap (held down with rubber bands), filling the tube with maple syrup, then covering the other end with Saran wrap (and more rubber bands) and giving it a slit. He f*cked pillows, blankets, swimming pool vacuums, stuffed animals. He jerked off to the Victoria’s Secret catalog, and the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue, and the backpage ads in the City Paper, and JCPenney bra advertisements in Parade magazine, and basically anything that could, with the far reaches of his all-powerful and highly motivated imagination, be construed to be an *, vagina, nipple, or mouth (in that order). Of course, he had unlimited access to more free porn than could be watched over the course of the lifetimes of every citizen of China, but even an anus-crazed twelve-year-old appreciates the correlation between the mental work required and the magnitude of the nut, hence his ultimate fantasy of intercepting some Arab virgin on her way to get f*cked by an actual martyr, tucking his head under her burka, and, in that deep-space, sensory-deprived blackness, licking orbits around Heranus. Would anyone ever believe that this had nothing to do with religion, or ethnicity, or even taboo?

He tied rubber bands around his wrist—rubber bands being to masturbation what flour is to baking—to make his fingers go numb so he would no longer recognize them as his own. It worked terrifically well, and he almost lost his hand. He angled mirrors in such a way as to see his * without the rest of his body, and was able to convince himself that it was the * of a woman who wanted him in her *. He masturbated with his dominant and his recessive hand—his intact and his mangled hand—and rubbed Indian burns into his shaft with both hands at once. For several months he favored what he called—called to no one, of course—the “Roger Ebert grip”: a half twist of the wrist, so that the thumb was pointing down. (For reasons he didn’t understand, and felt no need to understand, this also gave the impression of his hand being someone else’s hand.) He closed his eyes and held his breath until he started to black out. He f*cked the soles of his feet like some kind of horndog maharishi. If he were actually trying to detach his penis from his body, he couldn’t have squeezed or pulled it any harder, and it’s a miracle he never actually hurt himself, although even when he was pleasuring himself, he felt that, in some deep and irreparable way, he was hurting himself, that it had to be so, and that that was another elemental bit of knowledge with which he was born.

He masturbated in Amtrak bathrooms, plane bathrooms, the bathrooms of his school and Hebrew school, bookstore bathrooms, Gap and Zara and H&M bathrooms, restaurant bathrooms, the bathrooms of every house he’d been in since gaining the ability to come into a toilet. If it flushed, he f*cked it.

How many times did he try to suck his own dick? (Like Tantalus, as he reached, so did the fruit pull away.) He tried to f*ck his own *, but that required pushing his boner in the direction it most didn’t want to go, like a drawbridge being forced to touch the water. He was able to rub his scrotum around his *, but that only made him melancholy.

He once stumbled upon a sufficiently compelling argument, in an analingus community, for sticking his finger into his butt while jerking off. Once he’d trained his sphincter to stop reflexively impersonating a Chinese finger trap, it felt pretty good, if pretty strange. It felt like being a bowl whose rim was being wiped clean of cookie batter by the finger of someone—namely: him—who couldn’t wait. He was, indeed, able to find his prostate, and as promised, he saw through walls when he came. But there was nothing to see except the next crappy room. It was the removal of his finger that ruined everything. First of all, immediately after coming, everything that seemed not only good but logical, necessary, and inevitable before coming instantly seems inexplicable, deranged, and repugnant. It’s possible to play down, or even deny, almost anything you just said or did, but a finger in one’s butthole cannot be played down or denied. It can only be left there or removed. And it cannot be left there.

Sam never felt comfortable in his body—not in clothing that never fit, not when performing his ridiculous impression of a nonspastic walker—except when masturbating. When masturbating, he both owned and existed in his body. He was effortless, a natural, himself.

> It’s ME.

> That doesn’t help. And stop abusing caps.

> it’s me.

> Billie?

> Billie?

> Max?

> No.

> Great-Grandpa?

> NOAM.

> Stop shouting.

> noam. your cousin.

> My Israeli cousin Noam?

> No, your Swedish cousin Noam.

> Funny.

> And Israeli.

> Your dad and little brother are here.

> I know. My dad sent me an e-mail from the cemetery.

> That’s weird. He said he couldn’t contact you guys.

> He probably meant by phone. We e-mail all the time.

> We’re sitting shiva at my grandfather’s house.

> Yes, I know that, too. He e-mailed me a picture of the salmon.

> Why?

> Because it was there. And because the world lacks reality for him until he photographs it with his phone.