The Caterpillar Man

It wasn’t until I came across a pornographic pop up while browsing on my computer that I realised I had forgotten something. I couldn’t say how long, only that it had been days since I last masturbated. A dusky woman, probably Thai, with nipples like dried cherries invigorated a faint memory in me. Any other time I would’ve reached for my crotch without thinking. But this time I needed to remind myself and moved my arm down my pants only to find everything down there asleep. Odd, I thought. Then carrying my laptop into the bathroom, I laid it near the basin and tried with more intention. It was asleep, soft, and lifeless, turning to the side like a drowsy old man. I browsed for stronger content, yet nothing aroused me. Then I accessed all my favourite videos, and a rare collection of full-length POVs by Horny Preethi, yet it would not be dissuaded from its softness. I should have been aroused, but in my mind, sexual desire was now a concept, with only outlines. It was not full bodied, and my ‘little friend’ refused to respond. Under the florescent light of the bathroom, with its grooves and folds, my sexual organ seemed foreign, something apart from my body. I dismissed it as one day’s failing and returned to my desk to continue with my work. I was a third year PhD research fellow in developmental economics. In a matter of months, I’d be defending my thesis.

I tried not to think about it the next day. I went to the university, attended one lecture, ate a good lunch with meat, and returned. But nearing sundown, alone in my room, it began to bother me once more. I felt anxious that not the faintest desire had arisen in me throughout the day. I calculated when exactly I had pleasured myself last. I could not remember. Then I checked my browsing history. Yesterday withstanding, the last adult website I had visited was about a month ago. A month! There had to be a mistake. How was it possible that a month had passed without masturbating? Now I remembered. It wasn’t the date listed on the history tab. It was two days after. I had visited my aunt who was in the same city. She was my guardian of sorts. In fact, she wasn’t even my aunty, but a mature woman from our hometown that my parents knew well. I stayed in a 2 BHK with a roommate about a kilometre from the university. That night she had prepared dinner for me and after that I retired to the guestroom. When I was sure she had fallen asleep, I crept into the bathroom and lit a small marijuana cigarette that my roommate gave me. I returned to the bed and went under the covers. In the darkness I felt relaxed and had the best shag of my life and I did it with no pornography. I specifically remember being proud of that fact. After I cleaned myself off and hit the sack. I slept like a tired travelling horse in a stable, that had its load untied and removed.

That was the last time I masturbated. And now it had been a whole month. In this time, I had been seeing a fellow PhD candidate. Although nothing was formally established, we had gone on a few dates but had not managed to sleep together. I tried to recall what we spoke about and what I felt when I was with her this last month. But everything was hazy. I could remember nothing except bits from conversations in the cafeteria. I opened my computer and browsed for some new content. It was mostly colour-saturated bimbos and man-boys rubbing over each other like rag dolls. The new stuff these days didn’t turn me on. It was too artificial. The tragedy was that I was far too desensitised to enjoy soft core either. Then I tried once more with my strongest stuff, really dark content that I had put away long ago sensing that it was unhealthy both morally and psychologically. I stroked and jerked yet it was like holding a limp elastic band. It was debilitating and my work suffered for it. I could not concentrate on reading and writing, and would frequently disrupt my work to try again, failing which my worry only compounded.

I had terrible sleep that night. When I woke, I observed that I had no morning wood. I looked underneath the sheets and then my trousers and found it limp with no resistance. That day I visited a urologist. I told him about my problem. He was a doctor nearing retirement. You could tell he was old school from the way he spoke and his receding hairline. He directed me to the examination bed and told me to lie down. He told me to undo my jeans. I looked at the door behind us and only then did he remember to close the curtains. I pulled over the elastic of my underwear, not wanting to look down at that hairy mess below in the sterile lighting of the room. The man did not wear gloves, which surprised me. With two bare fingers he squeezed the head of my penis with some force. I winced and my right leg shook a little. Then he lightly pressed each testicle. One and two, and the examination was over. He told me to rise, and then went over to his table.

‘There’s nothing wrong with you.’

‘But it’s been a month.’

‘There’s nothing wrong with you,’ he said again, writing something in a scrap of blue paper.

‘But I feel nothing sexual. I see a girl and I don’t even think about anything. My mind is blank,’ I said, looking at his writing hand, wondering why he hadn’t washed them.

He repeated that there was nothing biologically wrong with me. When I told him I was doing a PhD, he chalked it up to stress. I complained that I was a twenty-nine-year-old man, in the prime of my life, but he replied saying that a drop in libido was normal at this time and that I shouldn’t expect my drive to be as ecstatic as a teenager’s.

‘It’s natural for someone who’s not been sexually active for some time. As we grow older, there is process by which you mentally block certain things. If I saw a beautiful girl walk into my medical room right now, my mind blocks it and tells me she is a cousin or a relative. If we were always attracted to everyone, how would things go on? Do you understand?’

‘But I’m twenty-nine!’

‘I want you to do something,’ he said, pinching the bridge of his nose and looking serious.  ‘Just put it out of your mind. Don’t even think about it. If worry comes, you won’t be able to get it up. Do your work, go on normally as you would if the problem did not exist and I promise you, it will come back.’

I came out feeling relieved. He promised it would come back and all I needed to do was not think about it. That night my roommate was out of town. I was scraping bits of information from a dozen different journals and databases and writing it down. After hours of work, it felt like the white contrast of all those PDFs and web pages on my screen was siphoning my spirit and essence. I was exhausted and wanted a break. Being alone with the computer, I knew I’d be tempted to try again. So, I decided to take a walk.

It was a strange city, a university town by the sea. I took an autorickshaw to St. Michael’s point, a spot on a hill that overlooked the entire city. The driver refused to drive all the way, saying that auto’s weren’t allowed in that area past eight. Sensing that I wasn’t from here, he overcharged me. I gave in, too exhausted to start a fight. I wanted nothing to distress me any further. It was chilly as I ascended the hill and hardly anyone was on the streets. When there were people, they gave me a dirty look and passed by.

I walked with my phone in hand so I wouldn’t feel lonely. There was a missed call from my mother, but I ignored it. I did not want her to check on me that day. She would ask if I’d eaten that day. That is what we’d mostly speak about. She could hardly understand what it was like studying in a big university – the sleepless nights, the isolation, and pressure that came with a doctoral program. More work emails from my supervisor about an upcoming conference. I had to present a paper substantiating the relevance of the Lorenz Curve as a theory in the contemporary measurement of inequality, another added responsibility that I didn’t want to take up so close to my defence, but only did so to gain favour with him. Unconsciously, my mind ran up and down logical arguments, equation after equation, until I came out the other side exhausted and anxious that I had not prepared enough. Fifteen messages on a WhatsApp friend group all in my native tongue. It all felt so far away from me.

I reached the Portuguese heritage quarters, a historic centre in the city, and walked down the cobbled pathway and passed a restored bell tower. The viewing point was close. I wasn’t expecting to meet anyone, but when I reached the banisters on the cliffside, I wished there was someone waiting for me. I could see the small city meet the sea. The ferries and the piers that were lit up in the distance. It looked beautiful from up here. I’d been by that seashore before, and it stank of fish and the swill of the ocean. But from up here, it was nice.

I thought of Natalia who was half German and would be presenting at the conference as well. Natalia was not beautiful, yet German blood and her education presented her as a conquest to me. To win someone like that, a man had to be qualified, accomplished, and sure of himself at all times. I had managed to convince her so far that I was such a man. The fact that I got into the university on a scholarship proved that there was something more to me than your average person. We got along well, but I feared she was much smarter than me, and would eventually go far beyond what I could keep up with. She had sixteen publications in reputed journals compared to my five. I have to keep up, I told myself constantly. Sometimes I felt strained and uncomfortable in her presence, and she did not bother to reassure me that I could be myself around her. I phoned her. It was busy. She texted back saying, ‘Hey, can’t talk right now. Deadline.’

I returned to my room and ate left over noodles from that afternoon. I slipped into freshly washed PJs and brushed my teeth. I was feeling strangely tired. My body throbbed with a satisfying ache as if I had run a half marathon or swam twenty laps in a pool. Apart from the uphill walk to the bell tower, I had done nothing exerting. Nevertheless, I welcomed the prospect of a good night’s sleep. As I tucked myself in, it occurred to me that I had not thought about sex the entire evening. The fresh air had done me good. Then I thought, imagine if my erection doesn’t come back; why am I doing all of this then? Natalia, the PhD, this strange city. Wouldn’t it all seem meaningless to me if I could never get it up? It was an unusual but enlightened thought, but I had tired myself out and couldn’t follow it. I thought on it later, and the only time I had slept like that was at my aunt’s house.

Sunlight falling through the bedroom window woke me up. I felt a strange sensation of tightness around my thighs and my crotch. It felt as if my PJs had shrunk into something tight and constricting like leather pants. I ran my hands over my thighs. Instead of cloth, I felt an outer covering that was coarse and rubbery. The sensation shocked me into getting up. I looked down at the lower half of my body in horror. A brown, leathery, skin-like sheath covered me from my waist down to the ankles of my feet like a pair of pants. It was coarse and prickly and small hairs grew out of it. I scrambled in my bed to remove it. It was fused to my body around the waistline and at the ankles. Where my genitals used to be, there was only a mound of skin and right down the middle, a crease that imitated a zip flap. When I probed with my finger in the crease, I found it was fused as well. It felt like being covered in a layer of foreskin above my regular skin. I knew that my legs and genitals were underneath it, because below the fleshy surface of the covering I could feel a light sensation.

At that point, a reminder from my phone went off. I was late for a lecture. Panicking, I pulled on my jeans over the flesh trousers and wore a used shirt. At the last minute I managed to catch an almost empty shuttle headed to the university.  When I reached class, I sat way at the back so no one would detect my discomfort. The lecturer entered, setting down his things and revising his notes. I squirmed and shifted about in my seat. Was this a giant tumour? Or some mutation? I thought, frantically rubbing my palms over the denim trousers, and feeling an artificial shifting movement over my thighs. I was consumed by the sight of that alien mound of skin where my genitals used to be. I was beginning to breath faster. I looked around me. None of the other students noticed my extreme discomfort. At one point I knew that if I did not control that bursting, nauseating anxiety in me, I would have a nervous breakdown. I was about to leave the room when the lecturer began writing down a few lines of equations. Then he drew a familiar graph on the whiteboard. My eyes followed the curve of the line. I sat back down in my seat and listened. It was the Lorenz curve of inequality measurement. My hearing began to sharpen. As the professor spoke, I heard every word and began to see each concept with a clarity I had never experienced before. Everything was falling into place like a puzzle arranging itself. The part of my paper I was struggling with, dealing with consumption and asset distribution vs. income inequality made absolute sense. I started making notes rapidly, looking up at the professor every once in a while. A tremendous weight had been lifted off me.

When the lecture was over, I felt calm. I went to the library and studied for six hours straight. The only reason I got up was to get something to eat. When I returned, the security guard told me it was closing time. I packed my things to leave. On the way out I met Natalia. I gave her a warm smile as if I had met an old school friend. She apologised for missing my call and spoke about her hectic schedule. When she spoke, I no longer felt the tension of insecurity that always followed me and left her words half unheard. I listened to everything and saw in her an inner beauty that wasn’t there before. Or was it always there and I just didn’t see it? In that moment I felt no attraction for her, no need to impress her, or act a certain way. I did not see her as a woman but a being of light, with a centre that warmed me. It was the same way I saw the flowers in the large pot beside her, and the spotted cat that jumped down from a ledge and looked at me as if he knew me. I knew in that instant that desire was dead inside me. It was replaced by what can I only describe as a brilliant arc of light inside my skull that stood out of the blackness. I could see it every time I blinked.

Instead of walking home, I boarded the shuttle bus from the university. I sat in the front seat behind the driver. The bus started and the driver waited for the last few seats to fill up. In his rear-view mirror, I saw another strange thing, but this time it was curiosity that gripped me, not fear. In the vibrating mirror I saw my reflection. My face looked odd, misshapen. Focusing harder I saw that it was not my face in the mirror, but a mask of sorts, a mask made of a skin. It was a fleshy, thick, and awkward mask that was way too big, with cut outs in the eyes, two holes for nostrils and a slit near the mouth. Through the cut outs I saw the glint of my own small eyes staring back at me. I touched my face; I was wearing a big fleshy mask.

I ordered in that night and spent a good part of it studying. But the stress I had felt with my thesis was completely absent. I was just glad to absorb pure distilled knowledge. Natalia phoned me, but being too engrossed in my work, I ignored it. She sent me a text saying that she missed me and sent me a picture of herself smooshed against a pillow, smiling in a tank top with some amount of cleavage. When I had the time, I texted back saying everything would turn out fine and that we would speak in the morning. When I was finally exhausted enough to sleep, I slipped into bed. I switched off the light, turned to one side and covered myself. It was pitch black, except for the faint moonlight coming in my room. I ran my fingers down the prickly, hairy, fleshy pants with the lump in the middle. But this no longer disturbed me. With my eyes closed, I could see the arc of light suspended in the void of my mind which caused me delight. Just then the bathroom door squeaked. In the darkness, something awkward and big poked its head out through the gap. It was the man in the fleshy mask staring at me in the window of the bus. I saw the same glint in its piercing eyes through the cut outs. Inside the slit for his mouth, his lips curved into a sardonic grin. I gave him the warmest smile and closed my eyes again, snuggling in my blanket. He watched me the entire night, and every night after.