During the Second World War, the Nazi leadership prescribed Pervitin to the Wehrmacht’s “animated machines” to eliminate exhaustion and inhibition. German paratroopers caught behind British lines were described as “fearless and berserk,” marching into active gunfire seemingly without fear. Japanese kamikaze pilots were also plied with methamphetamines to enable their death-plummets into American warships. Just as a powder known as “brown-brown,” made of cocaine mixed with smokeless gunpowder, was given to child soldiers to induce depersonalized fearlessness in the Liberian and Sierra Leonean civil wars. As the Italian fucked me I thought, Yes, of course, it was somehow appropriate the drugs being used by teenage suicide bombers to obliterate themselves in Lower Dir were the same ones being used by men to obliterate themselves in gay saunas half a world away. Perhaps the same erasure of self was required to enact extreme violence and extreme sex acts on one’s body and the bodies of others. The same unfixing of body from self that facilitated the transformation of one’s body into a thing, whether a lethal weapon or a receptacle for cum. The dissociation which enabled us to take twenty cocks or detonate a belt of explosives strapped around our torsos.

And it’s of course considered obscene, to transcend our bodies — whether through sex, drugs, or a suicide belt. For the self to consciously cleave itself apart from the body. There’s a horror in having agency in this act. It destabilizes that which is thought to be fixed: that only God or the universe or fate can unfix these two parts of our being. That sacred union. Our body, the temple. And in that moment I understood “sacred” as belonging to a language of limits, a word which demarcated boundaries we were not prepared to cross for fear of destabilizing the accepted order, for fear of realizing how far our bodies could actually stretch, transform, how much pleasure they could hold, how extreme they could be made, how fluid and porous they really were, because to realize those potentials might have meant remaking all the containers — physical, social, political — that held the world in place.

The next thing I knew I was walking with Clyde and Giacomo back along the wide banks of the raging Tiber, the sun just beginning to rise, my body still buzzing, coming down, I was talking, I could hear myself talking, but what was I saying, something about finding pleasure in death, how all taboos fell somewhere on the pleasure-death spectrum, and how this spectrum ranged from the socially permissible to the socially abhorrent, from horror films to necrophilia.

Giacomo and Clyde were laughing but listening, letting me ramble on and clearly getting a kick out of it. Giacomo replied that he once had a lover who fetishized being infected by HIV. This man had shown him whole porn sites dedicated to it.