I started to fixate on the idea that I was genetically predestined to be either a loser or a pervert. The kind of men who became sperm donors, the kind of men my dad was likely to be, largely fell into one of the following types: out-of-work construction workers, hapless students struggling to make tuition, aspiring musicians, potheads living in their parents’ basements, and sex criminals. You told me you had gone to Toronto for the procedure, and I figured there was a chance he’d still be walking the streets. I kept an eye out, searching passing faces for those of my features I didn’t see on you. The long nose. The divot in my chin. The protruding ears. Had he been hard up for a hit? Had it been a whim? A dare? Or was he a serial depositor? And what had gotten him off? A magazine? An elaborate fantasy? I could come just by thinking of a neck I’d seen on the streetcar or the small of someone’s back. I doubt I’d inherited this ability from you.

All my life I’ve feared that some perverse animal dwelled in me. An insatiable creature of pure sensation. And I’ve always had the sense you were afraid of it too. Walking in to find me masturbating in the crib when I was two months old. You joked I couldn’t keep my hands off myself. When I was five you’d have to remove the Q-Tip from my hand or else I would keep turning it in my ear forever, long past the utility of hygiene, lost in the strange erogeneity of it. Six years old, swimming in the silty waters of the Ottawa River with my friend Michael, we ventured towards the shore until the water grew so shallow we had to pull ourselves forward with our hands like tadpoles, bellies against the sandy riverbed, until we beached ourselves. Michael jumped up and dashed towards the cottage, but I lingered in the fetid muck among the reeds and gauze of dead minnows. I slathered my arms and legs with it like a Russian oligarch vacationing on the Dead Sea. There was just enough water to lie back in. It coated the bottom of my head. Filled my ears. I felt a leech attach itself to my neck and I let it. A skittish school of minnows nibbled my thighs. They mistook me for an inanimate object. A dead thing. Baking in filth under the sun. Saturated with the bliss of being my body. You had to come down to find me there and pull me up for dinner.