She was watching me scratch my stomach. There were certain conversations I’d missed in this new life. You might have a new body but if your mind is burdened the differences don’t count for much.

“Go on,” she said.

I told her how Alicia had got sweet on me and that I was concerned about it. I emphasized that I hadn’t deliberately led her on.

Of course, I loved the attention of the women at the Center—who didn’t, admittedly, have much else to look at—and had walked around barefoot, wearing only shorts. Celibacy had increased my desire; I wanted to live less in my mind. I remember Margot telling me, years ago, this thing about certain school phobics. Some boys, of particularly disturbed sexuality, imagined that their bodies had turned into penises. The dreaded school was their mother’s forbidden body. I was all sex, a walking prick, a penis with an appended body. I didn’t flirt; I was unprovocative. I didn’t need to do anything.

In my mad mind, I became a kind of performer. Many of my friends have been actors, singers, or dancers, men and women who used their bodies in the service of art, or as art itself; people who were looked at for a living. Those of us who cannot perform, who imagine from the audience only an examination of our faults, can have little idea of the relationship between player and voyeur, of how the audience, like a sea of feeling, might hold you up, if you can use it. What do you see and hear out there in all that blackness? What are the watchers doing to you? What was the stripper or any celebrity doing but increasing and controlling envy and desire? This was a splendidly erotic activity, it seemed to me.

It had been years since I had danced, and now, since I didn’t need much sleep, I danced every night in one or other of the town’s discos, with women from the Center. Most of them were older than forty, some were over fifty. They knew the chances of their being loved, caressed, wanted were diminishing, even as their passion increased, in the sun. I danced with them, but I didn’t touch them. If I’d been a “real” kid, I probably would have gone to bed, or to the beach, with several of them. I was their pornography, a cunt teaser. But at least everyone knew where they stood with me.

Usually, while I danced, Alicia watched me, or sat on a chair drinking and smoking. She never danced herself, but took a lot of pleasure in others’ enjoyment. Oddly enough, the music most people preferred originated in my day: 1950s rock ’n’ roll and 1960s soul. I knew every note. It sounded fresher and more lasting than the labored literary work of me and my contemporaries.