He started calling himself Candace – Candy, actually – but it was short for Candace. Only on the internet, at first. In real life his name was Stuart. Stuart liked pornography, a lot, too much. He watched it every day, jerked off all the time, whenever he had the time. Pretty normal stuff usually but he was open-minded. Sometimes after the third shot of the day it took something weirder to get him off. He liked the videos that made him uncomfortable, not even that he was aroused by whatever weird act per se but that the feeling of discomfort, of the distasteful, of “this is wrong” could be the only thing that pushed him over the edge.

Forbidden things are enticing. And when nothing is forbidden – what then? Stuart used to lurk 4chan, not even looking for porn, just for stimulation, for a surprise. People would post all kinds of weird porn there, with the subtext being that the porn in question was presented as strange or disgusting, not erotic, and that one might make use of it ironically, as if by a dare.

And this format of presenting something which is disgusting or ironically sexy gave Stuart the excuse maybe to sincerely “appreciate” these materials which were not, or that ought not to have been, sexual. Some of the stories or pictures had relatable sexual elements to them – BDSM usually, eventually featured P in V, but others, like vore – the fetish for being eaten alive – were just disorienting. He felt very uncomfortable the first time he read about that.

The worst thing he found was a story, he never knew if it was true, about a series of videos with no obvious sexual content, but which implied that people were being tortured, held captive, or killed by wild animals for the sexual gratification of some psychotic person.

But most of the time Stuart just jerked off to normal porn, for normal people, as often out of boredom as lust. And the more he watched, the more it would take to get him there. Half an hour, an hour of limp-dicked tendonitis jerking, like a tennis player with one hypertrophic arm, until finally he found that one stray thought, that annihilation of self, just for a moment, followed by a dry heave from his cock, a secretion of slime into a tissue, then clarity, post-nut clarity, what the Japanese call “wise man time”, a microcosm of enlightenment, when a man is free of desire.

When Stuart was free of desire, he would recoil a bit at whatever thing he had been watching just then, kinetic sacks of flesh colliding against each other; gooey, slimy, sweaty, smelly. Thank God you can’t smell things through the screen. When he closed his eyes he’d see an after-image haunting his retinas, the shape of a woman, her legs splayed out, people fucking in whatever position he’d been watching at the moment of release.

And an hour later those same slimy kinetic things would start to appeal again, only a search away. He wanted a girlfriend, yes, but the internet, which could give him so many things, just by searching, food, porn, work, news, friends even, had thus far failed to deliver that. But porn felt almost like a girlfriend, and it was easier – so much easier – and sometimes it would even talk sweetly to him, or ask him to do things like a real girl would. He liked videos where the girls gave him a “girlfriend experience” – they’d talk like they knew him, ask if he wanted to go to the farmer’s market or remind him about an upcoming trip to visit her family.

“I know you’re traveling for business right now but I miss you so much, so I made this video for you. I hope you like it. I’ve never done anything like this before” – then they would say some other guy’s name. It was never his name. That’s not true, one time he found a vid where the girl said “Stuart” and he beat his dick raw to that. But any other name and he’d instantly realize it was fake. Fake tits, fake tan, fake hair, fake eyes, fake moans, fake affect, fake orgasms, fake!

And after a while something happened that Stuart couldn’t quite explain. No, that’s a lie, he could explain it, but he didn’t want to. It was because – or he felt like it was because – the porn he liked most was when the camgirls would dress up as characters from his favorite anime and video games, and they would wear so many layers of makeup and wigs and like costumey clothing that the actual woman in the video became totally secondary to her presentation as a sexual object via the symbols of sexuality that adorned her, such that those same symbols eclipsed any visible fact of her womanhood and ultimately rendered him indifferent to whether he was watching a woman or a certain type of young effeminate male (he wouldn’t say man, exactly).

And somewhere in those countless hours of watching a screen, it became just as easy to identify and project himself sexually onto a female-presenting young man as onto a young woman, easier even because the hardware matched. In the feedback loop and reciprocity of the screen, in his mirror neurons – or look: he just used that word to sound smart to himself, but he doesn’t really know – some number of hours spent watching videos of women doing sexual acts screwed up his whole sense of self and he could no longer really distinguish between being the object of his desire vs. desiring that object and he started to find that in order to actually get off he was imagining himself as a woman, but also as having a penis – it didn’t really make sense.

And this wasn’t helped at all by the proliferation of camgirls staring right at the screen encouraging you to pretend you’re a girl (a hot, nubile, sexy one, not one with broad shoulders and body hair and big hands and feet) and act out some pantomime of femininity. Honestly he’d swear it was a conspiracy of someone uploading all of these videos to plant the idea in people’s heads. But that was crazy, it was just capitalism, right? There was a demand for this kind of thing, a lot of guys must have wanted to watch videos of women ordering them to pretend to be women, so the market identified that demand and satisfied it. The market is one of those cursed genies that gives you everything you ask for but with horrible side effects, unintended consequences.

~

So it takes Stuart a while to even admit to himself that he is doing all this but eventually it becomes too big of a thing to deny, I mean he always clears his search history so there is no evidence on his own personal computer but the way he figures it, Google and Microsoft and Pornhub and whoever else all have to know, right? They have his IP address and they know what he searched for and there is bound to be some kind of database somewhere that correlates all of these things and puts them on your permanent record. So they know; someone knows; the cloud knows. His Amazon recommendations start filling up with dildos and rainbow socks.

He knows he doesn’t want this but he isn’t sure if that’s quite how it works, and he can’t stop himself anyway, not from watching the porn, not from the autogynephiliacal fantasies, but he is determined to be a rational man (or girl, he winces) about it and as much as he is kind of a shut-in, he isn’t totally blind to the zeitgeist and he knows where to find all the forums and reddits and “resources” for all of these things. One search away, just like the porn, just like food delivery searches, just like anything else.

Stuart searches and he finds more words than he could ever read in a lifetime; arguments, life histories, despair, sexual fantasies, scientific theories, pseudoscientific theories. A legion of lonely, depressed guys. Stuart makes a new reddit account (he doesn’t want to use his real name) and posts on a board for people who are questioning their sexual identity. He introduces himself and talks a little bit about his porn habits and how he has noticed that he has started imagining himself as a girl in order to finish.

Almost immediately he is met with a friendly response from someone called OPEN_SOURCE_GIRL_JUICE (gross) explaining that what he is feeling is extremely normal and that for a lot of people who have female gender identities the first way it comes to their attention is through sex and sexuality. OSGJ tells him that your gender is something distinct from your genitals or even your body in any sense, that not everyone’s gender matches their body, and that if you feel like you’re a girl or a boy or something that doesn’t even fit into the binary at all, that’s something you can discover for yourself based on your own feelings. No one can tell you what your gender identity is but you, and some people might even feel like they’re a girl with a penis, but some might not.

And Stuart thinks about this and he clicks through some of the links that OSGJ sends him that talk about sex and gender and accepting your true authentic self, but he isn’t really sure about it, isn’t sure what to do. He’s heard about the concept of gender identity before but he’s never really taken it seriously, never paused to actually look inside of himself to interrogate the distance between his own gender and sex, and now he starts to feel that it’s potentially something he has to uncover about himself, almost like a quest in a video game.

So he starts constantly and maybe even a little bit desperately questioning himself to try to figure out if he “feels like” a girl or a boy or something else in between, but it feels more like looking into an infinity mirror, two mirrors pointed at each other, reflections of reflections of reflections, and nothing feels real. It seems like the more he questions it, the more dysphoric he becomes, as if the act of asking the question, as if even the serious consideration of the question causes dysphoria to be the answer.

He knows a little bit about Buddhism, they have a concept called Skandha, which is something that you cling to as part of your consciousness but which isn’t part of the ultimate nature of reality. It’s only a facet of the illusion that traps us in the cycle of reincarnation. The five Skandhas are impressions, sensations, perceptions, mental activity, and consciousness; if the initiate can let go of all of these, then what remains is their true, ultimate self, which is nothingness, which is everything, everything in the world. His gender identity (as such) feels a bit like that, like the people on the trans-curious subreddit are asking him to have faith in something immaterial and ineffable.

One of the things they say is that femininity and masculinity are performances that are conditioned by culture, and that all the things he likes and finds sexually attractive like dresses and eye makeup and certain ways of moving or talking are all only incidentally feminine, that he’s been taught by society to perform masculinity but he could just as well perform femininity, and the performance is a facet of his gender identity but that it ultimately, again, comes down to what he feels on the inside with this faculty that they assure him he has, however confusing it might be.

Another poster tells him it’s ok to experiment with different things when he’s trying to understand him- or her-self and suggests that if there’s some attribute or performance of femininity that resonates with him, he should just act it out and see how it makes him feel.

The aesthetic archetypes of porn – the cheerleader, the gamer girl with her controller and aquamarine hair and ahegao face, the office slut in her nylons and pencil skirt, the milf, the schoolgirl, the step sister in a sheer white tank top and pink panties, the goth girl, the brat – are all performances, all culture, all incidental – but they are signposts that can potentially point him to something real about himself.

~

And so but as uncomfortable as it feels he goes online and from the privacy of his house he buys makeup and a wig and a dress and black high heels in man’s size eleven from some kind of online drag queen emporium and he even buys girl’s underwear and he watches videos on youtube about how to contour his face and try to make his jaw and his nose look smaller and more feminine. He gets all dressed up and dolled up and takes a selfie and posts it for his new friends online to look at.

They all upvote him and tell him how pretty and cute and hot he is and call him a queen and a fox and etc., but he feels more like a hooker and when he looks in the mirror all he can see is his square jaw and his big hands and his five o’clock shadow that he gave himself razor burn trying to get rid of that is still somehow is visible through his many layers of foundation.

The clothes he is wearing are uncomfortable. They squeeze him awkwardly in certain places; they’re too slack in others. He had to stuff his bra with crumpled up paper to make the dress hang right, or kind-of right. Stuart can feel the weight of his makeup and wig on his skin. He feels like a bonsai tree, all these constraints bending him into a different shape.

But he’s done all this, and it took him a while, and he realizes that he has perhaps unintentionally tried to embody to his own sexual or pornographic ideal of a woman, so he decides to take her on a date. He sprays on a little perfume and calls a cab, and when he gets in and out of the same, he’s a little wobbly in his heels, but they make his ass lordotic and they give him just a slightly more feminine gait.

Stuart goes to a bar and orders a drink, sits alone and feels like everyone is staring at him. The bartender is obviously a little uncomfortable (or is he projecting?) but he stays professional and everything seems to go ok. He looks around and when anyone tries to make eye contact with him, he immediately looks down out of embarrassment.

Then something unthinkable happens – a girl sits down at the bar next to him and starts talking to him. She has dyed blond hair with visible dark roots, and she’s a little overweight maybe, not terribly, just a bit of a paunch visible underneath her little black dress. She’s not as hot as the girls in his favorite pornos of course but she’s real, tangible, right in front of him. She asks him his name and he stutters because somehow he’d never thought of it until this exact moment, and he says it’s Candy – Candace, it’s short for Candace. And he is extremely self-conscious that he says it with a male cadence and timbre but the girl doesn’t seem to care.

She says her name is Mandy – Amanda, Candy and Mandy, isn’t that fun? She even buys him a drink, says they should be drinking cosmos. She does most of the talking, and he doesn’t pay really close attention, honestly, because nothing like this has ever happened to him before, a girl sitting next to him in a bar talking to him like his friend or something. She’s going on about some TV show, and how her other friend ditched her tonight so she decided to come out alone and she’s so glad she did, she thinks it’s so cool and interesting how he – Stuart, Candy, OK – isn’t afraid to be herself in public like this and it’s really just such a great thing. They take some selfies together and she posts them on her socials.

As he drinks more he starts thinking about touching her – that if he is a girl, he’s a lesbian or something, but he doesn’t touch her, though she touches him on the arm, not in a sexual way he doesn’t think, but it feels really good anyway. He wants to go home and beat off about it. Eventually and despite him saying almost nothing the whole time, Mandy tells him she would love to see him again some time, introduce him to all her girlfriends, they’ll have a real girl’s night out, and she gives him her phone number and also takes his.

He goes home feeling giddy and dazed and horny, and he laughs kind of mockingly at himself that his date was a success and he will in fact get lucky, and pulls up a porno on his laptop and stops at the first blond girl with dark roots, hikes up his dress and beats off still in full costume, thinking about Mandy, Candy and Mandy, sweet like candy, jawbreakers lollipops gumballs gumdrops. He comes so hard it feels like the first time.

~

Stuart goes back to the trans reddit and tells them about his date night. He asks for advice on how to move and talk more like a girl. He tells them how much he loved feeling feminine. They tell him to take female hormones, but he feels embarrassed to go to a doctor and get a prescription, so they help him buy them from a shady Russian site using Bitcoin.

Sometimes when he takes the estradiol it makes him nauseous or dizzy, or gives him a headache, but he grows tits and hips, and he wishes it would stop his hair growth and shrink his feet and hands and jaw. The hormones also kill his sex drive and give him erectile dysfunction, but he jerks through it. Probably he sodomizes himself but let’s not dwell on it. His orgasms become more diffuse throughout this body, his emotions feel more immanent, and math and logic get harder.

He keeps going by Stuart when he works his job as a cashier at a retail store, and he wears a baggy shirt to hide his body. When he gets home, he’s Candace again; it’s like coming home to his girlfriend after a hard day of work. He becomes his own girlfriend, and she always gets all pretty to greet him. He buys her flowers on the way home. She makes him a roast in the slow cooker. Smells good, honey. He dotes on her a bit. The picture of domesticity.

One weekend, he dresses up and goes to a drag show with Mandy and her friends. The men performing on stage there are like him; male underneath their clothes and their affectations. He thinks about how they are “performing gender,” and it’s just like in the porn he likes, the goal is to stack so many symbols of femininity that you eclipse the actual fact of the person. Really, all those skirts and neon wigs and stiletto boots are Skandha – forms and illusions that obscure his real ultimate self underneath, whatever that is.

All those same symbols are the only reason his new girlfriends like him. If he took off the dress and let his stubble grow out they wouldn’t even recognize him, would never have talked to him, never given him the time of day. But he pushes that thought deep down inside. What is his “ultimate self” anyway? There’s no evidence that exists. He drowns this thought in some kind of fruity mixed shot with vodka and passion fruit at the intermission to the show. In the lobby with all his besties, they giggle and laugh and one of the drag queens, dressed like magenta dayglow dominatrix satan, comes out and mocks them and compliments Stuart on his tits.

The way Mandy and her friends treat him feels great, like he’s really just one of the girls. They tease him that Lucifera likes him, and maybe… but that doesn’t feel right. Somehow he can’t quite work up the courage to tell them he’s into girls, like that would spoil the fantasy, and they’d just see him as a creep or a loser. Like they praise him for his authenticity and that should mean he can be honest with them, but with some subconscious part of himself he knows it wouldn’t be well-received.

After the show, Mandy has him come back to her house with him, and they are both very drunk, and she tries to fondle him under his dress. But between the liquor and the estrogen and his nerves, he can’t even get to half-mast. She passes out, annoyed, and he calls a lyft and goes home, mortified. They never talk about it.

A lot of these uncertainties and doubts and discomforts, he thinks, come from a kind of physical incongruence to what his soul feels. That no matter what kind of gender performance he gives, there will always be that glaring, bulging fact of his penis, his “true self” (despite whateveryone says) reminding him he’s an impostor, sitting uncomfortably between his legs no matter how he tries to situate it, mocking him with its obstinacy.

Naturally, his online friends tell him to have it removed.

~

Candace does some research on “gender affirmation surgery” – the online brochures and pamphlets are always so carefully worded, so positive, so upbeat. Even when they’re describing the details of the surgery they manage to make it sound cheery, like they’re walking on eggshells, like their audience is made up of people on the brink of violence or despair. All the official documents and websites she finds tell her how happy she’ll be after she gets her surgeries, and there are before-and-after pictures where it looks just like any normal vagina she’s seen in porn.

She watches a video, several videos, of the procedure. Peritoneal Pull-Through Vaginoplasty. A video taken from the inside of a patient’s body using laparoscopy. Orchiectomy. Surgical scissors cutting through flesh like saran wrap. Slicing down the length of the penis, inverting it, flaying it, if we’re being quite honest. Slicing away the tip of the penis with a scalpel until it’s clit-sized, sewing it to the top of the neovagina.

But the picture painted by the resources his new friends give him just feels too rosey, the way they talk about all the satisfied customers, that the average post-op transwoman rates her happiness with her new vagina at a 5.9/7, like they’re rating an uber driver, not the man who just sliced and diced their cock like a sushi chef with a geoduck. So Candace looks for anti-trans forums, for people who will tell her the other side, and she finds stories about repeated collapse of the vagina, about anal fistulas, vaginal aplasia, the excruciating pain of dilation, how for the rest of her life she’ll have to insert a rubber cone into her inverted penis vagina and stretch it out or else it will close up.

And also it’s not as if any of this produces a cervix or a uterus. Melanesian islanders who witnessed airdrops of supplies during World War II developed entire religious practices around pantomining the airdrop procedures of US soldiers. They put on uniforms, did parade drills with wooden rifles, built runways and signal torches, wore headphones carved out of wood while sitting in fake control towers. None of this ever caused the US military to airdrop more supplies. The mtf neovagina is like that, inert headphones made from the wrong materials, a vagina carved out of a penis, a cargo cult of femininity, a cul-de-sac to nowhere in which the sack is literally culled.

She reads a story about how people can smell the stench of the the thing even through clothes, even after a fresh shower, the smell of bacteria and death and feces. 60% of gender affirmation surgeries have complications that require follow-up operations to correct, but most of those, the brochures assure her, are “minor.” And she feels like both the accounts of the doctors and the detractors have their own agendas, but that night she has a nightmare about a doctor’s office, where she’s laying on an operating table and the doctor is using a hammer and nails to nail her down so she can’t move while he’s cutting her up, no anaesthesia, blood shooting out of her body, screaming in pain.

Anyway she wakes up and all the phantom dream pain is gone, but the emotional pain is still there, and for that matter she constantly feels like she’s teetering on the brink of catastrophe, anxious over nothing and everything. And it starts to feel like her penis really is the source of all her problems, that if it were just gone then she would be free to be the woman she is inside, and all this doubt and sadness and fear would go away. That she has been lied to her whole life and this one magical redemptive act will wash away all the lies.

Even though she doesn’t have a very good job, the big company she works for will pay for her to see a doctor about her transition, for surgery, all of it, because they are committed to being a force for positive change in the world. Candace navigates through the company’s internal website and is able to make a virtual appointment at a gender clinic that very same day.

On the call with the psychiatrist, she explains that she’s been on grey market estrogen pills for half a year already, that she lives as a woman in her personal life but she has opted to continue presenting as male at work because she feels shame and embarrassment about it and has been worried about how she would be accepted by her coworkers. She’s confident enough as a woman and feminized enough that the shrink agrees to fast-track her surgery.

But the videos and the reading she’s done about gender affirmation have scared her and scarred her too much, so she doesn’t want a neovagina or any such thing; instead she opts for what’s called a nullification, for her penis and testicles to be removed, so she’ll have a crotch like a barbie doll. She knows it might sound crazy but the thought of it, the risks, the complications, the idea of the smell and the pain of it is all too much. In the future, if she really changes her mind, she knows she can opt to have a vagina fabricated out of tissue from the sigmoid colon, but for now, this is all she wants.

In fact she has one more request, and when she meets with her surgeon, she explains it and makes him promise: if he can remove them intact, she would like to keep her organs as a kind of memento. The surgeon tells her this is unusual but possible.

On the day of the surgery, she checks herself into the hospital. As she’s waiting to be called into the pre-operative holding area, she hears a voice in her heart, not quite her voice, but not not her voice either. It simply says. “Stuart. Don’t do this.” Nerves, pre-op butterflies. The next hour goes like a blur, as she’s placed in a hospital bed, given an IV, injected with various drugs. The last thing she remembers she’s trying to tell a nurse about the John Frum cult. When she wakes up, her front is all wrapped up in bandages like half of a diaper and, along with a prescription for oxycodone, they give her a styrofoam ice chest to take home, sealed with medical tape, biohazard sticker on the front.

Mandy picks her up at the hospital and drives her home, helps her get into bed, but neither one of them know what to do with the ice chest and the penis. Candy says she’ll figure it out in the morning, and has Mandy put it in the fridge, the whole ice chest, which she does, and then she goes home.

The drugs they gave Candy still haven’t worn off yet, and normally this would be the part of the day where she chokes one out before falling asleep, and despite the seeming complexity or diciness of that proposition, she has a plan. In fact she has lined up some premium and expensive handsfree erotic hypnosis porn, which she listens to for an hour and manages to get there. This is the future, she thinks, this is the way. She’s some kind of dickless Bodhisattva. She’ll write a best-selling book called The Cumless Cum. Or The Cockless Cock, something like that. She’ll be the patron Buddha of aces and queers. But none of that happens of course.

As she’s falling asleep, she wonders what to do with her penis. Formaldehyde? Shrink it, cure it like a shrunken head? Stuff it and mount it over her mantlepiece, wear it around her neck like a talisman? Roast it and eat it in some the kind of weird autocannibal ritual. Sell it on the internet. Dehydrate it and crush it into powder and snort it? That’s weird. Just weird. Sleep takes her.

~

When she wakes up in the morning, her whole body feels inflamed, most especially her pelvic region, and she has two oxycodone pills for breakfast before checking on her now severed anatomy. But when she opens the fridge, Candace finds that the styrofoam ice chest is on its side, the lid torn off, and huddling in the corner of the fridge, shivering, barely conscious, is a homunculus about the size of her fist, a tiny misshapen human growing out of the back of her cock and balls, her (former) organ looking comically large on this little person.

She thinks this must be a dream or a delusion from the painkillers, but she’s never heard of anything like this before, never imagined it, can’t even begin to process it really especially as the oxy start to soften the pain of her surgery. “Everything is fine,” she says, “and everything is going to be fine.”

She picks up the little homunculus and holds it in the palm of her hand, and its skin is cold to the touch, so she cradles it in both hands and holds it to her chest and tries to warm it up. She can’t explain this and to be honest she doesn’t even try. Somehow, within one day of being a girl, she has skipped courtship and pair-bonding and even sex and pregnancy and fallen right into motherhood. What will she call this child? She’s a virgin still, but in truth she hasn’t even conceived this baby, let alone given birth to it. It’s more like mitosis, asexual reproduction, like a eukaryotic cell splitting in two.

The homunculus warms up and even nestles into her a little bit, right between her breasts. Candy wonders if she should try to nurse the child; after all she has tits now, though her body is full of oxycodone, but she doesn’t think any milk will come out in any case, and the baby doesn’t seem interested. When she holds him closer to her nipple, he turns his tiny head away, with disgust almost. Or maybe she’s imagining it. But he curls back up against her and falls asleep.

Something maternal stirs in her, and she puts it on her bed and tucks it in, wrapped up in her blankets so it will stay warm, and then she goes and lies down on her couch. Maybe she won’t be a Buddha so much as a Virgin Mary. Her parents were catholics and she still remembers how to pray the rosary. Maybe she’ll call the baby Stuart. Stuart the second, even.

She falls asleep on the couch in a haze, wakes up late in the night, pops two more oxies and goes to check on her baby. Or on her cock. On Stuart the second. He’s still there, wrapped up in his blankets, but he’s grown much bigger now, and he’s the size of a real infant, maybe ten pounds, still sleeping, still nude, still with his comically oversize penis of a fully grown adult male. She’d better take him to the doctor, if she’s going to do this thing, so she makes an appointment through her phone, in a few days.

The next morning, the child is even bigger, toddler size, and it gets up and starts crawling around. Candy has the week off from work and she keeps taking her oxycodone, orders some Thai food delivery. By the time it arrives, Stuart has taken his first steps and she notices he already has all of his teeth. He picks the chicken out of her phad thai, doesn’t touch any of the other food, goes back to sleep. She tries to hug him but he pulls away. “Don’t touch me,” her penis says. “That’s not who you are any more.”

By the end of the week, Candy’s penis is a grown man, the same as when she was a man, before she started taking hormones. He’s wearing her old, male-presenting clothes, and for the first time, she sees how she must have looked from the outside. Skinny-fat, spindly arms, sickly pale, curiously over-developed right forearm. Her penis has a spark in its eye though, something she feels like she never had. He stands up straight, good posture. He’s cocky. Cockier than she ever was.

Stuart – her penis – doesn’t sleep in the same bed with her – he sleeps on the floor. Candy is back in her working life now, fully out as a woman, and the first day she comes home from work, she finds her cock doing push-ups, shirtless in the middle of her small living room. Her house, which is normally filthy, is clean. He’s vacuumed the floors and thrown away all the trash and re-arranged the furniture. He has pride in himself.

A few months pass and her cock has a job stocking shelves at a big box store; he’s gained weight and his arms and back are starting to look strong, his hair is cut short in a military style, and his skin is tan. He goes out in the evenings and doesn’t come back until late. One night he brings home a girl and bangs her on the couch. It’s loud and it wakes Candace up from her sleep, but she’s cut off from her balls and has lost all sexual desire, all initiative. She doesn’t even complain. Truth is, she’s intimidated.

She hears the girl asking her cock about the other room, and he says that’s just his weird roommate. He doesn’t know how much longer she’ll be around.

Their – no, her, no – Stuart’s – no — Candace’s parents come visit him for the first time in two years. Her penis invited them. They don’t even acknowledge her, don’t talk to her, it’s like she’s not even there. Her father doesn’t see her but he’s beaming. He’s so proud of his son. Stuart, not Candy. She’s never seen him so proud. He (her father) tells him (her penis) how strong he looks, how athletic. The apartment is so clean. The three of them leave to have dinner together.

In a way, Candace doesn’t even mind so much. She’s free of all desire, all suffering. Maybe she’s escaped Samsara, let go of the five Skandhas. Suddenly she realizes she never changed the name on her lease, and that legally, her penis is the real tenant. Maybe she’ll walk out into the street, sing in the rain, vanish forever, die ignominiously. Now I put it to you, my friend: who cut off what exactly?