Separation Anxiety by R.A. Roth

True to form, Fenton Hamish fell apart on a Monday. First, his dick fell off. Next his ears and nose fell off.

“Fell off” was an anachronism. Nobody said “fell off” anymore.

The phenomenon had been going on for so long doctors had developed specialized jargon to enhance the terror of it all.

When body parts fell off they were said to have “differentiated.” Doctors then coined the term Differentiation Syndrome (DS), and clinics specializing in the treatment of DS sprouted up almost overnight—thousands of white walled, sterilized dungeons where terrified victims were subjected to further medieval torture at the hands of quacks, con men, and profiteers—or so Fenton had read online. Fenton had no firsthand knowledge of the condition. In fact, his first exposure to the frightening reality of DS, the first for a majority of Americans, didn’t happened until President Andrea W. Simmons, the third woman to ascend to the highest office in the land, had her whole right arm differentiate in the middle of a gesture during the State of the Union Address. President Simmons picked up the differentiated arm in the dignified manner of a true leader and went off script:

“I think this illustrates in bold terms that Differentiation Syndrome is a disease without social or economic borders, a disease that affects us all. America must lead in the fight to curtail the rampant, unmitigated spread of DS. I will not rest,” she said, shaking the differentiated arm at the camera, “until we have found a cure for DS and eradicated this terrible disease once and for all!”

The Joint Session of Congress rose as one, and Fenton’s surround sound system erupted in a thunderous white avalanche of applause. Not a soul was seated, except for the wheelchair bound, the excessively old and the senior senator from the great state of Texas, Sheldon Marks, whose left leg had differentiated while filibustering a bill to extend disability benefits to victims of DS.

Six months to the day on a Monday morning, Fenton suffered the aforementioned differentiations.

The alarm went off. After hitting snooze four times, Fenton surrendered and got up. He went into the bathroom to pee. When he pulled out his dick, it came off in his hand. The event was no more painless than popping a pimple. But the idea that his dick was now and perhaps forever unmoored from his body was extremely—not upsetting but unsettling—for, as an experiment, he treated it to a few loving strokes, and lo and behold, his dick rose to the occasion. Moreover, the feelings of arousal were transmitted to his brain as though the differentiated dick were still attached.

The possibilities were endless, and endlessly disturbing.

Half an hour later, as Fenton showered and stared with day-dreamy detachment at his dick resting in the shower cozy, his nose differentiated and tumbled lopsidedly to the edge of the rusty drain, ripe with the stench of rotten eggs and soap sludge, smells which were transmitted to his brain through the same wireless connection that permitted sensual awareness. When he bent over to fetch his nose, his ears differentiated and splatted painlessly on the bottom of the tub. Apparently, each differentiation had its own set of rules. Ears were insensate, nothing more than decorative instruments, while noses, part of the olfactory system, served a purpose. Dicks, it went without saying, were entirely unique and valuable on every conceivable level, even if used sparingly.

After a long contemplative body rinse, Fenton rinsed his ears, nose and dick, separately, in the bathroom sink, as if there were any other way to rinse them ever again, and stashed them in a plastic bag normally used for vitamins. He looked up from the sink to the mirror, hampered by steam, and yelped at the smeary Phantom of the Opera staring back at him. The phantasmal reflection made one thing clear: showing his naked face in public was a recipe for being hunted down by angry villagers wielding pitchforks and torches. He’d have to augment his appearance accordingly.

For the first time in a decade as the chief payables clerk for Teed Off, Chicago Land’s largest manufacturer of golf tees and related golfing supplies, Fenton’s arrived at work early. He stored the bag of differentiated parts in a locked drawer, then retreated to the break room to slurp coffee through a thin straw and stare longingly at the pastry he bought but had lost his appetite for.

“Little early in the week for casual Friday,” said Quentin, a coworker in the payables department.

“Can you hear me through this thing?” Fenton said through the pinched aperture in the Yoda mask. It was either that or a vintage Michael Myers mask he inherited from an eccentric uncle.

“I can hear you just fine.”

“That’s good to know.”

“So, uh, any troubles at home you’d like to share?”

“Nope. Still happily unattached—” Fenton stopped speaking, considered never speaking again.

“You lose something?” Quentin said with heavy-handed emphasis.

He shoved the pastry toward Quentin. “Have a long john,” Fenton said.

“You should talk about it.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Show me then. Like show and tell without the tell.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea. What if somebody sees?”

“Let ’em see. Even better, charge them to see. C’mon, Fen. Show me what the big bad DS fairy took from you.”

“All right. Wait here.”

When Fenton retrieved the bag from his drawer, the environment within had changed radically, from clear and dry to a hazy tropical paradise beaded and streaked with humidity. All that was missing was the scent of tropical-themed drinks wafting up his nostrils and the sound of the ocean lapping the shorelines of his ears as a chiseled, muscular beach bully kicked sand on his dick.

“Aloha,” Fenton said as he showed Quentin the sweaty bag.

“Are you nuts?” Quentin snatched the bag from Fenton and unsealed the zip-lock. “You have to let them breathe or they’ll die.”

“I never heard that before.”

“Cousin of mine had a foot differentiate on a treadmill on Black Friday. Messed him up pretty bad. The paramedics bagged the foot and forgot about it. It died a day later. The death of the foot triggered a differentiation shit storm. By Christmas, he was all over the place. DS is nothing to fuck around with, man. Get your ass to a differentiationologist and sort that shit out before it gets worse.”

That Fenton should commit himself to the care of a DS clinic had crossed his mind the way being axe murdered in the woods crosses one’s mind on a camping trip.

“DS clinics are run by barbarians,” he said and repeated some of the popular horror stories that had done the rounds on the internet, stories of parts sewed onto the wrong patient, parts misplaced, parts taken by roving gangs of differentiation specialists called diffnappers. Fenton wondered what the ransom on a dick would run him. More than he’d made in a lifetime probably.

“That’s all bullshit,” Quentin said. “Believe what I’m saying and get your ass there, right now. There’s one two blocks down on Ashland.”

“By the Hoagie Palace?”

“Two doors over. You can’t miss it. Tell them I sent you.”

“You?” Fenton was astonished.

“Yeah, me.”

“Which?”

“Right hand.”

“I never noticed.”

“First law of human nature is that nobody ever notices good plastic surgery, only shitty plastic surgery. Now scat. I’ll cover for you. ‘He’s in the bathroom.’ ‘Just missed him.’ ‘He’s off tossing one in Patty from receivables.’”

“If I tossed one in anybody, I might never see it again.”

In secret amusement, Fenton watched through the eye-holes as Quentin winced, crossed his legs and lapsed into a spastic sort of pain-related potty dance. He could’ve let Quentin off the hook and told him it was a peaceful, practically painless differentiation, but right then Fenton prized comic relief more than the truth. “Goddamn,” Quentin said. “please say you’re lying.”

“Look for yourself.”

“Uh-uh.” The dancing settled into squirming so Quentin could hand over the sweaty plastic bag without dropping it, perhaps propelling Fenton’s dick under the refrigerator. “I’ll take your word for it.”

Fenton zipped up the bag, leaving a gap for air. “If there’s one thing I have learned from this experience,” he said, “it’s that my dick and ears don’t smell half as bad as the inside of this mask.”

Fenton barged inside Addison DS Specialists, annoyed. Was it too much to ask that he be left alone? Of course it was. It was the silliest thing one could ask of the world. Dumber than asking for your favorite dead relative to be resurrected whole or for better looks. The world didn’t do requests. It responded to stimuli. “Is that a mask?” several people asked as he walked to the clinic, and he let Yoda’s wizened grimace responded for him. Someone yelled from across Ashland, “Jedi training to finish, you have!” and Fenton waved at the yeller, a biker with a keen eye for the incongruity of a Yoda mask in July but blind to the absurdity of a full beard in July.

“May I help you?” said the clinic receptionist.

“Trick or treat,” Fenton said and held up the small bag of parts. Without rebuttal, the receptionist told him to take a number and have a seat.

The waiting room was full of people holding bags, except for an elderly gentleman who had the misfortune of having both arms differentiate. The arms were bundled in his wife’s lap, the disembodied hands gripping hers in terror. Fenton assumed she was his wife, since nobody but a wife could look so concerned for a man she looked about to murder. The only unoccupied seat was beside a one-legged woman. Based on the single leg, Fenton guessed she was a dancer, competitive runner, skier, or some other profession that demanded peak physical fitness, as well as two legs.

“Leg,” she said and pointed to the laundry bag in her lap. He noted the material was something which breathed.

Fenton pointed to the mask and said, “Ears and nose. Mostly.”

“First time?”

“Yes.”

“Me too,” she said. “I’m Lydia.”

Fenton offered his name.

“Fender?” she said.

“Fenton,” he said in a raised voice.

“Interesting name. I like it. But if it had been Fender, that’d be okay too.”

“Do you dance?”

Lydia recoiled demurely, a feminine feint to denote she was keenly aware that she’d been checked out. “How’d you ever guess?” she asked, as if she didn’t know.

“That is a very nice leg.”

“Nicer than the other one. Bitch fell off during a performance.”

“Don’t you mean it differentiated?”

“Doctors and their medical terms can kiss my ass.”

“What kind of dancing do you specialize in?”

“The kind that happens adjacent to a brass pole.”

“You’re a stripper?”

The waiting room came to a standstill. Certain words have that effect. Stripper is one of them. After a couple of sexually charged beats, the waiting room resumed its normal disinterest in the banal conversations of strangers.

“No,” Lydia said. “I’m an exotic dancer. I don’t take anything off.”

“Should I interpret that to mean you begin disrobed?”

“Interpret away, Fender Bender.” The contents of the laundry bag nudged Fenton in the thigh. “Pardon my leg,” she apologized. “It has a mind of its own.”

“You sure about that?” he said, conjuring the most suggestive lilt he could muster given the handicap of a Yoda mask.

“First you’re interpreting, now you’re implying. Insinuating can’t be far behind.”

“We’re past insinuation and well into innuendo territory.”

Fenton’s shirt pocket, where he’d stashed the bag of parts, expanded and bulged lewdly. Lydia noticed.

“Is that what I think it is?” she said.

They rushed in before Fenton could respond to Lydia’s question, as he had planned to respond, with manly diffidence and wide-eyed attention to the fact that he was en route to a sexual encounter if he played his cards right, if he didn’t (dare he go there?) cock it up. But then the goddamn diffnappers busted in and cold-cocked him. They took only those parts that were lucrative. Legs, arms, hands, feet, eyes, and, of course, Fenton’s dick. Differentiated dicks, Fenton later discovered, brought upwards of ten million on the black market, depending on length and girth. There was even a formula to determine probable selling price. Based on the formula, Fenton had a five-and-half-million-dollar dick. If he’d known that, he would’ve sold it himself.

Fenton crawled to his knees and helped Lydia up to her one. “That didn’t just happen, did it?” he said and Lydia said nothing. She was too frozen with terror to speak. “Are you all right?”

Lydia slapped Yoda in the left cheek for asking such a stupid question, and then she broke down. Fenton did the only thing he could do. He hugged her and told her everything was going to be okay. Which was a lie. But lies were at a premium. The truth could go to hell. The diffnappers had pinned the same generic, cookie-cutter ransom note to almost every diffnapping victim:

TELL THE COPS AND YOUR PART GETS IT! RETURN HOME. WE’LL BE IN CONTACT.

Except Fenton. Fenton’s note had been specially tailored for his circumstances:

YOU CAN’T AFFORD THE RANSOM. YOUR DICK IS GONE FOR GOOD. TRY TO GET ALONG WITHOUT IT.

The clinic undifferentiated Fenton’s ears and nose for free. It was a simple laser process. Seamless and painless. When he came out of surgery, the waiting room was empty. Everybody had gone home to await instructions from the diffnappers. He looked at the chair where Lydia had been sitting, where the elderly gentleman and his supportive but irritated wife had been sitting. It was all negative space now, untouchable and removed, like his dick. Parts or people, everything differentiates away from you eventually. It was the natural order of things.

That night, as Fenton ate leftover beef lo mein, a rush of stimulation flooded his brain. One of the diffnappers was tinkering with his dick. He felt soft hands manipulate and massage it to rigidity. The hands then inserted it in a warm, wet crevice and worked it in the usual fashion, in-out, in-out. He tried to guess where they had stuck his dick but he couldn’t. His dick was a blind worm navigating in darkness. That was more or less true when it was his sole property. Whether Fenton led his dick or his dick led him, it was the blind leading the blind. His list of ex-girlfriends was a rogues’ gallery of maladjusted users and sociopaths. Susie had cheated on him with a grad student she met at yoga class. Jackie left him for a roofer with a souped-up 1972 Maverick. Jean dumped him to play dyke for a year and then waltzed into the Metro arm-in-arm with a guitar player in a third-tier band that covered hits from the 1980s, predominantly REO Speedwagon and Journey. There were other examples, each more deflating than the next.

Then the in-out sensation ended un-dramatically, un-climactically.

Fenton felt the hands do a turnabout and go stiff as they tried desperately to stroke some life back into his dick, to no avail. His current arrangement was apparently a two-way street. They could fuck with him. He could fuck with them back. He wondered if the diffnappers might take out their frustrations on his dick, maybe throw it down a garbage disposal and hit the switch. Unlikely. His dick was a prized possession. A massive score. Six inches of solid gold. Okay, four, soft. But a stalwart, honest, upright four. No cheating or creative measuring techniques such as starting from the base of the asshole or making allowance for the curvature of the earth, or gravitational and tidal forces.

As Fenton washed his plate, he felt the hands cradling his dick as if it were a baby bird that had fallen out of the nest. “That’s okay, little fella,” the hands said, “we’ll take good care of you, nurse and nurture you to adulthood, help you reach your full potential.” He wasn’t buying it. It was a ploy to get him to cooperate, nothing more. What was in it for him? Nothing aside from a life underscored by sudden, unexpected erotic encounters with Lord knew who—or what.

“No deal,” Fenton said. “I don’t know if you can hear what I’m saying, and I don’t care, but I want a piece of the action. It’s my dick after all.”

He went to stash the plate in the drainer (he could’ve dried it, but he wasn’t the drying type) when the hands did something that caught him so off guard the plate slipped out of his hand and broke on the floor. His favorite plate. The one he’d eaten almost every meal off of for five years running. It wasn’t the kind of record a man should be proud of, but he nevertheless was. Picking up the pieces, he mentally reconstructed the message drawn on his dick one letter at a time with an index finger:

HOW MUCH?

“A third,” he said. “Nonnegotiable.”

The finger etched out a reply:

WE’LL TAKE IT UNDER CONSIDERATION.

Weeks bled into months, years. The diffnappers never contacted him, never paid him off. People were reliably disappointing. Diffnappers trebly so. Every now and then somewhere in the world a ghostly pair of hands plays with his dick, and he fights them with every ounce of his will.

Besides the periodic battle of wills, his life post-dick didn’t change radically.

He went to work.

He watched the Game Show Network.

He went to Cubs games and got shitfaced in the bleachers.

He even went on dates. Good dates with no pressure one way or the other. Lacking a dick put an end to the sexual tension inherent in dating. In fact, Fenton opened each date with the story of his diffnapped dick. It was a real winner. One that would have got him laid if not for its accuracy. His dates frequently asked what it felt like to be manipulated, stroked and toyed with by invisible hands. Some of them, he could tell, got excited at the prospect. Flushed cheeks. Bedroom eyes. The works. That’s the way it is with women. Sex is between the ears not the legs. He wished he’d figured that out sooner, when he still had a dick. But that’s life. Wisdom always comes with a price.

On the bright side, he never pays for dinner. His dates always pick up the check as an enticement to get him to drop his pants and show off his differentiation scar. Which he does. Sometimes he narrates the unveiling. “At certain angles, the diff scar resembles a tree stump surrounded by wild country,” he says. “At others, it looks like mesa wreathed in a boiling cascade of smoke.”

The sight of it always elicits an aww, the lower lip jutted into a pouty shelf. Some ask to put their mouth on it, and Fenton says, “Can’t hurt nothing,” and they don’t so much blow the stump as dart their tongue on the flat, faceless head then give up after a couple of minutes of nothing, and some look up at him as if they’d failed to perform a miracle or coax his dick out of hiding, as if it were a misanthrope, a hermit, or just shy around people—shy as a thing that isn’t there.

And then they part company, politely, and he never sees them again. They’d had their fun at the side show. One can only ogle a freak for so long before fascination is replaced by loathing.

For a goof, Fenton signed up for a dating service that catered to DS groupies. Under eccentricities he mentioned that his dick had been stolen by diffnappers. He got a thousand messages in an hour.

R.A. Roth’s work has appeared at The Molotov Cocktail, Noble / Gas Qtrly, Chicago Literati, Helen: A Literary Magazine, The Tishman Review and Tethered By Letters. His novella Tetraminion (Eraserhead Press, 2016) is available on Amazon. He farts around online under the Twitter handle @fantagor