Free Rust and Bone by Craig Davidson

particularly offensive strain of bacterium smeared across a specimen slide.
    Mitch Edmonds passes me a doodle: some guy with a gourd-shaped head in which a candle burns jack-o-lantern style, one eye twice outsizing the other, pumpkintoothed and drooling, squiggly stink-lines and bowtie flies and a speech bubble reading: You love it! You really, really love it!
    DR. CLIVE KETCHUM’S FERTILITY CLINIC is located in a neocolonial-style office building at the corner of Steeles and Yonge. I mount the steps leading up to a narrow hallway with hesitancy. Took a Xanax at lunch, another on the cab ride over—feeling no pain.
    Ketchum’s waiting area resembles a film noir movie set: a large, dim, oak-paneled room with high ceiling, frosted-glass valances, a white sand ashtray under a no smoking sign. The receptionist is young, petite, and blond, with prominent tits and an air of having woken this morning knowing in advance every move she’d make for the remainder of the day.
    â€œI have the five o’clock.”
    She consults the appointment book. “Mr. James Paris?”
    I tip her a wink, resisting—barely—the urge to flex.
    She leads me down a well-lit corridor into a spare antiseptic room. She gestures to an examination table and orders me to strip to my skivs before excusing herself.
    I hoist myself onto the examination table. Butcher paper crinkles under my thighs. A large medical illustration adorns the opposite wall: Scrotum and Contents . It’s all there: the superficial and external spermatic fascias, the tunica vaginalis, the epididymis and the testes, which, in this artist’s rendition, resemble capillary-threaded quail’s eggs. Disembodied tweezer-tips pinch and peel back to reveal strata of flesh and membrane and nerve.
    Dr. Ketchum enters. The man’s dimensions are those of a bowling pin, the majority of weight distributed to the hindquarters, and yet his body remains somehow insubstantial, as if stuffed with wadded newspapers.
    He flips open a dossier, nodding, then shaking his head. “You’ve been doing the exercises?” He performs a series of spread-legged knee bends, arms veed in front of him like a high diver. Ketchum contends this maneuver—the “gonad agitator”—will promote sperm production and, in tandem with other, uniformly unpleasant exercises—the “urethral tube widener,” the “scrotal exciter”—will have me shooting live rounds in no time.
    â€œI’ve been doing them.”
    â€œIt’s strange.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œStrange your sperm count hasn’t increased since the start of your exercise regimen.” He gives me a look. “It is my experience that men tend to baby their testes, usually as a result of early childhood trauma. But believe me when I say they’re terrifically hardy organs. My advice is to really push yourself. Make those testicles work for you. Give them hell, as it were.”
    â€œI’ve been giving them … hell.”
    â€œIs that so?”
    â€œIt’s been … a regular boot camp.”
    Dr. Ketchum chuckles perfunctorily. “Alright. The problem remains, James. Your scrotal sac is simply too hot . A blast furnace in there.”
    This is not new information. Five years ago, when our fledgling, lighthearted attempts at conception ended in failure, we blamed our lack of success on job stress, our recent relocation, a sheer lack of dedication to the task at hand. But as the streak lengthened, the finger of blame began to point wildly: the moon’s cycles/Alison’s low-protein diet/my pack-a-day habit/malevolent otherworldly forces. Alison visited a fertility clinic and, through a non-invasive, airy-fairy, casting-of-bones procedure I never truly understood, her womb was given a clean bill of health. Confusion and guilt propelled me to Dr. Ketchum’s office, where a violently invasive, teeth-clenchingly painful process