Middle

Middle Craig Shaw Growing up the lone survivor ofan Intrepid Airways jet that plunged thirteen thousand feet into waveless salt water only eight minutes after takeoff (dropping out of the sky like a bird perforated with buckshot and smacking the flat ocean so hard with its fuselage that the passengers, all wearing seatbelts, were torn in two at the waist), and surviving only because his mother's plump upper body was thrown against halfofan equally fat passenger to cushion his infant body from the impact (pinioning him between them like the unborn fetus of Siamese twins, and later serving as grim buoys on which he lay afloat for hours in the gently rocking water until rescue boats arrived), left Trip Pfingsten the victim of an invisible disfigurement. He always needed to be in the middle of a crowd, never on its periphery. He could only drive in the middle lane of a highway; he could only rent apartments on a building's middle floors; he couldn't sit in aisle seats at movies or be first or last in a line. And he could only achieve orgasm with two women at once, one wrapped around his back and the other backed against his chest, preventing him from thrusting incrementally toward the edge of the bed, beyond which lay, in the half-awake state in which he spent most of his nights, the blood-dark water and debris ofhis childhood catastrophe. Trip discovered his sexual penchant at a high-school dance. He rarely missed school, feeling at home in the overcrowded classrooms and halls, but his freakish stature (he had topped out, at age sixteen, at six-feet-eightinches , as ifthe accident that had halved his parents had perversely doubled his dormant height gene) made him an outcast, and while a certain kind of woman—quiet, wily, a sexual experimenter—was attracted to him, Trip avoided romances, knowing since puberty that his penis was oblivious to stimuli. Trip blamed it on his infant genitalia's prolonged exposure to cold ocean water, and had decided long before the dance that sex, like parents, was a luxury he would have to live without. But as he danced the box step that night with a fellow outcast—he had steered his date to the most tightly packed part of the gymnasium—another couple's clumsy footwork left the second girl's shoulder pressed against Trip's spine with no space to sidestep. Trapped between the two women, Trip felt his penis, which had never before 47 48CRAIG SHAW stirred even at the most provocative pornography or heaviest petting, bound off his leg and test the strength of his zipper. By the time he reached the bathroom, doubled over to prevent a rupture, the erection was fading, but he got to look at it for a half-minute before it wilted. Sitting on the toilet seat, sex organ alive between his legs at long last, Trip began to envision a future for himselfdifferent from the one he had grudgingly grown to accept; this future had photographs propped on a mantelpiece and rumpled pillows at the head ofa bed; and ifthe bed held three pillows instead ofthe standard two, and ifhis head in the portraits was framed by a pair offaces, that only meant there would be more love to go around. It took several years before Trip realized his dream. After graduating high school, he moved to the nearest city, claimed what little ofhis parents' insurance settlement that hadn't been squandered by the wastrel relatives who had taken him in as a child, and spent the rest ofthe money experimenting with prostitutes, two at a time. The hookers willing to do "couples" were hard-bitten , often twice his age, and far more interested in sex with fellow prostitutes than with him, making Trip watch from a chair as they bit and fisted and finger-fucked one another. But before taking his thousand dollars, they'd let Trip climb in between them and dry-hump one's buttcheeks while the other played with his testicles, and in this way Trip experienced his first orgasm, his semen trailing stem-like up the hooker's backbone to...