Self by Yann Martel

this shape.”
    I am straying from my point. At the age of which I am speaking, I went through this volume with wide open eyes and a beating heart and not a thought about the befriending of space aliens. I mention words and various diagrams that jumped out at me; these were only a prelude. What opened my eyes the widest, made my heart beat the hardest, were the photos. Black and white, headless, artless, bodies that could only be called ordinary — these photos couldn’t have been more clinical had they been of corpses in a morgue. Still, the nudity of these boys and girls, men and women, excited me deeply. To this day I remember the Adult Woman; I only wished I could see her face. I was sorry there wasn’t a single shot of an erect penis, adolescent or adult. I longed to see this pure expression of male desire, still couldn’t quite believe that such an extraordinary thing could be.
    My pleasure at this stage was visual. Occasionally I brought my penis into the show, pressing its softness against a picture that I particularly liked, but usually it was a simple bystander, no more. If, of late, I had involved it more in my enjoyment of the book, it was only because its new, slow growth of dark hairs made it more interesting to me. There was still no real connection between it and the pictures.
    But one day my hand happened to start a to-and-fro motion with my foreskin. I don’t know where the idea for this came from. I was not searching for anything, and I had certainly not received any advice. It was a common act of genius.
    The motion was distinctly pleasurable. I continued it, somewhat increasing the speed. Rapidly I had a taut erection, a new state of affairs. But I didn’t stop to consider it. A strange physical tension, a compelling ache, drew me on. “This isquite something,” I thought, breathlessly, not knowing what I was doing, where it would lead.
    I lay back on the bed. I half-closed my eyes. “Oh, this is really quite something.”
    Faster still.
    Then, in a spasm of physical tension, a response both fresh and ancestral was triggered by my body for the first time. A sort of convulsive exaltation overcame me, a rapture that pulsed through me in five waves, each one cresting in an explosive white gush from my penis.
    When it was over, I stared, drop-jawed and astounded. The stuff was all over my hand, my shirt, the book, my face, my hair, the wall behind me. It had a smell, a colour, a stickiness like nothing I had ever seen.
    I had no idea such pleasure was possible. My God, how could it be a secret?
    For a fraction of a second I wondered if this was normal. Quickly the thought vanished. If this was abnormal, then I was joyfully bound for the nether depths of abnormality. I looked again at the sperm-splattered book. Its authors suddenly became great, winking jokesters, going on so seriously about human reproduction. I laughed. So this was part of it. What a truly wondrous thing! Positively unearthly. A revelation. No wonder the earth was overpopulated.
    I cleaned up meticulously, though I could do nothing about the wrinkled spots on the page where the sperm had had time to seep in. I put the book back in exactly, precisely the position I had found it. I went to take a shower. This matter would have to be researched further, investigated, pursued. Why, right now, in the shower.
    Upon my discovery of masturbation the universe once again split into two. There was the human and there was the ecstatic. The task was simple: to accommodate the two. All my life I have sought to do this. Mostly I have failed.
    I met Sonya at a time when I was still hugging the walls of the school corridors, hoping to be invisible. Classes were just over and I was nervously on my way to being happy away from school. My hand was reaching for the bar of the double metal doors, for freedom, when I heard a breathless question behind my back.
    “You speak French, don’t you?”
    She was a girl in my grade but in a different class. She