It’s prodrome season at the boy aquarium. All I do anymore is watch.

Their big strong business fists, phoning in the revolution. Catch of the day, a still-buffering jester.

In sickness, I press a speaker against the glass. “I want your disease,” someone spits.

The other day, one of the boys asked me if psychopathy can be cured. I said no, not yet. But you could imagine it: the prefrontal implant, penetrating the brain and filling it with someone else.

It sounds sad when I put it like that. But don’t worry: Whimsy persists like a cockroach in lava. The exoskeleton, swollen with orange light. The blood plug. A careful inventory of oh my gods.

From sound alone, it’s tough to tell the knife from the dildo. Sometimes I leave my body during sex and when I come back, it’s like someone recorded my murder on a flip phone: tinny bursts of whiplash, that fake child’s voice reserved for wild animals, the glass like a knock-knock joke about a knock-knock joke about a germaphobe.

After he asked me about psychopathy, he sprawled out half-hard and watched me remove my own restraints. He always carried them in a ridiculous duffle, like a miner off to excavate hell.

Another called me from New York that night to tell me he wants to fly out and cheat on his wife. I told him that’s not how aquariums work, but he was drunk and kept referring to his dick as “this married cock,” as if he were the last living cryptid and I was supposed to snap a picture.

I’m not that kind of creep, though. I don’t take photos; I take samples. I already have his, labeled with his initials and the number 10. He used a condom, not to be safe, but to collect it for me, like rainwater for the thirst of nations. When he was done, I tied it off and tucked it in my purse, so I’d have something to report back about how to survive, something to savor off and on until sealed in the archive.

But that was 15 years ago, when the ocean leaked a lot more, and there were beached whales splashing the word “sperm” onto the papers, and I pretended to enjoy Moby Dick. Back then, I would have drilled through the glass just to know how it felt to be eaten.

I know that doesn’t make me unique. My whole generation was like that: any road trip, any storied gravesite, any elephant’s foot, any pop rocks and soda, any flip cup, any spin the bottle, any extended situationship with the devil himself, any antithetical attachment style, any spreader bar, any safe word, including none at all—we’d try anything at least once.

When I handle a specimen, it’s already contaminated. I don’t bother with rubber gloves anymore. In sickness, I get exactly what I want.

This is the origins story of every pervert: the fluids, the fish, the infinite feeding frenzy. I try to engage in the age-old tradition of flipping the couch cushion, but it’s stained both ways.

“Do you ever feel like you can’t stop watching?”

Mr. Psychopath had asked me to explain the term “gooning.” I told him it’s edging’s protestant cousin. He looked confused, so then I had to explain edging, too—how watching can become a sort of prayer without a request.

All I ever asked for is to be the whore who haunts. As a child, I must have cast a too-successful spell on myself. Against all odds, I beautified myself in time for the apocalypse, in time for the arrival of the four horse cocks, who hid themselves in thick fabrics for fear of being witnessed.

With every orifice leaking their demon glue, I watched him layer burlap on denim. I don’t even know who all this beauty is for. Nothing seems to be reserved for anyone anymore, but I keep collecting it anyway, just in case someone comes looking for it one day. And if no one else does, I will. I will take the bait when my phone shows me a memory slideshow of every dick I sucked in my 20s. I will memorize the catch in their snakelike throats, looping their orgasms through my headphones at the airport. I will pin down their momentary apotheosis like a moth on a spreading board and let its eyeball camouflage tickle the roof of my mouth until I can’t help but swallow it whole.

Sometimes the aquarium looks empty even when it isn’t, and that’s where the specimens come in—to remind me emptiness is a myth. I haven’t seen Mr. Psychopath since, but that doesn’t mean he’s not there, mere feet from the glass, obscured by artificial seaweed, bottom-feeding until he hits concrete. Even in death, his little labeled container will keep him safe.

“This guy sounds as married as the other one,” my novelist friend quips.

I try not to tell novelists much; whatever you tell them, they will polish and sell back to you through their agent. But I tell him just enough: The aquarium, the daily slideshow, the carousel of cocks—things that can be drained by overuse alone. I don’t tell him about the specimens, or the psychobabble, or that the natural endpoint of my sexuality is getting murdered. I don’t tell him the world is all aquarium now; it’s just a metaphor to him, a symptom of the law of excluded middle, where things are either real or unreal, strictly vehicle or strictly tenor, no in between. I don’t tell him because I can’t. I won’t. No one should. Novelists don’t deserve nonfiction.

Prodrome is just the beginning, of course. Novelists know this. But they seem to believe beginnings always lead to endings. I don’t correct them, but I know better. If you stay very still, save all the semen and skin flakes, if you open to any biblically accurate monster who knocks, if you keep shout-talking and refuse to shut up, if you replay the violence long enough, prodrome can last for eternity. If there is any ending worth watching, you won’t live to see it. Instead, before any real plot progression, the fantasy will simply manifest: the shard-spray, face-first, too fast to react. But eaten? That was teenage logic. In the real world, sharks will be busy drowning. Too busy to want you. Too busy even to stare.