This is what the man from the chat room wanted:

He wanted me to park in the alley and enter his house through the kitchen door, which would be unlocked, and once inside, I would take an immediate right and find a door leading to an unfinished basement, and because there would be no light, I would need to descend the stairs slowly, very slowly, grasping the rail like a child learning to walk, and grope along the cinderblock wall until I found another door, behind which he would be laying on a sleeping bag, waiting for me in the dark.

No names, no faces: only our bodies. Total anonymity.

He explained that he taught biology at the university and had a wife who was away that weekend. He had the house to himself but he couldn’t take chances. The darkness was unconventional but necessary. For all he knew, I was a student of his. For all I knew, he was lying about the wife. Maybe he was living out a fantasy he'd harbored in secret for many years. I really didn’t care.

As the man spoke, the telephone receiver shook in my hand, and then there was a long silence that gave me the time I needed to consider the possible outcomes. On the one hand, I could break afternoon plans with my friends and meet up with this man, this stranger, and return to my little studio apartment and resume my life. I would tell nobody.

On the other hand, there were all the people who go missing each year, all the bodies pulled out of rivers and lakes, all the abandoned cars discovered off dirt roads and highways, the drivers’ remains never found. Was I willing to take my chances and join them? At that time in my life, my early twenties, I had a taste for sex that was so potent and intoxicating I could focus on little else. And the riskiness—that, too, was potent and intoxicating. But at that moment, I decided I was too young to roll the dice. The roads were covered in wet leaves.

Not today, I told him, and hung up.

*

There were others, but I didn’t know their names. I didn’t remember many of our conversations. I didn’t consider how responsibly or irresponsibly they behaved during the day, what professional jobs they held down, what civic duties they performed. I didn’t know what familial obligations they may have temporarily abandoned for my company. I didn’t remember the particularities of their bodies, and I didn’t remember their faces, either, how some wore glasses, how some had mustaches and others were clean-shaven, how some had smooth jaw lines and others had skin that was rough and scarred.

So when the physician at the health department asked me to provide details about the sexual encounters I’d had, I lied and told her I was always under the influence so I couldn’t offer an exact number. I met them at bars, I told her, too ashamed to admit I was a chat room junky and that it was easier for me to seduce men with words than with body language.

Minutes before, in the waiting room, I’d felt breathless, my heart racing, as if I was awaiting a verdict: I knew that I would be punished for the way I treated my body, punished with a venereal disease, and I knew that recounting the story of how I got there was part of that punishment. My own blood would be used as evidence, and all I knew to do was lie. My sexually repressive adolescence entitled me to lie.

But I suspect the physician knew better. She rubbed my hand and said, “This can be a turning point for you. You’re only twenty-four. This can be a chance for you to start over.” And she was right, because my blood work came back negative. I had a clean bill of health. Returning to my car, I probably should have scanned the parking lot for pennies, because I felt spared and lucky: my journey in this life wasn’t over.

It puzzles me still, that breathless anticipation I experienced at the mere prospect of meeting those strange men and the part of myself who is a stranger to me now. It was a mixture of excitement and fear, because even though I knew I was wrong to believe that this rebelliousness empowered me, I couldn’t resist: I couldn’t resist contacting the man from the chat room, agreeing to drive to his house in the rain, couldn’t resist breaking plans with my friends, couldn’t resist finding my way to the stop of his basement stairs, looking down into the darkness.

I couldn’t resist keeping another secret.

When I reached the bottom of the stairs, I heard him call out, “I’m over here.” I followed his voice and knelt to the floor, and the excitement was already beginning to subside, because I could already see myself climbing the stairs, sweaty and exhausted, and I could see myself slipping out the kitchen door into the chilly evening, ashamed, wondering how time had gotten away from me, again.