Herod—why he was named that, no one ever satisfactorily explained—had been married three times. “Veteran of the domestic front,” he sometimes said, swirling a glass of indifferent supermarket Tempranillo as though he were a man with medals. In truth he left each marriage not with medals but with scar tissue. Little invisible welts of habit and disappointment. A small tic at the corner of the mouth. A suspicion that the universe might be, as a whole, rather unimpressed with him.
He had not meant to become a masturbator of distinction. He would have preferred other distinctions. A solid marriage. A thriving consultancy. A nicely honed physique. Even a reputation for good roasts on a Sunday would have done. But life deals the cards it deals, and Herod had learned to play the hand he held—or, at least, play with the hand he held.
At first it had been the usual thing: an efficient 2–3 times a day, ten minutes a session. A functional business. The emotional equivalent of a sandwich at your desk. Herod would zip up, wash hands, and get on with the day. He almost admired his own industriousness.
But then came the long evenings. The silences in the flat that absorbed even the radio static. The great territories of unoccupied time. It was then that Herod began to refine his craft.
Thirty minutes became normal. Then four sessions in a day. He read things online—reviews, practically—about pacing, lighting, mood, breathing. He experimented with scented candles he claimed were on clearance. He became, God help him, a connoisseur.
And then, like all hobbies pursued too intensely, it evolved. An afternoon tommy tank might take three hours and fifteen minutes. A quiet, meditative fugue of exploration and overthinking. He’d finish a bottle of wine beside him and barely notice. In the evening, after a few more glasses, the whole thing could stretch to four or even five hours. “A marathon of self-appreciation,” he joked once to the empty room. The room, sadly, did not laugh.
Was this good? Was this bad? It was certainly something. It was difficult, Herod reflected, to call it a hardship. He had known hardships—solicitor fees, estate agents, conversations that began with we need to talk. By comparison, a four-hour wank was practically a holiday in the Algarve.
But still: what did it mean? What did this excessive self-love say about the state of Herod’s psyche?
Was it an anguished cry for help from a man grown weary of an uncaring world? A displaced longing for connection, intimacy, warmth?
Or was it simply… bliss? A quiet, absurd, inexpensive contentment? Why scour the earth for transcendent love when one could locate a reasonably decent simulacrum in the privacy of one’s bedroom?
Some afternoons, Herod believed he was spiritually lost, drifting on a sea of sticky metaphor. Other afternoons, he thought himself a monk of the flesh, a contemplative, plumbing the mysteries of the self.
And some evenings—after the wine, after the candles, after the long, spiralling, faintly operatic performance—he simply lay back and whispered, to no one at all:
“Well… that was nice.”
And for a man named Herod, who had known three marriages and three disappointments, perhaps that was miracle enough.
