When Jack awoke he was disturbed by all these contradictions, but more so because now he found that not only his own loins, but her loins, floated free in his dreams. Always in the dream of the severed penis, which had afflicted him for years, was the fear that overcame him as he tried hurriedly to fit his cut cock back into place only to find it coming away again in his hands. No matter what he did, his prick would not take. He interpreted this as his desire to be a woman, and the man in him bemoaning the fact. The cry of the buck wailing always brought him awake, and with a sense of relief he’d find himself intact, though the sense of loss still remained.

Now the clitoris had freed itself from her dressed groin and the quest in the dream was how to tickle it that it might jump in ecstasy, but this, even though she had her eyes closed, could not be done outside of Catherine’s perspective. Yet despite his delicate nudging of the frog’s wet rump, it sat in the palm of his hand eyeing him and remained unmoved by all his coaxing. Nor could he bring it elsewhere because it still remained part of her.

He was sad that he had no control over her pleasure even though he carried its source around in his hand. And if he took his eye away – even for an instant – from the eye of the frog, it was gone. Then began the search to find it again, sometimes here, sometimes there, sometimes gone altogether. Then back again giving him that long, infinite gaze from the cup of his hand.

He realized that he had no control over the mystery.

Then, with a tightening of the knuckle of the spine, he considered the prospect of having a mind in which, while it slept, parts of the body disengaged themselves and floated free, and then he considered why the penis and the clitoris of his dreaming self and his dream-figure Catherine should so wander. And he wondered why, in the case of the male member, its painless severance brought not so much terror as the overwhelming urge that it be replaced immediately. “Some men,” Catherine once said, “are afraid to put it in lest they might never get it back again.” “Did you ever meet anyone like that?” he had enquired nonchalantly. “Only once,” she answered. They were walking at the time through a wood, and she laughed. He considered this implication now and knew it did not apply in his case, instead he became intensely aware of the fact that when the intimacy of two people ends, the secrets of their experience are handed on as tensions to the new lover.