Now something, oh, kind of funny happens here. Not that Slothrop is really aware of it now, while it’s going on—but later on, it will occur to him that he was—this may sound odd, but he was somehow, actually, well, inside his own cock. If you can imagine such a thing. Yes, inside the metropolitan organ entirely, all other colonial tissue forgotten and left to fend for itself, his arms and legs it seems woven among vessels and ducts, his sperm roaring louder and louder, getting ready to erupt, somewhere below his feet… maroon and evening cuntlight reaches him in a single ray through the opening at the top, refracted through the clear juices flowing up around him. He is enclosed. Everything is about to come, come incredibly, and he’s helpless here in this exploding emprise … red flesh echoing… an extraordinary sense of waiting to rise….

She posts, his pretty horsewoman, face to the overhead, quivering up and down, thightop muscles strung hard as cable, baby breasts working out the top of her garment… Slothrop pulls Bianca to him by her nipples and bites each one very hard. Sliding her arms around his neck, hugging him, she starts to come, and so does he, their own flood taking him up then out of his expectancy, out the eye at tower’s summit and into her with a singular detonation of touch. Announcing the void, what could it be but the kingly voice of the Aggregat itself?

Somewhere in their lying-still are her heart, buffeting, a chickadee in the snow, her hair, draping and sheltering both their faces, little tongue at his temples and eyes on and on, silk legs rubbing his flanks, cool leather of her shoes against his legs and ankles, shoulderblades rising like wings whenever she hugs him. What happened back there? Slothrop thinks he might cry.

They have been holding each other. She’s been talking about hiding out.

“Sure. But we’ll have to get off sometime, Swinemünde, someplace.”

“No. We can get away. I’m a child, I know how to hide. I can hide you too.”

He knows she can. He knows. Right here, right now, under the makeup and the fancy underwear, she exists, love, invisibility…. For Slothrop this is some discovery.

But her arms about his neck are shifting now, apprehensive. For good reason. Sure he’ll stay for a while, but eventually he’ll go, and for this he is to be counted, after all, among the Zone’s lost. The Pope’s staff is always going to remain barren, like Slothrop’s own unflowering cock.

So when he disentangles himself, it is extravagantly. He creates a bureaucracy of departure, inoculations against forgetting, exit visas stamped with love-bites… but coming back is something he’s already forgotten about. Straightening his bow tie, brushing off the satin lapels of his jacket, buttoning up his pants, back in uniform of the day, he turns his back on her, and up the ladder he goes. The last instant their eyes were in touch is already behind him….