“Because sex is the last great frontier.” Dick had gestured at the horizons of Regent’s Park like Cortés grasping the immensity of the Pacific. “One thing we can say for certain about the future of sex—there’s going to be a lot more of it. Already we can see that new forms of social structure will emerge to cope with the sexual imagination. What you and everyone else think of as the pornographic mind may well allow us to transcend ourselves and, in a sense, the limits of sex itself.”

“Your new series should be fascinating, Dick.”

“You’ve already heard about it? Good.”

I hadn’t, but I saluted him ungrudgingly. Thinking of our journey to Rio, I realised that the evening with Carmen and Fortunata had been a brave attempt to step down from the television screen into a lost world of emotion and desire. He had discarded the image of the hoodlum scientist—part rock star, part Robert Oppenheimer—that had sustained him since his Cambridge days. Out went the leather jackets and gold medallions, in came tweed suits and woollen ties. He was at ease with me now, happier and more confident, at last engaged on the original research that had always eluded him and unaware that he himself was the victim of a bogus experiment.

But Sally had been hurt. Along with the other volunteers who worked at the institute, she had been beguiled by Dick’s evangelical ardour. She told me that she had been amazed by the unedited films screened for the volunteers in the institute viewing theatre, of the cathedral-like interior of her own vagina, moisture beading on its cavernous walls like jewels dripping in a grotto. As she lay with her laboratory partner, a remote-controlled camera recorded the involuntary movements of her facial musculature, the flushing of her breasts and abdomen, the skin tremors on the backs of her thighs.

Seeing these abstracted portions of herself had led to a growing numbness, a fading sensitivity of her skin to pain and feeling, as if her nervous system had been connected, not to the familiar nerve endings of her hands and lips, but to the screen in Dick’s viewing theatre. She would turn the pages of the men’s magazines in the waiting room before the laboratory sessions and find detached parts of her anatomy between the covers, the moist escarpment of her pubis like a remote mountain range viewed from the window of an airliner.

A progressive dismemberment of herself was taking place, until she reached the point where she expected to find the skin of her breasts and thighs stretched across an advertising billboard or upholstering the seats of a modish nightclub. When, like most of Dick’s volunteers, she dropped out of the programme, she never fully reintegrated herself and would wander the streets in her heroin daze searching for the lost parts of her face and lips.