to a cave, because it kept expanding and contracting around the glans and moving down and up and down and up… ¡Dios mío! It was a woman’s lips! Projected onto the mainsail! Her head was twelve feet from brow to chin.
Magdalena’s heart took a nosedive… porn!… a porn movie projected at gigantic scale onto a gigantic sail… turning these hundreds of americanos into pigs, stampeding pigs squealing eeeee uh eeeee uh thanks to what? Porn.
And one of those americano pigs was Dr. Norman Lewis. He was right beside her, on this mobbed deck… trying to resist the drooling adoration that wants to creep across his face… eyes pinned on a schooner sail that reaches from here… to way up there… as porcine body parts pop up, drift, and invade one another, oozing and sliding and drooling and sucking and lapping… a woman’s legs the size of office towers, spread open… wide open… the labia majorae are three times as big as the entrance to the Miami Convention Center… the porn doctor Lewis is transfixed… he wants to enter that portal or is it he wants his eyes to enter… transfixed by the alternate galaxy of pornography?
“I don’t know about you, Norman, but I’ve had enough!”
He doesn’t even hear her. He’s drooling in his own world.
She grabs his elbow and shakes it… hard. Norman is startled… but more than that, bewildered. “How could anybody—”
“Let’s go, Norman.”
“Go…”
“Back. I wanna go back to Miami.”
Bewildered. “Back? When?”
“Right now, Norman.”
“Why?”
“Why?” says Magdalena. “Because you look like a drooling three-year-old standing here… a slobbering porn addict—”
“Slobbering porn addict”—but he’s not really absorbing the words. He’s so far gone, his eyes wander back to the sail… the twelve-foot-high head of a woman trying to nibble the foot-long clitoris of another woman with her yard-wide lips.
“Norman!”
“Uhhh, what?”
“We’re going! And that’s that!”
“Going? The night is just beginning! This is part of the experience!”
“They”—Magdalena swung her head about to indicate the rest of the crowd—“are going to have this awesome—pathetic—experience… without you. You’re leaving!”
“And going where?”—but he obviously had no real comprehension of what the two of them were saying… His eyes floated back to the sail—
“WE’RE LEAVING, NORMAN, AND I MEAN IT!”
Norman’s expression granted her marginally more attention, but not a lot. “We can’t,” he said. “We can’t take the boat back in the dark. It’s too dangerous.”
Magdalena stood there with an I can’t believe this expression, staring at Norman. Norman’s eyes were already back on the magnified body parts. An immense… cleft buttocks… was on the screen. A giant’s hands were spreading the cheeks apart. The anus itself filled the vast screen. It was deep as a gorge in the mountains of Peru.
“Norman, if you want me,” she said in a tense, clipped voice, “I’ll be in the boat, trying to get some sleep.”
“Sleep?” said Norman in the voice that said, “How can you even think of such a thing?” Nevertheless, he was at last focusing upon her. He spoke sternly. “Now, listen to me. Tonight is an obligatory all-nighter. All night is what this experience is all about! If you keep your eyes open, you will witness things you never thought possible. You will have a picture of mankind with all the rules removed. You will see Man’s behavior at the level of bonobos and baboons. And that’s where Man is headed! You will see the future out here in the middle of nowhere! You will have an extraordinary preview of the looming un-human, thoroughly animal, fate of Man! Believe me, treating porn addicts is not a narrow psychiatric specialty. It’s essential to any society’s bulwark against degeneracy and self-destruction. And to me, it’s not enough to gather data by listening to patients describe their lives. These people are weak and not very analytical. Otherwise they wouldn’t let these things happen to themselves. We have to see with our own eyes. And that’s why I’m willing to stay up all night—to get to know these wretched souls from the inside out.”
Jesu Cristo… this was the thickest wall of theory she had ever heard Norman concoct! An impenetrable fort!… and an inimitable pulling the rug out from under any critic.
She gave up. What use was it to argue with him? There was nothing to be done about it.
But giving up on the war brought her no peace. In the darkness she looked in every direction. Before the sun went down… Miami had been up there, to the north, even though all you saw on the horizon from here