.....Well. What happens when paranoid meets paranoid? A crossing of solipsisms. Clearly. The two patterns create a third: a moiré, a new world of shadows, interferences. . . . " 'Want me here'? What for?"
....."For me." Whispering out of scarlet lips, open, wet. . . . Hmm. Well, there's this hardon, here. He sits on the rack, leans, kisses her, presently unlacing his trousers and peeling them down far enough to release his cock bounding up with a slight wobble into the cool studio. "Put your helmet on."
....."O.K."
....."Are you very cruel?"
....."Don't know."
....."Could you be? Please. Find something to whip me with. Just a little. Just for the warmth." Nostalgia. The pain of a return home. He rummages around through inquisitional props, gyves, thumbscrews, leather harness, before coming up with a miniature cat-o'-nine-tails, a Black Forest elves' whip, its lacquered black handle carved in a bas-relief orgy, the lashes padded with velvet to hurt but not to draw blood. "Yes, that's perfect. Now on the insides of my thighs. . . ."
.....But somebody has already educated him. Something . . . that dreams Prussion and wintering among the meadows, in whatever cursive lash-marks wait across the flesh of their sky so bleak, so incapable of any sheltering, wait to be summoned. . . . No. No--he still says "their," but he knows better. His meadows now, his sky . . . his own cruelty. [Gravity's Rainbow, V395-396]