``You must turn over,'' he repeated insistently. She was too embarrassed to ask why. Her eyes--which somehow she was able to see, as if she were disembodied and floating above the bed, perhaps somewhere behind the quicksilver of the mirror--her eyes were slanted Oriental: long lashes, spangled on the upper lids with tiny fragments of gold leaf. She glanced sideways at the lay figure. It had grown a head, she thought. The face was turned away. ``To reach between your shoulderblades,'' said the German. What does he look for there, she wondered.

``Between my thighs,'' she whispered, moving on the bed. The silk there was dotted with the same gold, like sequins. He placed his hand under her shoulder, turned her. The skirt twisted on her thighs: she saw their two inner edges blond and set off by the muskrat skin on the slit of her skirt. The Melanie in the mirror watched sure fingers move to the center of her back, search, find a small key, which he began to wind.

``I got you in time,'' he breathed. ``You would have stopped, had I not . . .''

The face of the lay figure had been turned toward her, all the time. There was no face.

She woke up, not screaming, but moaning as if sexually aroused.

From Pynchon, V.