He comes to a stop in the middle of the room. Only one of the walls is lined with sex toys: rubber vaginas and penises, fantasy condoms, whips, ben wa balls, inflatable boy and girl dolls. . The other walls, painted yellow, are lined with rows and rows of magazines. On the ceiling there are three fluorescent panels, in one of which two of the tubes are flickering. He finds it odd that the two broken tubes should be precisely in the same panel when (by random chance) the probability of their being in different panels was much greater. This leads him to conclude that there is a defect in the fixture itself. Next to the door, on a platform, a bored elderly man with glasses and long sideburns is leaning on a counter as high as the tops of his clients’ heads, overseeing the room, apparently keeping everything under control. Heribert looks at the condoms: there are blue ones, pink ones, green ones, black ones, transparent ones, and red ones. . They come with bumps, with filaments, one has a little hand with five fingers at the tip, several have protruding stars. The boxes say that these extras give the woman pleasure and make her go mad with delight. The penises are all different sizes, colors, and shapes. Some reproduce the texture, the veins, and the shape of the real thing, but others are perfectly cylindrical, or cylindrical with bumps at the tip, like porcupines. . They look to him like orthopedic devices. He looks at the magazines. In the first one he opens there are pictures of a man with one woman. In the second, there are two men with one woman. In the third, there are two women. He opens a fourth: two women with one man. The fifth one he opens has two men with one woman again. He opens a sixth: there is a whole slew of people and part of the fun seems to consist of mixing whites, blacks, and Asians, and men and women. In the most general shot, Heribert counts four men and five women. He thinks it’s too convoluted to excite anyone.
Farther on is the teenage girl section, most of them unaccompanied, in positions of self-gratification, and in black and white. The magazines of men with men are all in another department, a bit farther on. One of the guys in charge of the store is busy attaching price tags to a pile of inflatable dolls, which, inside their clear plastic bags, look a lot like dead bodies.
The people in the store are mostly middle-aged men. When he entered, he thought he would find more teenagers. The men must be office workers, killing time after work (Heribert looks at his wristwatch; a little after 5:00 p.m.) before going home. There are old men, too, with that defeated look some retired people develop. A guy of about twenty-five is looking at a magazine that shows a woman and a Great Dane.
Heribert continues on, toward the back of the place, where the booths are located, announced by a large neon sign: peepshow. On the door of each booth hang two pictures and two titles, each of which, respectively, corresponds to one of the two films projected there. He looks at the doors to each of the booths and at each of the titles. By one of the walls next to the first booth there are two video games with Martians, and there’s a boy playing at one of them.
He gets change from a machine he spots in the back. He looks at all the doors once again. He has trouble deciding which picture to choose. He goes into the one whose protagonist’s face was the prettiest in the photograph.
The space he is enclosed in measures less than a square meter. Against one of the four walls there is a bench. He sits down on it. In front of him is a white surface. On the wall to the right, two machines with slots for coins labeled a and b. He sticks a coin into the slot labeled b. The light in the cabin goes out and the movie appears before his eyes, emerging from a projector (he stands up to get a better look) whose light flows out onto a tilted mirror located over the head of the seated spectator. From the mirror, the image is cast onto the white surface (he touches it: formica). On the screen, two girls (one blonde, one with light brown hair) and a boy (with dark brown hair) appear on a sofa. The boy is wearing a polo shirt (sky blue, with a Lacoste alligator); the girls (one of whom was white and the other black) are wearing stockings and garters (white stockings on the one with the white garters and gold on the one with the black garters) and high-heeled shoes (black for both of them). The boy is penetrating one of the girls, while the other goes from kissing the girl being penetrated, to kissing the boy, to kissing both of their genitals. Heribert quickly realizes that the booth is just isolated enough from the outside so that its occupant (aroused by the film) can masturbate in peace. He looks for traces on the walls, the surface of the screen, the floor set with shiny, irregular, multicolored tiles, the bench; it’s dark, though, so he doesn’t find any. When he looks up at the screen again (“What a jerk,” he thinks, “I’m missing the movie.”), the position of the officiants has shifted: the blond is performing fellatio on the boy as he performs cunnilingus on the brown-haired girl, who is sitting on top of him. At this point, the projection comes to a halt and the light in the booth goes on. Heribert inserts another coin. The action continues. Now the camera focuses, close up, on the activities of the blond girl, until the boy discharges all over her eyes, nose, and lips; she smiles contentedly. The boy and the brown-haired girl are also smiling contentedly. Then there is a brief pause (of only a few seconds), and the same girls appear, now sitting down, all dressed and demure, drinking from tall glasses. One of them moves her lips in silence, as if speaking, and the other nods in agreement as she runs her tongue over her upper lip. The blond girl picks up the receiver and dials a number. The brown-haired girl drinks her drink and smiles. The blonde sits down. A short while later they look at the door with a surprised expression on their faces (conveying the impression that someone has knocked). The brown-haired girl goes to open it and finds the same boy from before at the door, wearing the same polo shirt, but now with pants, carrying a cardboard box the size of a pizza. Gesturing and moving their lips, they invite him in. He comes in. He seems shy. The brown-haired girl takes out her handbag, gives him a five-dollar bill, and searches for change (obviously to give him a tip), but she only comes up with big bills. She looks surprised as the other girl searches through her handbag and also finds no change. Without missing a beat, they get out another glass for the boy, fill it for him, refill their own, and smile at him. He smiles, too, but shyly. The blond unbuttons two buttons on her blouse, gazing at the boy and bending down to flick the ash from her cigarette into the ashtray (suddenly they are smoking; had he not noticed until that moment, or has the cigarette appeared magically?), revealing a good expanse of breast. The brown-haired girl runs her tongue over her lower lip. The boy smiles broadly to indicate that he’s understood. He kisses the brown-haired girl, who runs her hand up the boy’s leg until she reaches his groin, in exaggerated evidence. .
The projection breaks off again. He leaves. Another man is leaving another booth at the very same moment, staring at the ground, his face red as a beet. Heribert looks at the man’s shoes to see if he has splattered. He thinks he could have put a coin in slot a, to see what it was. He walks out into the street, wondering why he hasn’t had an erection the whole time, neither leafing through the magazines nor in the booth.