Then a strange thing happened. Vienna Roberts knew, and she was fond of telling her friends, that there was a goal with this new sex thing, like there was a goal with everything American, there was a payoff, there was a bottom line, and the bottom line of proto-hominid sex was complete negation of cerebral activity. As with, she guessed, religions, like Buddhism or whatever, the goal with proto-hominid sex was to strike a fabulous blow against the reasoning part of the brain. Most people thought this whole idea was totally fake. Even her parents joked about it. Probably Spinrad was taking some kind of mood stabilizer when he wrote that part, and with his bald head, his little potbelly, and his stumpy legs (she’d seen him on the infomercial), he was cardiologically unsound, and probably he had some transient seizure while leaking a little eyedropper full of seminal fluid, and that was what he referred to as complete negation of cerebral activity. Both she and Jean-Paul had subjected this claim to exhaustive testing involving OxyPlus, cannabis, inhaled cleaning agents, mild strangulation, and they had found that they had headaches and got sore throats, but they still managed to worry about what would happen if their parents found their naked bodies in the desert. With all of their rigid scientific testing, they had never once achieved complete negation of cerebral activity.
And yet. And yet. And yet. Jean-Paul, while he was engaging in the clitoral devourment stuff, he was mumbling and really moaning, in a proto-hominid way, if she was any judge of it. It was like Jean-Paul had become, well, maybe some kind of hyena. Hyenas were supposedly a lot like humans in some ways. And Jean-Paul was like a hyena, with his weird Korean slang protestations and his moaning. Or maybe he was rutting like a javelina. Maybe Jean-Paul was imitating the javelina’s rutting cries. Whatever it was, it sounded like he sounded when she was doing something to him, except that she wasn’t doing anything to him, and he was supposed to be doing something to her, and while she was a big fan of clitoral devourment, didn’t trust any guy who said he wouldn’t do it, she just didn’t think it was so transcendental or anything, and she didn’t believe a guy would normally be all javelina-like while pursuing the clitoral devourment. And maybe it meant that he was just spindling the mandrel with his own fist while he was getting down with the clitoral devourment, but the really weird part, the strange part, the part she couldn’t figure out, was that it was almost like there was somebody else in the theater of proto-hominid sex with them, and maybe this third party was working on Jean-Paul, while Vienna was just lying there getting devoured, and if so, Jean-Paul seemed to like the third party just fine. Maybe it was a border jumper who’d happened on the scene?
There was some kind of gagging choking thing that Vienna had learned was consonant with the orgasmic ecstasy of Jean-Paul Koo, and so he was gasping and his breaths were slowing, and then he was lying back on the blanket. It was all a mystery. But before she could go on and on about the mystery part, Jean-Paul reached down, she thought (through her blindfold), between her legs, freshly shorn of everything, perfumed with essential oils, and running with a marshy abundance of female perspirants, and with his hand, he demonstrated a really stunning ability to locate, like a stud, for the first time, her clitoris, her little proto-hominid standby/on switch, which was glowing red just for him, and he began palpating the standby/on switch as though he were a champion, and almost instantly she could feel herself pulled into a strange new staccato rhythm, not some pulsating thing, a rhythm that was all off-kilter and proto-hominid, you know, some kind of African rhythm that the proto-hominids would have attempted to bang out when they were back on the veldt eating wildebeests. While she was not at all sure that this was love, and, indeed, she had no reason to connect this sensation to love, nor did she care if it was intimate or anything else, she certainly did feel as if the weird proto-hominid rhythm that would fall into some pattern of twos and threes, proto proto hominid, proto proto hominid hominid, this digital stimulation did shut down nearly all the cerebral activity. It did pull her down into centrifugal repetitions, until she felt as though she were becoming one with the principles of proto-hominid sexuality; she was remade; she had become a series of, you know, ritualized gestures that were about summoning the essence of what is, protoplasmic, prehistoric centrality of tissue, essence of tissue, and secretion, and molecular fusing and fissioning, she was the movement of the first fishy thing out of the oceans, she was the first mammal to scrabble up the banks of the river, she was the first bacterium to mutate, and when she came, she felt some kind of flooding in herself, and she heard her voice cry out, and her cry had the nearly automatic involuntariness of the principle everybody spurts, and she felt like she could almost reach out and touch Allan Spinrad; she understood how some people could venerate Allan Spinrad, but just as she was giving herself over to everybody spurts, and to the theocracy of Allan Spinrad, she heard a rustling from Jean-Paul, and then, suddenly, holyfuckingmotheroffuckinggodwhatthefuckinghellisthatohmyfuckinggodohjesusViennaohjesusViennaquicktakethefuckingohmyfuckingtakethefuckingmaskoffViennaquickjesusohhellwhatthefuckholyfuckingmotheroffuckinggodwhatthehell!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!… but she didn’t pay attention, not at first, because of what was rushing through her, all the lovers giving away all of their attachment to all the language or romance, the blinding interrogation lamp of romance, the product placement of romance, all of that being given away; she let herself go with it, back onto the veldt, eating the wildebeests, and she didn’t listen at first, until Jean-Paul ripped the mask off her face, tore away her veil of illusion, if you wanted to put it that way, having somehow freed himself from his restraints, which made it obvious to her that he couldn’t possibly have been the one who was frisking her, so perfectly obvious, and now it was obvious. Now the terrifying truth was known, and the clarity of it was so unsettling that at first she couldn’t even accept that what she was seeing in front of her, between her legs, was really what it appeared to be, but it was.