“It is because you see bodies. I see the poor girls I grew up with. I see my sister. My mother.”

“That is just a real cry for help.”

As much as I disliked agreeing with Freddo I shared his qualms, but for different reasons. Brothels were the nexus of everything I objected to. Besides commoditization of the body, the other interests colliding there were equally nefarious: human trafficking, drugs, violence, and a global network of corruption that flowed back into the legitimate economy. It was in fact one of the points where the legitimate and illegitimate markets mingled, and otherwise upstanding citizens aided all that civil society must necessarily abhor.

I did not say anything, but took it all in as we toured the rooms, more curious than anything else. I had never been inside one before. But the girls were beautiful, in so many different ways, as though someone had assembled a working definition of female beauty until, as we rounded a corner to the penultimate room, it was impossible to know where to focus your attention. There a forty-foot-high waterfall cascaded down from the ceiling, and a group of sirens frolicked in a pool beneath it.

“There,” Schoeller said, clapping his hands toward the water, as Doc fished in the interior pockets of his jacket and started passing around pills, “is the bunga, baby.”

“What’s this?” Schoeller asked, taking one of the pills Doc had passed.

“Molly.”

“The others?”

“China. Bolivia. Adderall. Sugarcubes. Valium. Methadone. Morphine.”

I knew then it had been a bad idea to come, but simply declined everything, until Schoeller lit a long, thin-stemmed pipe and passed it my way.

“What kind of hash is this?” I asked, exhaling a beautifully exotic taste in a plume of violet smoke.

“The opium kind,” he answered.

My muscles relaxed, and soon turned liquid, as the room began to swim pleasantly around me; I found a divan to relax on, while the others fanned out through the club, each in search of his respective desire. The last I remember of any of them that night was watching Doc leave around midnight with a coven of flame-haired she-devils. To do what, I could scarcely imagine.

My mind was swimming happily along the edges of the room, watching the light bend and colors merge, as I fused deeper and deeper into the divan. I had the sensation of falling through a trap door and descending ever deeper, until all that existed was music and color and light. I was completely oblivious to where I was when an Amazonian goddess appeared from the ether, and sat down next to me. She only spoke Tariana, a native language, and our conversation was halting at first, but soon felt completely fluent as she opened an app on her tablet that showed pictures of various poses, starting with starfish, and growing progressively more tantric.

“I do this, and this, and this if I like you. If I don’t like you, I do this. This if you’re good, and this if you are wicked.”

I wanted all she showed me, as I looked at her and wondered what it would be like to fuck a goddess.

Even if I had decided to leave with her, it would have been impossible, because I could not find my limbs. But as I lay there debating with myself, two other women approached, a tall, light one and a taller, dark one. Both looked like mutants from some further stage in human evolution as they sat down on either side of me.

“What language?” The taller one asked, as she took my head in her lap, while the other took my feet, stretching me out between them. The light one spoke Italian, Arabic, and Spanish; the dark one Japanese, German, Afrikaans, and Dutch. In the state I was in I spoke them all as we laughed and they asked if I wanted to go upstairs. Temptation was wearing me down, and I thought to go, telling myself it would be worthwhile if only for the experience. However, through a colossal and super-valiant effort of will, I declined.

They left and I was proud of my willpower, self-satisfied that I remained true to my discipline, as I watched the lights and color bend so that there were no longer angles in the room, only swooping curves of red and purple emotion until I locked eyes with a woman standing directly across from me, who I remembered seeing when I’d first entered, but had lost sight of amid the undifferentiated faces. When our eyes locked, though, she came to me right away, smiling enigmatically and asking what had taken me so long.

She was a large-eyed, big-bosomed country broad, no other term would do; there was something earthy and old-fashioned about her seductiveness. The kind of woman you hope to find on a lonesome night: apple-bottomed, quick-witted, bewitching, Old and Middle English words from the womb and the milk of the language.

Not beautiful, maybe even a little bit homely if you were slow and missed the point; when I looked at her, there was no explaining it, my dick signaled like a compass. A roost cock, keening and crowing to her soft heat as she sat down and took me in her lap, rocking me back to my first body.

“You work in entertainment,” she said perceptively, “but you were in the army before.”

“Close,” I answered, asking how she knew. She shrugged, and ordered herself a drink and put it on my tab. We began to talk and I poured out my tribulations, my conflicted desires, my whole damn life. She crooked her head to the side, looking down at me, and told me to wise up, I had a grand life if I looked the right way.

“Let me get you a spyglass, Watson,” she said. I still didn’t understand, and she didn’t answer again, only slid down and cradled herself against me to show me what she meant.

“Let’s go,” she said.

“I should not,” I answered. “It is against my code.”

“Your what?” she asked.

“My code.”

She laughed. “That is because you still do not know what is right for you, or what you want. If you did you wouldn’t say should. You would say will.”

“I don’t will anything from this place,” I said. “That’s not what I’m about.”

“Come with me, let me find out what you’re about,” she teased.

“I suppose you will help me know what I want, too,” I said.

“Yes,” she answered, turning serious. “The body has a knowledge of its own.”

“I do not sleep with odalisques.”

“You still do not understand, do you? That’s not what I am.”

“What are you doing here, then?”

“I am a professional lover.”

“What does that cost?”

“What is that worth?”

“What is the difference?” I looked up at her, but she was just a light among all the lights.

“The qualia of experience,” she answered.

“That’s a fine word.”

“I used to read in the library, when I dropped out of school and moved to the city to find a job.”

“You should have stayed in school.”

“If I would have had money.”

I had studied enough languages to appreciate the complexity of the verb tense she had constructed. “That took effort to master.”

“The compound subjunctive,” she said ruefully, “is the story of my life. If I would have known, if I could have done, if it should happen that. If it were up to me. Should it ever be. It’s not really the same in American as Brazilian, though. It’s the official verb tense of mad visions and inconsolable sorrows, and belongs to poor people and dreamers. This lifetime brought to you by the subjunctive tense.”

I laughed at her nerdy joke. At the same time I was touched and knew I was going to leave with her, despite my own rules. Smart girls turned me on.

“So,” she said, taking a sip of rum. “The physicalists believe all phenomena can be reduced to the material. The essential concern with all of these things is, of course, how consciousness arises from the body. Whether the consciousness, or soul that makes us human, is only another phenomenon of the body.”

I was too far gone to follow, and asked her to clarify.