- Joe loses track of all time and just concentrates on the tapping. He starts losing the distinction between sleep and wakefulness again, and he also loses track of the days.
- The nurse can't figure out what's going on with Joe. She tries different things, and then one day Joe notices a change in her touch as her hand wanders down to his crotch. It's probably the unsexiest hand job that the world has ever seen, and Joe is ashamed that the nurse thinks that that was what he wanted.
- All that sex gets Joe thinking about… sex.
- First, Joe thinks about Ruby, the first girl he ever did it with, back in eighth or ninth grade. It seems like most of the guys lost their virginity to Ruby and then felt embarrassed about it later.
- Next is Laurette, a prostitute at a brothel owned by Stumpy Telsa. When they were young, Joe and his friends tried to peek in to see what goes on there, but they got chased away. When Joe was seventeen or eighteen, he and Bill Harper decided to actually go in the front door. Both of them were too shy to say anything, and when the girls came down to meet them, they just sat and talked. After Joe and Bill left, they were both embarrassed by the fact that nothing happened, so they agreed not to tell anyone.
- Joe thinks about Laurette, the woman he had been talking to. He thinks about how she had invited him back to see her. He visited her a few times, and they just talked, because Joe didn't know how to make the next move.
- When he graduated from high school, someone sent him a pair of cufflinks with the initial L on them. Joe went down to Stumpy Telsa's to find Laurette, but Stumpy Telsa informed him that Laurette was gone for the summer to Estes Park. By the time fall came around, Joe had moved to Los Angeles, and he never saw Laurette again.
- Next up is Bonnie, a forthcoming girl who slapped Joe on the back in a drug store one day and said that she recognized him from Shale City. Joe sized her up as someone who got around, and he feels sad that she was from a place as nice as Shale City. Bonnie claimed to have been married three times and said that all of her husbands said she looked like Evelyn Nesbit.
- Finally there's Lucky, an American prostitute in Paris who assuaged the American soldiers' homesickness... and a whole lot more than that. She was usually naked, and she liked to crochet, because prostitutes have hobbies, too. She had a six- or seven-year-old son in Long Island she was raising to be a polo player, and she survived the San Francisco earthquake of 1906.
- As Joe thinks of how he felt in Paris, he remembers the sensation of knowing that he'll be sent back to the front at the end of his few days of leave.
- While he's thinking of Paris, Joe also thinks about the shell that put him in his all-but-dead condition. He imagines it being built somewhere in Germany.
- As Joe climaxes, he feels shame and sickness and disgust at his present state.