The drumbeats and the dancing speed up very slowly. The erections tell 
Hackworth why this is taking so long: He's watching foreplay here. After half 
an hour or so, the excitement, phallic and otherwise, is unbearable. The beat 
is now a notch faster than your basic pulse rate, lots of other beats and 
counterrhythms woven through it, and the chanting of the individual singer has 
become a wild semi-organized choral phenomenon. At some point, after seemingly 
nothing has happened for half an hour, everything happens at once: The drumming 
and chanting explode to a new, impossible level of intensity. The dancers reach 
down, grip the flaccid reservoir tips of their radioactive condoms, stretch 
them out. Someone runs out with a knife and cuts off the tips of the condoms in 
a freakish parody of circumcision, exposing the glans of each man's penis. The 
girl moves for the first time, tossing her bouquet up in the air like a bride 
making her move toward the limo; the roses fountain, spinning end over end, and 
come down individually among the dancers, who snatch them out of the air, 
scrabble for them on the floor, whatever. The girl faints, or something, 
falling backward, arms out, and is caught by several of the dancers, who hoist 
her body up over their heads and parade her around the circle for a while, like 
a crucified body just crowbarred off the tree. She ends up flat on her back on 
the ground, and one of the dancers is between her legs, and in a very few 
thrusts he has finished. A couple of others grab his arms and yank him out of 
there before he's even had a chance to tell her he'll still love her in the 
morning, and another one is in there, and he doesn't take very long 
either—all this foreplay has got these guys in hair-trigger mode. The 
dancers manage to rotate through in a few minutes. Hackworth can't see the 
girl, who's completely hidden, but she's not struggling, as far as he can tell, 
and they don't seem to be holding her down. Toward the end, smoke or steam or 
something begins to spiral up from the middle of the orgy. The last participant 
grimaces even more than the average person who's having an orgasm, and yanks 
himself back from the woman, grabbing his dick and hopping up and down and 
hollering in what looks like pain. That's the signal for all of the dancers to 
jump back away from the woman, who is now kind of hard to make out, just a 
fuzzy motionless package wrapped in steam.