The Raquel Welch mask speaker at White Flag (pp. 373–374)
in the vanity’s lights only Its eyes’ whites showed, and while Its utter catatonia and paralysis prevented the contraction of Its luridly rouged face’s circumoral muscles into any conventional human facial-type expression, nevertheless some hideously mobile and expressive layer in the moist regions below real people’s expressive facial layer, some slow-twitch layer unique to It, had blindly contracted, somehow, to gather the blank soft cheese of Its face into the sort of pinched gasping look of neurologic concentration that marks a carnal bliss beyond smiles or sighs. […] the exact same expression on the face of a catatonic who’d just been incestuously diddled, an expression at once reverent and greedy on a face connected by dead hair to the slack and flapping rubber visage of an old sex goddess’s empty face.
Context
The seminally scarring night, mask half-off under the vanity lights: an expression forming on a face neurologically incapable of expression, from "some slow-twitch layer unique to It" — the damaged body insisting on an interior life at the worst possible moment. The statue whose photo wears "the exact same expression" is (unnamed) Bernini's St. Teresa, the very image at the tip of Joelle's overdose spike the night before — bliss-beyond-the-face as the book's horror signature.