Mario's romantic experience with Millicent Kent
At which point U.S.S. Millicent stopped them in an unprickly thicket of what later turned out to be poison sumac and turned with a strange glint in the one eye that wasn’t in pine-shadow and crushed Mario’s large head to the area just below her breasts and said she needed to confess that Mario’s eyelashes and vest with extendable police lock he used for staying upright in one place had for quite some time now driven her right around the bend with sensual feeling.
Context
The book's gentlest inversion of U.H.I.D. shame: what drives Millicent Kent around the bend is precisely the apparatus of Mario's deformity — the lashes and the police-lock vest he needs to stand up — and the head crushed sideways to breathe is the body-as-logistics comedy turned erotic. Carlisle sharpens it: the police lock that assists Mario is itself what defeats Kent's intentions — the prosthesis as accidental chastity hardware.