The speaker begins by recounting her own birth, being "ejected" from the womb out of a "paradise of soundlessness," and she likens nighttime to that paradisiacal place. Being in the womb was easy and effortless, as she was borne up by water and carried along by it. There was no pain or discomfort there, never too hot or too cold, no hunger or weeping.

Next, the narrator describes being drawn to and aroused by the face of her lover, Sabina. Sabina is associated with soft images like black capes that fall like hair and violent images like a steel necklace that makes sounds like clashing swords. The speaker describes their sexual relationship in incredibly erotic terms. However, she says that Sabina is a liar and that each deception pains the narrator deeply. But she soon recognizes that Sabina lies to "destroy reality" and create a better world of illusion and fantasy. The narrator reveals that she and Sabina are twin halves of one whole.

Soon, however, the speaker imagines parting from each being that she loves. This is terribly painful, and she feels full of acid rather than blood. She describes being on a ship, seeing images that dissolve her soul into her body. The speaker describes herself as a liar, too—someone who cannot tell the truth any longer. She introduces Jeanne, a beautiful woman with a disfigured leg that makes her limp like a shackled prisoner. She also says that Jeanne loves her own brother in a way that both compels and repels her. In fact, it was hard for Jeanne to get married because of this love she feels for her brother. Jeanne leads the speaker into the house of incest, the speaker says, and she describes what it is like there: the "unquenchable desire" felt between father and daughter, brother and sister, mother and son. Everyone seems to become two-faced because of the desires they feel and must deny. Jeanne asks everyone in the house to hang something out of their window so that she can try to find the room where her brother is hiding from her. Jeanne seems to long for the absence of pain, claiming now to love only it. The speaker realizes that lies create solitude.

She begins to describe a man, a "paralytic" and drug-addled "modern Christ" who bows to her, to Sabina, and to Jeanne and will be "crucified by his own nerves" due to all the "neurotic sins" committed by this group. This Christ describes being skinned in a dream and how his skinlessness made him more open and vulnerable to the nature around him, how much more he could feel life. He wishes he could save these women from the house of incest where "we only love ourselves in the other" and not the other for themselves.

Finally, the speaker describes a woman who dances as though she is deaf, because her movements are so detached from the music. This woman dances in such a way that she permits everything to "flow away and beyond her." It pains the narrator to watch everything passing away from her.