V-2nd - 2: Summary, Part 1

[kelber at mindspring.com]

Profane and his new young friends, Angel and Geronimo, have been hanging out in Riverside Park, purportedly to girl-watch, but decide to leave in search of some wine.

Later, Rachel Owlglass passes the very spot where they'd been hanging out.  She's on her way home from meeting with a plastic surgeon, Dr. Shale Schoenmaker.

We learn that Rachel was there on a mission of mercy: to make the final payment for a nose job for her long-time roommate, Esther Harvitz.  Rachel wants to help Esther achieve her goal of the perfect nose, but is personally repelled by the procedure.  Before she's called in to talk with the doctor, Rachel sits in the waiting room, gazing at an ornate mechanical clock that's reflected in the mirror, and she ponders  the relationship between the world inside the mirror and the world outside the mirror. 
 
" ... did real time plus virtual or mirror-time equal zero and thus serve some half-understood moral purpose?"

When she meets with Dr. Schoenmaker, she takes a confrontational attitude towards him and his profession.  The doctor's caustic and humorous, but defensive.  He points out that he's doing no genetic damage; nothing that will affect the long-term survival of the Jewish nose.  Rachel vehemently disagrees.  Artificial manipulations, even if only on the surface, can result in long-term psychic damage that's passed down culturally, if not genetically.  She pays the money and splits.

On her way home, Rachel thinks of a conversation she had with Slab, an artist friend that both she and Esther have had fleeting relationships with.  Slab thinks Esther is using Rachel for her money, much as, Rachel now reflects, Schoenmaker is using Esther.  

"Is there this long daisy chain of victimizers and victims, screwers and screwees?" 

Back home, she finds a note from Paola, who's moved in with Rachel and Esther:  The Whole Sick Crew will be meeting up later at a club, the V-Note, to hear musician McClintic Sphere.  Rachel hops in the shower, singing a torch song.  She dresses and goes out.  The clock hands point to 6:30.  

"But soon the hand passed twelve and began its course down the other side of the face; as if it had passed through the surface of a mirror, and had now to repeat in mirror-time what it had done on the side of real-time."