Chapter 8 Summary

In chapter eight, the story shifts back to Bekker, who has frozen in place staring at a book he took from the Medicine/Anthropology section: Final Cuts, Torture Through the Ages. The clerk checks on him because he has been frozen for so long, and Bekker realizes he is trying to pick him up. He reflects on how the Minneapolis cops took Beauty from him and gave him his telltale scars. After leaving the bookstore, Bekker sees himself and Davenport on the cover of a newspaper, and is lost in his anger at the interview he reads. He has purchased the book because of a photograph taken in the 1880s of a Chinese man condemned to the death of a thousand cuts. Bekker sees radiance in the dying man's face, which is exactly what he searches for in his own work. He pops...