Evelyn has taped under his genitals. He sends Leilah red roses, then rents a bulletproof car and heads straight to the desert, leaving everything behind including Leilah. Evelyn seeks out the clean, clear desert and is captured by a woman from the subterranean female city of Beulah and dragged across the sandscape to encounter Mother, a mother goddess figure who fashioned herself with the surgeon's knife. She operates on Evelyn, removing his genitals and implants a fully functioning vagina and ovaries, as well as giving him breast augmentation surgery. She plans on impregnating him with a new Messiah, using his own sperm that she harvested from him before the operation. The transformation from male to female seems to be absolute, despite the fact that Eve struggles to learn to become the woman that her body is, and from this point on she is referred to only in female pronouns. Eve escapes but is captured, raped, and enslaved by Zero, a cruel male cult leader and "poet" with only one eye and one leg. His harem are all passive, slavish "wives" who he whips unless they talk in grunts and honour their bedfellows, the pigs. Zero leads Eve on a search for the silent film star Tristessa, an embodiment of beauty, sorrow, and loneliness, whom he hates obsessively, because he believes Tristessa has made him infertile. Tristessa was Evelyn's first object of desire in his boyhood, and Eve still has her own obsession with this figure. Zero leads his dungaree-clad harem to the glass palace of Tristessa and invades the beautiful gothic pile, discovering Tristessa herself laid out in a room surrounded by waxwork effigies in coffins. However she is alive and only when Zero tracks her down to the top of one of the towers and cuts her thong do the gang discover that Tristessa is male. Upon discovering this, Zero and his wives create a mock-up wedding ceremony and marry the two, forcing Tristessa to rape Eve. Eve and Tristessa escape, spin Zero and his harem to death in Tristessa's spinning glass palace. They escape back into the desert where they imbibe each other's newly discovered sexuality and fall in love through their realisation that they are Tiresias. Tristessa is shot by a passing band of teenage desert mafia boys. Their Colonel is 14 years old and scared of the dark. They "rescue" Eve, but she escapes and encounters