Last Seen Hitchhiking

Chapter 2

So far in her life, nothing really bad had happened to Meri. She had never been seriously sick or hurt. She had been in the hospital only once, to leave her tonsils. Her parents, in a Cleveland suburb, seemed to like her well enough, and they approved of most of the things she did except her hitchhiking. Her marks had always been O.K. She had never needed money. She had been in love several times, always pleasantly, and all these affairs, with the exception of the most recent, had ended without hard words or tears.

Now, it seemed, her luck had changed.

She dreamed that she was stretched out full-length on a padded table. An arrangement of seat belts kept her from moving. There was a light in her eyes. When she averted her face, the light followed.

She surfaced abruptly and stared up into a frosted globe on a movable arm. A long moment passed before she understood that it hadn’t been a nightmare. It was happening.

She was naked on a doctor’s examination table. Her feet were in stirrups. It wasn’t a seat belt across her chest, but a broad leather strap. Her arms were stretched out, with a leather cuff at each wrist. A rope connecting the cuffs ran underneath the table, and it had been tightened almost to the limit of her stretch. She could move her hands a few inches, but only in the direction of the floor.

She raised her head.

The driver who had picked her up on the interstate, wearing a green doctor’s smock, with his longish hair tucked inside a cloth cap, was sitting on a leather sofa reading a medical journal and smoking a cigar. He had a bottle of beer at his elbow.

When he saw she was awake he put the journal aside. “Finally. Do you know how long you’ve been out?”

Her eyes felt grainy. She wanted to rub them, but of course she couldn’t.

He answered his own question. “Hours and hours and hours. With chloral hydrate you never know.”

He came across to her. “Meri Gillespie. I looked at your ID. And you told me the truth, which doesn’t always happen. You really are a Miami grad student. How do you feel, outside of terrified?”

She moved her head slightly. There were several steel and bakelite machines, on wheeled stands, around the table, a glassed-in instrument cabinet, sinks, a framed diploma on the wall. It looked like a legitimate doctor’s office. The only thing that didn’t fit was the doctor himself, beaming down at her through his thick glasses.

He asked again how she felt. She felt weightless, as though her flesh had been changed to some much lighter substance. Her skin was sensitive to the chill breath of the air conditioner. There were two girls on the table — one the victim, the other the observer, who had always been lucky and had done well.

“You may feel a touch sick to your stomach for a time,” he said. “If you want to throw up, I’ll get you a basin. Now I don’t want you to feel embarrassed. Just be natural.”

One hand, with the burning cigar between the fingers, rested on the table near her shoulder. With his other hand he touched her neck.

“Rigid. That’s no good. Relax. You must realize by now that you aren’t going to do any more hitchhiking for a while.”

He laughed good-humoredly. “Don’t worry, I’m about to explain. That’s the part I love best. Here, if you’re determined to strain your neck.”

He brought a small pile of paper towels and put it under her head.

She spoke for the first time, thickly, “Who are you?”

“Haven’t you guessed?” he said happily. “I’m that old standby from late-night movies, the mad doctor.” He made a Count Dracula face and did a capering dance step in his bare feet. “I manufacture robots with no souls, and drink human blood.”

He bent over her and she pulled in her chin hard. His fat, moist lips touched her neck.

“Right there,” he said, pulling back. “I need a quart a day, and I hope you’re Type O, because otherwise my circulatory system gets confused.”

His face changed again and he said soberly, “As a matter of fact, I’m a med student, and I’m engaged in some very tricky physiological experiments. My name’s Bruno. People call me Bud.”

He went back for his beer. “I know you’re thirsty, but you can’t have any. One of the conditions is, you have to be sober.”

He hitched a stool closer to the table. After drinking he touched each of her nipples lightly. His fingertip was cold from the bottle.

“Meri, if it takes three days, you have to relax. Not that it matters a hell of a lot, because the machines don’t care, but you’re very… nicely put together, shall we say. I couldn’t tell in those cruddy clothes. And that’s important. I like to get the full Beauty and the Beast effect. The frog who’s going to turn into a prince if she fucks him, and then he double-crosses her and stays a frog. I like it that you wear a regular bathing suit and not a bikini. White stomachs are one of the things I dig.”

She said with difficulty, “A tank suit. I dive.”

He was delighted. “Tremendous. I don’t because I look so ridiculous and I get water in my ears. I’m one of the last remaining sidestroke swimmers. This is going to be — how they say” — he kissed his fingertips — “perfection. First, the briefing.”

He took a swallow of beer. “I saw you look at the diploma. The office belongs to a gynecologist who has made pots of money out of the female ailments and is now on a round-the-world cruise with his second wife. Isn’t that grand? Nothing to do but eat, read novels, and indulge in sexual intercourse. I broke in and found some duplicate keys. There’s a notice on the door. None of the doctor’s patients will be bothering us.”

She swallowed some of his used cigar smoke, and it caused her to gag slightly.

“Would you like the basin?” he asked.

“No.”

“Then I’ll plunge right in. Have you ever felt an inclination to take part in organized sex research?”

She drew a quick breath and took in more cigar smoke and coughed it out. She shook her head slightly.

“I see why not,” he said, “with a body like that. There was an announcement on the bulletin board — anybody interested, call such and such a number. I thought, what the hell, I might as well find out. They paid seven-fifty per episode. You must know the kind of thing I’m talking about. Ever since the people in St. Louis made themselves rich and famous with live sex in the laboratory, it’s been one of the hot research areas. You might be astounded by how much grant money you can get for the flimsiest proposal. I’m not putting it down! It’s really good and valuable. Because there’s no getting around the fact that sex is the single biggest cause of emotional disturbance. Unhappiness. Suicide. I wasn’t sure I could perform, you know, to specifications, but I let them persuade me to try, in the interest of science.” He laughed.

“Are you” — she hesitated, and brought out — “imagining this?”

“No,” he assured her, “it’s a real place. The Reproductive Physiology Clinic, and they’ve been open a year and a half. When you think about it, it’s not all that startling. These same guys were in dream research when that was the fad. They did some ground-breaking stuff about sexual dreams — which comes first, the dream or the erection — and it was easy to move from there into sex per se between wide-awake people. On the simplest level, all they try to do is observe and measure exactly what takes place in the human body during the response cycle. I was one of their most enthusiastic subjects. Very productive. Never missed an orgasm. You may have noticed that I’m a little repulsive?”

He was still smiling. When she said nothing, he went on, “I believe in being objective. Whenever I get a turndown outside the laboratory, I take off my clothes and look in a full-length mirror, and I understand why. To be perfectly honest, my batting average in ordinary situations is point zero zero zero. Who wants to have sex with a slob? Of course there are plenty of female slobs who might be willing, but I don’t demean myself.”

He drank, and sighed. “Now I can see that you’re beginning to wonder if I’m crazy. I won’t give you a definite answer on that. The shrink at school says I’ve been working too hard. I get these blinding headaches, and all I can do is collapse for a day. I used to steal Tampax from drugstores — heaven knows why.” His voice changed, and became more brisk. “Tell me how sex is with you. Satisfactory?”

She forced herself to say, “Most of the time.”

“And yet one of the astounding things I’ve discovered is that even nonslobs have trouble! I’ve talked to one really beautiful girl who’s never reached orgasm. When anybody calls her on the phone, she stutters and perspires.”

“Could you — untie me?”

“No, that’s the main part. Now I have to ask a personal question. Have you ever been raped?”

Her body tightened all over. “Is that what’s going to happen?”

“Well,” he said almost apologetically, “if I get an erection. And I hope I can, because I invested a lot of time and went to a lot of trouble getting you here. I’ve been driving the interstate steadily for two days. The only girls I’ve seen have been in pairs or threesomes, and I can only process them one at a time. I ought to wait till some of the hysteria dies down, but I only have the use of the office for one more week, and my data is far from complete.”

He patted one of the machines.

“The electroencephalograph,” he explained. “Measures changes in the electric potential of the brain, and that’s where you get some of your most interesting material. I’m getting a little ahead of myself. You didn’t answer my question. Just nod or shake your head if it’s too embarrassing to say. Have you ever been raped?”

She shook her head.

“You’d be surprised how often the answer is yes, and then how hard it is to establish what we’re talking about, exactly. Thanks to Masters and Johnson, we have very comprehensive physiological baselines on orthodox consensual sex. We finally know exactly what happens when the human female has orgasm — vasocongestive release, vaginal contractions at point-eight-second intervals, areolae detumescence, and all the rest. We’ve exploded dozens of myths. When I say we, I don’t include myself personally, because I’m damned if I know what they learned from the program I was in.”

He drank. “Be patient another minute. Sometimes when I talk about it, my friend here begins to stir. Not yet, though. O.K., we’ve accumulated a body of knowledge about the sexual process that didn’t exist a few decades ago. After all the centuries of superstition and ignorance, you can’t know too much about that shadowy area. I imagine, to generalize, that by now we must know nearly as much about the organs of generation as about, say, the stomach and lungs. But!”

He kicked back his stool and went to open another beer.

“The more I read in the literature,” he said, coming back, “the more I begin to wonder. Sex isn’t purely physiological. If I tickle your nasal membrane, the chances are that you’ll sneeze. But if I tickle you down here, and if you hate me, if you’re repelled by me, if you’re thinking of getting back on the interstate, you won’t come, will you? Of course not. The orgasm is a psychophysiological experience, of biologic-behavioral origin, taking place within a psychosocial context. I’m quoting the textbooks, naturally. Triggered somewhere in the cerebral cortex, and I can’t reach that with a tickler, right? One more personal question — in percentages, how often do you come?”

She breathed in and out slowly while he looked at her. He actually seemed to consider this conversation normal, as though they both had drinks in their hands.

“About half,” she said faintly.

“About half. Because all those other factors intervene. What if somebody else walks in? Does the pill really work? Do I like him? Did I pass the exam? Is that hair-spray I smell or something else? What would my father and mother say? And that little switch stays closed. The guy can be beautiful, the most accomplished technician in Florida, doing all the right things according to the paperbacks, and you won’t feel a twinge. And the sex researchers know that perfectly well. They cop out by saying that all they’re interested in is the physical aspects, and as far as the machines are concerned an orgasm is an orgasm, whether you get it with a stranger at a party or with a loving husband, the father of your children. I may not be saying this right. At present it’s only a working hypothesis. But the big question in my mind is, are all those statistical tables skewed because they record the sexual behavior of volunteers?”

He wanted her to comment. She still wasn’t making the usual connections. She didn’t know what he was talking about, or how it applied to her.

The best she could do was repeat, “Volunteers?”

“Masters and Johnson, the high priests, used a research population of a few hundred, and that was strictly a volunteer army. They were all sure they could produce under the lights, and if they failed, or if they didn’t get that little extra charge that makes some kinds of sex more interesting than others, they didn’t get invited back. I hope you’re beginning to see where I’m trying to take you. These were picked people, remarkable people. Most of the women could reach orgasm if one of the doctors snapped his fingers. And not just one orgasm, but dozens. Some of these virtuosi kept coming, time and again, for hours, until they fell asleep from pure physical exhaustion. And the machines took it all down, the heart rates and the myotonia, the blood pressure changes, the contractions. Some of those graphs ought to be X-rated. But how much of all that was sexual response, is the question. As opposed to response to the peculiar setting, to the demands of their audience, to the desire to excel, to earn a fee?”

He stopped to put down some more beer.

“So Bruno decided,” he said, shifting to the third person, “to work out an experimental design in which the purely physical response can be separated from all those others. For this he couldn’t post a notice on a bulletin board. The subjects must be unwilling, frightened, hostile. You’ve been abducted from the highway, anesthetized, stripped, humiliated. You are about to be ravished—if his drooping lily can be persuaded to cooperate — by a madman. A repulsive madman! You won’t be trying to produce, you’ll be trying hard not to. You’ll be thinking of what comes next. Because,” he explained with a sharp look, “Bruno is not completely off his rocker. He has a sane streak. He’s not that far to the left of others in sex research. If he ever stands trial, which naturally he’s hoping won’t come to pass, the defense attorneys will have to admit that he is capable of understanding the charges against him. He is well aware that these experiments are very much against the law. You would make a damaging witness for the prosecution. So you know what has to happen when Bruno is finished. Look at the thing from his point of view.”

“You killed the others—”

He spoke with his first trace of irritation. “What happens to any laboratory animal at the end of an experimental series? It doesn’t live out its normal life span on Social Security. It is sacrificed! That’s the word we use. The only thing Bruno will promise is that he’ll do it humanely. He has enrolled himself in the assault on Victorianism, and he may turn out in the end to be a martyr to the cause of sexual enlightenment. He wants to help others! Think of those millions of people tortured by sexual hangups, simply because the most fundamental physical facts remain undiscovered.” He licked the taste of beer off his lower lip. “Do you agree with me, or what? Give me an argument. Maybe you can talk me out of it.”

“What do you hope—” She swallowed; her throat seemed to be on fire. She tried to do something about the dangerous numbness that affected her brain. “Those millions of people. What possible use—”

It went spinning away.

“Do you realize how little is scientifically known on the subject of rape?”

Again he seemed to expect an answer. She moved her head slightly.

“There’s a vast body of legislation on the subject, but zero knowledge. Old wives’ tales, folklore, superstition. ‘If you know you’re going to be raped, relax and enjoy it.’ My preliminary data indicate that this is impossible. Forcible sexual entry is a kind of symbolic murder, and no one enjoys being murdered. But if the body responds sexually, against its will, so to speak, if the blood reverses its flow and the nipples erect and Bartolin’s glands contribute the usual lubrication — and I won’t tell you whether this happens or not, because I don’t want to prejudice you — well, I can’t exaggerate the importance of such a finding. It will explode a few delusions. Far-reaching legal effects, possibly.”

She made another attempt. “But people who like to be hurt—”

“The masochist effect,” he said promptly. “Right. I think I’ve worked out a way to compensate for it. On the sadomasochist teeter-totter, Bruno finds himself perched at the sadistic end. He takes some pleasure from the sight of a helpless nude, in straps, open to penetration by any suitably shaped object. There. At the thought, Bruno’s instrument is beginning to rise.”

He pulled the gown over his head. “Naked, I know I’m disgusting looking?”

The answer was so obvious that he didn’t want to listen to it. “I have a passion for rich desserts. How I love deep-fried potatoes. And of course all that shows. All Bruno’s life, he’s been preparing for these moments. If there is anybody a girl like you would hate to be raped by, it’s Bruno. Those rolls of fat. The absence of muscle tone. Indeed, the absence of muscles. Flesh the color of long-dead flounder. Now a few preparations. They won’t hurt.”

He busied himself about the machines. He dabbed petroleum jelly on her temples and affixed electrodes. Another electrode went over her heart. He did something at the sink, and came back with a razor and a can of shaving foam.

“Standard procedure in obstetrics. But you’ve never given birth, have you? Too bad, because now you never will.”

He shaved her pubic hair and attached more electrodes. Her eyes were tightly closed and her body was as rigid as metal.

“I’d tell you more about what we’re trying to get,” he said, “but I don’t want you to be too interested. You’re supposed to think what a horrible experience. It can’t be happening to you. You’re Meri Gillespie. You won gold medals. You lie in the sun at the edge of a pool. Picasso’s painting really turns you on. You have nice lean friends. Fatties disgust you. So little willpower.”

He took off his glasses. “Ready. Set.”

The machines had begun to hum. Humming himself, he moved about adjusting the controls.

“Music? I think so.”

He turned on a radio and found a station with rock music.

“Now open your eyes and I’ll give you a big surprise. Bruno is rampant! If you hold yourself stiff like that it’s going to hurt more, but of course it’s entirely up to you.”

The weightlessness was back, and Meri felt herself floating, attached to reality only by the wires that snaked out from her body to disappear inside the machines. She was breathing shallowly and quickly; one of the revolving drums counted the breaths and recorded their quickness and depth. Whenever he touched her, a shiver or twitch of revulsion altered the surface of her skin, and the reaction was picked up by another machine.

He worked on her now as a lover. She blanked out briefly when she felt the touch of his tongue. He perceived the change instantly, and pinched her thigh to bring her out of it.

He peered at her nearsightedly. “I want you to stay in the same room with Bruno. Don’t run away. Does that hurt much? Does that?”

Throwing her head from side to side, she strained upward against the straps. They were both sweating heavily. And as she pulled and twisted, she made a surprising discovery. The cuff on her right wrist slipped partway down her hand. Her breath came out in a gasp. His glance jumped to the moving drum and noted the change in the line. It interested him. She was sure her heart was beating more rapidly, but there was nothing she could do to slow it down. He checked the cardiograph, smiling.

She understood now. He had loosened the cuff to be sure the data wouldn’t be compromised by what he had called the masochist effect. He wanted her to think about escape, not about pain. A masochist would submit to restraint, and respond to that. But his guess had been a bit off. The cuff was too loose. Pulling hard while trying to conceal the effort, she felt it slip over her wrist-bone and along her hand. And then she had it.

Watching his eyes, she continued to pull and struggle, contorting her mouth. He resumed what he had been doing.

“Don’t, don’t, please, please don’t, Bruno, don’t.”

“You can’t plead with Bruno,” he said, lifting his head. “He likes cunnilingus too much. So pretty. So silky.”

Then he stopped talking.

She waited, telling herself to let him commit himself fully, to let his excitement take over, before showing him that she was no longer helpless. The recording instruments oscillated wildly. The green cap came off, and his long hair spilled out on her thighs.

“Wait,” he said, perhaps speaking out loud. “Not yet.”

But she couldn’t wait. Dropping the cuff, she seized his hair. The rope whipped beneath the table. Her knees tightened convulsively. She clawed at the buckle holding the strap across her chest. It was under one arm, nearly out of reach. An electrode pulled loose, and the machine sparked and hissed.

She twisted, emptying her lungs so there would be less pressure on the strap. Her fingers slipped. Bruno was thrashing between her legs, hurting her with his teeth. She had a handful of hair, and she held on desperately. With all this going on, it was impossible to get the free end of the strap back through the buckle loop.

The loose rope with the empty cuff attached skittered around on her wet body. Giving up her attempt to open the buckle, she worked the rope under Bruno’s chin and looped it around his neck, pulling it tight. He was trying to force her legs apart with both hands, but he was in a bad position to develop leverage. As the rope tightened, the sputtering sounds he was making changed in pitch. He raked at her hands with his fingernails. He began to stab awkwardly at her abdomen, trying to find some place that would hurt her enough to make her let him go.

She held on, the rope snug around her fist. Her mind was sharp and clear. If he managed to get away from her now, she knew she was done for. She hadn’t believed him at first. There had been a playfulness about some of those speeches, as though the Bud side was mocking the Bruno side. It was all too extreme, and she expected her usual luck to come to her rescue. The gynecologist whose equipment they were using would come back early, or someone would be curious about the lights, or the building would catch fire and the firemen would chop their way in and unfasten her. The earth rotated on schedule. Things like this didn’t happen.

Now she knew for sure it was happening. She was in the power of a lunatic who had every intention of killing her.

Somehow, as they changed position, the rope loosened enough so he could get his chin inside the loop. Air rushed back into his lungs. She still had him in a convulsive grip, with both hands and thighs, but she could feel her strength going. He planted himself more firmly and strained backward, pushing the table. His face slipped several inches along the damp flesh on her thighs.

“Hurts, hurts,” he said.

Her grip on his hair was already less secure. Abandoning the rope, she clutched his hair with that hand as well and brought him back. He grabbed one wrist from below, and with a convulsive effort broke her hold.

At that moment the chest strap let go.

She sat up abruptly. The sudden change was unexpected by them both, and she went partway off the table, held only at the ankles. She could bend her knees now, lessening the strain on her thigh muscles, but he, too, had better position, and as soon as he adjusted he would pull her up and over. Throwing himself to the floor, he could break her grip, at the cost of leaving bunches of hair in her hands.

His back was pimpled. The soft buttocks were covered with unhealthy-looking fuzz. At the last possible moment, she closed herself on his head like a folding jack-knife. He pivoted his heavy shoulders and began to slide. He hung for an instant, and Meri released his hair, snatched up the squat cardiograph in both hands and clubbed him with it. There was a quick spurt of flame.

She pounded at him again. Blood spurted, making them both more slippery.

He went backward on his haunches, peering up through a red mist while she worked frantically at one stirrup. She freed it. With a shout, he flung himself at her. Seizing the whipping rope, he pulled her off the table. She was still attached by one ankle. The back of her head struck the floor.

The air around her quivered. For a moment she was unable to do anything about the strain on her twisted leg. Music poured over them.

He groped for her, but he seemed to be having trouble seeing, and his movements were sluggish.

Now her long hours on the ten-meter platform paid off. She flipped herself upward, straightened her leg and at the same time caught his nose smartly with her knee. It was a tricky movement, not one of those required in intercollegiate competition. As he sagged, she hit out at his defenseless-looking eyes with stiff fingers. He jerked back blinking.

The buckle holding her ankle was on the far side, where she couldn’t reach it. He wavered away, and came back pushing at her with the tall low-backed stool. He didn’t hurt her with it, but it got in her way. In a desperate maneuver that took all her coordination, strength, and timing, she unkinked and sprang erect on one foot. Now the buckle opened quickly, almost by itself.

Feeling movement behind her, she whirled. He was holding the stool high with both hands. He brought it down hard. She saw it coming and moved, but not quickly enough. There was an explosion of light.

She fell against him and they grappled clumsily. Then they were apart. The stool came at her again. She raised her hand too late. The pain was worse this time, much worse. It pierced her and made her helpless.

He went off balance and fell heavily against one of the machines, which seemed to blow apart. As she went down herself she heard him yell. All the lights went off and the music stopped.