Last Seen Hitchhiking

Chapter 7

Bruno Lorenz was cruising the expressway at sixty-five, being overtaken by everybody. Passengers in the cars fleeing past him looked in at him with open contempt: a fat, dough-faced youth who didn’t regard interstate driving as a good way to prove his masculinity.

He knew this was a bad day to be out looking. It was much too soon, after Meri. The truth was… he was still in a state of shock as a result of that fiasco and the way it had happened. Theoretically, as part of the experimental design, he should remain aloof from his subjects, but it never proved possible. Their reactions were so interestingly various. Meri had been the prettiest, by fashion-magazine standards, the kind of girl who outside the laboratory had never given him a second glance. To face the facts — and Bruno had had to begin facing these facts rather early in life — he was a schmuck. He wished he exercised more, but a pattern of inactivity had been set when he was a child, and it was too late now to change. On the tennis court he was an embarrassment. On the beach, children kicked sand in his face. At the Reproductive Clinic, none of that had mattered, your looks, your intelligence, your previous history of sexual acceptance. The one thing they cared about was how you performed. To the machines, a schmuck was as good as a gold-medal diver, even better. The team of doctors who ran the experiments were rather schmucky-looking creatures themselves, and they tended to be suspicious of athletes, as being too narcissistic, too self-absorbed.

Unhappily for Bruno, he had a freakish IQ, in the low-genius range, and all the time he was producing some rather impressive orgasms, his mind was at work. There was no subject more compelling than sex. Children were interested, old folks were interested. The doctors’ findings were going to be believed, and not only believed but acted upon. And if the whole approach was wrong, if by watching and recording the experience they changed it beyond recognition, the treatment might turn out to be worse than the disease.

Bruno tried to tell this to the doctors. They gave him the stock response they gave everybody, and went merrily on.

So Bruno dropped out. He had persuaded a girl to volunteer with him. The doctors had brainwashed her, and she remained in that numb condition. Bruno’s objections had no scientific validity, she told him. She herself was lubricating well and getting some great contractions. When Bruno persisted, she asked him not to call her any more. That closed down his only sexual outlet. He tried to open others. All he got was rebuffs. In the sexual arena, people feel they have a right to be cruel.

In the dorm, he noticed that girls invariably left the common room a minute or so after he walked in. He had a bad period of a month of two, with psychiatrists and medicine and a short stay in the hospital, from which he was released into group therapy. That proved to be not for him. Groups were supposed to be hostile, as part of the therapeutic technique. In Bruno’s case, he thought, they overdid it.

He retreated into fantasies.

He kept a journal of these. It didn’t take him long to discern that whatever the circumstances, they were all rapes. He drew the obvious and necessary conclusion, and began hanging around breakwaters and poorly lighted parks, looking for somebody helpless. He fastened on one, finally, a frail middle-aged woman with psoriasis. Catastrophe! He refused to think about it now. To succeed as a park rapist, you have to be quick and strong, and if Bruno had been that kind of person he wouldn’t have had to go in for rape. Rapist? He was more of an exhibitionist. If he continued, he would end up making dirty phone calls.

It came to him in a dream, his big idea. When he woke up, he was pleasantly relaxed for the first time in weeks. He decided to do it, but nothing would have happened, obviously, if he hadn’t noticed a paragraph in some paper that a gynecologist had remarried and was taking his wife on a trip around the world. His office was attached to his house. Bruno broke in, after fortifying himself with nearly a full bottle of whiskey, and found that the set-up was ideal. He started the next morning, picking up hitchhikers and accumulating data. Then, with all the scare-talk on the air, all the scare-stories in the papers, it became harder to get subjects, and he had more or less made up his mind that Meri Gillespie would be the last. A jock, clearly, and athletes spend so much effort on their bodies that they can’t understand how other people might prefer to let themselves go to flab. How she would hate having Bruno inside her! It would profane the temple. His sleaziness and schmuckiness would be like a venereal disease, something she could catch.

She was lovely. Undressing her and strapping her to the table, he had been so carried away, almost awestruck, that he had nearly been premature, which had never been his problem. He managed to save it by thinking of something else. He inspected her carefully, touching her everywhere. To a future doctor — still a possibility although he had stopped going to classes — anatomical knowledge was important. She stayed unconscious so long, much longer than the others, that he became alarmed. What a waste if she failed to come out of it.

Then she opened her eyes and tried to sit up.

Of course no one believed it at first. There was a frozen period. He had timed these, and Meri’s wore off sooner than any of the others. She accepted her predicament and began to consider what could be done about it. He knew the look; he knew how her mind was working. She was one of the favored ones, and the ending had to be happy or the audience would come out of the theatre feeling confused. She forced herself to think about his mad story, to see if there was any way she could reach him. What was it he claimed to be doing? Isolating the physiological from everything else, establishing the baselines for an entirely new concept in the field, the involuntary cycle.

And she had perceived the flaw. What about the subject who liked to be strapped down? He knew from the literature how common the rape-victim fantasy was among passive women. His sample was statistically so small that even one such person would spoil the data.

He explained to each subject what was going to happen. He was attempting something new, laying his own neck on the line. He was well aware that legally he was a disaster area. If he wanted to complete his experiments and make a place for himself in medical history, he couldn’t allow them to get down from the table and trot off to complain to the state’s attorney. He was sorry about this. In his pathology courses, it had always distressed him to sacrifice laboratory animals after they fulfilled their function. But he had steeled himself. He put on his creepiest look, telling them this, and of course they believed him.

Meanwhile, accidentally on purpose, he left one of the cuffs too loose. He had even rubbed Meri’s wrist with Vaseline so the cuff would slide. He certainly hadn’t expected her to get it all the way off. All he had wanted to do was occupy her mind.

The fight had been enormously stimulating. He had been erect throughout. Of course he couldn’t allow her to get away. He had to subdue her, and in a literal sense he was fighting for his life. As he forced her this way and that, in slippery contact with the whole length of her no longer helpless body, he felt himself filled with a potency of an entirely new kind. Perhaps he was onto something, a new kind of sex — a battle for survival. And she, too, felt the difference. It was clear in her eyes. He was no longer a flabby, unlovely object to be viewed with distaste and no particular interest. He was an adversary. A killer of women you have to take seriously.

She hurt him. He hurt her. Landing a punishing blow, he felt himself keenly alive, really communicating with a woman at last.

As long as her ankles were caught, the fight was fairly even. She was more agile than Bruno and, in the early going, more desperate. He became desperate only after she recovered the full use of her limbs. She bit his cheek. To get her to unclamp he had to half strangle her. Somehow she left his field of vision for a moment. He learned later that one of the stirrups had torn loose from the table. He sensed a hard object coming at him and felt severe pain. After that things were foggy. The struggle continued. Some of the equipment was badly damaged. It had taken him half the morning to mop up. Blood was everywhere.

He had been on the interstate the rest of the day, driving compulsively, in a light daze. The lane divisions were in continuous lateral motion. He was a poor judge of speed. He kept drifting off on the shoulder, where the slight alteration of the surface under his wheels would wake him up. He escaped death several times by inches and microseconds. He was just sane enough to know how crazily he was behaving. He shouldn’t be driving up and down, he should keep going in one direction, abandon this car and steal another, and take a new identity somewhere. He had money, he still had time.

But he couldn’t do it. His findings were incomplete. Even if he could get them published, no one would take them seriously. In one corner of his brain, he knew that he had worked up this pseudo-scientific apparatus as a way of getting sex, but nevertheless he had to finish. Meri had been a total loss. He had been getting some interesting brain-wave tracing, but during the struggle the machine had gone berserk, and the jagged line ran right off the paper. He needed one more. Then it would be all right to quit. This time he would cuff the wrists separately, so if one came loose he would still have control.

He longed to be back in the sanctuary, with the subject transfixed with terror on the table and the machines giving their low, comforting hum. The clocks were running. Enemies were looking for him, prissy-minded Victorians who didn’t understand that the happiness of millions depended on the discovery and publication of the true facts about sex. They were waiting at the fuel stops. They were talking about him on the air. Bruno knew these red-necked troopers, who kept passing him with their lights blinking. They would warn him that he had a constitutional right to remain silent and to retain counsel. And then the guns would go off.

Today hysteria had really taken hold. Literally no one was hitching. He switched to secondary roads, back to the interstate. He gassed up, emptied the tank and gassed up again. His face was hurting, where Meri’s teeth-marks were hidden under a flesh-colored Band-Aid. He was hungry, dizzy, extremely depressed. Probably he ought to stop soon to eat, but he knew if he did he would never set out on the hunt again. He wouldn’t have minded so much if his work had been complete. Then he would have brazened it out. Here are the facts! There had been only one way to collect them. Adventurers and iconoclasts throughout history had always been martyrized. Socrates, Galileo, Wilhelm Reich.

While he was checking an interchange, something pulled at his eye. It seemed to him, in his blurriness and fatigue, that he had glimpsed a girl’s long hair. This had happened before, and it had turned out to be a trick of the light, a function of the heat-haze and desire. But this time it was unquestionably a girl, a tired one, traveling with a guitar. A yellow scarf fluttered like a signal.

He was going the wrong way, and he had to back down a one-way ramp. People coming up didn’t like this and honked at him, but as far as he was concerned they could fuck themselves, so long as none of them were cops. Straightening himself out at the bottom, he glanced at his reflection in the rearview mirror and tried a smile. It appalled him. He would have to do better than that.

He took a long swallow from a pint of blended whiskey, chasing it with a Life Saver so she wouldn’t smell danger when he leaned across toward her. He tried to think of something happy, to make his face relax. And the fantasy that popped into his mind was the same old one, a naked girl spread-eagled on a table. He smiled to himself, a genuine smile this time, and he was still smiling as he drove under the expressway and made the turn.

She had marvelous skin, marvelous legs. A sweater, nice pointy breasts. A good ass, excellent ass. Cool expression. What a joy, to replace that coolness with terror.

She flashed him a smile. “How far are you going?”

He unlatched the door. “Oh — till dark. New York, eventually. Just what I need to eat up some miles, a passenger.”

He was putting out too much candlepower, and she seemed to hesitate. The Band-Aid was a hell of a handicap. Anybody looked sinister in a Band-Aid. He gave her a boyish grin — he hoped it was boyish.

“And sometimes I get my second wind and drive all night. But I need somebody next to me or I get interstate fever. What you could do is tinkle away on the guitar. Work your way.”

That convinced her, and she got in. The door closed with a satisfying bang. Now he had her.

He told her to fasten the seat-belt, he was a freak on the subject of car safety. The belt jammed. Her breath, like his, was perfumed with alcohol. Liking her better and better, he reached around her.

“This damn thing gives me more trouble.”

The loaded hypodermic was in its usual place, under a flap of upholstery behind her head. He was a little too anxious, feeling the effect of a very rough twenty-four hours, and he fumbled momentarily. The belt pinned her in place. His lips came back. He freed the needle, hit one of her neck veins and depressed the plunger.

The taut belt kept her from moving her body. Her hand plunged into her bag. She twisted hard, and for a terrible instant he thought she was going to free herself. Then her eyelids fluttered and closed.

He waited a moment longer, embracing her, and ran the belt back onto the reel. He cupped one of her breasts. Its weight was lovely in his hand. It was a risky thing, out in the open like this, but he pulled up her sweater. Her breasts were really and truly elegant. On the beach she wore a bikini so small it was possibly illegal. She was in good trim, but not competitive trim like Meri. That had advantages too. She was a bit older than she had seemed on the roadside, but never mind, he distrusted the Virgin Effect.

He rocked her until she slid to the floor. He ran his hand around the curve of her buttocks and between her thighs. The last, the best. The climax. Maybe he would get inside her while she was still in the grip of the anesthetic. Let her wake up from a rape-dream and find it happening. Perhaps she would scream. Only one of the girls had screamed.

Her knees were against her chest in the inside-the-womb position. He worked her down under the dashboard. Her long yellow scarf had caught in the door. He freed it, folded it several times, and put it under her head to keep her face off the floor.