Лоуренс Блок - Random Walk - A Novel for a New Age

He nodded. “What’s your name?”

“Bethany.”

“How old are you?”

“Nineteen.”

“Take off your clothes, Bethany.”

“Here? Or should I get out of the car first?”

“Stay in the car. You’ll have to unhook your seat belt first, though.”

“Oh, right.”

She kicked off the sandals, opened her jeans and raised her hips up off the leather seat to squirm out of them. He took them from her, tossed them into the backseat. She took off the sweatshirt next, and then the T-shirt under it. No bra, and her tits were bigger than he would have guessed, milky white and very nice.

“Very nice,” he said aloud.

She colored, and hesitated, and he said, “Yes, Bethany, the panties too,” and she took those off and he flipped them into the back.

He had been wearing a suit jacket. He got out of it and tossed it in back with the clothes she’d removed. He filled his hands with her flesh. She was, he noticed, not terribly clean about her person. She had a discernible body odor, along with the very palpable smell of her fear.

He made her lie down on the front seat, and he laid his body on top of hers, pressing her down onto the seat. He could feel the heat of her loins through his trousers, he could feel her tits through his shirt, and he took her face in his hands and looked at her sweet young face.

“Just don’t hurt me,” she said.

“Oh, Bethany,” he said. “Oh, you poor darling, it’s no fun if I don’t hurt you.”

He watched her face as she took in what he’d said, and it was lovely, just lovely, and he didn’t want to put her through any more and couldn’t stand any more himself. So he placed the heel of his right hand under her chin, his fingertips just grazing her lip, and he cupped her forehead with his left hand, and he pushed up on her chin and back on her forehead and snapped her neck.

#57.

The first woman he killed, the black prostitute in the downtown motel, had been dispatched in a manner that was unplanned, impulsive, and extremely hazardous. He had left traces of his presence that a police laboratory could have found. And, although the pleasure had been unprecedented in his experience, it had been managed in such a manner as to make the aftermath uncomfortable and awkward.

Since then he had learned how to keep risk to a minimum while maximizing his pleasures; he was, indeed, conditioned to think in those terms, since they were essentially identical to one’s goals in real estate investment.

Almost from the beginning he had stopped having intercourse with his partners. It was a pleasant sensation, certainly, to have one’s sexual organ within a slippery envelope of flesh at the critical moment, but physical sensation of that sort played such a minor role in the excitement of the act as to render it almost irrelevant. And it was virtually impossible to achieve physical intimacy of that sort without leaving traces — pubic hair, semen, each capable of yielding no end of information to a trained forensic pathologist. On top of that, the act left traces upon oneself, and there was always the chance of catching a disease. While there was undeniable poetic justice in the notion of a woman infecting her killer with something at the least loathsome and at the worst life-threatening, he had no desire to afford one of his victims an opportunity for that sort of revenge.

So he tried keeping his clothing on, and the pleasure was no less intense for it. His orgasm came not as a result of friction between his penis and another object but as the pure inevitable response to his mental excitement. He usually pressed against a woman when he killed her, but he didn’t have to in order to reach full release.

But that, too, had a messy aftermath. He’d have to wash his underwear or throw it out, and sometimes his trousers had to make a trip to the dry cleaner. It took a while to hit on the solution, in part because he wasn’t looking for one at first; for the first year or more, each killing was followed by a vow that he would never kill again, and so there seemed little reason to seek a better way to manage it.

He tried putting on a condom first. That worked, certainly, but there was something ridiculous about it, and he hated it. And then, on one occasion when impulse and circumstance provided him with the opportunity to kill a very pretty waitress in the parking lot of a Mexican restaurant in Houston (lying on the asphalt between two parked cars, crushing her windpipe with a tire iron), he had used all the strength available to him to hold back his orgasm.

It was enormously frustrating, but the act was thrilling all the same, and he’d simply hurried back to his motel room to stretch naked on his bed, reliving the episode in his mind while he relieved himself manually. He masturbated again the following morning, but this time he held back his ejaculation to defer his pleasure, and in so doing he made an astonishing discovery: it was possible to have an orgasm without ejaculating.

Since then he had learned that he was not the first person to find this out. A whole school of yoga practiced the retention of semen in sexual activity, and it seemed to be a part of various Chinese disciplines as well. Something was released — some kind of energy, something that demanded to be released — but the ejaculation was held back and the semen retained. At first when you did this you wound up with an ache in the pit of your stomach and a feeling of uncomfortable fullness in your loins, but as you became proficient at it and used to it the sensation was diminished, and what ache you did feel was not unpleasant.

And you weren’t scattering your seed that way. Instead your system reabsorbed it, and retained its energy. You were stronger, and you could repeat the sex act almost immediately, and each further repetition, instead of draining you, simply energized you more.

He trained himself, practicing constantly through self-stimulation until he had mastered the new technique. Something he read suggested he could increase his muscular control by an exercise which involved cutting off the flow of urine in midstream. He did this, and developed whatever muscle was involved, but it was mental exercise that played the greater role. You had to build a filter into the mind so that it held back the passage of seed but allowed the spill of orgasmic release. He had some failures along the way, but he had more successes, and eventually he retained his semen as a matter of course, without much conscious effort at all.

Once he was able to do this regularly when he killed women, any thoughts he had about stopping the killings came to a permanent end. Evidently there was something in the passage of seed that engendered depression and remorse, because he felt neither once he ceased to ejaculate. He was still careful not to kill too often, he still sought to minimize risk, and he still had to take pains from time to time to keep his conscience at bay. But he knew he was not going to give all this up, and he didn’t even delude himself that he wanted to.

He left Bethany on the ground, screened from the farm road by a clump of brush. He piled her clothes beside her and weighted them down with her duffel bag. He went through the articles at the top of her handbag, wiping off anything he could have touched that might hold a print. He kept the canister of Mace.

On the way back to Columbia, he stopped for another hitchhiker, another college girl, this one returning for the summer session. She was an open-faced blonde and she reminded him a little of the sisters who’d given him the finger as he drove away from them. She was more solidly built, though, with a sort of bovine cast to her features.

She was silent in the seat beside him, and he didn’t attempt to make conversation with her. He let himself savor the memory of Bethany and enjoyed a few brief fantasies of repeating the act with this blond girl, whose name he did not know. He could drive her up the same farm road, he could leave her dead behind the same clump of brush.