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

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.

Instead, he drove her all the way into Columbia and dropped her off at her dormitory, then found his way back to I-70 and continued toward St. Louis.

If he’d found her before he found Bethany, he would have done her without a moment’s hesitation. Or, if she’d been irresistibly attractive, he might not have let the episode with Bethany keep him from having her, too. But she just wasn’t that appealing, and he wasn’t that ravenous.

In St. Louis he checked into a motel out toward the airport, unpacked and took a shower. He called a couple of realtors and made appointments for the next several days. He spoke to a man at the firm he used to manage his rental properties in the area, and handled some business over the phone. He relaxed awhile in front of the television set, then put on a tie and jacket and drove downtown for a big meal at Tony’s. He drank a half bottle of wine with his veal and had coffee and a brandy in the lounge. After dinner he walked for a couple of blocks to clear his head before collecting his car from the attendant and driving back to the motel.

In the morning he saw one of the realtors he had called, and then dropped in on his property management people just because he was in the neighborhood. He had a light lunch with the man he’d talked to on the telephone the previous afternoon, learned more than he cared to know about a local political scandal, and didn’t discuss business at all.

In the afternoon he went to a supermarket and pushed a cart up one aisle and down the next. He took something off a shelf every now and then and put it in the cart, but he wasn’t really shopping. He was looking at women. It was a wonderful place to observe them because they were remarkably unselfconscious, totally absorbed in the business of shopping and unaware that anyone might be looking at them. There were several very nice women in the supermarket, and he walked the aisles in a constant state of physical excitement.

When he’d spent as much time there as he wanted he abandoned his cart in the dairy section, picked up a couple of items he needed — a tube of toothpaste, a pack of six disposable razors, a box of Nutter Butter cookies — and hand-carried them to the checkout counter. The girl on the register (Sandy, according to her name tag) had a sunny smile and a pretty face. Her fingertips grazed his palm when she gave him his change.

“Have a nice day,” she said.

He had dinner at a Pizza Hut not far from his motel. His waitress was darling, and so were two or three of the other waitresses, and several of the customers. Afterward he sat in his car for half an hour with the motor off and the lights out, waiting to see if anyone interesting came out alone, but no one did and he tired of the game. He went back to the motel and called Marilee. Both kids were home, and he talked to them, talked some more to Marilee, had another shower and went to sleep.

The following morning he saw another of the realtors he’d spoken to the first day. He wound up going around with her to look at a couple of properties. Her name was Janet, and he had always found her quite attractive, but he knew her professionally and had never allowed himself to entertain fantasies about her. By now he knew her too well; even if there were no risk, he wouldn’t have been interested.

Nor was he much interested in either of the properties she took him to inspect. That was all right, he liked to look at property, you always learned something that way. She drove him back to her office and he picked up the Lincoln.

He drove around. The streets were full of women; the city was full of women. At a stop light, the car next to his was a Dodge convertible with the top down; the driver had a tight sweater and a pouty, sullen mouth. Country music blared on her radio. He let her pull ahead when the light turned and followed her for a dozen blocks until she sailed through an amber light that was red when he reached it. He didn’t want to run the light, and by the time it changed she was gone.

He headed back toward the motel, but stayed on Lindbergh Boulevard past Florissant and parked at the Jamestown Mall. All of the stores were full of women and a remarkable proportion of them looked good to him. It was crowded everywhere, you couldn’t even think about doing anything.

A salesgirl in a gift shop asked if she could help him. “Just looking,” he said.

In the Waldenbooks store, he browsed the shelves and studied the other customers. One book caught his eye, a paperback, and he carried it up front to the register.

The cashier was a woman about his age with a receding chin and a barbed Ozarks twang. She rang the sale and said, “ Men Who Hate Women . Well, I met a few of those and I sure hope you’re not one of them.”