Speaking of Lust - the novella

by Lawrence Block

  He had never been so excited in his life. He unzipped his pants, freed himself from his underwear. His cock was huge, and fiercely erect.

  He touched himself, then returned his hand to the rifle. His finger curled tentatively around the trigger.

  He thought he must be trembling too much to take aim, but his excitement was all within him, and his stance was rock-solid, his hands sure and skilled. He aimed, and drew a breath, and held the breath.

  And squeezed the trigger.

  The bullet took her in the throat. She hung on the ladder for a moment, blood gouting from the wound. Then she fell.

  He stared through the scope while his seed sprang forth from his body and fell upon the carpet of leaves.

  He was shocked, appalled. And, of course, more than a little frightened. He had taken life before, but that involved killing the enemy in time of war. He had just struck down a fellow citizen engaged in lawful activity on her own property, and for no good reason whatsoever. His sharpshooting overseas had won him medals and promotions; this would earn him---what? Life in prison? A death sentence?

  He left the woods, and on the way home he dropped his rifle in the river. No one would note its absence. He’d purchased it without mentioning it to his wife, and now it was gone, and as if he’d never owned it.

  But he had in fact owned it, and as a result a woman was dead.

  The story was in the papers for days, weeks. A woman had been struck down by a single shot from a high-powered rifle. The woman’s estranged husband, who was questioned and released, had been arrested twice on drug charges, and police theorized that her death was some sort of warning or reprisal. Another theory held that mere bad luck was to blame; a hunter, somewhere in the woods, had fired at a squirrel and missed, and the bullet, still lethal at a considerable distance, had flown with unerring aim at an unintended and unseen target.

  Luke waited for some shred of evidence to materialize and trip him up. When that didn’t happen, he realized he was in the clear. He could do nothing for the woman, but he could put the incident out of his mind and make certain nothing like it ever happened again.

  He could, as it turned out, do neither. The incident returned to his mind, its memory kindling a passion that heightened his relations with his wife a hundredfold. And he found, after his initial fear and shock had dissipated, that he felt no more remorse for the woman’s death than he had for those enemy soldiers he’d gunned down. If anything, what he felt for her was a curious gratitude, gratitude for being an instrument of pleasure for him. Every time he thought of her, every time he relived the memory of her murder, she furnished pleasure anew.

  You can probably imagine the rest. He went to a nearby city, and in a downtown motel room he mounted a hollow-eyed whore. While she toiled beneath him, he whipped out a silenced small-caliber pistol and held it to her temple. The horror in her eyes tore at him, but at the same time it thrilled him. He held off as long as he could, then squeezed the trigger and spurted into her even as the life flowed out of her.

  He picked up a hitchhiker, raped her, then killed her with a knife. Two states away, he picked up another hitchhiker, a teenage boy. When he stopped the car and drew a gun, the boy, terrified, offered sex. Luke was aroused and accepted the offer, but his ardor wilted the moment the boy took him in his mouth. He pushed the youth away, then pressed the gun to his chest and fired two shots into his heart.

  That excited him, but he walked away from the death scene with his passion unspent and found a prostitute. She did what the boy had attempted to do, and did it successfully as his mind filled with memories of the boy’s death. Then, satisfied, he killed the woman almost as an afterthought, taking her from behind and snapping her neck like a twig.

  He was clever, and it was several years before they caught him. Although the impulse to kill, once triggered, was uncontrollable, he could control its onset, and sometimes months would pass between episodes. His killing methods and choice of victims varied considerably, and he traveled widely when he hunted, so no pattern became evident. Nowadays there may be a national bank of DNA evidence, evidence that would have established that the semen in the vagina of a runaway teen in Minneapolis was identical to that left on the abdomen of a housewife in Oklahoma. But no such facility existed at the time, and his killings were seen as isolated incidents.

  And in some cases, of course, the bodies he left behind were never found. Once he managed to get two girls at once, sisters. He killed one right away, raped the other, killed her, and withdrew from her body in order to have his climax within the first victim. He threw both bodies down a well, where they remained until his confession led to their discovery.

  A stupid mistake led to his arrest. He’d made mistakes before, but this one was his undoing. And perhaps he was ready to be caught. Who can say?

  In his jail cell, he wrote out a lengthy confession, listing all the murders he had committed---or at least as many as he remembered. And then he committed suicide. They had taken his belt and shoelaces, of course, and there was nothing on the ceiling from which one could hang oneself with a braided bedsheet, but he found a way. He unbolted a metal support strip from his cot, honed it on the concrete floor of his cell until he’d fashioned a half-sharp homemade knife. He used it to amputate his penis, and bled to death.

  #

  “What a horrible story,” the policeman said.

  “Dreadful,” the priest agreed, wringing his hands, and the doctor nodded his assent.

  “I’m sorry,” said the soldier. “I apologize to you all. As I said, it wasn’t my own story, for which I must say I’m heartily grateful, nor was it a story I heard directly, and I daresay I’m grateful for that as well. It may have been embroidered along the way, before it was told to me, and I suspect I added something in the telling myself, inferring what went through the poor bastard’s mind. If I were a better storyteller I might have made a better story of it. Perhaps I shouldn’t have told it in the first place.”

  “No, no!” the doctor cried. “It wasn’t a bad story. It was gripping and fascinating and superbly told, and whatever license you took for dramatic purposes was license well taken. It’s a wonderful story.”

  “But you said---“

  “That it was horrible,” the priest said. “So Policeman said, and I added that it was terrible.”

  “You said dreadful,” said the doctor.

  “I stand corrected,” the priest said. “Horrible, dreadful---both of those, to be sure, and terrible as well. And, as you said in your prefatory remarks, awful and wonderful. What do you make of young Luke, Soldier? Was he in fact a casualty of war?”

  “We gave him a gun and taught him to kill,” the soldier said. “When he did, we pinned medals on his chest. But we didn’t make him like it. In fact, if his instructor had suspected he was likely to have that kind of a visceral response to firing at the enemy, he might never have been assigned to combat duty.”

  The doctor raised an eyebrow. “Oh? You find a lad who qualifies as Expert Rifleman and you shunt him aside for fear that he might enjoy doing what you’ve just taught him to do, and do so well? Is that any way to fight a war?”

  “Well, perhaps we’d have taken a chance on him anyway,” the soldier conceded. “Not so likely in a peacetime army, but with a war going on, yes, I suppose we might have applied a different standard.”

  “What passes for heroism on the battlefield,” said the priest, “we might otherwise label psychosis.”

  “But the question,” the soldier said doggedly, “is whether he’d have found the same end with or without his military service. The bullet that killed that first sniper put him on a path that led to the jail cell where he emasculated himself. But would he have gotten there anyway?”

  “Your lot didn’t program him,” the policeman said. “You didn’t have a surgeon implant a link between his trigger finger and his dick. The link was already in place and the first killing just activated it. Hunting hadn’t activated it, though who’s to say it
wouldn’t have if he got a cute little whitetail doe in his sights?”

  The priest rolled his eyes.

  “Sooner or later,” the policeman said, “he’d have found out what turned him on. And I have to say I think he must have at least half–known all along. You say he didn’t have sadistic sexual fantasies before the first killing, but how can any of us know that was the case? Did he state so unequivocally in this confession he wrote out? And can we take his word? Can we trust his memory?”

  “Sooner or later,” the doctor said, “his marital sex life would have slowed, for one reason or another.”

  “Or for no reason at all,” the policeman said.

  “Or for no reason at all, none beyond familiarity and entropy. And then he’d have found a fantasy that worked. And someone some day would have paid a terrible price.”

  “And the origin of it all?” the soldier wondered.

  “Something deep and unknowable,” the doctor said. “Something encoded in the genes or inscribed upon the psyche.”

  “Or the soul,” the priest suggested.

  “Or the soul,” the doctor allowed.

  There was a rumbling noise from the direction of the fireplace, and the doctor made a face. “There he goes again,” he said. “I suppose I should be tolerant of the infirmities of age, eh? Flatulent senescence awaits us all.”

  “I think that was the fire,” the policeman said.

  “The fire?”

  “An air pocket in a log.”

  “And the, ah, bouquet?”

  “The soldier’s pipe.”

  The doctor considered the matter. “Perhaps it is a foul pipe I smell,” he allowed, “rather than an elderly gentleman’s foul plumbing. No matter. We’ve rather covered the subject of lust, haven’t we? And I’d say our stories have darkened as we’ve gone along. I’ve lost track of the hand. Shall we gather the cards and deal again?”

  “We could,” the priest said, “but have you nothing to offer on the subject, Doctor?”

  “The subject of lust?”

  The priest nodded. “One would think your calling would give you a useful perspective.”

  “Oh, I’ve seen many things,” said the doctor, “and heard and read of many others. There’s nothing quite so extraordinary as human behavior, but I guess we all know that, don’t we?”

  “Yes,” said the priest and the policeman, and the soldier, busy lighting his pipe, managed a nod.

  “As a matter of fact,” the doctor said, “there was a story that came to mind. But I can’t say it’s the equal to what I’ve heard from the rest of you. Still, if you’d like to hear it. . .”

  “Tell it,” said the priest.

  #

  As a medical man (said the doctor) I have been privy to a good deal of information about people’s sex lives. When I entered the profession, I was immediately assumed to know more about human sexuality than the average layman. I don’t know that I actually did. I didn’t know much, but then it’s highly probable my patients knew even less.

  Still, one understands the presumption. A physician it taught a good deal about anatomy, and the average person knows precious little about his or her own anatomical apparatus, let alone that of the opposite sex. Thus, to the extent that sex is a physiological matter, a doctor might indeed be presumed to know something about it.

  So much of it, though, is in the mind. In the psyche or in the soul, as we’ve just now agreed. There may well be a physical component that’s at the root of it, a wayward chromosome, a gene that leans to the left or to the right, and a new generation of doctors is almost certain to know more than we did, but will they be revered as we were?

  I doubt it. For years people gave us more respect than we could possibly deserve, and now they don’t give us nearly enough. They see us as mercenary pill-pushers who do what the HMOs tell us to do, no less and no more. Lawyers sue us for malpractice, and we respond by ordering unneeded tests and procedures to forestall such lawsuits. Every time a fellow physician anesthetizes a pretty patient and gives her a free pelvic exam, why, the whole profession suffers, just as every cleric gets a black eye when one of the priest’s colleagues is caught playing Hide the Host with an altar boy.

  Lust. That’s our subject, isn’t it? And do you suppose there’s a physiological explanation for one’s tendency to natter on and on in one’s senior years? Is there a gene that turns us into garrulous old farts?

  My point, to the extent that I have one, is this: As a physician, as a trusted medical practitioner, as a putative authority on matters of the human anatomy, I was taken into the confidence of my patients and thus made more aware than most people of the infinite variety and remarkable vagaries of human sexuality. I saw more penises than Catherine the Great, more vaginas than Casanova. Saw them up close, too, with no fumbling around in the dark. Told husbands how to satisfy their wives, women how to get pregnant.

  Why, I knew an older man who had a half dozen women, widows and spinsters, who came to him once a month on average to be masturbated. The old duffer didn’t call it that, and I don’t even know if he thought of it in those terms. He was treating them, he confided, for hysteria, and the treatment employed an artificial phallus hygienically hooded with a condom. He wore rubber gloves, did this doctor, and seemed genuinely offended at the hint that he might be getting more than a fee for his troubles. As to my suggestion that he might send them home with dildoes and a clue as to how best to employ them, he grimaced at the very idea. “These are decent women,” he told me, as if that explained everything. And perhaps it did.

  I have become inclined, through observation both personal and professional in nature, to grant considerable respect to the sex drive. The urgency of its imperative is undeniable, the variety of its manifestation apparently infinite. I will furnish but one example of the latter: One patient of mine, a lesbian, married another woman in a ceremony which, if unsanctioned by the state, was nevertheless as formal a rite as any I’ve attended. My patient wore a white gown, her spouse a tuxedo.

  After a few years they parted company, without having to undergo the legal rigors of a divorce. My patient began living as a man, and eventually took hormone treatments and counseling and underwent sex-change surgery. And so, quite unbeknownst to her, did her former marriage partner. They are now pals, working out at the gym together, going to ball games together, and looking for nice feminine girls to hook up with and marry.

  Infinite variety. . .

  But, entertaining as their saga may be, I wouldn’t call it lust. Lust is desire raised to a level that prompts unacceptable behavior---how’s that for a definition? And I can think of no clearer example of that than a fellow I’ll call Gregory Dekker.

  Dekker was a serial rapist. That’s spelled with an S, not a C, lest you imagine some lunatic having it off with a bowl of Cream of Wheat, or working his way one by one through a box of Cheerios. His sexual desire was strong, though probably not abnormally so, and he satisfied it in one of two ways---by rape or by masturbation. And, when he masturbated, the images in his mind were rape fantasies.

  Rape, we are often assured, is not truly sexual in nature. Rape is a violent expression of hostility toward women, and has nothing at all to do with desire. The rapist is wielding his phallus as a weapon---a sword, a club, a gun that fires seminal bullets. He is getting even with his mother for real or imagined abuse.

  What crap.

  Oh, surely hostility may play a part in his makeup. And surely there are some rapists who are acting out their primal dramas. But, if the chief aim of the act is to inflict pain and damage, why choose such an uncertain weapon? Why reach for a gun so apt to jam or misfire?

  Rape, you see, requires an erect penis. And a successful rape culminates in orgasm and ejaculation. And who would imagine that all of this takes place in the absence of sexual desire?

  Rape, I submit, is often nothing more or less than the sexual activity of a sociopath, a man lacking conscience who, as he might tell you, quite sensibly seeks to sat
isfy himself sexually without having to resort to candy or flowers, sweet words and false promises. He doesn’t have to take his chosen partner to dinner or a movie, doesn’t have to feign interest in her conversation, doesn’t even have to tell her she looks nice. Why, he proves she looks good to him, good enough to throw down and ravish. Isn’t that compliment enough?

  I’ve no clear idea what makes a person grow up sociopathic. Is it in the genes? The upbringing? I don’t have the answer. Nor, in fact, do I know much about Gregory Dekker in particular. He was never a patient of mine.

  Susan Trenholme was, however.

  She was a remarkably ordinary young woman, neither beautiful nor plain. Her hair was light brown, not quite blond, and her figure was womanly, and fuller than she’d have preferred; she was always trying new diets and over-the-counter appetite suppressants, all in an effort to lose five pounds over and over again. She was, I suppose, no more neurotic in this area than most young women; if they were as obsessed about their height, they’d all put on weighted boots and suspend themselves from the ceiling.

  Susan met a young man in college and lived with him for two years. They drifted apart, and she was twenty-six years old and living alone when Gregory Dekker caught up with her in the parking lot of her apartment complex, knocked her to the ground, fell on her, and told her not to struggle or make a sound or he’d kill her.

  Looking into his eyes, she knew he was serious. And she became convinced that, whether she cried out or remained silent, whether she struggled or acquiesced, her fate was sealed. He would kill her anyway once he’d had his pleasure with her.

  In fact she had grounds for this assessment, beyond what she was able to read in his eyes. A rapist whose description matched her assailant had committed a string of rapes in the area within the past several months, and had left his two most recent victims for dead; one recovered, one was dead on arrival at a nearby hospital. Unlike the monster in your story, Soldier, Gregory Dekker was not given to lust-murder; he killed only to avoid being caught.