19 Nov Lover

Randy Wense had been parked on the corner of Water and 3rd for the last fifteen minutes listening to the newest reports.

The radio presenter was relaying a statement that the special agent in charge of the investigation had made earlier that day.

He was explaining how they’d found a duffel bag in a dumpster in Charleston full of the personal effects of the latest disappearance. It was apparently a new habit among the prostitutes of West Virginia to secrete a small number of identifiable items near any place where they picked up a john. That way, if things turned nasty, at least the streetwalking community would find out about it and the law would know how to proceed.

The reporter on the radio was now saying how great a step forward these findings were and how, without a shadow of a doubt, both local police and the federal authorities now believed that the nineteen-some disappearances of women in West Virginia, Pennsylvania and New York were the work of a single abductor.

Randy dialed down the radio slowly. There was a slightly shrill tenor to the reporter’s voice and, truthfully, it had been getting on his nerves.

He sat in the silence now. Just the darkness of the abandoned car-lot behind him; around him the solid discretion of derelict industrial shells and, out in front, the slight sparkle of white glints on black water, from the artificial road-lights that shone on the Monongahela River from its further bank.

Of course Randy knew what they’d be saying about him. They’d no evidence. Not a trace. Apart from that one duffel bag, he didn’t know that the whore had stowed away.

No blood. No semen. No DNA of any description. And yet they’d still be saying it — the civilized people of Charleston and Albany and, here, in Pittsburgh.

They’d say he was raping those girls.

They’d it because they had small and uncomplicated minds. Prostitutes are sex-workers, and so the crimes against them must be sexual in nature.

Worse! Women are sex objects and so crimes against them — against the entire gender — are interpreted by the masses as being about sex ninety-percent of the time.

Randy felt like spitting, he was so disgusted.

He hated human beings. He hated their dirty, small, uncomplicated minds.

He hadn’t raped anyone. He couldn’t. As far as he was concerned human sexuality was a violence. He wanted nothing to do with it.

There was only one for him. He thought about her and his stomach filled up with static. He closed his eyes to see her better in his memory. His Lover, waiting for him to come home, even now, across the New York border with Canada.

He pictured her the last way he’d seen her. Lying in their basement so enticingly. Urging him to love her as a body loves a body.

There was a dull noise of thin knuckles on glass.

Randy’s eyes shot open and the tingles of love in his stomach disappeared.

He looked up disgustedly at the face leering down at him from outside the car. She was dressed in a low-cut, high-riding rag of sparkly magenta. She must’ve been thirty, or thirty-five, and even the partial light hovering through the trees from the Monongahela showed on her face the blotches and abrasions of one who had recently cultivated an addiction for crystal meth.

That, and her tiny head and skinny body.

She’s disgusting, Randy thought. But she’ll do just fine.

* * * * * *

Randy adjusted his rearview disinterestedly as the prostitute ran through her tariff from the passenger seat.

Forty bucks for pussy. Twenty-five for head. Apparently, for ten bucks, she’d rub him off, and for a Benjamin, she’d let him take her up the ass.

“I don’t want sex,” Randy had said at last, abruptly cutting off her tirade of smut.

He looked at her.

“I just want to talk,” he said.

She looked back at him, scrutinizing. She’d figured he wouldn’t expect much of a party the minute she’d seen him. He was one of those painfully polite johns — she reckoned — one of those who would finish too soon and probably apologize.

Hell, she’d had guys pay extra for their premature ejaculations; like she gave a shit if it took them five minutes or thirty seconds.

“What you want to talk about, honey?” She settled in for an easy trick.

“Can we begin with your name?” Randy asked, polite still, but somehow unnaturally clinical at the same time.

“It’s Francesca,” Francesca smiled. “And you? What do I call you, honey?”

“Randy,” Randy answered. “Randy Wense.”

“Don’t get a lot of Randy’s anymore,” Francesca observed. “Kind of an old-fashioned name.”

“Well it suits me then,” Randy smiled tightly. “I’m a bit of an old-fashioned guy.”

“So how come you don’t wanna fuck, Randy?”  She slapped his shoulder playfully. “You’re a good lookin’ guy.”

He closed his eyes briefly. His shoulder, where she’d touched it, stung like a flare-up of dermatitis. He felt unclean.

Must she use those vulgar words!?

He calmed himself. He thought of the New York border. He thought of the basement back home and the Lover who was waiting for him.

“I’ve got someone,” he said, a little distractedly. “She’s waiting for me back home in Canada.”

“You got a girl?” Francesca smiled.

Don’t call her that, you whore, Randy thought.

Again he had to make an effort to calm down.

“She’s my Lover,” he said.

Francesca’s mouth cracked in the ugliest laugh he’d ever heard; a hooting, gasping thing that wrinkled her face and aggravated those repulsive drug-induced scars.

He stared at her angrily.

“Oh, I’m sorry, honey!” She was still laughing. “When you said you were old-fashioned I didn’t think you meant knights on white horses and shit… She’s your lover?”

“Yes,” he said, trying to seem unfazed. “She’s waiting for me in Canada.”

Francesca’s ugly laugh grew weaker and then she looked at him with something like respect.

“Aw, well, good for you, Randy.” She congratulated. “Nice to see a man who sticks by his woman; Jesus knows there ain’t many. And that’s how come you don’t wanna fuck tonight?”

Randy sniffed.

“Truthfully, Francesca, I don’t like sex,” he answered. “I think there’s a basic brutality in it, don’t you?”

He looked at her. She looked the same as every other dumb whore he’d had in that car. The whores of Charleston, Albany, Pittsburgh. They were all the same. None of them ever understood: why he thought the way he did; why he had to do the things to them he did.

He decided at least to try to explain.

“Think about it, Francesca,” he shook his head pityingly. “What do people say when they hate one another? Fuck you! Get the fuck outta here!? I’ll fuck you up!?  To be fucked is to be wasted, ruined, degraded. That’s how we see sex. As a species I’m talking about now, Francesca, as a species we look on sex as a form of aggression.”

Francesca moved a little uncomfortably in her seat. This easy trick was turning into a worse chore than screwing.

“That’s why I hate the sex trade, too, Francesca,” Randy went on. “Oh, not you, it’s not really your fault. You’re the victim in all this. It’s these bastards I hate…”

He pointed out across the river at the artificial lights and the hundreds of thousands of human sentiences they implied.

“People, Francesca. I hate people. Small. Uncomplicated. Confined. Condemned to commit the same violence and have the same violence committed on them again and again and again… The kicked cat kicking downwards, Francesca… Some fucking company accountant gets chewed out over a few numbers in the wrong column and suddenly he’s here — ghosting the streets of McKeesport — looking for you, Francesca. So he can pound out all that rage. So he can leave it behind, between your legs.”

It was Francesca’s turn to look disgusted and when Randy looked at her next he could see it written all over her face.

Time to change the mood, he thought to himself. Even whores could get squeamish.

“Let’s change the subject,” he suggested. “Do you smoke?”

Francesca nodded. She’d gone slightly silent and Randy guessed he’d shocked her with his philosophies.

“I don’t suppose many of your clients talk like I do.”

He fished around in the dash and produced a pack of smokes.

“Hell, mister,” Francesca shook her head, “hardly anyone I’ve met talks like you. You had college?”

Randy smiled at her. He offered her a cigarette and she took it. Then he gave her a light and she puffed out a trail from the gape of her nostrils.

“I went to Stanford,” he said.

Francesca choked on her smoke.

“Stanford?” She snorted. “Like in California? That Stanford?”

“Don’t be too impressed,” Randy said. “I dropped out before the end of my degree.”

Francesca coughed a little on her cigarette again and then looked at Randy.

“What were you studying?”

“I was studying medicine,” he answered, “but I didn’t like the professors very much.”

“You don’t like a lot a’ folks, huh, Randy?” Francesca observed.

Randy shook his head, dreamily.

In truth, he was only half in the car. The other part of him wanted the entire charade to be at an end. He wanted to be moving again. Out of the cesspit of Pittsburgh. Out over the pockmarked body of Pennsylvania. Through New York and away from the failed experiment of the United States.

Back to the basement in his home. Back to his Lover.

“I took my first panic attack at Stanford,” he confided.

Francesca just sat there listening; making the odd dry rasp from the harshness of the cigarette.

“People later said it was my age,” Randy said, “too young, they said. Too young for all the responsibility of a medical degree at one of the nation’s foremost universities. But that wasn’t it. It was a philosophy elective— of all things. You see, Francesca, there was an idea in that lesson I’d never heard before but didn’t learn that day either. It’d been in my bones for as long as I could remember.”

He looked at her.

“Do you know David Hume?”

She shook her head.

“Doesn’t matter,” he looked away. “David Hume believed the world was basically limited. A world of small, uncomplicated people; making the same mistakes over and over; having no way of making new ideas.

Except we can link things together, Francesca; jumble things up or make things smaller or — and this idea has been with me all my life — we can augment reality.”

“I’m not gonna lie to you, Randy,” Francesca said. “I don’t understand a word just came outta your mouth.”

She laughed. She coughed.

“Augmentation!” Randy stared at her angrily. “Making… things… bigger!”

She still didn’t understand. Christ, what did he have to do to make these whores understand!?

“You’re you, Francesca,” he lectured. “You’ll always be just you. A tiny little girl staggering in your stilettos from one car to the next. Servicing one collection of genitals after the next. Just you. Tiny, little you!”

Francesca’s ghost of a cough was getting worse. She was really hacking now.

“Hell, Randy…” she choked. “This is some strong cigarette.”

“Always just you!” Randy was nearly shouting now. “Unless someone makes you bigger! Unless someone augments you!”

He was pressing closer to her and Francesca was starting to notice the woozy feeling the smoke had produced in the center of her skull.

“Tell you what…” she slurred. “Keep the cash, honey. I think I’ve had about enough.”

She opened the door to the car. He let her. He adjusted his rearview before pulling out after her. After all, it was a long drive to Canada.

Francesca staggered out of the car; hooping and spluttering as her throat seemed to close in on itself.

“What the fuck was in that cigarette!?” she screamed.

Randy left the car door open and started moving towards her, checking the river and the nearest streets for the telltale shapes of watching humans.

There were none.

Francesca screamed again— but for the last time— as Randy grabbed her around the shoulders and wrestled her to the floor.

“Shhhh… shhhh…” he soothed, as his alarmingly strong hand clamped her mouth shut. “The drug’ll begin to take action in just a few seconds, Francesca.”

His voice was low and soothing. As though he was speaking to a child.

“It’s okay,” he kissed her blotched forehead. “All the pain’s over now. When you wake up there’ll be no more of this smallness. No more limitation. When you wake up you’ll be bigger. Bigger and better than you ever thought you’d be.”

Francesca continued to try to scream from behind the hard barrier of her attacker’s flesh.

Randy just lay there in the deserted car-lot, with the light of the Monongahela flitting like ghost moths over his and Francesca’s bodies.

He held her face tightly as she lost consciousness. And, all the while, he kept the same perfect picture in his mind’s eye.

His Lover. Her massive, augmented body lying on the concrete floor of their basement, begging him to love her.

* * * * * *

Lover. Lover. Lover. Lover.

In complete darkness, Francesca heard the words. For long minutes she never knew where she was — and that feeling was terrifying.

In the end, she began to feel the bump and grind of the wheels passing concrete under her body. She felt the shape of her confinement and recognized it.

Christ! She was in the trunk of his car!

She could hear him, through there, in the driver’s seat— hauling ass, no doubt, for whatever psychos’ Disneyland he’d built up in Canada — and he was talking to himself as he drove.

Lover, he was saying. It’s okay, Lover. I’m coming. I’m coming.

Francesca started to scream. She pounded her bound wrists on the cold metal door of his trunk. Trying, against all the odds, to attract attention.

The only attention she attracted was Randy’s.

“It’s okay, Francesca!” he shouted back at her. “Soon you’ll be bigger! Soon you’ll be bigger and better, Francesca!”

“You sick bastard!” she screamed and battered at her tiny prison. “Let me out!”

She continued to fight and hammer away until Randy was forced to pull the car off into a lay-by.

She heard the engine die.

She heard his boots trudging over small stones.

Then she heard his key entering the locked trunk.

Her heart started beating faster. She had to fight him! She had to get out of there!

There was a moment of blue sky and painful light as Randy opened the trunk. In his right hand, he was holding a stained rag.

Francesca screamed; lashing out at him with her ligatured limbs; trying to bite him.

He forced the cloth down over her nose and mouth.

“Sleepy time, my angel,” he smiled down at her.

She tried to hold her breath, but it was hopeless.

A flow of chloroform vapors rushed into her lungs.

Then there was nothing but darkness again.

* * * * * *

The next time she woke Francesca was on her back and she must’ve been lying on something sharp because there was a pain, or a series of pains, running down the length of her body.

The room was so dark she couldn’t have seen a hand in front of her face, but she could smell the mildew in the air; the cloy of antiseptic and, everywhere, a stink so putrid she couldn’t put a name to it. It was like the fruity smell of badly sunburnt skin.

Randy wiped her forehead with a soft, wet cloth.

“Wakey, wakey,” he soothed.

She moaned, not yet able to make an intelligible plea.

“Don’t try to speak,” he said softly. “You’ve been through a lot and you’re probably in a lot of pain.”

The pain down her back was intense. It was like lying naked on a nest of fire ants.

“It’s just growing pains, my angel,” Randy stroked her forehead lovingly. “You’ve grown so much — become so much bigger and better — in so short a time. It’s bound to be uncomfortable.”

“Please…” her voice quivered. “Please. Randy. I wanna go home.”

He smiled. God. God, he loved her.

“You are home, Lover,” he said.

Francesca shook her head. She was hyperventilating with the panic.

“You’re confused, Randy,” she tried to convince him. “You’re just confused. I’m not her. I’m not… your ‘lover’. You said she was waiting for you… in Canada.”

“She was,” Randy nodded. “And she was waiting for you, too.”

“I don’t understand!” Francesca cried.

“You will, Lover,” he stroked her.  Only when his hands touched her breasts did she notice she was naked. “Soon you’ll understand everything.”

He walked away into the dark and Francesca tried to pull herself to her feet. She couldn’t. It felt like something was holding her to the floor.

“I’ve always been attracted to hugeness, Lover…” Randy’s voice issued from somewhere in the dark basement. “Do you know Baudelaire?”

Francesca just lay there; drawing in frightened rags of breath.

“Ah, Baudelaire,” Randy breathed, “he said it best: ‘At the time when Nature with a lusty spirit was conceiving monstrous children each day, I should have liked to live near a young giantess, like a voluptuous cat at the feet of a queen.’”

“Randy! Please!” Francesca screamed.

Randy laughed.

“’I should have liked to see her soul and body thrive… and grow without restraint in her terrible games… to explore leisurely her magnificent form… to crawl upon the slopes of her enormous knees!’”

There was a hard snapping sound and suddenly the entire room was flooded in a painful, white light.

It took Francesca’s eyes long moments to adjust to what they were seeing.

Then it took the mind even longer to adjust to the evidence of the eyes.

She didn’t scream — not at first — the horror was too sublime for that.

Randy had mounted an elaborate mirror of the ceiling of the basement room so that Francesca could view herself; could view what she’d become:

He’d sewn her back and the backs of her legs and arms to the spongey floor. That was the reason for the pain.

And the floor. The floor wasn’t concrete. It was covered, as with rolls of carpet, with yard upon yard of human skin.

Francesca’s eyes swiveled around the room.

The walls too were papered in skin. The whole room. The door. Everything was skin. And the legs and the arms of dead girls hung down from out of it like the lolling heads of past trophies.

Finally she started to scream. She rocked her naked body, trying to get up onto her feet. The central mound of flesh that made up the center of Randy’s basement, the mound she’d been surgically attached to, seemed to rock and undulate with her feverish movements. As though the entire room was her body.

Randy stepped closer and kneeled down by the newly installed face of his Lover. The chloroform steeped cloth was already in his hand.

“Get away!” she screamed. “Jesus! Jesus Christ! What’ve you done to me?!”

He clamped the rag over her face and watched again as the lights of consciousness dulled in her fright-crazed eyes.

When she was safely sleeping he kissed her forehead and the entire room seemed to quiver. His Lover, his Giantess, begging him to love her.

He smiled; leaning in and kissing her new lips; fondling her new breasts.

He was in heaven… like a voluptuous cat at the feet of a queen.

“I love you, Lover,” he whispered to the room.

A drugged groan issued from Francesca’s mouth.

Randy smiled.

He knew it was really the Lover speaking.

He knew that she was really saying: I love you, too.