I took the 101, heading in the direction of San Francisco. Susan was all excited, that was obvious from her sighs of joy and the way she kept jumping in her seat. Chuck Berry was playing on the radio and she asked me to change stations, but I refused. She came back to the business of the door.
“Why doesn’t it open on my side?”
I was in no hurry to answer. “The mechanism is blocked, I suppose, this van’s getting old.”
“It’s strange, I get the impression you’re forcing yourself not to be nice.”
“I never force myself to do anything. That’s my problem.”
As we got closer to San Francisco the traffic grew denser and we slowed to a crawl. Susan took advantage of that to look at me closely.
“Why do you want to join a commune? You look more of a loner to me. Do you really like other people?”
“No, but I’d like to learn.”
“I get the feeling you’re at a stage where you don’t have any choice. Will it bother you if I roll a joint?”
“Until now this van has been a nonsmoking area.”
“Does that mean I can smoke?”
I answered with a categorical no and she retreated into her shell. Then she had a fierce urge to take a leak. We were approaching Bay Bridge on a highway packed with traffic, and I couldn’t see any place to stop.
“You’ll have to hold it in until we’ve crossed the Golden Gate.”
“When will that be?”
“If it carries on like this, I’d say an hour.”
“That’s really impossible!”
She begged me to pull up on the berm and I had to walk around to the other side of the car to open the door for her. She relieved herself behind the van where nobody could see her. I thought I might leave her there, after all I knew as much as she did about the location of the commune. Then I realized it was in my own interest to have her tag along. Without her, I’d arouse suspicion in the commune and that wasn’t what I wanted. Mist was falling over San Francisco, so damp it was like rain, and the stream of cars was taking its time to clear.
“I don’t think I’ll ever go back to civilization,” she said solemnly.
“How can you know that?”
“Because it’s meaningless. Look, we’re packed in like a herd of cows for slaughter. We’re here to consume, period. I can just see myself with a little house and a garden and the neighbors coming and bringing me an apple pie with cream to welcome me while they look inside the house to see if there’s any clue about what religion I am. There’ve never been so many bad people claiming they’re Christians as there are in this fucking country. But Jesus Christ is nowhere to be found. Either he’s dead for good, in other words the resurrection failed, or he’s so pissed about things he’s given up. What I like about what our generation is doing is that we’re returning to his basic principles and showing all those imposters that Christ’s message of love is still topical.”
“You’re going to fall flat on your face.”
“Why?”
“Because man is bad. Evil is in him from birth. Look at a schoolyard, it’s not much better than a prison yard.”
“Were you ever in prison?”
“That’s neither here nor there.”
The guy in front of us braked abruptly and I knocked his car without causing any damage. But he got out, looking as if he wanted to kill me.
“Why don’t you look where you’re going, asshole?”
He came running toward me. When I got out he was stunned to see all seven feet of me rising up in front of him. He might have held his ground except that I had a 9mm pistol in my hand. He turned straight around and walked back to his car as if nothing had happened. Susan was slumped against the door on her side.
“You pulled a gun on him. Are you crazy or what?”
“I’m not crazy, I just don’t like it when people show a lack of respect.”
We set off again. Two miles further on, having calmed down by now, I said, “I don’t regret it. When I was a kid, I used to be terrified whenever I was insulted, but that’s all over now. If you don’t want to keep riding with me, I’ll drop you wherever you want.”
“That’s not cool, it’s really not cool.”
She repeated this phrase several times, but she stayed put. Then she asked me to get rid of my gun. “It’s illegal anyway.”
“Then let’s get things straight, both of us,” I said. “I’m a cop. It’s my service weapon. I’m searching for two missing girls. I hope I find them in that commune, if I don’t it means they’ve been murdered. You keep that to yourself, okay? I don’t mean your brothers any harm, I’m even prepared to understand them, but I’ll never be one of you, I don’t like beards, or long hair, or smoke, or love, or people who don’t wash.”
The rain started beating down on the car, making the silence that had fallen between us more bearable. Susan sat wedged against the door, with her knees pulled up to her stomach. Her sudden attachment to me was like a victim’s to his executioner. I could say whatever I liked, brutalize her verbally, nothing could dissuade her from staying with me. The situation disgusted me.
“Why do you want to join a commune?” I asked. “Is it so you can sleep around?”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because free love is great for ugly girls. A pretty girl can have whoever she likes anyway.”
“Why are you so mean to me? Where does that get you?”
“I don’t think I like you. There’s something about you that bugs me.”
“That’s because you aren’t attracted to me, isn’t it? You’d have liked to combine business with pleasure but I don’t turn you on, right? Didn’t you see what I looked like when I got in?”
This conversation wasn’t going anywhere because neither of us knew where it had come from.
“What do you know about this commune?”
“My friend only called me once. They don’t have phones and using a booth costs a fortune. She said the people there were really cool, that they still didn’t have enough food but they were on the right track. I think we should take them something.”
“Like for a birthday party? We could take wine.”
“I don’t think wine’s their thing, they prefer grass or tabs.”
“What are tabs?”
“LSD.”
For a while we didn’t say anything. The Golden Gate was drenched. The cars were going at a snail’s pace. Below, the muddy sea was watching us like a shark observing its prey gesticulating on the surface. Susan suddenly retaliated.
“Even the ugliest woman can find someone to have sex with. It isn’t always the same for men.”
I didn’t reply, it wasn’t worth it and I wasn’t in the mood. I realized that crossing San Francisco had taken a while because she wanted to take another leak. I left 101 at Sausalito, a little coastal town filled with rich bohemians that’s going to tip into the sea one of these days, and took the 1, which winds its way through really luxuriant country. I dropped Susan on a dirt track. She didn’t think she was out of sight enough. I got a bit riled and asked her what she had to hide that was so amazing. I should have suspected that she was the kind of woman who’d fall in love with a guy that mistreats her. I told her that and all she could say was: “But I don’t feel like you’re mistreating me, Al.”
The road was winding so much it made you nauseous. Susan got her box of pills out of her bag.
“I didn’t know you had a man in your life.”
“I don’t have anyone,” she said gravely, “but I don’t like being caught by surprise. This thing is the invention of the century, lots of tragedies are going to be avoided. The poorer people are, the more kids they make, the more they argue, the more kids they make, it’s like having kids is the cure for everything. I don’t know why my mother had me. She didn’t love my father. Any more than she loved me. She became pregnant, and she kept me, without asking herself if she was doing the right thing. And as far back as I can remember, I don’t think I ever wanted to live.”
“That’s disappointing,” I joked. “Here was I wanting to cut your throat, and now you’ve taken away my motivation. You can’t kill someone who wants to be killed. Where’s the pleasure in that?”
“I swear to you that for a moment, when you first picked me up, the thought did cross my mind that you might be a murderer and then I told myself, ‘Hey, that’d be great if he was.’ I had this whole fantasy about someone who takes life meeting someone who doesn’t care about losing it.”
“I can’t believe you don’t want to live.”
“When I’m out in the country, my life seems valid, but in the city I sometimes think about killing myself.”
“Did you ever try?”
“No, I don’t love myself enough for that. But tell me, who are these two missing girls?”
“Two architecture students.”
“I’m studying literature, so I don’t suppose we ever met. Are they hippies?”
“You mean in the way they dress?”
“Yes.”
“No, they’re quite conservative.”
“I know lots of girls like them who’ve gone over to the other side. It’s a matter of survival. The family is the place where there’s the least oxygen, so they need to get away. Just because our parents fought the war and won it, they think their way of doing things can’t be challenged. I don’t give a fuck about the model they’ve set down. Work, religion, family, country! Pride in being American! How can you be proud of being American with all the terrible things we’re doing in Vietnam and South America and Africa? Whenever anyone tries to share out the wealth a little better, they’re killed. Supposedly because they’re Communists. America is a paradise for hypocrites . . .”
“If you don’t shut up, you walk the rest of the way.”
She had gotten a little overexcited and she realized it. “You’re just back from Vietnam, aren’t you?”
“Why do you say that?”
“I can tell when a man has killed and when he hasn’t. You’re tense, like a man who’s been forced to kill and who’ll never get over it, who’ll carry that guilt with him for the rest of his life. I understand you, you know, our fathers killed but they had morality on their side, whereas we can’t justify killing people in Vietnam. And you don’t like people like us, because we don’t help you to justify what you’ve done, we don’t glorify you for doing it. But I forgive you, you know?”
I could have killed her. With men like Duigan or Dahl, I was a different person. I used all my intelligence to impress them as if I they were my father. But sluts like this Susan brought me back to the real Al Kenner. I could have killed her in a second and thrown her in the bushes that lined the road and not even a dog would have picked up her scent. But that urge to kill was the kind you never do anything about. She sensed that I wanted it, that I was capable of doing it and she was enjoying it because she didn’t care about her wretched life. A man who’d like to kill but doesn’t dare and a woman who’d like to die but doesn’t dare, that was the situation we were in when the sea appeared around a bend. Honestly, who would want to kill a depressive like her?