Free Candy by Terry Southern

regained his composure, and when he spoke again he did so softly and not without dignity.
    “You may not believe this,” he said, “but I was very much like you are now—when I was a young man. Hotheaded . . . outspoken . . . I was pretty impatient with the older men too, and I didn’t give two hoots if they heard me saying so either. Just the way you are. I suppose that explains why—even though we’ve occasionally been at loggerheads since you’ve come here—I, er—er—well, that secretly, I liked you all the time. Sometimes, as a matter of fact, I almost feel as if I might be your Dad.” (Dr. Dunlap became a bit choked up again as he made this surprising revelation.) “Mrs. Dunlap and I don’t have any children,” he confessed, “but if we did have a son, I think I’d want him to be something like you. I don’t know why I should be telling you all this; especially after everything that’s been—” He stopped speaking brusquely and gaped at Candy.
    The precious girl lay on her back moaning faintly, like some sleeper beset by an ugly dream. In her new position, though she was still unconscious, she had drawn her legs up, and, once again, the pleated black skirt had slipped up her legs, affording a breath-taking view of her marvelous bare limbs and the milk-white V the panties made, concealing her honeypot from the prying eyes of Dr. Dunlap—for that was exactly where his stare was focused.
    When Krankeit noticed this he leaned over and arranged the skirt properly. He moved expertly and with assurance, as if these exposed legs belonged to him.
    “Now, now,” he said, returning his attention to Dunlap, “try to be a good boy. As you say, you’ve got just a few more months to go before retirement.”
    Dunlap blanched at this latest thrust, and his lips fairly jangled with distress. He said nothing though, and, after a moment, there came into his eyes a saintly look of sadness.
    Something about this expression intrigued Krankeit very much. He recognized it, yet couldn’t think of what it reminded him.
    Great Scott! he thought suddenly. It was true! Dunlap actually was behaving as if he were his father! There was no mistaking it—that look of patient suffering—he had seen it before on the face of his own father. And now thinking about his father (who had disappeared when Krankeit was still a boy) he felt a jab of remorse.
    “Do you think it’s nice,” Dunlap sniffled, “to have your every action pounced on by somebody and wrenched asunder?”
    Krankeit crushed his cigarette out in an ashtray and said:
    “It’s not you, it’s the damned shell you’re imprisoned in that I’m trying to jack off—er, I mean wrench off.”
    “What do you mean by that?” Dunlap asked in a hurt tone.
    “Just this: you’ve an ocean of drowned impulses to jack off! All your life something’s been preventing you—first your mother, then you yourself. You come from the last ‘primitive’ generation before Freud discovered copulation; you have a veneer of high moral virtue, but deep down you’re a veritable sewer of bestiality and lust!”
    This analysis of his character seemed to please Dr. Dunlap more than anything else, and he perked up a bit. Krankeit was, at least, taking a serious interest in him as a personality, which was a clear improvement over his former, uniformly vitriolic attitude.
    “I’m taking advantage of the fact that you symbolically adopted me as your son a little while ago, to speak frankly—in ‘family intimacy’—to you about this thing,” Krankeit said.
    At the words “adopted me as your son,” and again, at the words “family intimacy,” Dunlap’s eyes welled with happiness, and his spine began to straighten in sturdy little jerks— Exactly like an erection! thought Krankeit, taking a step forward, his hands cupped and raised as a ready catalyst for the process, before he checked himself.
    “You know, my boy,” said Dunlap, “there’s a great deal of good sense in what