She sits up, and sobs, staring at me.
“What is it?” I ask, suddenly afraid for her. In fact, it is more than that – her pain is now my pain – the kind of empathy only lovers deeply in love can understand. “What’s wrong?”
“Oh, Dick. I love you so much. You believe that, don’t you?
“Of course, darling. Why are you crying?”
“There is something I must tell you.”
“Alright, tell me, love.”
“It’s a terrible secret and it is something I should have told you before … well, before we became involved.”
“Let me guess. You have an incurable disease,” I try to joke, kissing her on the lips.
“I wish it were that simple,” Samantha sobs.
“What could possibly be worse than some dreadful communicable disease?” I ask.
“It’s about me,” she wails.
“What about you? Sam, what the hell is wrong?”
She stares at me, sniffs, then regains some kind of composure.
“Vampires, as you know, have a gift. We can transform ourselves into most anything in the world. It’s quite magical, really, but it comes down to a fundamental ability to very quickly manipulate matter on a cellular level, and reshape it by the power of thought.”
“Right,” I say. “You can turn yourself into bats and shit. Or fire, like Dracula did yesterday at the airport.”
“Yes, all this is true,” Samantha says quietly.
“I’m past all this,” I say, smiling. “Remember, I do this for a living. Fight vampires and such.”
She touches my cheek, and looks into my eyes.
“You remember when I told you I was a young novice when Dracula found me in the field outside of my convent. That he had taken me in the stage of his Hunger?”
“Sure, how could I forget?”
Samantha is beginning to cry again.
“He didn’t really … take me during the Hunger,” Samantha says. “He healed me.”
I stare at her, completely at a loss.
“What are you saying?”
Samantha takes a breath and speaks very slowly.
“That early evening, I was out walking by myself, deep in thought and meditation. I had been punished by the Brothers at the monastery. One of many times.”
Something clicks in my head. “The monastery?”
“Yes. It was not a nunnery.”
My throat tightens up. I begin to have a bad feeling.
“Dick,” Samantha says to me. “I wasn’t a young novice when Dracula found me.”
Sam pauses.
“I was a young monk! And I was dying.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
I sit opposite Dr. Simonhoffer and watch her as she leans forward, considering my demeanor. I am wearing sunglasses, pajama bottoms, and a bloodied t-shirt from my encounter with the vampires at the airport just 48 hours ago.
“Looks like we’ve been having a little drinkie,” the good doctor says in what could be easily discerned as both a compassionate and patronizing tone of voice.
I lift up the bottle of Jack Daniels I have liberated from Father Gastroni’s bar, and swill it back, not giving a shit what Dr. Simonhoffer might think about this indiscreet behavior on my part. The hot liquid tears through my throat and stomach with merciless abandon … and I am grateful for the alcoholic agony of it all.
“Sun is over the yard-arm, Doctor,” I smile.
I am, it is safe to say, completely ripped out of my gourd.
“I’m not judging you, Inspector,” she says to me, and reaches out for one hand that I have placed on her desk. “And I’m delighted that you have, in what is obviously a significant piece of emotional extremis, chosen to seek me out for guidance.”
I drink again, staring at her. She continues to prattle on.
“It looks like you’ve had a hard couple of days. In fact, I know as much because I read Captain Zelig’s report on your airport sting the other night. Quite traumatic, I’m sure.”
“That was a fuckin’ picnic,” I say. “Compared to some other shit…”
“I see.”
“No, you really don’t, and I don’t mean that in an insulting way,” I sputter drunkenly.
She leans back and considers me for a moment in silence.
“So. How are we dealing with other matters in life?” she asks me, switching gears. “Have you considered your clear desire for same-gender companionship, sexually speaking?”
I think about this for a moment, and nod.
“Yes, I’ve given it a spot … a lot of thought,” I respond honestly. “And I believe I am a full on faggot of the first cock-sucking order.”
Dr. Simonhoffer’s benign smile seems to disintegrate on her face.
“Really, Inspector,” she says, “that kind of referencing is hardly appropriate.”
“No, no, you were right. I’m a dick-smoker. Mr. Pillow Muncher, that’s my new nick-name. Yep. Fact, my current lover is a man. Well, was a man. Had a dick, once. Oh, and she’s also a vampire.”
I’m rambling and I realize this.
“She?” Dr. Simonhoffer replies, clearly confused.
“Yeah, long story,” I say and drink from the bottle once more.
“Isn’t that why you dropped in to see me? To talk, to regale me with long, significant, potentially therapeutic experiences by which we may both share and embark upon a mutually constructive or reconstructive endeavor to heal wounded mechanisms with your clearly trouble psyche?”
Well … she’s got a point.
“Okay,” I say, the room for me now spinning in earnest. “About an hour ago …”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
I am up against the far wall of Samantha’s room, trembling uncontrollably. All I can do for several seconds, after I have fairly torpedoed myself from Sam’s bed across the room, is stare in abject horror.
“You were a … a man?” I finally manage in a ragged, hoarse whisper?
Samantha is crying again, and nods. “Yes.”
It try to quell my rising emotions of loathing, fear, anger, betrayal … and find some calm in this miasma of madness.
“Tell me everything,” I say, allowing myself to crumble to my ass against the wall, staring at Sam through what I realize are stinging tears of acrimony.
Samantha wipes her eyes and stares at me with what I can discern is clear emotional agony.
“I was an orphan when I joined the monastery. I had been raised by some local peasants after my parents had died of plague just after I had been born. From a very early age, I realized I was not wholly content with being a little boy. I was filled with impulses and feelings I did not understand – nor could I control. I found, for example, that I was fond of wearing my foster mother’s dresses. I later discovered that I was extremely attracted to other boys. I could not share this secret with anyone else, but I knew that it was wrong – or at least wrong in that time and age.”
I listen, still trembling. Hoping perhaps that I will wake up and discover that this is all a dream.
“When I turned seventeen, my foster parents gave me over to the charges of the monks. This was a happy environment for me, inasmuch as there was discipline and a way of life which was regimented. There were rules of what I could do and what I couldn’t do. In short, there was God.”
Samantha is calming now. She leans back in bed, remembering.
“But I was still not comfortable in my own skin. I didn’t like being male, that was the simple truth of it. I wanted to be a woman. I felt in time that God had made a terrible mistake by making me a man. A cosmic error in the big cookie grinder, I used to tell myself. Instead of chocolate chip, one cookie came out cinnamon. Do you understand, Dick?”
“No.”
Sam sighs. And nods, clearly not surprised.
“In fact, I really was a woman, Dick. A woman imprisoned in a man’s body. That was my conclusion, anyway. I prayed to God for a way to reverse this terrible thing, to rectify this cru
el injustice.”
“You being born male instead of female,” I say dully.
“Yes. And then one day, it seems God answered that prayer. It was the night that Dracula found me.”
I say nothing as she pauses in her story. She stands now, wraps the bed sheet around herself and walks across the room, away from me, toward the shuttered window. Though what she is telling is disturbing, I am not unaware of the perfection of her figure – the femaleness of it – the beauty.
I try to shake free the nagging vision that Samantha once had a dangling cock and that she shared a propensity with me at one time for pissing standing up.
“It was one of many nights where I wandered a bit too far from the monastery’s protective grounds. Given to whimsy and day-dreaming, I would oftentimes use the twilight hours for my own kind of meditation, far and away from the madding crowd of self-flagellating monks and Gregorian chant.”
She turns slowly towards me and sits on the window banister across the room.
“On that night, some local bandits were in the area. They found me, on my own. Believing me to have something of value on my person, they stopped and searched me accordingly. Finding nothing, the leader of the bandit group broke into such a rage, that he beat me for the next ten minutes. When he finally tired of this activity, he ordered me set on fire.”
“Jesus God,” I whisper.
Samantha closes her eyes.
“As I could smell my own flesh roasting, it was not so much the pain that angered me. It was something more. The brutality of the inhuman act itself – the pure evil of the deed … this was what I was sure would be my dying thought, coupled with the wish that one day, if there were many lives to be lived by us, that in that future incarnation, I could try to save others from my fate. To help the innocents of a future age.”
I watch Samantha and nod.
“I’m sorry, Sam,” I say softly. “Burned alive. My god.”
“Even dying, I found the effort to extinguish the flames that consumed me. But once that was done, there was very little left recognizable as a human being. That I was still alive was astounding. It was at this point that Dracula entered the scene.”
Samantha proceeded to then outline most of what I already knew – with the exception that because of his intervention, Dracula was able to restore her flesh to normalcy once again within the span of a week.
“Once I was completely healed, Dracula asked me what I wanted to do. Something in me had changed. I no longer wanted to go back to the monastery. In fact, I did not know what I wanted. Dracula then presented me with his offer.”
“To be a vampire,” I say.
“Yes. And more than that – to change myself completely. I asked if this was possible in vampires – to change sex, to alter my sexual identity completely, physically, right down to every minute corpuscle. He said this could be done, but only by sheer vampiric will.”
Sam considers me in silence. “And that’s it.”
I shake my head for a moment, but say nothing. It is almost too much to digest, to accept. “So … you transformed yourself from male to female. Just like that.”
“It took a few days,” Samantha nods. “But the metamorphosis at the end of the day was one hundred percent, right down to the last strand of DNA in each ovary.”
I stand slowly. “You’re … you’re really a woman?”
“I think you should know that by now, Dick,” Sam says softly.
“No tricks?”
“No trick. Simply cellular metamorphosis.”
I walk up to her, and look at her in the eyes.
“Can you forgive me?” she whispers.
I stare into those beautiful eyes. And then I close my own. I nod.
“Yes, Sam. I can forgive you. I … I just … I’m having some trouble with all of this right now. I need time to process it.”
Samantha takes my hand, and I am sorry that I pull it away. But Samantha seems to understand my reticence in acceptance. She nods slowly, though says nothing.
I retrieve my robe, then look to her.
“Whatever may happen, Sam,” I say, “I do believe I love you. Male or female … that will never change.”
Samantha’s tears run down her cheeks and she nods, whispering back the words ‘I love you.”
I exit the room with one objective in mind.
Find the Esplanade and start driving.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
My bottle of Jack Daniels is now empty.
Dr. Simonhoffer stares at me with an expression I cannot immediately identify. Gone is the expression of self-satisfied confidence. Gone also is the practiced gaze of bemused compassion and sympathy. There is something else now that travels behind the corneas of my psychotherapist. Something strange. Something that very distantly makes my skin crawl worse than when I first heard the news that Samantha had once been a guy with a schlong.
“Dr. Simonhoffer?” I prod, though I think it sounds like I just said “Schochter Shimonhefter.”
The good doctor takes a breath, and stares past me.
“You … you love this woman, then?” she asks in a weird, weird voice.
“Yeah. I guess I do. I guess talking about this with you helped me realize that. I’m not as freaked as I was about an hour ago.”
“Yes … yes, that’s good, Inspector,” Dr. Simonhoffer says distantly.
She stands now, and walks toward the window, then looks out at the sun, now beginning its descent toward dusk.
“Funny how things can become so clear suddenly, don’t you think?” she asks me from a galaxy far, far away.
“Yeah, guess so,” I say, shrugging.
“Funny how you can look at your life – realize you’ve been sleepwalking through it – then wake up and take it for what it truly is.”
I’m not sure where my therapist is going with this, but I nod gamely. “Yep. Funny ‘nuff.”
“You live an interesting life, Inspector. I don’t think it’s a life necessarily always happy – perhaps most of the time, it is not. In fact, you probably are abjectly unhappy mostly. Mostly.”
I cannot disagree with my therapist. She has indeed hit the proverbial nail on the head. “Never really aimed for happiness, doc. If anything at all … maybe a little peace now and then.”
“And you seem to have found it in this love you have for your vampire girlfriend,” Dr. Simonhoffer says, her back still to me … as she continues to stare out the window.
“I guess so,” I nod. And it’s true. My love for Samantha transcends all that was … what matters is all there is now … and what will be.
“I … don’t believe I’ve ever had that kind of love before,” Dr. Simonhoffer says to me. “I envy you.”
Dr. Simonhoffer now turns to me. She has been crying, I now see.
“Doctor –“
“No, don’t say anything, Dick. Please.”
She sniffs, then walks back to her desk, but does not sit.
“Your story resonates with me particularly because of Samantha.”
“Really.”
“Yes.”
“Why is that?”
“Because, Dick … I was also a man once,” Dr. Simonhoffer says to me.
Believe it or not, this does not instantly take me by surprise. Birney was once a cop for Vice, and now he’s a German Shepherd. Since the Popov Incident, transmigration of souls, while rare, is still something that all of us are beginning to accept as something smacking of increasing normalcy.
And so I suspect that Dr. Simonhoffer means to tell me that she was once some lost soul, and that after having died, decided to inhabit the form she presently possesses. Either with the owner’s permission, or just after the prior owner’s own demise.
So I dare to ascertain in these few seconds.
“Ah, I see.”
“I don’t think you do, Inspector.”
Dr. Simonhoffer reaches behind head, and releases her hairclip. Her hair, where tightly bound before by the clip, spreads ou
t across her shoulders in a kind of rat-tassle haphazardness.
“You see, I was once a man, but have taken matters into my own hands, and had myself surgically reborn.”
Oh, but the world’s a-spinnin’ now.
“You –“
“I am a transgender, yes, Inspector.”
I stare at Dr. Simonhoffer. And I remain calm. I guess nothing can really further phase me at this stage of the game. Nothing whatsoever.
“Well … good for you,” I say heartily. And I mean what I say.
Dr. Simonhoffer does not smile.
She opens her desk drawer very slowly.
“I did not have the benefit of your Samantha’s change-over powers. I had to grow a pussy quite artificially. And I do believe I resent that most of all about her.”
I really don’t know what to say about all this. And so I seize upon the wisdom of the moment that to say nothing is the wisest course of action.
Until I see Dr. Simonhoffer pull out a .38 police special from her desk drawer.
“The expense involved – and the pain, Inspector. You cannot imagine it. I don’t mean the physical discomfort – the injections, the hormonal supplements, the growing of breasts – no, the pain emotionally, even spiritually … it is daunting at best.”
“Uh, doc – what are you doing with the gun?”
Dr. Simonhoffer ignores me, it would seem. She checks the cartridge bay, but continues to speak. “The real pain is in knowing that no one can rescue you from the decision you are about to make. That there is no kind and loving God that can reverse the way things are – my being born male instead of female, that is. Well, unless you’re Samantha and your new friend is a vampire.”
Dr. Simonhoffer’s tone of voice suddenly turns biting and bitter.
“Your Samantha had that chance … that opportunity from God. Why her? Why?”
I watch the gun in her hand. I sense great trouble and heartache is at hand.
“Doctor, perhaps you should give me the gun,” I suggest.
She now looks directly at me.
“My life is nothing,” she says flatly. “I have done nothing. I have butchered myself, pursuing my dream of womanhood, and I am a walking, breathing mockery of foolishness.”
Monster Vice Page 22
