The Need

by Andrew Neiderman

  “Beautiful night,” Detective Mayer said. “Makes me want to be young again, a teenager on his first date. You don’t live any longer than normal people, do you?” he asked.

  “No, and as I explained, the male counterpart lives even less than a so-called normal male.”

  “Why wasn’t it the other way around? As I remember it, God made Adam first and Eve only when Adam was lonely, right? How come the female half of you guys gets to live longer?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It’s just the way it is. You don’t have all the answers for your kind, do you?”

  “Hey, don’t get testy. Just asking. Mind if I smoke?”

  “Not in my car.”

  He shrugged. “It’s all right; I’m trying to stop. So,” he said, “tell me more about those early days, when you first became Richard.”

  “Those early days,” I said and smiled. I understood why he wished he could be a teenager again. There was such excitement in every discovery, in every change.

  “My first menstruation and subsequent metamorphosis had hastened my female development, just as Alison’s had hastened hers. During the next five days, I thought I could actually feel my body growing and molding.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No, I’m serious. In fact, one night I awoke because there was a tightness in my chest that made it hard to breathe. I began to panic and sat up quickly with a small scream. It was Dimitri who came to my door. He had just returned from a hunt in San Diego.”

  “San Diego? Why San Diego? Wasn’t there enough prey for him here?” the detective asked, sounding surprisingly bitter.

  “He had met someone and the pursuit took him to San Diego. Hey, we just don’t go after anybody, you know. Confident predators are selective, choosey. Why eat hamburger when you can have steak?”

  “Well, what does the male Androgyne look for in prey—big tits, long legs, pretty face?”

  I shook my head.

  “Just like all the others, you measure a woman in terms of what you see on the surface. Your dicks make you blind, dull your perception. You lack insight. I suppose that’s why I’ve come to appreciate some of my gay men friends. Unobstructed by a normal male’s hormones, they look at the whole woman, see her potential as a person rather than only as a good lay.

  “But to answer your question, male Androgyne see the essence of the woman, her life force. Sex is only a doorway through which we enter the heart and steal the fuel that makes it beat. Can you understand that?”

  He looked skeptical and confused in the light of the moon, but there was something in his eyes, a twinkling that confused me for the moment. He laughed quickly.

  “I’ll think about it. Hey, some of the things you’ve been telling me take a little digestion,” he said rubbing his stomach. “Like that gourmet meal. You don’t just chew and swallow.”

  “Very good.”

  “Go back to your story. You had screamed.”

  “Yes. Dimitri came to the door and flipped the light switch. Then he rushed into my room. I was drenched in sweat, my nightgown clinging to my skin. I looked up at him and tried to take deep breaths. Of course, he knew immediately what was happening.”

  “‘Stay calm,’ he said and sat beside me, taking my hand into his. ‘It will pass,’ he said reassuringly. ‘You will be all right.’

  “I told him I had had a terrible nightmare. A giant hand had taken hold of me and was squeezing me.” I laughed.

  “What’s so funny?” the detective asked.

  “Dimitri said, ‘Perhaps it wasn’t a nightmare. Perhaps God is molding you this very night.’”

  “Doesn’t sound like a nightmare; sounds like a nice way to explain it,” the detective said. I was surprised at his reaction, but continued my story.

  “Dimitri smiled and leaned forward to kiss me on the cheek. I could smell the scent of the woman he had been with. Her perfume, her hair spray, her very essence was pungent. He was still in the process of absorbing her and that was what was keeping him from metamorphosing back to Janice.”

  “You mean … the woman from San Diego that he…”

  “Yes. He saw that I was soaking wet and told me to get up and shower and change into a clean, dry nightgown.

  “I nodded and went into the bathroom. When I drew the wet garment over my head and gazed at myself in the mirror, I saw that my bosom had developed and my waist had narrowed. I turned and noticed how much tighter and curvier my buttocks had become.”

  “This happened overnight?”

  “Yes, and because these were changes that would come gradually to the inferior females, the sight of them frightened me at first. It was almost as if I had been transferred to another female form.”

  “Understandable.”

  “But as I turned about and considered myself, I grew more and more conceited. I was perfect; I was beautiful. I thought I was even better looking than Alison. Perhaps I was the prettiest androgynous female there was. The very sight of myself took my breath away,” I said and smiled, recalling the memory of those first images. The moonlight on the ocean glittered. I stroked my hair and took a deep breath, sighing like a lovesick teenager; only, I was in love with myself.

  “Well, as far as modesty goes, you’re not much different from any other female, I suppose,” Detective Mayer said. I ignored him because I was still lost in my reverie. “Hello?” he said drawing me back.

  “When I awoke the next morning,” I said, “I felt taller, fuller, and far stronger. I had a ravenous appetite and ate two portions of scrambled eggs. Janice wasn’t at all surprised, although she had no memory of what Dimitri had said to me the night before.”

  “Why not? It was her as a man, right?”

  “She wouldn’t remember,” I snapped.

  “All right, all right. I’m sorry. So you woke up in this beautiful body. Then what?”

  “What Richard had told me in his letter would happen began to happen that day at school. The boys in my class buzzed around me like flies longing to light on a piece of cake. They approached and pulled back, found reason to touch me, drew closer and then snapped away as if they sensed I could clamp down on each and every one of them and claim them forever. I couldn’t go from class to class without one of them coming up beside me to say something. Before the day was out, I realized I had become the object of some game they were playing. They were competing with one another to determine who would win me over first.

  “Of course, Alison had been having a similar thing happen to her. She had already had a conversation about all this with her mother.

  “‘We don’t want to bring undue attention to ourselves by becoming snobs,’ Alison said. ‘But we have to be careful about our relationships. Beatrice says that we are like newborn colts, unsteady on our feet, unsure about our strength. The adolescent still in us wants us to have normal teenage relationships, but we can’t have them. The longing will pass quickly,’ she assured me. I remember we were sitting by ourselves in the cafeteria…”

  “Now wait a minute. Hold on,” the detective said turning to me. “You told me Androgyne are only deadly in their male form, right? I mean, you don’t make love to a man and … suck the life out of him, do you?”

  “No, but we have a greater sexual capacity, a greater sexual appetite and things can happen sometimes, if we don’t control ourselves.”

  “Things? What things?”

  “I’m getting to it,” I said.

  “Wait, wait, just tell me up front. These things, they can be deadly to the man with whom you are making love?”

  “Yes.”

  “Shit. And I had such great plans for the night.”

  “But not always deadly,” I said, laughing. I was beginning to find him delightful, my detective.

  “Okay. Go on.”

  “Something remarkable but insidious had been occurring all that week—the girls who had been our friends were drifting away. Actually, it was more like they were standing still and we were pulling away. Things
that made them laugh, things that titillated them and things that annoyed them were suddenly very insignificant to us. We no longer sympathized or agreed, nor had we any interest in doing the things we had all done together before.

  “Like two foreigners who had just entered the school, we sat alone, speaking in our own language, while our old friends watched us, their eyes changing from confusion to anger and finally to indifference, returning once again, to mirrors of themselves. For us, they no longer existed. We were too involved in our own discoveries. And we were light years ahead of them when it came to emotions and desire.

  “Before Richard’s genesis and my subsequent maturation, I had fantasized being this boy’s or that boy’s girlfriend. I had often dreamt of being desired by older boys just the way I was being desired now. The feelings weren’t completely gone, although they were weakened because most of the older teenage boys looked immature to me.”

  “There goes your and Alison’s normal adolescent years, huh?”

  “Almost. There were two senior boys, Paul Slattery and Jimmy Burton. Both boys were well over six feet, Paul being six-four and Jimmy, six-five. They were the school’s basketball stars.

  “Before our conversions, like most of the junior high girls, Alison and I, too, had gone to the games and watched them lead our team to victory. We, too, had stood by in the halls and gazed longingly with fantasy eyes as they walked by with older girls, laughing, seemingly living on another level, worlds beyond the level we were on. They were the heroes, the movie stars, the celebrities of our school, respected and adored by so many, even by some teachers.

  “They were handsome and bright, each on his way toward winning academic scholarships as well as athletic, both often likened to someone like Bill Bradley, a Rhodes scholar who had become a professional basketball player and then a senator from New Jersey.

  “Although I no longer idolized them the way other girls my age did, I sensed their power and freshness in a new and more involving way. They weren’t as handsome and glamorous as they were delicious. Their health and sexual prowess turned them into a delicacy. I was drawn to them the way someone might be drawn to a gourmet meal, not that I had become cannibalistic in a literal sense. Rather, I had become sensitive to their masculine richness. I craved them the way someone with a weakness for sweets might crave a chocolate.

  “Standing between them and very close to them, I was able to drink in the scent of their bodies and vividly imagine the taste of their lips. Whenever one or the other spoke, I concentrated on his mouth, feeling myself drawn to his tongue. Each had a way of accenting something he said by bumping his hip or shoulder against my hip or shoulder. What they said didn’t matter. I heard only the rhythms in their voices and nodded and smiled at the proper times.

  “Their faces looked so shiny and soft. I felt as if I could dip my fingers into their cheeks and scoop out their tongues. No matter how I tried to avoid it, all my images were grotesque, a mixture of sex and violence. And, unfortunately, the same was true for Alison.”

  “Why unfortunately?” he asked.

  “One day, shortly after my conversion, I found Alison talking to them after school. Instinctively, I sensed some terrible danger in the intimate way she had wedged herself between them, rubbing her hips against theirs, stroking their arms and chests, tormenting them with her eyes. Even all the way across the hall, I could feel the heat and sensed something happening within myself.

  “It was like … like a claw scratching at the inside of my chest, digging its way out and I thought if this was happening to me only gazing at her with the boys, what could be happening to her?

  “I rushed to her side and pulled her away, but neither Paul nor Jimmy would give up pursuit. They followed us, trying to get us to stop and enter a conversation. Alison glared at me when I turned back to drive them away.

  “‘Why did you encourage them?’ I demanded.

  “‘I didn’t,’ she protested, but her voice was deeper and I had the distinct sense that Nicholas was emerging. It was the most frightening thing.”

  “You mean right there in the school hallway?” the detective asked almost in a whisper.

  “Yes. When I looked at her face, I saw almost imperceptible changes taking place: the metamorphosis of her eyes and mouth, even the faint traces of a beard and mustache. My heart began to pound. Paul and Jimmy were right behind us.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I pulled her into the girls’ room, thinking if I could splash her face with cold water…”

  “Yes?”

  “But the boys were under a spell. It was after school, no one was around … they followed us into the bathroom. I tried being annoyed, but Alison thought this was funny and even more exciting. When I looked at her hands, I saw the fingers had thickened and there was distinct hair over her wrist, darker, coarser.”

  “It was happening?”

  “Yes, Nicholas was emerging.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I thought if I drew the boys from her, I might stop the metamorphosis, but I succeeded only in accelerating it. I tried being nice to them, reasoning with them, promising them we would go someplace with them if they would leave the bathroom. That stimulated them further. Paul turned to me and Jimmy drew Alison into a booth.”

  “And…”

  “I realized it was too late. Something terrible was about to happen. I thought quickly, driven by a need to protect the Androgyne. I talked Paul into leaving the bathroom with me, promising to go for a ride with him and clearly suggesting that I would agree to park somewhere and have sex. He was so excited about it, he nearly walked through the door.

  “I looked back once before we left. Alison’s ankles were already thicker.”

  “Good grief, you mean she was changing into a male in the booth while she was with this boy?”

  “Yes.”

  “But wouldn’t he realize it?”

  “He was mesmerized by now and would see what he fantasized. At least that’s the way it’s been explained to me. Men are like that you know; Pygmalions always sculpting their Galateas and making love to the images rather than the women, and then, when they realize the woman is just a woman, they grow depressed and start sculpting another image.”

  “And women don’t do that, I suppose?”

  “They do, but men do it more. Men are more in control of visual images in this country—advertisements, magazines, film and television. They make composites: take the lips of this model, the breasts of this actress, the legs of another … and create their dream girls.”

  “Yeah, yeah. So you left this boy making love to his dream in a school toilet. What did you do?”

  “I succeeded in getting Paul out of the building. We went for a drive and I asked him to stop to get me an ice cream. When he did, I slipped away and rushed back to the school, but it was too late.”

  “Too late? Why?”

  “The janitor had already discovered Jimmy’s body. His head had been submerged into the toilet and he was drowned. An autopsy later also revealed his neck had been broken.”

  “Jesus. Why? Why did she do it?”

  “She didn’t. Nicholas did.”

  “Why?” the detective asked.

  I took a deep breath and turned to him.

  “For the same reason essentially that Richard killed Michael.”

  “Barrington? The publicist?”

  “Yes. He was my lover.”

  “But … you couldn’t stop it?”

  “I thought I could,” I said softly, tears now putting everything out of focus. “But I was wrong, I was arrogant and that’s another reason why I came to you to confess.”

  FIVE

  MY DETECTIVE DID not badger me with questions. He waited for me to get myself together and then start the car so we could return to my home. The tears that had streamed down my cheeks blew off into the wind as we sped up the Pacific Coast Highway. Before we reached the hill leading up to my house, he spoke.

  “I don
’t think I fully realized until now just how much emotional and mental pain you are in,” he said. “I must apologize for not taking you as seriously as I should have from the start, but I’m sure you can appreciate how difficult that was for me,” he added. “I meet all sorts of people and hear all sorts of stories. Last week, I met an alien from the planet Rudor in another galaxy. He killed people for their fingernails.”

  I didn’t appreciate his attempt at humor and he saw it.

  “Anyway,” he continued, “I’m sorry if I appeared insensitive.”

  I didn’t offer any forgiveness. At the moment his feelings were not very important to me.

  “So,” he said shifting in his seat, hoping to shift out of his own discomfort as well, “does the male part of an Androgyne always get jealous of the female’s lover and kill?”

  “No, not always.”

  “But that’s what happened to Nicholas, right?”

  “You have to remember he was still very young then and just learning how to control his emotions. Even though, as I have told you, androgynous teenagers are far more sophisticated than ordinary people at their age, they are still in some state of adolescence. Nicholas just … just lost it,” I said. I hit the button for the gate and watched it open. In the brisk breeze, the shadows cast by the moon swayed. The twisted, mangled contours looked like the odd but significant shapes on a Rorschach test.

  “He just lost it? I’ll say.”

  “Alison felt horrible about it afterward. I found her behind the school, just wandering about aimlessly. Nicholas had retreated immediately after his actions, cowering down in her like some mischievous little boy who knew his mischief was soon to be discovered. Alison had some of the boy’s blood on her hands, so I took her home quickly and scrubbed her fingers. Beatrice took one look at us and knew what had happened. She was very angry.