“We weren’t jealous; we were just upset with the way Nicholas and Richard were going about their hunts and how that was affecting us.”
My detective smirked.
“It’s not the same thing,” I insisted.
“All right, all right. I’ll take your word for it. So what did you do about it?”
“We didn’t do anything. Once the message reached them, they eventually did something. They began to argue about the choices, who would get the prettier, more vivacious prey, and soon after they decided they would be better off going out on their own. When they began to do that, the synchronized metamorphosing came to an end.”
“You sure you two weren’t just jealous of the male bonding, like two wives envious of the good times their husbands had without them?”
“Typical male conclusion.”
He laughed.
“Well, it doesn’t sound like things became so terrible for you though. What were you implying before when you said things weren’t so pleasant? There had to be more to it,” he added, coaxing me to continue.
“The competitiveness didn’t end when they ended their team hunts,” I said.
“Oh?”
“They were like two cavemen eying each other’s cave, coveting each other’s results. The more beautiful I looked, the more jealous Nicholas was of Richard.”
“And vice versa?”
“Yes.”
“So what happened?”
When I didn’t reply, he touched my hand and I looked up.
“You’ve told me this much, why not the rest?”
“Nicholas accused Richard of rape,” I blurted, “but it wasn’t Richard’s fault; it was Alison’s. She wanted it.”
The detective sat back, nodding softly with understanding. “He made her pregnant.”
“Yes.”
“Let me see if I remember what you told me—when an Androgyne becomes pregnant, the male part of her is virtually imprisoned within for nine months?”
“It’s longer than nine months because the mother breast-feeds.”
“How long was it?”
“Just about a year,” I said.
“During which time, Richard was free to metamorphose and hunt and Nicholas was incarcerated in Alison?”
“Yes.”
“And when he finally metamorphosed, he accused Richard of doing this deliberately, to put him out of commission, so to speak?”
“Yes,” I said. “Actually, Alison accused Richard of it first. That’s why I said she claimed she was raped.”
“Fascinating. Was she right?”
“You’re the detective,” I replied. We stared at each other a moment.
“Why didn’t Alison have an abortion? Surely the pregnancy interfered with her career.”
“Androgynous progeny are far more valuable than inferior progeny simply because there are far fewer of us. The importance of breeding our own kind is emphasized from the moment we can understand the meaning of the words. We don’t get pregnant that easily. If Alison had had an abortion, she would have been ostracized.”
Recalling Nicholas’s words just spoken to me on the phone, I added, “And an Androgyne who is scorned by her own people is the loneliest creature on the face of the earth.”
“Won’t you be scorned by your own people?” he asked softly, “when they find out what you’re doing here with me?”
“Yes, but I don’t intend to remain on the face of the earth,” I said.
We were both quiet for a long moment. My detective sat back thoughtfully, his hands behind his head, staring.
“Aren’t you tired yet?” I finally asked.
“No.”
“Do all detectives have your energy and perseverance?”
“Some, not all.” He smiled. “Why, are you too tired to go on?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Actually, you don’t look sleepy. Your rosy complexion has returned and your eyes are bright. You look revived, as if relating all this invigorates you.”
“Maybe it does.” I finished my coffee and put the cup on the nightstand.
“Well, since you’re up to it,” he said, “I’d like to hear Richard’s account of all this. Actually,” he mumbled, “I’d like to hear Alison’s and Nicholas’s accounts as well.”
“What?”
“Wouldn’t it be something … the four of you: first you and Alison and then you both metamorphose, and I hear Richard and Nicholas.”
I stared at him. He was beginning to worry me. Whenever I was in the midst of telling him the most serious things, he made jokes, and whenever I was being flippant, he looked serious. Perhaps all this was overwhelming for him, and in the end, he would be useless to me.
“Well you can’t hear them,” I said dryly.
“Just a thought.”
I continued to stare at him.
“Tell me,” I said, “what did you think when you first saw Michael’s body?”
“Michael? Oh. I thought … shit … what the hell happened here? He looked like someone used his head for a baseball.”
“And what else? Come on,” I coaxed, “you saw the rest of him.”
The detective squirmed.
“He had been castrated,” he finally said.
“How? By now you have your reports. How?” I insisted.
“Human teeth.”
I grimaced.
“Still think this is all so funny?”
“I never said it was funny. I…”
“The man who did that to him claimed to have loved him as much as a man can love another man, as much as an Androgyne can love an inferior.”
“Love does things to you, tears you up sometimes.”
I didn’t laugh.
“Look,” he said, “I have to be a little light-headed about all this. If I don’t joke, it will destroy me. It’s a madhouse out there, even without you and your kind. Human beings do the same horrible things to each other—they murder each other in hundreds of hideous ways and sometimes for no more reason than they didn’t like the way the victim glanced at them.
“High drama almost doesn’t exist in the streets. It used to be a police detective had a case of jealousy or greed or lust for power as the motive. He had something he could sink his teeth into. Nowadays the motives are as simple as ‘he was in my parking space.’
“You find the good stuff only in mystery stories,” he concluded so sadly I had to laugh.
“I feel sorry for you.”
“You should. Anyway, now you can understand why I am so interested in what you have to say and what Richard has to say.”
I nodded. He could be sincere when he wanted to be.
“All right,” I said reaching for the diary on the nightstand beside me, “but some of what Richard has written is untrue. He’s lying to cover up his own … selfishness,” I said. “And for the Androgyne, selfishness is a cardinal sin.”
“How do I know you’re not the one who’s lying and you’re not the one who was selfish?”
“You keep telling me you’re a detective,” I said, “and it’s your job to find the truth. So find it.”
He laughed, but my heart had begun to pound again.
What if he was right? What if I was lying to myself as well as to him? What if I was confessing to the wrong crimes?
My fingers trembled as I turned the pages.
NINE
“FROM THE BEGINNING I found New York City to be more exciting than any place I had been because of its tempo and cosmopolitan population. I discovered that all of us had a similar reaction. For the Androgyne, it was as if we were mountain lions slipped into a boxcar filled with sheep. Everywhere I turned there were attractive females. (I almost wrote nutritious instead of attractive, for that’s what they were to me. They literally looked delicious, making my mouth water.) I found myself standing stupidly on street corners, turning this way and that to follow the feminine scents. I could close my eyes and taste their skin on my lips, feel their breasts in my hand
s. Every avenue, every block presented still more exotic delicacies.
“I would walk for hours on end just to peruse the selection, and whenever I stood on a corner to wait for the light to change and I was in the midst of a half dozen or so young women, I would feel my heart pound and my body stir in a way unlike it ever had before.
“In the beginning, before Nicholas and I emerged simultaneously, I often went out on a hunt and nearly failed to consummate it because every time I settled on a victim, I thought there just might be a better one around the corner. I would find myself wandering for hours without making a decision and suddenly I would realize I was going to let the night pass without a kill.
“Nicholas told me he had had comparable experiences when he and Alison first arrived in New York. Only he had one additional reaction—like a child locked in a candy store, he became gluttonous, sometimes making two kills a night, one in one borough and one in another. Normally, there were a number of violent deaths in the city, so he didn’t think his actions would matter, but his hunger drew the attention of other Androgyne, when one, who was a homicide detective, realized what was happening. They confronted him in a bar in Greenwich Village.
“‘Actually,’ he told me, ‘this detective seized my arm, showed me his badge and asked me to come out with him. There were two other Androgyne waiting in his car, both in tuxedos. They had just come from some party at Gracie Mansion and they were very angry. They told me I was putting the entire community in danger of being discovered and making it very difficult for others to hunt. They took me for a ride down to some deserted docks on the West Side and frightened me so much I retreated into Alison and remained submerged for weeks,’ he said.
“By the time Clea and I had arrived in New York, Nicholas was calmer and more sophisticated. In fact, I was glad when he began to appear with me because he could show me around. He knew which bars and discos were frequented by single young women, which were mostly gay, and which catered to a much younger crowd. Occasionally, we both wanted a very young girl. They have a different sort of energy, what Nicholas sometimes referred to as a ‘cleaner-burning fuel.’
“Nicholas believed, and I suppose there is some validity to that belief, that we are what we eat, or in our case, what we consume. In a real sense, we are the sum total of all of our victims. Our prey become the building blocks with which we construct ourselves.
“Sometimes, it was a question of variety. We sought diversity for its own sake. We are not incapable of boredom and just as there is a monotony in consuming the same old thing, there is a monotony in choosing the same old prey. And when it came to seeking variety, what better place to be than New York? Here we had a wonderful choice of black women, Oriental, East Europeans, Hispanic, etc., all within a relatively small area; and Nicholas, as I said, already knew where we could find what we wanted.
“So, we would begin our evenings by first deciding what each of us desired or perhaps needed. Usually, we were in agreement; our needs were remarkably similar, perhaps because Alison and Clea had similar needs; but occasionally one or the other had to compromise if we were to hunt together.
“I suppose we could say we benefited somewhat from Alison and Clea being so theatrical. Both Nicholas and I had inherited their dramatic tendencies. Before every hunt we would decide on roles to play. Sometimes we were brothers in business; sometimes he or I would be visiting from another country, usually a country that would be of interest to our prey. Occasionally, we passed ourselves off as models or actors. We loved affecting accents. Nicholas does this great Englishman, Lord Livingston. Whatever we decided to be, we found that young women were gullible. Few, if any, challenged us, and even those who did, did so with the air of nonchalance. They didn’t really care. Everyone, in one way or another, was trying to be someone else anyway.
“She was a waitress who was really an actress; she was a legal secretary, but she expected to become a lawyer; she was a hostess, but she wanted to be an artist. On and on it went—a world of dual identities. We fit right in.
“Actually, there was never a question of our being successful; together we glided smoothly and easily over the hunting grounds, or what the inferiors disdainfully refer to as their ‘watering holes.’ How ironic. Just as a tiger or lion might go down to a ‘watering hole’ in the jungle and wait in the shadows, braced to pounce on its prey, we went to these bars and discotheques.
“Immediately after we made our entrances, we would stand and gaze out over the crowd of revelers and drink in the mixture of the hot, sweaty scents undetectable to them. We surveyed the panorama: a tableau of youth, vigor and energy. Their excited faces were made to look more so when they danced and bathed in the silver and blue, orange and pink flashing lights that dropped their rainbow of colors from dazzling ceilings filled with spinning silver balls and multicolored cubes—a veritable man-made galaxy of sensuous stars. It encouraged abandon. The loud music permeated through every pore of their bodies so that the incessant rhythms became kin with their very heartbeats.
“‘See,’ Nicholas said, ‘how even though they go onto the dance floor with a partner, they soon lose any bond and isolate themselves in their own private fantasy. Especially the women,’ he added, probably because they were our primary concern.
“But it was true. Women, whom I would imagine to be mousy, shy types, withdrawn and cloistered within their conservative clothes and hairstyles, were out there gyrating, beckoning to some phantom of the disco, imagining themselves the center of his libidinous attention, desired, craved, about to be chosen for a night of ecstasy.
“Nicholas and I agreed—nothing in this modern society trumpeted the self-centered nature of it as much as this frenzied dancing. It was almost as if we could hear them chanting: ‘Me, me, me, look at me, me, me.’ It made it all that much easier for us.
“We descended like two bats out of the darkness above them, directed toward our particular victims by our own special radar, a sensing in on the vulnerable, the sweet, the rich-blooded and ripe women longing to be held and wanted and stroked. We invaded dreams, honed in on the hungriest. Frustration hung over them like a cloud threatening to burst with the cold rain of disappointment. Satisfaction was eluding them yet again.
“We saw their desperation grow as the night wore on. Their eyes moved from one man to another hoping to find themselves discovered.
“But most drifted off, still unattached by the evening’s end. They stopped dancing and retreated to what solace they could find with companions who had met a similar fate. They gathered at the bar, forced laughter, and punctuated their inane discussions with an occasional glance back at the lucky fish who had been hooked and were being reeled in.
“‘The world is a lonely place,’ Nicholas said and then laughed. ‘Fortunately, for us.’
“Of course, he was right. Wherever lust is married to loneliness, there is a wedding feast to which Androgyne have an open invitation.
“We plunged, moving like two dark shadows over the floor, our eyes riveted on our prey. Even before we arrived, they sensed our coming and were drawn to us. A smile, a query, a suggestion and they were snared easy as one, two, three.
“I can’t recall the names or even a particular face. Now, whenever I think back to those days, the different young women meld into one. Even the different races, the black, the brown, the yellow and the white lose identity. I see a universal victim; I see beneath the skin, for whenever an Androgyne takes his prey, he draws from her essence, from deep down into her very being, and therefore the color of her eyes and hair, the color of her skin, her height, her weight is incidental.
“It is as if we walked about with X-ray eyes. Inferior men, whose ken is limited, whose vision is shorter, whose senses are restricted, whose very being is circumscribed and fixed, would find no pleasure in our view. But that is why they would rather make love to a woman who has had a plastic surgeon reform her face, stuff her breasts with silicone, tighten her buttocks, suck fat out of her midsection than make love t
o many of the women we choose. And therefore, why we often have such good choices: the leftovers.
“All these nights were the same for Nicholas and me: We came, we saw, we conquered. In the beginning and for a while afterward, we simply let our instincts gravitate us to one or the other of the pair we targeted. If there were significant differences between one or the other and one of us had an advantage, we managed to compensate the next time out.
“But one night as we left the apartment to go on a hunt, Nicholas told me of Alison’s displeasure. What surprised me was his agreement—she wasn’t all wrong; he had been getting the short end of things too many times, not that we were keeping track.
“Despite my surprise, I didn’t argue. When it came time to make our choices, I let him go first. He went first the next time out and the time after that as well.
“One night, I challenged his choice.
“‘You’ve taken the richest prize for some time now, Nicholas,’ I told him. ‘Tonight should be my turn. I have felt Clea’s concern, just as you felt Alison’s.’
“‘But I had a lot to make up for,’ he replied. When he grimaced and whined like that, I saw Alison’s face flash in his.
“‘That’s not true,’ I said softly. ‘Even if there was some sort of imbalance, surely we have corrected it by now. I should take the girl on the right.’
“‘No,’ he said. ‘If you want to take them together, I take the one on the right. Otherwise, we go after lone prey.’
“This recalcitrance wasn’t like him. He had had a bad metamorphosis, I concluded. If I had a propensity for the tongue in cheek, I would have said, he wasn’t himself tonight.
“‘Then we’ll have to go our separate ways tonight,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’
“‘So be it,’ Nicholas replied. I decided to let him have this entire watering hole and went off to another location. Soon after that, our synchronized metamorphosing came to an end, and we hunted in different parts of the city.
“I can’t say I didn’t miss his companionship. Whenever I metamorphosed, I watched Alison carefully to see if she was on the verge of changing. I think she misunderstood my intentions, and I know that even Clea, when she reads this, might not believe me when I say, I did not expect or intend what happened next.”
The Need Page 17
