At mention of my name, I paused in the reading of the diary and took a deep breath. My coffee was cold, but I sipped it anyway. My detective stared at me without speaking.
“Are you all right?” he finally asked. I nodded, but closed my eyes.
“You know,” I said, “that Nicholas knows you’re here.” I turned to him. “You listened in on my phone call before,” I said accusingly.
“Couldn’t help it,” he said shaking his head. “I don’t know whether I am a man who has become a detective, or a detective who just happens to be a man. I do so many things instinctively these days. Would you believe that two days ago I followed a man from Westwood to East L.A. because I thought he looked suspicious and might be involved in a cocaine ring dealing UCLA students? Turned out he was a shoe wholesaler. Yet I still wonder if there was something in the heels of those shoes … Anyway, I can’t help myself. But I apologize. I shouldn’t have done it.”
“They’re going to want to kill you even more now,” I said.
“Oh? So maybe we can safely assume that bullet was meant for me.”
“Maybe,” I admitted.
“I’d better stay away from the windows.”
“I wouldn’t joke about it.”
“I’m not. Anyway, it looks like I would be wise to remain here until morning.” He put his hands behind his head and smiled.
“Isn’t there anyone who will miss you, wonder where you are and what’s happened to you?” I asked. “Family, friends, girlfriends?”
“Everyone close to me is used to my not showing up for days on end. I don’t even have an answering machine anymore because the tapes run out, there are so many messages.”
“You like this life?”
“I told you,” he said. “It’s who I am. Same as you in a sense … it’s the hand I’ve been dealt.”
“Hardly the same thing. You have alternatives.”
“Apparently, so do you. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be here right now listening to all this, right?”
“If you can consider suicide an alternative,” I said.
“You sound like you’re having second thoughts. Are you?”
I thought about Michael and about the agony of my existence.
“You began by telling me God had made your kind first; you were the chosen people.”
“It’s what we were told,” I said.
“You don’t believe it anymore?”
“I don’t know. Let’s just say, I have doubts.”
“Isn’t that blasphemy?”
“If thinking is blasphemy, if feeling deeply is blasphemy, if challenging and questioning is blasphemy, then yes, I am guilty of blasphemy,” I replied.
“Jesus,” he said, “when you get fired up like that, you are so beautiful, you make me crumble inside. I want to be putty in your hands.” I nodded. “Typical inferior reaction, huh?” he asked, smirking.
“Yes.”
“What’s to become of us? Will we forever be prey for Androgyne, dust for worms?” He laughed at the expression on my face.
“The philosophical detective,” I said. “You don’t make love like a man with his mind in the clouds.”
“I guess I know when to come down to earth.” His gaze dropped hungrily to the diary in my hands. Or was he simply afraid of the look in my eyes? Anticipating what lay ahead in these pages, I felt myself stirred. I ran my tongue across my lips and pulled my shoulders back so my firm breasts would lift. But my detective didn’t seem to notice; his mind was locked on one thing.
“You’re right about yourself,” I said dryly. “You are a detective who just happens to be a man.”
He roared, and I turned back to the diary.
“Nicholas believes I tried to prevent his metamorphosing during those days in New York by seducing Alison so that she would fight his interfering emergence. The truth is Alison seduced me so that I would keep Clea from reappearing.”
“I’ve heard that sort of defense before,” my detective remarked. “Three out of four rapists have it imbedded in their brains: She was asking for it. Some juries buy it, especially the ones with frustrated spinsters complementing the angry men. Women are definitely at a disadvantage in this society, even androgynous ones.”
I didn’t look up from the diary. I let his words pass over me like an annoying wind.
“Sexual relations between two Androgyne are, on the surface, not much different from sexual relations between two inferiors. But when we are truly attracted to each other, we have the ability to see both of our dual personalities. Sporadically, Nicholas flashed in and out of Alison’s face.
“I suppose the easiest way for an inferior to understand this would be for him or her to imagine his lover’s sibling. Sometimes, brothers and sisters have such a close resemblance anyway.
“Essentially, what this means for us is the necessity of a compatibility, not only between the male and female Androgyne who happen to be metamorphosed at the time, but a compatibility between their submerged personalities as well. In essence four people fall in love or make love every time an androgynous female and an androgynous male do.”
“Holy shit,” the detective said. When I looked up at him, I saw his eyes were wide and he was shaking his head. “Can you imagine the confusion on Valentine’s Day.”
“This concept is probably beyond your ability to understand,” I replied dryly.
“I mean, it’s hard enough nowadays for only two people to fall in love and maintain a relationship, but to have to have four independent personalities compatible … the divorce rate would double. Good business for marriage counselors, of course,” he muttered.
“I wonder if I’m wasting my time with you,” I said.
“Easy. I’m just trying to come to grips with all this. The line between tragedy and comedy is really a very thin one. What’s tragic one day becomes absurdly comical after the passage of time.”
“We happen to be in the present right now and right now, it’s not comical to me.”
“Okay, okay. Let me ask you this. If Nicholas didn’t want Alison to fall in love with Richard and you didn’t want Richard to fall in love with Alison, how could it happen? Given what you just read from Richard’s diary, that is.”
“If you will recall, I told you I found Nicholas quite attractive from the start and he … before his conversion … imagined himself kissing me, wanting me.”
“Ah, so the seeds were always there?”
“Yes, but it’s a little more complicated than all that. There is one aspect of our particular being that put us into jealous conflict. You inferiors suffer from Oedipal complexes and Electra complexes … sons jealous of mothers and their lovers, daughters jealous of fathers and theirs … we suffer from a Narcissistic jealousy—we can’t help but resent it when our male or female counterparts fall in love with someone else.”
“So no matter who Richard fell for, you would be jealous?”
“Exactly.”
“And vice versa, which explains why he killed Michael Barrington,” the detective concluded quickly.
“Yes,” I said. I felt a tightening in my abdomen. It was as if a giant vise had been clamped down on my torso. I knew it was Richard’s rage. His entire submerged being was closed into a red fist. The pain of my betrayal forced him to embrace himself with a male Androgyne’s might. He was literally crushing himself to death within me. I had to take deep breaths.
My detective put his hand on my shoulder.
“Are you able to go on?”
“Yes,” I said even though I was crying. “You see,” I continued, “it was even worse because I had fallen in love with an inferior. Richard did all he could to destroy it, including seducing him.”
My detective nodded, his eyes filled with sympathy.
“And in a way it all started with this mess between you and Alison, Richard and Nicholas?”
“Yes.”
“Then let me hear the rest of it,” he said. “If you’re sure you can go on.”
I nodded. A few deep breaths relieved the knotting within me and I was able to resume reading.
“Alison continued to pursue me in little ways: parading about half naked under the guise of wanting my opinion of this dress or that, asking me to massage her because she had a muscular ache here or there, coming in on me whenever I showered or dressed … on and on it went: the seduction. I tried to resist. I had other things to do, but she’d be there in the morning, bringing me a cup of coffee. Dressed in a diaphanous nightgown, she would sit at the foot of my bed and peer alluringly at me over her own coffee cup.
“One night after I had emerged and I was preparing to go out on a hunt, she came to me in tears. She had auditioned for a commercial and not gotten it.
“‘I’m losing my uniqueness,’ she cried. ‘I’m not as beautiful as I was. Something terrible is happening.’
“‘Nonsense,’ I told her. ‘It’s only in your mind. You’re more beautiful than ever. I don’t see how anyone can resist you.’
“‘You do,’ she said. She denies saying these things and doing these things now, but she did.
“‘I don’t resist you, I don’t want to upset the balance we’ve all maintained so well.’
She pouted.
“‘If I can’t be attractive to you, I must be losing it,’ she insisted. She was crying now so I put my arm around her and kissed her to comfort her, trying to keep it brotherly.”
“Oh brother,” the detective quipped.
“But she misunderstood, deliberately misunderstood. She turned her lips to me. I tried closing my eyes so I wouldn’t look into hers, and when I did so, she brought her lips to mine. It was the first time I had kissed an androgynous female passionately. For me it was as if I were an inferior male making love to a female for the first time, a willing, demanding, lustful female. Unfamiliar with this experience, I groped about awkwardly looking for a graceful way to restrain myself, but she continued to arouse me until I lost complete control.
“Before I knew it we were wrapped in each other’s arms, our bodies naked. I heard Clea’s cries, and I was sure Alison heard Nicholas’s, but we were both beyond their influence, caught up in our own sexual roller coaster.
“I forgot about my hunt, forgot the real reason for my metamorphosis. We stayed with each other all that night and into the next morning. Every time I fell asleep, I saw Clea trying to begin her metamorphosis. It was like a recurrent nightmare, appearing each time in a different version of the same story: Clea trying to pry open a heavy dark door, getting it partially open only to have it slam shut on her fingers; Clea coming up through a manhole on a dark street, but just as she began to emerge, a heavy truck running over the lid and sending her falling back to the sewers; Clea in the Arctic Ocean under a ceiling of ice searching for an opening, but just after she found one, the ice closing, driving her under the water. Her cheeks were bursting; her eyes were bulging.
“I woke abruptly, the bad dreams forcing me to regress to childhood. Alison comforted me as would a mother comfort her infant. She embraced me and rocked me in her arms, kissing my cheeks and stroking my forehead until I felt safe again and could close my eyes.
“Making love to Alison was draining, as making love to an Androgyne would be for any other Androgyne because it’s giving without drawing the needed energy. When I awoke late in the morning of the following day, I felt exhausted. Nothing she could give me to eat helped. We both knew I needed a victim desperately, but I was so tired, I didn’t have the stamina to go out, and especially didn’t look vigorous and attractive enough to attract prey. My image in the mirror looked pale, sickly.”
“Why didn’t the lovemaking have the same effect on Alison?” my detective asked.
“He’s getting to that. Be patient,” I told him and read on.
“Alison came to me and sat on the bed. She held my hand and stroked my hair affectionately.
“‘Poor Richard,’ she said. ‘And poor Clea.’
“I saw the tight, little smile in her face. She was enjoying the disadvantageous position Clea and I were in. Part of that was Nicholas’s influence, of course, even though he was sinking deeply. I know Alison didn’t realize it yet, but she should have. She should have felt more fatigue and needed Nicholas to metamorphose for a kill, as much as I needed to kill for Clea and myself.
“But something of me had combined with something of her and the fertilization had given her a healthy pregnant woman’s vigor. Only she had yet to realize the reason for her vitality.
“I started to get up.
“‘Oh rest,’ she said. She sighed deeply. Then she looked at me and laughed. ‘I’ll bring you breakfast in bed.’
“She pressed me back against the pillow and kissed my cheek. I knew what she meant.
“She was gone for a little more than an hour before returning with a teenage prostitute, some runaway surviving on what she could offer between her legs. I thought the girl was rather dim, like a lamp during a brownout. Her vibrancy had already dwindled. It wouldn’t be anything close to a quality kill, but it would be sufficient to give me enough strength to stand on my own two feet.
“‘What’s wrong with him?’ the girl asked. She had thin red hair chopped short, a narrow face with a small mouth and a small nose. Her gray eyes looked more like two orbs with blotches of ash at their centers. There was a slight blush in her rather gaunt cheeks. She was small breasted, but she had a narrow waist and long, inviting legs. She wore a pair of jeans cut so the cheeks of her buttocks spilled out from under the jagged hems. Her dark blue blouse was opened so that her shallow cleavage was visible.
“‘Nothing’s wrong with him,’ Alison said. ‘Except he’s terribly depressed. His girlfriend left him for another man,’ she said with an impish smile. I could feel Clea cringe within me.
“‘Oh,’ the teenage prostitute laughed at that, her laughter sounding like the tinkle of broken glasses. She could understand and appreciate Alison’s fabrication. Human misery was the trough from which she now fed herself and she felt more comfortable in the presence of other unlucky people. It made her feel less alone, less diminished.
“‘Can you cheer him up?’ Alison asked her.
“‘Sure,’ she said. She smiled at me and her toothy grin suddenly suggested the vicious grimace of a skeleton. Very portentous, I thought as she sauntered over to the side of the bed.
“‘You gonna watch?’ she asked Alison. ‘Cause that’s another ten dollars if you do.’
“Alison considered it. She looked at me to see my reaction. I had none.
“‘All right,’ she said pulling the vanity chair away from the vanity table and placing it at the other side of the bed. ‘Another ten dollars.’
“The teenage prostitute looked happy about it. I thought she was as happy about having an audience as she was about getting another ten dollars.
“‘Hi there,’ she said to me. She unbuttoned the remainder of her skimpy shirt and stripped it away. The flesh around her nipples quivered. Because I didn’t move, because I simply lay there gazing up quietly, my eyes expressionless, she paused and looked at Alison.
“‘He ain’t paralyzed or nothin’, is he?’
“‘Paralyzed with depression,’ Alison said. The teenage prostitute nodded as though she had come across this many, many times.
“For a moment I had the weird feeling I was about to be examined by a physician. Are prostitutes a kind of surgeon of the soul? I wondered. Could their sort of sex be considered a treatment, a remedy for frustration or loneliness?
“I looked at Alison, and I knew she was wondering something similar by the way she gazed at the young girl and at me.
“Amazingly, the young prostitute said, ‘I can cure that.’
“She peeled away my blanket to find me naked beneath. I could see she was grateful for little favors—undressing her clients or patients, as it were, was more like menial labor. The real art work came afterward.
“She dropped her own shorts with a quick, almost invisible
movement unfastening them. She wore nothing underneath. Her hip bones were very prominent and her small stomach looked sunken, in retreat. The path of pubic hair curled upward until it became a thin line to her bellybutton. She really wasn’t very attractive, even to a desperately frustrated man, I thought. Surely Alison could have done better. The wry smile on her face told me she hadn’t tried to; in fact, she might have sought just such a victim on purpose. She didn’t want Clea’s beauty nourished beyond her own.
“The teenage girl straddled me and stroked my genitals with a knowing hand. I was so disgusted, I was half tempted to resist, but hunger and need took control. When I was hard and erect, the victim lowered herself onto me, unknowingly, like a Roman soldier impaling himself on a stake. She slipped me into her and began her slow rise and fall.
“I gazed at Alison who seemed genuinely absorbed in what was happening. Then I turned my attention to the victim and began to draw from her.
“Her eyes opened with surprise as I became more vigorous. She assumed she was performing well and doing what she had been brought here to do. She was, of course, but she was still unaware of it.
“Soon, however, something that had become perfunctory and routine to her took on a new significance. She who thought herself expert at arousing her customers, now found herself quite aroused. Her breathing quickened and so did her pace. The faster she drove herself at me, the faster I accepted and demanded more.
“The climax came quickly and I drew her life out of her in slow, long thrusts, siphoning the energy, the very essence of her fragile being. Her dim light that had brightened for a few ecstatic moments, dimmed rapidly again. Her ashen eyes darkened as blood drained from her lips and the surface of her skin. I felt her fold as if she were a paper doll. Her eyes went up and back into her head, her throat closed with a gurgle and her heart flattened and stopped as if it were a punctured bicycle tire. Then her thin, bony form fell softly to me and I threw off what was now the empty shell of her.
The Need Page 18
