The Need

by Andrew Neiderman

  I hesitated. Despite everything, it was still difficult to admit it to someone not of our race.

  “Yes.”

  “Which explains why you were so good in that scene. Not that you’re not a wonderful actress anyway,” he added quickly. “There was just something special there.”

  “Detective, short-order cook, and now critic,” I said.

  “In that order.”

  We stared at each other a moment. There was something different about my detective this morning, some new glint in his eye. How much more sophisticated and assured of himself than he had appeared when I had first walked into his office. It was as though he were growing along with my story, gaining confidence and wisdom through my relating events.

  “Now you tell me something,” I said. “What made you suspect my mother’s death was not accidental?”

  He fingered his coffee cup.

  “In my early days here, I was understandably fascinated with celebrities and everything associated with them, especially police business. As one of the low men on the totem pole, I wasn’t included in any of the bigger, more celebrated cases, but that didn’t stop me from poking my nose in whenever I had an opportunity.

  “Your mother’s death made headlines of course, along with the usual rumors that trembled through the department. Curious, I got hold of some of the reports and began reading. I noticed that one report had been altered considerably. I pursued, searched for the original, and found a duplicate copy stuck away. That business about the bannister being defective was obviously manufactured. I realized your mother didn’t lean against a faulty balustrade that gave way. She had to have been pushed.

  “I never understood why the police were covering up and I knew if I asked questions, I could find myself walking a beat in East Los Angeles. I know you were and still are upset about the cover-up, but do you know why it happened?”

  “Yes.”

  “The how is obvious to me now. One or more of your kind is in the department. You’ve told me that. Do you know who they are?”

  “Some of them.”

  “How many of them are there?”

  “Not that many.”

  “Well, why did your people want your mother’s murder changed to an accidental death?”

  I hesitated. My heart was pounding so hard, I knew it was Richard’s fear combined with my own. He was no longer simply screaming “no!” somewhere inside me. He was curled into a hot crimson ball of rage and terror, his eyes pools of dried blood, his teeth gnashing and cutting deeply into his own lips from which his liquefied bones had begun to pour—a starched, white putrescent drool. Frustration had distorted him. Twisted and turned, he squeezed the juices out of himself, each drop of blood and bone falling with the heat of boiling water, singeing my very soul. I could smell the scent of burning flesh in my nostrils.

  My detective leaned forward, his eyes riveted on mine, his gaze penetrating and prying deeper and deeper until I felt myself opening like a clam shell in hot water, my softer, secret insides nearly exposed.

  “Why?” he pursued. I tried looking away. His insistence felt like a knife being turned one more time, breaking the last vestige of resistance. I looked up at him, my face on fire.

  “Because,” I said in a gasp. “We knew who killed her.”

  I ran from the table and went into the nearest bathroom to splash cold water on my face and catch my breath. I could hear the chant of the Androgyne, the voices in the darkness around me warning me not to reveal certain secrets ever. A small candle burned in a holder placed between my naked legs. The flickering light made the eyes of the elders flicker like stars in a night sky without moonlight. The eyes were so similar, I couldn’t distinguish my mother’s from the others.

  “Never tell them … never tell them … never tell them…”

  I put my hands over my ears to drown out the memory, but the voices were inside me. It was only the detective’s knocking on the bathroom door that drove the chanting back into the vaults of my mind.

  “Are you all right? Clea?”

  “Yes, yes. I’ll be right out. It’s okay.”

  I took a deep breath, wiped my face dry and fixed my hair. He was standing just outside, a look of confusion written over his face.

  “I guess I misunderstood what you said back there. It sounded like you said you knew who killed your mother.”

  I returned to the kitchen, him trailing behind me like a persistent string of lint one couldn’t shake off one’s clothing. I said nothing, poured myself some fresh coffee and sipped it silently while staring out the window at the morning sunlight burning off the marine layer of clouds. Already, there were patches of blue sea visible. My patient detective hovered behind me, an arrogant shadow unafraid of the daylight or any abrupt movements on my part.

  “You didn’t misunderstand me,” I finally confessed.

  “I see. Was it … someone you loved, someone you trusted?”

  “Hardly.”

  A peal of laughter emerging from places within myself I didn’t know existed rippled between us. The detective smiled.

  “Why is that funny?”

  “I left something out of our mythology,” I said. “We don’t talk about it amongst ourselves, much less between ourselves and outsiders.” He stared. “Mary once referred to it as our Evil Eye Syndrome and that title took hold. Just as there are things you fear, things you fear deep down in your very essence and don’t like to talk about because the talk brings them to the forefront of your thoughts and reminds you of them, we don’t like to talk about the Evil Eye Syndrome.”

  “And this Evil Eye,” he said, turning his hand in the air as if he were modeling gloves, “whatever it is, is responsible for your mother’s death?”

  “Precisely.” I sat down again.

  He stared, smiled, started to laugh, and then thought again and grew serious.

  “Well, can you tell me something about it? Do you see it as a ghost, a creature … what is it?”

  “It’s anything it wants to be at the time. It can be a he or a she. There are no definite pictures, conceptions of its actual form; there are only pictures of it in other forms with its particular evil glint.

  “Simply put, the Evil Eye is our version of what you would call the devil and as such it can be any man, woman or child.”

  “I see.” He sat down beside me, looking thoughtful.

  “When I described our mythology, our version of creation, I deliberately left out our belief that after God had created us and then given us this divine mission, the devil who had corrupted Paradise was even more frustrated. Being we were destined to be the true army of God, he, the devil, set out to destroy us whenever he could.”

  “And how does he do that?”

  “The same way he supposedly does it to you—by temptation, by winning our trust, by invading our deepest thoughts, by getting us to betray the things we love, the things that are sacred to us—blaspheming … the seven deadly sins. You name it.”

  The detective sat back nodding.

  “So you believe the devil, as it were, killed your mother?”

  “Yes.”

  “But why cover that up? I don’t understand. Why make it look like an accident?”

  “First, for obvious reasons we couldn’t disclose any of what I’ve disclosed to you; and second, we carry on our own battle. We certainly couldn’t come to you for aid in this. What would we ask you to do—put out an all points bulletin for the devil who hunts Androgyne because we have been commanded by God to punish humanity for its devilish lust?”

  “I see.” He looked up quickly. “Does your kind have any luck in this battle with the Evil Eye?”

  “Yes and no. We’ve killed our devil many times in many ways,” I said. “Just like it’s impossible to eradicate evil forever, it’s impossible to kill him forever. The key thing is to kill him in whatever form he has taken for the moment before he kills us. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.” He stared at me, his eyes intense, pene
trating. I was surprised by their sharply analytical glint. “But why is it,” he began, “that I feel there is something else, some other reason why you and your people covered up the true cause of your mother’s death? Does it have something to do with how the devil gets to you?”

  “You’re getting too good at this,” I replied acridly, my words like razors slicing the air between us. “Either you are a far better detective than you first appeared to be or some of my androgynous insight and perception is rubbing off.”

  “Maybe you willingly gave me something of yourself during our lovemaking,” he suggested. “You have described how the Androgyne absorb their victims; perhaps you reversed the process and transferred some power into me.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” I said. The mere thought of such a thing frightened me. He shrugged.

  “Not any more ridiculous on the surface than some of the things you’ve told me. But, all right,” he conceded with a smile, “I’ll confess to being a far better detective than I first appeared. What did you leave out about your mother?”

  We heard the front door open and he looked up sharply, reaching for his pistol at the same time.

  “It’s all right,” I said. “It’s only Sylvia, my maid.”

  A moment later she appeared in the kitchen doorway.

  “Good morning,” she said. The detective scrutinized her quickly, obviously impressed with how nonchalantly she took his presence. What he didn’t know was Sylvia was as inanimate, as unemotional as any form of higher life could be.

  She was tall and exceedingly thin. Her clothing hung on her as if her shoulders were wire hangers. She had a lean, long face with big, dull brown eyes and a mouth with pencil-thin lips. She never wore any makeup. Her dark brown hair was kept short and neat, the bangs trimmed. No matter how she washed or treated it, it would always have a flat look to match her flat complexion: pale white skin that had the yellowish tint of age behind her ears, at the base of her neck, and over her hands and arms.

  “Good morning, Sylvia. This is Detective Mayer.” She nodded at him.

  “Good morning,” he said.

  “You can begin with my room, Sylvia,” I said. She turned abruptly and left us as if we hadn’t been there, as if I had left a note with instructions for her on the refrigerator. Detective Mayer turned to me quizzically.

  “She can’t be one of you?”

  “No, but she’s not one of you either. Sylvia is … how should I put it? I’ll put it the way William once put it: ‘a sexual albino.’ She’s an anomaly. We have our birth defects too, thanks to the way you and your kind have polluted the environment, our water and food.

  “Creatures like Sylvia have no place in your world and no place in ours, really. Yet we have to provide for them, so we find places for them in our lives. They’re satisfied to the extent anything can satisfy them.

  “They have no ambitions, no passions, no hope, no drive … nothing stirs them and conversely, nothing really upsets them either. They’re not even upset about their condition. We call them the Stoics, for obvious reasons.

  “When William was in a particularly bleak mood, he would look at one and predict we would all become like him or her in time, even you and your kind. He thought it would be the form the world would take when it came to an end—we would all meld into one lifeless species, all become Stoics and sleepwalk through our lives. Birth would be unremarkable, almost another form of excretion, and we would pass on to death just as we would pass through any other doorway—unconcerned, barely noticing any differences.”

  “That is bleak.” He grimaced. For some reason, I enjoyed depressing him at this moment.

  “Emotions would be reduced to nothing more than the stimulation of nerve endings—pleasure would be simplistic; love would drop out of the vocabulary, as well as hate. We would simply like and dislike, taste and spit, satiate our appetites and move off to sleep like dumb animals.”

  “All right,” he said succumbing to my doom and gloom, “I get the point. Get back to my point. How did the Evil Eye get to your mother?”

  “You’re determined to force me into a depression, aren’t you?”

  “Don’t worry, I have the antidote.” His promiscuous smile left no doubt as to his meaning.

  “My, you are a vigorous creature. All right.” I sat back. “I told you Mother retired even though she was still an extraordinarily beautiful woman. Androgynous women don’t look anywhere near their age either so she could have gone on modeling for years and years, but she began to suffer from the symptoms of premature change of life. It happens to us occasionally.

  “In our case the symptoms take one particular ugly form: It becomes more and more difficult to metamorphose.”

  “Sort of like creeping impotency,” my detective suggested.

  “Yes, only the consequence isn’t simply a denial of sexual satisfaction for us—it’s life threatening to our male selves. It’s difficult for you to understand how devoted we are to our second selves, how much we love our counterparts. I suppose the deepest, most complete form of love is self-love, narcissism is pure and uncompromising. By definition, survival depends on self-love. When we hate ourselves, hate who we are or what we’ve become, we kill ourselves.

  “Since the male part of us is in a true sense half of who we are, we suffer extraordinary pain when we lose him. It’s why, as I explained, so many of us end up babbling in an old age home, or…”

  “Commit suicide?”

  “Yes.”

  “Which is what you are now doing in a sense?”

  “Yes, a very true sense. Although I’m doing it slowly, contriving it.”

  “Okay, but I don’t understand. You said your mother was murdered by…” He turned smiling. “The Evil Eye, but now you’re suggesting she committed suicide. Which is it?”

  “Both,” I said.

  “Huh?” He shook his head.

  “You ever see a movie entitled The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone?”

  “Of course. Tennessee Williams.”

  “Then you remember how that ended, how she tossed her key out the window to the gigolo she knew would ultimately kill her.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “My mother did the same thing—only she invited the devil in. She could no longer live without Dimitri. I knew it was coming.

  “She began to tell me how difficult it was becoming for her to resurrect him, how he cried out to her from within her. His cries kept her awake at night. Can you even begin to imagine what it must be like to be haunted from within yourself?”

  “Like a schizophrenic who appears to be cured but who has succeeded in only subduing his second personality?”

  “Yes. He still senses it, hears it, needs it, but it won’t come back. So he is in perpetual agony.

  “My mother cried Dimitri’s tears as well as her own. She would spend hours and hours in his room touching his things, his clothing, his razor and brush. She would stare at his picture endlessly, hoping the eye contact would strengthen her dwindling androgynous powers, but all it did was intensify her torment.

  “All of this began to take its toll on her physically. She started to look her age; her hair turned gray. There were even wrinkles in her skin. It got so I hated to visit with her for I was watching her die.

  “And whenever I did visit, all she did was complain and mourn. Richard felt the same way. He stopped visiting altogether. She asked me about him repeatedly. Finally, I had to tell her. She knew it anyway.

  “‘I’m beginning to disgust you, too,’ she told me. ‘Don’t deny it. I see it in your face.’

  “‘It’s not that you disgust me,’ I replied. ‘I hate having to feel sorry for you. All my life I thought of you as strong and confident, someone I could turn to whenever I felt afraid or lost.’ She hated me for saying these things.”

  “All children feel that about their parents,” the detective said. “You weren’t telling her anything out of the ordinary.”

  “Yes, but they don’t say it to their
parents’ faces, not like that. I guess there was a bit of the Stoic in me already; already I was uncaring. It was a heartless thing to do.

  “‘All right,’ she said, smiling, ‘I’ll stop feeling sorry for myself. I’ll put an end to it immediately. You’re right, of course. I should face my fate and be strong.

  “She stood up and clapped her hands together as though she were going to begin a new life right that moment. Of course, at the time, I didn’t know what she intended.”

  “What did she do?”

  “She fixed herself up—had her hair colored, had her chin tucked, did away with wrinkles. She battled back at age with a fury I mistook for a hunger for life. It turned out to be a hunger for death, however.”

  “Huh? Who makes herself look beautiful before committing suicide?”

  “An Androgyne,” I said. “Once she felt confident about her looks again, she went out on her own kind of hunt, roaming through singles bars, threading herself through the dingiest sections of Los Angeles, weaving her own shroud. She brought home one loser after another. I couldn’t believe some of the scum she permitted into her bed. A number of times I received phone calls from other Androgyne who recognized her haunting some bar and I had to go retrieve her. If Richard received the call, he would metamorphose immediately so I would do it. He didn’t have the stomach for it. It wasn’t easy.

  “Everyone came to me complaining, of course; and of course, I begged her to stop, to get off this course of self-destruction, but she was already mad by then. She told me she would never stop, she would search forever until she found Dimitri.”

  “Which was something she couldn’t do.”

  “Right, but she did.”

  “What do you mean? Dimitri was her male self, right?”

  “Yes.” I looked out the window. Although it was still a very bright and promising morning, it suddenly looked all gray and dismal. I was looking out through my own tears.

  “You’ve really got me confused now,” the detective said.

  “I told you earlier … about the Evil Eye … how it can take any form.”

  “You mean … it took Dimitri’s form?” he concluded. I nodded.

  “And she brought him home with her. She would never have done so otherwise, but he had gotten into her madness, you see. That’s why I say she committed suicide. She wanted that to happen. She brought him home knowing he had to be the death of her.”