The Need

by Andrew Neiderman

  That hesitation was enough. The vision of him popped like a soap bubble and was gone. I covered my face with my palms and caught my breath. As I lowered them, I confronted the bag that contained the packet of letters. It was no use thinking I could rid myself of them without looking. They would haunt me forever. Resolved, I stepped forward and fell to my knees by the bag. I dipped my hand in and drew out the packet.

  “Why?” I asked them as if they had the power to respond. Of course, the answers lay within the rubber band. I stripped it off quickly and unfolded the first letter.

  Dear Richard,

  After you read this, you might not want to have anything to do with me again. I realize that is the risk I take, but after thinking it all over, I’ve decided it would be even worse if you made your own discovery and believed I had betrayed you. I swear that is not so, and I pray you will understand that we are driven by passions we often cannot control. You have told me this often yourself.

  Yes, I love you and want you and even need you, but I find I love Clea as well and need her too. You and I do have something special, but I would be lying if I didn’t tell you Clea and I have something special as well.

  You once told me we can expand the boundaries of our capacity to love and that we are complex creatures. You taught me not to be afraid of my desires and that passion was not wrong if it was a deep and sincere passion. I’m hoping you have that same open-mindedness you demanded of me and you will not hate me for revealing that Clea and I are lovers also.

  Forgive me for loving you both.

  Michael

  I threw the packet down, the tears streaming down my cheeks. I felt Richard holding his breath inside me, waiting to see my full reaction. I knew what he was expecting—he was expecting me to hate Michael for what he had done and to be grateful that Richard had killed him. He would claim he had done it for both of us.

  But I knew better.

  I shook my head.

  “You tempted and seduced him just so you would bring me to this moment,” I said, my words so filled with anger, I sounded more like a snake hissing them. I looked down at the remaining letters. “I don’t care what’s in the rest of these letters. It wasn’t Michael’s fault. How could it ever be an inferior’s fault?” I asked him and smiled. “For as you have written many times, they don’t have our cunning. No, Richard, this was obviously all part of your despicable plan and I still intend to make you pay.”

  I could feel him start to laugh inside me again, so I ended it quickly.

  “I loved him more than I love you,” I cried and his fetal laughter was quickly aborted. I could feel him shrink back like a shadow being pressed into a corner as light expanded in a room.

  I dropped the packet back in the garbage bag and tied the bag firmly. Then I rose and thought again about going to Antonio’s. Just as I turned to go to my own room and get dressed, I heard the buzzer. Someone was at the gate. Had Alison returned with a few of the others? I hesitated to press the button on the intercom and the buzzer rang again and again. I finally did it.

  “Yes?”

  “Hi. Hope I’m not interrupting anything,” Detective Mayer said.

  “I was just about to get dressed to go out to dinner,” I replied. “What do you want?”

  “Actually, dinner is a great idea. Do you have a date?”

  “A date?” I couldn’t help smiling at the term. “Hardly a date. What do you want?”

  “To apologize and ask if we could continue our talk.” I heard him laugh.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “I can never get used to talking to people through these dumb metal boxes.”

  “All right.” I sighed. “I’ll buzz you in. Come up to the house.” I pressed the button to open the gate and waited for him to arrive at the house.

  When he did, I opened the door to let him in. Before he could say another word, I gestured toward the bar.

  “Make yourself a drink and get comfortable. I was just about to dress.”

  I realized I had greeted him in one of my more diaphanous robes and I was nude underneath. His eyes widened and a smile of appreciation began at the corners of his mouth.

  “Thank you,” he said. He made it sound as if he were thanking me for giving him this unadulterated view of my body. I turned quickly and headed for my bedroom.

  I chose one of my Valente originals, a blood red dress with a tight, sleeveless bodice, v-neck collar and pleated skirt. The waist had a jeweled belt sewn in. It made my hips look even more narrow. Tonight, I would wear my hair down, I thought. A few quick strokes with my brush made it lie obediently down my neck and over my shoulders. I put on a wet, red lipstick and just a little eyeliner. Then I sprayed some cologne over my bosom and turned away from the mirror.

  When I did so, I caught Richard’s image flashing at the end of mine. I looked back. His face dissolved into the glass. Sometimes, that could happen: We would get a glimmer of our second selves sparkling across a mirror like a meteor flickering across a night sky.

  He would do all that he could to prevent me from doing what I had to do.

  The detective was looking at my album on the long glass table. He turned the pages slowly, drinking in each photograph with care, committing some of them to memory, I imagined. He looked up when I appeared and froze as if he had confronted a ghost.

  “Something wrong?”

  “Wrong? Hardly. I just didn’t realize how beautiful you were in person. I mean before, in my office, under those conditions, I…” He stumbled about, searching for a graceful way to express his own awe. It wasn’t the first time I had had such an impact on a man, of course, but for some reason, I enjoyed the delicious torment the detective was experiencing. My beauty confused him and made for obstacles he would rather not have encountered. “Well, let’s just say, I didn’t look at you as I would look at a beautiful woman.”

  “It was all business? Like a physician examining a pretty girl, but keeping his mind on track by telling himself she is just another patient, that’s just another heart I hear beating, and she has just another small intestine suffering spasmodic pain?”

  He laughed.

  “Something like that. I was admiring your photographs. Where were the ones of Richard taken? The ones at the end of this album,” he said indicating the polished black leather album before him.

  “Ixtapa, Mexico. He likes to go off on these holidays from time to time. A hunt under the sun, he calls them in his diary.”

  “Yes, that diary. Well,” he said, sitting back, “I must confess I didn’t just drop by for a chat.”

  “I didn’t think you had.” I headed for the bar.

  “Can I make you something?” he asked quickly, jumping to be gallant and gracious.

  “What are you having?”

  “A scotch and soda.”

  “I’ll have a vodka and orange juice,” I said. He slipped around the marble counter and took the orange juice out of the small refrigerator. I sat on the cushioned stool and watched him make my drink carefully. For a man who considered himself cool and collected, analytical and strong, the detective was behaving like a flustered fan. I couldn’t help smiling at him.

  “Anyway,” he said pouring the vodka in, “I did some checking.” He handed me my drink.

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome, especially since it’s your booze. So, as I was saying, I did some checking and the murder you described in Brentwood occurred more or less the way you described it.”

  “The way I read it from Richard’s diary,” I corrected.

  “Yes. I mean, the girl was seen going off with a young man and she did work at a bank, and…”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, the medical examiner has her down as dying from asphyxiation, but it was as if all the oxygen in her blood had been sucked out. There weren’t any traumas. Her breathing passages were clear and there was no evidence of anything having been kept over her mouth and nose.”

  “I told you what happens,”
I said dryly and sipped my drink, my eyes peering over the glass. He drank some more of his own.

  “Well, that’s part of what I wanted to clarify. When you say Androgyne draw the life out of their victims…”

  “Our bodies become like sponges, like magnets, like vacuum cleaners,” I added.

  “And there are no wounds, no cuts or stabs in the prey?”

  “No need.”

  He shook his head and then smiled.

  “It’s only in the male form though, that you…” He gestured with his free hand, making a small circle and then popping his fingers into the center of the imaginary ring.

  “That’s right.” I smiled seductively and leaned toward him. “You’re relatively safe with me.”

  He swallowed.

  “I don’t know about that.” He came around the bar. “Okay, suppose I buy all of what you are telling me. My first question is why are you doing this, betraying your own kind? And my second question is when do I get to arrest Richard?”

  Although the detective’s questions were quite predictable, I grew anxious once he put them into words. I turned toward the front door, wondering about Alison and whom she might have spoken to by now. The detective caught my glance.

  “Are you expecting someone?”

  “Eventually.” I swung back to face him. He was only inches away now and I could smell his manly scent beneath his cologne and aftershave lotion. It stirred my heart and quickened my pulse. I could actually taste his lips on mine without touching them. My eyes closed as if we did kiss.

  “I can tell you this,” he said barely above a whisper. “It would break my heart to see you change into a man.”

  I smiled. I liked him. He held onto his sense of humor, clung to it like a castaway clung to driftwood. It kept him from drowning in the sea of cynicism around him, the cold, dark ocean of blood, blood of the raped and murdered, the suicides and psychopaths, as well as the innocent victims who wandered into the path of that tide.

  “Whenever I meet anyone who interests me, I don’t rush to metamorphose.” I ran my right forefinger up his tie and over his chin to his lips. He didn’t back away. He was practically mesmerized. How easy it is, I thought; how easy it has always been.

  “And … what does Richard say to that?” he asked.

  “To what?”

  “To your dragging your feet to metamorphose?”

  I pulled my hand back abruptly and swallowed the remainder of my drink.

  “He gets upset,” I replied and put the glass down. I got off the bar stool. “I’m hungry.”

  “Can I take you to dinner then?”

  “Do you know Antonio’s in Pacific Palisades?” I asked heading for the door.

  “No, but…”

  “I’ll drive,” I said. I opened the door abruptly and waited. He smiled and rushed forward.

  “Aren’t you going to turn off your lights?” he asked as I started out behind him.

  “No. I don’t want anyone stumbling over anything,” I replied. He looked puzzled, but amused. It made me laugh.

  “We poor cops ain’t used to riding around in Mercedes convertibles,” he joked as I opened the car door. “But, anything for the force.” He got in quickly. “Nice Thunderbird,” he remarked looking over at Richard’s car.

  “It’s Richard’s. I never touch it.”

  “That’s another question,” he said as I backed out of the garage. “And I’m still aware you haven’t answered my other two. But after you metamorphose, will you and Richard still have the same fingerprints?”

  “Of course not. There will be nothing physically identical, just resemblances. I thought I told you that.”

  “Well, I…”

  He grabbed hold of the door handle as I shifted down and accelerated, driving the car so quickly out of the driveway, it looked as though we were going to ride right over the precipice across the street.

  “Hey … I’ll have to give you a speeding ticket, if you don’t slow down.”

  “I like driving fast,” I said turning into the hill to descend. “It’s only when we come face to face with death that we understand what it is to be alive. Trust me,” I told him and sped downward, deliberately going faster than I had ever gone before. When I nearly failed to negotiate a turn, I slowed down, realizing any suicidal tendencies could very well be engendered by Richard.

  The detective was grateful. He looked sincerely terrified. I had to be sure he understood.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “It was Richard.”

  “Richard?” He shook his head and looked back as though he thought I meant Richard had been on the road. “Where?”

  “In me. He was trying to kill us.”

  “Trying to kill us?” He started to smile.

  “Yes. And believe me,” I said, turning to him, “he’ll try again.”

  FOUR

  “TELL ME,” THE detective said, leaning toward me, “what happened after you first became Richard and then he became you again? How did it change you?”

  We were sitting at my table in Antonio’s. It was a corner table out of the view of most of the others, although it was on a landing raised above the main floor. Vincent Antonio had designed his restaurant with a simple, but elegant decor: red satin drapes over the small panel windows, white tiled floors and synthetic gray stone walls. The small cast iron tables were covered with white silk tablecloths. The seats were cushioned. There were wall lamps and a very subdued set of crystal chandeliers. All of the tables had candles in red or yellow glass sleeves.

  The music consisted of choral pieces like the Carmina Burana or arias from famous Italian operas. People who dined at Antonio’s kept their voices down. It wasn’t like the typical open, bright and noisy California restaurant with bright Southwestern colors.

  I smiled at my detective. Ever since our arrival, waiters and waitresses, and Vincent Antonio himself, had been falling all over themselves to please me. Mayer had become every inch the moth hovering about the light of my smile. He enjoyed basking in my celebrity.

  “You’re sure you want to hear all these nitty-gritty details? Most men, inferior men, would be bored.”

  “Try me,” he said, lifting his wine glass. He peered over it as he drank. I could feel his mind poised like the mind of a marksman taking aim. Where was all this leading? What exactly was he trying to find out? I was beginning to enjoy the intellectual tennis. My serve.

  “All right.” I took a deep breath and recalled. “I awoke the morning after my first conversion aware that Richard had been in my room and that what had once been solely my room was now our room. Yet, I did not resent the changes he had made. Things that he had removed were things I now saw as part of my preadolescent childhood. Although the room was distinctly less feminine, it hadn’t been turned into something solely masculine. It was truly androgynous.

  “My closet had been divided into two parts with Richard’s clothing on the left and mine on the right. Without having to check first, I knew which drawers in the dressers were his drawers, now containing his socks, his underwear and T-shirts.

  “Some of my things, mementos of junior high school experiences, stacks of perfumed letters I had received from my girlfriends, dolls and dolls’ clothing were placed on the floor of the closet toward the rear. It didn’t anger me, for I felt as if I had grown up overnight. When I looked at myself in the mirror, I discerned changes in my face, especially in my eyes. There was a new look of sophistication, a glint in my gaze that suggested a first-hand knowledge of intimate experiences.”

  “But weren’t they Richard’s intimate experiences and not yours?” he asked quickly. He was snappy in his return, hoping to make a point.

  “I told you we can share things, most things. In truth my metamorphosis had turned my eyes into two windows, and when I looked in the mirror, I thought I could see through them, see down a stream of history that flowed from the beginning of time. Images and visions of beautiful Androgyne passed before me. I saw men and women passionately embraci
ng one another, turning and fitting themselves every which way to reach for some ultimate ecstatic moment. I sensed that I had inherited much knowledge and experience and this awareness aged me in moments.

  “‘Experiences, wisdom, poetry,’ Janice would tell me, ‘link us together like some long, thick, but invisible umbilical cord.’

  “In my newer, more powerful and far more vivid imagination, I envisioned this rope of flesh pulsating with the blood of a thousand Androgyne. Spaced along its surface from its origin outward were the scars marking where each Androgyne had fed on the cord; and out on its forward section, extending into infinity, were the nodules marking the birth of what would someday be new Androgyne.”

  The detective grimaced.

  “Where did you get these grotesque images?” he wondered aloud and then turned to his wine as if seeking comfort in its warmth and flavor.

  “My ability to conjure such images didn’t surprise me. All of my senses had been heightened, enabling me to bring to life every aspect of my environment.

  “When I looked at Richard’s things, I saw him. In everything he touched, in all that was distinctly his, he had left a print of himself. His face, his eyes, his smile and laugh were all about me. Even though he now was submerged within my identity and being, the essence of him was still present with sufficient intensity to give me the understanding that everything I had once had, everything that had been solely mine, was now his and mine. My world had truly been split in half, and I sensed that I would no longer feel complete unless I could somehow share what I had with him.”

  “Let me ask you something,” the detective said. It was a poorly disguised attempt at something spontaneous. I knew he had spoken with some psychiatric expert and come away with a number of questions to pose, but I didn’t mind at the moment. I was eager to meet the challenge, to see what sort of weak strategy he and his so-called specialists could come up with. “When you’re not Richard, do you ever think as Richard or hear Richard’s voice?”

  “At times. All Androgyne do. It’s like someone whispering in your ear. You’ll turn around, forgetting for the moment that he can’t be entirely separate from you, and you will look for him in crowds or among your friends. You might,” I added smiling, “reply.”