The Sound of the 11 o'clock hour on this first mild Saturday evening of spring is a thin, shrill wail, almost bird-like in its musicality though it comes from no bird, impossible to locate and barely audible above the low hum of traffic cruising the bars and clubs that line Central Avenue. To me, it's pleasantly supernatural.
The Magical Image that accompanies this Sound at this particular time and place appears to me as a slim young woman with long dark hair, dressed in white briefs and tee-shirt and seated in a high-backed wooden chair, holding a yellow ball between her knees, a red rose in one hand and a lit candle in the other. Her look is one of frustration and impatience, as she wants sex and is not finding it.
That's a portent, and I step back from the window with some surprise.
I know these things because I'm a synesthesiac empath, so I'm aware of all sorts of things that normal people just can't see or hear or sense at all. Actually, I'm a synesthesiac Super-Empath, but that sounds more like a boast than a way of being, so I usually just omit the superlative. A Super-Empath is a person whose sense of empathy is so freakishly over-developed that he can perceive and feel other people's emotions as if they're his own-- can feel them more strongly, really, than his own feelings--and not just as simple emotions, but as physical objects and images not of this world. And because all thoughts carry emotions, I can read people's thoughts too, with a clarity that would be terrifying to someone not used to it and inured to the shock and strangeness of being in someone else's mind. Because that's very usually where I end up: in another person's mind.
Plus, in my case, as Super as I am, I can reverse the process and make people feel and think pretty much whatever I want them to, simply by injecting thoughts and emotions into their heads. I can implant memories of things that never happened, understandings of things you've never encountered, sudden fears or hatreds or compulsions. And to top it off, being synesthesiac means that all my senses are cross-wired and interconvertible, so I can easily change sensory modalities and thus hear colors and taste sounds, and see moods and emotions as pictures and images.
That's how I know the sound of 11 o'clock on this particular night, as well as knowing that the hours of every day each have their own sound that speaks of the mood, the possibilities and potentials and energies of that portion of infinity. That's how I can perceive the Magical Image that expresses its secret occult spirit.
As you might expect by now, I'm nowhere near normal, and I don't lead a normal life. And as this story begins—the story of my seduction of an extraordinary young woman, as you will see—I'm hanging out at my apartment with a group of other non-normals we call the North Side Supernaturals. We often meet at my place, which they call, half-jokingly, the Empath's Castle, though it isn't a castle at all but a third-floor walk-up overlooking the strip of clubs and restaurants on Central near Gilmore on the North Side of the City. It's the first nice Saturday of the new spring and the windows are open wide. We're lounging around the living room amidst the rinds of pizzas and cans of beer and Red Bull, getting ready to begin our Saturday night hunt.
There's Caveman the Wer-Hominin; the transsexual Time-Alien Twins known as GirlyGuy and GuylyGirl, mixed gender-blenders from the future; Count Nathan Larry the Suburban Vampire; and, outside the apartment and plastered against the building's side so he's barely visible even from my window, my old buddy Vince, the shadow-strider.
Plus, tonight we have this new guy called the Fuckable Jerk, a friend of the Caveman who claims to be a shape-shifter, but who so far has only managed to shift his legs from about the knees down, which he's doing now with much sweating and grunting, kicked back in the recliner and changing his feet from human feet to goat hooves and back again. He's trying to convince Nathan Larry and anyone else who'll listen that this is scary enough to get him laid in the upcoming Saturday Night Street Feast, but no one's especially buying it. And in truth, the Fuckable Jerk doesn't seem to be a real shape-shifter so much as a Dimlighter, one of the new generation of urban monsters that are popping up all the time. A Dimlighter is a kind of male bar-scum that looks great in a bar, but in the watery light of morning reveals himself to be some sort of awful scurrying gutter nightmare. He's apparently part of this trend we're seeing for monsters who only come out in the daytime.
Even so, the ranks of the Supernaturals have grown so thin lately that I think we should include him in on the Saturday Night Feast, as long as they don't stick him with me. Besides, the FJ paid for the pizza so we can't really turn him out. We may be monsters but we're not rude.
There was a time when the North Side Supernats could flood the night with vampires and lycans and other eroto-spookies of the night and give real meaning to all that darkness and frustrated sexuality, but times have changed and monstering isn't what it used to be, and now you never know who's going to show up on a Saturday Night.
With the pizza finished and everyone lying around with the bloat, Caveman's the first to speak.
"Well I gotta get laid," Caveman says, and everyone pretty much agrees.
As I said, Caveman's a Wer-Hominen. That is, he's normally a dog--a Bichon-Frise/shepherd mix, we think--but at the new moon he turns into an early primitive man, a "hominin."
Homo habilis
is our best guess, but no one's really sure. It's one of those really scary fuckers with the big jaws and teeth and beady little animal eyes.
I bet you probably thought humans were the only creatures that turned into other animals under the influence of moonlight, of you even thought about it at all. Well, not hardly.
Anyhow, the new moon is tonight so Caveman's already pretty much turned into this hulky gorilla figure and is muttering and scratching himself. (Shape-shifting makes you itch something fierce for a while.) He's at the point where he doesn't know whether to sit in a chair or on the floor, and his restlessness is infecting everyone in the room. Everyone's starting to squirm and scratch a little as the clocks get closer to midnight.
And I'm not immune. My powers are much more refined and sophisticated than the rest of the 'Nats, who mostly rely on brute strength and shock to get what they want. They realize this and so tend to treat me differently, not quite sure what to make of me or my talents, and wary of dealing with a creature who can mess with their minds so easily. But the excitement of Saturday night hits all creatures, and with my sensitivity to emotions I'm well aware of the call of the wild and the sexual buzz rising from the throngs of innocent humans out strolling in the spring night. There's people out wandering around, or gathering in bars and restaurants, restless, lonely, seeking to quench the springtime itch. The air is rich and soft with just enough of a warm breeze to ripple tee-shirts and make girls grab at their hair as they cross the street. It's shorts-and-sandals night with guys taking off their shirts, and all that flesh on display makes spirits high. The scent of cologne and shampoo and perfume is clear to, even up here on the third floor.
I may be a freak and a monster, but I'm happy to say that I don't share my friends' taste for the blood and bodies of my ex-fellow humans. Rather I feed on the thoughts and emotions of human beings, and not necessarily in a bad way. I'm something like a kind of spooky hummingbird the garden of human mentation. And even "feed" is too rough and ugly a word to describe what I do, because I don't really devour or bite or consume in the usual sense. I'm too evolved for that. It's more like I inhale or savor the emotional aura or vibration, and draw my sustenance from that surprisingly rich and nourishing brew. Nor is it to feed my body, which is quite happy getting by on veggies and pizza and an occasional burger or plate of sushi. It's to feed my soul and spirit with the intoxicatingly delicious pastiche of normal humans' hopes and fears, excitements, and experiences, their pleasures and pains.
And here it is, Saturday night, that weekly dinner time for us predatory freaks, and there's that desperate Saturday Night excitement coming up off the street below. This stretch of Central is where the clubs are, and so there are crowds down there basking in the weather: guys and girls, couples, lovers, loners, people of all sorts and ages. And despite the essential non-carnality of my diet, I'm not going to suggest to you that the pleasure I take from my feeding is somehow non-sexual or absent of erotic content. Because it's far from that. Way far.
As an empath, I'm drawn to strong emotion, especially strong positive emotion, and it's hard to find a more intense and readily available source of emotion than what's experienced during physical sex.. Sexual feelings run deep, run rich, and run hot, and permeate almost every area of the mind in one form or another, so are readily available. That, and I suppose my natural personality and predilections have made me a connoisseur of the human sexual experience and its attendant emotions, especially those of the female.
Oh, men's carnal emotions can be very intense and even intoxicating, but essentially they're very simple and rather uninteresting. A man wants sex: and that's pretty much the end of the story. He wants it so badly that he'll stick his penis in any sort of receptacle, no questions asked. It was the male, after all, who came up with the idea for the Glory Hole: a hole bored in the wall of a toilet stall where he'd gladly stick his yosh and hope for the best. That's about as basic as you can get.
But a woman's sexuality is rich, deep, and complex: a shifting medley of desire and trepidation, physical pleasure and excitement seasoned with a bit of worry or guilt; a pinch of trust and a hint of incipient love, and a kind of sweet-&-sour sauce made from inhibitions vigorously shaken with the deep urge to let one's self go. That's not to say that there aren't times when a woman's attitude towards sex is no more complicated than a man's, but on the whole, her emotions are more profound and involved. Her body and indeed her very self are more tied up and entangled with sex to the point where it's very difficult from an empath's point of view to drill down to the fundamental source of her sexuality