What would he do if he didn't have the need? In what direction would he go? As it was, his periodic hunger controlled and governed his every move. It provided all his ambition for him and created the subjects and natures of his dreams. In his mind there was an overall design, a road map only he could see and follow. It had brought him here, to this place, these mountains in upstate New York. If anything amazed him about himself, it was that instinctive knowledge of direction, that power, that force that literally took hold of his hands and arms and made him turn the steering wheel to the right or to the left. Sometimes, he thought he saw a red line before him leading the way, even in broad daylight. It disappeared as he drove over it. At night, it glowed with neon brightness, the light thumping, thumping, thumping behind his eyes. He was hypnotized by his destiny, mesmerized by the predetermined design set forth by some magical power. He reacted and acted on stimuli in a precise, given way each and every time.
Now, as hard as he tried, he couldn't even remember when he had first come here or how he had gotten here. Things just seemed to happen. Something had triggered him to leave where he was. He was being chased, and he had packed up and come here. It was the closest thing to fear he felt, this sense of being pursued. Something was out there that would do him harm and he had to make distance between it and himself whenever he could. It bothered him that he couldn't identify it specifically, but he blamed that on his difficulty to tap into his own history. He was truly an amnesiac.
Vaguely he understood that he had done many different things during his short but rich life. However, as soon as he had done them, he had put them into some dark closet in his mind. Whatever was necessary to do was done. It was as simple and as worry-free as that. In fact, he never once thought himself unlucky or freakish. He mourned no one, loved no one, suffered no anxiety except the anxiety that accompanied his hunger, for there was always the fear that he would not find suitable prey. However, he had come to recognize this as a natural thing, something to help drive him forward and be successful. If he were too nonchalant about his need, he would fail, and he could fail only once. Again, that was something he knew instinctively. No one taught him. There was no mother, no father, no sister or brother beside him to advise him. When he bothered to think of all this, he wondered why not, but after a short while, he would forget why it mattered and stop wondering. There was too much to do, too much to enjoy. Just like it had been this morning.
How sweet the air had been, how bright the day. He had gone through his stretching exercises quickly in the parking lot at the park. Who could deny that he wasn't the paragon of all creatures, a higher form of life? Look at his face, as young and handsome as it was from the day he was created. And aside from the agony he experienced when his hunger came, he had never had a sick day or a bodily pain, at least none that he could recall. Why, he had never even experienced the common cold. There were no medicines in his bags, not even aspirin. That was significant in and of itself, wasn't it?
When he looked at himself in a mirror, he could see that he had never had a cavity in his teeth. Of course, he couldn't recall ever having seen a doctor or a dentist, so he assumed he was just as he was created, perfect, complete, the epitome of life itself. And it made him proud. He showed it whenever he ran, his head high, his chest out, his arms perpendicular to the ground, pumping the air as he took his stride, his feet gliding over the turf, a veritable Mercury sailing through the parks wherever he was, his eyes bright and fixed on the way before him. He always sensed that other joggers were looking at him enviously as he passed them so swiftly and with such ease.
He wanted them to look at him. He understood that vanity had always been a part of whom and what he was, for what was more a proof of his love of life than his love of himself? It was the nature of an organism to be self-centered, to spend its life searching for ways to satisfy its needs and keep itself healthy and alive. Animals that worked for other animals had shorter life spans. This realization came to him one day when he stopped in a meadow and watched bees working around a hive. The individual sacrificed itself for the good of the whole. But what was its reward? It didn't live to see or to enjoy the fruits of its labor.
Enjoyment and fulfillment were the only reasons for life, and who could deny that both of these were enhanced when the individual cared only for himself?
There was more of everything for him. He lived to please himself. The weaker and the infirm called that greed or lust, but they were hoping to feed off the success of the stronger, weren't they? In that sense they, too, were selfish. He loved himself even more for being able to justify that love, and anyone who had seen him on mornings like this one, the morning after a feed, would step back in admiration, in awe, shaking his head, wondering who he was and how they could be like him. He had jogged through the park, past the inferiors like a beautiful fish swimming through a sea of covetousness. They had just wanted to touch him, to be beside him, to learn from him or take from him. But he was too fast, too graceful, and too clever to permit any of them to do so. As soon as one drew too near, he had driven his feet harder into the soil and had lifted his body away. In moments he had been gone and he had known they had been left shaking their heads and wondering if they had imagined it or they really had seen him.
They would know. Oh, they would know, but only one at a time, and after that knowledge, they would be drained and discarded, left behind like some emptied cartons. He was convinced they existed only for his pleasure and nourishment anyway. He saw them the same way a bird sees worms. And just like a bird, he suffered no guilt when he fed. Indeed, he felt it was coming to him. Why else was it there? Why else was he here?
Questions like these rarely bothered him anyway, and whenever they did, he brushed them aside as he would brush aside some annoying insect. It was just as pointless to stop and wonder why there were mosquitos. Don't wonder about them, destroy them and go on and on and on, he thought...
Just like he was doing now.
Just like he would always do.
Filled with the wonder of himself, he had glided ahead toward the rising sun and into its gradually expanding pool of warmth. Even that existed solely for him.
Late in the afternoon he had read the newspaper while he had sat in a booth in a small Italian restaurant and sipped some white wine. Every time he read a newspaper or turned on the news, it was as if he had been on a journey in space and had just returned to earth. He devoured the headlines and stories like one who had been kept hostage by terrorists for years. He knew that he needed the knowledge and the information in order to conduct himself well in the present. People wouldn't understand if he didn't know what month, day, or year it was, or if he didn't know who was president or what major events like earthquakes or revolutions had just occurred.
Most of the knowledge he had, he had inherited anyway, if inherited was the right word for it. Inherited implied so many things. It was all just there, at his beck and call. What difference did it make that he couldn't remember how it had gotten there?
When he came to the news story about the young woman who had been found dying in a motel room and read the details, he consumed them with a detachment that would cause anyone who saw him reading to think this was the first he had heard about it.
He sipped some more of his wine and then looked up to smile as the young, buxom waitress with light brown hair brought him his order of lasagna, the special of the day. She had guaranteed him it would be good.
"The pastas homemade here," she pointed out.
He was charming; it came natural to him to be so.