Deficiency by Andrew Neiderman Page A

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