The Princess of the Desert

By Melodie Thomas

Edited by Holly Hart

Chapter 5

Thursday, September 18, 2008
Forensics positively identified Robert Melons of Boston as the body found a little over six months ago. The ongoing detailed investigation into his background has revealed nothing to explain why he was kidnapped. No evidence of transsexual behavior or ties to such behavior was found. Everything that we have found says he was just a kid going to school.

The trail of the video that was found has run into two more copy points and is still being chased. So far the trail has crossed nearly all the states and Canada, still with no indication where it originated.

The situation with Stephanie is starting to bother me quite a bit. Whenever I meet with her, or reports I get of her meetings with the others, she appears bright, bubbly, inquisitive and very happy. However, I get reports from Mary, who takes the night shift watch in the apartment, and almost every night she finds Stephanie sitting on the floor in a corner crying. We discussed this information with Paula and the feedback we get is that it is probably the result of nightmares, and we just need to give her more time. I am developing a gut feeling that it is more than that.

The memory puzzle that we are building with Stephanie is becoming confusing. Stephanie will describe a random series of events, and when we compare those descriptions with the information already collected; we are finding some of the stories seem to be in conflict with each other. I don’t know how to put my finger on it but something just does not seem right here.

Today, Tina and I are meeting with Stephanie and Stacy for lunch at the hospital cafeteria before Stephanie’s afternoon appointment with Dr. Reinfelt. I was hoping to ask Stephanie a couple of questions to help clarify a few of the events that she described, and wanted some time with Paula after their session to discuss my concerns.

As Tina and I were sitting in the waiting area outside the cafeteria she said, “Stacy took Stephanie shopping again this morning. That seems to be good for her, she enjoys it.”

“I guess I don’t understand,” I responded. “Less than two weeks ago she was not even sure she wanted to be a girl, and now she can’t buy enough clothes? Doesn’t that seem a little strange to you?”

“Dan, you are just letting your bias show through again.”

I was pondering a response when I heard my name called. “Dan, Tina, Hi!” I saw Stephanie and Stacy come out of the elevator.

The one thing I will openly admit, the image that Stephanie put on was that of a very beautiful woman. Today she was wearing a white blouse with a red skirt that stopped just above her knees. That was topped off with red 4” heeled shoes, long dangling earrings and red lipstick. Her smile was incredible. Still, something did not feel right to me.

“Stacy and I just went shopping. You like it?” Stephanie asked as she did a small spin.

“It’s beautiful.” Tina said.

“How about you, Dan?” Stephanie flashed one of her million dollar smiles.

“The bigger question is,” I answered, “do you like it?”

“I love it. It makes me feel so good.”

Stacy, Tina and Stephanie entered the cafeteria, with me behind them. I was having difficulty with this. Two weeks ago, I was dealing with a person with no memory. That transformed into a person that was asking about changing back, then became a person that was in acceptance, and now, I feel like I have high school girl with me. This just was not adding up.

As we entered the service line, Stephanie held back so she was going through the line just ahead of me.

“I am so much looking forward to the barbeque this weekend.” Stephanie said.

I smiled, “I hope so. Do you have any special requests?” I answered.

“Not really, I think whatever you cook will be wonderful.”

As we reached the end of the line, Stephanie had only selected a salad and a cup of coffee. “That is not very much for lunch.” I commented.

“Well,” Stephanie smiled at me, “I need to watch my figure,” following the smile with a wink.

Alarm bells were going off in my head, but I was not sure what alarm. Someone that I knew was not a woman was flirting with me. Was this just my bias resurfacing as Tina claimed?

Tina and Stacy had already selected a table when I paid for Stephanie’s lunch and my own. Since Stephanie could not grasp her tray with her left hand, she was holding the tray from underneath with her left palm up. Stephanie was leading the way to the table when a man, seated at one of the tables, stood and accidentally bumped her right arm. The bump pushed the tray off Stephanie’s left hand and she could not catch it. The cup of coffee on her tray tipped off and landed on the left shoulder of an orderly sitting at an adjacent table.

“God Damn it!” the man cursed, jumping to his feet as the hot coffee covered his front and back.

As the man tried to get away from the hot coffee, he bumped the woman sitting next to him, causing her to spill her drink across the table. The two people opposite them also jumped their feet to avoid the liquid spreading on the table.

Stephanie’s hands were covering her mouth and her eyes filled with horror. She took a step back from the table then turned and started running.

“Stephanie!” I called out as I set my tray down and chased after her.

Stephanie continued to run down the hall but she was not going towards the hospital exit. I could hear Stacy call out behind me. Stephanie rounded a corner in the hall and ran into a couple walking the other way. The impact knocked her off her feet and she landed on her side, sliding into the wall. I reached her within a second as she was trying to get up. I pulled her into my arms; she was shaking and crying violently.

Her eyes were pleading as she looked at me. “I can’t do this anymore.” She sobbed. “Why didn’t you just let me die? Why? I can’t do this.”

Stacy arrived at my side, but when she reached out, Stephanie cowered away from her and closer to me. With a shocked expression, Stacy backed off. Tina was on the phone to someone, giving orders. Soon I heard the PA announce a ‘Code 3’ in the cafeteria hallway. I have no idea what a Code 3 is but assumed it had something to do with us. Within minutes, two orderlies with a gurney came running down the hall, followed by Paula. As the orderlies set up the gurney, Paula tried to talk to Stephanie and received the same reaction as Stacy had. Stephanie had wrapped her arms around my neck, so I scooped her up in my arms, lifting her to the gurney.

Two hours later, Stephanie had been readmitted to the hospital and was under sedation. Tina had called Mary, who is now guarding outside Stephanie’s room. The right shoulder of my shirt was still wet from Stephanie’s tears as I entered Paula’s office, set down my briefcase and dropped into a chair. I didn’t realize how much I was shaking until just now. I sat there, alone for about ten minutes, thinking, before Paula, Tina and Stacy came in.

Paula sat down at her desk while Stacy took the other chair. Tina walked up behind me and gave me a quick shoulder squeeze, then sat down on the couch.

“So, what happened?” I asked

“I really don’t know,” Paula answered, “I will have to wait until I talk to her.”

“I think we are doing something wrong here.” I said.

“What do you mean?” Paula challenged. I could see it in her eyes she took that as an insult.

“I don’t really know, I just think we are missing something important.”

“I don’t think so,” Paula answered. “We just need to give her more time.”

“Are you really, and I mean really, sure that Atkins is a ‘her’? I asked.

“Of course she is a ‘her’.” Stacy responded with anger in her voice.

“How do you know that?” I continued to challenge.

“Well, just look at her!” Stacy answered with a ‘what are you thinking’ attitude.

“I have, and I see something that somebody else made, and that is not necessarily a ‘her’.”

“Trust me, Dan,” Paula interjected, “I am far more qualified than you think to know what she is going through?”

“How is that?” I asked, sensing there was more here than her professional background.

“Let’s just say, I know what she is going through. I have been there.”

“You have been kidnapped and abused?” I asked.

“No, Dan, the sex change.” Paula looked me in the eye with a cold stare. “I am a male to female transsexual, Dan, a full, post op transsexual.”

I was stunned at that revelation. I just sat there in shock. I could see that neither Tina nor Stacy were surprised. Seems some discussions have been going on behind my back.

“I transitioned while in high school and had my SRS done when I finished college. That is why I was assigned to this case. I have a unique insight to what ‘SHE’ is going through.”

I sat there for a moment, trying to gather my wits again. “Okay, but I still don’t agree with you.”

“What don’t you agree with? That a boy or a girl can feel they are the wrong sex and what to change it?

“That is a completely different discussion. We are talking specifically about Stephanie, and I don’t think what you did, or went through, has any relation to her.”

“It has everything to do with her. We are working to help her accept who she is. Can’t you see that?”

“Accept who she is?” my voice was starting to rise, “Hell, Paula, she doesn’t even know ‘what’ she is. How can she accept that?

“Damn it, McNeil! When are you going to accept the fact that some people are different? Maybe, if you learned that you would still be talking to your brother!” Rienfelt’s voice was rising as well.

“My brother has nothing to do with this!”

“No?” Paula stood, leaning on her desk towards me, shouting. “I have been putting up with close-minded, discriminating assholes like you my entire life! I know precisely what she needs to do to survive the likes of you!

I stood and stepped to the desk, leaning into her. “Really Doctor? Then maybe some of us close-minded discriminating assholes owe you an apology, but that is not the case with Atkins!” I shouted back at her.

“It is exactly the same! You are just too blind to see it!”

My anger was at a boiling point “Doctor,” I shouted into her face, “have you ever been hung up by your arms and had a cattle prod shoved up your ass? She has!” I felt the tears start flowing from my eyes. “She has!”

My anger was building even higher, and the fact I could not control the tears made it worse. I spun around and grabbed my laptop out of my briefcase, taking it out of sleep mode. I slammed if on Paula’s desk.

“Watch the fucking video,” I said as I hit the play button. “Just watch the video and tell me you know how to deal with this!”

Tina and Stacy moved around by Paula to watch. When the sound of the scream came out of the speakers, I knew they had seen enough. Stacy was staggering to find a place to sit and Tina was hiding her eyes. Paula dropped back into her chair with a horrified look on her face. I closed the laptop, shutting off the video. I dropped the laptop back in my briefcase and fell into the chair.

Nobody spoke for a few minutes. “She tried to tell me last week,” I said in calmer voice, trying to control my own emotions, but I couldn’t stop the tears, “but I was too dumb to understand what she was saying. She told me, ‘she was still being feminized by her new keepers’, but we were doing it with tenderness instead of brutality, so she didn’t mind it. That should have set off alarms in me, but it didn’t. I couldn’t hide the fact that I found her attractive, so she magnified that because she thought it was what I wanted. For the last week and half he or she, hell, I don’t know, has been trying to be as girly as possible, too much so, because that was what we were expecting, and she was getting a lot of positive reinforcement for that behavior.”

Tina was as white as a ghost, with tears in her eyes, “Are you saying she was acting?”

“Yes and no,” I responded. “She was surviving, doing the same thing she has done for the past three years. She was bending to the will of the people around her. Those people that had her screwed her up so bad she has no idea what is the real ‘her’ is, and what the image is she is supposed to have.”

“But,” Stacy spoke for the first time, “I thought he wanted to be a girl.”

“Maybe she does, maybe she doesn’t.” I replied, “You saw her as a girl and you started treating her as one. She responded to that because that is how she felt she needed to be to survive.”

We all sat quietly for a few minutes, lost in our own thoughts.

“Dr. Reinfelt,” I spoke, “I am going to make a recommendation to my superiors, and that recommendation has nothing to do with your abilities or your background. I plan to request some new doctors be assigned to this case, preferably ones with experience in dealing with POWs. This isn’t a case of gender change. This isn’t my brother deciding to be a girl, this is torture and brainwashing, and we don’t know how to deal with it.”

Paula did not speak, nor did she look at me. She just nodded her head. I gathered up my briefcase and left.

I returned to the office and called Mike Holiday to give him an update on the situation. We were going to need more experienced help than we had. In my opinion, anyway, Stephanie’s case was well beyond our ability to handle locally. We needed people experienced in handling severe emotional trauma. Mike told me he would contact Washington and get back to me as soon as he could. The rest of the time, I just sat there and stared at the wall.

A few hours later Tina returned to the office. She closed the door to the office as she entered, and then wrapped her arms around my neck. As she hugged me I could feel her breathing shudder, and knew she was fighting tears.

“You okay, partner?” I asked after she returned to her desk.

Tina sighed, “Probably the same as you, if I were to guess. I am sorry I doubted you, Dan.”

I half smiled, “No, I deserved the doubt for reasons that you know, and I am pretty sure this whole mess is my fault.”

“And how did you make that leap?”

“The first day that I met with her after the hypnosis session, when she seemed to be in the most control of herself, I challenged her. She took that challenge as negative feedback, and she had been programmed to seek positive feedback. So I broke her down that day and made her find a different path so I would like her. Because I was biased when I started the case, drove the three of you into ‘protective’ mode. The three of you treated her like a girl, so that is what she pushed for because she got positive feedback for it. She was extremely beautiful in my eyes and she got positive reinforcement for that.”

I could feel the tears starting to form in my eyes again. “None of us, including Paula, understood just how vulnerable she is and we were just manipulating her.”

Tina sat there for a minute looking at me. “You like her don’t you?”

“What do you mean?”

“Just what I said, you like HER.”

I thought for a second, “Yeah, Tina, I do, but with some reservations.”

“What reservations?”

I smiled, “I will wait to answer that if she ever figures out if she is a ‘she’ or a ‘he’.”

Friday, September 19, 2008
First thing this morning I received a call from Mike. After reviewing the case file, the Washington office has decided to move Stephanie to Mount Elizabeth’s Psychiatric Hospital in Washington D.C., where they have the staff and resources to handle this case. Protection will be provided for her in Washington, and my team can return to their original assignments. Mary packed up and started her drive home this morning. Stacy would be staying until tomorrow before returning to Phoenix.

A chartered flight will be arriving in Tucson at noon today to pick up Stephanie. Tina and I went to the hospital to escort her to the airport. When I entered Stephanie’s room, she was just lying in bed, looking at the walls.

I got a weak smile when she saw me. “Hi, Dan.”

“Hi, how are you doing?”

“Not so good, I don’t think.”

“We are going to try to get you better. We are sending you to another hospital where they have experts in the things that happened to you.”

Stephanie got a worried look, “It is far away?”

“Yes, you are going to Washington D.C. Tina and I will be taking you to the airport soon.”

Stephanie just looked at her hands, “Am I going to see you again?”

“I hope so, but that will really be up to you, whatever you decide.”

The door to the room opened and an orderly came in with a wheelchair. The orderly pushed the wheelchair out to the car, and helped Stephanie get into the backseat where Tina was waiting. Tina and Stephanie hugged while I got in the front seat and Stacy drove us to the airport. The charter jet was waiting our arrival; a steward brought a wheelchair to the car. Stephanie hugged Tina and Stacy.

Stephanie looked up at me, “Do you think you can handle giving me a hug?”

I didn’t answer, I just hugged her. “I am going to miss you,” she whispered in my ear. I kissed her cheek.

The steward backed the wheelchair up the ramp and Stephanie waved to us. The door closed and the jet started moving. I stood there and watched it until I could no longer see it.

Friday, October 3, 2008
During the weekly conference call, the cyber unit reported finding another video. Since I no long had the principal, there was no reason to send it to me. The first video had been traced all over the country and the trail was finally lost after it entered Mexico. Our hope now was that the second video would show something in common with the first and help pinpoint some place of common activity.

Late Friday afternoon found me on the eighth floor of the hospital standing outside of Paula Reinfelt’s office. I knocked as I entered.

“Hi Paula.”

Paula had a surprised look on her face. We had not seen each other since the blow up in her office. “Dan! I am surprised to see you”

“It has been a couple of weeks. You have a few minutes?”

“Sure,” she said moving over to the couch to sit and motioning me to one of the chairs.

I closed the door and sat down. “How have you been, Dan?”

“I’m doing okay, how about you?”

“Fine, any word about Stephanie … or … honestly, I don’t know what to call him/her.”

I smiled, “Stephanie still works for me, and no, I don’t have news. I am no longer on the ‘need to know’ list, so I don’t hear anything. If the guys in Washington get a nugget of information from her it is in the weekly call, but no updates on her status.”

“I am sorry to hear that. What can I do for you?”

“Paula, I am here for personal reasons, so if you don’t want to talk to me, I will understand.”

“No, not a problem, please go ahead.”

“Well, it’s kind of a tough subject for me, but I would like to ask some questions about your … umm … “

“My change?” Paula smiled.

“Yeah.”

Paula thought for a second, “Is this about me, about your brother or about Stephanie?”

“All.”

“Okay, go ahead.”

“Why did you do it?”

Paula Chuckled, “You know, Dan, ‘girls’ like me have been trying for years to come up with the words to explain to ‘guys’ like you why we did what we did. I have given that a lot of thought over the last couple of weeks and have come to the conclusion that there is no way to explain it.”

“I am not sure I follow you.”

“I can tell you that I knew I was a girl since I was six years old, but that has no meaning to you, because you don’t know what that feeling is, you have never experienced it. It is like trying to explain to a blind person what the color red is. I just think it is something that can’t be done.”

“So, how are we supposed to understand it, to deal with it?”

“Understand it? I don’t think you can. Dealing with it? That is just called acceptance. You had no trouble dealing with me before you knew I was TS, and I am still the same person, now that you do know. My intellect does not decrease, my skills are the same and so is my capacity for love. Brenda is the same person as Ben was, just a different outer wrapping. Her becoming a woman does not, in any way, change the way she feels for you.”

“I don’t know Paula, that just seems like such a big hurdle, and I don’t know why it is. I think I understand what you are saying, but getting my mind wrapped around it is hard.”

“That is because you are looking for answers, Dan. There are no answers, there simply accepting someone for who they are and who they want to be.”

I thought about what she was saying, and then stood, “Thanks Paula, you have given me something to think about.”

Paula stood as well, “Any time, Dan. Come back again if you want to talk.”

Saturday, October 11, 2008
It is early evening and I am parked in the drive way of a single story ranch style house on the outskirts on Phoenix. The case has pretty much gone cold. Washington is still working, tracing the second video but so far they have come up with over one thousand common crossing points, mostly hacked home servers, with no new leads, Tina and I have gone back to working our old case load.

I still have no word on Stephanie. I even asked Mike to ask for me. That took a little explaining. Tonight I am attempting to break down another wall, as I walk to the front door and ring the bell.

The porch light came on and the door opened, “Hi Brenda.”

“Well, my goodness, you actually called me by name,” my brother or now, Sister smiled.

“I have been practicing for last two hours, so give me a break.” I returned the smile.

“Come on in, little brother.”

I had not seen her in three years and was quite surprised on how good she looked. At just under six foot tall and 150 pounds, she didn’t look too bad. More masculine in appearance than Stephanie or Paula, but not too bad.

“How you been?” I asked, sitting down.

“I am better now; I get to see you again.”

I smiled, “Sorry about that. I took me awhile to come to terms with myself.”

“I understand there may be another young lady responsible for some of that.”

I gave her a puzzled look.

“Oh, come on, little brother, if you can’t figure out that communication channel, you’re not as smart as I thought you were. Tina tells Mike, Mike tells mom and Mom tells me.”

I grin, “I should have known, no such thing as secrets.”

We were both quiet for a moment, both trying to decide how to proceed.

“Do you want to ask me the big question?” Brenda asked.

“What big question?”

“Why?”

“No. I have a friend that told me I would never understand the answer anyway, so I just need to learn to accept it. So that is the way I am trying to approach it is as long as you are happy.”

“I am doing well, Dan. I am happy with my life and who I am. I even have a new girlfriend.”

“Girlfriend?” That puzzled me.” But I thought you were … “

Brenda laughed, “I am not gay, I like girls, and I like being a girl.”

I couldn’t help but to start laughing “I don’t want to know! I don’t want to know! I am confused enough!”

It took a moment for us both to stop laughing.

“Brenda, this is going to take me some time to get used to, so please don’t expect a sudden change in me. A lot of things have opened my eyes in the last few weeks, but give me some time.”

“No problem, little brother, as long as you remember we are still family.”

“That is the part I will never forget.”

“So,” Brenda asked, “Did you really like her?”

I thought for a moment, “I don’t know. I was only around her for a few weeks, and I really didn’t know her, not the real her. But, I will be honest, if any of what I saw was real, and then yeah, I liked her. But, I don’t know what was real and what wasn’t, and I’m fairly certain she didn’t, and I may never know.”