Man V. Nature: Stories (15 page)

The bedroom was also bare, a mattress on the floor with a single sheet balled at the foot. The windows were shrouded in brown cloth, but a chair had been placed where someone could sit and look out a crack between the fabric panels. There was a shabby painted dresser. Our man swiped what little was on it to the floor.

He pulled her shirt over her head; her breasts, oblong and heavy, spilled from her bra with just a flick of the straps. She was plump. Her belly looked strangely swollen. All evidence to the contrary, he might have guessed she was already pregnant. But no, she had the hunger of an empty woman.

She moaned she was ready, and she was. He was about to bend her over that dresser when she said, “No,” and backed our man to the bed. He fell onto it, and she straddled him. “This way.”

The woman took him in with a long
oooh
. “It's like you're made of electricity,” she said. She began to rock slowly, smiling gravely. “I'm going to have the best kid.”

Our man concentrated on how tightly her legs locked around his hips, on how protected he felt.

“You're going to be a great mom.” He sighed.

She began wiggling around on top of him, tossing her hair, bucking, and it felt so good. He couldn't believe he'd been lucky enough to meet her, and at a moment when he most needed to. He watched her breasts sway, her belly heave, her mouth round into pleasure and then spread into surprise. He tucked his hands behind his head as if he were taking a nap in the park, not a care in the world, with his penis drawn inside her and about to start a family with her in just another minute or so. He was entering that buzzy state he loved, his body feeling like the glass casing of a thermometer, the liquid rising, swelling, getting dangerous—the casing could shatter!—when he thought he saw something move in the doorway; a man, a shadow, a ghost; and then it was gone.

“My kid will be the best,” she chanted as she writhed.

Our man became lost in the chant. She was coming. And then he was braying, grabbing at air, coming too.

Then she quieted and stopped moving.

His climax whimpered out, replaced by a new nervousness. He cleared his throat several times, but she stayed silent and still. “Did you like that?” It was not a question our man had ever asked.

“Sure,” she said, though she seemed displeased. Her smile had disappeared. She pressed her hands against his collarbones and said very somberly, “But it's not why I brought you here.”

She slipped her hands around our man's throat and tightened.

Everything in him cooled. His spent limbs went wax dead. He had never been threatened by a woman before. He didn't know how to respond. Should he hit her? He couldn't.

“What's going on?” he wheezed. His rejected ejaculate gummed between them.

“Don't hate me,” she said. “I'm doing this for my baby. I'm not a bad person.”

“Please,” our man sputtered. He struggled, but he'd been made defenseless on his back. She was strong and determined. A mother already. It all began to make sense. She
was
pregnant, had known exactly who he was, and was helping another man, the father of her child, conquer our man in order to rise in stature. She probably wasn't even from the Midwest.

Our man's sight turned to black smudges, his hearing clotted. He groped and kicked wildly, and she held tighter. He gurgled, his chest burned. He felt so stupid. He shut his eyes and couldn't believe this was it.

How terrible life was, he marveled, but how fair. He was getting what he deserved. He thought back on how he became our man. You remember: how he'd come upon his predecessor—a man in his prime, powerful and unchallenged—copulating in the middle of Main Street, an admiring crowd gathered and traffic stopped. How our man had pummeled and bloodied him, broke his bones with his bare hands and left him to crawl a few paces away, where he died. Then how our man impregnated the woman, who was waiting and hungry, and then fourteen other women from the circle of onlookers. The crowd had never seen such a spectacle. You know the rest.

What you probably didn't know is this: It wasn't something our man had planned or ever thought he wanted. He had a girlfriend he enjoyed spending time with and fucking. She wanted to be a nurse. And he had always loved movies and thought it would be fun to do something with them. But when he'd come upon the scene—the man, the woman, the crowd—a raw yearning seized him. He felt an urgent desire to be more than he'd ever wanted to be. He gave in to this new vision: with blood on his hands he became our man. And he enjoyed it. He was proud of his work. That story of the bank tellers? He would want you to remember that he also took seven of the female customers waiting to withdraw money.

But now, what he would give to have taken a different route that day, so he wouldn't have seen that man copulating, being adored, and he wouldn't have had that feeling in his gut: That should be me.

He felt the woman's grasp let go and thought, Okay, now I'm dead, I'm released from all of this, and maybe that's a good thing. But then a hand pressed gently on his forehead, and a voice said, “Hello? Hello? Hello?”

He opened his eyes, and a woman stood over him, a different woman, one with yellow hair and wearing a nightgown. She smiled at him and lifted a baseball bat red with blood, and then he felt the sensation of something cold wrapped around his hips. He looked down to see the woman who'd attacked him, slouched to the side, rigid, her head a bloody nest of hair and bone.

The woman in the nightgown pushed the body over onto the floor and offered our man her hand. “Let's get out of here before the others track you down,” she said. She pulled our man up and led him past a dead body slumped in the doorway, whose matter was sprayed along the wall. It was a man. He looked a bit like our man.

They ran through the night to another part of the city, our man barefoot and cold. Groups of young men roamed the sidewalks in search of him. They knew our man was weakened and hurt. They could smell it. They carried weapons, slapped them to their palms, jingled them if they were the jingling kind. Women lit candles in windows or on their front stoops, keeping vigil for him.

The woman was like a ghost in her nightgown, her hair blazing white under the streetlights, seemingly invisible to the others, and our man began to believe that as long as he was with her, he couldn't be seen. They crouched behind the postal boxes on corners when they saw gangs stomping toward them. They slunk behind parked cars to avoid the windows of bars where the patrons sat listening for any sound of our man. The woman cloaked him with her body to hide his scent with her own. He was aroused by her warmth. “Later,” she said, touching his chest.

In the streets, sirens wailed and the city roiled, anticipating a grand change.

The woman flew through the streets, pulling our man onward.

“Just a little farther,” she encouraged.

His feet were bloodied and embedded with loose asphalt, broken glass.

“Keep going,” she begged.

They heard barking. A pack of dogs was gaining on the scent of the blood he spilled with each step. The woman turned into an alley and leaped to pull down a fire escape ladder. She pushed him to it. Go, go, she cried, and he climbed and she climbed after him. Above, she led the way across a mile of rooftops, still hot from the deserted sun. Pigeons startled up from their roosts and marked our man's trail through the sky for the people below to follow.

Finally, after birds, after roof jumps, zagging to a whole other city section, the din of search parties falling behind, the woman swung open a plain door and our man threw himself inside.

A room full of women sucked in their breath.

Someone whispered, “It's him.” They erupted noisily like geese taking flight.

Our man saw dozens and dozens of women wringing their hands with need. He was afraid.

The woman in the nightgown led him to a chair in the middle of the room.

“You're safe here,” she said. “Do you believe me?” She locked eyes with him, and he believed her.

 

Our man woke to a naked blonde sucking him off.

“There's a line, but I wanted to be first,” she said. She roused him to his feet. They were in a windowless room with a cement floor; the twin bed he'd been sleeping on stuck out from one wall, and a small television on a metal arm from another. That was it.

The woman squeezed his hand and gazed at him, and then our man recognized her.

He pawed at her bare chest and laughed. “Where's your nightgown?” He almost wept at seeing her.

She rubbed at his face, wet-eyed, gasping. “I didn't want it to get in the way. My word, you're handsome,” she said and stroked his ears, his eyes, tried to put fingers into his mouth but then stopped herself. “It's just remarkable,” she said. He folded her over the bed. “Oh wow,” she cried. They thrust the bed across the room.

After he came, the woman placed her hands on the floor and threw her legs up against the wall. “My doctor says this will help,” she said, red-faced, her hair falling all around her, her breath strained as her insides sank toward her throat.

“You're hilarious,” our man said, near to joyful tears again. He tried to do a headstand too but fell over and laughed. “I want to spend every second with you!”

She giggled. “Don't distract me!”

When she stood to leave, he asked to go with her.

“Too dangerous, babe. You stay here.”

Our man asked when she would be back.

“When I can,” she said, and left.

Immediately another woman walked in and began to undress.

“I'm sorry,” our man said, and remembered he was naked. “You must have the wrong room.”

The woman pulled a T-shirt over her head. Her tight breasts quivered. She had tattoos on her hips of terrible eagle faces. “I'm certain I don't,” she said, and stepped toward him out of her skirt. She wore nothing under it.

“Oh.” His mouth got wet without him being able to stop it.

“They weren't kidding,” she said, running her hands up and down his chest, her fingernails leaving a tingling map that made his ears ring.

He cleared his throat. “That woman who just left. We're together.” He felt ready to make a commitment, and he believed the woman in the nightgown was ready too. It would mean saying no to other women. He wanted to say no.

She tongued his ear deeply. “Is that so?”

He could feel the heat between her legs. She lowered herself slowly until she was sitting in his lap. Her muscles contracted under her skin, and our man could smell her scent mixed with a ripe perfume on her neck. She was so close and so eager, and he just couldn't help it.

A long line of women waited, and they didn't like waiting. Many were gruff and got annoyed if he asked for a minute to himself. Some were old and others far too young, so that with his arousal came a feeling of shame. Some had ailments, deformities. They were not the kind of women he usually impregnated.

It felt like weeks before the woman in the nightgown circled back to him. She seemed sad.

“I didn't think I'd need to return.” She frowned. “I thought you were a sure thing.”

“Didn't you want to see me?”

“Of course.” She smiled thinly and patted between her legs. “Let's go. I'm ovulating.”

He surprised himself—he could see he surprised her too—by weeping as he held her, as he came, and as he watched her leave. But it was different from the first time, before he knew what these captive weeks would bring, when he just felt lucky to be alive, when he thought he'd met the love of his life and he didn't think he would survive until he saw her next. He yearned only for her. But he could not convince himself she felt the same, and it left him hollow.

 

“Please tell me your name,” our man said to the woman in the nightgown. She was curled in a ball in a corner of the mattress, as far away from him as she could be. She thought if she curled tightly enough, the baby would feel protected and so begin to grow.

“Mary,” she said.

He waited for her to ask his name. When she didn't, he said, “Don't you want to know mine?”

She shrugged. “Sure.”

“It's Sam.”

“You don't look like a Sam.”

“What do I look like?”

She peered at him. He wanted so badly to conjure a feeling of familiarity in her, a feeling like, You remind me of the past, of essences of people I once cared about, of times that might have been important to me. He wanted to be the kind of important that would make her stay. She said, “I don't know. Not Sam though.”

The next time she visited him, he asked, “What do you do on the days I don't see you, Mary?”

“I work, see friends, you know.”

That night he dreamed of her with her friends, and all the wonderful things they might talk about.

 

“Mary, can I go outside?” our man Sam asked. He'd grown pale, his shoulders had narrowed, he'd formed a paunch. “I could use a run.” He crossed his arms over his stomach to hide it.

“No, you're still a wanted man.” She uncrossed his arms. “Don't worry. It's what's inside that counts.”

“Where have all the other women gone?” He had more free time; when the door to his room opened for another woman to enter, the waiting room looked emptier.

“They went away to have babies,” Mary said sullenly.

He asked their names. He knew them only by symbols—leg scar, back tattoo, palsy. He thought knowing their names would help him imagine what their children—his children—might be like.

Mary told him: Claire, Veronica, Nan, and so on.

“What if one of them tells where I am?”

“They won't. Men are all blustery and short-sighted feelings. Women are thoughtful. We think long-term. You're good for the world.”

He touched his cheeks. They were hot. He was blushing. “Am I good for you?” he asked. He felt sick in his heart.