Diane Cook: Man V. Nature: Stories

Last week, our girl Marybeth was chosen and sent to a farm near Spokane. We made her a care package; we wrote out recipes on index cards for the treats we’d baked together so she could always remember her time here if she chose to. When we handed it to her, she cried. “I’m not ready,” she whimpered. “I still miss him.” A couple of us encouraged her, “Just do your best.” We stood in a circle embracing, and Marybeth did not want to let go. Eventually the guard led her away; we could hear her trying to catch her breath until the elevator doors closed.

A window has blinked to life across the road. A man is awake, like me. He pads around his small room in pajamas — the same as ours, hospital blue. I want to be seen, so I stand in my window. He sees me, steps to his window, and offers a quiet wave. I wave back. We are opposing floats in a parade.

If we had been poor and I had died, my husband would be over there now, waiting for someone to want him. How strange to worry about being wanted, when we had been wanted by each other so confidently. Most people reach the age of exemption before their partner dies and they are allowed to simply live alone. Who would want them, anyway? Ideally, you marry the man you love and get to stay with him forever, through everything you can think to put each other through, because you chose to go through it together.

But I had not prepared for this. Had he? Had my husband kept some part of himself separate so he could give it to someone else if he needed to? Was it possible I had managed to withhold something of myself without even realizing it? I hoped so.

I look around my small cinder-block room, painted a halfhearted pink, the desk too large for the unread library book on it. I had a picture of us hidden under my mattress. It was one of those pictures couples take when they are alone in a special place, at a moment they want to remember. We smooshed our heads together and my husband held the camera out and snapped the picture. We look distorted, ecstatic. One night, I fell asleep while looking at it; it dropped to the floor, was found at wake-up, and was confiscated. I still can’t believe I was so careless.

In bed, I imagine my husband lying beside me, warming the rubber-coated mattress, beneath the thin sheet so many women have slept under before me. My scalp tingles as I think of him scratching it. We rub feet. Then I have to picture him dissolving into the air like in a science-fiction movie, vaporized to another planet, grainy, muted, then gone. The sheet holds his shape for a moment before deflating to the bed. I practice not feeling a thing.

A few women on other floors have been chosen and will leave tomorrow. I can smell snow in the air pushing through the crack where the window insulation has peeled away. The late fall has given way to winter. When it is too cold, we aren’t let outside for activities in the pen. I would give anything to run through a field and not stop. I have never been the running-through-fields type.

Being chosen seems bittersweet. I imagine many of us wouldn’t mind living out our days at the shelter in the company of women like ourselves. But then again, it wouldn’t always be us. The woman who moved into Marybeth’s old room liked to start fights. She told me my muffins were dry. She squeezed one in my face; it crumbled between her fingers. She crept into sweet Laura’s room and cut a chunk of her long, shiny hair with safety scissors. Laura was forced into a bob that didn’t suit her. Luckily, this woman was very beautiful and was chosen after only four days. We’re waiting for her replacement. Even though there is uncertainty in being chosen, it seems more uncertain to remain among the women, a sentiment I’ve seen expressed in the manual.

Something very special has happened. I met my window friend. He came over with the others from the men’s shelter for bingo. This happens occasionally. It keeps everyone socially agile.

Even though we wave across a wide road, when he walked in I recognized him instantly — the darkness of his hair and the general line of his brow. The nights we wave have become important to me. It’s nice to be seen by a man.

My window friend spotted me, too, stopped in the doorway and waved. I waved back, and we laughed. A tiny, forgotten thrill bubbled up in me.

He sat next to me. Close up I found him handsome. He clowned around, pushed the bingo chips off my board whenever I wasn’t looking. He was nervous.

He said, “I’m going to tell you ten bad jokes in a row,” and he did, counting on his fingers as he went along, not pausing for my laughter, which made me laugh harder. A guard watched us disapprovingly. We were having too much fun. I guess it goes without saying that relations between shelter dwellers are prohibited. I mean, how could we survive together in the world if we have both ended up in a place like this?

At the end of the evening a whistle blew and the men began to shuffle out. Again my window friend stood in front of me and waved and I did the same. But this time he touched his open hand to mine. I felt us quake like animals that have been discovered where they shouldn’t be and have no time to run, no place to run to.

The next night, after we waved, I undressed in the window, the lights bright behind me. He placed his hands against the glass as if to get closer and watched.

Tonight, his light isn’t on and so we don’t wave, but still, I undress in front of my lit window. I can’t know if he’s watching from the darkness, or who else is watching, for that matter. I loved my husband. I mourn his tenderness. I have to believe that someone out there is feeling a kind of tenderness for me. I’ll take it any way I can.

I’ve been moved to another floor. Someone from the men’s shelter reported me, and my Case Manager thought it best that I occupy a room in the back of the building. Now I overlook the pen.

For days, I feign illness and stay in bed. I hear the groups of women doing their outside activities. It is a cyclical drone of laughing, arguing, calisthenic counting, and loaded silence.

When I do go outside to the pen, the women from my old floor give me hugs and we try to talk like the old days, but it’s different. A couple of friends have been chosen and are gone, and now there are some new women. Even one to replace me; she lives in my room and has a view across the road to the men’s shelter and my window friend. Her name is even close to mine. She told me that the women sometimes slip and call her by my name. She told me this to comfort me, with a sympathetic pat on my arm. But it doesn’t help. Is there any difference between us beyond a few letters in our names?

They pass me some of the cookies and sweets they bake, though they are always a few days old and crumbly, stale; nothing like the warm, fresh treats I was so fond of. I’ve started throwing them away, but I won’t tell them that, because I like that they still think of me.

The women on my new floor are mostly concerned with escape. They are dogged. Their desire scares me. But there are two nice women. They don’t try to run, or not that I’ve heard about. Our way out of here is to get chosen. So we swap tips from the different pamphlets we’ve read. We don’t bake.

The alarm sounds.

It sounds when someone runs.

Floodlights sweep over the field, then through my window. I hear the yowling of dogs as they smell their way through the night, tracking some woman. Curiously, I find myself rooting for her. Perhaps I’m half asleep but, peering out my window, I think I can see her. As the lights search the wasteland between the pen and the forest, a shadow moves swiftly, with what seems like hair whipping behind, barely able to keep up with the body it belongs to.

There’s nowhere to hide before the forest line. The runner needs a good head start. I doubt she got it. They never seem to. And yet they always try. What are they looking for? Out there, it’s cold and dark. No guarantee of food or money or comfort or love. And even if you have someone waiting for you, still it seems such a slippery thing to depend on. Say my window friend and I ran. Would he love me outside of here? Could I ever be sure? I barely know him.