Diane Cook - Man V. Nature - Stories

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.

“You better be,” she said, disrobing. “You’re my last hope.”

But he wasn’t good for her.

Maybe outside these walls he’d been replaced. Or maybe he’d managed to satisfy each woman in the city, except one. After all the other women swelled with child and left, only Mary remained, empty. And with each visit, she grew more disappointed. He didn’t understand why she kept coming when all he did was fail her, but he didn’t want her to stop — he would have nothing left. So he tried to try harder, though he didn’t know how.