Diane Cook: Man V. Nature: Stories

“Ice,” he slurs.

I shake my head. The fridge is dormant. My food is canned. And the kind of whiskey I keep should be enjoyed sans ice.

He’s so at ease in his stupor. Though he arrived sopping, if he asked me what’s with all this water, I wouldn’t be the least surprised.

Now he wears one of my bespoke suits, bespoken on a trip abroad, in fact. He wears it like he’s a metal hanger, but it’s a bit tight on me. I’m not ashamed. I live a good life.

I make a list of chores for him, written out like a contract.

“If you’re going to live here, you’re going to work,” I say, and slide it over for him to sign. He does so without reading. Irresponsible.

So I read it to him. “The contract states that in exchange for room and board, Gary will guard the house and take care of any beggars or intruders. He will refill the flush buckets with seawater so we can flush our toilets like civilized people. He will throw our empty cans, bottles, and uneaten food out the back door each night to avoid smells. He will help the owner with weekly cleanings of the house. He will perform all other duties the owner asks.”

There are plenty of extra bedrooms for him to stay in, but it’s my house. So for the first night, I set him up on the study love seat with some fine sheets and a goose down pillow. He scrunches into it, keeping one eye open as he sleeps, one foot up on the coffee table and the other leg bent, perfectly right-angled, foot flat on the floor, ready. For what? To run? Though the water is creeping closer to the house, I’m not sure that’s it.

The far stand of houses is gone. Where there should be rickety multifamilies, I see water flat like a prairie, occasional whale spouts blurring the horizon line. The glare off all that water is like looking right at the sun.

I see my neighbor padding around the sleeping bodies in his halfway home for derelicts. He is dressed in a tattered robe, his beard long and unkempt. I can practically smell him.

I catch his eye across the moat and mime a drowned body, limbs, head, and tongue hung and bobbing, and then point to where the houses had stood. He looks, rubs his eyes, and drops to his knees. Some of the criminals he’s invited into his home take this opportunity to rob him. Their hands work him over, dig in his bathrobe pockets, his hair, while he shudders with grief. Something is yanked from under his arm, and they disperse so quickly it’s like they were never there. I shiver. My neighbor is taller than I am, and stronger. What would become of me if I had hundreds of people crammed into my house? I’d have no food left. I’d be bullied out of my master suite. I might even lose my life. I am once again grateful for Gary. He wants nothing from me except my whiskey, and has the build of a welterweight or a thief: small and wiry, someone who can put you in a headlock before you feel his touch.

As my neighbor wipes his tears, I shrug in commiseration. But he just shakes his head at me with disappointment, like I’m the one who just robbed him; I’m the water that tore those houses down.

And here I thought I was being neighborly.

Unless he’s sneaking into the pantry late at night, I doubt Gary has eaten a morsel since his arrival. I notice no dent in my supplies, except the whiskey, which is already half gone. I’ve always known liquor to be the stuff of preservation, so I’m only a little surprised. The other night, I crumbled some crackers into a half-full bottle to see if he would take to the sustenance, and he roared, smashed the bottle against the marble table where we dine. The noise was exhilarating. Normally the only sound is the constant murmur of the sea around us. Some nights I hear displaced loons call out to find their mates, or human calls from the boats of survivors looking for land, shelter. Their voices travel low across the water and get trapped within the walls of my bedroom. Sometimes I hear music from my neighbor’s house. Not often. Usually it’s dreary, but on occasion a piano is tuned, accompanied by some squeaky string instrument. People stomp feet and call out. It’s rustic. One night I heard a wavering wedding march and imagined a bride, in a dress of pinned white towels, making her way through the mob to stand with her groom. Two people desperate to have what they think is love before the big end — it was hard not to feel something.

Gary doesn’t always hear noise, or even conversation. He sleeps undisturbed at strange intervals, like a pet. It’s pleasant enough. When I need him, he is a great bodyguard. When a knock echoes through the house, I send him to the door with instructions to gut-punch the supplicant men. And he does it. They fall backward from shock and he slams the door. Once a woman came to the door, bent like a hook, and Gary paused and then turned to me miserably. I shrugged. Most bands of vagrants send the men out of respect, but clearly they were desperate. They hoped we might treat a woman differently. I saw two tense shapes in a rowboat just beyond the south wing of the house. What could Gary do? Some people hang on to old ideals. I do not. But I couldn’t make a man like Gary do something he didn’t feel good about. He has integrity. I pointed to my knee. He gave hers a halfhearted kick and she crumbled. He shut the door gently. I hope he feels like this is his home too.

Gary has allowed me to shave him. He sits on the edge of my tub and snoozes while I hot-towel him, lather his face and neck. I wag the razor clean in a silver bowl of Evian. He looks more and more like a business partner; his graying temples lend him an executive air. He wears my suits — navy, charcoal, funeral black — and sometimes I put him in a tie. The ties are specks of color on his landscape. The world outside is all dark water, cloud, and night, dotted with faded plastic garbage, the clothing of the dead, the red brick of my neighbor’s house. A bit of color brings out Gary’s eyes.

I leave him to clean up, and a while later he tumbles through the bathroom door and knocks into the armoire. He is dangerously intoxicated and half dressed.

He crouches before me in my reading chair, sticks a soiled finger into my mouth, claws my lower jaw open. He strokes the caverns of my back teeth. I taste sour salt.

“Where’s your gold?” he asks, like a child who thinks everything is his mirror.

I lean back from his brackish finger. “I have porcelain fillings.”

He is blank.

“You can’t see them. They blend in with my teeth. They’re better.”

His face threatens a smile, which would be a first, but instead his mouth gapes wide; it’s like a California riverbed, shallow gold in every hole.

He taps one. “My bank,” he says, and howls irresistibly. I’m transported to another time when men brawled and kept their money in a sock. I slouch luxuriously into my Queen Anne. Gary gulps from the bottle and falls into my bed. He’s wearing a pair of my paisley silk boxers, his legs knobby and bowed like a baby bird’s, and a woven dress shirt, the French cuffs gutted. I’m sure he has no idea how to fasten them with cufflinks, or why he would.

“Gary.”

He murmurs from just below sleep.

“Did you ever think you’d be sleeping under down, in a well-appointed room, clean-shaven, in French tailored shirts and silk underwear?”

He strains an eye open, seems to ponder it, like maybe he can see where I’m going with all this.

“I’m just saying, I think we have a pretty good thing here. We are at the height of land. We have a very handsome house. It doesn’t smell, doesn’t leak, isn’t crowded. Think of the wind. It sweeps over the entire sea, gathers all that fresh air just to deposit it at our doorstep. We have loads of food. More than we could ever eat, really. We drink imported water.”