Where men hide

Here, men walked, under the concrete and metal girders spanning the roof, in their ancient wombs. It'd never been calculated that they would get here, nor was it foreseen as a circumstance substantiated purely by accident. It was the way it was. They waited for the train to arrive in silence, neither each standing alone nor in a few throngs, but they stood speckled on the banks of the tracks. It was the picture of nonchalance. The ocean might as well have been a few meters from their feet, and the water might as well have easily been lashing at their feet with poetic gusto, but they wouldn't care. They just stood there waiting for the train to arrive.

One man looked at his watch; I remember, I was standing right next to him. He pushed the sleeve of his very-old jacket back and looked at the dial of his watch, and when he was satisfied, he pushed the sleeve back down with a jerk of his arm and leaned on his other leg. Not a sigh had been heaved in the hall all this time, not one expression of mild consternation, not even of frustration. Some of them carried grocery bags: the orange bags were unmistakeable under the halogen lamps, the customary thumbnail of a butterfly sewn onto each face that meant they were made of downcycled plastic.

Others were getting back from the football game. The sweat glistened on their skin like the sweat on the foreheads of anxious and drooling devotees come to meet the sage, and He would walk in their midst seeking out the one He could at least trust. They would chant His name and they would pack His purse with coins in return for blessing, and when He taught them, they wouldn't listen. After all, they had purchased a lesson, and he had better give it to them. And I did, and I did. Say what you will, it was a glorious world filled with men, each the nucleus of my fantasies. And that one trustworthy disciple? He would end up in the sewers, curiously.

Finally, in the distance, there was a bright light visible, circular and white, and approaching with intent and steadily toward our platform, the low rumble of the perfunctory horn accompanying its enlarging. The men looked up from their News Todays and the concrete floor, slowly moving forward as if they going to grapple with it like it was a woman they had sighted and now yearned for.

They all yearned for a woman and I knew they no longer cared if she was fat or thin, if she was beautiful or grotesque, or even if she was healthy or carried in her loins a disfiguring fever. By the time the locomotive was a hundred metres away, they were in two barely distinguishable groups, one each for the two doors each compartment would have, and they would hurry to enter it like they did on every night, hurry to enter it, finish first, and discard the weight of loneliness. They would push the woman away and go home to be absolutely lonely. And in the dark confines of that room, their solipsistic hopes would be realized.

The train came closer, and as it did, they huddled closer, their shoulders so close that they almost touched. Nobody wanted to get too far away from the light descending from the office upstairs, its window the only window discernible in this cavern we stood in, the cold and mechanical glow quickly disintegrating within the spaces coveted by corners infested with rodents and disaster-blown fissures.

At the same time, nobody wanted to touch each other because nobody knew what would happen then, because someone might feel something, a strange sensation, and something might happen. They were so scared. So scared! I could laugh with pity.

I jumped in with them, deliberately pushing my shoulders against the brawniest men in the crowd, and they would grimace at the silken touch of my wonderful hands, and they would move away, and I would follow them. Some of the men gave me stern looks, attempting in vain to push me away with their eyes, while some others would look downcast, grunt something under their noses and walk away.

I liked the ones who used their eyes. The men who walked away were men, too, but they were a different kind of men. They were men with fathers who had worked in cities and had owned a small house in the suburbs with a wicket gate, and they were men with mothers who had doted over them when they had been young, and they were men who had never lost a sibling to a stalking paedophile or a psychotic serial killer or a maniac hopped up on acid and convinced he was carving the cross on a piece of bark and not on a baby’s head.

No, these were good men, men who understood decency and so had been cheated on by their former wives and girlfriends, men who believed in the goodness of other men, men who believed in such things as leading by example. I wanted the men who had been emotionally raped by their abusive fathers, who had awakened quickly enough to hit their wives and girlfriends, men who wouldn’t be afraid to be men.

Looking around within the packed compartment, my pity evaporated and into its wake condensed a fatigue that I had hoped would set in much later, a terrible world-weariness that removed from my indulgence, a reminder that I did have other things to do. It was already three years since the Emasculation and these men had no idea they were absolutely lonely in this world in their turmoil.

Should I have told them then? I don’t know. I didn’t know, I wasn’t sure. Anyway, as the train snaked its way through the city, I seemed no longer capable of enjoying the drove of jostling men, as if the night had become more colder – Had it? Someone must have opened the windows – and the airs drier, as if all the moisture had been expunged out of my brain and I seemed to stand in the middle of a large and empty field, the stalks of tall grass dark-blue in the darkness disappearing beneath my feet.

A foreboding beat of realization began to thump in the distance. I could remember my father, the railway engineer, sounding the three-step foghorn to signal danger for inbound trains at the station, I could remember him changing signal lights frantically before anything untoward happened, I could remember no train arriving at all as I looked to the east, and I could remember him collapsing on the bench in tears. I was almost 20 when I realized I was the child of a madman. I wished then that he was standing next to me so I could hold him upright and that we could enjoy this train ride together.

He was a man in his own right, a third kind, an invincible one.

As this and other odd images passed through my head, I stood standing in the train even though more and more seats became empty as we journeyed on, and at one point, I was offered a seat by a man who was getting off – how polite! After another hour, my stop was come, the last on the line, and I alighted, mentally drained from yet another evening of loafing around the city soliciting men who were the same universally but never seemed good enough for me, for my vainglorious body, a ritual that I called an ordeal.

Why did I play it out, then? Because I was hopeful, but don’t ask me what I was hopeful for or hopeful about because I have no idea. As the doors shut behind me with a plastic secularism, I paused for a moment’s wonderment as I always did, looking down at the street in which all the houses were mine, whose windows were all open and through all of which flowed a dull, orange glow of a mob of halogen bulbs, the abundance reeking of decay and death.

I decided I would sleep in the third house on the left tonight, the one I called Jacopo after Jacopo Belbo, poor conflicted Belbo. Then again, it didn’t matter: after the women had died, the men had moved to other parts of the city, slowly but with a steadiness that was both geographic and consistent. When I came across this street, I found all the rooms empty behind all the doors, and decided to stay on here, in these tombs, secretly wishing my increasing fatigue would push me to do something about my plight, an undead man-woman.

Mostly, I wondered what it meant to be anything less than a man in a world without any women. Beyond the walls, womanhood meant conflict simply because it meant a lot of things, and each choice therein was mired in conflicts both social and political. Within the ambit of these walls, on the other hand, it meant some kind of loss to not be a whole, and that oneness of being was lost to me because I was both and neither: I was trapped in the middle of a fight, and the fight was flaking, like a magical fog that was slowly disappearing and my sword was gnashing nothing, my shield blocking nothing, and soon, the enemy had deserted me. I was an unworthy opponent.

All the men were at a loss to understand what was really going on while some of them sincerely believed the aliens were finally here; none of them know that they were completely isolated and destined only to die, not unto any greatness or martyrdom but just death, myself included. They surrendered their will to the city itself, no longer incentivized to initiate anything, their hearts parched of any kind of freedom, and they walked the roads like zombies, as if simply to get from one point to another.

The shops were all shut for business and opened for rationing and all the supplies were tallied and stocked in a warehouse, away from fire and water, guarded by a small group of police officers. At the beginning of each week, queues would form outside the building for the next seven days’ supply of food, beer and chocolate; there were other small establishments that still sold anything, but when money wasn’t going anywhere or coming from anywhere, it ceased to mean anything.

Death, of course, was the greatest nullifier.