Lovers

Audrey stayed the night and left early in the morning. We had sex. Proper sex. Not the drunken and fumbling kind we had last time — but with foreplay and everything. After she left, I stayed in bed. I tried to think of all the women I had been with since the war. There had been, unexpectedly, a lot. And I realized that the war and the nuclear fallout had actually improved my love life. Before it all started I was a bit miserable. I was dating — or was trying to date. But it was all very depressing. Everything happened through apps, and the apps sorted me into two groups: One was women my age who already had kids and were divorced, and the other was women a bit younger than me who wanted kids. The ones that already had kids were on the prowl, jacked up on hormones and peptides and full of energy, looking for younger men, indulging in fantasies of romance. They didn’t really want me — a bald man approaching fifty. I was in okay shape for my age, but they wanted chiseled young studs whose bodies could take the punishment inflicted on them by the women’s pharma-enhanced sex drive. One woman I met on a date, who opened up to me about her pill regimen after we drank two bottles at a wine bar on the Embarcadero, said she had been tweaking her cocktail for months trying to get the exact feeling she wanted while keeping side effects to a minimum. There were estrogen patches, progesterone pills, testosterone injections, dehydxroepiandrosterone suppositories…all of them modulating her energy and sex drive. She was a corporate attorney close to fifty and worked for some forgettable startup in the city. She talked about this loudly at the packed little place we were in. She wanted people to hear. And I felt like she was getting a kick out of watching my reaction. “Yeah, old man, you can’t handle what I’m dishing out,” she wanted me to know. Women had become like men that way — taking libido enhancers, looking for fresh meat to satisfy their hunger, bragging about their sexual prowess. I was just a dildo to them and not a very good dildo, as they saw it. Too old and too flabby.

RADIANCE, my serialized novel, continues.

Read previous installments here.

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The other type that the algo funneled me into was the flip side of this same group. These were women in their late thirties and early forties who were frantically trying to find a man they could pair off with. They had put off having kids and instead had focused on their careers and their personal freedom and growth, and now they were entering the end of their fertility window and had a tiny sliver of time in which to find a suitable partner. They also looked at me as a means to an end — not a dildo but a potential sperm donor, preferably one with a stable job and savings. And for this group, I wasn’t a good match, either. A divorcee with no real job, living off rental income that went mostly to my daughter as child support? They smelled failure on me, and they were not wrong. Even in the couple of cases where we got along and had fun and seemed like a good match, the women broke off contact. I sensed that they didn’t want to end it but felt they must before “it got serious.” I wasn’t a viable partner in their eyes, and so they couldn’t waste time on me. They didn’t have the luxury. They weren’t in their twenties anymore. I found all this depressing, but it was interesting from a purely sociological perspective. And, of course, I did get laid once in a while. Women were treating love and friendship as a consumer would. Man was an object to find and enjoy…something to shop for. I felt objectified in a way that I guess women had been objectified for a long time. Feminism had triumphed. Or a certain kind of feminism, anyway. Objectification now went both ways. The war and the fallout changed things, though. Changed them for the better.

There was a woman in the garage where I spent the first few days after the war, when we still weren’t sure if the initial exchange we heard about on the news was about to expand into a global war. We were strangers and had set up our bedrolls next to each other purely by chance. Like everyone else, I was exhausted and teetering on the edge of a nervous breakdown. I threw myself down on my sleeping bag and spent half the night in a fitful adrenaline crash sleep — tossing and turning, tired and unable to stay awake and yet unable to sleep, not knowing if I was about to be annihilated by a nuclear bomb or not, my thoughts filled with my daughter and explosions and screams. She was going through the same thing. Without thinking or talking or even flirting, we somehow ended up merging our bedding in the middle of the night, and just slept together. She lay on my chest. I had my arm around her. She’d wake up and whimper periodically. I’d stroke her hair, calming her down. I had a bottle of Xanax, and I shared it with her, giving both of us a double dose. It felt good to care for someone else. It distracted me from my own panic. I can’t even remember her name now. I can barely recall what she looked like. All I can recall is that she was a recent transplant to the city, and we talked about how nice it was to jog the Land’s End trail. Like most corporate workers in the city, she was an avid jogger. We spent the next few nights together. We had sex those times. It wasn’t transactional. It wasn’t planned. I hadn’t been thinking about how I could woo her or get into her pants. We were just drawn together, exhausted after a day spent in the dark, damp underground garage, wondering if the world was about to end, our nerves completely shot. The sex came out of pure, innocent need of connection…to be with someone…to not feel alone. It was true love-making, a surrendering of your own individuality, rather than the individualistic gratification that a lot of casual sex had been before the war. We paired off like that every night until I left the bunker to go out on my own. I even invited her to come with me, but she declined. She was too scared to go outside, she said. She’d take her chances here. We hugged. And I left.

Thinking about it now, most of the relationships I had after the war were similar that way — on the one hand, they were casual, on the other, they were very deep in a way I hadn’t really felt before. There was the woman from around the corner who owned an entire Victorian up the hill from me — or her husband and she owned it. Abigail, her name was. Her husband and her two kids died during that first long lockdown, when the fallout finally got to us. They went out quickly — an aggressive cancer of some kind. Her doctor friends later told her it was probably leukemia or some other blood cancer. For whatever reason, maybe genetic, they were hypersensitive to radiation exposure, and she wasn’t. It played out like this all over. In fact, the survivors — people like me, alive right now — made it through the initial bottleneck. We’re still getting cancer and strange mutations the longer we live in this dust. But we’re the tough ones…the ones who can take some radioactive punishment. I met Abigail at the local swap meet right after the first lockdown ended — people came out to trade…to give out what they didn’t need and look for what they did. She had a Blu-ray player, and I needed one just in case the one I had broke. We got to talking. It was clear she was lonely and I was lonely. I invited her over to watch a film. We got along. Her big Victorian was filled with the extended family of one of her nieces that ran from the fallout in the north, so she started spending more time at my place. We tended my little garden. She brewed compost beer. She even started helping out with my pill barter business, and went out on a couple of scavenging trips with me. We had an idyllic home-life. Just two people randomly thrown together, and the sex was just a natural part of it. It didn’t last. A few months after we met, she suddenly died. I still don’t know what it was. An aneurysm? Some kind of internal cancer? Or maybe just grief and depression? There was no one left to mourn her except for me. So I borrowed a cargo bike from a neighbor and rode out with her body to the middle of the Golden Gate Bridge. And there, after taking a moment of silence, I pitched her over the railing with the help of a passerby, giving her an ocean burial. That’s how we did funerals. There were always too many bodies to bury and not enough space.

A few months later, I met another woman — this time through Skinny’s network.

Her name was Ann, and Skinny’s people were helping move her south to reunite her with some family she had living down in San Mateo after her parents and husband had died. She was supposed to stay only for a few days with me while they figured out the logistics, but we got along, and she ended up staying with me for six months. We talked about her staying with me permanently, but then she died, too. It started with seizures. Since there was no way to do any tests, it was almost certainly some sort of cancer that spread into her brain. The seizures got progressively worse, and finally, she lost consciousness. I took care of her as best I could for several weeks, but when she went into a coma and couldn’t eat…I asked a doctor friend about what to do…and he came over with an insulin injection, and we both watched her quietly die. It seemed like the ethnical thing to do. She never did reach her extended family, not like they cared much — they had their own problems to worry too much about it. In fact imagine they were relieved. They dodged a bullet. If she hadn’t stayed with me, they would have had to nurse her while she died. I biked to the Golden Gate Bridge and pitched her over the side, too. I had buried two women that I had gotten to know intimately, and even to love — all within half a year. I wondered if I was going to bury Audrey, too. Or maybe she’s going to bury me.

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