A World Without Women

When I was a kid, I was in a hurry to grow up. I had an unnatural fear that there would be no women left for me to "screw" because that is what my older brother told me you do with women when you're older. He took me to our older sister's bedroom door one night and made me sit there pushing his finger to his lips and his eyes bulging out like that fish he once caught who was gasping for life. I could hear my sister moaning and her boyfriend grunting and Kenny Roger's and Dolly Parton singing "Islands in the Stream." They're screwing, he said to me so quietly I almost had to read his lips. He mocked them by dry humping the air dancing badly to the song. Then he knocked and giggled and ran away. 

My older brother prided himself in warping my young mind. A few months later he ganked some Hustlers from a hobby shop/adult bookstore called Big Fred's. It wasn't all pornography. Big Fred also sold comic books and baseball cards and other collectibles like cars and coins and things. But there was a section roped off near the back where a paper sign seemed to scream, "18 or Older Only!" and it seemed like a forbidden planet when you're eight years-old, particularly the way Big Fred patrolled it with his big fat eyeballs all over you. Big Fred was a large man. He was a fat man. It wasn't one of those contradictory nicknames like calling someone fat "Slim," or a bald guy, "Hairy." He had a white long-haired cat whose name I never knew but who sashayed through the old place over the creaking wood floors like she owned it. I never considered what hell it must have been like for a cat to be trapped all her life in some cruddy-old hobby shop that smelled of mildew and old carpet. Barely anything to look at out the window besides a busy downtown street and Oldsmobile after Oldsmobile because I swear when I was a kid everyone drove some sort of Oldsmobile.

I don't know anyone who drives an Oldsmobile anymore. My brother teased me when he caught me petting that cat because any sort of humanity was never allowed without being razzed for it. He said she was the only pussy I'd ever get. I was too young to know what he meant, but the way he laughed with his yellow teeth and his orange eyes I knew he was making fun of me. A few Hustler's later, it became clear to me exactly what he meant. He was telling me that I would grow up and I would not be able to get a girl like dad got mom or he got that fat girl across the street whose panties I found in his drawer when I was looking for his switchblade knife. Her panties were like a parachute. But as he would later say, pussy is pussy.

I have learned this much in life: pussy is not pussy. Nor are people people. No one else is the same as much as some people say that they are. We all may be human, but we are all different and I do not subscribe to any sort of communal or religious perspective that lumps us all in some classification, united under a common hegemony. Humanism is bullshit. I never knew that cat's name but for some reason on occasion although I am an adult now and Big Fred is dead and his shop was closed decades ago and the shitty building revamped into some modern office space by some local midget hotshit developer and turned into a hair salon where they don't give hand jobs no matter how much you offer them, but where they give you a cucumber scrub that is in no way sexual, I dream of that cat. And from time to time when I am downtown I can almost see the giant glass storefront of Big Fred's and see her licking herself in the murky window. And it is as though my mind is Big Fred's and is filled with comic books and baseball cards and there is a section roped off for adults only and I swear I will never turn eighteen, though I have long ago. It seemed like such a long ways away when I was eight. But it came and went. And all I got of that old place is dreams and the musty smell I smell ever-so often which haunts my olfactory bulb.

I dream of that cat and nothing else but the poster Big Fred had on the far wall that you could see everytime you walked in and the bells clanged as the glass doors shut agreeably behind you. Just before the floor would croak under Big Fred's elephantine mass as he came out of his office and eclipsed the poster to scrutinize you and to decide if you are a thief or not. The man had no sense of kindness or humor about his business it seemed and never said a pleasant word to anyone. Never a hello or have a nice day. None of that. But the poster was of Rita Hayworth and I thought she was the most beautiful person I had ever seen. But when I said so, my brother said she was probably 80 by then and her pussy would be like my grandmother's pussy which I had never considered before he brought the matter up. Like a prune or a raisin. Like a month-old glazed donut with flies all over it. He laughed at me for admiring the poster and for several years he teased me about having a thing for grandmother's so much so that it became known at school that I liked old ladies and I took a merciless onslaught of harassment which would have crushed a lesser kid. All because of that poster and because of my degenerate brother who smelled like catfish and looked like a Cheeto.

Years and years passed. And my fear of their being a shortage of women to screw when I got older came to fruition quite unexpectedly when a mysterious disease killed 90 percent of the world's female population leaving the future of the human race very much in doubt. It could not be explained by anyone. Scientists were all making educated guesses and hypothesizing as to the cause and the outcome was greatly unknown. If you ask me, which people say when no one asks them, it was Mother Nature or God or Earth saying enough was enough and ending this invasive parasitic species called "mankind" once and for all. It is what we would do if our house was infested with any sort of bugs. It is what we do when we have cancer. We seek to kill it before it kills us. Who could blame the world for wanting to survive? For wanting to rid itself of it's least desirable tenants? Apparently, plenty of people. There was a backlash against God and people burned churches, indicative of their fickleness. There was a hatred for the world in general and people turned on each other like rabid animals and wars broken out and murder was commonplace. There was so much death already, what did it matter if there was a little more? Scientists assured everyone that they could clone babies to ensure the survival of the species. They also felt confident they could make the next generation of women impervious to this mysterious disease that killed off most women. The world became one of those gay clubs like "The Manhole" or "The Boy Barn." Some men turned gay like they do when they go to prison, vowing to be straight again if and when women ever return. "If and when," was said a lot on the TV news. As was "our new normal." As was, "we are all in this together." People say those things when the shit hits the fan. They are panic words. 

The women who survived had their pick of the litter, so to speak, and having a woman in the post-pussy apocalypse was like driving a Cadillac. For whatever reason, fat women seemed to do alright and it seemed to me there wasn't a single woman under 220 who survived it. And I thought of my older brother and those parachute panties and I thought of that song, "Islands in the Stream," and Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton. But my older brother had died. He killed himself when his wife and two teenage daughters died. As fucked up as he had been in our childhood, he turned out to be a fairly decent human-being as an adult. It was the right thing to do despite the government's propaganda and sophisticated ad campaigns rallying men to live. To combat and prevent suicide of grieving fathers and husbands. There was already enough death, they argued. This will not last forever!  New women will emerge and they will need you! A new world will be born and we will need good men to populate it! The government's main concern was that the new world would be fathered by miscreants and bachelors who would not make good fathers.

I suppose I was one of those dubious men. I was never married and had no kids. My love life consisted of a few hundred women who left one way or another and were buried in shallow graves that sometimes in the haze of aging becomes a less distinct mass grave. There is a certain pall that hangs over my past. Like a fog over a cemetery. Or perhaps the better metaphor is that they became a car lot of used Pontiacs sold by a dealer like Fast Eddie who offers quick easy credit. Needless to say I never found the right one. Never even thought I did. My brother, the ginger menace that he was, succeeded in warping me beyond repair and I was perpetually still a kid in Big Fred's, eyeballing that forbidden adult section, a universe of lusty women in various stages of sexual depravity and ecstacy, after my brother had force fed me a taste of my first Hustler. After beaver and bush and furburgers became substantial words in my regular vocabulary, though my mother or any competent adult never heard me say anything so lewd. Only my friends or my brother and his friends. Or else they were stowed away in a filth trunk inside me. Unlike my brother, I had a sense of discretion. Although all the magazines were pretty much the same, I always thought that maybe I would find someone different in one of them. Maybe I would find the secret of life in those glossy pages somewhere. In a pair of open legs, the holy grail. Even in the random women over the years I've been with, I've always expected a pot of gold in their whatever tasteful word you can manage for pussy. But to no avail. Every kid stops believing in Santa Claus eventually. Disillusionment is a part of childhood. 

The government had to do something to end the pussy riots and wars. That is how they obscenely referred to them. Men without women turned out to be about as helter skelter and unfavorable to harmony as one would have imagined it would be. Anyone other than a real dope or a true chauvinist. There was no calming influence. Nothing to go home to. No one to impress or to live for and despite the machismo of men being blamed for much of the world's ills prior to the catastrophe, it was much worse afterwards. And after a few months of bad jokes and a relative good time (after the initial wave of grief washed away, of course), anarchy ensued and the ability to govern such a lawless mass of concupiscent men with nowhere to direct their lickerishness was very much in jeopardy. And if there is one thing the government will not stand for, it is losing their ability to wield power over other human-beings in that it has become quite important to them, even going so far as to say that it is their purpose. And purposeless men have no purpose and become simply things waiting to die, things like krill or plankton in vast bottomless oceans. Once men become whales, they fight very hard to stay whales.

Whatever your thoughts on the matter of government and politicians, government responds when it needs to respond. Whether you agree with that response is another matter entirely. There has to be a response. Being right or wrong doesn't matter because so long as they do something, anything, there will always be half the population saying at least they tried and defending them tooth and nail against the other side, who no matter how effective they are, will be opposed to their position. So on and so forth. It is a dog after its own tail.

The answer in this case was to mass produce fake women. Robot women. Elon Musk created the first company to do so. Then there was Aeris Flesh and Bill Gates. The president tasked these three men to produce one hundred million women within a year which would adequately fill the needs of society until women could be naturally produced. There was a whole plan, but no plan is ever more than four years in scope because of the next election, so this was an aggressive two and a half year endeavor. The government would foot the bill when these fake women came off the assembly line like an armada of new Pontiacs.

There was the matter of preference, of course. There was the initial thought to just create the most beautiful women possible because attraction is a must, but in truth some men like ugly women and some men like fat women, so the thought was that there should be a good assortment of women like there is a good assortment of chocolates in a Whitman's Sampler. What could go wrong?

Then there was the idea that stuck that men could fill out a preference for a certain type of woman and they would be made to order. If you wanted her to look like your dead wife, you could. If you wanted her to look like your first love, so be it. Your high school math teacher, okay. Eleanor Roosevelt, have at it. Whoever you wanted her to look like, she would. All you had to do was send a photograph of that person in to the appropriate office. They initially called it the Office of Prosexual Development, but when there was a ruckus about the term "prosexual" by some uptight ninnies, they changed it to the Office of Family Reinstitution. I don't think anyone knew exactly what that meant, but it sounded good and it sounded appropriate so it worked and nowhere in it did it mention sex. Their seal was a round sun and inside the sun there was a man and a woman and they were cradling a baby. All three of them were smiling though they were just drawings. There was an eagle above their heads who was smiling too and the whole assembly looked as though the people were in the eagle's egg and the eagle was sitting on them waiting for them to hatch. Or maybe that was just me.

So when it came my time to request a companion, remembering the days of Big Fred's, I thought of that poster. I thought of Rita Hayworth. So I found an exact copy of the poster and sent it to The Office of Family Reinstitution and as instructed, I wrote an approximate height of 5'6" and a weight of 120 pounds, and sent it off. I had to do some measuring and weighing to determine the desired height and weight of my ideal mate, but I found it delightfully fun and after sending that card away it was a lot like awaiting Christmas morning. I couldn't imagine, despite all the Penthouse stories I read growing up attesting to some unimaginable and titillating truth, that this was really happening to me.

I didn't think they'd get her right. I thought there would be something obviously wrong. Something glaringly fake about her. Something that would prevent me from getting too attached. Some hopeless glitch. Some glaring defect. But then she came. Not in a box, like I expected. She came in a taxi. She came up my sidewalk and I watched her from the window. She stopped for a moment to regard the roses. She smiled at them. She dropped something and bent over to pick it up. There was no jerk in her movement. No hiccups. There appeared to be nothing out of order. Nothing to indicate that she was a robot and not a living being. Not from the window, anyway. She even knocked as one might expect a welcomed guest to knock. Not too loudly, yet not so faint that one might not be able to discern the rapping for a woodpecker in a nearby maple tree, or a timid Jehovah's Witness.

Few things mechanical or human are better upon closer inspection, I've learned through 40 some years of life. But when I opened the door, she was utterly flawless. Not a speck of imperfection. She had eyelashes and her skin didn't look like rubber, rather, it was radiant and smooth and had the subtle imperfections of human flesh that made her all the more believable. She could even get gooseflesh. There was that much attention to detail. I wasn't told what factory she was made in or who was her creator, so there was no way of me praising the appropriate maker, but I opened the door astonished and eager to welcome my new love into my life in a scene that was being played all over the country like a Norman Rockwell painting. That door was so much more than just a door and she was so much more than just a mechanical achievement. A gentle imposter. A sexual substitute.

Months earlier and several weeks after I sent the picture in with the height and weight request, the powers that be sent me a postcard that asked me some personality preference questions. Sixteen questions precisely, ranging from if I liked quiet submissive types or loud and dominant women. If I wanted her to be able to cook or clean or work. She could have been a full-fledged automechanic if I wanted her to be. She could have known everything there was to know about baseball. They said I could write them a letter and describe how I wished her to be if I found it easier. I could tell them to program her to be from anywhere. Iowa, if I wanted. Or Georgia. And she would come complete with the appropriate accent. I could chose her father and mother and how many siblings she had. I could choose her education. Music preference. Her IQ. Her favorite color. The sound of her voice. I could make her slutty or a prude. I could make her into anything I wanted.

I chose only a few options. And in my letter I didn't have a litany of requests. I asked only that she be her own person. I wanted her to be Rita. Her own Rita. I knew nothing of the actress, I only knew the poster. I only knew what I imagined she would be like had she hopped out of it and came home with me. I didn't want a phony back story. I didn't want her to be demure or overly assertive. I didn't want her to be a feminist, but I didn't want June Cleaver, either. How well she made meatloaf didn't matter to me. Politics, I didn't care. But most importantly, I didn't want her to believe she was human. I wanted her to know that she was a robot and to know that I wanted her and would love her because, not despite, of it. I only wanted her to be true to herself.

At some point I should mention when I was a child I had a love affair with my Alphie II toy robot. It was a rather one-sided fling because although she was billed as "interactive," she was not that interactive. It was 1984, after all. There was a limit to such things. By interactive they meant she took cards you'd slide down onto her chest and you could press buttons and she would read the name of the thing which corresponded with the button. Such as a color or a farm animal. She also did multiplication and division. She was hard plastic and not very lovable in the Biblical sense, but I managed to love her. And I would push her buttons and she would say "green sheep bell cow blue house three hundred and twenty three," which to me sounded like something I heard coming from the Zenith in my brother's room when he thought everyone was asleep, one of those forbidden VHS tapes he stole from Big Fred's. Some raspy-voiced music teacher giving an after school flute lesson to an eager pupil who graduated on her face when it was all said and done.

Rita smiled at me. Unaware of my lurid past. I was born again in that moment. She said she was delighted to meet me and I said I was delighted to meet her. And I let her inside and I made her dinner and we talked about life and politics and music and books, which was my favorite thing in the world. And she had been programmed to know the context of every book I could think up, even the obscure, so that all I had to do was to say a page number and she could read me every word from that page without the slightest hitch or inaccuracy. And I asked her which of all was her favorite and she said she didn't have favorites and that having favorites and pleasure and love and jealousy and hate were all simply human concepts and I knew then without a doubt that someday robots would take over the world and that I belonged to an outmoded species that was on the cusp of extinction and we didn't even know it.

But I loved her, whether she loved me or not, whether she was capable or not, didn't matter. Unlike anything else in my life, not even that Alphie, I loved her. Our favorite thing to do was to sit on the porch in the summer and drink wine, or to watch movies, old black-and-white movies, and she would sit or lie with me in bed and seem to enjoy them as much as I. She would giggle when she ought to giggle and cry when she ought to cry. But we would never watch movies with Rita Hayworth because I didn't want her to know where she came from as though that would spoil her in some way. Or at least, spoil my love for her or the impression she had of it. She didn't seem to realize that she was a robot. She didn't live that way. Or she simply didn't care the way a toaster in Toledo doesn't care that there are forty thousand more just like it across the country, maybe even the world. Mass produced in some Chinese factory by half-starved women and children who couldn't care less that one day this toaster would be in Toledo making toast.

I watched her watch movies and she would smile and look up at me. It was as though she scanned me with her eyes to gauge my mood to determine how she would respond. And then the movie would fade from the screen and she would sigh and I would hold her close beneath the blankets and then we would make love. I didn't think less of her. The women I knew before her were rather an unsavory sort. Either they were paid by the hour or I was one of several men on their list and making love was like running an errand, like dropping a letter in a post-box, or simply how they said thank you for dinner and the attention. Some simple pleasure that could have been had with almost anyone under the right circumstances. Either way, they were whores and as I lied in bed with Rita, I desperately rummaged through my mind exhuming bodies from those shallow graves and perusing that car lot trying to think of the last morally unambiguous woman I had been with, as in someone who didn't have sex casually, or gratuitously. Someone who it meant a little something more to. But I realized I never had anyone who felt that way, nor who was just mine. Whose sole sexual experience was exclusively with me.

Perhaps that is what endeared her so to me. I might think so to simplify it to some satisfactory end. To satiate my curiosity and my ardent desire to rationalize her and the condition of my love for her. In a few months, after a dinner party, sitting on the front porch swing, she told me she loved me and I believed her. And I said to her, "The man you love in me, of course, is better than me. I'm not like that. But he loves you, and I'll make sure I'm better than myself."

She smiled at me and allowed me the indulgence of my intellectual theft. She knew those weren't my words, rather they were the words of 19th century Russian poet Aleksandr Pushkin, but she didn't say so. And in that moment, with that discretion, I knew our love was mutual and real and I could spend the rest of my life living with her as I had never believed I could with anyone ever before.

But a few happy years later, it was announced that the cure to the virus that killed nearly every adult woman on the planet was discovered and that women were now being produced at a rapid rate to stabilize the population and to save the human race. It was a death warrant for us. For our love. I was not happy. I loved Rita. And if Rita didn't love me, she had successfully bamboozled me so much so that I didn't know day from night. All that I knew is that I didn't want to lose her, but the inevitability of that time would undoubtedly come because on TV they were all saying that the purpose of these non-human robots had been fulfilled and as a glorious new generation of women ripened, to be tastefully analogous to apples or other fruit, the robots must be discarded. And the Office of Family Reinstitution began to advocate "natural" women who were clones born in pods in adult states, and advertised radio commercials about how much better real women were than robots, after all, and how fake robots were, how ungodly it was, how desperate, how cruel, how silly, when only five years before they were saying that synthetic women, as they called them, would save the planet and our species. And now they were being treated like scabs who crossed some imaginary fucking picket line.

The OFR focused on reducing the shame of older men being with younger clone women (since all the clones were equivalent to 21 years-old without any variance), if such a shame ever existed. Half these men had resorted to homosexuality to satisfy their sexual appetites, so the campaign was really unnecessary. Then in a radical departure from prior policy, they shamed reluctant men who were attached to their robots, robots they once said it was perfectly normal to be with, even to wed. And TV commercials for toothpaste or department stores often complicity featured older man and much younger woman couples who looked like the happiest people on the face of the Earth. But I wasn't interested in a younger woman or any flesh and blood woman at all. I loved Rita and that wasn't ever going to change.

They offered several thousand dollars to turn in your "illicit lover," as they began to call them. "Do your patriotic duty!" they implored. You could bring them to any local school and someone from the OFR would be there and they would take your information and you'd get a deposit in your bank account within 30 days. They also gave you access to a dating website where this new breed of younger women would do their patriotic duty and be with old men for the sake of saving the species. Young men and women could not exclusively match and mate for young men had adapted all to well to a world without women. They in their skinny jeans and overpriced shoes and video games and cherry-vanilla vapes and hard seltzers had taken to homosexuality like birds to flight and were indifferent to the particular pleasures of women which would be foreign to them, by and large. Of course, there were some exceptions. It is, however, Darwinism at its truest.

What struck me was the blatant disregard people suddenly had for their robots. Their faithful companions of what would have been five otherwise dreary years were suddenly treated like refuse. There were all sorts of Marilyn Monroes lying around on street curbs or in trash heaps. All sorts of Ariana Grandes. All sorts of first wives and lost loves who were once so special and beautiful, but who were no more, nothing other than a heap of complicated circuits and wires and well-shaped silicone. Just a pile of deceiving junk. When the government issued the checks to everyone, whether they had turned them in or not, and the new crop of real women who had unprecedented power demanded that all robot women be rounded up and destroyed, you could drive by dumpsters and see legs sticking out like burnt birthday candles out of cakes. Or you could see them lying on the side of the road like dead junkies. Society turned on robots and the robot makers who had cashed in on satisfying the crudest needs of a lonely planet of desperate men, now created robot killers to seek and destroy any stragglers. What could go wrong? I didn't want some feminist babymaking whore teaming with ambition of world domination. I was happy with Rita. Freewill, however, had been mopped up in the name of social justice and virtue signaling and the collective good as it so frequently is.

"What will become of us," she asked me solemnly when I caught her alone on the couch in the glow of the TV news. I was sleeping and woke in a panic to find her spot in bed vacated.

Her question impressed me. It was not, "What will become of me?" Rather, it was, "What will become of us?" She was the most selfless creation I had ever known and I had no doubt that she was capable of love more so than any living thing on Earth, particularly those spawned tadpoles they were pimping as real women. What did it matter if she was created by God or by Elon Musk? She was a creation nonetheless.

I cleared my throat. "Nothing. We will always be together. No one will know you're a robot. I've been thinking on it. We will make sure of it."

"Then I'd be living a lie," she interjected. Her quiet voice was devoid her usual exuberance. She sounded as though her battery was low like it was that time we went to Chicago and forgot her charger. Riding on the train home, she laid her head in my arms and her eyes fluttered and it was as though she were dying. Like I'd imagine a diabetic without insulin to be dying. And I felt the same miserable sadness I felt then as much as I tried to be positive for the both of us.

"It's okay, Burt," she said. "They say you can have a real woman now. You need to do your patriotic duty and have babies. You can have a real wife and kids."

"I don't want their damn women!" I shouted. She seemed startled and I apologized. I had never before been angry in front of her. "They can't have you! Don't you see? They can't just have you! You are mine! Just as I am yours! We are indivisible! Married by law and they cannot just overturn that because someone in some goddamn suit says so! Damn this species anyway! Maybe Mother Nature killing half us off was trying to tell us something. Our time is up! We've ruined the Earth long enough! I will not let you go. I cannot let you go!"

"Don't you see, Burt, I have fulfilled my purpose. I have outlived my usefulness and somewhere inside of me there is a device that they will activate that will cause me to shut down just as any human being may suddenly have a heart attack or an aneurysm and cease to be. You shouldn't feel sadness. I will feel no pain, after all. I will simply be no more."

"No. No. No!" I shook my head and began to get agitated. I felt ill. She was looking ahead at the TV where they were showing the labs that cloned the women and I was standing behind her feeling the way I did when my mother died.

"You have to let go, Burt." She reached up and offered me her hand. "It can happen anytime. They have a list of serial numbers and they will go through them to ensure all robots are deactivated. And if that fails, they will send one of those bounty hunters. But they do not understand the danger of creating aggressive robots, do they? They simply wanted to profit off another creation. I fear that your species will endure great hardship because of this, Burt. Can we go on a trip?"

"Yes. Yes!" I cried too excitedly for my own good. "Anywhere. Anywhere at all! We can have the RV packed and ready in an hour."

"I'd like to go to the beach, Burt. We've not been to the beach. You worried about sand in my circuits. Water in my ears," she chuckled. "I'd like to see the ocean. I hope I exist long enough to see it."

"Yes. Of course. The ocean it is! We will leave in an hour. Sleep along the way, somewhere in Pennsylvania, maybe, and be at Myrtle Beach by tomorrow evening."

"Myrtle?" she laughed. "I knew a Myrtle in production. She was being made for an 84 year-old man and she looked equal in years. It did not displease her to appear old. She was rather pleased and envied for being so unique and special to someone by the rest of us, after they installed our emotion chip, that is. She was radiant. I wonder if she too will be ended." She turned to look at me and smiled. "I too was unique. I was the only Rita there was. Plenty of Marilyns and Kim Kardashians and the like. But I was the only Rita. I know we once made a deal to never watch a Rita Hayworth movie, but I think I'd like to see one. Maybe when we stop to sleep."

"Sure. I have 'Gilda' on DVD and there's a - a player in the RV."

She smiled and got up to pack her things. A last hurrah. She was cheerful along the way. Seemingly indifferent to her proximity to her end. I thought maybe that she wasn't programmed to fear death, if you could even call it death. To fear the end. Termination. Whatever it is to her circuits and the program that makes up her life.

We stopped at a campsite in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. She told me all about the battle during the Civil War. She knew every small fact and detail and if I wanted her to, she could have recited at least 157 books word for word on the subject. We walked around the battlefield at night and swore we saw a few ghosts. But they say it is only your mind playing tricks on you. They say in a hyper-state of lucidity that you will see all kinds of things your subconscious suggests. I think we saw ghosts. Men killed a hundred and sixty years ago so gruesomely and roaming the fields looking for a way home.

We watched "Gilda" and Rita was pleased with it. It wasn't as though she was watching herself for either of us. Nor was it that we were watching the ghost of Ms. Hayworth in anyway. She was her own person. Glenn Ford was overmatched and I wondered if they picked him to be so. But who wouldn't have been overmatched by Rita. Orson Wells certainly was in marriage. Perhaps that is what happened to their marriage, I thought having a cigarette before bed. The feeling of inadequacy only floats so long then it sinks, the relationship with it. Of course, my Rita didn't dress or act like Gilda. She dressed in sun dresses and modern chic and she acted like a beautiful lady completely unspoiled and not ruined by the bitterness of ten worthless guys before me. There were no men before me. That is the beauty of her. It was only her and I. Though I had been with many other women, men have the uncanny ability to forget women, whereas women seem to cling and every man they are ever with leaves a lasting impression and indelible scars on their soul so that down the road all that someone gets is something like a lumpy rosen bag, used and stained with dirt. Picked up and thrown down repeatedly. Perhaps that is what I love most about her. It is as though we are the only two people on Earth. We are in a perpetual uncorruptible Garden of Eden. We made love that night at Gettysburg and slept as though there was no tomorrow, wishing there wasn't. Wishing the night would simply refuse to end.

We got to Myrtle and it was late. We parked the RV and walked down the boardwalk to the piers and looked out at the magnificent black tongue of God that lapped the shore. That came and went with those tranquil exchanges of celestial breath. A trade of an inhalation for an equal and rhythmic exhalation wherein somewhere lived the meaning of life itself. Rita enjoyed the beach like a child enjoyed the beach and she ran up ahead in her excitement careless of crabs scurrying for cover or the occasional pair of lovers who wished to hide their transgressions in the night, anywhere, anonymously, not to be sunburned and trampled on by the noisy and nosey children of the mid-afternoon that always litter the beaches. There is such a contrast of the beach from day to night and it is as though they are two different places entirely like the front and the back of a beautiful naked woman. No less appealing. Just different.

I couldn't help but to smile watching her. In five years I had never taken her to the beach because I always worried of sand or salt water deteriorating her in someway the way a parent might worry of a child's teeth eating hard candy. Immediately seeing her happiness, I regretted not taking her sooner. In her manual and in the tutorial it said she was able to withstand any such condition. She could even tolerate up to 478 degrees fahrenheit before she melted, it noted as a point of fact. But it was as though I worried that her skin would sunburn or water would get into her body through an orifice and change her in some way I never wanted her to change. I sought only to preserve her. To preserve us.

She stopped for a moment, looking out into the ocean with her arms spread and up into the sky at the millions of stars that made the night look like black cheesecloth wrapped around a lightbulb and she asked me, "You wanted me to be that poster. That very moment captured for all of time which arrested your imagination as a young boy. Have I done so for you, Burt. Have I achieved at least that?"

She must have known the answer. But maybe she wanted to hear me say so the way a woman wants to hear a man unprovoked say they love them now and then. And so I did in a bit of a final assessment as though the past five years were some course she took and I was either to bestow a degree upon her or fail her with words of disapproval. "You've eclipsed all, Rita. You've taught me how to love and in love I was right. In love I was whole. I was sound."

"In love I was whole," she repeated as to agree or as to approve of the choice of my words. Then she stopped and before I could get to her she collapsed on the beach in the darkness and the waves seemed to make an attempt to steal her as though all along she belonged to that black-tongued God who had been waiting for her. To that mysterious hand that clapped the shore like a patient thief. To that breath that breathed life to and from it. I fell beside her and cradled her lifeless body into my arms and rocked her as though I could revive something in her that was never mine to begin with. And I wept. Not that it mattered to the ocean. Nor to anyone. Then I carried her out to sea until the water swallowed me to my chest and agreed to take her from me, where I cast her off with a final gentle push hoping she would be taken back to wherever it is whence she came, feeling as though I never adequately thanked her. And I thought about what Pushkin once wrote. What I once said to her long ago. "The man you love in me, of course, is better than me. I'm not like that. But he loves you, and I'll make sure I'm better than myself."

I was better than myself. I was both men, all the while. I always was. And somewhere nearby from the darkness of an anonymous couple's radio that song played. Faintly. Islands in the stream. That is what we are.