The Woman Who Pretended to Love Men

by Anna Ferrara

  Two steady streams of tears fell down Milla’s cheeks and she laughed. She rubbed tears out of my eyes and she nodded with enthusiasm for a good while. “Okay,” she whispered.

  “Okay,” I said. The whole of my being buzzed with joy until—

  —Milla contorted her face into one of pain again and groaned. She then screamed, grabbed onto my shoulders and began pushing and grunting with everything she had all over again. “Help me! Please help me!”

  I felt her pain in my shoulders and found myself sobbing again as I watched her suffer without being able to do a thing to make her feel any better. “You can do this! I know you can! I know you!” was all I could think of to say.

  She nodded, strained and struggled till she was red in the face, hollered and grunted till she was out of breath, and then, all of a sudden, she began gasping as if in shock.

  “What’s—”

  I stopped because I saw it: our baby—my baby—sliding right out of her.

  Milla groaned and said, “Catch... her!”

  I did. When our baby slid all the way out, she landed right in the middle of my waiting arms.

  The room took on a surreal quiet once that happened. Milla went completely silent for the first time in a long time, as did I. In my arms, a tiny, crumpled human being stared up at me with large, blue, curious eyes.

  I heard myself gasp and I heard Milla follow suit. “Why isn’t she crying?” she asked, in a whisper. She stared at the tiny human being in my arms and looked entirely awestruck.

  I had no idea. Our baby was breathing, moving and making little gurgling sounds as she gazed all around her—at me, at Milla and at the fireworks outside the window.

  “Maybe she’s... not unhappy?” I said. “Maybe she likes what she sees?”

  As if she understood what I was saying, our baby broke into a grin. She looked like a happy toy doll when she did so; as cute as young Milla had been.

  I passed our baby over to Milla with a heart swollen with love and curled up next to her as she brought our baby close to her chest. “She’s perfect,” I added, also in a whisper. “I think she’s going to grow up to be as beautiful as you.”

  Milla, drenched and pale but no longer in pain, beamed when our adorable baby curled a tiny hand around her index finger and held on tight. “We are officially parents,” she said to me with a gaze that suggested she loved me again.

  I kissed her on the lips and told her how much I loved her. Then, I kissed our little baby on the cheek and told her all the ways I was going to spoil her rotten.

  “Roller,” Milla suddenly said. Colour returned to her cheeks and lips as she spoke. “I’m going to name her Roller Milone. Any objections?”

  Our eyes met; I felt that connection for the thousandth time that day and this time, I could tell Milla felt it too. I shook my head and grinned. “It’s perfect. We can call her Lola the second at home—”

  “Wait, you’re a... Lola?”

  I laughed when I saw the look on her face. “It is easier for Cantonese-speakers to pronounce—”

  “No way. You’re too tall and tough to be a Lola, or a Fleur, now that I think about it. I’m just going to call you Roll and our baby is going to be Rollie.”

  “Rollie?”

  “Yes, Roll-Yee. I get a Roll-name and you get a somewhat Cantonese-sounding name. How about that?” She looked right at me and began looking as flushed, fierce and beautiful as she had been the first day I met her.

  All of a sudden, I was aware of how far we’d come; how much we’d changed; how much I’d learned. “Cool,” I said.

  “Cool,” she replied.

  A creak sounded from the wooden stairs and made us both turn.

  It was a short and scrawny local guy who looked no older than twenty-five; he had stepped onto the landing and was staring at us and the baby in Milla’s hands while looking absolutely stupefied.

  He had a big camera slung around his neck, a backpack on his back and a cap over his head. I jumped up and went to stand between him and Milla at once. “Don’t come any closer,” I said to him. I remembered locking the wooden door at the foot of the tower behind us so I knew I had plenty cause for concern, even though the scrawny guy, frankly, looked more like a kid who had just seen a cockroach than a dangerous Everquest agent.

  “Uh,” he said, in a voice that sounded like it hadn’t quite broken properly yet. “I need…” He pointed to the window at our corner, made a downwards gesture, then pulled his camera up to his face and made clicking sounds with his tongue as he mimed the pressing of the trigger. “Newspaper,” he added and gave us a crooked smile as if that would make us feel any safer.

  I noted no glasses, earphones or earrings on his person and noticed his muscles were all flabby and not particularly well-formed—the mark of an unfit person. In fact, right then, he was panting a little, winded from the climb up the tower. Would such a person have been able to pass Everquest’s qualifying physical test? I truly doubted so but I didn’t dare think ‘no’ for sure, not after all I had seen that night. “You’re going to have to come back tomorrow,” I said. “This space is fully taken.”

  “No, tomorrow! Tomorrow no N.Y.E.... Today…” He mimed taking a photo and made little clicking sounds with his tongue yet again. Then, he did the downward gesture but finished by spreading out his hands this time, as if he were doing the breast stroke. “Please... okay? Life... one time. My boss... fried... me... fish... if I... no... photo, you know?”

  “What?” I heard Milla say behind me. She sounded more amused than afraid.

  “He got the word wrong.” I looked him from head to toe once more, just to make sure he had nothing on him that had little holes in them, and saw nothing to be alarmed about. “He should have said cuttlefish, not fish.”

  “What?!”

  “In Cantonese, getting your cuttlefish fried means you’re going to get fired,” I told her.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “Good question. I don’t know. I never wondered why people said it.”

  “Maybe you should.”

  “Yeah, maybe I should. And rethink everything else I was taught too.” I turned back to give Milla a smile then went up to the scrawny guy with my back straight, all ready for a fight. “Sorry, pal,” I said to him in Cantonese. “Find another tall building.”

  The scrawny guy reacted like it was the best thing he had heard all day. “You speak Cantonese! Good, then you’ll understand I need this job! I’m an intern! If I don’t take a photo of the crowd below, I’ll get fired and if I get fired I’ll fail my internship and if I fail my internship, I won’t be able to graduate and will have to spend another ton of money paying for another semester of University. So please let me just take one photo, my life depends on it! Please help!”

  “How did you get in anyway? You know how to break locks?” I kept my arms loose and my hands slightly curled in case I would need to turn them into fists at any moment.

  “No! I have a key! My boss applied for permission to come up here to get a photo of the crowd on N.Y.E.! I have a key and a permit!” He dug into his pocket and fished out a key that was on a tattered looking piece of string. He waved it in front of my face. “Do you?”

  “Of course!” I felt a little bit better knowing he used an actual key because Everquest agents never used keys, ever. “And we were here first. Sorry.” I put one hand on his arm and tried to nudge him down the stairs.

  He felt like bones in a sack, with even less muscle than Milla had, but he did his best to stand where he was. “Just one shot! Please? Start your new millennium with kindness, sister!”

  “Sorry, brother, but I’m out of kindness so you need to leave.” I put more force on his arm and got him three steps down.

  “I won’t disturb you, I promise, I just need a photo! See, I’ve got nothing in my hands but a camera!” He lifted both hands in the air to prove a point. Both palms were empty and very clean.

  “Sorry, pa
l. Happy new millennium!” I took one step down to move him further down the stairs and thought everything was going to be okay until he, very abruptly, picked up his camera, shoved it in front of my face and pressed the trigger.

  I squinted right away, for I expected a flash to blind me but there was no flash, not even light of any sort. There was only a large puff of what looked like smoke. Within a few seconds, however, by the time I opened my eyes fully again, the puff was gone. There was no smell, just the sensation of icy cold droplets of vapour crashing into the middle of my face, falling against my eyes, my forehead, on the bridge of my nose and going into my nostrils.

  The next time I looked, the scrawny guy was ten steps lower with one arm over his nose. He stared at me with a blank look in his eyes and I could tell right away he was counting inside. Counting the way I used to do every time I was on a mission.

  My face began to burn and I began feeling all hot inside. I dashed towards the scrawny guy, intending to beat the daylights out of him, but found myself bothered by how the world around me seemed to be getting progressively darker every step of the way. When I did get to him, with some effort, he simply skipped down another flight of stairs and stayed out of my reach.

  “What was that?” I asked when I realised the burn in my face was turning into pain—like a sudden intense migraine, in my face and also at the back of my head. My limbs began to ache. I tried to lift my feet but found I could only drag them along with my legs. My knees became so stiff, I had to grab hold of the rickety wooden railing next to me just to remain standing.

  “Roll?” I heard Milla say from above. She sounded alarmed this time.

  Milla! Rollie! I knew I had to get them both away from that scrawny guy but I was aware I now had a bigger problem. I was finding it increasingly difficult to catch my breath and I was sweating like I was being steamed from the inside out. My limbs were starting to tremble, as were the tiny muscles all over my neck. Nerve gas. Only a nerve gas would be able to do all that!

  I took one step towards the scrawny guy but lost my balance and tumbled all the way to the landing he was on. When I landed, my body was burning hot, oozing buckets of fluids and my muscles were starting to feel like they had cement hardening around them. I found I no longer had any way of moving my legs. In the meantime, my world got darker while sharp pains began piercing through my chest. The scrawny guy stepped over me effortlessly and ran up to the very top where I had been and Milla still was.

  “Roll! What’s happening?” Milla shouted.

  I tried to respond but my throat and lips wouldn’t relax enough for me to form words. I felt as if the whole upper portion of my body was being suffocated by my own contracting muscles and I had no way of making them stop. My arms and legs began to rattle against the floor and twist into the most unnatural of positions; my body began to scream on its own, I think, in a low tone that sounded like I was saying ‘errrrrrrrrrrrrrr’ without once stopping to take a breath.

  I heard Milla scream. “No! Get away from me! No!! No!!! Owww! Fuck you! Fuck! You! You’re not taking her! You’re not! She’s not... your…”

  She never got to finish her sentence; I never heard her voice again. I never got to see her either for my world had gone mostly dark and the position of my head was no longer within my control.

  All I could see were the shadows cast onto the granite wall ahead of me: a silhouette of a thick and tall man holding up a tiny baby. He was cutting away the cord the baby was connected to so swiftly and confidently, I knew at once who he worked for. Only an Everquest agent would know how to do all of those things with such finesse.

  A second after, I found myself no longer able to exhale or see. My body began to feel like it was on fire. I will get her back, Milla, I thought as fluids began spilling out of my eyes and nostrils. I promise I will get her—

  I didn’t get to finish my thought because the most excruciating pain I had ever felt engulfed my body in that moment. It was as if I was full of raw wounds that someone was pouring scorching hot acid on. I lost consciousness shortly after that.

  The last thing I heard? The sound of my baby crying.

  Crying, loud and clear, like her life depended on it.

  Chapter 29

  31 Jan 2000, Monday

  Some time later, I woke up. I opened my eyes, dragged myself into a sitting position and found I was on a cold, metal, human-sized tray in the middle of a windowless room with dark grey walls—likely made of raw cement.

  There was only one source of light: a single black-caged red bunker light in the middle of one of the bare walls; it gave the entire room a reddish hue. Two of the other walls had bookshelves in front of them; shelves that were lined not with books but jars full of a translucent yellowish fluid and other small, floating biological objects that looked a lot to me like small animals—squids, birds, frogs, lizards, cockroaches, maybe—although I couldn’t be sure from where I was.

  Looking at them made my goose pimples rise. I shivered and realised, as I ran my hands down my arms, that I was completely naked.

  There was a song playing somewhere; an acoustic one full of gentle guitar notes. Faint but just loud enough for me to hear what the female singer was singing—something about love being meant only for beauty queens. I vaguely remembered having heard that song somewhere... On TV possibly? On The Simpsons?

  “Hi.”

  That made me jump. I swivelled around, towards the ‘hi’, with my defences all up and found Dr Jones/Alpha/whoever right behind me, seated behind a metal worktable covered in computers and electronic devices. She had been there the whole time, sipping from a cup with steam coming out the top of it, like a person might do after a long, hard day of work while watching television.

  “Everything okay?” she asked in that British-sounding accent I recognised—Dr Jones’ accent in Dr Jones’ voice; no trace of raspy, American-ish, mannish Alpha anywhere.

  I wasn’t sure if everything was. My mind felt thick, as if I had to penetrate through layers of foam to form thoughts. My body ached like I had just done another one of those Ironman triathlons without having trained for it.

  “Where am I?” I asked and realised my voice was not what I remembered it to be. My voice now seemed one octave lower and was raspy—a little like Alpha’s.

  “My place. How are you feeling?”

  “Cold.”

  I swung my legs to the side of the metal tray table I was on and tried to stand but my knees buckled the moment I put my weight on them and I crumpled.

  My cheek crashed against the stone-hard, chilly cement floor and I found the wheels and metal legs of the tray table I had been on just centimetres away from my face. There was a thick maroon stain on the part of the floor my head landed on—the remnants of a thick liquid that had been ineffectively mopped up, maybe. I tried to push myself up with my arms but found I didn’t have enough strength to do so. I was like a newborn baby—floppy, with no ability to sit or crawl, much less stand. My limbs were like ice and tingly too, as if they didn’t have sufficient blood running through them. In the meantime, that faint song in the background ended then started up again as if it had been put on loop.

  I pulled all the strength I had together and turned my head towards Dr Jones’ worktable. “Do you mind?” I asked once I managed to do so.

  Her feet were bare and pale. Her calves too. “Yes, I do mind,” she said. I couldn’t see her face because one of the boxy computer monitors was in the way but I could hear her setting her cup down and typing into a keyboard really slowly, possibly with only two fingers. “My helping you will only skew the results and I don’t want that,” she said in the meantime.

  No shoes? Who in the world goes to work without shoes? “Is this another one of Everquest’s tests?”

  “No. Everquest doesn’t even know you’re here.”

  “Then why am I here?”

  “Because I do have my own mind and hobbies, and secrets. I’m not just an employee, you
know.” I heard her chair creak, possibly because she leaned back into it, and saw her stretch her legs out towards me. “I’ll explain only when you start walking again. I don’t want an overtly excitable emotional state skewing the results either.”

  “Results of what?”

  “You’ll see.” She sounded like she was smiling.

  I looked around for clues, at the shelf of jars next to her worktable and realised one of the jars on the lowest shelf contained a floating object that looked very much like... something I had seen in biology class a long time ago. A... not quite developed... human foetus.

  “Milla and the baby,” I said at once. I turned my eyes back to Dr Jones’ pale feet. “Where are they now?”

  “In the United States,” she said. “I convinced Everquest to send her there.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I think it’ll be easier for you to find a baby who looks like her there.”

  “What?” How did you... “I don’t understand. What about Milla?”

  Silence. I heard Dr Jones setting her cup down on the worktable. That song in the background ended and started up yet again.

  “Is she... alive?”

  “No. Sorry.”

  Sorry? Sorry?! My chest began to feel a little squeezed and for a long time after that I found it difficult to breathe. You would think I would have cried but for some reason, I never did. All I did was stare at Dr Jones’ feet without moving or saying a word.

  “I want us to work together, Fleur,” Dr Jones said at some point. “You have a talent for surveillance and language, exactly the skills I lack. I think, together, we’ll be able to do a whole lot of good.”