The Men I Am
I see the women I might have known. They stand in a boundless white square, their postures straight as palace guards’ but their expressions lively and revealing, their eyes and heads following me as I make my way through the rows.
They are not ordered in any obvious way. Their races and ages and sexual dispositions, in so far as these things can be categorised, are all shuffled, so that I pass now by a fifty-year-old with heavy bags under her eyes and mustard stains on her sweater, and now by a twenty-year-old Chinese woman with lipstick the colour of merlot and a leather collar fastened around her neck.
I am impressed with the variety. I had known, of course, that in the twenty-first century my options outnumbered those of my forebears, but I had not internalised this fact as strongly as I might have until I was confronted with all of them here. Indeed, even now I struggle to imagine the precise set of circumstances that would have led me to the arms of the four-foot jungle woman in front of me, who wears nothing but a suspicious scowl and a bronze rod through the bridge of her nose, and whose sagging breasts are covered almost beyond recognition with tattoos of birds in rust-red ink.
That said, there are some patterns. My preference for Mediterraneans and East Asians is evident today, as is my weakness for long legs and gold jewellery. Interestingly, the women with whom I seem to have enjoyed more stable relationships - a fact deduced by necessity through the everyday clothes they wear now - are less likely to meet these criteria. I have come to believe that one knows a man best by knowing his women, and that this applies as strongly to the self as it does to others. What my observation says about me, however, I am too overwhelmed to consider.
Some of the women are here more than once. One in particular I have seen no fewer than a dozen times. She is beautiful and finely dressed, peach skin in a mix of plaid skirts, black boots and woollen jumpers. I stop now in front of yet another version of her to examine her face. I look into her eyes. They are shaped like almonds and almost completely black, though there are hazes of gold and orange around the irises, like Christmas lights viewed through thick-curtained windows. Her lips are thin and pink, and she had shifted most of her weight to her left leg. Something about her posture stirs some emotion in me, albeit weakly, like dust shifted by the gentle close of a distant door. I almost remember her. It’s as though I met her only once a long time ago, at a dark house party early in my youth, for instance, and I’m seeing her again after all these years, wishing I were young and trying desperately to remember her name. But I can’t remember it. I can tell from the fact of there being so many of her here that she must have been important, and my failure to place her properly stirs in me the sort of wistful sadness one feels when walking through the ruins of a once-vibrant town.
As I continue through the rows, not in a straight line but bouncing like a pinball between the various figures who catch my eye - here a sweaty blonde in leather boots and turtle-shell glasses; here a frail old creature who reeks strongly enough of ground beef and tomato sauce that I am brought to the edge of tears without knowing why - I catch sunlight glinting off gold in the distance. I head in that direction. I do not rush; I have all the time that’s ever been. Instead, I continue perusing the various iterations of my subconscious like an aspiring writer in a bookshop on a sunny afternoon, gravitating to the gleam that grows brighter with each step. When eventually I reach a blue-haired woman with fat rolls like uncooked bread dough and an American flag tattooed across her left thigh, I am close enough to make out the shape of two open gates, faint but imposing, like faraway skyscrapers or half-forgotten dreams.
My suspicions are confirmed. I cannot feel too upset, though - I lived a good life.
By coincidence (I believe it to be coincidence, but of course such terms are fuzzier now than they were before), I am standing at this point in front of the only woman I have seen thus far to look actively distressed by my presence. She looks at me as though I am the only person who could save her from some unknown but wretched fate. I look at her closely. I take in the knobbly shape of her knees, the faded French words printed on her sweatshirt, the wintery shade of red on the tip of her nose. I note the freckles on her cheeks and the few strands of grey caught between a swirling mass of ginger. Again, I try and force a memory, tensing the muscles around my skull as though trying to understand some abstract equation, but again all I produce is wispy and short lived, like spirits on a sunny spring morning.
It is around now that I begin to understand what I am. The romantics in me tell me that I am 1001, though whether that’s true I have no way of knowing. Either way, I am the amalgamation of multiple lives - at least many hundreds, if the number of women here now is anything to go by. All branches collapsed with death into a single being, a being with the wisdom, folly and heartbreak of all his component selves. The result? Oddly, a harmonic chaos, a feverish stillness, like that of a bustling street or a windswept hilltop.
I smile meekly at the ginger woman as though she were a beggar with her hand outstretched, then continue past her towards the gates safe in the knowledge that she is only a part of herself, and that she is no doubt doing the same to a part of myself somewhere very close and very distant, somewhere right now and a very long time ago.