The Naked Woman
3
In hindsight, Natalie realized she had made a mistake trying to make her way home. With no men or women on the sidewalks, only mannequins; without any understanding of writing or speech, only illegible blurs; without comprehension: the roar of traffic, the multitude of footsteps slapping pavement, the buzz of traffic signals turning, music, car horns, the distant rumbling of planes passing overhead, all, all rendered unfathomable; without anything, the towering structures to either side of her were no longer buildings constructed by man. They had become instead the soaring walls of an immense labyrinth.
Her city had become a surreal, foreign land. The office complexes she had known by heart had been transformed into monuments devoid of purpose. Instead of familiar signs and advertisements, strange sigils and weird symbols were all she saw. She could understand none of them. She became lost, utterly and completely lost.
After an indeterminate time walking, Natalie stopped at a street corner she could almost recognize.
There, an immense statue of a man stood, obscene in its resplendent marble and polished bronze. Or maybe it’s gold, she thought, shivering in its enormous shadow. It could have been solid gold.
She couldn’t tell.
It was a gigantic statue, at least a building floor high. Both its arms were held out, palms up, as if the figure portrayed were trying to encompass everything before it, draw everything in toward itself. Its features were powerful, masculine, and, by now, intimately familiar to Natalie: they bore a close resemblance to the Men! who had controlled her, to the one Man! who had raped her and made her squeal herself his (His!) slave.
“This can’t be here,” Natalie said aloud, shaking her head in negation.
She closed her eyes, rubbed them with her fists, and tried to will the disturbing image away.
At the same time, she tried to will away her own obscene feelings: the statue was nude, very nude, its strong manly flanks and arms elegantly exposed, and its sexual organ prominently, proudly outstanding, and as a result Natalie found herself growing heated before it, heated and wet, recalling her rape.
She was ashamed of herself, and yet still helpless before the erotic, deeply fascinating sensation. She wanted to go to her knees before the statue. It took, in fact, an enormous effort of willpower on her part not to do so. And yet this was only a statue, the unliving representation of one of those Men!
She opened her eyes. It was still there, as permanent as the Statue of Liberty: the Statue of Carnality!
“Damn you!” she called out, screaming. The mannequins passing to and fro around her didn’t stop or hear. “You can’t be here! You can’t exist here!”
But the immense male nude stood there nonetheless, openly defying her, inviting her.
The mannequins—the people, Natalie knew, the people she was being prevented from seeing or hearing—strolled around the statue. They didn’t look up at it. Despite Natalie’s inability to comprehend their expressions—their mannequin faces weren’t really blank, but they might as well have been for all her knack for reading them now—it was obvious that they couldn’t see the giant statue. They were as oblivious to it as they were oblivious to her. In the real world, or her old life, as she thought of it, and not this nightmare! the installation of such a huge piece of artwork would have been important local, if not national, news. It was that big. That it was naked, and its male organ so prominently jutting forth, enflaming her, would have made it a national, perhaps even international controversy. Everyone would have been talking about it on the news. Blogs would have been proclaiming their opinions, good or bad. Natalie, certainly, would have seen it, would have recognized it; and yet she had never seen this statue before, had never even suspected its existence before. It had been—still was—invisible to all.
In her wanderings through the city, the statue had not been the first such previously invisible thing Natalie had seen revealed to her and her alone.
In the sky, for instance, above her was a second sun.
It was red and bloated and hung ominously over the streets and buildings, like a huge and baleful eye staring down at everyone. Natalie couldn’t tell how far away it was. She could only barely bring her own eyes to stare at it. The “red sun” could have been millions of miles away or just floating overhead.
Either way, it painted everything outdoors in a dark and unusual coloration, adding to the alien landscape of Natalie’s vision. It cast double shadows on everything. Instead of heat, it projected cold.
There were animals, too. Natalie would hear them approaching, and she would desperately hide behind whatever she could at the moment, behind an alley corner or a newspaper stand (she could read none of their headlines), terrified at the wild sounds. They were hairless, ugly things, she would see, in hiding, like dogs or wolves but much, much larger, and they would stalk in snarling pairs right in the middle of the street, cars passing around them, patiently waiting their turns: the cars, not the creatures, waiting.
The creatures’ eyes, like the second sun overhead, were supernaturally red. They would turn their vulpine heads back and forth, gazing at everyone in obvious hunger. They were large enough, and clearly feral enough, that had they been actually seen, people would have run screaming from them.
One bite, and, why, they would swallow a man whole! And yet people passed them by, unnoticing, unknowing, perfectly oblivious to the danger.
Natalie would shiver as they passed, hoping, praying they wouldn’t see her. Her teeth chattered.
Fortunately, they never stopped. Whatever their purpose was, it had nothing to do with her.
These were the most obvious things, the second sun, the wolves, the statue. Natalie had also seen weird symbols on the sides of select buildings: not small advertising but huge glyphs that she could read with no more precision than she could her own language now, emblazoned in floor-sized depictions on their building faces. She heard buzzing sounds, like the noise of swarms of insects, flying overhead. In the distance, near the center of the city, Natalie guessed—she couldn’t be sure—she thought she could discern the outline of a pyramid: a big black pyramid in the middle of her city that no one else could see, its glistening, ebony walls reflecting the light of the second sun overhead. But it had been the statue that had most affected her. It had been the most obvious thing, both for its heated effect on her as well as its clear implication in city design, she standing right before it and seeing the people walk to avoid it.
The city had been designed to accommodate this huge nude figure. It was not something that had just been added extraneously. No, it was clear: the sidewalks made too ample room for it, the buildings to either side were too suitably spaced. It fit.
The buildings, the streets—the city itself—had been built around this statue, not the other way!
Natalie shivered, thinking over the implications.
How long . . . how long had these . . these creatures been here, that the city had been built around them? She wasn’t sure she was even in her own city, so awestruck was she, so horrified and bewildered.
The city did look different, yet it was so with an obscure sense of familiarity that made it, in its own way, all the more disturbing. Natalie would come to a corner that she knew—she knew!—she recognized, yet, at the same time, that she just couldn’t! Someone—He!—was preventing her from recognizing it.
I know that place, she would think, coming to a place frequented by a lot of the faceless mannequins constantly surrounding her, and then she would wonder what they did there. Was it a restaurant? The place she had once bought her coffee? A bookstore? All the possibilities seemed equal in her eyes.
Natalie had read somewhere once that insanity was “reality just plus or minus five percent.”
In other words, the world she saw and heard around her looked and sounded normal, except that just enough extra stuff had been added, and just enough of familiar things were, well, missing! that it all looked a bit off kilter. Most prominently, there were the people: most of them weren’t people anymore!
Their faces were gone, what they wore Natalie could not recognize, and what they said to one another sounded like gibberish. And they were everywhere! Natalie shuffled the street in between them. As she staggered, they marched, or they jogged, or they chatted all around her. She had long since stopped trying to make contact with them. She couldn’t. Anytime she approached one to do so, her hands would falter, her feet would stop moving, and she would freeze, and the mannequin—the anonymous man or woman she had tried to get to help her—would walk on by, oblivious to her pain.
Natalie’s bare feet hurt. She was cold. She shuffled, naked, along the sidewalk, wincing occasionally at a stitch of pain in her side. She was hungry but at least she was no longer thirsty. She had found—Thank God!—a drinking fountain someplace and stood in line behind a couple that, of course, hadn’t noticed the naked woman there behind them.
Hardly anyone, in fact, noticed the naked, fucked woman walking amidst them.
The city looked different without people. It didn’t even look like a city! She might as well have been shuffling through the stone canyons of Arizona or the rains forests of Brazil or the Martian landscapes of some science fiction hack. The second sun made even that a possibility. Nothing looked familiar.
It was simply impossible to tell where she was or where she was going.
She didn’t even know how long it had been since her rape in the elevator—minutes? hours?—that she had left the building. Along with everything else, Natalie’s time sense was skewed. She should have known better. She had had trouble locating the restroom! Desperate to clean herself, Natalie had tried any number of doors in her old office building, the same building in which she had worked these last couple of years. It should have been easy, yet it had proved anything but. The women’s rest room should be right here, she would think. Then, she would push on the door, and it would only be a supply closet. Here, maybe, and it would only be some mannequin’s workplace. She kept getting twisted around, her directions confused. She stepped into the same office three times in a row, once, even while keeping one hand on the wall and trailing her fingers along its surface, as if she were a blind woman, so as to avoid turning herself around.
Stick to the left, she kept telling herself. Stick to the left! But it had done no good. Her desperation in the end only made her clumsy. She had been cold, too, without any clothes, and she kept crying, feeling dirty. She still felt dirty, more so because she could not deny that her rape had felt wonderful.
Natalie had had her share of sexual partners, but though bondage or submission had never remotely interested her before, she could not deny that being in that man’s—Man’s—power had been utterly intoxicating! She had climaxed so hard, she was still receiving tingles from it. She cursed her body.
Eventually, when did she finally locate a restroom in the building’s lobby (the men’s restroom, she noted, seeing the urinals, though by that time she could hardly have cared less), she sobbed with relief. She cleaned herself up using paper towels. She rinsed her mouth out, first by trying to stick her head under the running faucet, and when that failed, by cupping handful after handful of water to her lips. It had been an ordeal to find that restroom, and, so, she should have known better than to leave the building, she should have known that she would get lost, more so because everything looked so different without people, without signs that she could read, with the feeling in her head that something was wrong.
She had been unable to find anything to wear. Natalie clutched at her breasts, held her hands before her sex, embarrassed, feeling guilty, and yet very few saw anything unusual.
Some did see her. And, at the same time, she could see them, at least partially.
The first time it had happened, she had nearly cried out in joy. She had run to the woman, recognizing her as a woman, in a dress she could remember in a shop, holding a purse Natalie had once thought about buying for herself, before all this had happened. And the woman had seen her, a naked woman sprinting toward her, clearly, for she had stepped back, a startled expression on her face, and horror.
But then, before she could get to her, against her will, Natalie had stopped.
She had stopped, frozen, and the woman, short, brunette, pretty, had blinked, staggered for a second, and then moved on, clearly forgetting her. Her eyes, so concerned a second before, turned empty.
“Nooooo!” Natalie had screamed. For a second, then, the woman had paused, again, maybe, at the sound. And then she had been gone, rendered blank and anonymous as any other ambulatory mannequin in this nightmarish alien cityscape.
Perhaps out of every hundred or two hundred blank, anonymous mannequins, Natalie would see one that was clearly a person, a man or a woman, sometimes even a child. And these people—for they were people!—would hesitate momentarily as they did see her, at least for a time. Inevitably, though, and painfully, they would turn away and ignore her, lapsing back into unrecognizability. None could meet her gaze for more than a second before whatever it was that made her invisible took over again.
Animals saw her. The pigeons avoided her as she walked, and, once, a cat had snarled as she approached. Natalie felt like a ghost, trapped in a world not her own, untouched by anything, anyone.
She wanted so much to be touched again, or to touch someone else.
In hindsight, again, had she but known the cost of that wish, she would have well reconsidered.
Natalie didn’t hear them until they were literally on top of her. They came at her from behind, and she was so concerned with the second sun, the naked wolves, and the giant ebony pyramid that they had her before she even had a chance to get away. A hand grabbed Natalie by the arm, and she yelled.
She was spun around and into the face of a man.
Not a Man! just an ordinary man.
For a second, though, all she saw was his eyes. She could see his eyes! He was ill-shaven, too, and she recognized that he was ill-shaven. He had dark hair; he had cruel features; he was smiling.
“Natalie, right?” this man said. “You can call me Tommy. We were sent for you.”
You are not yet fit to claim, her Master had said to her, earlier. No, Natalie thought.
“You . . . you can see me?” Natalie’s mouth opened in utter surprise. There were four of them, she saw. Four men. Not four mannequins: four men! Ordinary men in jackets and jeans, but men!
Before she could say anything else, before she could ask for help, ask for some explanation, ask anything, “Tommy” suddenly pawed at her naked breasts. She screamed and tried to pull away, but he held onto her. He laughed. “Hey, baby. Don’t be like that. It’s what you’re going to be for in a few days. Soon, you’ll be screaming for it.” The gang nudged at each and laughed. They looked like trolls.
One of them patted Natalie on the ass. No, she thought. Please, God, no!
They were going to rape her.
“Maybe we shouldn’t, Tommy,” another guy said. “Maybe we should just take her to the doc.”
“No, we’re gonna have some fun first. What does it matter, eh?” “Tommy” turned back to Natalie.
“You got pretty lips, sweetheart. You wanna wrap ‘em around my dick?” He laughed again, sickly.
No, Natalie thought, and she kneed “Tommy” in the groin. He made a strange strangling sound in his throat and let go of her. In their own surprise, before the others could grab her, Natalie ran for her life.
The mannequin-people on the street made room for her unconsciously. The faceless figures parted like the Red Sea, in fact—the Mannequin Sea?—providing more than enough room for her to run full-tilt along the dirty sidewalk. Almost immediately she heard them after her, heard “Tommy” scream at her and curse, but she didn’t dare turn her head to look back at them.
She ran, terrified. And, in no little part, she soon found, exhilarated.
The exhilaration came from finally having a problem that she could deal with. A problem that she understood, that made sense in this otherwise nightmarish situation she had found herself. She was dealing with the problem by running, true, but she at least understood what she was running from.
She spun left at the next corner, bare feet padding on the cold concrete.
Her breathing was sharp, painful.
“Get her!!” She heard them.
The warm sun she knew, and the cold red sun she didn’t, both shone down on her. Natalie’s shadow stretched out ahead of her, doubled in the weird light.
For a timeless period, the street seemed to be on an angle, and for a few strange moments Natalie felt as if she were running perpendicular to gravity, running up a wall or other vertical surface.
The geometry of the cityscape was askew. Behind her, she heard feet slapping pavement, very close.
They’ll catch me on a straight run, she figured out, and abruptly she turned right into the building next to her, storming through the open glass double doors.
A sign outside said “GHAME!”
She passed a woman, who turned her head to stare at her naked form.
The world seemed to rightside itself abruptly, and Natalie recognized what kind of place she was in: a department store. She actually recognized many of the wares on display.
Clothing racks were all around her, men’s wear, by the looks of them.
“Bitch!” she heard. She turned and saw them running through the department store doors after her.
Natalie dodged their grasping fingers and pushed a clothing rack in their path, which two of them tripped over. She was screaming, her heart pounding. She ran down the aisle of men’s coats and jackets, real mannequins and people-mannequins, the latter always making way for the invisible people.
Natalie saw an escalator and ran up it. At the top, she sprinted right down an aisle of refrigerators and other kitchen equipment. She looked around. The weird light was fading.
A strange thing started to happen. It took Natalie a few minutes for her to grasp it, as she continued to run, the men never far behind. It was this: people started to look like people again. The cold run sun outside faded away. The world as she had always known it came back. When Natalie first recognized this, she tried to call for help, thinking the spell she was under had somehow been broken.
She was able to read! SEARS! she saw as she passed outside into an open common area, not GHAME!
A security guard was talking to some people by a open railing. She ran to him. “Help me!” she screamed at him. “Can you see me?” She tried to pull on his hand, but her fingers refused to work.
The mallcop stopped for a bare second, looked directly at Natalie, frowned, then turned his head and resumed his chat with the couple of girls he evidently hitting on. “Damn you!” Natalie screamed.
“There she is!” Natalie turned. The four of them, “Tommy” included, were running out of the store in her direction. Natalie didn’t waste anymore time. She ran past the security guard and into an open mall. The place was packed. Teens, music that she understood as music, signs that she could read once again . . . but no one spared her a second glance. They saw her once, and then they turned away.
It was, in a way, worse than simple obliviousness.
They caught her. There was only so far she could run. Natalie had never been athletic, and she had already been exhausted, physically and emotionally. “Tommy” and his crew tackled her near a taco stand and pushed her to the floor.
“Bitch!” the dark-haired man said, and he pushed his way on top.
“Nooo! Please!” Natalie tried raking him with her fingernails, but one of “Tommy”’s goons held her hands. Her arms pulled vainly in their grip. Her feet kicked uselessly.
“Tommy” pushed down his pants. “Slut,” he said. “In a few weeks, you’ll being loving this.”
“NOOO!” He pawed at her breasts. She tried twisting her legs together, but he was too strong, he put his fingers inside her, held her thighs apart with his other hand. Her rape at his hands was as far removed from the mindless pleasure she had received earlier from the Man! as it possibly could be. He pushed his erection into her, and she screamed. Around her, Natalie saw people stop for a second, to watch, and then whatever effect that controlled them, altered their perceptions, took over again, and they turned away. She was raped in the middle of the mall, everyone watching, nobody helping.
They took turns with her. They let her scream.
After all four of them had had their fun, “Tommy” held her down again and brought a hypodermic needle for her to see.
“Sleepy time now, bitch.” She struggled, but she lost consciousness almost at once.