The next few days settled into a routine. I cooked, cleaned and did as Mildred had instructed. I really had no other choice. I was not allowed to leave the house and grounds and would have been stopped and returned if I had. That aside, where the hell could I go? I was on an island, somewhere in the Pacific Ocean but that was as much as I could figure out. It was warm here and the length of the days and nights were about equal so I could guess that I was somewhere within a few hundred miles of either side of the equator but where? What good was that information without any means of communication or travel? Even if I could contact someone, what could I tell them? Who could I expect help from? The answer in every scenario was nothing or no one. My only choice was to do as I was told and try to make the best of it.
Mildred was business like but also kind and caring. She checked my wounds every day and applied fresh dressings. She insisted I join her for meals and afterwards, when everything was cleaned and put away, I joined her to watch TV or just chat. She liked to talk about her work both at the hospital and the local food cooperative. Once in awhile the topic came around to me and how she saw me fitting in to her life.
"You must understand," she said one evening after dinner, "that your being here is no accident. We are not so desperate for men to come here that we have to kidnap them. If we wanted, we could place a single online ad and have a ship load of men ready to come within a week."
"Why don't you?" I asked.
"None of those men would be suitable. We are not interested in femdom junkies or pain puppies. Such men usually try to top from the bottom and see women like us as a means to fulfill their fantasies. While there are a few men out there who accept the idea of female superiority in a genuine way, most of that sort are already in a relationship. It is too hard to separate the genuine article from the posers. When we need a man, our preferred male is one who fits a certain profile and who can be broken or made to accept our way of life. You fit our profile."
I never saw myself as fitting or fantasizing about anything like this place so I had to ask: "I had a traditional marriage and never was much into porn of any type, what made me fit your profile?"
Mildred sat quiet for a few minutes and I knew better than to press her. We sat there in silence until she finally looked at me and explained: "Your first qualification was to make us aware of you. You did that by responding to our ad. We don't run that ad very often and it is designed to appeal to certain people. If you think back you may recall that the ad advertised an isolated location, cut off from the troubles of the world. Not everybody likes that sort of thing but you did or you would not of inquired further. The next filter were the pictures in the ad itself. The ad featured women of all sizes and shapes, relaxing in various ways. There were only two men shown in that ad and both were serving the women. One was carrying a tray of drinks to some women at a table and the other rubbing a woman's feet as she sat in a beach chair. Those were subliminal clues designed to appeal to a certain type of male."
"The next filter was you contacting us and filling out the application you were sent in return. That application gave us a lot of information about you. It was especially important that you have no dependents, either family or spouse and that you had a good job, a steady income and were a productive member of society. That triggered our next step, an investigation."
"You were thoroughly investigated by more than one private detective. Within a month we had a complete picture of every aspect of your life. Political candidates are not as thoroughly checked out by their opposition as you were checked out by us. You had no history of violence of any type, especially not even a hint of any violence towards a woman. You worked for a female supervisor the past few years and resisted her flirtations. She actually told one of our detectives that she deliberately flirts with the married men she supervises in order to weed out those who would cheat on their wives. Such men are dishonest on some level and she makes sure that any married man receptive and willing to act on her flirtations never gets into a position of trust. She usually finds some reason to fire them or shove them into some dead end project that is a career killer."
I had always wondered why my boss acted like she was hitting on me. It was never anything overt but a lot of small things like personal dinner meetings with her that I was asked to attend and one business trip she insisted that I go on with her. I was flattered but never really tempted.
Mildred continued: "The one thing that pushed you to the top of our list was the way you took care of your wife from the time she became ill and right up until her death. That showed character and your ability to manage a bad situation and make the best of it. Brain cancer is a horrible disease and our research showed that your wife became quite nasty and even violent towards the end. It had to be hard for you to endure it and not pack her off to some institution. I understand you even took a sabbatical from your job for most of her final year in order to provide her with round the clock care."
There were tears in my eyes as she said this. All of those repressed memories came rushing back to me. The hateful accusations my wife made and the wild temper tantrums she threw when the disease that was destroying her brain pushed the right buttons. It was nearly impossible to endure at that time and many times I just wanted to walk away. It was made even harder by the knowledge that such words and actions were completely the opposite of what my wife had always been. It was the most difficult and stressful thing that I ever had to do but I did it, every day until the end.
I wiped my face and said to Mildred: "Yes, I cared for my wife. I did what any decent human being should do and now you tell me that my doing so made me a candidate for kidnapping and torture? What the fuck!"
