I’m Starved for You (Kindle Single) Read online

  I’m Starved for You

  By Margaret Atwood

  BYLINER ORIGINALS

  Copyright © 2012 by Margaret Atwood

  All rights reserved

  Cover image: © Davies and Starr/Stone/Getty Images (lipstick); Veer (paper)

  ISBN: 978-1-61452-025-2

  Byliner Inc.

  San Francisco, California

  www.byliner.com

  For press inquiries, please contact [email protected]

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  Stan opens the large green locker and stows away the clothes he’s been wearing: the shorts, the T-shirts, the jeans, the summer stuff. He won’t be wearing these clothes for a while: by the time he gets back here the hot weather will most likely be over and he’ll be into the fleece pullovers. He won’t have to do so much lawn maintenance then, which is a plus. Though the lawn will be a wreck. Some guys have no feeling for lawns, they take them for granted, they let them mat up and dry out and then the yellow ants get into them and it takes a lot of work to bring them back. If he were here all the time he could keep the lawn in peak condition. As it is, he’s constantly in repair mode.

  His clothes are all washed and neatly folded: wife, Charmaine, did the laundry last thing, before she set off on her scooter for the women’s wing at Positron. In recent months he’s been leaving the house after she does, so he’s been the one doing the final check: no bathtub ring, no orphaned sock, no ends of soap or wispy gatherings of shed hair on the floor. When they return on the first day of every second month, Stan and Charmaine find the house pristine, spotless, hinting of lemon-scented cleaning products and without a trace of recent occupancy—and they like to leave it that way.

  Though it hasn’t been spotless every time. Three months ago Stan found a folded note: the corner was sticking out from under the refrigerator. It must originally have been attached with the silver fridge magnet in the shape of a duck, the same one Charmaine uses to post shopping reminders. Despite the strict Consilience taboo against contact of any kind with Alternates, he read the note immediately. It was typed and printed, but it was still shockingly intimate:

  Darling Max, I can hardly wait till next time. I’m starved for you! I need you so much. XXOO and you know what more—Jasmine.

  There was a lipstick kiss: hot pink. No, darker: some kind of purple. Not violet, not mauve, not maroon. He riffled through his head, trying to recall the names of the colors on the paint chips and fabric swatches Charmaine spends so much time brooding over. He’d lifted it to his nose, breathed in: still a faint scent, like cherry bubble gum.

  Charmaine has never worn a lipstick that color. And she’s never written him a note like that. He dropped it into the trash as if it were burning, though on reflection he fished it out and repositioned it under the refrigerator: Jasmine must never know that her note to Max had been intercepted. Also, it’s possible Max has been trained to look under the fridge for such notes—it might be a kinky little game they play with each other—and Max would be upset not to find it. “Did you get my note?” Jasmine would say to him as they lay stuck together. “What note?” would not be a good thing for Max to say. “Omigod, one of them found it!” Jasmine would exclaim. Then she would laugh. It might even turn her on, the consciousness of a third pair of eyes having seen the imprint of her avid mouth.

  Not that she needs turning on. Stan can’t stop thinking about that: about Jasmine, about her mouth. It’s bad enough here at the house, even with Charmaine breathing beside him, lightly or heavily depending on what they’re doing, or rather on what he’s doing—Charmaine has never been much of a joiner, more of a sidelines woman, cheering him on from a distance. But at Positron, in his narrow bed in the men’s wing, that kiss floats in the darkness before his open eyes like four plush pillows, parted invitingly as if about to sigh or speak. He knows the color of that mouth by now, he’s tracked it down. Fuchsia. It has a moist, luscious feel to it. Oh hurry, that mouth would say. I need you, I need you now! I’m starved for you! But it would be speaking to Stan, not to the guy whose clothes repose in the locker beside his own. Not to Max.

  Max and Jasmine, those are their names—the names of the Alternates, the two others who occupy the house, walk through its routines, cater to its demands, partake of its modest luxuries, act out its fantasies of normal life when he and Charmaine aren’t there. He isn’t supposed to know those names, or anything at all about their owners: that’s Consilience protocol. But he does know the names. And by now he knows—or deduces, or, more accurately, imagines—a lot of other things as well.

  Max’s locker is the red one. Charmaine’s locker is pink, Jasmine’s is purple. In an hour or so—once Stan has left the house, once he’s logged out—Max will walk in through the front door, open the red locker, take out his stored clothes, carry them upstairs, arrange them in the bedroom, on the shelves, in the closet: enough for a month’s stay.

  Then Jasmine will arrive. She won’t bother with her locker, not at first. They’ll throw themselves into each other’s arms. No: Jasmine will throw herself into Max’s arms, press herself against him, open her fuchsia mouth, tear off Max’s clothes and her own, pull him down onto—what? The living room carpet? Or will they stumble upstairs, reeling with lust, and fall entwined onto the bed, so thoughtfully and neatly made up with newly ironed sheets by Charmaine before she left? Sheets with a border of birthday-party bluebirds tying pink ribbon bows. Nursery sheets, kiddie sheets: Charmaine’s idea of cuteness. Though, like everything else in the place, they came with the house.

  Those sheets don’t seem right for Max and Jasmine, who would never choose such accessories for themselves. Jasmine is not a sheet ironer, nor does she make up the bed for Stan and Charmaine before she leaves: they find the mattress bare, and no towels set out in the bathroom either. But of course Jasmine is lax about such household details, thinks Stan, because all she really cares about is sex.

  Stan rearranges Jasmine and Max in his head, this way and that, lace bra ripped asunder, legs in the air, hair wildly tangled, even though he has no idea what either of them looks like. Max’s back is covered with scratch marks like a cat fancier’s leather sofa. What a slut, that Jasmine. Flaming hot in an instant, like an induction cooker. He can’t stand it.

  Maybe she’s ugly. Ugly ugly ugly, he repeats like a charm, trying to exorcise her—her and her maddening bubble-gum lipstick smell and her musky voice, a voice he’s never heard. But it doesn’t work, because she’s not ugly, she’s beautiful. She’s so beautiful she glows in the dark.

  No such pranks with Charmaine. No blistering fuchsia kisses, no rolling around on the carpet. A month from now it’ll be “Stanley! Stan! Honey! I’m here!” in a light, clear voice, a voice without undertones: Charmaine, wearing her blue-and-white-striped shirt, so crisp, with its faint underscent of bleach and its overtone of baby-powder-themed fabric softener.

  He wouldn’t have her any other way. That’s why he married her: she was an escape from the many-layered, sumptuous, devious, ironic, hot-cold women he’d tangled himself up with until then. Openness, transparency, certainty, fidelity: various humiliations had taught him to value those. He liked the retro thing about Charmaine, the cookie-ad thing. They pictured kids, once they could afford them.

  But still.

  He keys in the code on his locker, waits for it to flash CLOSED, climbs the cellar stairs, leaves the house. Once outside, he taps a second code into the signal pad beside the door, coding himself out.

  Over at Positron, Jasmine and Max must already have changed into the civvies they stored there last month. Now they must be checking out of their respective wings and ditching their orange prison uniforms at the ma
in desk. Very soon they’ll hop onto their scooters and make their way to the house. Stan has a voyeur’s urge to hide behind the hedge, that cedar hedge he trimmed last week, tidying up the slapdash job done by Max during his last sojourn. He’ll wait until they’re both inside, then peer through the windows. He’s figured out the sight lines, he’s left the ground-floor blinds up a crack. If they go upstairs, though, he’ll have no option but to set up the extension ladder, and he knows how screechy and metallic that would be.

  And what if he falls off? Worse, if Max leans out the window, stark naked, and pushes him off? He doesn’t know much about Max—he knows almost nothing—but Max had first choice of lockers, and he chose the red one. Aggressive. Stan wouldn’t wish to be pushed off an extension ladder by an angry naked man, a naked man he now colors copper tan, and to whose rippling epidermis he adds—now that he comes to think of it—copious tattoos. Dragons, vultures, snakes, grinning skeletons: these would be Max’s tattoos of choice. Most likely he also has a shaved head, covered in scars and welts from all the times he’s broken men’s teeth and jaws with the sheer force of his bullet-shaped skull.

  Stan’s own skull still has a cushion of sandy hair, but it’s thinning, even though he’s only thirty-six. He’s never used his skull to butt anyone in the mouth, though he’s willing to bet Max has. Most likely Max once worked as a bodyguard for some depraved, black-jacketed, gold-chained, coke-pushing, girl-enslaving money lord in his life before Positron. He might even be a kingpin criminal himself—one of the original eye-gouging, kneecapping inhabitants of Positron when it was still a mere state correctional pen.

  On level ground, Stan might be able to hold his own against such a man. He’s hefty—maybe a little too hefty, there are a few flab issues, though he’s working on them in the weights room at Positron—so he could land a few kicks and punches. But on that ladder he’d be defenseless. And he’d land in the hedge, spearing himself on it, bashing a jagged hole.

  That asshole Max is even worse with the hedge than he is with the lawn. He should learn to use a hedge trimmer, he didn’t even clean the fucking thing. Stan found it in the garage with its blade all gummed up with slaughtered foliage. But there’s no chance he’ll be able to focus on hedge trimming, since Jasmine leaps on the poor bastard every time she sees him in his leather work gloves and starts pawing at his belt buckle.

  So, all things considered, best not to peep.

  Also there’s the penalty for that sort of behavior—for furtive snooping, for wandering outside the allowable limits, and especially for not reaching Positron before the sign-in curfew. Too much official-guideline evasion, too much attitude, and then what? Once inside Consilience, you don’t get out. They’d had to sign on to that part, the no-exit part. It was daunting to consider; Charmaine had felt that, too—and there were some other things that weren’t too great as well, such as cutting your outside ties and giving up your cell phone. But Stan didn’t have outside ties to speak of, and neither did Charmaine, and they would get other cell phones once inside, and they hadn’t had much time to ponder the fine print because there were only a limited number of spaces and the counter on the online application showed them filling up fast. So it was a now-or-never kind of thing, said Charmaine, who also called it a leap of faith. Though Stan himself wouldn’t have put it that way.

  And, as the online application had said, Consider The Alternatives. Stan did consider them, and whenever he has twinges of misgiving he considers them again. It’s a festering rust bucket, out there beyond the Consilience gates, the alarm systems, the seeing-eye boundaries. Out there, people are starving. He saw too much of that, he knows how easily he himself could have slid down to that level. He’s much better off where he is. As they’re never tired of saying in here, nobody forced him to do this.

  * * *

  Consilience is an experiment. It is ultra, ultra important, which was made clear at the outset—they must have used the word ultra at least ten times—because if it succeeds, it could be the salvation of the nation as a whole.

  Along with the other volunteers, Stan was subjected to the introductory classes, presented by a half-dozen young, earnest, dark-suited, zit-picking graduates of some globally funded think tank’s motivational-speaking program. In one of his past lives—his short-lived stint with the insurance company—Stan had encountered the type. He’d disliked them before; but, as before, they couldn’t be avoided, since the classes were mandatory.

  In three days of sessions they got the indoctrination: the rationale for Consilience, its history, the potential obstacles, the odds ranged against it. They were heroic, they were told: they’d chosen to risk themselves, to take a gamble on the brighter side of human nature, to chart unknown territories within the psyche. They were like the early pioneers, blazing a trail, clearing a way to the future: a future that would be more secure, more prosperous, and just all-round better because of them. Posterity would revere them.

  That was the spiel. Stan thought he’d never heard so much mealymouthed bullshit in his life. On the other hand, he sort of wanted to believe it.

  On the third day the speaker was older, and although his suit was of the same dark material, it looked lusher somehow. There was a woman with him, also in a dark suit, with black straight hair and bangs, a squarish jaw; no makeup, though she did have earrings. Her legs were good, though muscular. She sat to the side, fooling with her cell phone. Was she an assistant? It wasn’t clear. Stan pegged her as butch. The volunteers in the sessions were gender-segregated, to get them used to the concept—prison would be like that—so she was the only woman in the room: better to look at her than at the guy.

  The guy began by saying they should call him Ed. Ed hoped they were now feeling comfortable, and that they knew—as he did!—that they had made the right choice. Now he’d like to give them—share with them—a deeper peek behind the scenes. The powers that be had not decided easily on this plan, he said. Definitely more than one policy planner’s ass was on the line (he smirked a little at his own use of the word ass) as witness the howling when the scheme was first announced. The spokesmen—the spokespersons (Ed glanced at the woman, who smiled) had braved a lot of indignant screaming from the online radicals and malcontents who’d claimed Consilience was an infringement on individual liberties, an attempt at total social control, a takeover of America, an insult to the human spirit; but as you all know—here Ed gave a conspiratorial smile—you can’t eat your so-called individual liberties, and the human spirit pays no bills, and something had to be done to relieve the pressure inside the social pressure cooker. Wouldn’t they agree?

  The woman in the suit glanced up. What was she looking at? Stan wondered. Her gaze swept over them, calm, cool. Then she turned back to her phone. Without a phone himself, Stan felt naked. He wondered when the new cell phones would be issued.

  Ed lowered his voice: serious stuff coming up, and, sure enough, on came a PowerPoint with a slew of graphs. They’d had to conceal the true statistics to avoid panic, he said, but a shocking forty percent of the population had no jobs, with fifty percent of those being under twenty-five: which was a recipe for systems breakdown, for anarchy, for chaos, for the senseless destruction of property, for looting and gang rule and warlords and mass rape, and the terrorization of the weak and helpless. That was the grim prospect staring society right between the eyes.

  What could be done? Ed asked, wrinkling his brows upward. How to keep the lid on? Which it was in the interest of society at large to do, as they would surely agree. At the leadership level, ideas were running out fast. There was only so much manpower and tax revenue that could be devoted to riot squashing, to social surveillance, to chasing fast youths down dark alleyways, to fire-hosing and pepper-spraying suspicious-looking gatherings. Too many once bustling cities across the land were stagnant or derelict, too many of the disenfranchised were living in abandoned cars or subway tunnels or even in culverts. There was an epidemic of drugging and boozing: suicide-grade alcohol, skin-blis
tering injectionables that would kill you in under a year. Oblivion was increasingly attractive, since why retain your brain when no amount of thinking could even begin to solve the problem? It wasn’t even a problem, it was beyond a problem. It was more like a looming general collapse.

  At first the solution was to build more prisons and cram more people into them, but that soon became prohibitively expensive. Here Ed flicked through a few more slides. Not only that, it resulted in platoons of prison graduates with professional-grade criminal skills they were more than willing to exercise. Even when the prisons were privatized, even when the prisoners were rented out as unpaid labor to international business interests, the cost-benefit charts did not improve, because American slave workers couldn’t outperform the slave workers in other countries. Competitiveness in the slave-labor market was linked to the price of food, and Americans—who remained good-hearted despite everything—were not ready to starve their prisoners to death while working them to the bone. No matter how much the prisoners were vilified by politicians and the press as filthy dregs and toxic scum: heaps of stick-legged corpses couldn’t be hidden from view. The odd unexplained death, maybe—there had always been the odd unexplained death, said Ed, shrugging—but not heaps. Some snoop would have done a phone video—they knew how that went, didn’t they? Such things could escape despite the best attempts at control, and who knows what sort of uproar, not to mention uprising, might result?

  Ed opened his arms like a TV preacher: his voice got louder. Then it had occurred to the planners—and this was brilliant, he said—that if prisons were truly scaled out and handled rationally, they could be win-win viable economic units. So many jobs could be spawned by them: construction jobs, maintenance jobs, cleaning jobs, guard jobs. Hospital jobs, uniform-sewing jobs, shoemaking jobs, jobs in agriculture: an ever-flowing cornucopia of jobs. Medium-size towns with large penitentiaries could maintain themselves, and the people inside such towns could live in middle-class comfort. And if every citizen were either a guard or a prisoner, the result would be full employment: half would be prisoners, the other half would be engaged in the business of tending the prisoners, in some way or other. Since it was unrealistic to expect certified criminality from fifty percent of the population, the fair thing would be to take turns.