I’m Starved for You (Kindle Single)

by Margaret Atwood

  Hence Consilience. Of which they are all such an important part! Ed smiles, the welcoming smile of a car salesman.

  Stan wants to ask about the profit margin, and about whether this thing is a private venture: someone’s got the lucrative contracts, walls don’t build themselves, and the security systems are top grade, from what he’s been able to guess. But he stops himself: this doesn’t feel like the right moment to ask, because now a great big CONSILIENCE has come up on the screen.

  He has to admit that the PR team and the branders have done well. CONSILIENCE = CONS + RESILIENCE. DO TIME NOW, BUY TIME FOR OUR FUTURE. They also changed the name of the actual prison, because “The Upstate Correctional Institute” was dingy and boring. They came up with “Positron,” which technically means the antimatter counterpart of the electron, but few would know that. As a word it just sounded very, well, positive. And positivity was what was needed in the country as a whole: positivity. Even the most cynical—said Ed—even the most jaundiced would have to admit that.

  Positron—the name and the concept, both—hit a popular nerve. Credible stratagem, said the online news bloggers. At last, a vision! Even the depressives among them said why not try it, since nothing else was working. People were starved for hope, and in that state they’d swallow anything vaguely uplifting. The authorities had been surprised by the huge wave of enthusiasm their proposed model had generated. The initial number of online applications had been overwhelming, and no wonder: there were so many advantages to be had inside Consilience. Who wouldn’t rather eat well three times a day, and have a shower with more than a cupful of water, and wear clean clothes and sleep in a comfortable bed devoid of bedbugs? Not to mention the inspiring sense of a shared purpose. Rather than scavenging food from dumpsters and festering in some deserted condo crawling with black mold or crouching in a stench-filled trailer dumped in a nothingland where you’d spend the nights beating off feral dead-eyed teenagers armed with crowbars and broken bottles who were ready to murder you for a handful of cigarette butts, you’d have gainful employment, three wholesome meals a day, a lawn to tend, a hedge to trim, the assurance that you were contributing to the general good, and a toilet that flushed. In a word, or rather three words: A Meaningful Life.

  And that was the last slogan on the last slide on the last PowerPoint of the last day. Something to take home with them, said Ed. Their new home, right here inside Consilience.

  Ed turned off the PowerPoint, put on his glasses, consulted a list. Practical matters: their new names—their Positron names, their Consilience names—and their new cell phones would be issued in the main hall. Their Alternates had already been assigned, and their joint timetables for switchover days were on the blue sheet, along with a map of the town. The residence-sharing system was explained on the green sheet. Those who did not know how to drive a scooter should sign up on the yellow sheet, using their numbers only; the scooter classes would begin on Tuesday. He, Ed, was sure they would all make a great success of this revolutionary new venture. Good luck!

  He left the room, the woman in the dark suit walking three paces behind. Maybe she’s a bodyguard, Stan thought. Powerful glutes.

  * * *

  In the cafeteria, over a cup of coffee that tasted like burnt toast, Stan went over the green sheet. The housing system wasn’t that complicated. Everyone in Consilience would have, in effect, two lives: prisoners one month, guards or whatever’s needed the next. Everyone would have an assigned Alternate. One detached residential dwelling would serve at least four people: in Month One the houses would be occupied by the civilians, and then in Month Two by the prisoners of Month One, who would take on the civilian roles and move into the houses. And so it would go, month after month, turn and turn about. It would halve the cost of living.

  Detached houses were reserved for couples and families. Each of these houses would have four lockers in the basement, one for each adult. The guard outfits—the Positron uniforms and the civvies worn off-duty—would be stored in the lockers during the months when their owners were doing a prisoner shift. The prisoner garb would be kept at the prison, as was appropriate. Upon arrival at Positron, the incoming prisoners would be equipped with orange boiler suits, and their in-transit civvies would be kept for them until the end of the month, when the orange wear would deposited at the check-in desk for cleaning.

  Unmarrieds would live in studio condos when not in prison. Teens would have two schools—one inside the prison, one outside it. Young children would stay with the mothers in the women’s wing. They’d have play schools in there, kindergartens, toddler dance classes.

  From time to time film crews would be sent in to take footage of the ideal life they would all be leading, to be shown outside Consilience, though it should be noted that no fraternizing with the crews would be permitted. The footage could be seen by them as well on their closed-circuit TV network. Music and movies would also be available, although, to avoid overexcitement, there would be no pornography or undue violence, and no rock or hip-hop. There would, however, be no limitation on string quartets, Bing Crosby, Doris Day, the Mills Brothers, or show tunes from vintage Hollywood musicals.

  * * *

  Now, listening to “Paper Doll” on his phone while unsnapping the rain cover on his scooter, Stan wonders how all that kiddie stuff is working out: the play schools in prison and so forth. But he doesn’t wonder much, because he and Charmaine don’t yet have children. For some reason they’ve both been hesitating. Those flirty, flirty guys, he hums to himself. At first he hated the music in Consilience, but he’s begun to find it oddly consoling. Doris Day is even kind of a turn-on.

  How does Charmaine pass the time away from him, when she’s inside the women’s wing at Positron? “We knit a lot,” she’s told him. “In the off-hours. And there are the vegetable gardens, and the cooking—we take turns at those daily things. And the laundry, of course. And then my special position, at the hospital. Chief Medications Administrator—it’s a responsibility, keeping track of everything. I’m never bored! The days just fly by!”

  “Do you miss me?” Stan asked her a week ago. “When you’re in there?” He’d never asked before.

  “Of course I miss you. Don’t be silly,” she said, kissing him on the nose. But a nose kiss wasn’t what he wanted. Do you hunger for me, do you burn for me? That’s what he’d like to ask. But he doesn’t dare ask, because he’s almost certain she would laugh.

  It’s not that they don’t have sex, it’s not that she isn’t willing; but it’s sex that she enacts, more or less like yoga, with careful breath control. What he wants is sex that can’t be helped. He wants helplessness. No no no, yes yes yes. That’s what he wants.

  * * *

  It’s a beautiful sunny day, not too hot for the first of August. Charmaine finds switchover days almost festive: when it’s not raining, the streets are full of people, smiling, greeting one another, some walking, some on scooters, the odd one in a golf cart. Now and then one of the dark Surveillance cars glides through them: there are more of those cars on switchover days.

  Some of the people are heading toward Positron, some coming away from it. They seem quite happy: having two lives means there’s always something different to look forward to. It’s like having a vacation every month. But which life is the vacation and which is work? Charmaine hardly knows.

  Making her way to the Consilience pharmacy on her pink-and-purple electric scooter, she checks her watch: she doesn’t have much time. She needs to key in at Positron by five-thirty at the latest, and it’s already three. She told Stan she had to do some ordering for the hospital: that’s why she was in a rush to leave the house. The month before last, her excuse was slipcovers—didn’t he agree about the slipcovers, weren’t they a drab color, shouldn’t they both go and view the selection and put in a requisition for something more cheerful? Look, she has some fabric swatches! A floral, or maybe an abstract motif?

  Anything along those lines and Stan zones out, and she can count o
n his not having heard a word she’s said. He’d notice her if she were to suddenly disappear, but he doesn’t register her much otherwise. Lately he’s been treating her like white noise, like the rivulet sound on their sleep machine. This would once have hurt her—did hurt her—but now it suits her fine.

  She parks the scooter in the lot behind the pharmacy, then walks around to the front. Already her heart is beating faster. She takes a breath, assumes her bustling, efficient pose, consults her little notebook as if there’s something written in it. Then she selects and orders a large box of gauze bandages, putting it on the hospital account. The bandages aren’t needed, but they’re also not remarkable: no one will be keeping track of gauze bandages, one box more or less, especially since keeping track of them happens to be her own job, every other month.

  She smiles in her perkiest manner at Bill Nairn, who’s putting in his last hour as pharmacist before shedding his white coat and assuming his orange outfit and taking up whatever role he plays inside the Positron walls. Bill smiles back, and they exchange remarks about the lovely weather, then goodbyes. She smiles again: she has such guileless teeth, asexual teeth, nothing fanged about them. She used to worry about looking so symmetrical, so blond, so Barbie, but she’s come to think of this as an asset. Her small teeth alarm no one: bland is good camouflage.

  She hurries back to the lot, and sure enough there’s a small envelope tucked in under the scooter seat. She palms it, fishtails out of the lot, makes it around the corner to a residential street, parks.

  They never use their Consilience-issue cell phones to arrange these meetings: it’s too risky, because you never know what the central IT people are tracking. The whole town is under a bell jar: communications can be exchanged inside it, but nothing gets in or out except through approved gateways. The message must be tightly controlled: the outside world must be assured that Consilience is working.

  And it is working, because look: safe streets, no homelessness, jobs for all. Though there were some bumps along the way. And those bumps had to be flattened out. But right now Charmaine doesn’t intend to dwell on those discouraging bumps, or on the nature of the flattening.

  She unfolds the paper, reads the address. She’ll dispose of the note by burning it, though not out here in the open: a woman on a scooter setting fire to something might attract notice. There aren’t any black cars in view, but it’s rumored they can see around corners.

  Today’s address is in a housing development left over from earlier times, some decade in the mid-twentieth century: one of the many relics from the town’s past. Consilience was once Beulah, founded in the late nineteenth century by a Quaker subset. Brotherly love was its mantra; its crest was a beehive, symbolizing cooperative labor. Its first industry was a beet-sugar mill; next came a furniture factory, then a corset-sewing company. Then came an automobile plant—one of those pre-Ford companies—then a camera film company, and finally, after some adroit lobbying and boosterism, a state correctional institution.

  But after the Second World War, the key industries had gradually faded and disappeared until nothing was left but a gutted downtown, several crumbling public buildings with white columns, and a lot of repossessed houses not even the banks could sell. And, of course, the correctional institution, which was where the inhabitants of Beulah had worked when they’d worked at all.

  But now, thinks Charmaine, it’s all different. Now it’s Consilience. Such an improvement! Already the gym has been renovated, for instance. And a whole bunch of houses are being brought up to standard—a fresh batch of volunteers will arrive any month now to fill them. Or maybe to fill the houses that aren’t so upgraded, such as the one she and Stan had lived in at first. There had been plumbing problems there. Luckily they’d been approved for a move, all four of them. She assumes the Alternates had moved as well, but maybe not. She hasn’t thought to ask Max about that. It isn’t the kind of thing they talk about.

  * * *

  Every month it’s a new address: better that way. Luckily there’s a wide selection of vacant houses in Consilience, left over from the period when the industries were failing and the lenders were foreclosing and people were fleeing for what they hoped would be more affluent locations, and then from that later period when so many houses were repossessed, only to stand empty because no one wanted to buy them.

  Max is a member of the Consilience Dwellings Reclamation Team when he’s not living in a cell at Positron. They’re the ones who inspect the houses, then tag them either for wrecking-ball destruction and leveling for parkland or for renovation and rehabitation, so he’s in a position to know which ones really are vacant and which ones only look it: upgrading has been sporadic, and not everyone lives in a house as nice as Charmaine’s.

  Max knows what style of interior decoration Charmaine prefers: she likes pretty wallpaper, with rosebuds or daisies. But in each house they’ve used, the vandals had been there long before them, from the time when they roamed from town to town and from house to house, smashing windows and bottles and drinking and drugging and sleeping on the floor and using the bathtubs as outhouses, back before they fenced Consilience in, and classified and sorted the vandals, and dealt with them. And they’d left their marks on the floral wallpaper: gang tags, and other things. Short, hard words, written in spray paint, markers, lipstick, and, a couple of times, something brown and crusted that might have been shit.

  “Read to me,” Max had whispered into her ear, in the first house, the first time.

  “I can’t,” she said. “I don’t want to.”

  “Yes, you do,” Max said. “You do want to.” And she must have wanted to, because now those words were spilling out of her mouth. He laughed, picked her up, pushed his hands up under her skirt. She never wears jeans to these meetings, and that’s why. The next minute they were down on the bare floorboards.

  “Wait!” she said, gasping with pleasure. “Undo the buttons!”

  “I can’t wait,” he said, and it was true, he couldn’t wait, and because he couldn’t, neither could she. It was like the copy on the back of the most lurid novel in the limited-titles library at Positron. Swept away. Drugged with desire. Like a cyclone. Helpless moaning. All of that.

  She gathered the buttons up afterwards, pocketed them. Only two had come off. She sewed them on again, later, after her stint in Positron, before returning to the house where she lived with Stan. She did love Stan, but it was different. A different kind of love. Trusting, sedate. It went with pet fish, in fishbowls—not that they had one of those—and with cats, perhaps. And with eggs for breakfast, poached, snuggled inside their individual poachers. And with babies.

  She’d been a tidy child, with sickly parents she’d had to tend—they’d both come from one of the cancer towns built on buried industrial waste—and then she’d been an orphan. She’d had to make her way; it had been precarious, thin ice, but the trick was to keep gliding. She liked Stan because she liked solid ground under her feet, non-reflective surfaces, movies with neat endings. Closure, they called it. She’d opted for Chief Medical Administrator when it was offered to her because it involved shelves and inventories. Or that’s all she thought it would be; but there are depths. She’s getting proficient at them.

  She shouldn’t have left that note under the refrigerator. The one that said, I’m starved, with the lipstick kiss. She keeps the lipstick in her pink locker; she’s only ever used it on that one note. Stan would never put up with her wearing a garish hue like that—Purple Passion is its name, on the tube, such bad taste. Which is why she bought it: that’s how she thinks of her feelings toward Max. Purple. Passionate. Garish. And, yes, bad taste. To a man like that, for whom you have feelings like that, you can say all sorts of things, I’m starved being the mildest of them. Words she would never have used, before. Vandal words. Sometimes she can’t believe what comes out of her mouth; not to mention what goes into it.

  Stan found the note. Stupid not to have thought of the possibility. Stupid on many levels,
because she’d left the note for Max, but Max’s wife might have found it instead. Jocelyn, that was her name.

  Or that was what Max said her name was. His name wasn’t Max, of course, any more than hers was Jasmine. By common accord they hadn’t used their Consilience names; they’d decided on that the first time, without even talking about it, as they’d decided so much. It was as if they could read each other’s minds. No, not minds: each other’s mindlessness. When she’s with Max, she throws away her mind.

  That first occasion had been an accident. Charmaine had stayed behind at the house after Stan had left, finishing the final tidy, as she’d always done in those days. “You go on ahead,” she used to tell him, to get him out of her hair, which was pulled back into her housekeeping ponytail. She liked her cleanup routine, she liked to put on her pinafore apron and her rubber gloves and tick the items off her mental list without being interrupted. Rugs, tubs, sinks. Towels, toilets, sheets. Anyway Stan hated the sound of the vacuum. “I’ll just make up the bed,” she’d say. “Off you go, hon. See you in a month. Have a good one.”

  And that’s what she was doing—making up the bed, humming to herself—when Max walked into the room. He startled her. Cornered her: there was only the one door. A thinnish man, wiry. Not unusually tall. A lot of black hair.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “Sorry. I’m early. I live here.” He took a step forward.