I’m Starved for You (Kindle Single)

by Margaret Atwood

  “So do I,” Charmaine said. They looked at each other.

  “Pink locker?” Another step.

  “Yes. You’re the red one.” Backing away. “I’m almost finished here, and then you can …”

  “No hurry,” he said. He took another step. “What do you keep inside that pink locker of yours? I’ve often wondered.”

  Had he made a joke? “Maybe you’d like some coffee,” she said. “In the kitchen. I cleaned the machine, but I can always … It’s not very good coffee, though.” Charmaine, you’re babbling, she told herself.

  “I’m good,” he said. “I’d rather stay here. I like the way you always make up the bed before you leave. And put out the towels. Like a hotel.”

  “It’s okay, I kind of like doing it, I think it looks …” Now she was up against the night table. I need to get out of this room, she told herself. Maybe she could get around him. She stepped to the side and forward. “I’m sorry, I have to leave now,” she said, in what she hoped was a neutral tone. But he put his hand on her shoulder.

  He stepped forward again. “I like your apron,” he said. “Or whatever it is. Does it tie at the back?”

  The next minute—how did it happen?—her pinafore apron was on the floor, her hair had come loose—had he done that?—and they were kissing, and his hands were under her freshly ironed shirt. “We’ve got a couple of hours,” he said, breaking away. “But we can’t stay here. My wife … Look, this place …” He scribbled an address. “Go there now.”

  “I’ll just tuck in the sheet,” she said. “It would look wrong otherwise.” He smiled at that.

  She did tuck in the sheet, though not as tightly as usual, because her hands were shaking. Then she did what he said.

  That was their first vacant house. It was dim, there were dead flies, the lights didn’t work, nor the water; the walls had been cracked and stained, but none of that mattered that first time, because she wasn’t noticing those kinds of details.

  After that she’d scootered straight to Positron, checked in, handed over her civvies, taken the mandatory shower, put on the orange suit. After dinner in the women’s hall with the others—it was roast pork with Brussels sprouts—she’d joined her knitting circle as usual, and chatted about this and that, also as usual. But she was sleepwalking.

  Then it was into the double cell with Gilly, the woman she shared with, and the reassuring clang of the door and click of the lock. It felt safe to be caged in, now that she knew she had this other person inside her who was capable of escapades and contortions she’d never known about before. It wasn’t Stan’s fault, it was the fault of chemistry. People said chemistry when they meant something else, such as personality, but she does mean chemistry. She sees a lot of it in her work. Atoms mixed together, pills with warning labels, seductive compounds. Chemistry can be merciless.

  She slept that night as if drunk. The next day she went about her hospital duties as briskly as ever, hiding behind the grillwork of her smile.

  Ever since then she’s been waiting: inside Positron, while Max inspects vacant dwellings in Consilience; then in the house with Stan, working at the bakery during the days. She does the pies, and the cinnamon buns. Then there’s an hour or two being Jasmine, with Max, on switchover days, while he is going in and she is coming out, or vice versa. Then more waiting. It’s like being stretched so thin you feel you’ll break the very next minute; but she hasn’t broken yet.

  Though maybe leaving the note was breakage of a sort. Or the beginning of it. She should have had better control.

  Stan read the note. He must have read it and then put it back, because Max described where he’d found it, and it was a lot farther over to the right than where she’d stashed it. Ever since then, Stan has been so preoccupied he might as well be deaf and blind. When he makes love—that’s how Charmaine thinks of it, as distinct from whatever it is that happens with Max—when Stan makes love, it isn’t to her. Or not his usual idea of her. He’s almost angry.

  “Let go,” Stan said to her once. “Just fucking let go!”

  “What did you mean, ‘let go?’ ” she asked him afterwards, in her puzzled, clueless voice, the voice that had once been her only voice. “Let go of what? What are you talking about?” He said “Never mind” and “Sorry,” and seemed ashamed of himself. She did nothing to discourage that. She wants him to feel ashamed of himself, because such feelings of his are a part of her disguise.

  He called her Jasmine once, by mistake. What if she’d answered? It would have been a giveaway. But she caught herself, and pretended she hadn’t heard.

  Maybe Stan has fallen in love with her note, with its ill-advised purple kiss. Is that funny, or is it dangerous? What if Stan goes off the rails? He has a temper; he’s been known to throw glassware, swear at things when they don’t work the way he wants: the hedge pruner, the lawn trimmer. He wouldn’t enjoy the discovery that there is no Jasmine really. Or not the way he thinks.

  She needs to break it off with Max. She needs to keep them both safe—Stan as well as Max—and herself, too. But just not yet. Surely she can permit herself a few more moments of whatever it is. Not happiness, it isn’t that.

  It would have been better if Jocelyn had found that note. What would she have thought? Nothing too unsafe. She wouldn’t have known who “Max” was, because he never uses that name with her. For her, “Max” and “Jasmine” would just be the Alternates, living in the house whenever she and her husband were in Positron. She would have thought that Stan and Charmaine were Max and Jasmine. What else could she possibly have thought?

  So whew! Charmaine tells herself. Looks like you got away with it, so far.

  You said what? She hears Max’s voice in her head, the way she often does when he isn’t there. She invents him, she knows it; she makes up things for him to say. Though it doesn’t feel like making up, it feels as if he’s really talking to her. Whew? Like a vintage funny-paper guy? Baby, you’re so fucking retro you’re cool! Now I’m gonna make you say something better. Ask me for it. Bend over.

  Anything, she answers. Anything inside this non-house, inside this nothing space, a space that doesn’t exist, between these two people with no real names. Oh anything. Already she’s abject.

  Here it is now, today’s address. Max’s scooter is already parked, discreetly, four derelict doors away. She can barely make her weak-kneed way up the front steps. If anyone were watching, they’d think she was crippled.

  * * *

  Stan clocks in at Positron, takes a shower, changes into the boiler suit, lines up for the routine haircut. They like to preserve an appearance of authenticity at Positron, though the shorn look for convicts is archaic—it belongs with the head lice of olden times—and they no longer do the full buzz: just short enough so that when it’s time to leave again the hair’s a respectable civilian length.

  “Have a good month?” asks the barber, whose name is Clint. That’s what it says on the tag, and that’s how Stan knows him. Clint has a big T on his front because he’s playing the part of a Trusty. He’s not one of the original criminals: you’d never let a dangerous offender anywhere near those scissors and razors. Outside, when he’s a civilian, Clint does tree pruning. Before he came to Consilience he was an actuary, but he’d lost that job to a computer.

  It’s a familiar story, though nobody talks much about what they were before Consilience. Backward glances are not encouraged. Stan himself doesn’t dwell on his insurance-claims interlude, back when people thought they could sidestep their debts by setting fire to things. When that caved in, he’d leapt from job to job as businesses collapsed in his wake. He’d skip-traced, delivered parcels, driven taxis, with Charmaine assuring him that something better would turn up soon. They were both unemployed, though him more so, when the Consilience opportunity turned up. It was, as they said, a way forward.

  Clint must have learned the barbering inside: they’d all had to apprentice, in order to gain a practical skill that would be of use inside Positron
.

  “Yeah, good month, can’t complain,” says Stan. “You?”

  “Terrific,” says Clint. “Did a little work on my house. Went to the committee, got permission, painted the kitchen. Primrose yellow, gave the place a lift. Northern exposure. Wife was pleased.”

  “What’s she do, inside?” Stan asks.

  “Works in the hospital. Surgeon,” says Clint. “Heart, mostly. Yours?”

  “Hospital too, Chief Medical Administrator,” says Stan. He feels a twinge of pride in Charmaine: despite her pink locker, she’s no airhead. It’s a serious position, it comes with power. You need to be dependable, you need to be upbeat; also stable, and not given to moping.

  “Must be a tough job sometimes,” says Clint.

  “Was at first,” says Stan. “Got to her a bit. Things are getting weeded out more, now.”

  “You’d need a cool head,” says Clint. “Not sentimental.”

  This calls for no more than a yup. Clint decides on a tactful, snippety-snipping silence, which is fine with Stan. He wants to concentrate on Jasmine, Jasmine of the fuchsia kiss.

  He closes his eyes, sees himself as one of those dorky video-game hero princes of his childhood, slashing his questing way through swamps full of tentacled maneating plants, annihilating giant leeches, hacking through the poison brambles to the iron castle where Jasmine lies asleep, guarded by a dragon, the dragon of Max. Shortly to be awakened by a kiss, the kiss of Stan. Trouble is she’s already awake, she’s super awake, having sex with the dragon. Him and his big scaly tail.

  Bad reverie. He opens his eyes.

  Who is Max? He could be someone Stan sees often without knowing it. He could be a con supervised by Stan during the odd months, he could be a guard locking him in and saying Stay in line during the even ones. He might even be Clint: is that possible? Surely not. Clint is an older guy, with graying hair and a paunch.

  “There you go,” says Clint. He holds up a mirror so Stan can see the back of his own head. There’s a bristly roll of fat taking shape at the nape of his neck, but only if he leans his head back. When he finds Jasmine he must remember to keep his head upright. Or forward a little. She might put her hand there, a hand with long, strong fingers tipped with nails the color of arterial blood. At the mere thought he feels himself flushing.

  Clint is whisking off the prickly hairs. “Thanks,” says Stan. “See you in two.” Two months—one in, one out—until his next haircut. Before then he’ll be connected with Jasmine, whatever it takes.

  He joins the lineup for lunch, which is always the first thing that happens after the haircut. Positron food is generally excellent, because if their team orders up crap for you, you’ll dish out crap to them the next month. It’s amazing how many four-star amateur chefs have sprung into being. Today it’s chicken dumplings, one of his favorites. It’s an added satisfaction that he himself has made a contribution to the production of the chickens in his Positron role as Poultry Supervisor.

  Lunch hour used to be stressful, back when there were more bona fide criminals in the place. Drug traders, gang enforcers, grifters and con artists, assorted thieves. Seriously shaved heads, deeply engraved tats that hooked the wearer to affiliates and advertised feuds. There were shovings in the lineup, there were glarings, there were standoffs, there were verbal obscenities: Stan learned some ingenious combinations of words he would never have put together himself, and you had to admire the inventiveness. (Pus, cock, mother, dog, strawberry jam: how did that one go, exactly?) Scuffles broke out over muffins, plates of scrambled eggs were shoved into faces. Things might escalate: stompings, the cracking of bones.

  Then the guards would muscle in, but only some of them had been real guards, so these interventions lacked authority. Tramplings took place, kickings, punchings, chokings, scaldings even, followed by retribution behind the scenes: mysterious knifings in the showers, mysterious puncture wounds traced to double-pronged barbecue forks lifted from the kitchen, mysterious concussions caused by men somehow banging their heads repeatedly on rocks, out in the market-garden area, among the sheltering rows of tomato plants. In those early days, Stan hunkered down and kept his mouth shut and tried to be as invisible as possible, knowing he lacked the skill set for such hardcore games.

  The disturbances caused by the criminal elements were a threat to the grand Consilience experiment. The original thinking had been that the real criminals would be sprinkled among the non-criminals now making up the bulk of the prisoners, which was supposed to have an ameliorating effect on them. Not only that, but they too would be let out every second month to take their turns as civilian inhabitants of Consilience, doing town-side tasks or acting as guards at Positron. This would give them an experience they might never have had before—namely, a job—and would also earn them respect from others and a place in the community, leading to a newfound self-respect. Having prisoners act as guards and the reverse would be positive all round. The guards would be less likely to abuse their authority, as it would soon be their turn to be under lock and key. And the prisoners would have an incentive for good behavior, since violent acting out would attract retaliation. Also, there was no longer an upside to criminality. Gang dominance got you no material goods, and you couldn’t fence anything: who’d want to buy stuff that was replicated in all the other furnished houses? There were no illicit substances that could be bootlegged or pushed, no rackets that could be run. That was the official theory.

  But it seemed some criminals wanted to throw their weight around just for the hell of it: top dog was top dog, even if there was no payoff. Gangs formed, non-criminals were intimidated by criminals or else drawn into circles of dark power they found newly appealing. Under pressure, folks ratted out their neighbors, revealing town-side names and addresses. There were acts of revenge: home invasions, trashing-and-smashing parties, gang rapes. At one moment there was a threat of wholesale insurrection, with hostages taken and ears cut off. The outside forces could always turn off the power supply and the water, but then the innocent would suffer and the grand Consilience experiment would go down in flames, way too publicly. The model would be judged worthless. It would be scrapped, and its political sponsors disgraced.

  An armed unit from outside was sent in to restore order, and during a few weeks of tense lockdown and door-to-door searches, and amid promises of forgive and forget for the rest of them, the worst ringleaders disappeared. Consilience was a closed system—once in, nobody went out—so where had they gone? “Transferred to another wing” was the official version. Or else “health problems.” Rumors as to their actual fates began to circulate, in furtive hints and nods. Behavior improved dramatically.

  * * *

  Lunch completed, Stan has a brief rest in his cell; then, once the chicken dumplings have settled, he works out in the weights room, concentrating on his core strength and his love handles. Then it’s time for his shift at the poultry facility.

  Positron has four kinds of animals—cows, pigs, rabbits, and chickens. It also has extensive greenhouses that stand on the sites of demolished buildings, and several acres of apple trees in addition to the outdoor market gardens. These, and the soybean and perennial-wheat fields, are supposed to produce the fresh food, both for Positron and for Consilience at large. Not only fresh, but preserved, and not only foods, but drink: soon there will be a brewery. Some items are brought in from outside—quite a few items, in fact—but that state of affairs is viewed as temporary: in time, Consilience will be self-sustaining. Except for paper products, and plastics, and fuel, and sugar, and bananas, and …

  But still, think of the savings in other areas. Such as chickens. The chickens have been an unqualified success. They’re plump and tasty, they breed like mice, eggs roll out of them with clockwork regularity. They eat the leafy leftovers from the vegetables, and the table scraps from Positron, and the chopped-up remnants of slaughtered animals. The pigs eat the same sorts of things, only more of them. The cows and the rabbits are still vegetarian.

&nb
sp; But Stan has nothing to do with the cows and pigs and rabbits, only the chickens. These live in wire cages, but are let out for a run twice a day, which is supposed to improve their morale. Their heating and light are run by a computer inside a little shed, which Stan checks periodically: there was a malfunction once that almost resulted in roast chicken, but Stan knew enough to be able to reprogram and save the day. The eggs are collected via ingenious chutes and funnels with a digital program counting them, so Stan doesn’t have to bother about that part. Mainly he spends his four-hour shift supervising the afternoon outing, breaking up the squabbles, and monitoring the combs for poor health.

  It’s a make-work job, he knows that. He suspects that each chicken has a chip implanted in it, with the real supervision done that way, in a roomful of automated chicken snoopers recording numbers on flow charts and graphs. But he finds the routine soothing.

  In earlier days—during the semi-reign of the run-amok criminals, and before the authorities had felt the need for spyware cameras overlooking the poultry facility—Stan got daily visitations during his shifts from men inside Positron, his fellow prisoners-for-a-month. What they wanted was a short time alone with a chicken. They were willing to trade for it. In return, Stan would be offered protection from the gang thuggery that was then running rampant.

  “You want to what?” he asked the first time. The man had spelled it out: he wanted to have sex with a chicken. It didn’t hurt the chicken, he’d done it before, it was normal, lots of guys did it, and chickens didn’t talk. A guy got very horny in here with no outlets, right? And it was no fair that Stan was keeping the chickens all to himself, and if he didn’t unlock that cage his life might not be so pleasant, supposing he was allowed to keep it, because he might end up as a chicken substitute, like the fag he probably was.

  Stan got the message. He’d allowed the chicken assignations. What did that make him? A chicken pimp. Better that than dead.

  Strolling between the rows of cages now, listening to the soothing clucks of contented hens, smelling the familiar ammonia scent of chicken shit, he wonders if he’s ashamed of himself, and discovers that he isn’t. Worse, he ponders maybe giving it a try himself, which might do something toward erasing his mania, wiping the image of Jasmine off his brain. But there were the surveillance cameras: a man could look very undignified with a chicken stuck onto him like a marshmallow on a stick. Most likely it wouldn’t work as an exorcism: he’d only start having daydreams about Jasmine in feathers.