I’m Starved for You (Kindle Single)

by Margaret Atwood

  Cut it, Stan, he tells himself. Block it off. Suck it up. He’s getting way too obsessive. There must be some drug he can take to get rid of this waking dream. No, this waking nightmare: endless tantalization, with no release. Maybe he could ask Charmaine about it: she works in Medical, she could get her hands on something. But how can he explain his needs to her? So crisp, so blue and white, so baby-powder-scented. She wouldn’t understand anything so twisted. Not to mention so plain bone-ass dumb.

  Maybe he needs to spend some time in the woodworking shop, after his poultry shift. Saw something in two. Pound a few nails.

  * * *

  Charmaine slips her green smock on over her orange basics. There’s another procedure scheduled for this afternoon. They always do them in the afternoons; they like to avoid the darkness of night. That way it’s more cheerful for everybody, her included.

  She checks to make sure she has her mask, and her surgical gloves: yes, in her pocket. First she needs to get the key from the monitoring desk that sits at the conjunction of three corridors. There’s no receptionist in the flesh at that desk, only a head box, but at least there’s a head in the box. Or a canned image of a head. Whether it’s live or not is anyone’s guess: they do those things so well nowadays. Maybe soon they’ll have robots carrying out the procedures and she’ll no longer be required for them. Would that be a good thing? No. Surely the procedure needs the human factor. It’s more respectful.

  “Could I have the key, please,” she says to the head. It’s best to treat the heads as if they’re real, just in case they are.

  “Login, please,” says the head, smiling. She, or it, is an attractive though square-jawed brunette with bangs and small hoop earrings. The heads change every few days, perhaps to give the illusion that they exist in real time. Charmaine can’t stop herself from wondering: can the head see her? She enters her code, verifies it with her thumb, stares at the iris reader beside the head box until it blinks.

  “Thank you,” says the head. A plastic key slides out of a slot at the bottom of the box. Charmaine pockets it. “Here is your procedure for today.” A slip of paper emerges from a second slot: room number, Positron name, age, last dosage of sedative and when administered. The man must be pretty doped up. It’s better that way.

  She keys herself into the dispensary, locates the cabinet, codes its door open. There’s the vial, all ready for her, and the needle. She snaps on her gloves. The man is attached to his bed at five points, as they always are now, so thrashing around, kicking, and biting are not options. He’s groggy but awake, which is good. Charmaine is in favor of awake: it would be wrong to carry out the procedure on someone who’s asleep, because they would miss out. On what exactly, she’s not sure; but on something that’s nicer than it otherwise would be. He looks up at her: despite the drugs, he’s clearly frightened. He tries to speak: a thickened sound comes out. Uhuhuhuh … They always make that sound; she finds it a little painful.

  “Hello,” she says. “Isn’t it a lovely day? Look at all that sunshine! Who could be down on a day like this? Nothing bad is going to happen to you.” This is true: from all that’s been observed, the experience appears to be an ecstatic one. The bad part happens to her, because she’s the one who has to worry about whether what she’s doing is right. Granted, it’s only the incorrigibles, the ones they haven’t been able to turn around, who are brought in for the procedure. The troublemakers, the ones who’d ruin Consilience if they had the chance. It’s a last resort, or so she has been assured. Most of the procedures are men, but not all. Though none of the ones she’s done have been women, yet.

  She leans over, kisses this man on the forehead. A young man, smooth-skinned, golden under the tattoos. Such a waste.

  She leaves the mask in her pocket. She’s supposed to wear it for the procedure to protect against germs, but she never does: a mask would be scary. No doubt she’s being monitored via some hidden camera or other, but so far no one has reprimanded her about this minor breach of protocol. It’s not easy for them to find people willing to carry out the procedure, they’d told her: dedicated people, sincere people. But someone has to do it, for the good of all.

  The first time she attempted the forehead kiss, there was a lunge of the head, an attempt at snapping. He’d drawn blood. She requested that a neck restraint be added. And it was.

  She strokes the man’s head, smiles with her deceptive teeth. She hopes she appears to him like an angel: an angel of mercy. Because isn’t she one? Such men will never be happy where they are—in Positron, in Consilience, maybe even on the entire Planet Earth. So she’s providing the alternative for him. The escape. Either he’ll go to a better place, or else to nowhere. Whichever it is, he’s about to have a great time getting there. Recently she’s had a tempting thought—What if I gave him a last blow job? Sort of like a last meal. But enough is enough, and he’ll soon be blissful without anything extra.

  “Have a wonderful trip,” she says to him. She pats his arm, then turns her back so he can’t see her sliding the needle into the vial and drawing up the contents.

  “Off we go,” she says. She finds the vein, slips in the needle.

  Uhuhuh, he says. He strains upward. His eyes are horrified, but not for long. His face relaxes; he turns his gaze from her to the ceiling, the white blank ceiling, which is no longer white and blank for him. He smiles. She times the procedure: five minutes of ecstasy. It’s more than a lot of people get in their whole lifetimes.

  Then he’s unconscious. Then he stops breathing. The heart goes last.

  Textbook. If anything, better. It’s good to be good at what you do.

  She codes in the numbers that signal a successful termination, drops the needle into the recycling bin—not much sense in having totally sterile needles for the procedure, so they get reused. She peels off the gloves, contributes them to the Save Our Plastics box, then leaves the room. Others will now arrive, do whatever is done. The death will be recorded as “cardiac arrest,” which is true so far as it goes. What will happen to the body? Not cremation; that’s a wasteful power draw. And nobody in any form, dead or alive, departs through the gates of Consilience.

  There’ve been rumors about organ harvesting, but wouldn’t they want them brain-dead and on a drip? The fresher the better, as everyone knows. There’s also been veiled talk about protein-enriched livestock feed, but Charmaine can’t believe that.

  There are just some things it’s better not to think about.

  Tonight she’ll join the knitting circle, as usual. They’re doing little cotton hats for newborns. “Nice day?” they’ll say to her. “Oh, a perfect day,” she’ll reply.

  * * *

  It’s mid-September. The heat’s already gone. In the evenings, when Stan sometimes goes for a stroll around the block, he wears a jacket. A few leaves have fallen on the lawn already; he rakes them up in the early mornings, before breakfast. Not many people around at that hour. Just the odd black Surveillance car, gliding past silently as a shark. Is it protocol to give them a friendly wave? Stan has decided against it: better to pretend they’re invisible. Anyway, who’s inside? They may be remote-controlled, like drones.

  After breakfast—poached eggs if he’s lucky, they’re one of his favorites—and then a goodbye peck from Charmaine, he goes to his civilian job, working at the electric-scooter repair depot. It was a good choice: he’s always liked tinkering with his hands, messing around with machines and their digital programs. He once took apart the cheap musical toaster some joker had given them for a wedding present and rebuilt it to play “Steam Heat.” Charmaine thought that was cute.

  Each scooter has a number, but no name attached, because it wouldn’t do for a driver to know the identity of the other user. There would be grudges held, there would be arguments: Who made the dent? Who scratched the finish? What kind of a dickhead would let its battery run down, or leave it out in the rain? It’s not as if the things don’t have covers! The scooters belong to Consilience, not to any one pers
on. Or any two people. But it’s amazing how possessive you can get about this shit.

  The scooter he’s working on is the one Charmaine drives: pink with purple stripes. The scooters are all two-tone, to match the two lockers of their drivers. His own—his own and Max’s—is green and red. It’s infuriating to think of that bastard Max driving around on the scooter, with his ass-end clamped onto the very same scooter seat that Stan thinks of as his own. But better not to dwell on that. He needs to keep his cool.

  Charmaine has been having trouble with her scooter for a couple of days now. The darn thing—that’s how she puts it—has been sputtering at start-up, then conking out after a few blocks. Maybe something about the solar hookup?

  “I’ll take it in for you,” Stan offered. “To the depot. Work on it there.”

  “Oh thanks, hon, would you?” she said airily. Maybe not as appreciatively as once, or is he imagining that? “You’re a doll,” she added, a bit absentmindedly. She was cleaning the stove at the time: such chores distract her.

  He’d spent a couple of evenings in the garage fixing those short-outs so they were operating just right. Now he’s got the scooter all to himself, down at the depot. In two more weeks—on the first day of October—it will be turned over to Jasmine.

  Why has it taken him so long to figure this out? This method? When it’s been right in front of him all this time! He’ll install a little GPS signaler, the one he’s abstracted from his cell phone—he’ll report it broken—and pick up its signals on the recorder he’s managed to cobble together out of some chips he’s filched from the poultry operation’s egg-routing tech. Now he’ll be able to track Jasmine’s movements as she flows around in Consilience. He’ll be in the slammer in October, but when he comes out on November 1 he’ll be able to reconstruct her pathways. And eventually those pathways will lead him to a point of intersection—a place where he might see her, or even ambush her. He’ll bump into her in the supermarket aisle, or what passes for a supermarket in Consilience. He’ll linger on a street corner. He’ll crouch behind a shrub, on a vacant lot. Then, before she knows it, he’ll have his mouth on those cherry-flavored lips, and she’ll crumple; she won’t be able to resist, any more than paper can resist a lit match. Whoosh! Up in flames! Ring of fire! What a picture. He can barely stand it.

  You’re nuts, he tells himself. You are a freaking maniac. You might get caught. Then what, smartass? Off to the hospital for your so-called health problems? Haven’t you guessed what happens to lunatics like you?

  Nevertheless, he proceeds.

  The pink seat of the scooter is the best place to hide it. He cuts a tiny slit in the fake leather, low down at the side, where it won’t be noticed. There. Done.

  “Good as new,” he tells Charmaine. She exclaims with joy, a cooing, ooing sound he used to find provocative but now finds sickly sweet, then gives him a perfunctory hug.

  “I’m so grateful,” she tells him. But not grateful enough by a long shot. When he crawls on top of her that night and tries a few new gambits, hoping for more than her limited repertoire of little gasping breaths followed by a sigh, she starts to giggle and says he’s tickling. Which is not very fucking encouraging. He might as well be porking a chicken.

  But never mind. Now that he can follow Jasmine, divine her every move, read her mind, she’s almost within reach. Meanwhile he can practice by tracking Charmaine around on the scooter. It will be boring, because where can she go? The bakery where she works, the shops, the house, the bakery, the shops. But he’ll be able to tell whether his GPS system is working or not.

  * * *

  It’s already the 1st of October. Where has the time gone? Charmaine lies tangled in her shed clothes on the floor of the vacant house—quite a good one this time, slated for reno rather than demolition. The wallpaper is subdued, an embossed ivy-leaf design in eggshell and truffle. The writing stands out on it: dark red paint, black marker.

  “You’re such a surprise,” Max says to her. Murmurs, in her ear, which he’s nibbling. Will this be a two-in-a-row day, she wonders? She arrived at the vacant house early, hoping it would be. “Cool as a cucumber,” Max continues, “but then … That husband of yours is one lucky guy.”

  “I’m not the same with him,” she says.

  “Tell me how you are, with him,” says Max. “No. Tell me how you’d be with a perfect stranger.” He wants her to turn him on by describing mild atrocities. A few ropes, modified screaming. It’s a game they sometimes play, now that it’s fall and they know each other better.

  “Max,” she says. “I need us to be serious.”

  “I am serious,” says Max, moving his mouth down her neck.

  “No, listen. I think he knows something.”

  “How could he?” says Max. His head comes up: he’s alarmed. If Stan walked in through the front door, Max would be out the window like a shot. That’s what he’d do, she knows by now; that’s the realistic truth. She shouldn’t scare him too much, because she doesn’t want him fleeing, not before there’s a need. She wants to clutch him against her: the thought of letting him go makes her sadder than anything.

  “I don’t think he knows,” she says. “Not knows. As such. But he looks at me funny.”

  “Is that all?” says Max. “Hey. I look at you funny, too. Who wouldn’t?” He takes hold of her hair, turns her head, gives her a brief kiss. “Are you worried?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe not. He has a temper,” she says. “He might get violent.” That has an effect on Max.

  “I would,” he says. “Hey. I would love to get violent with you.” He raises his hand; she flinches and gives a shriek that is half a laugh. Now they’re entwined again, snarled up in random cloth, falling down into namelessness.

  But she is worried. What if Stan really does know? And what if he cares? He could get ugly, but how ugly? It’s been on her mind for a while. If she were to save just a little from each vial for the procedures—if she were to pocket one of the needles instead of depositing it for recycling—would anyone notice? She’d have to do the procedure while Stan was asleep, so he’d be denied a beatific exit. Which would be unfair. But there’s a downside to everything.

  What would she do with the body? That would be a big problem. Dig a hole in the lawn? Someone would see. She has a wild thought of stashing it in her pink locker, supposing she could even drag it down there: Stan is quite heavy. Also she might have to cut part of him off to make him fit in, though the lockers are quite big. But if she left him there it would make a horrible stench, and the next time Max’s wife, Jocelyn, came down to the cellar to open her purple locker she’d be sure to smell it.

  Max has never said much about Jocelyn, despite Charmaine’s gentle pestering. At the outset she’d vowed never to be jealous, because isn’t she herself the one Max truly wants? And she isn’t jealous: curiosity isn’t the same as jealousy.

  But whenever she asks, Max stonewalls her. “You don’t need to know,” he says. She pictures Jocelyn as a tall, rangy, aristocratic woman with her hair skinned back from her head, like a ballerina or a schoolteacher in old movies; sometimes she has the feeling that Jocelyn knows about her and is contemptuous of her. Worse: that Max has told Jocelyn about her, that they both think she’s a credulous pushover and a boring little slut, that they laugh together about her. But that’s paranoid.

  She doesn’t think Max would be much help in the matter of dead Stan. Yes, he’s overpoweringly sexy, but he doesn’t have willpower. He’d leave her holding the bag, the bagful of danger. The bagful of Stan, because she’d have to put Stan into a bag of some kind, she wouldn’t be able to look at him in cold blood that way. Lying inert and defenseless. So maybe she does love him.

  “Roll over,” says Max. “Open your eyes.” At some moments he likes to be watched.

  Has she been a fool? Yes. Has it been worth it? Yes.

  Or yes right now.

  * * *

  Every three months there’s a Town Meeting. Not that anyone actually meets
up, not that they go anywhere in person: they watch on closed-circuit TV, whether they’re inside Positron or out of it. The Town Meeting is to let everyone know how well the Consilience experiment is doing. Their Personal Healthy Interaction scores, their food-production goals, their Dwelling Maintenance rates: things like that. Pep talks, helpful feedback. Admonishments kept to a minimum, a few new rules added in at the end.

  These Town Meetings emphasize the positives, as a rule, and this one is no exception. Incidents of violence are way down—a graph pops onto the screen—and egg production is up. A new process will soon be introduced at Poultry: headless chickens nourished through tubes, which has been shown to decrease anxiety and increase meat-production efficiencies, and it eliminates cruelty to animals, which is just the sort of multiple win that Positron has come to stand for. Shout-out to the Brussels Sprouts team, which has exceeded its quotas two months in a row! Let’s raise the bar on rabbit production in the second half of November, there are some great new recipes coming soon. More attention to the sorting for the Waste Recycling program, please, it won’t work unless we all pull together. And so on and so on.

  Headless chickens, no way, thinks Stan; but he’s not taking it all in, since he downed three beers before this started: the Consilience brewery is up and running, the stuff tastes like piss, though it’s better than nothing.

  He lets his attention drift; Charmaine, sitting beside him on the sofa, chirps up with “Oh, the eggs are doing well! That must be you, hon!” And the violent incidents must be you, thinks Stan. They’ve never discussed the details of the work she does at the hospital, but he’s aware of the general idea. He used to be proud of her for doing this work—it takes guts—but lately he finds himself chilled by it. Jasmine, for all her sexual fervor, or possibly because of it, would never be able to follow through on such operations. She’s ruthless in her sexual demands, but she’s no executioner.