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
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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 main 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-blistering 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.

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 on 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.

“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.

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.

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 person. 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.

And there’s something else about Charmaine that’s been bothering him. He’s tracked her via the scooter, and everything’s normal until switchover days—she bustles here and there, to the bakery, to the shops, to the house. But then, on the first day of each month, she’s been making detours. It’s to a different house each time, and—he’s checked the addresses—a different vacant house. What’s she doing? Checking out real estate? Is she in nesting mode? Is she going to start pushing for them to get a transfer, a move into a bigger house, which she’ll then fill with cackling little kids? That’s most likely her game plan, though she hasn’t brought up the subject lately. If so, he is negatively thrilled. Kids aside, they’ve transferred once before, and it was a lot of questions and paperwork.

He knows where Jasmine goes, too, during her time as a Consilience citizen: she goes to the gym. She must work there. How lithe and toned and strong her body must be. That alarms him slightly: she might put up a struggle when he surges out of the swimming pool like a powerful giant squid and wraps her in his wet, naked arms. But she won’t struggle for long.

He’s taken to going to the gym himself, checking around. Not that she’d be there: she’d be in Positron. Still, he keeps expecting to find signs of her: a dropped handkerchief, a glass slipper, some fuchsia bikini briefs. No, maybe not those. Sometimes, when he’s loitering, he feels watched; maybe by the shadowy face at the window one floor up, overlooking the gym’s swimming pool, where the supervisors are said to work. It makes him nervous: he doesn’t want to be singled out, he doesn’t want to be of interest. Except to Jasmine.

The Town Meeting guy today is Ed, from Stan’s very first days at Positron. He drones on and on. How well they are doing, beyond everyone’s highest expectations, they must be so proud of their efforts and achievements, history is being made, they are a model for future towns just like theirs; indeed there are now nineteen other cities that are being reconstructed according to the Consilience model, and soon it will be deployed all across America! Better still, thanks to them and the construction boom generated by the reordering of civic life, the economy is pulling out of the slump. Who said the spirit of cooperation could not prevail?

Wait a minute, thinks Stan. Hold on. What’s underneath all the horn-tooting altruism? Some folks must be making a shitload of cash out of this whole thing. Has he made the wrong decision, has he signed away … just exactly what has he signed away? He really wants another beer. But he’ll wait until this is over because the TV can most likely see you, and he doesn’t want to call attention to himself.

Now Ed has put on a prissy frown. “Some of you,” he says, “and you know who you are—some of you have been dabbling in unauthorized cyber-experiments. Now, you all know the rules. You may believe you are engaging in harmless private entertainment. And so far no harm has been done. But our systems are very sensitive; they pick up even the faintest of unauthorized signals. Disconnect now—again, you know who you are—and we will take no action.”

Stan feels a chill. He’ll disable his tracker immediately. But that’s all right, because he already knows what he needs to know.

The Consilience theme comes on—the barn-raising music from Seven Brides for Seven Brothers—and the slogan zooms up: DO TIME NOW, BUY TIME FOR OUR FUTURE. CONS + RESILIENCE = CONSILIENCE.

*  *  *

It won’t be the gym: that would be too public, he now realizes. Instead it will be right here, at the house. On switchover day Charmaine will depart on her scooter to inspect more real estate, after which she’ll take the scooter to Positron, after which Jasmine will get onto it and drive it here. He’ll stash his pile of folded clothes in the green locker, key himself out of the house, then wait in the garage. When Jasmine turns up he’ll watch her go into the house, and then he’ll follow, and then the inevitable will happen, at last. And they won’t be interrupted, because how will Max get here without the scooter he shares with Stan—the red-and-green one? Which is supposed to be arriving at Positron round about now, but which is still parked in the garage. He takes satisfaction in the thought of Max cooling his heels and checking his watch while his wayward, insatiable Jasmine is winding her arms and legs around Stan.

Now he’s in the garage. It’s warm for December 1, but he’s shivering a bit: it must be the tension. The hedge trimmer is hanging on the wall, newly cleaned, battery charged, not that scum-bucket Max will appreciate it. The hedge trimmer would make a good weapon, supposing Max makes it to the house by some means other than their scooter and there’s a confrontation. The thing has a hair-trigger start button; once full-throttle, with its sharp saw whizzing around, it could take off a guy’s head. Self-defense would be his plea. If that doesn’t happen and he’s tangling with Jasmine, he’ll be late for check-in. He’s almost certain to be late, but he’ll have to risk it, because he can’t go on the way he’s been going. It’s eating him up. It’s killing him.

There’s a crack in the front door of the garage. Stan is peering through it, waiting for Jasmine to drive up on her scooter, so he doesn’t hear the side door opening.

“It’s Stan, isn’t it?” says a voice. He jerks upright, whirls around. His first instinct is to go for the hedge trimmer. But it’s a woman.

“Who the fuck are you?” he says. She’s thickset, shortish, with straight black hair down to her shoulders. Dark eyebrows. A heavy mouth, naked, no lipstick. Black jeans and T-shirt. She looks like a dyke martial arts expert. There’s something familiar. Has he seen her at the gym? No, not there.

“I live here,” she says. She smiles. Her teeth are square: piano-key teeth, harsh teeth.

“Jasmine?” he asks uncertainly. It can’t be. This isn’t what Jasmine would look like.

“There is no Jasmine,” she says. Now he’s confused. If there is no Jasmine, how does she know there’s supposed to be one?

“Where’s your scooter?” he says. “How did you get here?”

“I drove,” she says. “In the car. I’m parked next door. By the way, I’m Jocelyn.”

She holds out her hand, but Stan doesn’t take it. Shit, he thinks. She’s in Surveillance, which is the only way she could have a car. He feels cold.

“Now maybe you’d better tell me why you put a GPS tracker in my scooter,” she says, withdrawing her hand. “Or the scooter you thought was mine. I’ve been following it around, your clever little tracker. It shows up well on our monitoring equipment.”

Somehow they’re in the kitchen—his kitchen, her kitchen, their kitchen. He’s sitting down. Everything in this kitchen is familiar to him—there’s the coffee machine, there are the folded tea towels Charmaine set out before she left—but it all seems foreign to him.

“Want a beer?” she says. A sound comes out of his mouth. She pours the beer and one for herself, then sits down opposite him, leans forward, and describes to him in way too much detail the once monthly movements of Charmaine, in and out of the vacant houses, in conjunction with her husband, Max. Conjunction is the word she uses. Among other, shorter words.

Though Max isn’t her husband’s real name. His name is Phil, and she’s had this kind of problem with him before. She always knows about it—naturally she bugs his clothing—and he knows she knows. He’ll stray off-track—it’s an addiction with him, like gambling, doesn’t Stan agree, you have to feel sorry—and she’ll let him run with it for a while. It’s an outlet for him: in a gated city with one-way gates, outlets are limited for a man like him. When she thinks it’s gone far enough, she confronts him. That shuts it down.

“But there’s never been a wild card before,” she says. “Oh, there have been wild cards, of course, over at Positron. We know what to do with them in there. But there hasn’t been one among our own Alternates. Mine and Phil’s.”

Stan is so addled he can’t think straight. Charmaine! Right under his nose, the depraved bitch. It must’ve been her who wrote that note, sealed it with a fuchsia kiss. How dare she be everything he was annoyed with her for not being? And with some dipshit named Phil, married to a sumo wrestler! On the other hand, how dare anyone else tag his wife as a mere outlet? “Wild card,” he says weakly. “You mean Charmaine.”

“No. I mean you,” she says. She looks at him from under her eyebrows. “You’re the wild card.” She smiles at him: not a demure smile. Despite her lack of makeup her mouth looks dark and liquid, like oil.

“I need to be getting along,” he says. “I need to check in before curfew, over at Positron. I need …”

“That’s all taken care of,” she says. “I have access to the codes. I’ve fixed it so Phil’s going there, in your place. He’s not the best with tools—not good with his hands, not like you—but he’s all right with digital. He’ll take care of your chickens for you, both ends. He won’t let anyone interfere with them.”

Fuck, thinks Stan. She knows about the chickens.

“Meanwhile,” she says. She puts her head on one side as if considering. “Meanwhile, you’ll be here, with me. You can tell me all about … Jasmine. If you want to, we can listen in on them, during their little encounters. The sound quality is excellent, you’d be surprised. It’s quite exciting.”

“But that’s …” He wants to say, “that’s fucking warped,” but he stops himself. This woman is upper-level management: she could make his life truly disagreeable. “That’s unfair,” he says. His voice is going all wussy.

She smiles again with her slippery-looking mouth. She has biceps, and shoulders, and her thighs are alarming; not to mention the fact that she’s a sick voyeur. What has he done? Where is bland, perky Charmaine? It’s her he wants, not this sinister and most likely hairy-legged ball crusher. Surreptitiously he checks out the exits: back door, door to the front hall, door to the cellar stairs. What if he were to shove this woman into his green basement locker, then make a run for it? But run to where? He’s blocked his own exits.

“Seriously. This won’t work, it’s not … I’m not … I need to go,” he says. He can’t bring himself to say Please.

“Don’t be worried,” she says. “You won’t be missed. I switched the data entries: you’re Phil now, and Phil is you. You’ll get two months in a row here at the house. Then, next month, when Charmaine comes out of Positron, you can go in. Think of it as an intervention to avoid possible violence. You’ll have to admit you feel like strangling her, anyone would. Want another beer?”

“Yes,” he says. “Make it two.” He’s trapped. “What else do I have to do?”

“We’ll find out, won’t we?” she says. “We have lots of time. I’m sure you’re very talented. By the way, I switched the lockers, too. Yours is the red one now.”

About the Author

Margaret Atwood is the author of the internationally best-selling novel The Handmaid’s Tale, as well as the 2000 Booker Prize winner, The Blind Assassin, and more than forty other books. These include Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, which is now a documentary film, just launched at Sundance. Her two most recent novels are Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood. Like I’m Starved for You, both are set in a possible future, the ingredients for which are already with us. Margaret lives in Toronto with writer Graeme Gibson, who, having a devious mind, helps her with the more extreme criminal details in her work.

Photograph by George Whiteside

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