The Heart Goes Last - Страница 9

Each dwelling unit has four lockers, one for each adult. Civilian clothes, which may be selected from the catalogue, are stored in these lockers during the months when their owners are doing a prisoner shift. The orange prisoner garb is kept at the Positron Prison, worn while in prison, and left there for cleaning.

The prison cells themselves have been upgraded, and though care has been taken to maintain the theme, considerable amenities have been added. It’s not as if they’re being asked to live in an old-fashioned sort of prison! The prison food, for instance, is at least three-star quality. He himself enjoys nothing more because it’s amazing what care and a top attitude can add to simple and wholesome ingredients.

Ed consults his notes. Stan shifts from cheek to cheek: how long is this windbag going to go on? He’s got the picture, and so far there’s nothing to freak out about. He could use a coffee. Better, a beer. He wonders what they’ve been telling Charmaine, over in the ladies’ workshops.

Right, another thing, says Ed. From time to time a film crew may arrive to shoot some footage of the ideal life they will all be leading, to be shown outside Consilience as a boost to the helpful work they are doing here. They themselves will be able to view those results too, on the closed-circuit Consilience network. Music and movies are available on the same network, although, to avoid overexcitement, there is no pornography or undue violence, and no rock or hip-hop. However, there is no limitation on string quartets, Bing Crosby, Doris Day, the Mills Brothers, or show tunes from vintage Hollywood musicals.

Fuck, thinks Stan. Granny junk. What about sports, will they be able to watch any games? He wonders if there’s any way of picking up a signal from outside. What’s bad about football? But maybe not try anything like that too soon.

A couple more things, says Ed. There’s a sign-up list for preferred jobs, in prison and in town: they should number their three top choices, with ten being the most preferred. Those who’ve never driven a scooter should sign up on the yellow sheet; the scooter classes will begin on Tuesday. Scooters are colour-matched to lockers, and all individuals must take personal responsibility for their scooter while it is in their care.

He, Ed, is sure they will all make a great success of this revolutionary new venture. Good luck! He gives a wave of the hand, like Santa Claus, then leaves the room. The woman in the dark suit walks behind him. Maybe she’s a bodyguard, Stan thinks. Powerful glutes.

When he gets to the list of jobs, Stan chooses Robotics first. After that, IT; and third, scooter repair. He figures he could do any one of them. Just so long as he doesn’t end up in Kitchen Cleanup, he’ll be fine.

That evening, he and Charmaine do their first shopping with their Posidollars, and share their first meal in their new abode. Charmaine can’t get over it; she’s so happy she’s warbling. She wants to open all the closet doors, turn on all the appliances. She can hardly wait to see what sorts of jobs they’ll be given, and she’s signed herself up for scooter lessons. It will all be so terrific!

“Let’s go to bed,” says Stan. She’s spinning out of control. He feels he needs a butterfly net to catch her, she’s so hyper.

“I’m just too excited!” she says. As if, thinks Stan. He wishes he were the object of that excitement, and not the dishwasher, which she’s now cooing over as if it’s a kitten. He can’t shake the feeling that this place is some sort of pyramid scheme, and that those who fail to understand that will be left empty-handed. But there’s no obvious reason for this feeling of his. Maybe he’s ungrateful by nature.

I’m Starved for You

Stan’s lost count of the exact time they’ve been inside the twin cities. You can get into a drifting mode. Has a year gone by already? More than a year. He’s repaired scooters one month, dealt with egg-counting software the next, then back to the scooters. Nothing he hasn’t been able to handle.

He’s listening to “Paper Doll” on his phone ear buds while rinsing out his coffee cup. Those 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.

Today is switchover day, when he and Charmaine both go into the prison. How does she pass the time away from him, inside the women’s wing? “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 at the hospital, my job as Chief Medications Administrator – it’s a big responsibility! I’m never bored! The days just fly by!”

“Do you miss me?” Stan asked her a week ago. “When you’re in there?”

“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 that, because he’s almost certain she would laugh.

It’s not that they don’t have sex. They certainly have more of it than they had in the car; but it’s sex that Charmaine enacts, 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. He’s come to realize that, in recent months.

Down in the cellar, he opens the large green locker and stows away the clothes he’s been wearing for summer: the shorts, the T-shirts, the jeans. He may not be using these for a while: by the time he gets back here next month, the hot weather may be over and he’ll be into the fleece pullovers, though you never know with September. 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.

Upstairs, clean towels are deployed in the bathroom, clean sheets are on the bed. Charmaine did that before she set off on her scooter for Positron. In the past couple of months he’s been leaving the house after she does, so he does 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 are supposed to find the house pristine, spotless, hinting of lemon-scented cleaning products, and Charmaine likes to leave it that way. She says they should lead by example.

It certainly hasn’t been spotless every time they’ve returned. As Charmaine has pointed out, there have been hairs, there have been toast crumbs, there have been smudges. More than that: 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 with Alternates, he read the note immediately. Though it was done on a printer, it was 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 colours on the paint chips and fabric swatches Charmaine spends so much time brooding over. He’d lifted the paper to his nose, breathed in: still a faint scent, like cherry bubble gum.

Charmaine has never worn a lipstick that colour. And she’s never written him a note like that. He dropped it into the trash as if it was burning, but then fished it out and slid it back under the refrigerator: Jasmine shouldn’t know that her note to Max had been intercepted. Also, it’s possible Max looks under the fridge for such notes – it might be a kinky little game they play – 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?” Max would answer. “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 colour of that mouth by now, he’s tracked it down.

Fuchsia. It has a moist, luscious feel to it. Oh hurry, that mouth says. I need you, I need you now! I’m starved for you! But it’s 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, 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 because of the note, he does know the names. And by now he knows – or deduces, or, more accurately, imagines – a lot of other things as well.