I’m Starved for You (Kindle Single)

by Margaret Atwood

  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 so
me 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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