The source of his panic: Jocelyn, the walking Vise-Grip. She’s got him shackled to her ankle. He’s on her invisible leash; he’s wearing her invisible choke collar. He can’t shake free.
Deep breath, Stan, he tells himself. At least you’re still fucking alive. Or alive and fucking. He laughs inwardly. Good one, Stan.
He’s got buds in his ears, hooked up to his cell. The whining trimmer plays backup to the voice of Doris Day, whose greatest hits playlist serves as his daytime lullaby music. At first he’d had fantasies of booting Doris off a rooftop, but there isn’t a lot of musical choice – they censor anything too arousing or disruptive – and he prefers her to the medley from
Doris would never have opted for a skirt like that, unless for something sporty and asexual, such as tennis. Maybe it was a girl like Doris he’d been wishing for when he married Charmaine. Safe, simple, clean. Armoured in pure white undergarments. What a joke that’s turned out to be.
He stands on a stepladder to reach the topmost layer of hedge. If he shifts he might topple, and that could be lethal, because the hedge trimmer is ultrasharp. It could slice neatly through a neck with a lightning-swift move, as in the Japanese samurai films he and Conor used to watch when they were kids. Medieval executioners could take off a head with an axe in one clean chop, at least in history flicks. Could he ever do anything that extreme? Maybe, with the drumroll and the crowd of jeering, vegetable-hurling yokels to egg him on. He’d need leather gloves, only with gauntlets, and a leather face mask like those in horror films. Would his torso be bare? Better not: he needs to firm up, bulk out the muscles. He’s swilling too much of that paunch-building beer: tastes like piss, but anything to get drunk.
Yesterday Jocelyn poked her index finger into the jelly roll over his lowest rib. “Shed that flab!” she said. It was supposed to be teasing, but here was an unspoken
He has more than once pictured Jocelyn’s head becoming detached from her body by means of edged tools.
Or like Conor. What if he’d been named Conor?
Arf arf,
Which would be better, the axe or the hedge trimmer? he muses. The axe, if you had the knack of the clean stroke. Otherwise, for amateurs, the trimmer. The tendons would cut like wet string; then there would be the hot blood, hitting him in the face like a water cannon. The thought of it makes him feel a little sick. This is the problem with his fantasies: they become too vivid, then veer off into snafus and fuckups, and he gets tangled up in what might go wrong. So much already has.
You could do a good job on your own neck with the trimmer; though not with the axe. Once the trimmer was turned on it would just keep going whether or not you were still conscious. Conor once told him about a guy who committed suicide in his own bed with an electric carving knife. His cheating wife was lying beside him; it was the warmth of his blood seeping into the mattress that woke her up. He’s fantasized about that too, because some days he feels so trapped, so hopeless, so dead-ended, so nutless that he’d do almost anything to get away.
But why is he being so negative?
Surely your life isn’t that bad!
Stuff it,
Human Resources
Charmaine waits and waits. Why aren’t there magazines to read, why isn’t there TV? She’d even watch a baseball game. Plus, now she needs to go to the bathroom and there isn’t one. That’s really inconsiderate, and if she doesn’t take control of herself she’s going to get cranky. But crankiness leads to bad outcomes, if you don’t have any power to back up your crankiness. People blow you off, or else they get even crankier than you
Aurora of Human Resources smiles mirthlessly, her eyes like sleet. She has a message to deliver and she delivers it smoothly: So sorry, but Charmaine must stay in Positron Prison for another month; and, in addition to that, she’s been relieved of her duties with Medications Administration.
“But why?” says Charmaine, her voice faltering. “If there’s been any complaint filed … Which is a dumb thing to say, because the subjects of her medication administrations all flatline five minutes after the Special Procedure, that’s what people usually do when their hearts have stopped beating, so who is there still walking around on the planet who could file a complaint? Maybe some of them have returned from the afterlife and criticized the quality of her services, she jokes to herself. Suppose they did, they’d have been lying, she adds indignantly. She’s justly proud of her efforts and her talent, she does have a gift, you can see it in their eyes. She executes well, she gives good death: those entrusted to her care go out in a state of bliss and with feelings of gratitude toward her, if body language is any indication. And it is: in the hands of Max, she has honed her skills in body language.
“Oh no, no complaints,” says Aurora of Human Resources, a sliver too carelessly. Her face barely moves: she’s had work done and they went too far. She has pop eyes, and her skin is wrenched back as if a giant fist is squeezing all the hair on the back of her head. She most likely went to a session at the cosmetic school in the Positron retraining program. The surgeons are the students, so it’s only natural that they’d slip up from time to time. Though Charmaine would jump off a bridge if her face looked as malpractised as that. At the Ruby Slippers Retirement Homes and Clinics, they did way better work. They could take someone seventy, eighty, eighty-five even, and have them come out looking no older than sixty.
They’re most likely training the cosmetic surgeons because it’s going to be really in demand here pretty soon. The average age in Consilience is thirty-three, so feeling beautiful isn’t that much of a challenge for them yet, but what will happen in the Project as the years go by? Charmaine wonders. A top-heavy population of geriatrics in wheelchairs? Or will those people be released, or rather expelled – tossed out onto the street, forced to take up life in a hardscrabble outside world? No, because the contract is for life. That’s what they were all told before they signed.
But – this is a new thought for Charmaine, and it’s not a nice one – there were no guarantees about how long that life might last. Maybe after a certain age people will be sent to Medications Administration for the Procedure. Maybe I’ll end up there too, thinks Charmaine, with someone like me telling me everything will be fine, and stroking my hair and kissing my forehead and tucking me in with a needle, and I won’t be able to move or say anything because I’ll be strapped down and drugged to the eyebrows.
“If there aren’t any complaints, then why?” Charmaine says to Aurora, trying not to let her desperation show. “I’m needed in Medications, it’s a special technique, I have the experience, I’ve never had a single –”
“Well, as I’m sure you’ll agree is necessary,” Aurora cuts in, “considering the uncertainty as to your identity, your codes and cards have been deactivated. For the moment you’re in limbo, you might say. The database crosschecking is very thorough, as it has to be, since I can share with you that we’ve had a few impostors in here. Journalists.” She frowns as well as she is able to with her stretched face. “And other troublemakers. Trying to unearth – trying to
If all you’ve got is lemons,
When she returns to her cell that night, she finds it empty. Her cellmate is gone; it’s her month back in Consilience. But the other bed isn’t made up, it’s stripped bare. It’s as if someone has died.
They aren’t giving her a new cellmate, then. They’re isolating her. Is this the beginning of her punishment? Why did she ever let herself get mixed up with Max? She should have run out of the room the first minute she laid eyes on him. She’s been such a pushover. And now she’s all alone.
For the first time that day, she cries.
Houseboy
“Honey, cheer up, surely life’s not so bad,” Charmaine was in the habit of saying when they were living in their car, which used to grate on him: how could she be so fucking perky, with the shit that was bombarding them from all sides? But now he tries to recall her light tone, her consolations, her reassuring quotes from her dead Aunt Win.
Every weekday he goes to his so-called work at the Consilience electric-scooter repair depot, where he’s had to fend off questions from the other guys – “What’re you doing back here? Thought it was your month to be in Positron.” To which he replies, “Administration morons screwed up, they got my info mixed up with some other guy’s. Case of mistaken identity, but hey, I’m not complaining.”
No need to add that the other guy is the douche who’s been jumping his chirpy, treacherous wife, and that the administration moron was a highly placed Surveillance spook who’s recorded her husband’s encounters with Charmaine in grainy but surprisingly erotic videos. Stan knows they’re surprisingly erotic because he’s watched them with Jocelyn, sitting on the exact same sofa where he used to sit with Charmaine to watch TV.
That sofa, with its royal blue ground and overall design of off-white lilies, had meant tedium and a comforting routine; the most he’d ever done on it with Charmaine had been hand-holding or an arm around the shoulders, because Charmaine claimed she didn’t want to do bed things except where they belonged, in a bed. A wildly false claim, judging from those videos, in which Charmaine required nothing more than a closed door and a bare floor to release her inner sidewalk whore and urge Phil to do things she’d never allowed Stan to do and say things she’d never once said to Stan.
Jocelyn, smiling a tight but lip-licking smile, likes to watch Stan watching. Then she wants him to recreate these videos, playing Phil, with her in the role of Charmaine. The horrible thing is that sometimes he can; though it’s equally horrible when he can’t. If he roughs her up and fucks her, it’s because she told him to; if he isn’t up to it, he’s a failure; so whichever it is, he loses. Jocelyn has transformed the neutral sofa with its harmless lilies into a nest of tortuous and humiliating vice. He can barely sit down on it any more: who knew that a harmless consumer good made of fabric and stuffing could become such a crippling head-games weapon?
He hopes Jocelyn has been recording these scenes, and will make Phil watch them in his turn. She’s mean enough for it. No doubt Phil’s wondering why he’s still in prison, and is trying bluster –
. Stan takes an acidic pleasure in imagining this scenario, as well as the stonewalling stares and hidden snickering among the guards, because haven’t they got their orders, which come from higher up?
. That twisted fuckwit Phil had it coming.
Holding this thought keeps Stan going during his sexual command performances with Jocelyn, which are a good deal more like tenderizing a steak than anything he finds purely pleasurable.
You get a kick out of it, you must! You know you do, well, most of the time anyway, and every man has those letdown moments, but the rest of the time don’t think I can’t hear those groans, which have to be enjoyable for you, don’t deny it!