Connie’s a prostitute, I’m a thirty-year-old virgin, but all things considered, we could have turned out a lot worse.
I walk past the beanfields and the Corporate Porcine Receptacle to cry on Connie’s shoulder in the women’s bunkhouse. The Receptacle is for the Dietary Supplement Pigs, hardened bits of which ultimately end up in the black bean soup. The Dietary Supplement Pigs are distinct from the Ambience Enhancement Pigs, which we breed special to resemble the coarse varieties extant during the actual Middle Ages, and whose primary function is to stand around the castle courtyard looking realistic.
The bunkhouse is empty. Then the lowly Ramirez twins come in from a morning of hand-lugging dirt clods in the beanfields. Connie considers Lupe and Maria a couple of excellent arguments for remaining a floozy. They’re moral but not bright. They’ve got holy cards plastered all over their metal bedframes. They rarely speak and when they do are either proselytizing or claiming to have seen the Virgin Mary hovering above a moat. Last fall Mr. Oberlin suggested that Lupe might like to supplement her paycheck by spending some time in the Reward Suite with a high-school friend of his who’d done well in the arms trade. When she refused he made her work overtime. She kept panting by my window with her basket full of clods. Finally I went out to help and she gave me her holy scapular. Since then she’s wanted me. She sends me drawings of Saint Francis with my Employee Yearbook picture taped over his face. She’s sweet but too apocalyptic. You try kissing someone good-night who’s just told you for the umpteenth time that the world’s experiencing its last disgusting paroxysm before Rapture.
Connie comes in and I tell her I’m a Table Boy. She says it serves me right. She takes off her blouse and says that in spite of being bombarded with rocks, Corbett’s decided to stay, and desires Bookish Queen Mother instead of the scheduled Ferryman’s Mentally Feeble Daughter. She asks if by way of apology I’ll help her suit up. I tell her no way She puts on a push-up bra and a fake ermine robe and some horn-rims. She says Corbett’s better than most, in that he’s nonabusive and buys her gifts off the record. She says she thinks he’s fallen for her. I accuse her of self-delusion. I ask her to reconsider for my sake and not have sex with him.
She takes my face between her hands.
“I am never, ever starving or being made a fool of again,” she says. “No matter what. I’ll sleep with the entire universe before I ever pick up another horse turd in a bucket.”
Then she goes out the door and the Ramirez twins cross themselves in tandem and take out their checkerboard.
The Gleasons are regulars. They’ve got a tidy nest egg that allows them to patronize us three times a year. Mr. Gleason’s an undertaker. When the first wave of mass death swept over the Northeast he got rich by inventing the Mobile Embalmer. Anyone with even a cursory knowledge of chemistry could preserve a loved one on the spot, and for a fraction of the cost associated with traditional methods.
I go in wearing my Table Boy duds and he’s stretched out on a couch being fed grapes by Lydia Bell, a closet radical feminist born without eyelids who’s always telling me about her secret plan to eventually slaughter some male Clients. For now she’s saving like crazy and biding her time. She gets revenge in small ways, like leaving bits of stem on Gleason’s grapes. Every time she does it she gives me a look. Gleason doesn’t notice because he’s too busy miming licking her navel whenever she reaches for her eye-drops.
After the Feast we all hustle down to the walk-in as usual to wolf down the leftovers. Before long Gleason comes wandering in drunk with a gravy splotch on his tunic and gives a speech about how fair free enterprise is. He asks what percentage of us are Flawed. I say all. He says the fact that we’re not at each other’s throats fighting for our daily bread but instead are squatting in a walk-in enjoying food he’s paid for is testimony to the workability of this beautiful system. He leers and asks Lydia if she’d like to do some grape-feeding in a less formal setting.
Then the Perimeter Violation Alarm sounds. Lydia rushes out ahead of me, gnawing on a roaster and shading her lidless eyes. Per specs we dash to the front gate, where a dozen members of Austerity are singing minor-key hymns and throwing buckets of black paint at our retaining wall. As usual one of them is dressed as Death Eating Chips to protest the reemergence of wasteful packaging practices. Austerity considers us decadent. They hate the fact that we market opulence. They kill a cow per family per year and use every single part. They make candles from the bone marrow and pudding from the brains. They boil the fat to make soap and use the leftovers to grease their looms. Their faces are pale and they have bony knuckles from so often going around with their fists clenched. The women all look depressed and wear bonnets. In their camps everybody works. The children work and the elderly work and the handicapped work. At one camp they had a baldheaded lunatic who paced and paced while reciting Browning, so they tethered him to the water well and he wore a circular trough into the ground, but not before producing hundreds of useful gallons.
They’re screaming up at us to reduce our Clients’ per capita caloric intake. They’re imploring us to refuse our allocated narcotics so we can see the power structure more clearly. They’re calling us brothers and sisters and asking why we honor the very mind-set responsible for the world’s sorry state.
Oberlin’s screaming back that they’re only austere because they’ve got no other options. Gerard, Oberlin’s behemoth Security stooge, says let’s turn the firehoses on the loudmouths. I fall in with the others and we wrestle the hose to the top of the wall. Gerard turns on the water and we blast Austerity back to tree line. Death Eating Chips stumbles and because of the weight of his head can’t get up.
“Immerse that particular sucker in water!” Oberlin screams. “I desire you to make that costume inoperable.”
So every time the guy gets up we blast him in the legs and he goes down in the mud again. The costume’s coming apart. When it comes all the way apart we see that Death Eating Chips is a girl. In deference to Austerity’s policy of eschewing anything even vaguely degrading to women she’s shaved off her hair and plucked her eyebrows and is wearing a chest-flattening harness. Still, her beauty shines through.
We stop blasting her.
“Think!” she shouts. “Extrapolate your daily actions one-million-fold. Ask yourself if the things you do make sense. Then walk out of that Babylon and join us.”
“Oh, shut up,” Oberlin shouts. “Honestly.”
She picks up what’s left of her enormous head, then flips us off and rejoins her cowering wet friends in the grove. Singing “We Shall Overcome,” they march back to their camp carrying lit homemade candles.