Twenty Sixty-Four

Chapter 6

Chapter 6

Bradley was writing in his diary:

It was three years ago. It was on a dark evening, in a narrow side-street near one of the big abandoned malls. She was standing near a doorway in the wall, under the harsh light of an LED streetlamp. She had a young face, painted very thick. It was really the paint that appealed to me, the whiteness of it, like a mask, and the bright red lips. It was the disguise, not her offer, that thrilled me most. There was nobody else in the street, and no faceboogle. She said five hundred bitdollars. I—

For the moment it was too difficult to go on. He shut his eyes and pressed his fingers against them, trying to squeeze out the vision that kept recurring. He had an almost overwhelming temptation to shout a string of filthy words at the top of his voice. Or to bang his head against the wall, to kick over the table, and hurl the fountain pen through the window—to do any violent or noisy or painful thing to black out the memory tormenting him.

Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your own nervous system. At any moment all the tension inside you might erupt into some visible symptom. He thought of a woman he passed in the street a few weeks back. She was a quite ordinary-looking Corporate employee, aged thirty-five to forty, tallish and thin, carrying a laptop. They were a few yards apart when the left side of the woman's face suddenly contorted in spasm. It happened again just as they passed one another. It was only a twitch, a quiver, rapid as the beat of a giant beetle's wing. He remembered thinking at the time: poor bitch is done for. And what was frightening was her twitching was probably unconscious. She had no idea. The most deadly danger of all was talking in your sleep. There was no way of guarding against that.

He drew his breath and went on writing:

I went with her through the mall and across a parking lot into a basement apartment. There was a bed against the wall, and a lamp on the table, turned down very low. She—

He ground his teeth, at the same time he wanted to spit. As he struggled with his memory of the woman, he thought of his wife Kaitlyn. Bradley was married—had been married—probably was still married, as far as he knew his wife was not dead. He felt himself breathe again the warm stuffy odor of that basement kitchen, an odor of roach-spray and dirty clothes and repellent cheap scent. At the same time, he felt drawn to it, no Corporate woman would ever use perfume like that. Only the losers used cheap scent. In his mind the smell of it was inextricably mixed up with stolen moments when he had sprayed some on his own wrist, letting the smell linger as long as he dared.

When he had gone with that woman it had been his first lapse in three years or thereabouts. Associating with freelance prostitutes was forbidden, against incel laws, but it was one of those rules you could occasionally nerve yourself to break. It was dangerous, but not a life-or-death matter. To be caught with a prostitute might mean three years in a forced-work camp like the tar sands: no more, if you had committed no other offence. And it was easy enough, provided you avoided being caught in the act. The poorer quarters swarmed with women ready to sell themselves. Some could even be purchased for a box of Trumpot, which losers were not supposed to smoke. Tacitly, the Corporate encouraged freelance prostitution as an outlet for instincts which could not be altogether suppressed. The unforgivable crime was unsanctioned sex between Corporate employees, men with women above their score on the Ronald scale was particulalry taboo. But—though this was one of the crimes the accused in the great purges invariably confessed to—it was difficult to imagine any such thing actually happening.

The aim of the Corporate was not just to prevent people from forming loyalties it might not be able to control. Its real, undeclared purpose was to remove the disruptive power of love. Not love so much as desire was the enemy, inside marriage as well as outside it. All marriages between Corporate employees had to be approved by a committee with rigid incel guidelines, and permission was always refused if the match was deemed "a bad deal"—particularly if the wife was better suited to a higher status male. Besides, the prevailing culture was one of self-absorption in carefully controlled online sex. Marriage, or even being in a physical relationship, was increasingly seen as distasteful and outdated. The only recognized purpose of marriage was to assign resources for service to the Corporate. Sexual intercourse was looked on as corporate duty. This was never put into plain words, but in an indirect way it was rubbed into every Corporate member from childhood onwards. There were even organizations such as the Junior Sex League, which strictly described and enforced sexual heirarchy. This was never explicit, Bradley was aware, but somehow it fitted in with the general ideology of the Corporate. The Corporate wanted to control the sex instinct, to distort human desire as another means of control. He did not know why this was so, but it seemed natural it should. And the Corporate's efforts were largely successful.