Mates Draft One finished

Mates

    “Okay, Jamie, take off the blindfold.”
    I did as my father told me, although I already had an idea of where I was. Most guys got taken to the dealership when they turned 21. It was just expected where I came from. My family was pretty well off, so getting Dad’s old model passed down to me was unheard of. No, I was going to get my own.
    “Pick any one you want, son,” Dad said, slapping me playfully on the back. I looked around eagerly at all the beautiful things. They all stood on slowly rotating platforms, bathed in multi colored spotlights. They all looked very new, probably fresh from the manufacturer. I walked over to one, a sleek little Italian thing in red.
   “This one’s nice,” I said, running my fingers over the smooth body.
   “Just came in,” said a sharply dressed salesman who had sidled up behind me. “I reckon she’ll last really nice for ten years at least before she starts to get slow.”
   “I like the exterior,” I said, walking around the platform and looking it up and down. “But what’s the interior like?”
  “Oh, standard,” he replied, following me to the rear. “Manufacturer wanted to make it real welcoming. You’ll feel right at home, she’s very accommodating.”
  “Don’t fall in love right away, Jamie-boy, plenty of things to see,” laughed Dad, his white teeth glinting under the fluorescent lights. I returned his smile, suddenly overcome with appreciation. Dad was a good man. He had always given me whatever I wanted. I’d lived a comfortable and easy life, and he was to thank for it. And today I was twenty one. Things were only looking up from here.
   I perused the store, examining the models, asking my questions. I needed the right one. I wasn’t going to end up with a dud and make my dad have to buy me a better one. I knew guys who had made that mistake before. They see something pretty, buy it without a thought, but it has some crippling flaw, some basic thing it can’t do, so they have to trade it in. That won’t happen with me. I wanted to be very thorough.
   And then I saw it. Beautiful. Small, but beautiful. It was fantastic, dressed up in powder blue that shined under the lights. I walked to it, but a salesman caught me by the arm.
  “That one’s not for sale, kid. Not until we fix it a little more.”
  “What’s wrong with it? Looks perfect to me,” I protested.
  “Found it in the woods, believe it or not. It was still pretty damaged. Never used, though, from what we can tell.”
  “I’ll take it.”
  “Jamie-boy, you can’t be serious,” said Dad, ruffling my hair. “Why don’t we take another look at that Italian one?”
  “No, Dad. I want that one. I want her.” I took another step towards it. It was being guarded by two employees. It was out of place among the others...wilder, somehow. I imagined parading it around, earning the jealousy and respect of every guy in town. I wanted it so badly. I would pay any price to call it mine.
  It looked at me and frowned.
  “Are you sure you want it, kid? Not sure it’s ready to take home yet...” The salesman started to guide me away.
   I brushed him away. “I’m sure. I want her. Bring her over here.”
   The salesman sighed and spoke into his megaphone. “Number 56912! Come.”
   It bowed its head and walked to me.

---

  It was three days later, and I was enjoying my new mate. It was a good worker, cooked well, did what it was told promptly. Still, would it kill her to smile once in awhile? Other guys had a mate who at least made an effort to please in other ways than just labor. I had a friend, Nate Hawkins, who had just bought a brand new beautiful mate who was always smiling. Maybe she’d taken a special class back at the manufacturer’s, but every day she was there, smiling her pretty smile. She did her hair up in ribbons, too. Usually it was a rule that the man had to dictate the way that the mate looked, but Nate liked it so her let her keep them. Little snatches of creativity couldn’t do any harm, the way he figured it.
  But my mate, Number 56912...I couldn’t crack a single smile out of the girl. She just walked around the house like a ghost, doing what she was told but nothing else. I tried being gentle with her, figuring she had been living in the woods for years and probably wasn’t used to a man’s orders. Still, her expression was unchanging; cold, dark and full of contempt.
  Monday night, I came home from work as usual. I threw off my coat and she hung it up. I asked for coffee and she made it. Sitting down in my favorite armchair, I sipped my coffee and sighed. She was standing in a corner, not watching me, just looking. I tried to follow her eyes but they were looking at something invisible, something too far away for me to see.
  “Come here, mate.”
   She did.
  “Sit at my feet, please.”
   She did.
   I looked down at her. She really was a pretty thing. She had nice long brown hair. All the mates usually had it at the same length, just to the shoulder, but hers went down longer, well past her chest. I reached down and petted it. Most men touch their mates casually, and they accept it as second nature. But this one flinched. I drew back. I honestly didn’t want to upset the kid. She was very young, seventeen at most. I thought about what I had heard of her background. Raised in the woods. Surely she was some kind of savage. But why, then, did she do her duties so well, so easily?
  “Do you know how to speak?”
  She nodded slowly. This was a surprise. Who could have taught her? The manufacturers couldn’t have. Did she meet a man in the woods who taught her our ways? If she could speak, what else was she capable of?
  “You may, if you’d like.” My suggestion was met with silence. “I won’t tell.”
  “Thank you.”
  I had never heard a woman speak before. It was indescribable. Lighter than any voice I had heard, higher, like a young boy, but different somehow. A little pink glow burned quietly in my belly. I didn’t know what to think of her voice, only that I liked it.
  “Who taught you to speak?” I asked her.
  “My mother.”
  “Did she live with you in the woods?”
  “Yes. She took me there.”
  “Did you run away from your keeper?”
  “Yes.”
  I nodded and sat up straighter in my chair. “You won’t run away from me, will you?” She was silent. “Be honest.”
  “I haven’t decided.”

---

  My life became, in a word, atypical. Still, it felt to me as natural as the life of any man. In our own little home, the police couldn’t see what I allowed my mate to do. Every evening, I came home. She made coffee and we drank it together. We talked, me in my chair and she sitting next to me on the couch. Mostly, we just talked about me. How my work was, who my friends were, how I lived my life. I didn’t want to ask too much about her, for fear of finding out how powerful she was. One night, I came home and found her admiring the books on my shelf. I seldom read them, having neither the time nor the interest, so I saw no reason not to let her have a go at them.
  “You can take one out if you like,” I suggested.
  “Could I?” Her eyes lit up with an excitement, a passion for something that I had never seen in her before.
  “Sure, I mean, if you know how to read.” I figured she wouldn’t. Of course she wouldn’t.
  “I can.” She pulled out a book, something by a man named Dickens, and sat down at the couch to read it.
  “You’re joking.”
  “My mother taught me,” she responded. “There wasn’t much else to do in the woods. Have you read this before?”
  “No.”
  “It’s lovely. Here, sit down next to me and I’ll read to you.”
   And for many months, this is what we would do. I came home, we talked, she read books to me. I felt her shields coming down with everything I allowed her to do that other mates could not. I didn’t feel like I had much of a choice. As a man I had a right to do whatever I wanted with her; I could keep her locked in the basement all day if I wanted and dress her in a burlap sack just for the fun of it. It was written in the constitution, after all, that a man has a right to his own land, body and woman. Still, she wasn’t used to any of that. I could tell that after being found in the woods, dragged away from her mother, forced to learn and to be altered at the manufacturer, something had died inside of her. She was still a child in many ways, not fully used to the rules of our world.
  One day, the two of us were sitting at the table eating dinner. We had been discussing the book we had been reading, something called “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,”. It was sort of strange. The man who wrote it, William something, called mates “ladies” and instead of numbers, they had odd names like Helena and Titania. She told me they lived in a different time, before the women’s bloody revolution, before the men had to cut off all their power. Mates used to be given names when they were born, different than men’s names, but names all the same.
  “I used to have a name, actually,” she said, beginning to clear dishes from the table.
  “You did?”
  “Well, not officially. My mother called me by it, after we moved away. When the police finally found us, I was never called it anymore, of course.”
  “What was it?” I asked, picking up glasses to help her.
  “It was Jane. Named after a book. Have we read Jane Eyre yet? It’s a beautiful work. Written by a woman, of course, so it may be banned, but I’m sure we could find it around.”
  “Jane.”
  “Janie, too. That was my pet name, I suppose. Just like your name is James but people call you Jamie. Jamie and Janie. That’s kind of funny.”
  “Janie.”
  “Yes?” She turned around, smiling at me. Her smile struck me, electrified me in a way nothing had before. The pink glow in my belly burned brighter than ever.
  “Oh, nothing. I just...I like that.”

 ---

  Dad came over for dinner a few weeks later. Hanging on his arm was a new mate, a blonde one who couldn’t have been much older than Janie. I guess his old mate had been scrapped. Janie bustled around the kitchen, cooking and cleaning up after us. She was clever enough not to talk when Dad was around, knowing the way that he would react to it.
  “So, Jamie-boy,” Dad said, taking a sip of wine, “How have you been enjoying your mate?”
 “Oh, she-I mean, it’s just great, dad. A great little worker.”
 “Uh huh.” Dad furrowed his brow and stared at me. “I’ve been hearing some interesting things.”
 My stomach tightened. “Like what?”
 “Well, according to your neighbors, they’ve heard you and your mate...talking to each other.”
 I opened my mouth, but he cut me off before I could speak.
 “Don’t try to lie to me, James. I know.” He straightened his back, the action I had learned meant he was being serious. “Listen, Jamie. I know how it is. Some men tend to...get attached, as it is, to their mates. It’s natural. I mean, it does live with you, and it’s expected to have your children. But you can’t take it too far, son. Mates aren’t like men. They don’t feel the way we do. Give it too much freedom, and it will run with it until it’s controlling you.”
  “That’s not going to happen, Dad.”
  “You’d be surprised.” He set down his now-empty wine glass and the blonde mate swept it away. “I had those problems too once, you know. With the mate that had you. The trick is to not view it as human, Jamie-boy. Men made that mistake once, and look at what they did! They damn near collapsed the entire structure of this country. A revolution is a messy thing, son. The reason we have this system now is to prevent another from happening.” He stood and snapped for his mate to bring him his coat and join him at the door. “Don’t rock the boat, Jamie.”

   Janie and I resumed the way we had been living, but my father’s words echoed in my head. Every time Janie took a new liberty, like picking out a tie for me to wear or asking me to empty the dishwasher because she was feeling ill, I would become apprehensive. Still, I let her. It wasn’t because I felt I had to anymore. I felt something for her, something that, when described to any of my friends, none would fully recognize. I cared about Janie, not just as a possession, but as something stronger than that. It went beyond the feelings of friendship that I had for my buddies at work. It even went beyond the feelings I had for my father. Janie was something different. Something wonderful. And reading the old books she had taught me to love so well, Shakespeare and Marlowe and all, I learned to identify the feeling as a phrase never associated with women anymore. I was falling in love.
  Soon after I discovered this fact, I learned that we were expecting a child. This news should have been happy, but it terrified me. What if she had a girl? Would she follow in her mother’s footsteps and leave me? I’d surely have to turn her in after that. Send her back to the manufacturer’s for more training, maybe. I wasn’t about to give her up. But I didn’t know if I could live with that kind of guilt.
  Nine months later my fears were confirmed.
  “She’s beautiful, isn’t she?” Janie said. She was glowing with pride. So beautiful.
  “Yes. She’s really something.”
  “What do you think we should call her?”
  I swallowed hard. “I didn’t think we’d be calling her anything.”
  Janie looked at me, wide-eyed and reproachful. “No, Jamie. We can’t.”
 “It’s the law, Janie. We have to.” I reached out to take the child from her hands. She held it to her chest, turning away from me.
 “No! I thought...I thought you would be different, I thought you understood now...”
 “You know I want to keep her, love, don’t you think I would if I could? But there are rules!”
 “So we’ll go away!” she exclaimed, her eyes wild and desperate. “I know the woods well, we could find somewhere to hide.”
 “I’m not going to do that, Janie.” My voice was hard, resolute. Like my father.
 She looked at me as if I was a stranger. “Jamie...”
 “Go to your room, Janie. We can sort this out later but you need to calm down.”
 “I’m not going to stay here and let them take our baby away!”
 “You don’t have a choice.”

---

   The police came and took away the child the next morning. Janie screamed, struggled, tried to escape from my grasp to take her daughter back. I expected it to be hard for me, to see her in such a state. It was even worse that it wasn’t hard for me. I was cold. I held her back with a straight, somber face and watched the men take my child away. These were the rules. This was how things worked.
  Janie disappeared three days later. I was not surprised. The bedroom window was open, the drawers ransacked. She knew how to write so she could have left me a note if she wanted to. She didn’t. She just left.
     I contemplated reporting it to the police, but in the end, I decided against it. I wanted her back with me, desperately, hopelessly, but knew that I was far past her ever loving me back. At least with a different mate, our feelings would be mutual for each other. The police called me a day or so after she left. She had been found on the outskirts of the forest, and, after resisting the policemen’s efforts to take her to the manufacturing company, they had been forced to gun her down. She died quickly.  
  Dad gave me a new mate the next week. That night, she made me dinner, cleaned my dishes and sat at my feet. I stroked her hair and she didn’t move. I asked her if she could speak and she said nothing. She didn’t look at all like Janie. She had the regulation hair and vacant, staring eyes. They looked just like mine. We were the same, I realized. What pretty children we would make.