somewhere to her right. I look around: no sign of it. Nor can I risk getting up and walking anywhere, without the Commander. I don’t know enough, I don’t know the ropes, I might be challenged.
A minute, two. Moira begins to saunter off, not glancing around. She can only hope I’ve understood her and will follow.
The Commander comes back, with two drinks. He smiles down at me, places the drinks on the long black coffee table in front of the sofa, sits. “Enjoying yourself?” he says. He wants me to. This after all is a treat.
I smile at him. “Is there a washroom?” I say.
“Of course,” he says. He sips at his drink. He does not volunteer directions.
“I need to go to it.” I am counting in my head now, seconds, not minutes.
“It’s over there.” He nods.
“What if someone stops me?”
“Just show them your tag,” he says. “It’ll be all right. They’ll know you’re taken.”
I get up, wobble across the room. I lurch a little, near the fountain, almost fall. It’s the heels. Without the Commander’s arm to steady me I’m off balance. Several of the men look at me, with surprise I think rather than lust. I feel like a fool. I hold my left arm conspicuously in front of me, bent at the elbow, with the tag turned outwards. Nobody says anything.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
I find the entrance to the women’s washroom. It still says Ladies, in scrolly gold script. There’s a corridor leading in to the door, and a woman seated at a table beside it, supervising the entrances and exits. She’s an older woman, wearing a purple caftan and gold eye-shadow, but I can tell she is nevertheless an Aunt. The cattle prod’s on the table, its thong around her wrist. No nonsense here.
“Fifteen minutes,” she says to me. She gives me an oblong of purple cardboard from a stack of them on the table. It’s like a fitting room, in the department stores of the time before. To the woman behind me I hear her say, “You were just here.”
“I need to go again,” the woman says.
“Rest break once an hour,” says the Aunt. “You know the rules.”
The woman begins to protest, in a whiny desperate voice. I push open the door.
I remember this. There’s a rest area, gently lit in pinkish tones, with several easy chairs and a sofa, in lime-green bamboo-shoot print, with a wall clock above it in a gold filigree frame. Here they haven’t removed the mirror, there’s a long one opposite the sofa. You need to know, here, what you look like. Through an archway beyond there’s the row of toilet cubicles, also pink, and wash basins and more mirrors.
Several women are sitting in the chairs and on the sofa, with their shoes off, smoking. They stare at me as I come in. There’s perfume in the air and stale smoke, and the scent of working flesh.
“You new?” one of them says.
“Yes,” I say, looking around for Moira, who is nowhere in sight.
The women don’t smile. They return to their smoking as if it’s serious business. In the room beyond, a woman in a cat suit with a tail made of orange fake fur is re-doing her makeup. This is like backstage: greasepaint, smoke, the materials of illusion.
I stand hesitant, not knowing what to do. I don’t want to ask about Moira, I don’t know whether it’s safe. Then a toilet flushes and Moira comes out of a pink cubicle. She teeters towards me; I wait for a sign.
“It’s all right,” she says, to me and to the other women. “I know her.” The others smile now, and Moira hugs me. My arms go around her, the wires propping up her breasts dig into my chest. We kiss each other, on one cheek, then the other. Then we stand back.
“Godawful,” she says. She grins at me. “You look like the Whore of Babylon.”
“Isn’t that what I’m supposed to look like?” I say. “You look like something the cat dragged in.”
“Yes,” she says, pulling up her front, “not my style and this thing is about to fall to shreds. I wish they’d dredge up someone who still knows how to make them. Then I could get something halfway decent.”
“You pick that out?” I say. I wonder if maybe she’s chosen it, out of the others, because it was less garish. At least it’s only black and white.
“Hell no,” she says. “Government issue. I guess they thought it was me.”
I still can’t believe it’s