Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand Read Online Free

Several times other trainers came and kidded him about it or, occasionally, yelled at him about it. Sometimes he kidded or yelled back. But he didn’t stop. ‘I mean,’ he said, ‘they all do it too. Even some of the bitches. It ain’t nothing. It goes along with keeping you rats in line. I mean, what’s a damned rat for, anyway? I ain’t never heard one of you complain about it – hey, rat?’ And
he
wasn’t one of the rats the man took off with him, anyway.
    He had a sleeping pad again. During those hours of the afternoon or night when his shift was not working, he sat on a long bench, watching a high screen, on which were projected stories about men and women who wore the dangling masks. Somewhere before the end of each story one man or another would rip a woman’s mask off and the woman would turn her face away and cry. If thewrong man did it, the right man would kill him – or sometimes kill the woman.
    A month after he got there, they fixed the sound on the projector; after that the stories made more sense.
    He worked and watched stories for three years; then one morning the man in charge came to kick him awake.
    He pushed himself up to his elbow.
    ‘They sold you!’ The man kicked him again, about as hard as he’d ever
been
kicked, so that he fell back down and had to push up again. ‘How you like that! They sold you out from under me! I’ve really
worked
on you, too, you mindless rat! You don’t treat a damned man like that. You don’t treat a rat like that, either!’
    He thought the man was going to kick him again. But he didn’t.
    ‘They said they needed some rats with some kind of experience down in the south. You didn’t
have
no damned experience when you came here. You didn’t know a thing. Now you got some you can use to do something useful, and they’re gonna take you off, who knows where, and use you for who knows what! It ain’t fair, not after all the words I shoved into your dirty ears! It ain’t fair!’
    The man went away. But that evening, after work, he came back. ‘Come with me, now.’
    So he got up off his pad and went.
    The man’s quarters were not large. The other male rat and the five females they had picked up on the way almost filled the cluttered cubicle.
    ‘Okay, okay, get your clothes off. Get ’em off, now.’ The man was tall (almost as tall as he was), and he put an arm around his shoulder. ‘This is going to be a going-away party for our friend here. He’s been sold south, you see. He’s going away tomorrow – and it’s a damned shame, too. It ain’t fair. So come on! Get your clothes off, now. Put ’em over there. There’re some masks. Put‘em on – no, on your
head
, shit-for-brains! Come on, you been here before. You remember now, for next time. Put on the masks; then you can feel like real people for a while.’ He scratched his ear. ‘I don’t think it does a damned rat no harm to feel like a real bitch – excuse me –’ (to a rat who’d dropped her splotched tunic to adjust a wire headframe from which more than half the plastic pieces were missing) ‘– or a man. Myself, I think it makes ’em work better. And it don’t hurt ’em much, don’t care what they say …’
    That night he was told to do some odd things. (‘I want you to do just like you’d ’a’ done at this kind of party before you come to the Institute. Exactly like it, you understand? You can use that one, or that one, or that. Only not her – she’s my favourite, right through here, you see? Unless of course she’s got something you really like a lot.’) The man in charge never did put on a mask himself. For much of the evening he made love to one of the masked women while the other masked male struck him on the shoulders and buttocks with a piece of frayed copper wire and called him ‘a tiny rat’ and other things.
    There
wasn’t
much he’d have done at this kind of party except sit, watch, and bite at his cuticles and nails. (As a boy he’d been to a