Work Text:
The one good thing about the Party coveralls is they make Alex look like he doesn’t have tits.
When he’s at work in the Fiction department, or having Victory Coffee (boiled dandelions) at the Chestnut Tree Café, or even at home in his apartment in front of the telescreen, the shapeless dark-grey uniform pools around him the same way it does all of the women in his department. He feels them, though: elastic lasts longer when you wash it in cold water, and his apartment building’s boiler has been out for a year, but his last brasserie still gave out months ago. He knows somebody on the black market, but she’s told him that every woman in all of Airstrip One has been trying to get contraband elastic for brasierres from her for months.
“What can you do,” she’d said, shrugging. Her mouthful of smoke hung in the air, the distinct scent of real tobacco. It was effective enough advertising that Alex bought a pack of cigarettes off her—he needed a smoke, even though it was a waste of money when all he wanted was to stop the goddamn bouncing.
Still, though, as far as he can tell, the coveralls and his hair make him just as manly as he needs—just not enough that he’ll look like he’s rebelling against the Party on purpose. He can’t be rebelling against the Party; he’s got the cushy job and he always yells the loudest during the Two Minutes’ Hate and he always holds a banner in the parades. He always has the correct opinion on Eastasia and Eurasia and Goldstein’s Brotherhood. He can spout the party line in perfect Newspeak, quack-quack-quacking along until his comrades snort about duckspeak. He’s sure someday he’ll get bored and apply to the Party for a husband who won’t make him hot in any way whatsoever and they’ll do their duty to the party so he can at least say they tried to pop out more fucking babies to fight in the glorious war against Eastasia.
Or, more likely, to play war games in a giant chess set and hurl bombs onto Airstrip One.
Schlatt thinks that’s a crazy opinion, of course. He thinks the war’s actually real, and that there really are three megacountries that are all fighting each other to a standstill. Alex likes his own version better, because it’s less fucking depressing to think it’s only one little island crazy enough to do this. Schlatt thinks a lot of fucked-up shit. Still, there are three good things about him, which is two better than the Party uniform.
The first came when they first met alone in the woods, when Alex steeled himself and told Schlatt about the man thing. It burst out of him so fast the words barely made sense to him, a gabble to rival anything Goldstein ever said in the Two Minutes’ Hate broadcasts. Schlatt just nodded, taken aback, and said, “All right, uh- handsome.”
The second good thing came a little later, in a little clearing where Schlatt was on top of him before Alex could even finish undressing, rutting against him like a dog until his dick found the right place and slid in. His hand snaked down to join when Alex started touching himself, clumsily copying the motions until Alex bit back a moan and came around him. Schlatt clearly hadn’t seen that happen before, but he just laughed it off and affectionately called Alex a whore. He does it every time. He isn’t the most generous of the men Alex has fucked, but some of them were even bigger assholes about the man thing, and one of them flat-out refused to believe he could be jacked off at all.
Schlatt refuses to let Alex call him by his first name, and he says he doesn’t know hardly anything about the world that was before even though he must have been practically grown when Ingsoc came into power, and he thinks Alex is a ditzy little slut. He smells like cabbage and he has a wife and maybe a kid and Alex still had to teach him how a clit is like a dick. He won’t stop complaining about something in his leg called a varicose ulcer and he’s mesmerized by the way Alex’s tits bounce when he’s fucked and once he left a goddamn bite mark on Alex’s ass, which is a surefire way to make sure a Miniluv truncheon knocks out all those teeth and then goes up the ass dry. But Alex is twenty-five and horny and his last lover’s apartment complex got hit with a bomb and he watched Schlatt carefully to make absolutely certain he wasn’t a honeypot or true believer, so Schlatt’s all right. Besides, the third good thing about him is this room he rented. It’s over a little white-painted shop in the prole part of town, just a bedroom and bathroom, but the bed is soft and big enough for two. There’s a painting on the wall of a lovely cottage in the countryside, and a window to a small yard where a prole washerwoman seems to spend all her days hanging laundry and singing.
She’s singing now, one of the inane songs they make two departments over from where Alex works. The versificators are nearly the same as the machines in the Fiction Department where Alex works. They’re just smaller, spinning up different rhymes and platitudes like dice rolling. And—just like dice rolling—they’re just for the proles. The song has wormed its way into Alex’s brain, so he sings it when he sleeps, even now, months after its release.
I just wonder what you’re dreaming of
When you sleep and smile so comfortable
I just wish that I could give you that
That look that’s perfectly un-sad.
“Un-sad”. It isn’t even real Newspeak. Her crooning makes it sound almost good, though: something intimate, a secret whispered by somebody whose brain has been doublethought over and over and under and backflipping until they can’t remember the word for “good”.
No wonder it’s stayed so long, he thinks idly, sprawled out on the bed. It is a heat wave now. Alex is covered in sweat, naked as the day he was born and wishing there were any more clothes to remove. His tits could go, he thinks. Schlatt was playing with them before, licking and fondling and telling Alex how big and sexy they were. In that moment Alex wanted to kill him. Wanted to take that new black-market razor blade Schlatt was so damn proud of and cut his throat, wanted to smash his head in with a brick, wanted to tear his ribcage open and sink his teeth into his heart.
There was a war film he saw with his school when he was six, a bombed-out city full of corpses. He thinks it was Eastasia, but they’ve changed who they were at war with at least three times since then and it was probably filmed five miles from Airstrip One and anyway all Alex really remembers is the dog. There was a body on the street, chest ripped open like fabric, and a dog was eating it. Its head plunged into the chest cavity, where a close-up camera showed the teeth tearing at the heart. Alex still wants to shudder at the memory. Alex hasn’t let himself react to the memory since he was a child.
The flash of hate ended, like they always do, and Alex pulled Schlatt close and stuck his tongue in his mouth. He didn’t use his teeth, nothing like the dog at all.
It’s fair, he thinks now, fanning himself uselessly. He knows Schlatt sometimes wants to kill him too. When they’re together away from telescreens, they can relax and let their faces show feelings they’d forgotten existed. He’s seen Schlatt’s face spasm into hate when looking at him.
He wonders how Schlatt fantasizes about doing it. Maybe he’s thought about the razor blade, too. Maybe he’d find a gun somewhere. Schlatt seems the type to like guns; he could make it erotic if he tried. If he pressed the barrel against Alex’s dick where his fingers have worked so many times. Alex might love him, then.
He’s going to get them caught, Alex thinks. Whether he leaves any more bite marks or not, the only direction this relationship can go is straight into the Ministry of Love. Alex is going to go out kicking and screaming, but they’re still going to lose everything.
“She’s beautiful,” Schlatt says, and absent-mindedly rubs that ache in his leg he can’t stop complaining about. He’s at the window, looking down into the yard. Alex gets up and joins him, because never in a million years did he think he’d hear Schlatt say something as sentimental as she’s beautiful. There’s nobody in the yard but the old prole washerwoman, still singing that fucking song. She isn’t beautiful, Alex thinks. She’s just…constant. She’s big and burly, with a crooked nose that’s probably from her husband and a stride that would make anybody sane get out of her way. She’s old enough to be Schlatt’s mother, and he knows Schlatt doesn’t like older women. He likes young men who make the first move, because that’s all he’s ever had the chance to fuck outside of his Party-approved marriage. He may think this woman is beautiful, but he loves Alex, he says so.
“She’s a meter across at the hips,” Alex jeers anyway, because if Schlatt was trying to make Alex jealous, well, he’ll always succeed at that. Schlatt doesn’t even answer, just pulls him into a one-armed hug.
Alex is still naked, but if the washerwoman is a member of the Thought Police there’s nothing they can do about it at this point. He tilts his head up, kissing his lover. If Schlatt wasn’t trying to make him jealous, he was being philosophical, and if Alex can’t head him off he’ll spend hours brooding about politics that he can’t even change. Schlatt kisses back mechanically and Alex sighs—too late to turn him off philosophy, then. He leans back into the hug, because what’s the point in meeting up if you let a goddamn heatwave keep you from touching?
There’s a bird singing in the yard, perched on the clothesline. It’s not some fancy thrush like Alex has seen on Anti-Sex League hikes in the countryside, just one of the little brown house-sparrows that live in the city, but it’s singing its tiny heart out just like the thrushes do. Alex doesn’t even know what it is that makes a sparrow different from a thrush, except he sees sparrows so often and hardly ever gets to hear the prettier songs of a thrush. Listening to a sparrow sing is like…Alex knows the word duckspeak, but that word’s never been right, has it? Birds don’t make noise to make people listen, or to sound like what those people want to hear. They sing for themselves. They sing to each other. They just sing. Alex doesn’t think he’s ever just sang in his life.
But, no—what else is he doing with Schlatt? What is this but a swan song?
“We are the dead,” says Schlatt, who’s clearly been on a drastically different train of thought than Alex has. Where the fuck does he get this from? Why are all Alex’s lovers fucking insane?
Because Alex does love him, in spite of everything. In spite of Schlatt’s wife and the way he looks at Alex’s tits, in spite of the way he thinks he’s so smart and Alex is so stupid, in spite of the way he’s going to give them away. Because what else is there to do? What greater rebellion than love, in Oceania?
“We are the dead,” he says fondly, not meaning a word of it, as below the window the washerwoman sings on.