The Clarkl Soup Kitchens (20 page)

And my performance is somewhat enhanced here, but I don’t know why. I am a little stronger now because of the atmosphere, but I can’t figure how that results in a harder erection and a longer sexual congress.

Of course our guests the Drones are known for fornication, early and often. Maybe something is in the air.

January 22, 2136
– Over six months on the job, and I am getting used to the long hours.

I get up about five in the morning and shower. By the time I am dressed and into the kitchen, the churchwomen have prepared all the fruits and vegetables we use at breakfast. Grapefruit or orange juice is made and is in the dispenser. Syrups are heated and are ready in the soup wells on the buffet line.

When the doors open a little after six, the hot muffins are on the trays and we are ready for orders of omelets or pancakes. For three or four hours, the guests noisily move through the line and to the tables. Some go back for seconds or thirds.

After each table is vacated, our churchwomen quickly clear it and reset it for the next group. They use very nice china and real silver, certainly better than anything I have ever seen at an American hotel’s dining room. For some meals, the tables are set with linen cloths and napkins, all laundered with my toques.

There is a brief lull about
midday
, but then the crowd returns, often including those same entities who had been back for seconds earlier in the day. For this meal, we serve salads, vegetables, sandwiches, and more fruit. We always have both pie and cake, usually three or four kinds.

How our Drones love their sugar! The churchwomen who prepare the cakes are busy all day, often staying into the evening to get a start on the next day’s offerings.

We have really no period between lunch and dinner. As things for dinner are ready, they are brought to the buffet line and are quickly selected. The typical dinner consists of a pasta dish, three or four vegetables, more lettuce salad, and more pie and cake. There is a bitter tea the locals like, and we always have a big pot of that and a companion pitcher of iced orange pekoe tea. Both are refilled frequently during the dinner service.

I tend to supervise nearly everything but the cakes. I stay at the stove during breakfast, but I am all over the kitchen and the dining room during the other meals.

After the guests have gone, I go back to my cabin while the churchwomen clean the facility. No other person is on duty as long as I, but I am able to get to bed earlier than anyone else.

The guests are fairly happy, I think. Certainly the numbers of meals served per day has gone up about five percent since I arrived.

I ordered great quantities of all the flours from my former employer, and I believe the Drones like the cakes we make from them. They also like the syrups, in keeping with their sugar addiction.

January 1, 2137
– Celebrating our New Year’s Day in the dining room today. We still have the makeshift tree from Christmas in the main window, and we added some noisemakers, funny hats, and streamers.

I remember all those New Year’s dinners with sauerkraut and pork. Nothing like that here, of course, with these vegetarians. We prepared a Yule Log cake, making it about five feet long, and the locals were too pleased with it to eat it.

My love life has picked up somewhat. I have regular dates on my days off now, with other Americans who also have the same holiday. I have gone through the twenty-four dozen condoms I brought, and my order for more was filled just in time.

The Clarklians don’t use any form of birth control at all. So many of them starve to death in the first years that everybody is happy to help repopulate the planet. I understand that for every Drone we see, four others have succumbed to famine.

The Monarchs seem to be well fed, and we have heard that their offspring always have enough to eat. Of course, the Monarchs don’t come to our dining room, even though it is managed by their agents, the Batwigs.

From time to time, we will see a group of Batwigs in the dining room. They stick together and avoid the rough and poorly clad Drones. Last October, ten Batwigs came for dinner one evening and polished off a German Chocolate cake within ten minutes. The churchwomen quickly iced and decorated two more, one more for the Batwigs and one for the usual clientele.

I can’t understand why the Monarchs don’t come, though. I would like to see what they eat that is so superior to what we serve. If they don’t eat meat, and I have been assured they would not consider it, they can’t have better food than the produce grown on our farms and the baked goods prepared in our kitchen.

November 18, 2137
– Still working my tail off in our dining room. My stamina has improved over the last two years, and I no longer fall into bed after my long shift.

Sometimes I have a date after work now. The women come from the farms and the other dining rooms to meet me in my cabin, and they go back to their own quarters before
midnight
.

The dates are still very simple. There is nowhere to go for a nice dinner, so we meet and have sex. The few women under forty are a bit more in demand, so I see mostly women between forty and sixty. These women tend to save their best underwear for our dates and are very ready for foreplay when they arrive.

One of the best things about older women is their breasts. They are larger. Sometimes the vagina is quite loose, the result of childbirth, but the large breasts make up for it.

I brought a vibrator from home, and the women always want me to use it, even if I have kept up the sex act for a very long time. I run the vibrator over their clitorises while I bury my head in those large breasts, and everybody has a good time.

Sometimes a woman will insist on one hundred contractions, as if it were an Olympic event. The first one is the one that takes the time. After that, they come quickly, sometimes two hundred. I put my index finger inside the vagina and count.

On those lucky nights when I have a date with a woman under thirty-five, I try to put off intercourse as long as possible. I come too fast with a tight box.

None of these women has any interest in cunnilingus, unlike most of the women I dated in
America
. They don’t even care to discuss fellatio. It is little wonder to me why they had to come to Clarkl.  

December 20, 2137
– I am leading a very busy life here, and I am fairly happy.

With my terrible depression after Lucille and the children were swept out to sea with the great
California
earthquake, I volunteered for this Clarkl gig. I see now I was just in a pique about the terrible turn of events. I thought God had abandoned me, taking all those who were dear to me.

This stretch on Clarkl has given me hope that a meaningful life lies ahead for me. I need to fulfill my commitment to the New Christian Congregation and then return to
America
with a renewed faith.

This year has been good for finances, too. I finally settled with my parents’ insurance company, and I was able to deposit over $500,000 in my bank account. I was the only living beneficiary, but it took the insurance people over three years to figure it out. They had to have a private investigator trace all the descendants, reviewing the death certificates the State of
California
filed on behalf of the people of the
Sacramento
region.

With my other funds, my bank account now stands at just over $800,000. I will have money to buy a house in 2144 when I return. Maybe I can start a new family, too.

Here on Clarkl we continue to pack the dining room for most meals. The breakfast and dinner services are still our most popular. I don’t think the Clarklians eat more than two meals a day at home, but they are starting to get used to our lunches.

The Drones come most often, of course. I don’t think they ever prepare food in their little cabins.

The Wolpters are frequent guests, too. I saw many pictures of these creatures in the guidebooks, but I had to see them in person before I realized just how ugly they are. The tall ears usually reach above their heads, giving them a very hare-like appearance.
Harvey
, maybe, except the skin is darker.

But it’s bitch, bitch, bitch with those Wolpters. The syrup is too hot, the tea is too cold, the pancakes are too brown. None of these complaints prevents them from wolfing up everything on their plates and returning to the buffet line for seconds. The churchwomen always have a good laugh about the Wolpters and their complaints.

I sent out my Christmas greetings last week. I sent no greeting or gift to a family member. It stuns me to realize I am the lone survivor of that quake.

October 9, 2138
– A great parade of Monarchs came today to tour the dining room, accompanied by Batwigs.

The most surprising thing to me was how well they were dressed. Every other American, in talking about the Monarchs, mentions the crown of skin projections. To be sure, these are very strange and make you wonder what condition allowed these to be selected for reproduction. But their clothes are the most interesting to me. Every Monarch was dressed in a cape-like outer garment with a lining of gold fabric.

These cloaks must be very warm. To have a garment lined with a metal fabric is very fortunate in this cold climate, but the gold must make these cloaks both distinctive and useful. I have certainly never seen any Drone in anything like it.

The Monarchs did not take any food, but they looked over their countrymen moving through the buffet line and eating at the tables. One churchwoman offered slices of pumpkin pie, and the Batwigs agreed to take some to go. We eventually boxed up four pies, each cut into six slices.

September 30, 2139
– Starting to count the days now. I have served half my sentence.

People gossip about the amounts they are being paid, and I feel ashamed I am by far the best remunerated. Some of the churchwomen in our dining establishment are earning only five hundred American dollars each month, and most of them earn less than two thousand. I have not discussed my salary with anybody here, but they can see I have money to spend in the commissary.

They praise the Lord the money the government pays is going directly to the work of the Church. They talk about feeding the hungry in Africa, converting people to Christianity in
China
, and lecturing Indians on the proper way to salvation. I believe it would surprise them to find out most of this money is going to relieve the enormous debt of the former Roman Catholic Church in
America
.

I know our work here in Clarkl is as close as anybody comes to doing good deeds. We work from sun to sun for very little money, myself excepted, to prepare and serve food for those who would surely starve if left to their own devices. The Drones are good-time playboys, not interested in what tomorrow may bring. The Wolpters are sometimes willing to work, but they do not have the skills to earn a decent living here. Our dining room is the only constant in what must be chaotic lives for both these groups.

The only way for a Wolpter to get ahead is to mate with a Monarch and produce a Monarch offspring, a situation that is so rare that it causes headlines in what passes for the media here. If a Wolpter and a Monarch mate, half the time the offspring is another Wolpter, and the Wolpter parent is no better off than before. Only when the offspring is a Monarch does the Wolpter parent get adopted by the Monarchs and set up in a comfortable dwelling for life. But the trick for the Wolpter is to attract the Monarch so it will mate.

The Monarchs keep their youngsters hidden away. Nobody here at our dining room has ever seen a young Monarch. Attracting a Monarch for mating is nearly impossible since the Monarchs themselves arrange mating for their young. Power must be kept within the family, as on Earth.

February 22, 2140
– I just lived through the worst snowstorm of my life.

These Clarklians are used to an occasional storm that produces five feet of snow, but Californians are not.

I awoke on February 19 to find so much snow I could not leave my cabin. I called the dining room and told the manager, who lives in a room adjacent to the kitchen, that my path out my door was entirely blocked. She said she had received ten other calls with exactly the same story.

The Slinkers came by
midday
, with enormous vacuum cleaners that sucked up the snow, heated it into water, and dumped the hot water onto the ground. Within two hours, all the little pathways in our complex were cleared, and we could get to the dining room by walking through snow tunnels. Perhaps I exaggerate. The snow was not overhead, of course, but it was so high that our complex was like a garden maze made of tall, white shrubs.

If I had not known exactly which way to turn, I might still be walking those pathways.

When I arrived at the dining room, I expected to be asked to prepare a meal for our staff only. After all, what guest would tramp a block or two through that snow to get to our place?

We were confronted by a long line of Drones, clamoring for breakfast.

We worked into the evening to feed everybody. It was a congenial crowd, with our staff making sure to greet the guests with good humor and plenty of hot tea.