The Angels stood outside it with their backs to us. The guards weren't allowed inside the building except when called, and we weren't allowed out, except for our walks, twice daily, two by two around the football field which was enclosed now by a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. Guns were for the guards, specially picked from the Angels. No guns though, even they could not be trusted with guns. Aunt Sara and Aunt Elizabeth patrolled they had electric cattle prods slung on thongs from their leather belts. We folded our clothes neatly and laid them on the stools at the ends of the beds. We had flannelette sheets, like children's, and army-issue blankets, old ones that still said u.s. How did we learn it, that talent for insatiability ? It was in the air and it was still in the air, an afterthought, as we tried to sleep, in the army cots that had been set up in rows, with spaces between so we could not talk.

I remember that yearning, for something that was always about to happen and was never the same as the hands that were on us there and then, in the small of the back, or out back, in the parking lot, or in the television room with the sound turned down and only the pictures flickering over lifting flesh. There was old sex in the room and loneliness, and expectation, of something without a shape or name.

Dances would have been held there the music lingered, a palimpsest of unheard sound, style upon style, an undercurrent of drums, a forlorn wail, garlands made of tissue-paper flowers, cardboard devils, a revolving ball of mirrors, powdering the dancers with a snow of light. A balcony ran around the room, for the spectators, and I thought I could smell, faintly like an afterimage, the pungent scent of sweat, shot through with the sweet taint of chewing gum and perfume from the watching girls, felt-skirted as I knew from pictures, later in mini-skirts, then pants, then in one earring, spiky green-streaked hair.

The floor was of varnished wood, with stripes and circles painted on it, for the games that were formerly played there the hoops for the basketball nets were still in place, though the nets were gone. We slept in what had once been the gymnasium.

The handmaid's tale by margaret atwood