Free Woman On The Edge Of Time by Marge Piercy

Connie flounced up and turned on the faucet of the sink. “That’s drinking water.” Then she hauled him up by the arm and marched him into the hall. He hung back skittishly until she said, “There’s no one.” Then he scuttled behind her nervously as she opened the door and showed him the toilet. She wished it were cleaner. She felt a little embarrassed. The other people who used it never cleaned it, and she cursed as she cleaned for all of them once a week. She flushed the toilet, pulling the chain for demonstration. “See? It goes down and is flushed away.” Following him back to her apartment and routinely locking the door with the bolt, the Yale lock, the police lock with its metal rod that fit into the floor, she sucked her lip with satisfaction. For the first time shehad scored a point. Then she realized her reaction made sense only if she was such a naïve idiot as to believe his fairy tale.
    “So that’s a water closet!” Luciente rubbed his scalp, setting his long thick black hair flying. “I can’t believe it! So it’s all true.”
    “What’s true? The water comes out of the faucet in the sink. Then you use the toilet and the waste goes away.”
    “The garbage? Where does the food waste go?”
    “I put it downstairs in cans. Believe me, some people around here just throw it out the window. But why foul your own nest? I could see carrying it downtown and putting it by City Hall, to teach them to improve the garbage pickup. In white neighborhoods, you better believe it, they don’t drown in their garbage. In the summer, how it stinks! There in the white apartments, they have a super who picks up the garbage in the hall. Or else they have a dumbwaiter—that’s a little elevator—and the garbage goes down to the basement, where the super unloads it.”
    “The super is the name of the task? The person who does the job of returning the garbage to the earth?”
    “He puts it in cans in the street and the city comes and takes it away.”
    “And what does the city do with it?”
    “They burn it.”
    “It’s all true!” Luciente shouted with amazement. More gently he added, “Sometimes I suspect our history is infected with propaganda. Many of my generation and even more of Jackrabbit’s suspect the Age of Greed and Waste to be … crudely overdrawn. But to burn your compost! To pour your shit into the waters others downstream must drink! That fish must live in! Into rivers whose estuaries and marshes are links in the whole offshore food chain! Wait till I tell Bee and Jackrabbit! Nobody’s going to believe this. It all goes to show you can be too smart to see the middle step and fall on your face leaping!”
    “All right, smart ass. What do you do with garbage and shit? Send it to the moon?”
    “We sent it to the earth. We compost everything compostible. We reuse everything else.”
    She frowned. Oh, he had to be putting her on. “Are you talking about … outhouses?”
    “Out houses? Houses isolated from others?” Luciente made a despairing face. “We aren’t supposed to bombard you with technology, but this is more than I redded.” He raised his wrist-watch to his ear to see if it was ticking, his lips moving.
    “I mean how it used to be at my Tío Manuel’s in Texas, for instance. They were too dirt poor to have inside plumbing. They had an outhouse. Flies crawling all over. You sit on a board with a hole in it and it goes down in the ground.”
    “That’s the idea in very primitive—I mean rudimentary form. Of course now—I mean in our time—it’s composted centrally for groups of houses, and once it is safe, used in farming.”
    “You’re trying to tell me you come from the future? Listen, in fifty years they’ll take their food in pellets and nobody will shit at all!”
    “That was tried out late in your century—petrochemical foods. Whopping disaster. Think how people in your time suffered from switching to an overrefined diet—cancer of the colon—”
    Connie