Choke Collar: Positron, Episode Two

by Margaret Atwood

  The cosmetic school is called Liftoff: its logo is a face with wings, a slogan in a curly handwriting style around it: LIGHTER THAN AIR! And underneath: DEFEAT GRAVITY! So if Aurora had her dermal makeover performed after signing into Consilience rather than before, that’s where she had it. The surgeons are students, so it’s only natural that they’d slip up a bit. Though Charmaine would jump off a bridge if her face looked like that.

  Cosmetic surgery will be big in the future, because if you’re a woman and feeling trapped by the system, it’s sure to be a mood stabilizer if you can also feel beautiful. The average age in Consilience is thirty-five, so feeling beautiful isn’t that much of a challenge yet.

  But what will happen as the years go by? Charmaine wonders. A top-heavy population of geriatrics in wheelchairs isn’t maybe something the head honchos have thought through. Will those now in Consilience be replaced by waves of younger arrivals once their productivity is used up? Will they be released, or rather expelled, forced to take up life in the hardscrabble world outside the Consilience walls as best they can? No, because the Consilience contract is for life: if you’re in, you’re in. No second thoughts, period. They were all told that very clearly before they signed.

  So maybe—and this isn’t a nice thought—maybe they’ll end up in Medications Administration, the Procedures Department. Maybe I’ll end up there too, thinks Charmaine, with someone like me telling me everything will be just fine and stroking my hair and kissing my forehead goodnight and tucking me in with a needle, and I won’t be able to move or say anything because I’ll be strapped down and drugged. Like the others who have gone before.

  “Then why?” Charmaine says to Aurora, trying not to let her frustration show. No, more than that: her desperation. “I’m needed in Medications, it’s a special technique, I have the experience, I’ve never had a single—”

  “Well, as I’m sure you’ll agree is necessary under the circumstances, your codes and cards have been deactivated,” Aurora cut in. “For the moment you’re in limbo, you might say. The database is very careful, and just as well, because I don’t mind sharing with you that we’ve had a few impostors in here. Journalists.” She frowned, as well as she was able to with her stretched face. “And other nosy troublemakers. Trying to unearth—trying to invent bad stories about our wonderful community.”

  “Oh, that’s terrible!” says Charmaine breathily. “The way they make things up …” She wonders what the bad stories are and if she can ask, decides against it.

  “Yes, well,” says Aurora. “We all have to be very careful about what we say, because you never know, do you? If the person is real or not.”

  “Oh, I never thought of that,” says Charmaine, truthfully.

  Aurora’s face relaxes a millimeter. “You’ll get new cards and codes if”—she catches herself—“when you’re reverified. Until then, it’s a trust issue.”

  “Trust issue!” says Charmaine indignantly. “There has never been any …”

  “This isn’t about you personally,” says Aurora. “It’s your data. I’m sure you yourself are completely trustworthy in every way. More than loyal.” Is that a little smirk? Hard to tell on a wrenched-back face like that. Charmaine finds herself blushing. It’s that word: loyal. At least she’s been loyal to her job.

  “Now,” says Aurora, switching to bustling mode, “I’m placing you temporarily in Laundry. Towel folding—there’s a shortage in that department. I’ve done towel folding myself, it’s very soothing. Sometimes it’s wise to take a break from too much stress and responsibility, and the after-work pursuits we may”—she hesitates, searching for the word—“the pursuits we may pursue, to deal with that stress. Towel folding gives time for reflection. Think of it as professional development time. Like a vacation.”

  Darn, thinks Charmaine. Darn it to hell. Towel folding. Her status in Positron has just taken a pratfall over a cliff.

  There’s something else in Aurora’s manner, Charmaine decides as she’s changing out of the street clothes she’d put on just hours ago. (Oh shoot, look at that bra, she thinks: bright pink under the arms from the sweater, she’ll never get it out. She must have been really nervous.) Of course Aurora can’t smile like a normal person, but it was more than that. Charmaine is sensitive about voices; a lot of people wouldn’t notice such fine nuances, but there was definitely something fake in Aurora’s tone. Overly mollifying. How you’d talk to a fearful dog or child about to have a painful vaccination, or a cow on the way to the abattoir. They had special ramps for those cows, to lull them into walking placidly to their doom.

  * * *

  In the evening, after four hours of towel folding and the communal dinner—shepherd’s pie, spinach salad, raspberry mousse—Charmaine joins the knitting circle in the main gathering room of the women’s wing. It’s not her usual knitting circle, not the group that knows her: those women left today and were replaced by their Alternates. Not only are they strangers to Charmaine but they obviously view her as a stranger, too. They’ve made it clear they don’t know why she’s been inserted among them; they’re polite to her, but only just. Her attempts to make trivial chat have mostly been cold-shouldered; it’s almost as if they’ve been told some disreputable story about her, one they’ve been instructed not to mention.

  The group is supposed to be making stuffed toys for preschoolers—some for the Positron playgroup, the rest for export, to craft and doodad shops in outside towns and cities, maybe even in other countries, because Consilience has to earn its keep, doesn’t it? And everyone must contribute as best they can. But Charmaine can’t concentrate on the blue teddy bear she’s knitting. She’s jittery, she’s more anxious by the hour. It’s the mix-up: she can’t figure out how it could have happened; the system is supposed to be bug-proof. The female guards are sticking to the story of the database snarl: there are IT personnel working on it right now, but meanwhile Charmaine should just try some yoga classes in the gym and stick with the routine, and they’re sorry but numbers are numbers, and her numbers are not showing her as being who she says she is; they’re sure it will all work out, and soon she’ll be free to get back to what she claims is her life.

  She doesn’t believe this runaround for an instant. Someone must have it in for her. But who? A relative or lover of one of her medications procedures? How would they even know, how would they have access? That list is supposed to be totally classified! Or else they know about her and Max.

  If only she could talk to Stan. Not Max: at the first hint of danger, the first wail of approaching sirens, Max would vamoose. He’s a traveling salesman at heart. I will always treasure our moments together and keep you safe in my heart, and more in that vein; then out the bathroom window and over the back fence, leaving her to deal with the smoking gun and the body on the floor, which might prove to be—at second glance—her own.

  Max is like quicksand. Quicksilver. Quick. She’s always known that about him. Stan, though, Stan is solid. If he were here, he’d roll up his sleeves and tackle reality. He’d tell her what to do.

  Heck. Now she’s made a boo-boo with the neck of the blue teddy bear, she’s knitted where she should have purled. Should she unravel the row, knit it over? No. The bear will just have to wear a little ridge around its neck. She might even tie a ribbon around it, with a bow. Cover up the flaw by adding an individual touch. If all you’ve got is lemons, she tells herself, make pink lemonade.

  * * *

  When she returns to her cell that night—the cell she left that morning with such anticipation—she finds it empty. The other bed is empty, stripped bare. It’s as if someone has died.

  So they aren’t giving her a new cellmate, a woman from this batch of Alternates. They’re isolating her. Maybe they’ve judged her untrustworthy after all. Why did she ever let herself get mixed up with Max? And so quickly, too. She should have run out of the room the first minute she laid eyes on him. She’d been such a pushover. And now she’s all alone.

  For the first ti
me all day, she cries.

  * * *

  It’s the tenth day of February, and Stan is still here. Still among the living, still in the house, still in limbo. He hasn’t been sent back to Positron, not yet; and Charmaine didn’t reappear on New Year’s Day, as he’d been both hoping and fearing she would. Hoping because, he has to admit, he wants to see her, especially if she replaces Jocelyn. Fearing because would he lose his temper? Belt her one? Would she be defiant, would she laugh at him? Or would she cry and say what a mistake she’s made and how sorry she is, and how much she loves him? And if she does say that, how will he know she means it?

  “I think you two need more time apart” was what Jocelyn said, as if he and Charmaine were squabbling children who’d been given a time-out by a loving but strict mother. No, not a mother: a decadent babysitter who’d shortly be charged with corrupting minors, because right after that prissy little sermon, Stan found himself on the blue sofa with its chaste but by now grubby lilies, enacting one of Jocelyn’s favorite scenes from the frequently replayed video-porn saga featuring their two energetic spouses.

  “What if it were both of us at once?” he found himself growling as if from a great distance. The voice was his, the words were Max’s. The script called for some handwork here. It was hard to remember all the words, synchronize them with the gestures. How did they manage it in films? But those people got multiple takes: if they did it wrong, they could do it over. “Front and back?”

  “Oh no, I couldn’t!” Jocelyn replied, in a voice intended to sound breathless and ashamed, like Charmaine’s on the video. And it did kind of sound that way: she wasn’t acting, or not entirely. “Not both at once! That’s …”

  What came next? His mind went blank. To gain time he tore off a few buttons.

  “I think you could,” Jocelyn prompted him.

  “I think you could,” he said. “I think you want to. Look, you’re blushing. You’re a dirty little slut, aren’t you?”

  When would this be over? Why couldn’t he just skip all the crap, cut to the chase, get to the part where her eyes rolled back in her head and she screamed like a raccoon? But she didn’t want the short form. She wanted dialogue and ritual, she wanted courtship. She wanted what Charmaine had, right there onscreen, and not a syllable less. It was sad; she must feel she’d been left out, like the one kid not invited to the birthday party, so she was going to have her own birthday party all by herself.

  And she was having it all by herself, more or less, because Stan wasn’t present in any real sense. Why doesn’t she just order herself a robot? he thought. Among the guys down at the scooter depot, talk has it that they’re now in full production down at Positron with a line of Dutch-designed prostibots, some for home consumption in Positron itself, but the majority for export. The prostibots are said to be lifelike, with touch-sensitive plastic fiber skin and several different voice modes, and flushable interiors for sanitary purposes, because who wants to catch a dick-rotting disease? These bots will cut down on sex trafficking, say the boosters: no more young girls smuggled over borders, beaten into submission, chained to the bed, reduced to a pulp, then thrown into sewage lagoons. No more of that. But it won’t be anything like the real thing, say the detractors: you won’t be able to look into their eyes and see a real person looking out. Oh, they’ve got a few tricks up their sleeves, say the boosters. But they can’t feel pain, say the detractors. They’re working on it, say the boosters. Anyway, they’ll never say no. Or only if you want them to.

  The guys joke about applying to be prostibot testers; some claim to have actually done it. It’s a wild experience, they say: you choose the voice and phrase option, the bot whispers enticing flatteries or dirty words, you touch her, she wriggles, you give her a jump. Then, while the rinse cycle is kicking in—that part is weird, say the testers—you fill out the questionnaire, you check the ratings boxes for this or that feature, you suggest improvements. It’s better than the bonk-a-chicken racket that used to go on at Positron, they add. No squawking, no scratchy claws.

  There must be male prostibots for the Jocelyns of this world, thinks Stan. Randy Andy the Handy Android. But that wouldn’t suit Jocelyn, because she wants something that can feel resentment, even rage. Feel it and have to repress it. He knows quite a lot about her tastes by now.

  That night—the night of New Year’s Day—she’d made popcorn and insisted they eat it while watching the video prelims: Phil’s arrival at the derelict house, his restless pacing, the breath mint he’d slipped into his mouth, his swift preening of himself in the reflection of a shard of glass left in a shattered mirror. The popcorn was greasy with melted butter, but when Stan moved to get a paper towel, Jocelyn laid a hand on his leg; lightly enough, but he knew a command signal when he felt one. “No,” she said, smiling her square-toothed smile. “Stay here. I want your butter all over me.”

  At least it was something extra, something Phil and Charmaine hadn’t done. Or not on the videos.

  And so it went on. But toward the end of January, Jocelyn’s ardor or whatever it was had flagged. She seemed distracted, she worked in her room at the computer she’d set up in there, and some nights he found himself drinking beer alone because she was out of the house. He felt relief—some of the performance pressure was off—but also fear, because what if she was about to discard him? And what if the destination she had in mind for him was not Positron but that unknown void into which the bona fide criminals who were originally warehoused at Positron had vanished? Jocelyn could erase him. She could just wave her hand and reduce him to zero. She had that power.

  But the first of February had come and gone, with no switchover for him. He’d finally dared to bring the subject up: when, exactly, would he be leaving? “Missing the chickens?” she’d said. “Never mind, you’ll be joining them soon.” This made his neck hair stand up: the nature of the chicken feed at Positron was a matter for grisly rumor. “But first I want to spend Valentine’s Day with you.” The tone was almost sentimental, though there was an underlayer of flint. “I want it to be special.” Was special a threat? She watched him, smiling a little. “I don’t want us to be … interrupted.”

  “Who’d interrupt us?” he said. In old movies, the kind they showed at Consilience—comic movies, tragic movies, melodramatic movies—there were frequent interruptions. Someone would burst through a door—a jealous spouse, a betrayed lover. Unless it was a spy movie, in which case it would be a double agent, or a crime movie in which a stool pigeon had betrayed the gang. Scuffles or gunshots would follow. Escapes from balconies. Bullets to the head. Speedboats zigzagging out of reach. That’s what those interruptions led to. But who’d do the interrupting here?

  “No one, I suppose,” she said. She watched him. “Charmaine is perfectly safe,” she added. “I’m not a monster!” Then that hand on his knee again. Spider silk, stronger than iron. “Are you worried?”

  Of course I’m fucking worried, he wanted to shout. What do you think, you twisted perv? You think it’s a kiddie picnic for me, being house slave to a fucking dog trainer who could have me put down at any minute? But all he’d said was “No, not really.” Then, to his shame: “I’m looking forward to it.”

  “Looking forward to what?” she said with a blank stare. She was such a gamester. “To what, Stan?” when he stalled.

  “Valentine’s Day,” he muttered. What a loser. Crawl, Stan. Lick shoes. Kiss ass. Your life may depend on it.

  She smiled openly this time. That mouth he would soon be obliged to mash with his own, those square teeth that would soon be biting his ear. “Good,” she said sweetly, patting his leg. “I’m glad you’re looking forward to it. I like surprises, don’t you? Valentine’s Day reminds me of cinnamon hearts. Those little red ones you sucked. Red Hots, they were called. Remember?” She licked her lips.

  Cut the crap, he wanted to say. Drop the fucking innuendo. I know, I know you want to suck my little red-hot heart.

  “I need a beer,” he said.

&nb
sp; “Work for it,” she said, abruptly harsh again. She moved her hand up his leg, squeezed.

  * * *

  Now Stan does the countdown: it’s February 10. Four more days to go before Valentine’s Day. The subject hasn’t come up again, but every once in a while Stan catches her looking at him speculatively, as if measuring him.

  Tonight they’re on the sofa as usual, but this time the upholstery will remain unsullied. They’re side by side, facing forward, like a married couple—which they are, though they’re married to other people. But they aren’t watching the digital gyrations of Charmaine and Phil, not tonight. They’re watching actual TV—Consilience TV, but still TV. If you drank enough beer, slit your eyes, wiped the context, you could almost believe you were in the outside world. Or the outside world in the past.

  They’ve tuned in at the end of a motivational self-helper. So far as Stan can make out, it’s about channeling the positive energy rays of the universe through the invisible power points on your body. You do it through the nostrils: close the right nostril with the index finger, breathe in, open, close the left nostril, breathe out. It gives a whole new dimension to nose picking.

  The star of the show is a youngish woman in a skintight pink leotard. Nice tits—especially when she does the right nostril—despite the air bubbles coming out of her mouth. So, something for everyone: self-help and nostrils for the women, tits for the men. Distractions. They don’t go out of their way to make you unhappy here.