Hag-Seed

by Margaret Atwood

  The silence began to get to him. Not silence, exactly. The bird songs, the chirping of the crickets, the wind in the trees. The flies, buzzing so contrapuntally in his outhouse. Melodious. Soothing. Sometimes, to escape that ongoing semi-music, he'd climb into his increasingly unreliable car and drive into Wilmot and buy something at the hardware store, just to hear the sound of an ordinary human voice. After a few years, he had an accumulation of Krazy Glues and a small junk-pile of loose screws, hooks without eyes, and picture hangers. Had he begun to shamble? Was he regarded as a harmless local eccentric? Was he a subject of tittle-tattle, or did anyone notice him at all? Did he even care?

  And if not, what did he care about? What did he want, in the way he had once wanted, so passionately, to be a mover and shaker in the world of the theatre? What was his purpose now? What did he have to live for? His occupation was gone, and the love of his life. Both of his loves. He was in danger of stagnating. Losing all energy. Succumbing to inertia. At least he kept out of the liquor store, and the bars.

  He could become one of those aimless late-middle-aged men--past the snares of romanticism, past ambition--wandering here and there on the earth. He could take himself on trips: he could more or less afford it. But they would not be numerous, these trips, or interesting to him, because where did he want to go? He could hook up with some lonely woman and have a fling, and make both of them miserable. Starting a new family was out of the question, because no one could supply the place of the lost, the vanished one. He could join a bridge club, a camera club, a watercolor painting club. But he hated bridge, he no longer wanted to take photographs, and he couldn't paint to save his life.

  But did he want to save his life? And if not, what then?

  He could hang himself. He could blow his brains out. He could drown himself in Lake Huron, which was not that far away.

  Idle speculation. He wasn't serious.

  Therefore?

  --

  He required a focus, a purpose. He gave this much thought while sitting in his deck chair. Eventually he concluded that there were two things thing left for him--two projects that could still hold satisfaction. After a time he began to see more clearly what they were.

  First, he needed to get his Tempest back. He had to stage it, somehow, somewhere. His reasons were beyond theatrical; they had nothing to do with his reputation, his career--none of that. Quite simply, his Miranda must be released from her glass coffin; she must be given a life. But how to do it, where to find the actors? Actors did not grow on trees, numerous though the trees were around his hovel.

  Second, he wanted revenge. He longed for it. He daydreamed about it. Tony and Sal must suffer. His present woeful situation was their doing, or a lot of it was. They'd treated him shabbily. But what form could such revenge possibly take?

  Those were the two things he wanted. He wanted them more each day. But he didn't know how to go about getting them.

  His Tempest would be forced to wait, faute de mieux: he didn't have the wherewithal. So first he would concentrate on the revenge.

  How would it work? Would he lure Tony down into a dank cellar with the promise of a cask of Amontillado, then brick him up in the wall? But Tony wasn't a foodie. He wasn't much interested in gourmet eats and drinks for their own sakes: they pleased him only as status markers. And he would never be so stupid as to go down into a dark place with Felix unsupported by a couple of armed guards, since he would be well aware of Felix's justified resentment.

  Would Felix seduce Tony's wife or, better, hint that some young stud had seduced her? But Tony's wife was a showpiece made of frozen alabaster: she was most likely a robot, and unseducible. And, even suppose her invisible chastity belt could be safe-cracked, why be unfair to the innocent young stud, whoever he might be? Why bring down upon him the ire of Tony, now the wielder of considerable career-incinerating weaponry? Young studs had a half-life and should be allowed to enjoy their prime time in the swimming pools and scented sheets of the demi-matronly while that time was still theirs to enjoy. Before wilt set in, before drooping, and an inability to focus.

  Would he sneak into Tony's house/office/favorite restaurant and spike Tony's lunch with a toxic agent that would give Tony an incurable illness or inflict upon him a lingering and painful death? Then Felix could disguise himself as a doctor and appear in Tony's hospital room and gloat. He'd read a murder mystery in which the victim had died from eating daffodil bulbs. They'd been disguised in an onion soup, as he recalled.

  No, no. Mere fantasizing. Such revenges were far too melodramatic, and in any case well beyond his capabilities. He would have to be more subtle.

  Know thine enemy, all the best authorities advised. He began to trace the movements of Tony: where he went, what he was doing, his pronouncements, his television appearances. His list of achievements; Tony liked accumulating achievements, and was careful to ensure that they were acknowledged.

  At first this indirect stalking was easy: all Felix needed to do was get the Makeshiweg papers--of which, in those days, there were two--and look up the theatrical news and the social notes. Tony had been much in demand for soirees and fundraisers at that time, and was an affable granter of interviews. Felix ground his teeth over the Arts Entrepreneur of the Year Award, then over the Scholastic Outreach Award, given to Tony for the Festival program that bussed kids in from the surrounding area and made them sit through Hamlet, whispering and giggling, as the bodies piled up onstage. That program had been Felix's idea. In fact, most of the items Tony was getting awards for had originated in the brain of Felix.

  In Year Five of Felix's exile, here was another award: the Order of Ontario. La-de-da, Felix growled to himself. Another dingbat to wear on your lapel. Imposter!

  In Year Six, Tony changed direction. He resigned from the Festival and ran for political office, right in the town of Makeshiweg, where he was a familiar face in public life, and he won a seat in the provincial legislature and became an Honorable. The Heritage Minister was still Sal O'Nally, so now they were both in the same nest, no doubt assiduously feathering it. How cozy for both of them.

  It wouldn't be long before Tony would wiggle his way into Cabinet, thought Felix. Already he was being spoken of as up-and-coming. In his photographs, he had a ministerial air.

  --

  Then technology added a new telescope to Felix's meager arsenal of spyware: the snoop gremlin, Google. Felix had once had a computer, but it had belonged to the Festival and had been impounded when Felix was deposed. For a while he'd lurked around in the Internet cafe in Wilmot, following Tony's activities as best he could. He'd closed his work email account when he'd left the Festival--how galling it would have been to receive all those hypocritical messages of commiseration on it--but now he opened two new accounts, one for himself and another one for Mr. Duke, who had acquired a couple of credit cards. He thought about getting Mr. Duke a driver's licence, but that would've been pushing it.

  He felt he was becoming too visible in the Wilmot cafe--he might be suspected of watching porn--so he bought a cheap personal computer, second-hand. He had a telephone line run into his hovel from the Maude household and used dial-up. But after a while cable was installed along his back road, so he upgraded to an Ethernet connection and a router, which increased both the speed and the privacy of his Internet access.

  It was amazing how much you could learn about a person over the Net. There was Felix, alone in his neglected corner reading the Google Alerts, and there were Tony and Sal, bustling about in the world, not suspecting that they had a shadower; a watcher, a waiter, an Internet stalker.

  What was Felix waiting for? He hardly knew. A chance opening, a lucky break? A pathway toward a moment of confrontation? A moment when the balance of power would lie with him. It was an impossible thing to wish for, but suppressed rage sustained him. That, and his thirst for justice.

  --

  He realized that his spying was a little deranged, though only a little. But he'd gradually been opening another s
pace in his life that verged on full-blown lunacy.

  It began when he was counting time by how old Miranda would be, had she lived. She'd be five, then six; she'd be losing her baby teeth; she'd be learning to write. That sort of thing. Wistful daydreaming at first.

  But it was only a short distance from wistful daydreaming to the half-belief that she was still there with him, only invisible. Call it a conceit, a whimsy, a piece of acting: he didn't really believe it, but he engaged in this non-reality as if it were real. He returned to his habit of checking out kids' books from the Wilmot library, only now he read them out loud in the evenings. Partly he enjoyed it--his voice was still as good as it had ever been, it kept him in practice--but partly he was indulging his self-created illusion. Was there a small girl listening to him? No, not really. But it was soothing to think that there was.

  When Miranda was five, six, seven, he helped her with her schoolwork; she was home-schooled, naturally. They'd sit at the Formica table, he in one of his old wooden chairs, she in the other one. "Six times nine?" he'd quiz her. She was so sharp! She almost never made a mistake.

  They began having their meals together, which was a good thing because otherwise he might sometimes have forgotten about meals. She scolded him gently when he didn't eat enough. Finish what's on your plate, she would say to him. Her own favorite was macaroni and cheese.

  When she was eight, he taught her to play chess. She was a quick learner, and was soon beating him two times out of three. How seriously she would study the board, chewing on the end of the long braid she'd learned to make all by herself. How delighted he would be, secretly, when she won, although he'd pretend to be downhearted. Then she would laugh, because she knew he was only fooling. If he really had been downhearted, she would have been all sympathy. Such an empathetic girl. He tried never to show his anger to her, the anger he was hoarding up against Tony, against Sal: it would have confused her. When he was following their antics on the Internet, muttering out loud to himself, she was always out of the room.

  During the day she was often outside, playing in the field beside the house or in the woodlot at the back. He would see a cloud of butterflies lift in the meadow: she must have startled them. When blue jays or crows would make a fuss in the woods, he'd conclude that Miranda had been walking there. Squirrels chattered at her, grouse whirred away at her approach. In the dusk, fireflies marked her path, and owls greeted her with muffled calls.

  In the winters, when the snow drifted in the laneway and the wind howled, she'd slip outside without a second thought. She didn't dress as warmly as she ought to have done, despite his nagging about mittens, but nothing happened as a consequence: no colds, no flu. In fact, she was never ill, unlike himself. When he was sick she tiptoed around him, anxious; but he never had to worry about her, because what harm could possibly come to her? She was beyond harm.

  She never asked him how they came to be there together, living in the shanty, apart from everyone else. He never told her. It would have been a shock to her, to learn that she did not exist. Or not in the usual way.

  --

  One day he heard her singing, right outside the window. He didn't daydream it, the way he'd been semi-daydreaming up to then. It wasn't one of his whimsical yet despairing fabrications. He actually heard a voice. It was not a consolation. Instead, it frightened him.

  "This has gone way too far," he told himself sternly. "Snap out of it, Felix. Pull yourself together. Break out of your cell. You need a real-world connection."

  Therefore, in Year Nine of his exile--when Miranda was twelve--Mr. Duke took a job. It wasn't a high-status job, but that suited Felix: he wanted to keep a low profile. Getting back into the world, re-engaging with people--he hoped it would ground him. He'd been going stir-crazy, he could see that now. Too much time alone with his grief eating away at him, too much time gnawing on his grievances. He felt as if he were waking up from a long and melancholy dream.

  The job came his way via one of the local online papers. A teacher in the Literacy Through Literature high school level program at the nearby Fletcher County Correctional Institute had suffered a sudden illness--a fatal illness, as it turned out. A vacancy needed to be filled at short notice. It would be a temporary position. Some experience was required, although--Felix assumed--not much. Those interested...

  Felix was interested. Using Mr. Duke's email account, he sent an initial note registering his willingness. Then he cobbled together a fraudulent resume, forging decades-old letters of reference from several obscure schools in Saskatchewan, signed by principals who might be expected to have died or moved to Florida. He was ninety percent certain that these would never be checked: he'd be, after all, just a stopgap. In his covering letter he said he'd been retired for some years but felt the need to give back to the community, since he had been given so much in life himself.

  He was summoned by email for an interview almost immediately, by which he divined that there weren't any other applicants. So much the better: they were probably desperate, and he'd get the job by default. By this time he really wanted it, he'd talked himself into it. It had, perhaps, some potential.

  He cleaned himself up--he'd been letting himself get ratty--and bought a new dark-green plebian-looking shirt at the Mark's Work Wearhouse in Wilmot. He even trimmed his beard. He'd grown it over the years; it was gray now, almost white, and he had long white eyebrows to match. He hoped he looked sage.

  The interview took place not at Fletcher Correctional itself but at a McDonald's nearby. The woman interviewing him was forty-odd and making efforts: the streak of pink in her gray-blond hair, the shining earrings; the careful nails, a fashionable silver. Her name was Estelle, she offered. The first name was a positive signal, she wanted them to be friends. She didn't work at Fletcher herself, she explained: she was a professor at Guelph University and supervised the Fletcher course from a distance. She also sat on various advisory committees, for the government. The Ministry of Justice. "My grandfather was a Senator," she said. "It's given me a certain access. I know the ropes, you could say, and I have to share with you that the Literacy Through Literature program has been more or less...well, my special baby. I've lobbied quite hard for it!"

  Felix said that was admirable. Estelle said we all did what we could.

  The teacher who'd died had been such a fine person, she said; he'd be missed by so many, it was so sudden, a shock. He'd really tried, up at Fletcher; he'd accomplished...well, he'd done his very best, under conditions that were...no one could go into it expecting too much.

  Felix nodded and um-hummed at the right places, and looked sympathetic, and made eye contact. In return, Estelle's smiles multiplied. All was as going as it should.

  The preliminaries over, Estelle launched into the interview proper. She took a breath. "I believe I recognize you, Mr. Duke," she said. "Despite the beard, which I must say looks very distinguished. You're Felix Phillips, yes? The famous director? I've been attending that Festival since I was a kid, my grandfather used to take us; I have a big collection of the programs!"

  So much for alter egos. "Indeed," said Felix, "but I'm going under Mr. Duke for this job. I thought it would be less intimidating."

  "I see." A smile, more tentative. A weaponless, elderly theatre director, intimidating? To the hardened Fletcher inmates? Really?

  "If anyone on the hiring end knew who I was, they'd say I was way overqualified. Too professional for this position." A bigger smile: Estelle found this more convincing. "So it can be our secret," Felix said, lowering his voice, leaning across the table. "You can be my confidante."

  "Oh, what fun!" She liked it. "A confidante! It's like a Restoration play! The City Heiress, or..."

  "By Aphra Behn," said Felix. "Except the confidantes are burglars." He was impressed: it was an obscure play, not one he'd ever done.

  "Maybe I've always longed to be a burglar," she laughed. "But seriously, this is quite an honor! I must have seen almost all of your plays, over at Makeshiweg, when yo
u were there. I loved your Lear! It was so, it was so..."

  "Visceral," said Felix, quoting one of the more enthusiastic reviews.

  "Yes," said Estelle. "Visceral." She paused. "But this position...I mean, you are of course way overqualified. You realize it's only part-time--three months a year. You wouldn't expect a commensurate--"

  "No, no," said Felix. "Standard pay. I've been retired for a while, I'm bound to be rusty."

  "Retired? Oh, you're too young to retire," she said, a reflex compliment. "That would be a waste."

  "Too kind," said Felix.

  There was a pause. "You do understand that this is a prison," she said at length. "You'll be teaching, well, convicted criminals. The goal of the course is to improve their basic literacy skills so they can find a meaningful place in the community once they're back in the world. Wouldn't you be rather wasted on them?"

  "It would be a challenge," said Felix. "I've always liked challenges."

  "Let's be frank," said Estelle. "Some of these men have very short fuses. They act out. I wouldn't want you to..." She clearly had a vision of Felix lying on the floor with a homemade shiv sticking out of his neck and a puddle of blood spreading around him.

  "Dear lady," said Felix, resorting to one of his posh-aristocrat stage accents, "in the early days of the theatre, actors were regarded as next door to criminals anyway. And I've known many actors--that's what they do, they act out! Stage rage. There are ways of handling that. And, studying with me, they'll be guaranteed to learn more self-control."

  Estelle was still wavering, but she said, "Well, if you're willing to give it a try..."

  "I'd need to do things in my own way," said Felix, pushing his luck. "I'd want considerable latitude." It was the beginning of the semester and the dead teacher had barely got started, so Felix himself would have room to create. "What do they usually read for this course?"