The Heart Goes Last

by Margaret Atwood

  "Oh no, I'm sure it's nothing," the clerk says. She adds that it's just an administrative formality. Someone must have keyed in the wrong piece of code; such things happen and it can take a while to unsnarl them. Even with modern technology there's always human error, and Charmaine will just have to be patient until they can trace what they can only assume is a bug in the works.

  She nods and smiles. But they're looking at her strangely (now there are two of them, now there are three behind the checkout desk, one of them texting on a cell), and there's something odd in their voices: they aren't telling the truth. She doesn't think she's imagining that.

  "If you'll wait in the Chat Room," the one with the cellphone says, indicating a door to the side of the counter. "Away from the checkout process. Thank you. There's a chair, you can sit down. The Human Resources Officer will be with you shortly."

  Charmaine looks over at the group of departing prisoners. Is that Sandi among them, and Veronica? She's glimpsed them briefly over the months - they're in prison when she is - but they aren't in her knitting group and they don't work in the hospital, so she's had no reason to get close. Now, however, she longs for a friendly face. But they don't see her, they've turned away. They've shed their orange prison boiler suits and are wearing their street clothing, they must be anticipating the fun times they're about to have, outside.

  As she was, just moments ago. She's wearing a lacy white bra underneath her new cherry-coloured sweater. She chose these items a month ago to be special for Max today.

  "What's wrong?" one of the other women calls over to her. Someone from her knitting circle. Charmaine must be signalling distress, she must be making a sad face. She forces up the corners of her mouth.

  "Nothing, really. Some data entry thing. I'll be out later today," she says as gaily as she can. But she doubts it. She can feel the sweat soaking into her sweater, underneath her arms. That bra will have to be washed, pronto. Most likely the cherry colour is leaking into it, and it's so hard to get dye stains like that out of whites.

  She sits on the wooden chair in the Chat Room, trying not to count the minutes, resisting the urge to go back out to the front desk and make a scene, which will definitely not be any use. And even if she does get out later that day, what about Max? Their meet-up, planned a month ago. At this very moment he must be scootering toward this month's empty house; he told her the address last time and she memorized it, repeating it like a silent prayer as she lay in her narrow bed in her Positron Prison cell, in her poly-cotton standard-issue nightgown.

  Max likes her to describe that nightgown. He likes her to tell him what torture it is for her to lie there alone, wearing that scratchy nightgown, tossing and turning and unable to sleep, thinking about him, living every word and touch over and over, tracing with her own hands the pathways across and into her flesh that his hands have taken. And then what, and then what? he'll whisper as they lie together on the dirty floorboards. Tell me. Show me.

  What he likes even better - because she can hardly bring herself to do it, he has to force it out of her word by word - what he likes even better is to have her describe what she's feeling when it's Stan who's making love to her. Then what does he do? Tell me, show me. And then what do you feel?

  I'm pretending it's you, she'll say. I have to, I have to do that. I'd go crazy otherwise, I couldn't stand it. Which isn't true really, but it's what Max likes to hear.

  Last time he went further. What if it were both of us at once? he said. Front and back. Tell me...

  Oh no, I couldn't! Not both at once! That's...

  I think you could. I think you want to. Look, you're blushing. You're a dirty little slut, aren't you? You'd do the midget football team if there was room for them. You want to. Both of us at once. Say it.

  At those moments she'd say anything. What he doesn't know is that in a way it's always both at once: whichever one she's with, the other one is there with her as well, invisible, partaking, though at an unconscious level. Unconscious to him but conscious to her, because she holds them both in her consciousness, so carefully, like fragile meringues, or uncooked eggs, or baby birds. But she doesn't think that's a dirty thing, cherishing both at once: each of them has a different essence, and she happens to be good at treasuring the unique essence of a person. It's a gift not everyone has.

  And now, today, she'll miss the meet-up with Max, and she has no way of warning him that she can't be there. What will he think? He'll arrive at the house early because, like her, he can hardly restrain himself. He lives for these encounters, he longs to crush her in his arms and ruin her clothing, ripping open zippers and buttons and even a seam or two, in the haste of his ardent, irresistible desire. He'll wait and wait in the empty house, impatiently, pacing the stained, mud-crusted floor, looking out through the flyspecked windows. But she won't appear. Will he assume she's failed him? Dumped him? Blown him off? Abandoned him in a fit of cowardice, or of loyalty toward Stan?

  Then there's Stan himself. After the month he's just spent as a prisoner in Positron, he'll have turned in his boiler suit and put on his jeans and fleece jacket. He'll have left the men's wing in the Positron Prison complex; he'll have scootered back through the streets of Consilience, which will be thronged with people in a festive mood, some streaming into the jail to take their turn as prisoners, others streaming out of it, back to their civilian lives.

  Stan too will be waiting for her, not in an abandoned building dank with the aroma of long-ago drug parties and biker sex but in their own house, the house she thinks of as theirs. Or half theirs, anyway. Stan will be inside that house, in their familiar domestic nest, expecting her to turn up at any minute and put on her apron and cook dinner while he fools around with his tools in the garage. He may even be intending to tell her he's missed her - he usually does that, though less recently - and give her a casual hug.

  She relishes the casualness of those hugs: casual means he has no idea what she's just been doing. He doesn't realize she's returning from a stolen hour with Max. She loves that expression - stolen hour. It's so fifties. Like in the romantic movies they sometimes show on Consilience TV, where it comes out all right in the end.

  Though stolen hour doesn't make sense, when you come to think about it. It's like stolen kisses: the stolen hour is about time, and the stolen kisses are about place, about whose lips go where. But how can those things be stolen? Who does the thieving? Is Stan the owner of that hour, and of those kisses too? Surely not. And even if he is, if he doesn't know about the missing time and the missing kisses, how is she hurting him? There have been art thieves who've made exact copies of expensive paintings and substituted them for the real ones, and the owners have gone for months and even years without noticing. It's like that.

  But Stan will notice when she doesn't turn up. He'll be irritated, then dismayed. He'll ask the Consilience officials to do a street search, check up on scooter accidents. Then he'll contact Positron. Most likely he'll be told that Charmaine is still inside, in the women's wing. Though he won't be told why.

  Charmaine sits and sits on the hard little chair in the Chat Room, trying to keep her mind quiet. No wonder people used to go nuts in solitary confinement, she thinks. No one to talk to, nothing to do. But they don't have solitary at Positron any more. She and Stan were shown the cells, though, during the orientation tour, when they were making the big decision to sign up. The former solitary cells had been refitted with desks and computers - those were for the IT engineers and also for the robotics division they were going to build. Very exciting possibilities there, said the guide. Now, let's go and see the communal dining room, and then the livestock and horticulture - all our chickens are raised right here - and after that we can look in at the Handcrafts studio, where you'll be issued your knitting supplies.

  Knitting. If she has to stay in Positron Prison another whole month she's going to get really fed up with that knitting. It was fun at first, sort of old-timey and chatty, but now they've been given quotas. The supervisors
make you feel like a slacker if you don't knit fast enough.

  Oh, Max. Where are you? I'm scared! But even if Max could hear her, would he come?

  Stan would. He doesn't minimize it when she's scared. Spiders, for instance: she doesn't like those. Stan is very efficient with spiders. She appreciates that about him.

  CHOKE COLLAR

  It's late afternoon. The sun is low in the sky, the street is empty. Or it seems empty: no doubt there are eyes embedded everywhere - the lamppost, the fire hydrant. Because you can't see them doesn't mean they can't see you.

  Stan is trimming the hedge, making an effort to appear not only useful but also cheerful. The hedge doesn't need trimming - it's the first of January, it's winter, despite the lack of snow - but he finds the activity calming for the same reasons nail biting is calming: it's repetitive, it imitates meaningful activity, and it's violent. The hedge trimmer emits a menacing whine, like a wasp's nest. The sound gives him an illusion of power that dulls his sense of panic. Panic of a rat in a cage, with ample food and drink and even sex, though with no way out and the suspicion that it's part of an experiment that is sure to be painful.

  --

  The source of his panic: Jocelyn, the walking Vise-Grip. She's got him shackled to her ankle. He's on her invisible leash; he's wearing her invisible choke collar. He can't shake free.

  Deep breath, Stan, he tells himself. At least you're still fucking alive. Or alive and fucking. He laughs inwardly. Good one, Stan.

  He's got buds in his ears, hooked up to his cell. The whining trimmer plays backup to the voice of Doris Day, whose greatest hits playlist serves as his daytime lullaby music. At first he'd had fantasies of booting Doris off a rooftop, but there isn't a lot of musical choice - they censor anything too arousing or disruptive - and he prefers her to the medley from Oklahoma! or Bing Crosby singing "White Christmas."

  To the bouncy swing of "Love Me or Leave Me," he lops off a clutch of feathery cedar branches. Now that he's used to her, it's calming to think of Doris, ever virginal but with impressively firm bra-bolstered tits, smiling her long-ago sun-bleached smile, mixing milkshakes in her kitchen, as in the biopic of her so often shown on Consilience TV. She was the "nice" girl, back when the opposite was "naughty." He has a childhood memory of an alcoholic uncle annoying young girls by calling them naughty for wearing short skirts. He was eleven then, beginning to notice.

  Doris would never have opted for a skirt like that, unless for something sporty and asexual, such as tennis. Maybe it was a girl like Doris he'd been wishing for when he married Charmaine. Safe, simple, clean. Armoured in pure white undergarments. What a joke that's turned out to be.

  Lonely, he hums in his head. But he won't be allowed loneliness, not once Jocelyn gets back from her spooky daytime job. "You should put your leather thingies on," she said to him two nights ago, in the voice she intends as enticing. "With the little screwdriver doodad. I'll pretend you're the plumber." She meant what he's wearing now: the leather work gloves, the work apron with its pockets and widgets. Kink dress-ups for men, in her view. He hadn't put the leather thingies on, however: he does have some pride. Though, increasingly, less.

  He stands on a stepladder to reach the topmost layer of hedge. If he shifts he might topple, and that could be lethal, because the hedge trimmer is ultra sharp. It could slice neatly through a neck with a lightning-swift move, as in the Japanese samurai films he and Conor used to watch when they were kids. Medieval executioners could take off a head with an axe in one clean chop, at least in history flicks. Could he ever do anything that extreme? Maybe, with the drumroll and the crowd of jeering, vegetable-hurling yokels to egg him on. He'd need leather gloves, only with gauntlets, and a leather face mask like those in horror films. Would his torso be bare? Better not: he needs to firm up, bulk out the muscles. He's swilling too much of that paunch-building beer: tastes like piss, but anything to get drunk.

  Yesterday Jocelyn poked her index finger into the jelly roll over his lowest rib. "Shed that flab!" she said. It was supposed to be teasing, but here was an unspoken or else. But or else what? Stan knows he's on probation; but if he fails the test, whatever it is, what then?

  He has more than once pictured Jocelyn's head becoming detached from her body by means of edged tools.

  Secret love, Doris sings. Dum de dum, me, yearning, free. Stan barely hears the words, he's heard them so often. Wallpaper, with rosebuds on it. Would Doris Day's life have been different if she'd called herself Doris Night? Would she have worn black lace, dyed her hair red, sung torch songs? What about Stan's own life? Would he be thinner and fitter if his name were Phil, like Jocelyn's cheating dipstick of a husband?

  Or like Conor. What if he'd been named Conor?

  No more, sings Doris. Next up will be the Patti Page top ten playlist. "How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?" Arf arf, real dog barks. Charmaine thinks that song is cute. Cute is a primary category for her, like right and wrong. Crocuses: cute; thunderstorms: not cute. Eggcups in the shape of chickens: cute; Stan angry: not cute. He is not cute a lot these days.

  Which would be better, the axe or the hedge trimmer? he muses. The axe, if you had the knack of the clean stroke. Otherwise, for amateurs, the trimmer. The tendons would cut like wet string; then there would be the hot blood, hitting him in the face like a water cannon. The thought of it makes him feel a little sick. This is the problem with his fantasies: they become too vivid, then veer off into snafus and fuckups, and he gets tangled up in what might go wrong. So much already has.

  You could do a good job on your own neck with the trimmer; though not with the axe. Once the trimmer was turned on it would just keep going whether or not you were still conscious. Conor once told him about a guy who committed suicide in his own bed with an electric carving knife. His cheating wife was lying beside him; it was the warmth of his blood seeping into the mattress that woke her up. He's fantasized about that too, because some days he feels so trapped, so hopeless, so dead-ended, so nutless that he'd do almost anything to get away.

  But why is he being so negative? Honey, why are you being so negative? he hears in his head: Charmaine's chirpy, childishly high Barbie-doll voice. Surely your life isn't that bad! The implication being: with her in it. Stuff it, he tells the voice. The voice gives a little shocked Oh, then pops like a bubble.

  HUMAN RESOURCES

  Charmaine waits and waits. Why aren't there magazines to read, why isn't there TV? She'd even watch a baseball game. Plus, now she needs to go to the bathroom and there isn't one. That's really inconsiderate, and if she doesn't take control of herself she's going to get cranky. But crankiness leads to bad outcomes, if you don't have any power to back up your crankiness. People blow you off, or else they get even crankier than you. Smile, and the world smiles with you, Grandma Win used to say. Cry, and you cry alone. She must not cry: she must act as if this is normal, and boring. Just a bureaucracy thing.

  Finally a woman with a PosiPad enters, in a guard uniform but with an identity badge pinned to her breast pocket: AURORA, HUMAN RESOURCES. Charmaine's heart sinks.

  Aurora of Human Resources smiles mirthlessly, her eyes like sleet. She has a message to deliver and she delivers it smoothly: So sorry, but Charmaine must stay in Positron Prison for another month; and, in addition to that, she's been relieved of her duties with Medications Administration.

  "But why?" says Charmaine, her voice faltering. "If there's been any complaint filed..." Which is a dumb thing to say, because the subjects of her medication administrations all flatline five minutes after the Special Procedure, that's what people usually do when their hearts have stopped beating, so who is there still walking around on the planet who could file a complaint? Maybe some of them have returned from the afterlife and criticized the quality of her services, she jokes to herself. Suppose they did, they'd have been lying, she adds indignantly. She's justly proud of her efforts and her talent, she does have a gift, you can see it in their eyes. She executes well, she gives good death: thos
e entrusted to her care go out in a state of bliss and with feelings of gratitude toward her, if body language is any indication. And it is: in the hands of Max, she has honed her skills in body language.

  "Oh no, no complaints," says Aurora of Human Resources, a sliver too carelessly. Her face barely moves: she's had work done and they went too far. She has pop eyes, and her skin is wrenched back as if a giant fist is squeezing all the hair on the back of her head. She most likely went to a session at the cosmetic school in the Positron retraining program. The surgeons are the students, so it's only natural that they'd slip up from time to time. Though Charmaine would jump off a bridge if her face looked as malpractised as that. At the Ruby Slippers Retirement Homes and Clinics, they did way better work. They could take someone seventy, eighty, eighty-five even, and have them come out looking no older than sixty.

  They're most likely training the cosmetic surgeons because it's going to be really in demand here pretty soon. The average age in Consilience is thirty-three, so feeling beautiful isn't that much of a challenge for them yet, but what will happen in the Project as the years go by? Charmaine wonders. A top-heavy population of geriatrics in wheelchairs? Or will those people be released, or rather expelled - tossed out onto the street, forced to take up life in a hardscrabble outside world? No, because the contract is for life. That's what they were all told before they signed.

  But - this is a new thought for Charmaine, and it's not a nice one - there were no guarantees about how long that life might last. Maybe after a certain age people will be sent to Medications Administration for the Procedure. Maybe I'll end up there too, thinks Charmaine, with someone like me telling me everything will be fine, and stroking my hair and kissing my forehead 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 to the eyebrows.