Atwood Margaret - The Heart Goes Last

“I don’t think he knows,” she says. “Not knows. As such. But he looks at me funny.”

“Is that all?” says Max. “Hey. I look at you funny too. Who wouldn’t?” He takes hold of her hair, turns her head, gives her a brief kiss. “Are you worried?”

“I don’t know. Maybe not. He has a temper,” she says. “He might get violent.” That has an effect on Max.

“I would,” he says. “Hey. I would love to get violent with you.” He raises his hand; she flinches away, as he wants her to. Now they’re entwined again, snarled up in random cloth, falling down into namelessness.

Eyes closed, getting her breath back, she realizes how worried she is really: on a scale of one to ten, it’s at least an eight. What if Stan really does know? And what if he cares? He could get ugly, but how ugly? He could turn threatening. His brother Conor is that way, from what Stan’s told her: he’d think nothing of bashing a girl senseless if she cheated on him. What if Stan has a bad part like that hidden inside him?

Maybe she should protect herself now, while she can. If she saved just a little from each Procedure vial – if she pocketed one of the needles instead of depositing it for recycling – would anyone notice? She’d have to slide the needle in while Stan was asleep, so he’d be denied a beatific exit. Which would be unfair. But there’s a downside to everything.

What would she do with the body? That would be a problem. Dig a hole in the lawn? Someone would see. She has a wild thought of stashing it in her pink locker, supposing she could even drag it down there: Stan is quite heavy. Also she might have to cut part of him off to make him fit in, though the lockers are big. But if she left him there it would make a horrible stench, and the next time Max’s wife, Jocelyn, came down to the cellar to open her purple locker she’d be sure to smell it.

Max has never said much about Jocelyn, despite Charmaine’s gentle pestering. At the outset she’d vowed never to be jealous, because isn’t she herself the one Max truly wants? And she isn’t jealous: curiosity isn’t the same as jealousy. But whenever she asks, Max stonewalls her. “You don’t need to know,” he says.

She pictures Jocelyn as a rangy, aristocratic woman with her hair skinned back from her head, like a ballerina or a schoolteacher in old movies. A distant, snobby, disapproving woman. Sometimes she has the feeling that Jocelyn knows about her and is contemptuous of her. Worse: that Max has told Jocelyn about her, that they both think she’s a credulous pushover and a dime-a-dozen little slut, that they laugh together about her. But that’s paranoid.

She doesn’t think Max would be much help with Stan, supposing Stan was dead. Yes, Max is overpoweringly sexy, but he doesn’t have backbone, he doesn’t have grit, not the way Charmaine herself has them. He’d leave her holding the bag, the bagful of danger. The bagful of Stan, because she’d have to put Stan into a bag of some kind, she wouldn’t be able to look at him in cold blood that way. Lying inert and defenceless. She’d remember too much about how it was when they were in love, and then when they first got married, and had sex in the ocean, and he had that green shirt with the penguins on it … Just thinking about that shirt while at the same time thinking about Stan being dead makes her want to cry.

So maybe she does love him. Yes, of course she does! Think of how lucky she was to meet him, after Grandma Win died and she was all by herself, since her mother was gone and her father was gone in a different way, plus she had no wish to see that person ever again . Think of everything she and Stan have been through together, of what they had, what they lost, what they still had in spite of those losses. Think of how loyal he’s been to her.

Be the person you’ve always wanted to be, they’d said at Positron. Is this the person she’s always wanted to be? A person so slack, so quick to give herself over, so easily rendered helpless, so lacking in, lacking in what? But whatever she’s lacking in, she would never want to harm Stan.

“Roll over, dirty girl,” says Max. “Open your eyes.” At some moments he likes her to watch him. “Tell me what you want.”

“Don’t stop,” she says.

He pauses. “Don’t stop what?” It’s such pauses that will make her say anything.

Has she been a fool? No question, yes. Has it been worth it? No. Maybe. Yes.

Or yes, right now.

On the evening before the December 1 switchover day there’s another Town Meeting. Not that anyone actually meets up: they watch on closed-circuit TV, whether they’re inside Positron Prison or out of it. The Town Meeting is to let everyone know how well the Consilience/Position experiment is doing. Their collective Healthy Interaction scores, their Food Production goals, their Dwelling Maintenance rates: things like that. Pep talks, Zing ratings, helpful feedback. Admonishments kept to a minimum, a few new rules added in at the end.

These Town Meetings emphasize the positives. Incidents of violence are way down, they’re told today – a graph pops onto the screen – and egg production is up. A new process will soon be introduced at Poultry: headless chickens nourished through tubes, which has been shown to decrease anxiety and increase meat growth efficiencies; in addition to which it eliminates cruelty to animals, which is the sort of multiple win that Positron has come to stand for! Shout-out to the Brussels Sprouts team, which has exceeded its quotas two months in a row! Let’s raise the bar on rabbit production in the second half of November, there are some great new rabbit recipes coming soon. More attention to the sorting for the Waste Recycling program, please; it won’t work unless we all pull together. And so on and so on.

Headless chickens, no fucking way I’d eat that, thinks Stan. He’s downed three beers before the meeting started: the Consilience brewery is up and running, and the beer is better than nothing, though he can imagine what Conor would say about it. You’re joking. It’s not beer, it’s horse piss. What’s it made out of, anyway?

Yeah, what, he thinks, taking another swig. He lets his attention drift; Charmaine, sitting beside him on the sofa, chirps up with “Oh, the eggs are doing well! That must be you, hon!” He talks to her, off and on, about his work in the chicken facility, but she hasn’t been similarly forthcoming about her own work, which has made him curious about it. What exactly is it that she does, over at Medications Administration? It’s more than just giving out pills, but when he asks questions, her face goes blank and she shuts the conversation down. Or she says everything is just fine, as if he might think it isn’t.

There’s something else about Charmaine that’s been bothering him. During their town times, he’s tracked the scooter off and on, just to make sure his two-phone system is working. Everything was as expected: Charmaine spent her time bustling here and there, to the bakery, to the shops, back to the house. But then, on the switchover days he’s monitored, she’s been making detours. Why would she have gone to the seedier part of town, where the unreclaimed houses are located? What was she doing? Checking out future real estate? That must be why she spent so much time inside the houses: she must’ve been measuring the rooms. Is she in nesting mode? Is she going to start pushing for them to get another transfer, move into a bigger house? Is she planning a baby? That’s most likely her game plan, though she hasn’t brought up the subject lately. He isn’t sure how he feels about that: a baby might interere with his Jasmine plans, not that these are crystal clear. He hasn’t imagined much beyond that first sulfurous encounter.